She looked uncertain about that, and her eyes lost their focus for a long moment. Katie didn’t know what to say. Yes, fathers pushed their sons to do better. What did Vera think that mothers did about it, she wondered?
She got up from her seat and careful not to touch anything with her bloody bandages. “I think I’m just going to go home. I’ll stop by again as soon as I can, all right?”
Vera nodded, but Katie thought she wasn’t really listening. She sank down into a chair, and stared away into her memories, and didn’t move as Katie left.
On her way out, she passed the soccer ball right where it belonged, sitting in its place on the sideboard between photos of Martin. In the picture on the left, he was on the soccer field in that blue uniform with the number eight on it, one leg bent up with his foot on a soccer ball. The same ball that was now on the sideboard right next to the photo’s frame.
Katie leaned in closer to the photo.
The ball in the picture exploded in a geyser of blood that covered the young man from head to two.
Katie fell backward, away from the photo. She lifted her hands defensively but it was just a picture, and when she looked again, Martin was smiling up at her, the ball under his foot again. Katie breathed a shaky breath. Just a picture.
Then Martin’s eyes closed, and he fell over, there on the soccer field. His body decayed and rotted away to a skeleton in a matter of seconds. He was dead.
Katie reached out and slapped the photo down. She backed away from the whole thing, photos and soccer ball and everything, and turned for the front door again.
If she had any doubt about there being a ghost here before, she certainly wasn’t doubting it now.
Behind her, she heard a thump.
Looking over her shoulder, she saw the soccer ball. It had rolled off its perch and fallen to the floor. It was still bouncing there, waiting for her to move.
Bounce.
Bounce.
Katie ran out the front door before it could follow her.
Chapter 9
Outside, Katie took a few deep breaths, and tried to calm down. She half expected the soccer ball to roll after her, right through the closed door. After a minute or two, she dared to look back.
The door to the house was closed, and she was alone.
Which meant she had the chance to do what she really came here for.
She didn’t bother looking to see if anyone was watching her as she went around the side of the house. She didn’t want to look suspicious. She went right to the backyard with her head held up and a smile on her face that she didn’t feel. She was going to act like she was supposed to be here.
Even though she didn’t want to be here anymore at all.
The well was right in the middle of the backyard. The grass around the edges of the hole was brown and dry, dying early in the month of November. Short trees and shrubs created a sort of natural fence all around the property, blocking the neighbors from seeing anything. Katie could now see the rotted planks that she had broken through yesterday. They’d been stacked to one side. Riley’s work, she figured.
She could just see the top of the ladder sticking up out of the rectangle-shaped hole. Riley had put up wooden stakes around the hole, tied together with orange rope, warning people to stay away. Nobody else was going to accidentally drop down there.
Katie pressed her lips together as she stepped over the rope. Her drop into that well hadn’t been an accident. She was even more convinced now that she was right. Martin Keats was down in that well. This was where he’d died, and he had drawn her here to help.
She needed to find him. Or rather, she needed to find his body. The answers to this whole nightmare she had stepped into were only going to be found, when she found him.
Unfortunately, that meant she had to go down there into the deep.
At the edge of the stone-lined hole she looked at her hands. The bandages were still stained with blood from the kitchen. It wasn’t hers, she reminded herself. It was a ghostly manifestation, something that shouldn’t be there, but was. She tried to rub it off the edges of her bandages, but it wasn’t going away.
Swallowing, working up her courage, she put a foot on one of the top rungs of the ladder. Her hands were more for balance as she started down, but it was enough that she knew she wasn’t going to fall.
It was dark halfway down, and darker still near the bottom. She fell down this? Dear God, Katie thought to herself. She really was lucky to be alive.
In the next step down, her foot felt the water below.
Ew, she thought to herself. She’d been in that water. That contaminated water, where a boy had died. She’d taken two showers at the hospital. She was going to take two more tonight.
Katie looked around, as best she could, her eyes adjusting to the dim light. All the stones sat tightly together. She looked closely at several of the seams. She used her forearm to push against a few of the rocks. Nothing moved.
Then she looked down. She needed to see the bottom of the well but she didn’t have any idea how that was going to happen. The ladder went down to the bottom, sunk into the wet sand a few mere inches. She could climb down there, but then the water would be up to her chin again and it still wouldn’t help. She had no desire to be submerged in that again.
If she couldn’t see what was there, she couldn’t search.
“Damn it,” she swore to herself. “This was a really bad idea.”
She stepped up to the next rung. There was nothing she could do, except leave and think of something else.
A slurping sound from below echoed of the walls.
Heart in her throat, Katie looked down again. The surface of the water was moving. It was swirling, spinning around in a slow circle.
The noise got louder, and louder.
She held onto the ladder tighter.
A really, really bad idea.
In the gloom, for just an instant, it looked like she was rising, like the ladder was being pushed up out of the water. She wrapped her arms around the rungs and held on, panicking as a sudden sense of claustrophobia tightened around her heart. The walls were closing in, pressing up against her, the wet stones slick and cold and hard against her skin...
“Breathe, Katie,” she whispered to herself. “Just breathe. The walls aren’t moving. You’re just scared.”
She looked again. The stone walls were back in place, close but not pressing in on her.
Then she looked down again and she realized what was happening. She wasn’t going up. The water was being slurped down.
She watched in amazement as every drop was drained away, leaving the wet rocks exposed. The bottom was sand, and now she understood how she’d fallen all that way, a hundred feet or so, and not broken her legs. It was wet sand. Mud.
Slowly, cautiously, she went down the ladder, further and further, until she was on the last rung before the bottom. She had an image flash through her head of the water rushing back in again, all at once, and drowning her down here where no one would ever find her. At least, not until Riley came back to finish his work. Maybe not even then, if he was convinced there was no ghost down here and that he had no reason to even look.
If he took the ladder up without looking would she end up the next dead body down here, contaminating this well with her corpse?
She held her breath, and listened, but there was no sound. The water stayed gone. There was nothing to be afraid of.
She went to step down onto the sandy bottom.
A hand broke up through the muddy surface. It was a small hand, the flesh rotting away until the bone showed through in places. It grabbed hold of her ankle, and it pulled.
Katie screamed. She desperately clung to the ladder, forcing her hands to work for her even though the pain it caused her was like bathing in hot acid.
She tried to pull herself up. The hand held her in a deathly grip, and would not let go.
Gasping, crying out for help, Katie pulled herself up one rung, and then another, h
er one leg stretched out below her where the dead arm held her fast. Slowly, as she climbed higher, the body attached to that arm peeled itself out of the bottom of the well. Wet sand fell away as the whole thing was revealed.
His face was unrecognizable, more skull than flesh, and his red hair was only clumps of wet strands now. He would have been unrecognizable even to his mother, if not for the filthy, torn soccer uniform he was wearing.
A blue uniform, with the number eight a black silhouette in the gloom.
Martin Keats.
“Get off!” she screamed, frantic to climb her way out of the well and away from the dead boy. “Get off of me!”
His fingers tore through her pants, biting into her flesh, clenching her in a deathly grip. She felt the bones in her ankle grinding together. Inch by inch, rung by rung, she pulled Martin from his grave.
Then, with the next step, he let go.
The sudden release nearly made her slip and fall off the ladder. She got her feet on the rungs again and then she was moving as fast as her feet and her injured hands would let her. She was bleeding into her bandages for real now. The stitches, she remembered. She must have torn them open.
At the top she pulled herself out and dropped herself onto the ground, panting heavily, shivering in the cool air even though the sun was out and shining down on her.
She was wet, and she was cold, but she was trembling for another reason altogether.
A shadow covered the sun, and Katie opened her eyes to look up at the person standing there.
Vera Keats.
“You!” Katie shouted at her. “You did this. You knew he was down there! You knew!”
“What?” Vera’s face went very pale. She rushed to the edge of the opening in the ground, and dropped to her knees, and stared over the edge. “Martin? You found him? You found...my boy...”
Vera collapsed on the ground. Katie managed to get to her knees, her fingers raw and burning, and her ankle adding a new depth of pain.
Vera was breathing. She was conscious, she’d just fainted.
Down in the well, the body of Martin Keats waited. He’d been there all this time, and no one had found him until now. He was free now. He could be buried and the world would know that his mother had sat in her house and left him here to rot.
The police. She needed the police. They could deal with the body, and with Vera, and with all of it. This nightmare was at an end.
Now Martin could rest in peace.
Chapter 10
This time the hospital took care of her in the emergency room.
There were more bandages for her ankle, and a warm compress for the bruise that had already been on her thigh from the first time she fell into the well. It was her hands that were the worst off.
Katie nearly vomited when they removed the red-stained wrappings and she saw the torn sutures and the puckered flesh, and her ruined nails. Cleaning the wounds hurt. She was insanely grateful for the injection of local anesthetic when they cut and pulled off a long piece of broken nail so the finger would heal better.
In the end, they only had to wrap up five of her fingers, and they left both of her thumbs free, so she could almost use her hands again. She looked like a penguin, but burgers were back on the menu.
Not that she felt like eating right now.
The whole time they were working on her fingers, Katie was thinking about Martin Keats. That poor child. Dumped in a well all this time, waiting for someone to notice him and save him from an eternity of damnation in that cold, damp space. Katie could imagine the water moving over him all these years, and the soft sand slowly sucking him under, until he was in a cold and lonely grave.
His ghost had wanted her to find him. Now she had. Now he could get peace.
Why would a mother do that to her only child?
Katie didn’t know the answer to that and she prayed hard that she never would. On the other hand, she thought she might just know why Martin’s father had left the family. If Vera was that psychotic then her husband probably wanted to be free of her.
Katie frowned as the doctor finished the last suture and tied it off. The secrets of Twilight Ridge ran deep, and dark. Kind of like that well.
The doctor had a few choice words for her about taking care of herself this time, and about staying out of holes in the ground. After warning her that she needed to take it easy on her hands for at least a week, he left and a nurse discharged her. The nurse went through the same things the doctor had said, and by the end of it Katie thought she could have recited the whole thing from memory.
She wasted no time at all in getting out of the emergency room and to the front doors of the hospital.
Which was when she remembered she didn’t have a car.
She didn’t even have her cell. There’d been no reason to take it with her to Vera Keats’ because with her hands under heavily wrapped bandages she didn’t have a chance in hell of using her smartphone’s touchscreen. Now that she had the use of her thumbs back, she still didn’t have the phone with her.
“Damn it,” she whispered under her breath. “Why isn’t anything ever easy?”
Turning around, heading back into the hospital, she figured there was nothing for it but to ask the people at the registration desk to make a call for her.
Back inside, a uniformed State Trooper was talking to a woman behind the desk. The woman looked up as Katie approached, and then pointed at her.
The Trooper turned around.
Well, she thought. That can’t be good.
She hesitated when the officer made a beeline right for her. He was a tall and thin man, and if it weren’t for the leather duty belt with all the weapons on it and the nice shiny badge, he probably wouldn’t have been nearly as intimidating as he was. Still, she didn’t like the idea of the police being this interested in her.
“Are you Miss Pierce?” he asked her.
“Uh, no. Pearson. I’m Katie Pearson.”
“Right, right. Pearson.” He smiled apologetically. “My mistake. You’re the one who found the boy’s body, right?”
“Yes. That’s me.” Katie thought she should feel better about it. She’d done a good thing. She should be thrilled.
Only, she wasn’t. All she felt was tired.
“We have some questions for you, Ma’am. About why you were there in the first place.”
Katie had been expecting the question. She was prepared for this. “I met Vera Keats a few days ago. She told me about the problems with her well and my boyfriend is a contractor, so we offered to help her fix them. That’s why I fell down there the first time. This time I was just following up with the repairs.”
“I see.” The officer wrote some things out on a small notepad. “How’d you find the boy?”
“Putting the ladder into the well must have opened up a pocket in the ground or something. All the water drained, and there he was.”
Nodding, writing down that last part, the officer snapped the notepad closed. “Well, that settles it, then. Thank you, Miss Pearson.”
“You’re welcome, Officer...?”
“Norstrom. Might have heard of us. I’m part of a pretty big family from these parts.”
“Sorry, I’m from out West. Colorado, actually, and a few other areas.”
“Oh. New to our little part of the country, are you?”
“Recently, yes. I bought the Inn down in Twilight Ridge.”
His face soured as soon as she said the name. Obviously, he would have heard the reports of all the goings on at the Heritage Inn. It wasn’t just ghost hunters who knew the stories.
“Right,” he said after a long moment. “I won’t keep you anymore. If we need anything else from you we’ll be in touch. That poor family. First the boy goes missing, then the father. Now this. It’s almost too much to believe.”
“Wait. The father?” Katie wasn’t sure that she’d heard him right. “What about the father?”
“Just that he’s missing.” Officer Norstrom scratched his
forehead. “I thought everybody round here knew about...then again, you’re not from here, are you? Well. It’s a hell of a thing, that’s for sure. The father, Mark Keats, was by all accounts a model citizen. Coached his son’s soccer team, worked as the executive officer of a local company, lots of friends, that sort of thing. Then one day he’s just gone.”
“Right. Vera said something about that to me.”
He nodded his head. “Right. Well, the way I hear it Vera ran him off. Guess she fell apart after their boy went missing. Wonder what would have happened if they knew he was right there, in the backyard?” He shrugged. “Guess we’ll never know. So, anyway, thank you for all of your help on this. Gave that boy some peace, and I imagine Vera Keats’ going to be going away to jail for a very long time.”
“Um. You’re welcome,” Katie told Officer Norstrom, not really hearing her own words. Something he’d said was bothering her. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Something about Mark Keats disappearing, maybe. It reminded her of what she’d been thinking earlier, about how she could picture him wanting to get away from Vera. Hadn’t she said something similar? About how he needed to leave and she needed to stay?
Had anyone seen him since, she wondered?
When she felt a hand touch her arm she jerked and spun around, her nerves stretched tight as piano wire.
“Jeez, Katie,” Mel said to her. “Is that the way you greet someone who’s here to give you a ride? For the second time, I might add.”
Katie threw her arms around Mel’s shoulders, holding onto her tight. She stayed like that, standing in the middle of the hospital floor, as people walked around them. She didn’t care who saw them. Mel always made things better.
“Chickie,” she said, “what’s wrong? You’re shaking like a leaf.”
“I don’t know,” Katie admitted. “I don’t know. I’m just scared. I’m so scared.”
“Come on. Let’s get you home. Everything will look better when you’re at home.”
Katie nodded, wanting that to be true.
Sight Unseen Complete Series Box Set Page 65
