The Return

by Bentley Little

  According to Een, Ron was scheduled to be released at ten, and they pulled into the driveway of Melanie's parents' house by nine-thirty. "Just a quick visit," she promised. "Then we're out of here."

  "It's okay. Don't worry about it."

  "It's for my sake, not yours," she told him.

  He'd only met Melanie's parents once, but that was just last week, and they both seemed to have aged a decade in that time. Her mother, Margaret, a small, chipper, rather outgoing woman, now looked dour and bedraggled.

  "Come in, come in," Margaret insisted when she answered the door and saw who it was.

  "We just stopped by to say hi," Melanie said. "We were in the neighborhood, so . . ."

  "Well, you'd better come in and see your father."

  "Why? He's okay, isn't he? There's nothing wrong?"

  "What are you talking about?" Her mother frowned. "Are you okay?"

  Melanie stole a glance at Glen. "I'm fine. I'm fine."

  George was seated on a recliner in the living room, watching a basketball game. He nodded at them as they walked into the room, but offered no greeting. A careworn man to begin with, he seemed downright haggard.

  Melanie sat down on the couch. "We're going to the police station after this."

  Her father scowled. "To get that pornographer out?"

  "Yes. To get that pornographer out." She sighed heavily. "Look, Daddy, we don't really have anything to do with that. We're just doing what Al would do if he were here. Mostly we're going because we want to find out if the police have discovered anything. They were supposed to go through Al's room over at the TeePee. Maybe they found something in his effects . . ." She trailed off, not bothering to finish.

  "Someone else is missing," Margaret said, her voice small. "Besides your people and that boy's parents."

  "Who?"

  "Jack Connor. He went fishing out to the lake." She licked her lips. "He never came back. His truck's still there, and his fishing stuff, but he just disappeared." She cleared her throat. "People are starting to talk."

  "Starting to talk?"

  Her father stood, pointed. "About you."

  Melanie looked incredulous. "Me?"

  "You all with your excavation! You caused it!"

  "What?"

  "The past should remain buried! You don't dig it up!"

  What the hell was that supposed to mean? Glen looked at Melanie. She seemed to be just as surprised and confused as he was.

  The past should remain buried.

  He thought about Melanie's great-grandfather. The murderer.

  The old man seemed genuinely angry, and he remained standing, practically shaking, glaring at them. "This all started when you dug up those ruins, started taking things out of the ground that should've been left there forever. What do you expect?"

  Glen stepped in. "I don't expect people to start disappearing because some bones and pottery were excavated by archeology students."

  Margaret pulled her husband toward the kitchen. "Excuse us," she said in a sugary voice tinged with steel.

  "Do you think they know what's behind all this?" Glen asked when they left the room. "It sure seems like your dad's afraid of something being found out, something he knows about but we don't."

  Melanie shook her head, obviously at a loss. She looked baffled. "I don't know. I've never . . . This doesn't make any sense to me. You're right. It's like some bad secret-in-a-small-town movie. I can understand some superstitious yokels acting this way. But my father?"

  "We're not superstitious yokels," Glen pointed out. "And we've been thinking along the same lines."

  "I guess so," she admitted. "It's just . . . it's my daddy."

  Melanie's parents returned, a strained smile on the face of her mother, a blank, noncomittal expression on her father's.

  "Sorry," George said gruffly. "I guess we're all on edge here."

  Glen hoped Melanie was going to quiz him, confront him, but it was her call, her family, and he'd follow her lead.

  "What should've been left in the ground forever?" she asked, and he was proud of her for standing up to her father, impressed by her bravery.

  George stared at her, not answering.

  "You said--"

  "I know what I said."

  "Daddy, our friends are missing, that boy Ricky's parents are missing, and now I guess Jack Connor's missing, too. If you know anything or can help find them, you need to speak up. Tell us, tell the police, tell somebody."

  "I don't know anything. I just know that certain things ought to be left well enough alone."

  "I think what Melanie's asking," Glen said, "is how you know which things ought to be left well enough alone." He turned toward Margaret. "You said 'people are starting to talk.' Talk about what? Is there something we should know?"

  Melanie's mother stood there with a plastic Nancy Reagan smile on her face. Her father pointed. "I don't know you, and I don't want to talk to you," he said. "Stay out of my affairs."

  "Then talk to me, Daddy."

  "There's nothing to talk about."

  "Obviously there is."

  "It's just obvious that your friends were digging up that Indian ruin and disappeared. The paper said that this boy's parents, that it was their yard that had that tomb. Jack Connor was probably involved in digging stuff up, too."

  "What about that pottery shard you found?"

  "I don't want to talk about it."

  "Did you notice that it had a picture of our house on it? This house?"

  "I don't want to talk about it!"

  He had noticed, Glen thought.

  "Something's going on here."

  "That's what I said!"

  Margaret was still wearing that plastic smile. She put a hand on her daughter's shoulder. "Maybe you'd better go," she told Melanie. "You know how your father gets--"

  "How do I get?"

  Margaret pretended he wasn't there. "Wait until he cools off. Try again later."

  "We have to go anyway," Glen said. "We're due at the police station at ten."

  Melanie was shaking her head. "I want to--"

  "I'm not talking!" George said.

  "Come on," Glen prodded. "We can come back afterward."

  "I have nothing to say to you!"

  "Who, Daddy? Me?"

  "No. Him. He's the one who got you into this in the first place, who got us all into this."

  Melanie was about to argue, and a part of Glen wanted to argue, too, but he pulled her toward the door, and she allowed herself to be led.

  "What was that all about?" Glen asked when they were in the car and rolling.

  "I have no idea." Melanie looked in the side mirror back at her parents' street. "But I don't like it."

  Zack Een was waiting for them at the police station. Tall and geeky, wearing black pants and white shirt, no tie, he sat on a bench in the lobby, not reading, not talking on the phone, not writing, simply staring into space with a preternatural stillness that Glen found unnerving. All of the paperwork was completed, and all that was needed was Glen's signature on two forms, since he was the man who had fronted the money for the bond.

  Glen signed where he was told. Een accompanied a uniformed officer through the security door toward the cells, and several minutes later, Ron emerged, still removing his keys and change from a sealed plastic bag.

  "Thanks," he told Glen, walking over. "I owe you one."

  Glen nodded, gave him a semi-smile, not sure how to respond.

  "So where am I going to live?" Ron asked. "Can I go back to my motel room?"

  "I guess so," Melanie said. "The university rented those rooms for the summer."

  "Your computer equipment has been confiscated," Een reminded him. "For your sake, don't buy, borrow, or try to replace any of it. If we win, and I think we will since you do have signed releases, you'll get it all back. But for now, for appearance's sake, just stay away from computers for a while."

  "What about my photo equipment? Has that been taken, too?"

&nbs
p; "Yes, and any undeveloped film in your cameras is being developed."

  "But I need that to document the site."

  "Again, stay away from it for now."

  "There's nothing to document at the moment," Melanie told him.

  A strange look came over his face. "Oh, yeah."

  "I'm through here," Een said. He addressed Ron. "Be in my office by ten tomorrow morning. We have a lot to get through before trial. Judge Okerlund's impressed by volume of documentation, so we'd better start generating some. Our case is good, and if we can just tailor our presentation to the judge's idiosyncrasies, I think you'll be free and clear."

  "What about our countersuit?"

  "We'll discuss that in my office," Een said quickly. "Ten o'clock. Tomorrow."

  Ron waved as the lawyer started for the door. "See you then. Thanks."

  "Countersuit?" Glen said.

  "I'm not allowed to talk about it."

  Glen looked at the bald and heavily tattooed student, and he wanted to say I paid your bail, asshole. You're allowed to tell me anything I want to know. But instead, he let it slide and walked up to the sergeant at the desk to ask about the status of the disappearances.

  The detective in charge of the case was named Dyer. Short and stocky, with a thin mustache and perpetual air of busyness, he was in his office, sorting through a fat pile of very thin folders when the sergeant knocked on his doorframe. "Visitors, Chuck."

  "Thanks."

  The three of them entered the office.

  Dyer frowned at Ron, then turned his attention to Glen and Melanie. "What can I do for you folks?"

  "We're here about the disappearances at the--"

  "Oh, yeah! I recognize you now. Did you remember something else?"

  "No," Melanie said. "We were wondering if you had any information for us."

  "Well, we've gone through Dr. Wittinghill's vehicle and hotel room, sorted through his belongings, and have found some interesting items, though not like the stuff we found in his room," he said, nodding toward Ron.

  Ron snorted.

  Melanie shot him a look of warning.

  "There are no real leads, nothing that indicates what happened to Dr. Wittinghill or your other colleagues, but we did find a fax you might be interested in seeing. It arrived day before yesterday from a Professor McCormack at ASU, although there's no indication that Dr. Wittinghill ever saw it--which is why we're tentatively assuming that Wednesday was the day of the disappearances." Detective Dyer sorted through the files on his desk and finally pulled out a single sheet of paper from the bottom. "We contacted the professor and interviewed him over the phone. While he wasn't able to shed any light on the disappearances, he did reiterate what he says in here, that he'd like someone from your team to look at some new discovery at an Indian ruin in Phoenix. He wouldn't go into detail, but he sounded pretty excited about it. Maybe you should give him a call."

  Glen read the fax, handed it to Melanie. "Do you have his number?"

  "It's on there. Oh, wait a minute, that's his fax number." Dyer quickly rummaged through a messy stack of notepads and scraps of paper next to the file folders. He found what he was looking for, wrote down the number, and handed it to Glen. "Here."

  "Thanks."

  McCormack had left a message on Melanie's answering machine when they returned home, saying essentially the same thing that he'd told the detective and said in his fax to Al. He'd left two numbers--his office and his pager--and when Melanie called the office number, he was in.

  Glen walked out to the kitchen to get himself some ice water, and when he came back into the living room, Melanie was just hanging up the phone, a strange look on her face.

  Already his pulse was accelerating. "What is it?"

  She shook her head. "He wouldn't say. Said there was something new they'd found at Pima House Ruins in Scottsdale and he wanted Al to look at it. But that since Al was gone, he wanted us to see it." She looked up at him. "He said it was urgent."

  "Urgent?"

  Melanie nodded.

  "What the hell does that mean?"

  "I don't know. But he sounded scared."

  2

  He wasn't prepared for this.

  For the second night in a row, Vince slept in the museum, unrolling his sleeping bag on the floor next to the desk and leaving the office light on. The Springerville police had promised that a patrol car would circle the block every two hours or so, but even if that were true--and he had his doubts--such a cursory cruise would not necessarily deter or frighten away a person intent on doing damage.

  Two nights ago, someone had broken in and stolen some of their most valuable pieces: an intact urn, two clay pitchers, a beaded necklace. The weird thing was that no windows had been broken, no locks had been jimmied. Whoever did this had somehow opened the bolted door, then shut it and locked it again.

  Which was impossible.

  If the archeological society had more money, they could install security cameras or hire a night watchman. But they didn't, and so Vince was volunteering to stake the place out and guard the museum.

  He wasn't a big man, wasn't much of a fighter, and didn't believe in guns. He was here more as a deterrent than anything else, and if an armed robber came in, he wouldn't be able to do much with his little pocket knife other than make empty threats.

  But it wasn't armed intruders he was worried about, was it?

  No.

  He'd learned that last night, when he was awakened shortly after two by an eerie clicking that seemed to come from one of the exhibits near the east wall. He could see from the dim shapes in the semidarkness that there was no one else in the museum besides himself, and he tried to think of an insect or rodent or mechanical object that could be making such a noise, but could not. The image in his mind, for some reason, was of the diorama, and he thought of those painted plaster figures moving about inside the glass case, gathering minuscule objects from the mock-up landscape and taking them into the pueblo model.

  The idea frightened him. It was absurd. Still, he squinted into the gloom, trying to make out details within the diorama case, needing to know, but childishly afraid to leave the safety of his sleeping bag.

  Click-Clickclick-Clickclickclick-Click.

  What was making that noise?

  He did not know, but he was afraid to find out. He spent the rest of the night ignoring the sound, trying in vain to sleep, hoping that he wouldn't hear the tinkle of breaking glass and the clatter of tiny plaster feet running across the tiled floor.

  He'd found nothing out of place in the morning, everything undisturbed, and he'd tried all day to figure out what could have caused that noise, even going so far as to move the two cases that were flush against the wall.

  He'd half convinced himself that he'd imagined it, but when it was time to hit the hay again, he'd left the light on in the office and moved his sleeping bag from the open area by the west wall to the space next to the desk, next to the phone.

  Now the light was off.

  And the clicking noise was back.

  He had no idea when or how it had happened. All he knew was that he had fallen asleep with the light on and now there was only darkness.

  Clickclick-Clickclickclick.

  He wasn't prepared for this.

  Quietly, Vince unzipped the side of his sleeping bag. He crawled out and stood up. The clicking noise was all around the room now, not just by the east wall. Last night's image of animated plaster figures was replaced by one of huge oversize bugs, science fiction beetles with pincers and impossible-to-penetrate shells. He looked around fearfully, his gaze moving slowly about the room in a clockwise direction, focusing on each object in order to make sure it belonged here.

  The clicking stopped.

  He turned around, thinking he'd heard a muffled thump behind him.

  And saw it.

  A shadow was moving on the wall above the cash register, an oddly shaped shadow with a human form and unruly hair and the herky-jerky movements of an old
silent film. It seemed to have no source, no real object to which it corresponded. Only a combination of the streetlight across the highway and an overbright full moon allowed him to discern its presence at all.

  The shadow paused, and though he could not make out any visible features on the flat black head, he had the distinct impression that it had stopped to watch him, that it was staring at him.

  Then it was moving again in that old-time-movie manner, across the wall, over the map of Arizona, over an exhibit case, around the corner, over the front window. The shadow bled through the glass of the door--was inside, and then, a second later, was outside. It hovered for a moment in the air, backlit by the streetlight . . . then faded into nothing.

  All around him exploded a sudden riot of movement as the doors to exhibit cases flew open, as glass shattered, as books fell from shelves. Vince scrambled behind the desk and reached for the light switch. He expected the lights to remain off, assumed the power was cut, and was already planning to grab the flashlight he'd stashed in his backpack, but the overhead fluorescents flickered on, bathing the room in harsh white light.

  The artifacts were going crazy. Bowls and pots were rocking back and forth on their own accord. Arrowheads were spinning wildly on shelves. Necklaces were inching across tabletops like earthworms. Metates and their manos were chattering insanely on the floor. He'd assumed that the disappearance of that strange shadow had caused some sort of psychic power surge, setting everything in motion, but these things continued to move on their own, imbued with life, with purpose, not merely shaken by an outside force.

  He'd heard rumors of this phenomenon the past few weeks, accounts of ambulatory artifacts--moving masks, walking dolls, pottery shards that rearranged themselves when no one was looking--so he was not the only one to experience this. An epidemic of animate relics was spreading throughout the Southwest.

  But that didn't make it any less frightening.

  All at once, he saw a broken spear flying at his head and he ducked. It clattered harmlessly against the wall behind him.

  Amidst all the commotion, Vince saw two large carvings making a beeline for the door: totemic figures from the late Anasazi period. Unlike the other artifacts, which seemed content to move about the small museum, these two seemed bent on escape. It occurred to him that all of the accompanying sound and fury was meant to be a distraction, to keep his attention off the stone idols.