Fever Dream

by Douglas Preston

  D’Agosta watched as she wiggled toward the kitchen. Then he sighed, took a sip of his beer. It had been a long, wearisome afternoon. Sunflower, Louisiana, was a town of about three thousand people, surrounded on one side by liveoak forest, on the other by the vast cypress swamp known as Black Brake. It had proven utterly unremarkable: small shabby houses with picket fences, scuffed boardwalks in need of repair, redbone hounds dozing on front porches. It was a hardworking, hard-bitten, down-at-the-heels hamlet forgotten by the outside world.

  They had registered at the town’s only hotel, then split up and gone their separate ways, each trying to uncover why Helen Pendergast would have made a three-day pilgrimage to such a remote spot.

  Their recent run of luck seemed to sputter out on the threshold of Sunflower. D’Agosta had spent five fruitless hours looking into blank faces and walking into dead ends. There were no art dealers, museums, private collections, or historical societies. Nobody remembered seeing Helen Pendergast—the photo he’d shown around triggered only blank looks. Not even the car produced a glimmer of recall. John James Audubon, their research showed, had never been anywhere near this region of Louisiana.

  When D’Agosta finally met up with Pendergast in the hotel’s small restaurant for dinner, he felt almost as dejected as the FBI agent had looked that morning. As if to match his mood, the sunny skies had boiled up into dark thunderheads that threatened a storm.

  “Zilch,” he said in answer to Pendergast’s query, and described his discouraging morning. “Maybe that old lady remembered wrong. Or was just bullshitting us for another twenty. What about you?”

  The food arrived, and the waitress laid their plates before them with a cheery “Here we are!” Pendergast eyed his in silence, dipping some stew out with his spoon to examine it more closely.

  “Can I get you another beer?” she asked D’Agosta, beaming.

  “Why not?”

  “Club soda?” she asked Pendergast.

  “No thank you, this will be sufficient.”

  The waitress bounced off again.

  D’Agosta turned back. “Well? Any luck?”

  “One moment.” Pendergast plucked out his cell phone, dialed. “Maurice? We’ll be spending the night here in Sunflower. That’s right. Good night.” He put away the phone. “My experience, I fear, was as discouraging as yours.” However, his alleged disappointment was belied by a glimmer in his eye and a wry smile teasing the corners of his lips.

  “How come I don’t believe you?” D’Agosta finally asked.

  “Watch, if you please, as I perform a little experiment on our waitress.”

  The waitress came back with a Bud and a fresh napkin. As she placed them before D’Agosta, Pendergast spoke in his most honeyed voice, laying the accent on thick. “My dear, I wonder if I might ask you a question.”

  She turned to him with a perky smile. “Ask away, hon.”

  Pendergast made a show of pulling a small notebook from his jacket pocket. “I’m a reporter up from New Orleans, and I’m doing research on a family that used to live here.” He opened the notebook, looked up at the waitress expectantly.

  “Sure, which family?”

  “Doane.”

  If Pendergast had announced a holdup, the reaction couldn’t have been more dramatic. The woman’s face immediately shut down, blank and expressionless, her eyes hooded. The perkiness vanished instantly.

  “Don’t know anything about that,” she mumbled. “Can’t help you.” She turned and walked away, pushing through the door to the kitchen.

  Pendergast slipped the notebook back into his jacket and turned to D’Agosta. “What do you think of my experiment?”

  “How the hell did you know she’d react like that? She’s obviously hiding something.”

  “That, my dear Vincent, is precisely the point.” Pendergast took another sip of club soda. “I didn’t single her out. Everyone in town reacts the same way. Haven’t you noticed, during your inquiries this afternoon, a certain degree of hesitancy and suspicion?”

  D’Agosta paused to consider. It was true that nobody had been particularly helpful, but he’d simply ascribed it to small-town truculence, local folk suspicious of some Yankee coming in and asking a lot of questions.

  “As I made my own inquiries,” Pendergast went on, “I ran into an increasingly suspicious level of obfuscation and denial. And then, when I pressed one elderly gentleman for information, he heatedly informed me that despite what I might have heard otherwise, the stories about the Doanes were nothing but hogwash. Naturally I began to ask about the Doane family. And that’s when I started getting the reaction you just saw.”

  “And so?”

  “I repaired to the local newspaper office and asked to see the back issues, dating from around the time of Helen’s visit. They were unwilling to help, and it took this—” Pendergast pulled out his shield. “—to change their minds. I found that in the years surrounding Helen’s visit, several pages had been carefully cut out of certain newspapers. I made a note of what the issues were, then made my way back down the road to the library at Kemp, the last town before Sunflower. Their copies of the newspapers had all the missing pages. And that’s where I got the story.”

  “What story?” D’Agosta asked.

  “The strange story of the Doane family. Mr. Doane was a novelist of independent means, and he brought his extended family to Sunflower to get away from it all, to write the great American novel far from the distractions of civilization. They bought one of the town’s biggest and best houses, built by a small-time lumber baron in the years before the local mill shut down. Doane had two children. One of them, the son, won the highest honors ever awarded by the Sunflower High School, a clever fellow by all accounts. The daughter was a gifted poet whose works were occasionally published in the local papers. I read a few and they are, in fact, exceedingly well done. Mrs. Doane had grown into a noted landscape painter. The town became very proud of their talented, adopted family, and they were frequently in the papers, accepting awards, raising funds for one or another local charity, ribbon cutting, that sort of thing.”

  “Landscape painter,” D’Agosta repeated. “How about birds?”

  “Not that I could find out. Nor did they appear to have any particular interest in Audubon or natural history art. Then, a few months after Helen’s visit, the steady stream of approving stories began to cease.”

  “Maybe the family got tired of the attention.”

  “I think not. There was one more article about the Doane family—one final article,” he went on. “Half a year after that. It stated that William, the Doane son, had been captured by the police after an extended manhunt through the national forest, and that he was now in solitary confinement in the county jail, charged with two ax murders.”

  “The star student?” D’Agosta asked incredulously.

  Pendergast nodded. “After reading this, I began asking around Kemp about the Doane family. The townspeople there felt none of the restraint I noticed here. I heard a veritable outpouring of rumor and innuendo. Homicidal maniacs that only came out at night. Madness and violence. Stalking and menace. It became difficult to sift fact from fiction, town gossip from reality. The only thing that I feel reasonably sure of is that all are now dead, each having died in a uniquely unpleasant way.”

  “All of them?”

  “The mother was a suicide. The son died on death row while awaiting execution for the ax murders I spoke of. The daughter died in an insane asylum after refusing to sleep for two weeks. The last to die was the father, shot by the town sheriff of Sunflower.”

  “What happened?”

  “He apparently took to wandering into town, accosting young women, threatening the townsfolk. There were reports of vandalism, destruction, babies gone missing. The people I spoke to hinted it might have been less of a killing and more of an execution—with the tacit approval of the Sunflower town fathers. The sheriff and his deputies shotgunned Mr. Doane in his house as he allegedly resisted
arrest. There was no investigation.”

  “Jesus,” D’Agosta replied. “That would explain the waitress’s reaction. As well as all the hostility around here.”

  “Precisely.”

  “What the hell do you think happened to them? Something in the water?”

  “I have no idea. But I will tell you this: I’m convinced they were the object of Helen’s visit.”

  “That’s a pretty big leap.”

  Pendergast nodded. “Consider this: they are the only unique element in an otherwise unremarkable town. There’s nothing else here of interest. Somehow, they’re the link we’re searching for.”

  The waitress hustled up to their table, took away their plates, and went off, even as D’Agosta began to order coffee. “I wonder what it takes to get a cup of java around here,” D’Agosta said, trying to attract her attention.

  “Somehow, Vincent, I doubt you’ll be getting your ‘java’ or anything more in this establishment.”

  D’Agosta sighed. “So who lives in the house now?”

  “Nobody. It was abandoned and shut up since the shooting of Mr. Doane.”

  “We’re going there,” D’Agosta said, more as a statement than a question.

  “Exactly.”

  “When?”

  Pendergast raised his finger for the waitress. “As soon as we can get the check from our reticent but nevertheless most eloquent waitress.”

  25

  THE WAITRESS DID NOT ARRIVE WITH THE check. Instead, it was the manager of the hotel. He placed the check on the table and then, without even a show of apology, informed them they would not be able to stay the night after all.

  “What do you mean?” D’Agosta said. “We booked the room; you took our credit card numbers.”

  “There’s a large party coming in,” the man replied. “They had prior reservations the front desk overlooked—and as you can see, this is a small hotel.”

  “Too bad for them,” D’Agosta said. “We’re already here.”

  “You haven’t unpacked yet,” the manager replied. “In fact, I’m told your luggage isn’t even in your rooms yet. I’ve already torn up your credit card voucher. I’m sorry.”

  But he didn’t sound sorry, and D’Agosta was about to rake the man over the coals when Pendergast laid a hand on his arm. “Very well,” Pendergast said, reaching into his wallet and paying the dinner bill in cash. “Good evening, then.”

  The manager walked away, and D’Agosta turned to Pendergast. “You’re gonna let that prick walk all over us? It’s obvious he’s kicking us out because of the questions you’re asking—and the ancient history we’re stirring up.”

  In response, Pendergast nodded out the window. Glancing through it, D’Agosta saw the hotel manager now crossing the street. As D’Agosta watched, the man walked past several store buildings, shuttered for the night, and then vanished into the sheriff’s office.

  “What the hell kind of town is this?” D’Agosta said. “Next thing you know, it’ll be villagers with pitchforks.”

  “Our interest doesn’t lie with the town,” Pendergast said. “There’s no point in complicating things. I suggest that we leave at once—before the local sheriff finds an excuse to run us out.”

  They exited the restaurant and made their way to the back parking lot of the hotel. The storm that had been threatening was fast approaching: the wind raked the treetops, and thunder could be heard rumbling in the distance. Pendergast put up the Porsche’s top as D’Agosta climbed in. Pendergast slipped in himself, turned on the engine, nosed the car into a back alley, then made his way through town via back streets, avoiding main thoroughfares.

  The Doane house was located about two miles past town, up an unpaved drive that had once been well tended but was now little more than a rutted track. He drove cautiously, careful not to bottom out the Spyder in the hard-packed dirt. Dense stands of trees crowded in on both sides of the road, their skeletal branches lacing the night sky above their heads. D’Agosta, flung around in his seat until his teeth rattled, decided that even the Zambian Land Rover would have been preferable in these conditions.

  Pendergast rounded a final bend and the house itself came into view in the headlights, the sky roiling with clouds above. D’Agosta stared at it in surprise. He had expected a large, elegant structure, as ornate as the rest of the town was plain. What he saw was large, all right, but it was hardly elegant. In fact, it looked more like a fort left over from the days of the Louisiana Purchase. Built out of huge, rough-edged beams, it sported tall towers at either end and a long, squat central façade with innumerable small windows. Atop this façade was the bizarre anachronism of a widow’s walk, surrounded by spiked iron railings. It stood alone on a small rise of land. Beyond to the east lay forest, dense and dark, leading to the vast Black Brake swamp. As D’Agosta stared at the structure, a tongue of lightning struck the woods behind, briefly silhouetting it in spectral yellow light.

  “Looks like somebody tried to cross a castle with a log cabin,” he said.

  “The original owner was a timber baron, after all.” Pendergast nodded at the widow’s walk. “No doubt he used that to survey his domain. I read that he personally owned sixty thousand acres of land—including much of the cypress forests in the Black Brake—before the government acquired it for the national forest and a wilderness area.”

  He pulled up to the house and stopped. The agent glanced briefly in the rearview mirror before maneuvering the car around to the back and killing the engine.

  “Expecting company?” D’Agosta asked.

  “No point in attracting attention.”

  Now the rain started: fat drops that drummed against the windshield and the fabric top. Pendergast got out, and D’Agosta quickly followed suit. They trotted over to the shelter of a rear porch. D’Agosta glanced up a little uneasily at the rambling structure. It was exactly the kind of eccentric residence that might attract a novelist. Every tiny window was carefully shuttered, and the door itself was secured with a padlock and chain. A riot of vegetation had grown up around the house, softening the rough lines of its foundation, while moss and lichens draped some of the beams.

  Pendergast took a final look around, then turned his attention to the padlock. He held it by the hasp, turning it this way and that, and then passed his other hand, holding a small tool, over the cylinder housing. A quick fiddle and it snapped open with a loud creak. Pendergast removed the chain and let it drop to the ground. The door itself was also locked; Pendergast bent over it and swiftly defeated the mechanism with the same tool. Then he rose again and turned the knob, pushing the door open with a squeal of protesting hinges. Pulling a flashlight from his jacket, he stepped inside. D’Agosta had long ago learned, when working with Pendergast, to never get caught without two things: a gun and a flashlight. Now he pulled out his own light and followed Pendergast into the house.

  They found themselves in a large, old-fashioned kitchen. In the center stood a wooden breakfast table, and an oven, refrigerator, and washing machine were arranged in a porcelain row along the far wall. Beyond that, any resemblance to a normal family kitchen ended. The cabinets were thrown open, and crockery and glassware, almost all of it broken, streamed out from the shelves and onto the countertops and floor. Remains of foodstuffs—grains, rice, beans—lay scattered here and there, desiccated, scattered by rats, and fringed with ancient mold. The chairs were overturned and splintered, and the walls were punctuated with holes made by a sledgehammer or—perhaps—a fist. Plaster had fallen from the ceiling in chunks, making miniature explosions of white powder here and there on the floor, in which vermin tracks and droppings could be clearly seen. D’Agosta played his beam around the room, taking in the whirlwind of destruction. His light stopped in one corner, where a large, long-dried accumulation of what seemed to be blood lay on the floor; on the wall above, at chest height, were several ragged holes made by blasts from a heavy-gauge shotgun with similar sprays of dried blood and offal.

  “I’d guess
this is where our Mr. Doane met his end,” D’Agosta said, “courtesy of the local sheriff. Looks like one hell of a struggle took place.”

  “It would indeed appear to be the site of the shooting,” Pendergast murmured in reply. “However, there was no struggle. This damage occurred before the time of death.”

  “What the hell happened, then?”

  Pendergast glanced around the mess a moment longer before replying. “A descent into madness.” He shone his light toward a door in the far wall. “Come on, Vincent—let us continue.”

  They walked slowly through the first floor, searching the dining room, parlor, pantry, living room, bathrooms, and other spaces of indeterminate use. Everywhere they found the same chaos: overturned furniture, broken glassware, books ripped into dozens of pieces and scattered mindlessly over the floor. The fireplace in the den held hundreds of small bones. Examining them carefully, Pendergast announced that they were squirrel remains, which—based on their relative positions—had been stuffed up the chimney, staying there until decay and putrefaction caused them to fall back down onto the firedogs. In another room they found a dark, greasy mattress, surrounded by the detritus of countless ancient meals: empty tins of Spam and sardines, candy bar wrappers, crushed beer cans. One corner of the room appeared to have been used as an open latrine, with no attempt at sanitation or concealment. There were no paintings on any of the walls of the rooms, black-framed or otherwise. In fact, the only decorative works the walls displayed were endless frantic doodles in purple Magic Marker: a storm of squiggles and manic jagged lines that was disquieting to look at.

  “Jesus,” D’Agosta said. “What could Helen possibly have wanted here?”

  “It is exceedingly curious,” Pendergast replied, “especially considering that at the time of her visit, the Doane family was the pride of Sunflower. This decline into criminal madness happened much later.”

  Thunder rumbled ominously outside, accompanied by flashes of livid lightning through the shuttered windows. They descended into the basement, which, though less cluttered, showed signs of the same blizzard of lunatic destruction so evident on the first floor. After a thorough and fruitless search, they climbed to the second floor. Here the whirlwind of ruin was somewhat abated, although there were plenty of troubling signs. In what was clearly the son’s bedroom, one wall was almost completely covered in awards for academic excellence and distinguished community service—based on their dates, taking place over a year or two around the time of Helen Pendergast’s visit. The facing wall, however, was equally crowded with the desiccated heads of animals—pigs, dogs, rats—all hammered into the wood in the roughest manner possible, with no effort made to clean or even exsanguinate them: dried blood ran down in heavy streams from each mummified trophy onto those hammered in place below.