Sly looked bleakly at the two girls and shook his head in disbelief. "What should we do?" he asked.
"What we have to," Melissa replied, feeling closer to throwing up. "We have to go with him and get this straightened out." She grabbed her stomach. "But if you'll excuse me for just a minute." She sprinted through the rain and into the house.
* * *
The heavy downpour began as Sheriff Ryan exited the Dodsville city limits in his unmarked patrol car on route for Black Falls. He forced himself to slow down to forty. The last thing he needed right now was to get into an accident. He had never had to face a murder in his county during his entire fifteen years on the job. Now, all of a sudden, he had a mass murderer to deal with. His position in the community was on the line.
As he rounded a curve about halfway to Black Falls, he spotted skid marks shooting across the pavement in front of him. This wouldn't have been enough to alarm him, but where the skid marks ended, trampled grass began. He couldn't see down the embankment, and the rain was coming down so hard he probably wouldn't even have been able to see into a level field. He stopped and backed the car until he reached the trampled grass.
He popped open the trunk and hurried back to get his raincoat. Lightning struck in the forest close behind him, and he jumped at the immediate clap of thunder. He walked to where the marks went into the ditch and saw the blue camaro where it rested against an old oak tree. Steam rose from a crashed open hood as though the engine had simply overheated. But Ryan tightened his stomach as he slid down into the ditch. The car had skidded off the road sideways, he noted, and hit the oak tree directly against the driver's side door. The trunk of the tree reached halfway across the front seat. If the driver was still alive, he thought, it would be a small miracle.
Upon reaching the car, Ryan looked first through the back window. If there were any survivors, they would most likely be in the back seat--away from that adamant tree trunk. No sign of anyone. He couldn't see anyone in the front seat from his vantage point, but the steering wheel was pushed up against the back of the seat and sticking out over the top. He swallowed hard, consenting to fact he wouldn't be eating much for supper, and proceeded around the car to have a look at that front seat--or what was left of it.
Something moved in the woods to his right, and he shot around quickly to see what it was. About thirty yards away from him, barely visible through the downpour and shrubbery stood a little blonde girl in pigtails. Sheriff Ryan wiped the water off his brows to get a better look at her, but she immediately ran off deeper into the forest and out of sight.
"Hey!" Ryan shouted after her. "Come back here!"
The footsteps kicking up dead leaves in the rain faded until the only sounds he heard were that of the wind and rain pounding the leaves on the trees.
A clap of thunder snapped him out of his reverie and he turned his attention back to the camaro. He bent over and cupped his hands against the passenger window. Directly below the glass was the head and face of a young man whom Ryan didn't recognize. But what caught his attention was the cut on the side of the face, with blood pouring out at a steady rate.
"Well, I'll be," he said as he slowly opened the door and caught the head in his hands. He sat the man upright and proceeded to take off his own raincoat. He tore his shirt in half and wrapped it snugly around the head to stop the bleeding. Then he climbed back up the embankment to his squad car and called for an ambulance.
Agnus Milhaus stopped dead in his tracks and his mouth dangled open from the sight in the coroner's room just as lightning struck a power line and the lights went out. After Detective Pierce and the sheriff left, he had been filling out the proper forms in triplicate before doing the brief autopsy on the two bodies and sending them down the line to the mortician. Then his wife had called, wanting to know every detail about the murders so she could pass the information on to her friends. He didn't talk to her long, thankfully, because of the thunderstorm. Still, an hour and change had passed since he had been left alone to do his job. Now, as he stood gaping in the darkened doorway, he felt his bowels wanting to explode in his pants.
His mind worked desperately to convince him that he did not see what he thought he had seen, but as his eyes adjusted to the lack of light his mind conceded. Although there were no windows in the room, enough light came from behind him, passed him, and entered the room where the two bodies should have been. Only one body wasn't there. The little girl was gone. Only the white sheet lay crumpled in the bottom corner of the table, as if she had simply awakened and got up to get a drink of water.
He cautiously walked, step-by-step, up to the empty table. He lifted the sheet, as if expecting a body to be hiding under it, then dropped it back to its original position. No body was under the table either--nor anywhere near where it should have been. He walked the distance to the mother and pulled back the sheet to see her face. He wanted to breathe a sigh of relief that, at least, this body hadn't been stolen, but couldn't. He covered her back up.
He heard someone enter the room behind him.
Clair Klaus walked past him and up to the table where she should have been all along, lifted herself on top on it with a little grunt from the effort, and lay down. With her feet, she kicked up the sheet and finished pulling it up over her face with her hands.
Agnus Milhaus pissed his pants. Moreover, he didn't even know he had done it. Nor had he noticed that when Clair Klaus entered the room that she held something shiny in her right hand. But, then, he had dropped so deep into a state of shock that he was barely aware of anything. The only detail that did stick in his mind was the fact that she was soaking wet and that if she didn't dry herself soon, she might catch a cold.
He stood staring at the lump covered by the white sheet for almost ten minutes. His groin started to itch from the drying urine. He blinked six times in rapid succession. The clump under the sheet was rising and lowering--the exact motion it would make if someone under the sheet were breathing.
His shook his head, blinked again, and took another look. Yes, by God, someone was breathing under that sheet. He willed his feet to carry him up to the table. He reached out, grabbed the top of the sheet, and with a great will of effort yanked the sheet off of the body.
Clair Klaus met his stare with one of her own. If he still had any urine left in his body, Agnus Milhaus would have dumped it all right there. For, not only did she stare at him, she even winked. In a swift motion, too fast for a shocked coroner to react, she sat upright. At the same time she lifted the knife she held in her right hand and sank it deep into the coroner's belly. He let out a short squeal and fell silently to the floor. The child jumped on him and stabbed him two more times.
She stood. "Did I do it right?" she asked.
Rhonda Klaus sat up on her table and threw the sheet to the floor. She eased herself to her feet and walked up to her daughter. Bending over slowly--stiffly--she pulled up Agnus Milhaus's shirt and examined the body.
"Close enough," she said, smiling at her daughter. "Close enough."
She stood and took Clair's hands in her own. "But did you take care of the other man? The one I told you about?"
Clair Klaus nodded tentatively. "Yes," she replied.
Mrs. Klaus picked the knife off the floor and wiped it clean on the coroner's shirt. She grabbed her daughter's hand, and together they walked out into the pouring rain.
CHAPTER ELEVEN:
Unanswered Questions
About the same time that Sheriff Ryan called for an ambulance from his squad car five miles out of town on Highway 13, Detective Pierce sat tapping his forefinger on his temporary desk in his temporary office. In front of him sat his neat little catch from up on the Hill. And he was getting nowhere fast.
"Where is Stephen O'Neal?" he asked for the fifteenth time, though he hardly expected to get an answer he wanted.
Sly stood from his chair and leaned on Pierce's temporary desk, staring as belligerently as was possible under the circumstances into Pierce's eyes. "
It's like we told you before," he said, saying each word slowly, as if talking to a moron. "We don't know where Stephen is. He told Melissa that he was going to look for Mrs. Klaus. However, it does seem impossible that he found her considering she's lying on a slab in the morgue." He slammed his right fist down on the desk in a sudden outburst of anger, tipping over a cup of pencils. Two of the pencils rolled off the desk. The rest settled down near the cup. "That, Inspector, is all that we know," he said in an almost, but not quite, shout. He didn’t want to upset Pierce to the point he threw them all behind bars, after all. Then he sat back down.
Pierce replied calmly, mocking Sly's slow speech, "And I think you're all holding something back. Listen," he said, switching over to the good guy approach. "Why would you still want to protect him? Look at all the trouble he’s putting you through. I promise to--"
An impatient knock at his office door interrupted him. "Come on in," he said. "Join the party."
Julie Price threw open the door and stood silently over the threshold still donned in her clean white nurse's uniform.
"Ah," Pierce said, standing to greet her. "Just the person I've been waiting for.” He walked to the door to welcome her, but she pushed him aside.
"Are you guys all right?" she asked, walking past him, as if he didn’t exist.
Sly nodded, too angry to speak. Tabitha looked down into her lap, and Melissa simply stared out the open door like a caged animal waiting for the proper moment to leap to its freedom.
Slightly embarrassed by the cavalier treatment he'd just received, but still trying to be the good guy, Pierce walked back to his chair calmly and sat. "Grab a seat, Julie," he said, forcing his best smile. "I want to hear your version of why I found these three staying at Rhonda Klaus's."
"Is it true she's been murdered?" she asked Sly, ignoring Pierce completely yet.
Sly only nodded again.
"And her daughter?"
"That's right," Pierce answered for Sly, starting to lose his patience. "Now if you would please sit down and tell me all about the alleged conversation you had with the deceased." He motioned to the last empty chair in the office, though he now no longer smiled.
Julie looked at him for the first time, without any expression, and emphatically plopped down in the chair. "I was the one who answered the door," she began. She proceeded to tell the same story that Tabitha and Melissa had told before her.
When she finished, Pierce leaned back in his chair and sighed heavily. "You know what I'm beginning to believe?" he said at length, picking up one of the pencils on his desk and tapping it on the pad of paper in front of him. "I think that you have all been set up by your buddy, O'Neal. He's split, and left the four of you holding the bag."
Quite forcefully, Melissa said, "Stephen didn't do anything!"
"How do you explain the fact that the four of us sitting here in front of you saw Rhonda Klaus and her daughter alive two days after they were dead?" Sly added. "Explain that, if you would."
Sheriff Ryan entered the room before Pierce had a chance to reply. His clothes were soaking wet despite the fact he had been wearing a raincoat. Under his jacket he wore no shirt. Upon his face shone the expression of a man who had experienced enough of life and only wanted to sleep away the remainder of it. "I found your Stephen O'Neal," he said to Pierce.
Pierce's eyebrows shot up. "Where is he?" he asked, standing. "Now we can get someplace with this mess."
Sheriff Ryan held out a hand. "Hold on a minute before you get too excited." He paused and looked nervously at the other four in the room. "I'm sorry to be the one with this news," he said to them. "But he's lying in a hospital right now. And he's in a coma."
Melissa jumped from her chair so fast that she tipped it over, and, without saying a word, she sprinted from the room. Sly, Tabitha, and Julie followed her a second later.
Pierce slammed his fist down on his desk, sending a few more pencils to the floor. "Well," he said to the sheriff. "Let's go after them."
Detective Pierce took the four of them over in his station wagon, after catching up to them in the parking lot outside the police station. He didn't want them slipping away from him--not just yet. There were too many unanswered questions.
A doctor exited the room they had been told Stephen was in just as they reached it. "Hold on here," he said, stopping the delegation before they could squeeze past him. He pushed them back away from the door and shut it behind him. "Who are all of you?"
"Friends of Stephen O'Neal," Sly answered. "Is he in there?"
"Is he all right?" Melissa added, pushing her way in front of Sly.
"Your friend is a lucky man," the doctor replied. "I believe that this is one of the cases where not wearing his seat belt may actually have saved his life. According to the sheriff, it seems Stephen managed to jump out of the way of a tree, while seated in his car." He chuckled and scratched his head.
"But how is he?" Melissa repeated, wanting to break past the man in front of her and see for herself.
The doctor tried to smile, failed, and then simply frowned. "He's in a coma right now," he replied, holding the chart he carried in his right hand to his chest, as if for protection. "He has multiple contusions to the head and body. He also has a severe concussion, which is the cause of the comatose condition he is now in. His shoulder was dislocated, but we've already corrected that--as well as bandaging a few lacerations."
"How long before he comes to?" Detective Pierce asked, to the relief of the other four, who were too afraid to ask.
Scratching his head again with his free hand, and pulling the clipboard tighter to his chest, the doctor cleared his throat. "Good question," he replied. "Could be in a couple of hours. Then it could be a few weeks, or even a few months." He paused, and looked at a point past the entire group in front of him. "And there is the slim possibility that he may never awaken at all."
A silence ruled over the group for a minute. Then, almost reluctantly, Julie asked, "Can we see him?"
"I'm sorry," the doctor replied, meeting her sullen expression with one of his own. "But, since this is intensive care, only the immediate family is allowed in there."
Tabitha sat in a chair in the hallway across from Stephen's room and placed her face in her hands. Julie knelt beside her. "He's going to be all right," she said. "Remember all the trouble he and Reed used to get into when they were kids? And didn't they survive just fine?"
Tabitha took her hands away from her face. Her eyes were turning red, and a single teardrop balanced precariously on her left cheek. "Reed didn't make it, though. Did he?" she said. "Did he?"
Julie opened her mouth as if to speak, but nothing came out. For one of the few times in her life, she was at a loss of words.
"No," Melissa said, laconically. "Reed didn't make it. But Stephen is still alive in there and has a chance. If Reed had had the same chance, I'm sure he'd be alive right now."
Detective Pierce tapped Sly on the shoulder and motioned for him to follow. They walked out of earshot of the girls and stopped. "Everyone is pretty upset right now," Pierce said in low voice. "But there is still the matter of the murder you four are involved with. I want to see all of you at the station tonight at seven. You understand?"
"Don't worry," Sly said, walking back to the girls. "We will be there."
Detective Pierce watched them in silence for a minute and then exited the building.
"Excuse me," the doctor said, eager to get away. "But I have other rounds to make."
Melissa grabbed him by the arm. "Wait," she said. "Can't we please go in and see him? Just for a minute?"
She looked up at him with her soft green eyes, and the doctor sighed. "Well, until his grandmother arrives, one-- and only one--of you may visit him. And only for a couple of minutes." He attempted a reassuring smile once more, failed again, and left to his rounds.
Eagerly, Melissa grabbed the doorknob, but hesitated after realizing she had assumed that she would be the one to see Stephen. She looked back at the g
roup. "Is it all right if I--"
"Go ahead," Julie said. "You're the one who talked the good doctor into it.”
Melissa smiled as best as she could and entered the room. A nurse blocked her initial view of Stephen by standing at the foot of his bed, writing something down on a chart. She turned as Melissa closed the door.
"You allowed in here?" the nurse asked, letting the chart hang on its string.
"Doctor's permission," Melissa replied.
"All right then. But only for a few minutes." She checked the tubes running into Stephen's body, and satisfied they were doing what they were supposed to be doing, excused herself.
Melissa took a couple of seconds to compose herself after the nurse left before walking up to the bed. Finally, mustering all the courage she was capable of, she walked to Stephen's side.
His head was wrapped completely with a bandage from the point right above his eyes. The laceration on his left cheek had also been bandaged. A tube ran from his nostrils to a machine next to the bed. The blanket was pulled up to his chest, allowing Melissa to see the cast on his left arm. The doctor had failed to mention that, Melissa thought.
"You're going to be all right, Stephen," she whispered. "You have to be." Then she sat in the chair next to the bed, in front of the machine hooked up to Stephen's nose, and began to sob quietly.
Outside in the hall, Sly had gotten some more chairs and they now sat quietly staring at nothing, waiting for Melissa to return from Stephen's room and report what she had seen.
Tabitha was the first to break the silence. "Remember," she said, smiling for the first time that day, "when Stephen and Reed were playing on the roof, and Reed fell off and broke his arm."
Julie laughed. "I had warned them to get off of there. But, of course, they wouldn't listen." She turned to Sly. "They were wrestling up on the roof," she explained. "And when Reed fell off, Stephen blamed himself."
The Revenant: A Horror in Dodsville Page 19
