by Jess Lourey
Mrs. Berns offered me a surprisingly strong shoulder to lean on. “Are you all right, Dyna Girl?”
“No,” I said, trying not to cry. “I think my ankle is broken.”
“The pastor dirty-dogged you, didn’t he?”
“He stepped on my foot.” I brushed dripping hair out of my face. “I suppose it could have been an accident.”
“I suppose walleyes can fly, too. Let’s get you to a doctor.”
“Where’s Weston?”
“He disappeared about the same time you got all moony-eyed and went into the lake. He can find his own way home.”
“I don’t want to leave him here.”
“Have you seen your ankle?”
I purposely had not. It felt hot and pulsed like a migraine. When I let my eyes wander down my mud-streaked leg, I was rewarded with the sight of my left ankle as wide as a rabbit in a snake’s throat, the skin purple and stretched. “Yeah, Weston can probably find his way home. Can you drive?”
“Is the Pope Catholic?”
“I’m pretty sure he is, but can you drive?” Don’t ever deflect a deflector.
“Not in the eyes of the law, but that doesn’t stop me from getting where I’m going.”
“Good enough.” We hobbled back to the car. I mostly limped, using Mrs. Berns for balance, and my ankle throbbed with every jolt. I periodically looked back at the congregation, but they took no notice of us. The air was hot but I was wet and in shock, and I shivered as we made our way.
Once we reached the car, it took Mrs. Berns a couple tries and painful grinds to figure out my stick shift, but soon we were headed to the Douglas County Hospital in Alexandria. When we arrived, I had Mrs. Berns bring out a wheelchair so I didn’t have to walk in. She wheeled me in with a flourish, and we spent the next several hours waiting next to sunstroked tourists, a guy with a fishhook stuck in his lip, and other assorted emergencies.
By the time we got to a doctor, I had lost most of the feeling in my ankle. My overriding sensation was of being covered in sticky, dried swamp water. An evil poking session and several x-rays later, my ankle was declared sprained, but intact. A kind nurse cleaned it off, wrapped an Ace bandage around tight as a tourniquet, and gave me an ice pack for the ride home. She offered crutches, but I didn’t take them. I wasn’t planning on being out of commission long enough to learn how to use them. In fact, thanks to a Paul Bunyan–sized dose of Percocet, I had decided I was going to drive us home. One trip on windy back roads with Mrs. Berns at the wheel had been enough for me.
“Hey, Green Lantern, you mind if I drive?”
“Suit yourself, but the doctor said you shouldn’t operate heavy machinery on the happy pills and to stay off that ankle.”
“It’s my left foot. I hardly need it. Can you help me find a sweatshirt, though? I think there’s one in the trunk, and I’m feeling chilly.”
Mrs. Berns looked at me doubtfully. “It’s 97 degrees. You sure you’re okay to drive?”
I shivered. “Positive. I just want a sweatshirt.”
“Okay.” She took my keys and went around to the back. “Will this do?” She held up the black coat I had found in the woods at the Festival last night.
“No. That’s not mine.”
She looked at the inside. “Hell of a rip here on the left shoulder. My aunt used to have rips in all her coats just like this. She was a gypsy, and all her big, sharp rings tore the shoulders of every coat she had when she put them on. Boy, could that woman belly dance, though.”
The sudden thought was almost too big to fit inside my head. Naomi Meale wore a big, sharp ring on her left hand. Could it have torn the inside shoulder of this coat? Had I found Naomi Meales’ coat at the corn maze, stuck in the trees as if she could walk out of it. Mrs. Meale could walk. But then how come she hadn’t pushed the burning cigarette off her leg? Was she that crazy? Or was I the crazy one for even thinking she could use her legs?
I thought back to Naomi talking in tongues, and her reverent adoration of her husband. No, the more I thought about it, the more it made a sick sense. Naomi Meale could walk, she and Robert Meale had some twisted reason for kidnapping and killing teenage girls, first in Georgia and now in Minnesota, and Mrs. Meales’ sister was their partner in crime. No one would believe me if I told them my crazy hunch, least of all Gary Wohnt, who was under the Meale spell.
No, it was up to me. I would take my flashlight, my knife, and a digital camera and find Lydia tonight, if she was still alive. Nothing would turn me away. Nothing.
It was almost seven p.m. when I finally dropped Mrs. Berns off at the Senior Sunset. She didn’t want to let me go home alone. She said it was because she was worried about my ankle, but I think she sniffed a showdown in the air and didn’t want to miss it. Part of me wanted to bring her along—she had been a good little bodyguard to me in July—but I didn’t know what I was walking into and couldn’t in good conscience let her tag along.
At my house, I played fetch with Luna so she could exercise without me needing to move, and then I hobbled around, filling both pets’ food and water dishes. I also fed and watered myself, though I was too jittery from anticipation to swallow much more than some fruit and juice.
I showered and re-wrapped my ankle, only this time I made it so tight it felt like a club. I couldn’t have bent it to save my soul. I hadn’t had time to wash my summer spying outfit since my last mission, but it didn’t smell too bad, and the linen pants slipped on easily over my mummified ankle. I added my stun gun to the knife and flashlight in my waistband. I had bought Z-Force, as I had fondly named the weapon, in June, and even had a couple good opportunities to see it in action. The little gizmo looked like a black hair trimmer but stung like a scorpion, if said scorpion could deliver several thousand volts of electricity off one charge. Z-Force was a passive-aggressive, commitment-avoidant weapon—you zap and run, and no one is hurt for very long—and it fit my lifestyle like a glove.
I wasn’t stupid. If my instincts were correct, two of the Meales were kidnappers and at least one was a murderer. They were dangerous, and the odds weren’t on my side in a direct confrontation. However, the odds of convincing God-struck Gary Wohnt that they were culpable were even poorer. All I needed was one shred of concrete proof that the Meales were guilty—Lucy Lebowski’s pompoms squirreled away in the assembly hall kitchen, or Lydia locked in the church basement, or a recording of Pastor Meale confessing to God that he murdered the Lebowski girl as a way to redirect his inappropriate feelings about his daughter.
If I didn’t find that evidence at the Bible camp, I would uncover it at the Hancock Lake house, even if it took me all night. I could find that proof and slip away without being seen and let Gary take it from there. If I didn’t come up with that proof, though, Lydia was a dead girl, guaranteed.
If she was even still alive. I pushed the thought away. Lydia had to be alive, though what the poor girl was suffering now was impossible to imagine. Better action than fear. I was the only person who suspected the Meales, and I took that responsibility seriously.
Before I went to the Bible camp, however, I had a hunch that needed following up. A short drive brought me to the curiously-named Makeout Point, odd because there was no point, just a lot of making out in a field next to an abandoned farmhouse. All the local teens parked and partied here, even though the Battle Lake police regularly busted them up. Whoever owned the land had finally caved in to reality last summer and had placed a port-a-potty next to one of the decaying sheds.
I counted four cars and a minivan as I pulled in. Knocking on the windows of the first two brought embarrassment for all involved—it’s hard to tell one brunette from another when she’s got a blonde farm boy attached to her face—but the minivan contained the pot o’gold.
“Alicia?” I knocked on one of the backseat windows, impressed with the amount of heavy breathing it must have taken to fog up every window in a seven-passenger Dodge Caravan. My initial knocks didn’t break the pace of the writhing mass
I could make out through the misty window, so I rapped with the nice end of Z-Force. “Police!”
What fun. Wild shuffling took place inside the minivan. Minutes later, the sliding door rumbled open, and I was face to face with a flushed young man with saucer eyes and an underbite. “You saw a cop car?”
“What? No, I said, ‘Puh-leez.’ Who makes out in a Dodge Caravan?”
He ducked his wide round eyes sheepishly. “It’s my parents’.”
“Figured. I’m looking for Alicia Meale. Preacher’s daughter?”
A batch of tangled brunette hair peeped over his shoulder, followed by two angry eyes. “Whaddya want with me?”
Bingo. Anyone who’s grown up in a small town knows that nobody parties like the pastors’ kids. I liked Alicia about as much as a cold sore, but I had had a feeling she was too whiny to be a murderer and too manipulative to follow her parents’ lead, except when it benefited her. I had started work on this theory when I found the bag of weed in her drawer. When I spotted her holding hands at the August Moon Festival with Knute Anderson, last year’s star senior quarterback and local manwhore, I knew exactly what type of person I was dealing with. No way would she give up a Saturday night to kidnap a teenager. A little early morning vandalism as revenge for some imagined slight, maybe. A crime that involved getting dirty and didn’t have boys around? Never. Now to follow up on the second part of my hunch. “I need to talk to you.”
“Don’t care.”
“You will care. Either you answer a couple questions, or I tell your parents you were making hot monkey friction on the Sabbath.”
“They’d never believe you over me. They think I’m an angel straight from God’s hands.”
Probably true. I had another ace in the hole, though. “I know someone else who would think you’re a heavenly angel.”
She snorted. “Who?”
“You know the band that played at the Festival last night? Not with My Horse?”
“Do I know them? Gawd, do I wish! They were smokin’!” Alicia said this with no consideration for the hurt-looking minivan-driver whose pants she had most recently visited. He was, incidentally, not the star quarterback she had been holding hands with last night. Someone really should do a study on the direct correlation between proximity with God in your childhood and affinity with beer, bongs, and boys in the teen years.
“The lead singer is a good friend of mine.”
“The one that looks like a blond Jim Morrison?”
And screws like a blond Andy Rooney. But she didn’t need to know that. “Yeah. His name is Brad. How about we do a trade? You answer a couple questions for me, and I set you up with Brad.”
“How do I know you’ll follow through?”
“You don’t, but what have you got to lose?”
She pushed her hair back, looked like she was about to close the door on my face, and then realized she had just been making out in a minivan. What did she have to lose? “Fine. Make it quick.”
“You know Lucy Lebowski and Lydia Henderson?”
“I know who they are.”
“Their parents go to your church?”
She weighed the question and must have decided it was information I could find out elsewhere if I wanted to. “Yeah. At least a couple times.”
“Did Lucy and Lydia go to church with their parents?”
“Hell, no!” This was the minivan driver, apparently pulled out of his lust-stupor. “You couldn’t get Lucy within a mile of a church. She said she’d go up in smoke!” He laughed at the memory. “Lydia wasn’t as much of a partier, but she stopped going to church her junior year. Stopped eating meat, stopped curling her hair, the whole deal. It was really weird. We thought maybe she was joining a cult.”
Ah, yes, the cult of free thinking. Scary stuff. But between Alicia and her boy toy, my questions had been answered and my theory confirmed. “Thank you both. You’ve been a big help.”
“You’re not going to introduce me to Brad, are you?” Alicia pouted.
“Oh, I most certainly am. You two will make a perfect pair. I’ll be in touch.” I’m not sure if they were able to get back in the mood after I left, but I didn’t much care. I was on to bigger and scarier things.
As I pulled out of the Makeout Point road, the full moon stared down at me, as round and myopic as a saucer of milk. There was an ominous, electric feeling in the air. It reminded me of the day in fifth-grade science class when our teacher, Mr. Bowden, brought in a Van de Graaff generator. The static electricity generator looked like an aluminum ball on a pedestal. I’m not sure what Mr. Bowden’s teaching goal was, but what I took away from the experience was that you didn’t want to be the last person in a Van de Graaff chain. You’d receive a shock that would singe your toenails. Even if you didn’t touch the silver ball, your arm hair crackled up whenever you stood within five feet of it and your blood felt a little bit lighter than normal. That’s how I felt now as I stared down empty County Road 5, heading south. Heat lightning flashed across a field to my left and I shivered, the night air smelling as lonely as a wolf’s howl.
As I drove, I weighed my situation. I knew I couldn’t bring anyone with me tonight because it was too dangerous, but if something happened to me, my theory could disappear forever, and teens would continue to disappear from Battle Lake. Settling for a compromise, I backtracked to Clitherall and wrote my theory on a sheet of scrap paper that I folded like an envelope. I grabbed a stamp from the sheet I kept in my checkbook and stuck it on the outside but was at a momentary loss for whom to send it to. Suddenly the name and address came like a flash, and I added an extra two lines at the end of the note.
There was one blue metal mailbox outside the Clitherall Post Office, and I heaved open the top and dropped my letter in. It would go out with tomorrow’s mail, come hell or high water.
Back in my car, the light-blooded feeling was still with me, but I didn’t feel quite as lonely. Too nervous to listen to the radio, I hummed and played “Would You Rather” with myself. It was a childish game that Mrs. Berns loved, and it involved giving a person two horrible choices, like “Would you rather wake up next to Donald Trump or Michael Jackson?” I was just mulling over the merits of working the fryer at McDonald’s versus personning the complaints desk at Wal-Mart when I took a right onto the dirt road leading to New Millennium Bible Camp.
When I heard my tires chew the gravel and realized I was actually doing this, my blood drifted even farther north. I deliberately kept up my inane mind chatter. I couldn’t afford to talk myself out of this, as perilous as it felt. I was imbued if not with confidence at least with faith in the rightness of my actions.
I believe I would have made it all the way to the Bible Camp if not for the bloodied woman dragging herself across the dusty road in front of me.
The glimpse I caught was of a female figure in bloody rags, army crawling, pulling heavy legs behind her. Then, it was a hurricane of fear too big for my body, screams that were mine or hers, and pure, ice-cold adrenaline as I pumped my brakes. Because she was so low to the road, my headlights hadn’t caught sight of her until I was almost on top of her. I pulled back on my steering wheel as if I could stop the car by sheer force of will, and I squeezed shut my ears and hoped like I had never hoped before that I wasn’t about to hear my car thump over her.
Silence. Drifting dust sprinkling through the beam of my headlights like snow. A full, bright moon. The sweaty, sour smell of fear. But no thump. I realized my car had killed itself, either out of terror or my inability to remove my bandaged left foot from the clutch before I buried the brake. Shakily, I reached for the door handle and let myself out. My legs quivered as I limped around to the front of the car.
“Hurry.” The voice was raspy and sad, not at all commanding. But she was alive.
“Lydia?” She had her face and body to the road, her hands stretched out in front of her as if in supplication. Her dark hair was long and matted, part of it underneath the passenger-side tire of my Toyota, itsel
f just inches from her head. The scene was surreal, a tableau of horror coming and going.
I hobbled over and kneeled next to her. “Lydia? Can you talk to me? I’m going to turn you over, okay?”
When she didn’t answer, I slipped out my knife to gently cut the hair under my tire and turned her away from my car. I was irrationally worried that the Toyota was going to roll forward that handbreadth and pop her skull like a summer squash. Her head lolled as I turned her on her back, and I had to bite my lip to keep from yelling. Her face was black with dried blood and swollen beyond recognition. I grabbed her left hand to feel for a pulse when I saw the gigantic rings.
Click. Click. Click. “Mrs. Meale?” I drew back, scared all over again. “Mrs. Meale? Is that you?”
Her lids fluttered open. She didn’t move anything but her eyes, which darted around like birds trapped in a house. “Where am I?”
“You’re just outside the Bible camp, Mrs. Meale. I’m going to run up there for help. Don’t worry. I’ll be right…”
She pushed herself up with her hands, not minding her legs, which were at awkward angles. Her eyes burned liked coals. “Don’t! Don’t go back there! Please, don’t go back there.” Tears that obviously hurt her cut cheeks rolled down her face.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Meale, but I don’t have a cell phone. I need to get you to a hospital. It’s just a jog up the road. I won’t leave you alone for long.”
She grabbed my arm with desperate strength. “He did this to me. Don’t you understand? Robert did this to me. If you go back up there, he’ll kill us both. He’s out looking for me right now. We have to get out of here!”
She threw frightened glances into the woods she had just dragged herself out of, and her terror was contagious. The forest was thick and ominous on each side of the road, barely containing the evil with it. “If we work together, can I get you into my car?”
Naomi nodded her head mutely and offered me her arm, raw from pulling her body along. I pulled her up, oblivious to the pain shooting through my ankle, and towed her to the passenger door. She was nearly as light as a child, but the drag of her legs made it hard to maneuver. I tried to be as gentle with her battered body as I could, but I was as tense as a razor wire, waiting for the wicked hand of Robert Meale to reach out and grab me.
