“They’re not?” Mrs. Spruel asked.
Janis shook her head. “They were nowhere near Dr. Fields’s house on the night of the murder.”
“Have you told the police this?”
“We can’t, Mom,” Scott said. “Not without compromising our identities.”
“The second thing you should know,” Janis continued, “is that the real killer will strike again, unless we stop him.”
“You—you know who he is?” Mrs. Spruel asked, straightening slowly.
“No,” Janis admitted. “But we’re close.”
“We are, Mom.”
Mrs. Spruel looked from the two of them to the cooler and finally over to her husband, who was sitting at the kitchen table. He had opened a panel near the metal detector’s base and was poking the inside with a straightened paper clip, his tongue poking from the corner of his mouth.
Mrs. Spruel sighed. Janis could see the muscles beneath the skin of her forehead working. After a moment, she took the package of hotdogs, which hadn’t quite fit inside the cooler, and returned it to the fridge.
“We’ll sleep on it,” she said.
Scott shrugged his brows toward Janis: It’s the best we’re going to get.
Janis nodded, the beating of moth wings in her chest slowly subsiding. We’ll just need to be sure to leave before they wake up.
Oh, most definitely, he thought back.
The cold air made vapor of Scott’s breath and burned his ears despite that his sweatshirt hood was up. It was the early start. He and Janis had set their watches for 5:30 a.m. and gotten on the road by six. Fifteen minutes later, woods had overtaken the land on both sides of County Road 12, save for the occasional leaning house and a sidewalk to nowhere.
“Should be coming up on the left,” Janis panted.
As they topped the rise, the sky ahead of them paled to pink and a shack grew into view. A cluster of scrub oaks sprouted through the roof, branches shoving the peeling-white structure apart. Scott and Janis veered toward it, bouncing from the sidewalk into a sweep of weedy grass.
“There’s the pump,” Scott called, pointing out an ancient-looking hand pump. Rust had turned it brown.
“And there’s the path.”
Scott followed Janis’s gaze to the right. It didn’t take him long to spot the sandy trail that slipped into the trees. “Let’s comb the grass between here and there,” he said. “See if anything turns up.”
As he searched, Scott tried to work things out in his head. The grass hid a number of jagged branches. Could the killer have thrown the stolen goods from the beach house into garbage bags? And had one of those bags snagged on a branch, creating a tear that released his dad’s shirt and the other items found here? Seemed plausible. It would also fit with Janis’s theory as to why the knife taken from David’s house was a match to Dr. Fields’s neck laceration. The killer had stolen a matching pair of knives from his mother’s collection. Assuming one had been the murder weapon, the other might have fallen out along with the T-shirt. David might have grabbed that, too.
After ten minutes, Scott came back with an old shoe and Janis with nothing. He waited as she palpated the imprints and currents of energy in their search space, but no matches turned up.
“Ready to hit the path?” she asked.
They hid their bikes in the weeds behind the shack and set off. The path at their feet was sandy and loose. Here and there Scott made out depressions that might have been footprints, but they were too soft to discern any details. Longleaf pines and wind-stunted oak trees rose around them. When Scott peered back, the shack and road were no longer visible.
“Oh, almost forgot,” he whispered. He slung his backpack around to the front of him and, getting a hand inside, began untangling his headlamp laser from the wires that connected it to his battery.
“Look out!” Janis cried.
Something grazed Scott’s shoulder and clattered against a loblolly pine. He stared down at where the object landed. Amid the leaves, Scott made out the stained metal head of a hatchet.
He and Janis spun toward the person who had thrown it.
17
Janis recognized the toothless man. He was crouched beside a cluster of saw palmettos, mouth open, a second hatchet cocked to his shoulder. When he saw he’d been spotted, the brow beneath his blue wool hat bunched into dirty knots. A sick, ochre-colored energy emanated off him.
“Shtealers!” he wailed.
“No, no,” Janis said, remembering the way he had hunched over his tarp-covered shopping cart as their car had passed. “We’re not interested in your things. We’re just out on a walk.”
“Sh-sh-shtealers!” he wailed again.
You got him? Scott asked, securing his headlamp laser around his head.
She did. The moment she’d seen the old man, she had applied a counter force to his cocked arm—just enough to stunt another throw. The hatchet would fall short of its target.
How’s your shoulder? she asked.
Good, thanks. The handle caught me, not the blade.
The man trembled as he stared at them. Without teeth, his entire face seemed to draw toward the hole of his mouth.
Is he the killer? Scott asked.
I … I’m not sure, Janis answered. His energy is fragmented, all over the place.
At that moment a high voice pierced the trees. “Jasper!”
The old man turned toward where a woman was tromping through a growth of palmettos. Like the man, she was bundled in flannel, a hooded sweatshirt, and a thick coat. When the woman stepped into full view, though, Janis saw she was wearing pink pajama bottoms.
“You bothering these poor kids?” she asked.
“Sh-shtealers,” Jasper repeated, but with less certainty now.
“Put that thing away,” the woman said of Jasper’s hatchet. She slapped the back of his head. “Where’s the other one?”
Scott knelt for the weapon that had nearly notched his skull. “It’s right here, ma’am.”
The woman came forward and accepted it with a gloved hand and a huff. “Not only does he take both our hatchets, he goes looking for trouble instead of kindling.” The woman’s round cheeks were as red as apples, as was the end of her bulbous nose. She rounded on Jasper again. “Gonna get yourself arrested one of these days, you keep up that a way.”
“Shtealers,” Jasper tried one final time.
“Oh, quit that. These kids don’t want nothing you got.”
Janis could see now that, either as a result of mental illness, alcoholism, or an unfortunate distillation of the two, Jasper didn’t posses the mental resources to slip in and out of locked homes undetected.
And yet, his energy did possess an ochre-colored hue—too similar to the killer’s fingerprint for Janis to dismiss.
“We’re sorry to have bothered you,” she said to the woman. “We were just out on a walk.”
“We didn’t know anyone lived here,” Scott put in.
The woman waved a hand. “You’re no bother. It’s him.”
“Is it just the two of you back here?” Janis asked.
“Well, besides Papa and me—name’s Cassie, by the way—there’s Resal and Kathy, Todd, who likes to be called T-bone, Bill … Well, heck, why don’t you just come on back and see for yourselves.”
Without waiting for their response, she took her father by the elbow and began tromping back through the palmettos. Janis raised her brows to Scott: Looks like we’re in.
They followed Cassie and Jasper along the path that reappeared on the far side of the palmettos. Cassie stooped for branches along the way, snapping them into smaller segments and tucking them under an arm. Before long, Janis smelled wood smoke. The scent was coming from a thinning of trees ahead of them, where tarp tents began to take shape.
“This is us,” Cassie said as they stepped into the clearing.
Janis and Scott followed her to an Army-green tent. In front, smoke blew from a shallow pit of ashes. Cassie dumped her collection of
kindling into the pit and gestured to a pair of upended plastic buckets.
Scott looked down at them, perplexity wrinkling his brow.
Janis tugged on his sleeve for him to sit beside her as Cassie disappeared through a flap in the tent. Jasper sank onto a bucket on the opposite side of the fire pit and watched them with jaundiced eyes. His hands balled around opposite lapels as though Janis and Scott might at any second decide to strip the tattered coat from his body and make a run for it.
At least he’s been relieved of those hatchets, Scott said.
We need to keep an eye on him, regardless, Janis answered without elaborating. She still couldn’t be sure what she was feeling.
She peeked around and counted seven tents in the clearing. The others were also surrounded by assortments of buckets, plastic crates, and crude shelving. Shirts and pants draped tree branches and guy lines. Garbage littered the ground in primary colors. No one stirred.
Janis performed a cursory feel throughout the encampment, but didn’t detect the energy elsewhere.
Cassie reemerged from the tent carrying a metal teapot, the first finger of the hand that supported its bottom hooked through the handles of four plastic teacups. She set the teapot atop the crackling kindling and handed the cups around. When Janis looked inside hers, she found a spoonful of instant coffee and a second of what might have been powdered milk.
“It’ll only take a few minutes,” Cassie said of the water.
Ready to start info gathering? Janis thought toward Scott.
Let’s do it.
“So … how long have you lived here?” Janis asked.
“Since October last, I think it was.” Cassie elbowed Jasper’s arm. “That sound ’bout right?”
Jasper grunted without shifting his gaze from the stealers.
“And everyone here is from Murder Creek?” Scott asked.
“We’re from all parts, though guess you could say we come from the same place: Down and Out.” When Cassie smiled, Janis saw a space that had once belonged to her front teeth. A black decay was spreading to the others. “We stay in one township till the ’ficials run us out, then we move to another. The ’ficials round here have mostly left us alone, though.”
Not if my mother has anything to say about it, Scott thought-spoke glumly.
“Mostly?” Janis asked. “Have they been around recently?”
“A couple weeks back, before all this murder business.” Cassie stooped for the teapot, which had begun to knock and hiss steam. She gestured for Janis and Scott to pass their cups. “Guess there was some break-ins in town. A couple of police officers came back here to talk to us, look around the camp. I kept telling them we weren’t thieves. The little we have is through recycling and from the ministry.”
When Janis’s cup came back steaming, she held it in both hands to warm her numb fingers.
“So, they didn’t find anything?” Scott asked.
“Not here, they didn’t. We never told them ’bout the fellow over yonder, though.”
Janis straightened. “There’s someone else?”
“He never announced hisself,” Cassie said. “We happened on his camp while collecting wood one day.”
“What did he look like?” Scott asked.
“Can’t tell you ’cause we never seen him. Well, I didn’t, anyway. Just heard his voice. Had a tent like the ones here, but smaller. The day we came up on it, he was inside, talking to hisself. When we called out a hello, he went quiet. Thought he’d at least poke his head out, but he never showed a hair on his face.”
“Did you happen to recognize his voice?” Scott asked.
Cassie shrugged. “Like I said, we’re not from around here. He’s never been in any of our other camps. I’d ’ve recognized his voice. Low, sort of raspy. Didn’t much like the sound of it, tell you the truth.”
“Is he still here?” Janis asked quietly.
“That’s the dang thing of it,” Cassie said. “After the police left, Jasper went to talk to him. He was gonna tell the man that if it were him stealing, he either better quit it or move somewhere else. Folks like us get on by keeping out of sight and staying out of trouble. It’s what’s worked so far here. Jasper headed off in the late afternoon, four, maybe five o’clock. ”
Janis shifted her gaze to Cassie’s father, trying to picture the disheveled man delivering a public service announcement. Tan-colored coffee dribbled through the whiskers of his chin.
“When it got to be dark and he hadn’t come back, I went looking for him,” Cassie said. “Found him sitting on the ground, middle of nowhere, babbling like he’d lost all his marbles save two.”
A chill gripped Janis’s insides. “You mean, he wasn’t like this before?”
“Used to be sharp as a whip,” Cassie said. “When he weren’t drinking, that is.”
“Wh-what happened?” Scott asked.
“A few of us went to the man’s camp, aiming to find that out. I told Resal to bring his hunting rifle, just in case. When we got there, his camp was empty. Everything cleared out.”
“Does he remember anything?” Janis asked, nodding toward Jasper.
Cassie shook his head. “For two days all he would say was ‘the ghost, the ghost.’”
“The ghost?” Scott echoed.
“Shtealer,” Jasper hissed back.
Cassie slapped his knee. “Quit that, Papa.”
Keep her talking, Janis thought toward Scott. I’m going to see if I can tap his memories.
“Can I assume the man never turned up again?” Scott asked.
“Ain’t been seen back in these woods, I can tell you that,” Cassie said.
As Scott posed another question, Janis slipped across the lines that connected her and Jasper. The ochre haze that colored him was unmistakable—and now it made sense. Just as Scott’s sliding glass door and the dead dog had been subject to a disruptive energy, so had Jasper.
Pity swimming up inside her, Janis waded deeper into Jasper’s layers. The thoughts and images that bombarded her were kaleidoscopic—here one second, gone the next—but without any symmetry. She smelled grain alcohol, heard the screams of a broken home, felt the low, gray pull of depression. Each fragment enveloped her for a moment as she submerged further.
The ghost, she thought. I’m looking for the ghost.
An image rattled into view. A series of them. Janis found herself striding through the woods. The muddy hems of brown trousers flapped around a pair of heavy work boots. The boots stomped into a dry creek bed and up the other side. Ahead of her, the trees jumped in and out of focus, as though Jasper’s memory were being replayed on Super 8 film. She could feel the memory threatening to go off track, to unspool around her. Because just as much as she wanted to see and experience what had happened that day, Jasper’s psyche was bracing against it.
Janis risked a little more energy to cohere the images.
On the far side of the dry creek bed, the ground leveled. A tent showed through a thicket of trees. The tent was little more than a dark tarp draped over a line that ran low between two pines. The tarp’s corners and sides had been staked down. A flap covered the front.
Neighbor? Jasper called.
The tent remained silent.
Jasper stomped nearer. He figured that the man was either out, sleeping, or stone drunk.
Hello? he tried again, batting a hand against the side of the tent. It made a hollow sound.
He looked around. The site was cleaner than those at his own encampment. Beyond the tent he spotted a second tarp, nearly the same color as the fallen leaves. It, too, was staked down, mounding over whatever it was meant to conceal. Jasper walked over. Descending to hands and knees, he lifted up a side. Out of the dimness appeared the round, white body of a propane tank.
The idea that it might have been stolen made Jasper’s stomach burn with anger. He was preparing to pull up the stakes and throw the tarp back when something whispered behind him.
Jasper spun.
The soun
d had come from the tent, like someone shifting his weight. For the first time, Jasper noticed a small hole in the tent’s side. A vague uneasiness fluttered near his heart. He couldn’t say how, but he knew that whoever was inside was hovering on the other side of that hole, watching him.
Jasper rose slowly to his feet. Hello? he called. Anyone home? He waited a moment. Just wanna talk with you.
Above the tent, the last light of day winked low in the trees.
A chill in Jasper’s bones told him to leave, to forget this business with the strange man who wouldn’t answer him and head back to his own encampment. Jasper started to do just that, but when he passed the front of the low tent, he realized how silly he was being. So what if the man didn’t want to come out? Jasper could still do what he’d come to do.
He knelt until he was on level with the flap covering the front.
Look, he said. I’m sorry to be bothering you, but we’re having some problems with the police. Think we stole some stuff in town. Now, what you do is your own business, mister, but if you’re involved in anything illegal, we ask you to keep it away from our camp. They won’t tolerate us out here for long if they think we’re stealing. And there are several of us who call these woods home now.
Still no response. Had he imagined the sound earlier? The sensation of being watched?
It seemed too quiet now.
He moved a hand to the flap, hesitated, and—
A violent scream blew the image apart. Heart hammering, Janis tumbled from Jasper’s thoughts and into a chaotic scene. Jasper was on the ground beyond his tipped-over bucket, swiping the air with a clawed hand. “The ghost!” he wailed. “Th-the ghost! Th-th-th-th…”
When Cassie stood, Jasper’s red-rimmed eyes flinched toward her. He covered his face and began sobbing into his dirty hands.
“Papa.” Cassie sounded both angry and worried. She lifted him from underneath his arms. Scott hurried over to help, picking up his legs. An oval stain grew over the front of Jasper’s pants. Together, they carried him into the tent.
XGeneration (Book 5): Cry Little Sister Page 12
