by Ninie Hammon
“And I’d like to hear about the shenanigans of your other classmates, too,” the sheriff said. “You got time for a cup of coffee in the cafeteria?”
Jack turned to Daniel.
“Why don’t you go see Michael Rutherford,” he said. “He might want to talk to you privately anyway. I’ll be back in a little while.”
Jack turned in place and punched the elevator call button.
“You probably didn’t put the names together, but Daniel is the father of the little girl I”—he still couldn’t say ‘shot’—“who was hit by the through-and-through.”
“That so?”
“And the school shooter, Jacob Dumas, was one of our classmates, too, went to elementary school here—with Daniel and me and Michael Rutherford,” Jack said.
“I did not know that,” the sheriff said thoughtfully. “No sir, I did not know that for a fact.” He looked Jack up and down. “Would it interest you to know that, given what’s gone on in Bradford’s Ridge in the past few weeks, that does not surprise me?”
“It would, sir,” Jack said as the elevator doors opened. “But you’re going to tell me why that is, aren’t you?”
“Indeed, I am.”
* * * * * * *
Michael Rutherford opened his eyes a slit, barely wide enough to see the man standing at his bedside. He acted as if he were sleeping still, wanted to be sure it wasn’t…who? Wasn’t somebody trying to kill him, that’s who!
His heart began to race again and he began to cough.
He opened his eyes—no use pretending to sleep when you’re hacking your head off—and felt the ground glass in his chest slice him open on the inside. Each coughing spasm was an agony that sent silent tears streaming down his face—and they had him so doped up the room looked like he was seeing it from inside an aquarium.
The man by his bedside—Daniel Burke, he was sure of it now—handed him a wad of tissues out of the box and Michael coughed and gasped into them until he was too weak to cough, even though the reflex still hitched in his chest.
“Can I get you anything?” Daniel asked. “A drink of water? Some juice?”
Michael shook his head, unable yet to speak. Daniel’s voice was the same. Even as a kid, Daniel had sounded like a preacher. It was something about the way he pronounced words, or the rhythm of his speech. And his voice was deep. At twelve, it had already changed and he sounded like a man.
At twelve, Mikey Rutherford had sounded like one of those munchkins from The Wizard of Oz.
Daniel and Jack had both sounded like men, as a matter of fact. The others, the bad ones, weren’t nearly as…mature and self-possessed. They were squeaky and wimpy and cowardly. Bullies. Mike believed, at least he had at the time, that Jack and Daniel could have stood them down—all of them—even outnumbered. Well, maybe not, but they’d have kicked some major butt in the effort.
As it was, they never had a chance to kick butt. Never had a chance, period. What the others could do, did do, no twelve-year-old on the planet could have stood up to that. At least, if that part had been real, had happened the way Michael remembered it. Of course, it couldn’t possibly have happened the way he remembered it.
But it had.
“Stop it,” Cole Stuart says. He reaches out a big hand and grabs a hank of Jacob Dumas’s hair, yanks his head back. “You can’t do that!”
Mikey is crouched behind an azalea bush, hidden from view by the big fronds of leaves and the pendulous clusters of pink blossoms. He’d wanted to run as soon as he heard Dumas’s voice, edgy and menacing, but if the others were with him and spotted Mikey, he’d be sunk, fat as he was. So far, he’d managed to escape their wrath. Focused as they were on Becca, Jack and Daniel, they’d let him slide, contenting themselves with menacing glares that sent him scurrying away from their confrontations with the other three. Not all the way away, though. They didn’t know he hung around, watched what they did. And he doesn’t want them to find out.
There was a wooded area in the park next to the baseball fields and he’d been on his way through it to baseball practice—early so he could get all the equipment in order. He wasn’t on the team, of course. He was the manager. Ronnie Martin called him the Fat Boy instead of the Bat Boy when Coach Washington was out of earshot.
He had come around the big rock that rested beside the shaggy bark hickory tree next to the footpath when he heard the voices and recognized them at once. Should have run then, should have turned tail and run fast as his fat legs would carry him.
But he’d crept closer instead, finally hiding in the azalea bush where he could watch Jacob Dumas torture Jack. And that’s what he was doing. Other boys pinned Jack’s arms behind his back while Jacob landed one blow after another in his belly. Then Jacob pulled out his pocket knife, flipped out the sharpest blade and held it up next to Jack’s cheek.
“How’d you like to lose an ear, nigger?” he’d purred. Jack tried to turn his head away but Jacob grabbed his chin in a vice grip and held his head still. “Tell you what, I’ll cut off both of them so you’ll match. But you’ll have to give up wearing sunglasses.”
Jacob roared at his own humor, then began edging the knife toward Jack’s ear.
“Hold still, nigger. I ain’t planning on cutting off nothing but your ears, but if you keep on wiggling, you could lose a nose…”
That’s when Cole Stuart showed up, grabbed Jacob by the hair and told him he couldn’t hurt Jack.
“I ain’t gonna kill him, just—” Jacob snarls, squirming free.
Cole grabs the front of Jacob’s shirt and leans over until his nose is inches from Jacob’s.
“You’re as stupid as you are ugly.” He snarls the words into Jacob’s face. “Don’t you get it? You hurt him, do something that leaves a mark—on any of them—and they can turn us in. Parents—police, maybe. We got a job to do.” He holds Jacob out in front of him. “You wanna have to explain how you brought the law down on our heads because you cut a nigger?”
He lets go of Jacob’s shirt and shoves him away, then turns to Jack, who stands with his arms still pinned behind him by the other boys.
“You owe me, nigger,” he says. “I saved your black butt.”
Jack spits in his face.
Cole instinctively draws back his fist in response, then stops. He wipes the spittle off his cheek as something resembling a smile pulls up the corners of his mouth.
“Grab his legs,” he says to Jacob and the others. “Don’t let him kick me.”
Jacob drops to one knee and grabs Jack’s left leg as another boy kneels and grabs the right. Jack struggles, but the boys are so strong it’s as if he’s in a vice.
Cole reaches into his hip pocket and pulls out something. Mikey can’t see it well, some kind of tool. A screw driver, Phillips head.
“Won’t leave much of a mark, just look like he banged into something,” Cole says. Then he places the point of the screwdriver on Jack’s shin halfway between his ankle and his knee and begins to gouge it into his flesh. Jack howls, but Cole continues.
“There,” he says to the other boys. “I’ve hit bone.” He grins. “Now we’re gonna really screw you, nigger.”
He begins to grind the screwdriver back and forth, digging it deeper and deeper into the shin bone of Jack’s leg. Jack lets out a ferocious wail before Jacob clamps his free hand over his mouth and muffles his cries. Cole continues to grind, a maniacal grin distorting his face as Jack squirms and screams soundlessly, tears streaming down his cheeks.
Mikey has do to something! But what can he do? Before he has time to think about it and lose his nerve, he darts back up the trail about forty feet and begins to talk loud, his machine-gun babble, non-stop.
“Wow, Coach Washington, I didn’t know you ever walked through the woods to the field. I thought you always drove your car. That’s a great car, sir, a fine car. Wish I had me a car like that. If I had me a car like that, I’d …”
He hears scuffling sounds on the other side of the rock, thumpin
g, then silence.
Continuing to talk, he slowly edges around the rock. The little clearing where the others were torturing Jack only a few moments before is empty. Where did they go? Where’s Jack?
Then Mikey hears a sound, a groan above him. He looks up and sees Jack crumpled among the tree limbs twenty feet off the ground. How in the world…he didn’t climb up there. The only possible way he could have gotten there was if somebody threw him.
Michael Rutherford gasped and reached out for Daniel Burke’s hand.
“They jammed that screw driver into his leg,” he said, clutching the hand as tight as he could. He had to explain, tell Daniel that what had happened before was happening all over again. That Ronnie Martin, who’d called him Fat Boy, had tried to do the same thing to him that Jacob Dumas had done to Jack in the woods that day. And that…an ape spider with wings had come into his room last night wrapped around Ronnie Martin and…
But the walls were spinning around him wildly, around and around. And the words in his head began to spin along with them.
<
CHAPTER 24
Jack took a sip of his coffee and was grateful his years of drinking police department brew had toughened the walls of his stomach.
“Tastes like battery acid,” he said, and sat the Styrofoam cup on the table in front of him.
“Sugar helps,” the sheriff said, then proceeded to dump three little white packets of it into his cup. He stirred it with the red plastic swizzle stick, then sipped it. “I lied. It doesn’t help.” He set his cup next to Jack’s in the center of the table.
Jack had selected a sweet roll and a banana from the cafeteria line. The sheriff had picked up a bagel and a tin of cream cheese. He began opening the tin as Jack spoke.
“So tell me about Ronnie Martin” Jack said.
“Don’t know a whole lot yet. He lived in Great Falls, Montana, worked in a pool hall. Police there say he wasn’t exactly Man of the Year material, but he wasn’t a real bad-ass either. Had a rap sheet for petty crimes, floated checks, B & E amended down to criminal trespass. Worst thing he ever did was stab a guy in a bar fight about five years ago, but they didn’t prosecute.”
Jack lifted his eyebrows.
“Friends of the guy he stabbed beat the crap out of him before the police got there, put him in the hospital for months. Head injuries paralyzed him on his left side. He walked with a bad limp, couldn’t use his left arm.”
The sheriff picked up a plastic knife and smeared cheese on the bagel.
“Which is the good news for Michael Rutherford. The guy’s dying of cancer—you knew that didn’t you?”
“I do now.”
“Weak as a drowned pup like he is, there’s no way he could have fought off somebody who had use of both hands.”
“Why’d Martin want to kill Mikey?” Jack remembered the childhood name only as he spoke it. He knew better than to hope there was a normal explanation for Martin’s behavior, but he had to ask.
“You got me, pal, I couldn’t tell you. Martin’s boss says he was at work yesterday, left at the usual time. Then apparently, he got in his car, drove twenty-six hours, straight through—only stopped for gas—to Bradford’s Ridge, sneaked into Rutherford’s hospital room and tried to kill him.”
Jack felt his own face harden and knew the sheriff picked up on it.
“What?” the sheriff asked.
“It’s just not the first time I’ve heard that story,” Jack said.
The sheriff said nothing as Jack told him about Stephenson and Willingham—and about the picture of the Little League team from 1985. He stuck to the facts, omitted the parts that would have made him sound like a raving lunatic—demons made out of flies, little girls coming back from the dead, his memory of three months of his life a blank slate. When he finished, he slowly peeled the banana as the sheriff sat opposite him, chewing his bagel in silence.
“I’ve tracked down as many of the team members as I could,” Jack said. “A lot of the names were illegible, faces faded out, too. Some are dead, some I couldn’t find—Martin was one of those. I’ll mark him off my list. But the ones I did find—garden variety stuff. A plumber, a car salesman, one’s a high school baseball coach—doctors, lawyers and Indian chiefs. Leading normal lives.” He paused. “Of course, Willingham, Stephenson and Martin were leading normal lives, too, until they suddenly went inexplicably psycho and tried to kill people. Dumas was always a nutcase, sister said he was bi-polar, but he was a harmless nutcase until a few weeks ago.”
Jack took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “So it’s not outside the realm of possibility that anybody who was on that team could suddenly drop whatever he’s doing and…”
The sheriff plastered another gob of cream cheese on his bagel and lifted it to his mouth.
“You said you wouldn’t likely be surprised by what I told you ‘given what’s been going on here lately,’” Jack said. “Such as?”
The sheriff put the bagel back on the paper plate without taking a bite.
“Spiders.”
“Spiders?”
“Dozens and dozens of ’em, seventy-five, a hundred—all kinds. The big old ugly brown wolf spiders and cobweb spiders and crab spiders and…you name it.” The sheriff took a deep breath before he continued. “Crawlin’ all over the little kids in Sunday School at First Baptist last Sunday! Them little kids was so freaked out, was screaming and running around, trying to get em off.” He paused to take a breath. “Horriblest thing I ever saw in my life,” he said, and his face was pale.
“Where’d the spiders come—?”
“How would I know!”
Two old ladies seated at a table near the door looked up and the sheriff lowered his voice to a rasping whisper. “I don’t have any idea and neither does anybody else. They were just…there. Somebody brought ’em and let ’em loose, of course, but how could anybody collect that many spiders, musta been near a hundred of them. And what would possess somebody to…?”
Possess. Jack pushed the thought out of his mind.
The sheriff cleared his throat and continued.
“There’s more,” he said.
Jack said nothing, merely listened.
“Far as I can tell, there ain’t a single dog left in this whole town that weighs less than fifty pounds. Ever last one of ’em— Mrs. Pruit’s Pomeranian, the Talbot’s miniature poodles, Sarah Warren’s Dachshund—every one of ’em was found laying in the yard or on the porch, or shoved through the doggie doors onto the kitchen floor! All of them dead and horribly mutilated.”
Becca’s precious mutt—McDougal. Daniel had described how he remembered Victor Alexander killing it and suddenly the memory flooded into Jack’s mind, too, in full living color. Becca wailing, Victor swinging the dog around and around by its head until…
Jack was sure his face had registered the horror of it but the sheriff was so intent on his own gruesome tales he didn’t even notice.
“And cats. Had four of ’em…burned up. Somebody put gasoline on ’em and…” He stopped, gathered himself. “Folks started keeping their cats inside after that. Until a few weeks ago, people didn’t even lock their doors in this town. Now, you can’t buy a deadbolt anywhere for fifty miles in every direction.”
“Any suspects?”
“Nobody reasonable. Several people have said they saw children around. I’ve talked to the kids, but they don’t know anything. And where would a bunch of little kids come up with a hundred spiders? Besides, killing dogs and cats like that, them animals would have fought back! Little kids couldn’t have done it.”
“Don’t bet the grocery money,” Jack said.
The sheriff looked startled.
“Have you…?” Jack didn’t know how to frame the question, but he had to ask it all the same. “Have there been stories…have little kids told stories about other little kids who can…?” The sheriff’s eyes were boring into his. Jack shifted his gaze to his coffee cup. “Little kids who can do things that they
couldn’t possibly do, but…” His voice trailed off. He knew he wasn’t making sense.
“Like?” the sheriff prodded, but Jack heard no skepticism in his voice.
“Like throwing a ninety-pound boy twenty feet up into a tree.”
Jack waited for the grunt of disbelief. It didn’t come.
“Or a little girl ripping up a garden full of rosebushes?” There was wonder in the sheriff’s voice, and something like understanding.
Jack’s head snapped up and he stared unbelieving into the sheriff’s eyes.
“Who…?”
“My daughter…my Jenny, she’s eight. She told me her friend Ariel Murphy had suddenly changed, was different, had gotten mean, but I told her it was only kid stuff, that Ariel’d get over it. Four days ago, I got home and found Jenny sitting on the front porch crying. She said Ariel had destroyed her rose garden for no reason, went berserk and tore it up. I figured maybe the kid had…you know, tore off all the blooms, maybe even took a hatchet and…” He paused. “Went out in the back yard and every plant—seven of them—was laying on the ground, ripped out by the roots. You ever try to pull a rosebush out of the ground with your bare hands?”
Jack sat still.
“Do you know what’s going on here, Sergeant Carpenter?” the sheriff asked. His voice sounded almost pleading.
“No,” Jack said carefully. “But what you’re describing…the same kinds of things happened here in 1985…the summer when I was twelve years old.”
“Folks have told me that, claimed there’s a “copycat assassin” on the loose in Bradford’s Ridge. I’ve only been here eleven years. There were several police reports filed in 1985 about pets being killed, but nothing else in the jackets—it’s been twenty-six years! Nothing to follow up on, no evidence, nobody was ever charged. And you gotta remember, that was the summer of the fire—folks were so traumatized by that it’s hard to know what to believe.”
