Chapter Fifty-Two
Laura relived her nightmare. She was back in the barn, back with the cold steel grate and the musty smell of petrified horse manure. Her husband bent over her, possessed by a murderous spirit and wielding a knife that would soon slit her open to bleed to death. She couldn’t do this again. She had to wake herself up.
A slap hit her face. She awoke sitting up. She forced open her eyes. The light hurt like hell and she closed them to narrow slits.
Her chest felt like it had been crushed by a battering ram where the beanbag hit her. Her head pounded, especially the left side. She remembered Rhonda Mears smashing her in the face with the butt of some kind of gun. She had been outside a trailer. The smell, the nightmare smell was still here, strong and real. She tried to move her hands. Thin, rough rope bound her wrists behind her.
Another slap stung the other cheek. “Time’s a-wasting, sleepyhead.”
Laura opened her eyes a bit more. Rhonda’s face was inches from hers. Her bloodshot eyes looked like rusted spiderwebs.
“There we go,” Rhonda said. “It isn’t justice if the criminal isn’t aware of the punishment.”
Rhonda moved back. Laura saw they were in the Galaxy Farm barn. Goose bumps ran up her arms. Memories of her hellish time here resurfaced and sent waves of panic crashing through her. She tried to get up, but she was pinned back behind one of the roof’s wooden central pillars. Splinters from the gouged surface pricked her back through her shirt.
“The criminal always returns to the scene of the crime,” Rhonda said. “And here you are.”
She held a black 9 mm automatic. The bulky weapon looked more outsized, more menacing, in her small hand. She flourished it in a haphazard wave around the barn’s interior. The heavy weight at the end of her arm swung like the head of a furious snake.
“You know, my husband died in here.” Rhonda pointed the pistol at Laura, cocked to the right and sloppy. “But, wait, you know that. You killed him.”
Beads of sweat ran down Laura’s arms. “Rhonda, I didn’t kill Rick. It was Doug. He almost killed me too.”
“You don’t need to stick to that story,” Rhonda said. “It’s just us two girls here. You can tell the truth.”
Laura didn’t want to be in this place, and she sure as hell didn’t want to die in this place. A frantic look at the empty floor around her offered no ideas for escape. This woman was out of her mind. “Rhonda, you know the truth.”
“I certainly do. And so do you. And that truth is hard to live with, isn’t it? Being an adulterous, murdering bitch?”
Laura wasn’t going to shake whatever paranoid fantasy Rhonda had concocted. She twisted her wrists against the rope. It gave a little, but not enough.
Rhonda dropped the magazine from the pistol. She tucked the gun in her waistband and fished some bullets from her pocket. She crouched at Laura’s side.
“Guilt is horrible,” Rhonda whispered in her ear. Her hot breath made Laura shudder. “Corrosive. Destructive.”
Laura tried to shift and face her. Rhonda smacked her shoulder back into place.
“After a while, there would be only one escape, one road to relief.”
A cold metal bullet pressed against Laura’s fingertip, followed by a metallic click of the round going into a magazine. Rhonda forced Laura’s fingerprint onto a second round and then moved back into her line of sight. She snapped the next bullet into the clip.
“So, racked by remorse, you made a plan,” Rhonda said. “A payment of penance.” She slapped the magazine into the pistol. “An offer of your life in exchange for the lives you took.”
Laura’s pulse surged. Last time, the spirit of Sarah Hutchington saved her, broke through from the other side of eternity and slayed the demon about to kill her.
Sarah, she thought. I felt your presence here a few nights ago. I need you now.
“So you loaded this gun,” Rhonda said, “took a seat at the scene of your crime and ended your miserable life.”
Laura grasped at a straw. “They’ll know it’s staged. I don’t own a gun.”
“That’s the clincher,” Rhonda said. “This is Rick’s gun. The one I reported stolen a few days ago. The only item missing from the break-in. You had to atone for your sin the same way you committed it.”
Sarah, please, Laura prayed. Just loosen my wrists. Give me a fighting chance.
Rhonda pulled a faded red bandanna from her pocket and wiped down the pistol. “And they’ll find you here, gun in hand, brains on the ceiling. I’ll leave a wide enough trail that even the pseudo-Sherlocks in this department will be able to follow it. You pick up a few things as the sheriff’s wife.”
Sarah, Sarah, Laura pleaded in her mind. Please!
The skin on the back of Laura’s neck tingled. Five feet up the wall behind Rhonda, one of the leg traps silently yawned open, though the rusted springs should have groaned at the effort. The oxidized iron teeth gaped wide, like the mouth of a great white shark, and presented the circular center pressure plate as a bull’s-eye target. But the target was ten feet away.
Hope dawned. Laura was not in this alone. Sarah had come through, again, and at least given her a fighting chance.
Rhonda pulled back the slide with the rag and a round clicked into the chamber. The slide thrust forward with the sound of a tomb door locking shut. She knelt in front of Laura and jammed the barrel up under her chin. The cold metal wedged into her jaw.
“Confess now,” Rhonda said. “Bare your soul and pray for redemption.”
Rhonda was too close. Laura grumbled something through gritted teeth. Rhonda’s mouth curled up in victory. She pulled the barrel away and rocked back on her heels.
“Be redeemed,” Rhonda said.
Laura tucked her legs up to her chest and jammed her heels up and out into Rhonda. She staggered up and back, arms flailing, trying to maintain balance. She closed on the trap. Six feet, five, three, one.
She stopped and steadied herself. Her eyes narrowed to slits. “That’s going to cost you.”
Suddenly, Rhonda jerked up and back, like a hooked prize fish. She sailed back to the wall. The back of her head struck the pressure plate dead on. The great jaws snapped shut and buried their serrated teeth deep into the sides of her head. Her face crushed into an oblong expression of complete surprise. Blood gushed down the sides of her head and ran down the jaws of the trap. Her body jerked against the wall, but the trap did not move. Rhonda went still.
Laura exhaled in relief.
Then, with the slowness of a crossing gate, Rhonda raised the pistol and pointed it at Laura’s head. Rhonda gurgled an epithet. Laura closed her eyes. A pistol shot echoed inside the great barn.
The bullet blasted the pillar just over Laura’s head. She jerked forward. Splinters showered her hair.
Rhonda exhaled a growl of frustrated disappointment. The pistol fell to the ground. Her body went slack and hung from the trap on the wall.
The 9 mm round had nearly blown the four-by-four pillar in two. Laura inched herself up until she stood. She aligned her bound wrists with the blast hole in the pillar. She raised a foot against the pillar and pushed. She snapped through the remains of the weakened support and rolled free onto the ground. Tucking her hands around her feet, she slipped them in front of her. She untied herself with her teeth.
Rhonda hung like an idled marionette on the barn wall. Laura turned from the gruesome sight of her dead assailant and staggered out of the door.
The sun had set. Laura figured she must have been out for hours. The Jeep next to the barn had to be Rhonda’s. She popped open the passenger door. Laura’s phone lay on the seat along with her keys and the rest of what Rhonda had apparently emptied from Laura’s pockets. It flashed that she had a text message. She read Theresa’s frantic note. This whole night was going to hell. She had to get back into town.
The keys weren’t in the ignition. Laura didn’t like what that meant. What she had to do to get out of here. She reentered the barn.<
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Rhonda’s misshapen face stared out from the trap with glazed eyes. Laura avoided the sight and looked to the ground. She scooped up the pistol and tucked it into the back of her waistband.
She needed the car keys. A bulge in Rhonda’s front pocket pointed the way. Laura took a step closer to the dead body. The idea of reaching into a corpse’s pocket made her skin crawl. And she’d already experienced a reanimation when Rhonda shot at her.
Laura held her breath and slid her hand into Rhonda’s jeans. The inside of her pocket was still warm. Her hand inched forward until she felt a key against her fingertips. She clenched her teeth. She hooked the ring on her finger and yanked the keys free. Rhonda’s body swayed and Laura jumped back. The corpse went still.
Laura returned to the Jeep and took the driver’s seat. The repercussions of what’d just happened were too much to think about now. Theresa was in trouble. Laura dialed her number. It rang six times and rolled over to voice mail. Bad just got worse.
She fired up the Jeep and peeled away from Galaxy Farms in a plume of dust.
Chapter Fifty-Three
Theresa awakened blind.
She opened her eyes and saw nothing but black. She fought for a breath through the heavy cloth bag with short, sharp inhalations. The cold of the polished wood floor seeped through the front of her shirt. She remembered that she was on the kitchen floor and that at least two women had jumped her there, one of whom she recognized.
She moaned as she remembered one more thing. They had taken Dustin. Her horrific vision of Dustin in a sea of flames flashed through her consciousness. Panic rolled in like a tsunami.
She tugged at her hands, bound behind her and to her ankles. Hog-tied in her own home. She choked in another breath, and her mind reeled in frustration.
The front door of her house creaked open. She froze. They were back. They wanted something else. She rested her head back on the floor. They’d left her unconscious, she could play that part. Maybe acting dead would keep her from being dead.
Footsteps crept through the hallway, paused and then continued towards the kitchen.
Theresa’s pounding heart sounded like a bass drum against the wooden floor. She closed her eyes and tried to do nothing but breathe. Her head throbbed from the earlier impact with the floor and she bit back a moan of pain.
Boards creaked inches from her face. For the second time that night, she heard the crisp snap of a gun being cocked.
She remembered that one of the women had wanted to kill her. Now she’d doubled back to finish the job. Theresa held her breath.
The black bag tore in two as it was yanked off her head. She looked up to see Laura’s face behind the black open barrel of a pistol.
“Theresa!” Laura dropped the gun to the floor. She began to untie Theresa’s bindings. “What the hell?”
Theresa rolled to rest on her side. “Two women were in here when we got home. They jumped me and took Dustin. One of them was Mayor McCormack.”
Laura paused in untying the rope. “Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
Laura resumed and freed Theresa’s hands. Theresa eyed the pistol on the floor inches from her head.
“Were you going to shoot me?”
“The door was cracked open,” Laura said. “The house was dark. I couldn’t tell who you were, and I wasn’t taking any chances.”
“What are you doing with a gun anyway?”
Laura delivered a quick version of her barn ordeal as she untied Lara’s ankles.
“Are you all right?” Theresa asked.
“She was a bad shot, so I’m okay,” Laura said. She helped Theresa to her feet. Theresa winced as a needle of pain lanced her brain. “But you’re not.”
“I’ll manage.” She felt the swelling bump on the side of her head. “We need to find Dustin. I had a horrible vision at Princess Day Care, so I didn’t leave him out there. That’s a good place to start.”
Moultrie was a ghost town as the women cruised through it. Every business closed, most citizens out for the time of their life at Donkey Day. Angelina’s was shuttered. Even the omnipresent deputy parked on the square was pulled in to the fairgrounds. The stoplights flashed red and yellow hours before their usual midnight switch from three options. The day-care parking lot was completely empty when they pulled in. Theresa shut down the engine. The lot was silent.
Laura gripped the dash of Theresa’s Explorer. Goose bumps rippled up her arms.
“Oh God. Something’s wrong here. Very wrong. My Triple S just experienced an earthquake.”
“Ms. Gentry and the other caregivers are gone,” Theresa said. “Unsupervised, those kids should—”
Laura was already out of the car and on her way to the door. Theresa followed. She tried to banish the idea that quiet kids could only be dead kids.
The two blew through the doorway at a dead run. Laura broke right for the meeting room. Theresa went left and through the first day-care door. She skidded to a stop. The children all sat wearing thick black-plastic glasses, staring straight ahead through a faint haze. A blue screen had replaced the long-finished DVD.
“Children!” Theresa said. No one twitched. “CHILDREN!”
None acknowledged her, but half the group took a quarter turn and faced the closed door near the front of the room. Milliseconds later, Laura burst through that door.
“Theresa!” she yelled. She stopped short, as if pinned by the sea of black-plastic spectacles that by now all pointed at her. She stepped to the center of the room. Rows of glasses tracked her movement.
“What’s wrong with them?” Theresa said.
Laura knelt before one boy and slipped off the 3-D glasses. She looked deep into his dilated eyes. “I’d say the same thing that was wrong with Caroline and Bo out with the witches on Pear Tree Lane, at about twice the intensity.” She sniffed the air. “Smell that?”
“Yes, it’s familiar, but just part of it.”
“It’s what the inside of their farmhouse smelled like, the incense Tammy burned.”
Tammy. Theresa’s recognition clicked. Tammy smelled like this at the Women’s Night meeting. Not exactly like this, but very similar, and it was too strong to have been just contact scent from the inside of her house.
Both women rushed for the nearest windows and yanked them straight up. A cool incoming breeze rattled the blinds like castanets. The air cleared and one by one the children slumped to the ground. Laura checked several children’s pulses and breathing.
“They’re asleep,” she said. “Their bodies must be exhausted from sitting up and still for who knows how long.”
Theresa bent down to a girl she recognized from Dustin’s class. “Isabel?” She gave her a little shake. “Isabel?” She turned to Laura. “When Dustin’s out cold like this he doesn’t stir for hours.”
Laura counted sleeping bags and then kids. “This place is four kids short. Dustin wasn’t the only child abducted tonight. And the smell in the air says they’re all out at the Petty place.”
“What’s going on here?” said a voice from the doorway. “Julian?”
Both women recognized Eboni Wales, whose son Julian was in Dustin’s class. The woman made a frantic visual search of the class. She spotted her sleeping son and ran to his side.
“We need to go save my son,” Theresa said to Laura. She turned to Eboni. “We came in and found the kids asleep and Ms. Gentry gone. Dustin’s missing and we need to find him. Can you start calling parents?”
Eboni had Julian’s head in her lap. His eyes fluttered open and he smiled in recognition.
“Mom?”
Eboni waved Theresa off without looking up. “I’ve got it. Go.”
Chapter Fifty-Four
A minute later, Theresa and Laura were pulling out of the parking lot.
“The smell,” Theresa said. “It’s from bewitching herbs. I read about them in a journal on witchcraft. They act like a sedative, making you suggestible in low doses, comatose in high. I think t
hat Tammy used them in some sort of perfume to more easily gain my trust.”
“That’s the other place I caught that scent,” Laura realized, “or a variation of it. Dalton Gowan smelled something like it. That sure explains a lot.”
“Meaning?”
Laura gave her head a rueful shake. “Meaning he’s definitely involved in all this. Maybe the witches used the information he stole to target the children they kidnapped.”
A half mile out of town, the headlights caught the silhouette of a woman walking against traffic on the side of the road. Theresa slowed the Explorer and flicked on the high beams. Aileen raised a hand to shield her eyes.
“Aileen? Head witch out for a stroll?” Laura said.
Theresa stopped the SUV. Aileen hobbled up to the passenger window in a cockeyed jog. Strands of her hair stuck out at wild angles. Sweat speckled her forehead despite the cool evening. She squinted into the vehicle.
“Laura Locke,” she said with relief. “Thank God…the children…terrible things. We need to call the police, get some help.”
“We were thinking the same thing, but with you on the receiving end.”
Aileen’s eyes went wide. “You know what they’re doing? No, I’m not part of that. They used me, drugged me with something. Tammy and Janice have some ritual going on out there. There are lots of kids involved, including Caroline and Bo.” Aileen recognized Theresa in the driver’s seat. “And Dustin.”
“Get in!” Theresa said.
Aileen was still closing the door when Theresa punched the accelerator and finished the job for her.
“Where’s my son?”
“There’s a ritual going on in the backyard,” Aileen said. “Children like zombies. Dustin is at the center of it all, tied up to a pole next to a pale little girl in white.”
“That was the girl I saw in the yard that night,” Laura said. “Then it wasn’t Caroline or Bo.”
“I don’t know how many women are there, all dressed in black robes. The whole yard is filled with cars from all over the country.”
Dark Vengeance Page 18
