Rock Spider (A New Hampshire Mystery Book 2)

by Mira Gibson

  “Have you considered the possibility that Maude didn’t kill herself?”

  Zhana didn’t have to be facing her for Gertrude to see she’d cracked her wide open. When Zhana managed to turn, which she did slowly—a ballerina pivoting within a jewelry box—her air of perfection was stripped. She looked wounded. Honest and miserable, and most distinctly, she looked afraid.

  She spoke with a thin voice. “You think my daughter was killed?”

  “I wonder if Maude saw something,” she supplied. “Something that someone thought she shouldn’t have seen.”

  “And who would that be? Who do you think would shoot her in the head in the middle of the night with me sleeping across the hall and her father downstairs and her sister in any room of this house?”

  Zhana seethed, chest heaving, her fiery eyes burning through Gertrude, who couldn’t have felt smaller sinking into the soft lounge chair.

  Then Zhana’s eyes widened and she gaped. “You fucking little bitch.”

  Gertrude was stunned speechless.

  “How dare you come into my home,” she raged, advancing on Gertrude as she paced into the living room, “and accuse my family of killing my precious daughter.”

  “Mrs. King, please calm down.” She was on her feet, backing away with very little room to go—stumbling around the couch, tripping back into the coffee table, meeting the bookshelf behind her. Gertrude minced and mangled her words. “Blame is against my... I’m not blaming you... accusing you, I mean. I’m hearing accounts, I mean, there has been chanting going on in that field.”

  “No,” said Zhana in a deathly quiet tone, silencing her. “You are accusing me. And you must be insane.”

  “Have you seen any cult activity?” she demanded.

  “I want you to leave here and never come back.”

  As if dismissing her, Zhana returned to the couch where she sat stoically, eyebrows lifting and face long. She pulled a dusty magazine off the coffee table, set it in her lap, and began flipping through. Her eyes glazed over at the fawn-eyed models gazing vacantly up at her, their plastic smiles and hollow advice—pesky pubic hair no more! and rev up date night! and reverse-cowgirl for G-spot orgasms!

  Without looking at her, she said, “I’d appreciate it if you let yourself out.”

  Gertrude drew in deep breaths of air, squaring her shoulders and clenching her jaw, and didn’t stop inhaling until it hurt; all the while it didn’t feel to her like she was staring the woman down. Instead, she felt like an ignored child whose problems could never be big enough to match an adult's.

  Regardless, she stated, “I am here to take custody of Roberta. I will not leave without her.” When Zhana lifted her gaze, growing so appalled that she seemed to turn white, Gertrude produced the document, marched forward, and deposited it on the coffee table. Zhana didn’t even look at it, but stared at her as though aliens had just beamed down into her living room.

  Then, without warning, she burst into tears, wailing and covering her face, as she collapsed into a miserable hunch, shoulders quaking, silken handkerchief slipping down the back of her head.

  Slinking closer, cautious not to roust her, Gertrude retrieved the document and tucked it into its folder then asked, “Is there anything you’d like to tell me?”

  “Yeah,” she said, keeping her face shielded between trembling hands. “Go to hell.”

  It wasn’t until she got outside on the porch that she felt raw, used up, spent, and at the core of her exhaustion was the sharpest prick of sorrow. So much of her life, the memories, the recollections, were as lost as her car at the bottom of the lake. But the emotions, the memory her feelings contained, were anchored to distinct points in time.

  She’d felt like this before—clawing at the walls for answers, finding her mother balled on the couch, Gertrude urgent to make a pact before her father got home, failing, sabotaged, betrayed by Marsha’s ugly silence, dreading Albert’s iron fists.

  Where the hell was Roberta?

  Decisively, she padded down the steps and started around the house, her black Keds brushing over dying grass with each stride. The lake shimmered, its shore not ten yards away, as she rounded the back of the house. The yard looked months overdue to be mowed, but even with the growth, Gertrude could see the dividing line where the yard ended and the field began a good five acres out.

  As soon as she had Roberta, she wouldn’t be able to investigate the field. Now was her only chance.

  If the map she’d pulled from the county records was accurate, the field was twenty square acres enclosed by sparse woodlands where the properties were divided among the seven houses—five previously owned by the incarcerated, Jake Livingston, and the Kings themselves. Only the Kings and Jake had lake front property. The others were tucked in the woods along Moulton, which hooked around Lake Winnipesaukee but with meandering bends.

  Jake came to mind, as she high-stepped through the foxtail and sweet grass fronds that were up to her chest. He’d been reluctant to leave her the night he helped bury her dog, and she’d lingered on the deck as well. She’d felt like she was falling towards him in that moment, the Xanax long since worn off. It had been her energy, or his, strange magnetism they both had resisted. She couldn’t believe she’d turned down a date with him. When he’d told her, it’d seemed incomprehensible. Why wouldn’t she have jumped at the chance?

  Her daydream cleared the moment she realized the tall grass up ahead appeared leveled, like it’d been bushwhacked or matted down. Spilling into the clearing where the sun beat down hot and humid, and sent a glare bouncing up off a broad, thin puddle of water, her eyes locked onto a deer carcass lain on its side in a bloody heap. She froze seeing it and a zing of adrenaline rushed through her veins, causing her temples to throb, her chest tightening, her legs turning rubbery.

  But something inside told her to look at it, edge near, and when she did, rounding the animal, she realized a symbol had been carved into its chest. The same symbol she’d found painted in her cabin. Even more disturbing was its face. It wasn’t there. Blood and bone and teeth in a startling mess she could barely make sense of was all that was left of it.

  Then, all of a sudden, she knew something was wrong. She could feel it like a blade scraping against a whetstone, instinct that comes on hard in the gut.

  Nerves ratcheting up, heart slamming in her chest, she whipped around and found Peter King glowering at her.

  “Didn’t I tell you to keep to yourself?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Isolated with him in the field, nothing but wilderness and vacant houses in the distance, the probability of him attacking had her stomach twisting into hot knots and her skin pricking up with gooseflesh. His eyes looked black and gleaming under his pronounced brow, the angle of the sun causing a hard shadow to cut across his face. Peter seemed to revel the effect he was having on her. It felt like she was cowering, intimidated, which meant she probably looked it.

  “What happened to this deer?” Her hand was reaching into her back pocket where she kept her cell phone, but the impulse to get someone on the line—the police, what good would that do her? Harry or Wendy or anyone from the office, no they were too far away, Jake perhaps—made her stiff, petrified in fact.

  “I have no idea,” he said easily without even looking at the thing. “I’m never out this way.”

  “This is your family’s property, isn’t it?” she challenged him as though it was, not that she was certain. But if he denied ownership, she’d have all the more right to be here.

  “Whether it is or isn’t, it certainly isn’t yours.” He drew his hands up to his hips, resting his right one on the butt of a gun like a reminder. “You’re not going to make me drag you off the premises, are you?”

  “The symbol carved into that animal’s chest is the same symbol I found painted on the wall of my cabin,” she asserted. Yelling was the only way to get the words out. “There have been accounts of cult activity in this field and accounts of victims, human victims, with the
same trauma to their faces.”

  He looked amused as if she were a child spouting fiction. It touched a nerve and the point she was ramping towards deflated.

  “I don’t know anything about that. The Kings had nothing to do with that animal or your house. Your business was with Roberta and it’s concluded.”

  “It hasn't.” Her hands were on her hips now, and taking a cue from Zhana, she tried to dismiss him, pacing away, rounding the deer, and finally pulling her cell phone out of her pants. When she found the camera app on her phone, she snapped a few close-up shots of the symbol then the deer's bloody face.

  “If you think you’re taking Roberta from this house, you’re dead wrong.”

  So Zhana had called him. “I have a court order and you can’t stop me,” she stated, stomping around the puddle and making for the house, but he lunged fast, grabbing her arm. She spat, “Get your hands off of me,” through her teeth, trying to jerk free.

  “For your own good,” he said so kindly it rattled her. “You leave well enough alone, you hear?”

  “Where’s Charlie?”

  “He’s taking some time, which isn’t against the law. I’d know since it’s my job to uphold it or have you forgotten I'm a cop?”

  Yanking her arm free, squaring off her shoulders, and fighting the sun in her eyes, she glared up at him. “I’ve also been made aware of the original police report.” A voice in her head was screaming at her not to tip her hand, but accusations were flying out of her so fast there was no controlling them. “Your granddaughter didn’t kill herself and I’m going to find out who did.”

  In response, he hardened. She could feel the rage rolling off of him, like steam from an engine. It was enough of an indication that Peter knew exactly what had happened to Maude and he looked about ready to kill Gertrude to keep her quiet.

  “You’re out of your mind,” he said, tone so deep and raw it cut through her.

  “I have proof,” she countered, but her voice quaked. Swallowing hard, she willed her tone firm then barked, “I have the document.”

  “You don’t have shit except for a brain that doesn’t work. You should’ve stayed in that hospital.”

  Fleeing, she padded quickly across the matted grass then parted the wall of foxtail like a curtain, starting through the gnarly field.

  “Watch yourself,” he called after her. “You talk crazy like that and you might end up in an institution.”

  Like Weird Wanda?

  “Or worse,” he concluded.

  Whipping around, locking eyes with him through the feathery fronds of the grass as they shimmied in the breeze, she warned, “If anything happens to me, Jake will publicize it and it won’t matter the hold you have on this town. Everyone in the Tri-State area will be looking at you and this family. You’ll be destroyed.”

  “Jake Livingston, huh?” Rocking back on his heels, he grinned. “I doubt Jake will be a problem much longer.”

  Gertrude couldn’t move fast enough, prickly fronds slapping her face, slicing her forearms like paper cuts, peppering her skin with tiny lacerations. In delayed reaction, her heart was beating out of her chest, the pressure in her veins causing her hands to shake. She felt dizzy. Several times she envisioned herself plummeting into the thicket and passing out. This particular brand of terror was strikingly familiar, though she didn’t let herself make the leap into her own family. Instead, she plotted how she might find Roberta, which included driving to the cabin and touching base with Jake, fortifying her safety with what little resources she had.

  In a stroke of good luck, when she reached the front yard, she spotted a red dress tearing through—Roberta’s stick legs punching over grass, her boney-arms pumping, mud-green eyes wild. Sweeping her gaze across the yard, the driveway, the road beyond the trees, Gertrude couldn’t establish what she was sprinting from. There was nothing there.

  “Roberta,” she yelled, running after her as the girl arched around the far side of the house.

  She turned on her heel, keeling over, and nearly lost her balance, staggering sideways, bare feet shuffling over dying grass.

  “What’s wrong?” Gertrude slowed to a jog until she reached her.

  She heaved winded words. “They’re after me. He’s not home.”

  “Who’s not home?”

  Roberta gasped for air, wincing through a stitch in her side. “Quinton. I hide out in his shed sometimes. He’s not there.”

  Gathering that Roberta’s teenaged friend offered a safe haven, she hooked her arm around the girl, ushering her towards the driveway and saying, “Come with me.”

  “What? Where?”

  “I’m taking you from this place.”

  Roberta slowed, knees buckling from the jabs of gravel under her bare feet when they reached the driveway. “Should I get my things?”

  “There’s no time.” Then she qualified the statement, adding, “I got a court order. There’s nothing they can do.”

  “I don’t want to live with a bunch of strangers,” she yelled, shoving Gertrude off of her.

  “You won’t. I promise.” But it wasn’t enough to keep her moving. She’d planted her feet, angling her dark eyes at Gertrude like a scheming fox. “You’ll be staying with me.”

  Screwing her face up, Roberta stared at her as though the information was a riddle wrapped in an enigma she couldn’t figure out.

  “It’s only temporary,” she said urgently, prodding the girl forward. “Now come on.”

  Gertrude sensed the men who had been after Roberta were near. She could feel their predatory glares spying from the woodland shadows, but when she glanced over her shoulder at the house, she saw only Peter and Zhana standing on the porch, their narrowing eyes locked on her.

  “Quickly now.”

  And she did hurry, using long strides and keeping up with Gertrude.

  When they reached her Audi on the grassy shoulder, Gertrude opened the passenger’s side door, keen to its quirks, and helped Roberta inside. The girl was too big for the seat. Her long legs splayed out and still her knees met the dash. Gertrude moved her dress out of the door jam then shut it firmly, and when she climbed behind the wheel and started the engine she saw a truck idling up the road just shy of the bend.

  Pulling a hard U-turn, tires kicking up grass and dirt as she redirected the vehicle, Gertrude stole a fast peak at her rearview and saw a truck creeping down the road after them.

  “Who are they?” she demanded, gunning it. The car began vibrating with the juts and buckles of scarred asphalt.

  “My dad’s friends.” Roberta was leaning forward and watching the side view mirror.

  “Why were you running from them?” she asked, quickly upshifting and stepping on the gas.

  “So they wouldn’t catch me.”

  Roberta leaned back in her seat and took stock of the index cards covering every inch of the Audi’s interior. Reptilian scales, was how they looked. She stroked her hand down the dash, feeling the texture.

  “They’re following us,” she remarked, her tone strangely resigned as though she’d been through this before and had accepted that all roads would eventually lead back to the house.

  “It’ll be all right,” said Gertrude, feeling a twinge of guilt for lying so blatantly. They’d been in her house. They’d be back. Things were far from all right.

  Randomly, she asked, “Are you married?”

  “What? No.”

  “Am I going to have to share a room?”

  Gertrude glanced at her quickly to get a read on the girl's main concern and determined she was worrying about the characters she might have to deal with in her new home. But sharing a room was a good question regardless of the fact it would be just the two of them. Doris had stayed in Gertrude’s bedroom. Sisters could get away with that kind of closeness, which wouldn’t at all be appropriate with Roberta.

  “I’ll figure something out,” she said then stammered, adding, “You won’t have to share a room.”

  “Why are you doing
this?”

  She could feel Roberta’s gaze burning into the side of her head, penetrating her thoughts, the real reason they were arriving at this precarious solution.

  “I don’t trust anyone,” she said eventually, the only statement she could make that echoed the truth while at the same time concealing it.

  Perhaps satisfied with her answer, Roberta leaned her head back and watched the road twisting and dipping through the windshield.

  It wasn’t until they turned onto Messer that Gertrude realized the truck was not only still behind them, but gaining on them. Her foot grew heavy in response and soon she felt the floor, having pushed the pedal as far as it would go. The engine squealed, as the Audi accelerated. Roberta tensed in the passenger’s seat and gripped the armrest.

  “You’re going really fast,” she said nervously, teeth clipping together when they bounced over the asphalt lip before the bridge.

  Gertrude shifted her gaze back and forth from the rearview, her attention glued to the truck and not the hairpin turn at the end of the bridge, as they flew towards it.

  “Slow down!” Roberta yelled, pressing her tight body into her seat, as the entire vehicle shook, tires vibrating against the wooden slats.

  But Gertrude was deaf to her, a jarring surrealism taking hold, déjà vu commingling with nightmarish panic—Doris? Is that Doris beside me?

  Screaming, Gertrude ordered again and again and again, “Put on your seatbelt!”

  And over her, yelling back, but not being heard, as she scrambled to comprehend what had come over the manic social worker, Roberta insisted, “I did! I did! Slow down!”

  Gertrude slammed on the brakes the second they cleared the bridge and the front tires hit asphalt. She cut the wheel, sliding sideways onto Opechee Street, centrifugal force sending Roberta careening into her, though she’d braced the door handle in a white-knuckle grip. When the Audi slammed down, Gertrude realized it had taken the turn on two wheels, but the second she straightened out and saw the lake gleaming sunlight to her right she was consumed with an incredible lightness. Lake water wasn’t filling the vehicle. They were still on the road. She’d cheated death. And all risks she’d taken were forgotten.