“Archer. Don’t lie to me, damn it.” He clamped his fingers tight again.
She fumbled with her left hand, running it along the edge of the counter. She felt the cool rim of the bowl. If only she could keep him talking. “It is. And he doesn’t want me . . . that way.”
“It can’t be Archer.”
“He’s come back.”
David choked on a laugh. “The second coming. They really do have you again, don’t they?”
“No, I meant he’s come back to Whispering Pines.” Her hand went around the bowl and touched wood. Her fingers crawled along the knife’s handle. Archer said sometimes you had to fight fire with fire, even if it meant descending down to their level. Even if it was a sin.
“You said he was dead.”
“They said . . . I thought . . . I never saw his body.”
“It’s not Archer.”
“It is. You know I’d never cheat on you.”
He released her arm with his left hand and drew his arm back. He was going to hit her. She snatched at the butcher knife, then had it in her palm, her fingers around it, and all the old memories flooded back, all the energy and power and purity that Archer promised and delivered. She raised the knife.
David saw it and stepped away easily. The blade sliced the air a foot from his face. He lurched forward and caught her wrist on the down-stroke. The knife clattered to the floor.
They both looked at it. Silence crowded the room like death crowded a coffin.
A chicken clucked out in the barnyard. Somewhere over the hill, in the direction of the Potter farm, a hound dog let out one brassy howl. A tractor engine murmured in the far distance. The clock in the living room ticked six times, seven, eight. David reached out with the toe of his boot and kicked the knife into the corner.
He exhaled, deflating his rage. “So it’s come to this.”
“I didn’t mean to—”
“Is that what they preach? Stabbing your own husband?”
“I . . . you scared me.” The tears erupted from her eyes even as David’s tears dried up, probably for good. “I thought you were going to hit me.”
“Yeah.” He was calm again, walking dead, a man who wouldn’t harm a fly. “I guess you never could trust me, could you? Not the way you could trust them.”
“I didn’t lie to you.”
“Which time?”
Archer was right. Pain was a steep price. Faith required sacrifice. “When we got married, and I said I was through. I believed it then.”
“And I believed it, too. Guess you’re not the only fool in the family.”
“Please, David. Don’t make this any worse than it has to be.”
“Fine.” He spread his arms in surrender. “I guess it don’t matter none who it is. I just don’t see why you had to make up this stuff about the cult.”
“It’s not a cult.”
“And Archer McFall just happens to walk back into your life twenty years after he died. You really must be crazy, or else you think I am.”
Archer always said he would return. How could she ever have doubted him?
Easy. You had your world taken away from you, and you came back to this safe, normal, God-fearing life and slipped into it like a second skin. You hid away your heart like it was separate from loving and mothering and living. But this normal life was all a lie, wasn’t it? Maybe David was right, even if he was right about the wrong thing.
“I reckon I’ll get the kids, then,” he said, and a chill sank into her, deep-freezing her bones.
“No.” She went to him.
“Any judge in the land would give me custody. Don’t worry. I won’t make no claim on the farm. That’s rightly yours as a Gregg, if for no other reason.”
“Not the kids,” she wailed. She pounded her fists on his chest. He didn’t try to stop her.
The blows softened and she collapsed, grabbing his shirt for support. He kept her from falling. She felt nothing in his embrace.
“How are we going to tell the boys about us?” She sniffled.
“They already know. They ain’t dumb.”
“I thought . . . I don’t know what I thought.” But Linda knew exactly what she thought. She thought the children were hers, to love and protect and introduce to the joys of worship in the Temple of the Two Suns. To deliver unto Archer, so the generations would be spared.
“Now quit your crying. They’ll be here any minute.”
Damn him for trying to be strong. Acting like she didn’t matter. Her eyes went to the knife in the corner.
“Don’t do it, Linda. I’d hate for that to come up at the custody hearing.”
Jesus-loving bastard. But she wouldn’t lose hope. Archer would know what to do. Archer would—
“Did you hear that?” David asked, releasing her.
“Hear what?” She rubbed her arms, trying to wipe away the memory of his rough touch.
David went to the door. Linda thought about the knife. No, if she used the knife, they’d take the kids away for sure. She heard something that sounded like a calf caught in a crabapple thicket and bawling its heart out.
“It’s Ronnie,” David said, then leaped off the porch and ran toward the creek that divided a stretch of pasture from the front yard.
Ronnie raced across the pasture, moaning and wailing, waving his arms. Tim was farther back, running down the road, and even from that distance Linda saw that her youngest boy had lost his glasses.
Ronnie reached the little wooden footbridge that spanned the creek, a bridge that was nothing more than some pallet planks laid across two locust poles. His foot caught in a gap in the planks and his scream went an octave higher as he plummeted into the rocky creek bed. Her own shout caught in her throat.
David reached the creek and jumped down to where Ronnie lay. Linda scrambled down the bank after him. Ronnie was facedown, his legs in the shallow water. His head rested on a large flat stone. A trail of blood ran down the surface of the rock and dribbled into the creek, where it was quickly swept away.
“Don’t move him,” Linda shouted.
David gave her a look, then knelt beside Ronnie. The boy moaned and lifted his head. Blood oozed from his nose. His lip was swollen.
He moaned again.
“What?” David said.
This time Linda was close enough to hear what he was saying.
Ronnie’s lips parted again. “Uhr—red church.”
His eyes were looking past both of them, seeing nothing, seeing too much.
CHAPTER THREE
Sheriff Frank Littlefield looked up the hill at the church and the monstrous dogwood that hovered beside it like a guardian. He’d always hated that tree, ever since he was a boy. It hadn’t changed much since the last time he’d set foot in the graveyard. But he had, the world had, and Boonie most definitely had.
The young get old and the dead get deader, he thought as he studied the shadowed belfry for movement.
“What do you figure done it?” asked Dr. Perry Hoyle, the Pickett County medical examiner.
Littlefield didn’t turn to face the man immediately. Instead, he squinted past the church steeple to the sun setting behind the crippled cross. The cross threw a long jagged shadow over the cemetery green. Somebody was cutting hay. Littlefield could smell the crush of grass in the wind. He scratched at his buzz cut. “You’re the ME.”
“Wild animal, that’s my guess. Mountain lion, maybe. Or a black bear.”
“Sure it wasn’t somebody with a knife or an ax?”
“Not real likely. Wounds are too jagged, for one thing.”
Littlefield exhaled in relief. “So I guess we can’t call it a murder.”
“Probably not.”
One of the deputies was vomiting in the weeds at the edge of the cemetery.
“Don’t get that mixed in with the evidence,” Littlefield hollered at him. He turned back to Hoyle. “Black bear wouldn’t attack a man unless her cubs were threatened. And it’d have to be a mighty big mountain lion.
”
“They get up to two hundred pounds.”
“But they’re extinct up here.”
“One of them college professors down at Westridge believes mountain lions are making their way back to these parts.”
Littlefield resumed rubbing his scalp. He’d just had it trimmed at Ray’s, a good clipper job that let the wind and sun get right to the scalp. The department thought he wore the short style to give himself a ramrod appearance, but the truth was, he kind of liked the shape of his skull. And his hat fit better when he went to the Borderline Tavern to kick up his heels to some Friday-night country music. Boonie used to dance at the Borderline, too. Back when he still had feet.
The two men stood quietly and looked at the church for a moment. “Never been many happy times here,” Hoyle said.
Littlefield didn’t rise to the bait. He was annoyed that Hoyle would fish those waters. Some things were for nothing but forgetting. He hardened his face against the past as easily as if he’d slipped on a plastic superhero mask.
“Who found the body?” Hoyle hurriedly asked.
“Couple of kids who live down the road. They were walking home from school this afternoon.”
“Must have bothered them something awful.”
“Hell, it’s bothering me, and you know I’ve seen a few ripe ones.”
“What did they tell you?”
“The older one, he’s about thirteen, fell running home and busted his face up. He’ll be all right, but for some reason it got to him worse than it did the little one. Kept mumbling ‘the red church’ over and over again.”
“How old’s the little one?”
“Nine. Said he saw some stuff laying in the graveyard and went through the bushes to have a look. He said he saw a cap and a flashlight and a bottle of liquor, but he didn’t touch any of it. Ronnie, the thirteen-year-old, came back to see what was taking so long, and that’s when the victim must have dragged himself out from the bushes and grabbed ahold of Ronnie.”
Littlefield didn’t like calling Boonie Houck a victim. Boonie was a good fellow. A little bit creepy and plenty lazy, but he was in church of a Sunday morning and was known to vote Republican. Nobody deserved to die this way.
Hoyle looked like he could use a cup of coffee, maybe with a few drops of brandy in it. “He lived a lot longer than he should have with those kinds of wounds. My guess is he was attacked sometime in the early morning, between midnight and sunup.”
Littlefield’s stomach rolled a little. How did Boonie feel lying in the weeds, wondering about the wound between his legs, knowing that whatever had ripped him up was somewhere out there in the dark? “You going to send him to the state ME’s office?”
“Reckon I ought to. They can do a better job of guessing than I can.” Hoyle pulled a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and wiped the sweat from his bald head. “The press is going to want to know something.”
“Wonderful.”
“Plus, if it is a wild animal, might be some rabies going around. That could make an animal go nuts and do something like this.”
“We haven’t had that up here in a long time, either.”
“Times change.”
The sheriff nodded. You used to have hair, and I used to be worth a damn. Boonie used to be alive, and the red church used to be white.
“Let me know when you’re ready to drive him down,” Littlefield said. “We’ll get the pieces together.”
He didn’t envy Hoyle. The drive to Chapel Hill took about four hours. Boonie would be kicking up a mean stench by the time the trip was over. But Littlefield decided he ought to save his pity. Unlike Boonie, at least Hoyle would be coming back.
Littlefield patted the medical examiner on the shoulder and went to examine the articles lying on the grass in clear plastic bags. He bent over the bag that held a porn magazine. He fought an odd urge to flip through the pages.
A camera flash went off. “Could you please move to one side, Sheriff?”
He looked up. Detective Sgt. Sheila Storie waved her arm. She was taking photos of the crime scene.
No, not a CRIME scene, Littlefield had to remind himself. An accident. A tragic, violent, unexplained ACCIDENT.
The kind of thing that happened too often in Whispering Pines. But Littlefield was relieved that a psycho with a set of Ginsu knives wasn’t on the loose in his jurisdiction. They’d had one of those down the mountain in Shady Valley a few years back, and the case was never solved. Damned inept city cops.
He already knew he was going to put Storie in charge of the investigation. When they arrived and found the mess, she hadn’t even blinked, just got out her clipboard and tape measure and went to work. She was too young to be so unmoved by death, in Littlefield’s opinion. But maybe she was a little bit like him. Maybe it was the kind of thing that made them cops.
Got to keep yourself outside of it all. Don’t let them get to you. No matter what they do, no matter what the world takes from you.
“What do you make of it?” he asked Storie.
Her eyes were blue enough to hide everything, as unrevealing as her camera lens. “Extensive trauma. Death probably due to exsanguination.”
Storie’s educated flatland accent always surprised him, even though he should have been used to it by now. Most people took her for a local until they heard her speak. “That’s what Hoyle says. Only he calls it ‘bled to death.’“
“Unless shock got him first. Same to the subject either way. I haven’t seen this much blood since those driver’s ed films they showed in high school.” She took two steps to her right and snapped another picture, then let the camera hang by its strap over her chest.
“Must have taken a while. You looked over in the bushes where he crawled after the attack?”
“Yes, sir. He left a few scraps.”
Littlefield swallowed a knot of nausea.
“Footprints go from this grave marker here, where the boys said they found the stuff. They’re deep, see?” She pointed to the pressed grass. The smaller prints of the boys were visible as well. But Boonie’s were clearly marked by the thick treads of his boots.
“That means he was running, right?”
“He must have seen or heard whatever it was and gotten scared. He was probably attacked just before he started running.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Blood here is coagulated almost to powder. The blood over there- “-she waved to the slick trail of slime where Boonie had crawled out of the bushes- “-isn’t as oxidized.”
Littlefield nodded and passed his hand over his scalp. The breeze shifted and he could smell Boonie now. A person never got used to the odor of death. The detective didn’t even wrinkle her nose.
“Hoyle thinks it’s a mountain lion,” Littlefield said.
She shook her head. Her brown hair was a couple of inches past regulation and swished over her shoulders. “Wild animals typically go for the throat if they’re treating something as prey. There are a few wounds around the eyes, but those are no more devastating than the other injuries. And it doesn’t look like the subject had an animal cornered so that it would be forced to defend itself.”
Littlefield was constantly amazed by the level of instruction that new officers received. A college degree in Criminal Justice, for starters. Then state training, not to mention extra seminars along the way. Littlefield had long since quit going to those things, at least the ones that didn’t help him politically.
Or maybe Storie was a little too educated for her own good. Frank knew that as a female in a rural department, she had to be twice as smart and icy and sarcastic as everybody else. She couldn’t go out for after-shift beers.
Pay attention, damn it. In case you’re going senile and need a reminder, one of your constituents is gathering flies long before his natural time.
“So you don’t necessarily hold to the wild animal attack theory?” he asked.
“I’m not saying that. I’m just saying that if it was an animal, its behav
ior was unnatural.” She looked across the stretch of tombstones to where the cemetery ended near the forest. Her brow furrowed.
“What is it?” Littlefield asked.
“The thing that bothers me the most.”
If STORIE’S bothered . . . A small chill wended its way up Littlefield’s spinal column and settled in the base of his neck.
“No animal tracks,” she said.
The sheriff’s jaw tightened. So that was what had been bothering him ever since he’d first walked the scene. An animal’s claws would have ripped chunks out of the ground, especially if it were attacking.
“Damn,” he whispered.
“No tracks means no easy answers.” She almost sounded pleased. “There are no other human footprints, either.”
Storie had cracked a big case last year, when an ex-cop had hauled a body up to the mountains for disposal. Perp was a big goofy guy who went around bragging about how he’d never get caught. Well, Storie set her nose on his trail and nailed him so hard that his lawyers had to recite scripture in the courtroom to save him from a lethal injection. The conviction got statewide coverage, and Storie’s picture was in both the local papers.
This looked like it might be another of those high-profile mysteries that, if she solved it, would make her a legitimate candidate for sheriff. If she ever ran against him, she’d have him beat all to hell on looks. Her accent would hurt her some, though.
“Tell me, Sergeant. What do you think did it?” he asked.
“I can honestly say I have no idea, sir.” She folded her arms over the camera.
”Any chance that somebody did it with a sharp weapon, without leaving footprints that we could see?”
“The pattern of the wounds seems random at first glance. But what bugs me is the ritualistic nature of the injured areas.”
Areas? Littlefield wanted to remind Storie that those body parts were once near and dear to Boonie Houck. But he only nodded at her to continue.
“Look at the major wounds. First, there’s the eyes.”
“We haven’t found them yet.”
“Exactly. That’s an inconvenient spot for a rampaging animal to reach. In any event, it’s unlikely that a claw would take both eyes.”
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