Blood Ghost (The Hunting Tree Book 2)

by Ike Hamill

  She unlocked her phone and handed it to him. Don held it and studied the side of her face for a second. She never handed over her phone willingly. He scrolled through the videos until he saw several taken from her bedroom window. From a distance, he watched himself walk across the yard before the phone panned over and showed the clock. In the next video, he saw himself returning. She had several sets of these, all from different dates.

  “These are real?”

  “Yup,” Chelsea said. She signaled, slowed, and turned.

  “I guess I was sleepwalking,” Don said.

  “Where’s the driveway to this place?”

  “It’s a bit farther.”

  Don thought about the preceding weeks. He had been tired, but he’d blamed it on depression. He was depressed over his friend, and anxious because he hadn’t told his parents that he wanted to quit school. With each passing day it got harder to deal with and seemed more impossible to broach the subject. Don had written it down in a letter. He even folded it and put it in an envelope for his parents. When he read it a second time, it sounded like a suicide note, so he’d ripped it up.

  “So what are you up to?” Chelsea asked. “You can tell me. I won’t tell anyone.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You know I stole Dad’s car. That’s why I was down the road when I saw you the first time. Brandon tried to make it with Alexa in the back seat and I almost ran over Barney. There—now you know one of my secrets so you can tell me one of yours.”

  “I really don’t know, Chelse,” Don said. He lowered his head and squeezed his temples between his thumb and middle finger. “What’s happening to me?”

  “Is this it?”

  Don looked up and saw the dirt driveway that wound into the woods.

  “Yes.”

  She pulled up the long dirt track, navigating carefully under the low-hanging branches and leaning forward every time the drive took another turn.

  “Why wouldn’t they just make the driveway straight?” Chelsea asked. She pulled up behind a beat-up old truck.

  “Wait—why did we even come here? I told you, I already talked to these guys.”

  “You should have thought of that before you gave me directions,” Chelsea said. She started giggling. “I guess some part of you wanted to come back.”

  “It’s not funny. What am I supposed to say to these guys now?”

  “I don’t know, but you better think of something. Here they come.”

  A big man with a bad limp came down the porch stairs into the evening sun. He was followed by one of the men Don had met earlier that day.

  “Stay here,” Don said to Chelsea. He got out of the SUV and closed the door behind him. He heard the passenger’s window descending behind him and he shot Chelsea a look, but she pretended not to notice. Don walked towards the men so he could have his conversation in private.

  “Hi,” Don said.

  “You’re back,” Merritt said. He came up from behind Morris’s limp and formed a triangle with Morris and Don.

  “I forgot to give you my phone number,” Don said. “In case you see my dog?” He couldn’t remember if he’d given them his number or not, but it seemed like a good excuse for why he would be back. He recited the digits and Merritt pulled a pencil from behind his ear. Merritt wrote the phone number on the back of a scrap of paper and shoved it into his pocket.

  “If you want to track down a dog, I could help you out,” Morris said. He reached into his pocket and his fingers pulled out a smudged business card. “I usually charge by the hour, but we could talk about a fixed fee.”

  “Come on, Morris,” Merritt said. He reached for the business card but Morris pulled it away. Don plucked it from Morris’s fingers.

  “What? What’s wrong with offering the kid some help finding his dog?” Morris asked.

  “You don’t want to take this kid’s money. You’re not going to find that dog and you know it,” Merritt said. He frowned at Morris and narrowed his eyes until his cousin looked away. “Kid, you’ve got some thinking to do before you’re going to find that dog.”

  “I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” Don said. He stuffed the card into his pocket. “If you know something about my dog, I wish you’d just tell me.”

  The door to the trailer banged shut and Roland came down the stairs. He joined the other three in the middle of the yard. Don took a step backwards, towards the car, and looked at each of the men. They didn’t look angry; they seemed resolved.

  “Thing is, we don’t know anything for sure,” Merritt said. “But we’ve been talking, and there’s a good chance your dog went away with that woman—the one that you don’t remember going to see every night.”

  Don took another step backwards and nearly screamed as he backed into Chelsea.

  “I didn’t…” Don said.

  “Where’d she go?” Chelsea asked. “And why did she take Barney?”

  “We don’t know,” Merritt said. He pointed to Don and said, “If he doesn’t know then nobody does.”

  “Maybe,” Roland said. Morris and Merritt both turned to Roland when he spoke.

  “Roland thinks that David knows where the witch went to,” Merritt said.

  “It’s his theory,” Roland said, pointing to Morris. “I’m just the only one who believes it.”

  Don tried to turn away from the three men, but Chelsea caught his arm. She held Don there.

  “So there’s some guy named David who might know where Barney is?” Chelsea asked.

  “Yup,” Morris said. “But he’s not a guy. He’s just a boy.”

  “Where do we find him?” Chelsea asked.

  “His name is David Hunter, he lives up near Lisbon, Maine. His mom’s name is Melanie,” Morris said. “Don’t talk to her though. She’ll send you packing.”

  “Come on, this is some kind of scam,” Don said, dragging his sister towards the car.

  # # # #

  After dinner, Chelsea waited for Don to go back to his room before she burst in. He was sitting on the bed, propped up against the wall when she flopped down next to him with a computer in her hands.

  “I found him,” she said.

  “What?” Don asked, taking off his headphones.

  “I found him on Facebook.”

  “You said nobody uses Facebook anymore,” Don said.

  “They don’t, but everyone’s on it.” She clicked on a picture. “That’s Davey, this is his mom, and that’s his sister. She’s almost my age.”

  “So, what? Are you going to message him?”

  “No, that’s too risky. Look at his picture. He’s maybe, what, fourteen? His mom probably reads all his messages.”

  “Oh well. Case closed then—I guess there’s nothing we can do,” Don said.

  “Do you want to find Barney or not?”

  “Of course, but I don’t see what this kid has to do with it. He lives up in Maine. What could he possibly know about what happened to Barney?”

  “Didn’t you listen to Mom and Dad’s story? They said that there was a woman and a kid from Maine in the woods the other night. That’s got to be the same people—Davey and his mom. They could easily have seen what happened to Barney,” Chelsea said.

  “I’ll admit—that’s a pretty big coincidence if it’s not the same people. But what do you propose we do about it?”

  “Do you remember my friend Marjory?”

  “That really huge girl?” Don asked.

  “Shut up. She wasn’t huge. She just got her boobs early so she used to wear baggy clothes to hide them.”

  “Well what about her?”

  “She moved to Maine last year, and she has a younger brother named Chad.”

  “Chad?”

  “Yeah, and he’s in baseball camp this summer. It’s the same camp that Davey goes to, look,” Chelsea said. She clicked through a bunch of links, going from her friend to her friend’s brother, to a group picture. “See, someone tagged him in this photo.”

&nb
sp; “You’re a stalker.”

  “And it’s a good thing, too.”

  “So Davey’s in baseball camp,” Don said.

  “And we’re going to go visit him there. I found out where it is, what time they start, and I have a pretty good idea which field Davey will be on tomorrow. I’ll say I’m his sister and I’ll get him to talk to us.”

  “And we’ll say, ‘Hey, when you were in the woods the other night, did you happen to see my dog?’”

  “Yeah, we can ask him that. But we can also ask him where the witch went. Those men said there was a witch, and they said that she might have taken Barney with her when she went away.”

  “You don’t believe all that stuff, do you? Those guys were probably trying to lure us into some scam where they take all our money or something.”

  “We’re just going to Maine to talk to this boy. How could that be a scam?” Chelsea asked.

  “Dad will never let us.”

  “He won’t know. I’ll be sick tomorrow. You’re supposed to stay home anyway. All I have to do is think of a good reason Dad has to leave his car at home and we’ll be all set.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Listen,” Chelsea said. She turned off her computer. “We probably won’t find out anything, but so what? It will take a couple of hours and at least we’ll know that we did everything we could to track down Barney, right?”

  “I guess,” Don said.

  “So you’ll go?”

  Don sighed. “Chelse, I don’t think this is a good idea. You don’t just go talking to some random kid. They’re going to think you’re a kidnapper or something. And Dad’s never going to let you use his car. Why would he?”

  “So if I can get Dad’s car, will you go or do I have to go alone?”

  “You get the car and I’ll consider it,” Don said.

  # # # #

  Don pulled the blinds, and turned the face of his clock down so the green numbers didn’t light up the room. He intended to sleep through the next day and avoid his sister’s crazy plans. His father woke him up early with a light knock on the door.

  “What?” Don asked, expecting his sister.

  “Hey, Donny, you haven’t seen my keys have you? I’ve looked everywhere.”

  “Ask Chelsea,” Don said.

  “I did, but I remember her giving them back to me yesterday after you guys visited the neighbors. I should have made her put them back on the ring. I thought I did, but I must have put them down somewhere.”

  Don rolled over and pulled the pillow over his head.

  “Go back to sleep,” Wes said as he closed the door.

  He knocked again ten minutes later.

  “Hey, Don,” Wes said. He opened the door and then knocked a couple of times on the jam when Don didn’t reply.

  “What?” Don asked.

  “I’m going to take your bike to work.”

  “What?”

  “Your mom already left, my spare key doesn’t work, and Chelsea is staying home sick anyway. I’ll just take your bike.”

  “Fine,” Don said.

  “If you find my keys, could you give me a call at work?”

  “Fine,” Don said into his pillow.

  As Wes pulled the door shut, Don flipped the blanket over his head. He hoped that if he were asleep, or at least looked asleep, he would be left alone. Twenty minutes later, his hopes were dashed.

  “Get up,” Chelsea said, pushing her way into his room. “Get up, get up, get up. Dad might come home for lunch. I want to be back.”

  “Ugh,” Don said. He held onto the sheets as Chelsea tried to pull them from his bed. She gave up on the sheets and started pulling on his foot instead. “Get off.”

  “Get up or I’ll tell Dad that you stole his keys.”

  “Don’t threaten me,” Don said.

  “Get up because there’s a small chance we might find out what happened to Barney,” she said. She had the sense to let that idea sink in. She retreated to the doorway and waited.

  “Fine,” Don said. He pushed himself to the edge of the bed and swung his feet down. “Can you get out? I have to get dressed.”

  “I’ll be in the car in five minutes,” she said. “I packed some snacks, so you don’t have to worry about breakfast.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “No excuses. Five minutes.”

  It was more like ten minutes, but Chelsea looked thoroughly satisfied with herself as she turned her Dad’s car around and left the driveway. Don looked around the car. His sister brought a small cooler with snacks, had the GPS programmed and a paper map of Maine, had her cell phone display tracking the location of both of their parents, and looked completely confident behind the wheel.

  “You’re pretty scary when you apply yourself,” Don said.

  “I always apply myself,” Chelsea said. “I just have goals that don’t always align with those of Mom and Dad.”

  “Have you figured out what you want to be when you grow up?” Don said. He’d meant it to sound like light conversation, but the depression clouding his voice made it sound like a mild accusation.

  “Have you?” she asked.

  “No,” Don said. “I didn’t mean anything by that. I just wonder about you sometimes. You seem a little too angry sometimes.”

  “I’m not,” she said. She stopped at an intersection and turned towards town, where they could pick up the highway. “I just don’t like it when people automatically assume they know everything about me just because they know what sports I play or what bands I like. I can be my own person, you know? I’m allowed.”

  “Yeah, of course. Who says you can’t?”

  “I just don’t want to be pigeonholed.”

  “Okay, fine. So then tell me something. Tell me what makes you excited to get out of bed in the morning.”

  Chelsea looked up at the sky and drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. Don watched the road, because he figured that at least one of them should.

  “Besides crossing state lines to kidnap someone’s child from baseball camp, I mean.”

  “Shut up,” Chelsea said with a giggle. “I’m thinking.”

  She hummed for a second and then seemed to settle on an answer.

  “I think I like making stuff. You remember when we used to do those projects for Dad?”

  “The models?”

  “Yeah. He used to do all those scale models of buildings and additions and whatever. I liked making the trees and bushes and grass.”

  “So you want a job working with pipe cleaners, and plaster of Paris, and green paint?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “It was fun, wasn’t it? You had to get the outline correct with the plan view, but aside from that you were free to do whatever you wanted. I used to love when he’d bring those home at the last minute and we’d be up half the night decorating them with shrubs and whatever. You remember that one of the parking garage. That was crazy.”

  “Yeah, but Dad didn’t get that contract.”

  “Still, it was fun. Mom kept trying to make popcorn, but she kept burning it. The kitchen smelled for a week. Kyle ran home in the middle of the night and got microwave popcorn and brought it back.”

  “Didn’t he empty it in the pot when she wasn’t looking?”

  “Yeah,” Chelsea said with an easy grin. “She went upstairs to go to the bathroom and he put it in the pot and we all pretended that she had made it. I think she knew. I spent all night doing the bushes along the sidewalk, you remember?”

  “They looked awesome.”

  “I loved that.”

  “But how would you do that for a living?”

  “I don’t know, shut up. I was just thinking about something I enjoyed. I can figure out how to make money at it later.”

  “Are you enjoying working for Dad this summer?” Don asked.

  “Yuck,” she said. “Turn on my music, would you?”

  Don fumbled with her phone until pulsing, generic beats thumped from the SUV’s speakers. He l
eaned his head against the window and tried to ignore all the mistakes his sister was making. She followed too close, didn’t use her turn signals consistently, and didn’t slow down enough for the toll booths. Despite his fear, by the time they crossed the bridge into Maine, he was drifting back to sleep. Chelsea woke him up when she got off the highway.

  “Okay, I need your help,” Chelsea said.

  “What?” Don asked, rubbing his eyes and slowly blinking.

  “Help me figure out where this park is,” she said. “I can’t tell if I should approach from this road or that one.” She pointed at the GPS screen.

  “Just get close and we’ll go around the block. What’s the big deal?”

  “I’m supposed to be his sister. I don’t want people to see me driving around suspiciously in a car with New Hampshire plates,” she said.

  “Then pull over and we’ll walk. Settle down.”

  “That’s actually a good idea,” Chelsea said.

  “Don’t sound so surprised.”

  “It’s like seeing a shooting star, or finding a four-leaf clover,” she said. She was still laughing at her own joke as she pulled down the side street and parked. They walked side by side. She chewed gum and blew bubbles and he stuffed his hands in his pockets. It was a pretty day—warm and breezy with big puffy clouds to keep it from getting too hot.

  “It’s nice here. Marjory hates it.”

  “Because she gets teased for being huge?” Don asked.

  “Shut up. You’d totally think she was hot if you saw her again.”

  “Whatever.”

  “You wait here.” Chelsea pointed at a bench under thick maple branches. “I’ll yell to you when I find him, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Try not to look creepy.”

  “Fine.”

  Don pulled out his cell phone and dug through the apps until he found a game to occupy his time. Between levels on the game, he looked over his shoulder at his sister to track her progress. She talked to the coach, waited near the fence, and talked to another guy. Finally a kid wearing a catcher’s mask and a big glove came up to the fence. She gripped the links as they talked. The boy held back. When Don looked up again, Chelsea was waving him over.

  Don felt nervous and out-of-place as he walked across the lawn towards the fence. The fences were tall—probably to keep the baseballs away from the parked cars and to keep the kids out of the street. They made the place seem like a prison. The ubiquitous uniforms didn’t help the image. Every kid wore the same gray t-shirt. They had numbers on the front and back. David was a 5 with a little “C” next to the tail of the number.