A Killer in the Wind (34 page)

She lifted her chin. It made her look regal—even more regal. “You’re going to kill her, aren’t you? Sadie Trader. That’s your plan, isn’t it?”

I figured it was just as well not to answer.

“And so it all just continues,” Mrs. Longstreet declared. “The violence, the cruelty—it all just goes on and on.”

“I guess that’s one way to look at it.”

“Is there another?”

“Sure,” I said. “She’s evil. And soon she’ll be dead.”

“And the world will be a better place.”

“I didn’t say that.”

She smiled again, that same, strange smile. Then she startled me by reaching out her hand toward my face. The gesture took me aback. I recoiled from her, at first. But it was just her hand, an old lady’s open hand, and I came forward again in my seat and she laid her palm against my scarred cheek. Her skin was soft with age and warm from the mug of tea.

“Go to St. Mary’s,” she repeated, quietly but firmly. “You’ll find all the answers there.”

14

St. Mary’s

I
SHACKED UP FOR
the night in some hellhole or other. The Roadside Cottages, I think it was called. I checked into a little box of aluminum, plywood, and linoleum with a bed like a board and a bathroom the size of a sink. I went into the bathroom and coaxed the faucet into coughing some cloudy water into a cloudy glass. I washed down half a tablet of Z. I was hoping to taper off the stuff slowly this time, hoping to ease my way clean without all the craziness of going cold turkey.

Fat chance. I went to sleep, fully dressed, on the stiff bed, and almost instantly found myself walking in a nightmare world more real than reality. I was a child again. I was lost in a forest. There was a wind moving through the spring leaves, making a high, eerie singing sound. I turned to look beside me and there, suddenly, was Samantha—Samantha as a little girl—holding my hand, watching me, her eyes wide and staring.

“What’s that noise?” I asked her.

“It’s the dead children,” she explained.

So it was. They were all around us, I noticed now, gray figures here and there among the trees, some even sitting in the branches. That high eerie singing sound was the sound of their voices. They were reciting their stories to the empty woods, each repeating a fragment of the whole, the sentences overlapping into a single, simultaneous narrative . . .

They kept me alive a long time
. . .

I wanted to be dead but when they killed me, I was afraid
. . .

I want to be dead now, every day, but I still have to live
. . .

I cried every night for my mommy, but they said she didn’t want me and she would never come back
. . .

I turned my eyes from one to another of them, discovering each gray form as if it were appearing suddenly among the gray mazes of branches and vines. As the weird whispered song of their laments went on, another sound, another whisper rose beneath them, growing louder by the second.

I searched the forest for the source of that other noise until my gaze rested on Samantha again, little Samantha staring up at me.

“The fire is coming,” she said.

Then the fire came, from all around us, a circle of flame eating in from the periphery of the forest, closing over the trees, devouring the trees and devouring the ghostly forms of the children standing among them. Very quickly, I could taste the ashes on my tongue. I felt the harsh, raw, rasping smoke in my throat. The circle of fire closed on itself, consuming the trees and the children and everything but me and Samantha, who were at its center . . .

And then it closed in on us, the heat raging . . .

I woke with a wordless cry. I lay gasping for breath, my eyes wide, my heart pounding. I stared up into the shadows, into the low, dark cobwebbed rafters of the Roadside Cottages. It was a long time before I calmed down. Then, sweating, I turned my head on the pillow.

Stark—the skull-faced killer—sat in a chair right beside me.

He grinned. Casually, he lifted a Glock and pulled the trigger, firing a slug into my stomach. I doubled over in agony, clutching myself . . .

But it was all just part of the dream. All just part of the process of withdrawal.

I had another flash of vision in the morning, on the road to Sawnee. I had taken another small dose of Z just before setting out. Now I was driving on a two-lane past a patch of woods dappled by sun and shadow. I saw a figure watching me as I went by. I turned back to scan the woods. There was no one there. But I had taken my eyes off the road too long. When I faced forward, I was heading toward a ditch at the shoulder. I wrenched the wheel—too hard. The tires screamed. The car skidded and spun, the rear fishtailing away as the front went into the oncoming lane. I just had time to catch sight of a truck—coming out of nowhere—speeding toward me. I kept turning the wheel, fast as I could, into the skid. The Mustang did a one-eighty. I forced it back into the right lane, going backward—back the way I’d come—just as the truck thundered by my window, inches away, air horn blaring. The car shivered with its backwash. Then the truck was gone—speeding away. I eased my foot down on the brake, bringing the Mustang under control.

I guided the car off the road, onto the shoulder. I cracked the door open and stumbled out, nearly falling into the ditch myself.

I leaned against the side of the car, my head bowed as I fought to catch my breath. Then I lifted my head—and there was Samantha.

It was not the child Samantha. It was the woman. Walking toward me through the woods. She was wearing a flowered dress that blended with the scene. She gazed at me steadily, a slight smile playing on her lips, as she passed through beams of sunlight and into fields of shadow and out again. She looked so solid, so real, that even after I understood what she was, I could barely believe it—and I couldn’t turn away.

I stood there watching in fascination as she stepped into another column of light, closer now, smiling now more fully, serene and kind and lofty and beautiful. Another step and she was once more in the blue shadows of the forest, melding with the blue shadows, becoming one of them. She did not come out of them again. She was gone.

I knew by the way I ached with disappointment that I still loved her. I had loved her ever since we were kids, I guess, and I had never stopped. More than that: We were part of each other. I understood that now. Maybe it was because we’d gone through hell together, or maybe that was just the way we were made from the beginning. Like Stark when I killed his brother, I had lost a piece of myself when I lost her, when they took her away from me after the fire, when they sent her off to her foster homes and me off to mine, so that we never saw each other again . . .

How did I hallucinate her as a woman then?
I thought suddenly.
If I only knew her as a child, how did I know what she would look like as a woman
. . .
?

I shuddered as a chill, eerie feeling went up my spine.

I pushed off the car and got back in behind the wheel and drove on.

St. Mary’s Hospital. There was a sign by the side of the road. There was a pair of stone gateposts nearby leading onto a driveway that curled out of sight up a tree-lined hill.

Right away, I knew by the look of the place that something was wrong.

The town of Sawnee lay behind me. It had probably been a nice little place once. But the farms around it had died and the town itself was ailing. The cluster of brick stores at the center of it were black with grime. Some of their windows were boarded. Most of the cars by the curb were old. The houses on the outskirts were uncared for, many of the windows dark, many of the lawns unmown.

Beyond that, there was a winding road. A motel or two. A forest. Nothing. Then the sign:
St. Mary’s
.

I turned the Mustang up the hospital drive. I passed between the gateposts. There was still a wrought-iron gate on one post—only on one—green with verdigris, chained back, half off its hinges. There was a rusted sign on the other:
No Trespassing
. Something wrong.

The road twined through the trees, a long way. Sunlight and shadow played on the Mustang’s windshield, the reflections of the forest flashing on the glass. The haze of the drug was passing, but my thoughts were still jumbled and uncertain. As I felt myself getting closer to the hospital, I felt a rising anxiety. I caught glimpses of the building now through the trees: a large red-brick structure. But something wrong . . . I thought of the look on Mrs. Longstreet’s face—that strange smile of hers.
Go to St. Mary’s. You’ll find all the answers there.
What was she trying to tell me? What did she know that she wouldn’t say?

Or was I being crazy, paranoid? Withdrawing from the Z, even slowly like this, had to have an effect. The dreams. The hallucination by the side of the road. Maybe this dread I felt was just another symptom.

I came around the last bend in the drive and saw the place head-on. It was a massive brick ziggurat, the first four stories three broad wings across, the next two stories narrower, the next narrower still, and then a structure on top like a pyramid’s peak, as if the place were some sort of ancient temple.

There was a cul-de-sac out front. I stopped the car at the entrance to it. I could see even from there that the hospital’s broad glass doorways were chained shut. The glass was opaque with dust and overrun with climbing vines—where there
was
glass. Some of the tall panes had been replaced with plywood boards. I bent forward to look up at the building through the windshield. Window after window, rising up to the highest story, all dark. Some of the glass broken.

The place had been abandoned.

I shut off the car. Got out. The quiet of the day folded over me. A spring breeze whispering in the forest below. Traffic noises whispering somewhere in the distance. And then emptiness—that high hum of emptiness—surrounding everything.

I thought of my dream. The voices in the forest. The gray ghosts of children standing among the branches. Telling their sad stories in a song like a breeze. The thought made me shiver.

I walked up the cul-de-sac, my eyes lifted to the louring, deserted building. Its shadow fell over me and the air grew cool.

Go to St. Mary’s.

Why did the old woman say that? Was it some kind of trick, some kind of trap? Was Stark behind it all, somehow using Mrs. Longstreet to lure me to this abandoned spot?

But no, I didn’t believe that. I didn’t believe she was speaking under duress or playing a role. She struck me as just an honest lady with an old sin on her conscience. I thought she wanted me to know the truth . . .

Then another idea came to me—an idea that made more sense: Mrs. Longstreet had known who I was. It had to be because Samantha had told her. Maybe Samantha had also told her to send me here . . .

I stopped. I stood still in the building’s shadow, the old hospital looming over me. I looked up and scanned the dark windows slowly.

Finally—as happened so often since I’d started taking the drug—I caught a movement at the corner of my eye. I turned to it—to a window on the second story.

And there was Samantha. Standing behind the glass. Watching me.

The moment I saw her, she sank back into the darkness of the building and was gone. I was so crazy with the drug and the memories, the dreams and the visions and all that, I had no idea —no clue—whether she had been real or not.

My heart was beating hard as I moved over the last yards of the cul-de-sac to the front doors. I reached through the vines. Grabbed the metal handle. Pulled and pushed on it so that the chain rattled. But the doors wouldn’t open. I tested the wooden boards, but they were stuck fast. I moved to a section thickly overgrown with ivy and pushed the green leaves and vines aside.

There I found what I was looking for: a jagged patch of shadow—a section of broken glass that had been hidden by the vines. An entryway.

Carefully, holding the ivy aside, I stepped into the darkness, into the hospital.

The quiet was deeper in here. No sounds of traffic, no whispering breeze. The light was pale gray just by the doors, but then slowly drained into dark shadows in the broad hall beyond the abandoned front desk.

I moved forward cautiously. Nervous. Hopeful. Was she real this time? Had I really found her? Was that really why Mrs. Longstreet had sent me? Because Samantha told her to? Because Samantha had been hiding from Stark here, waiting for me. Because she didn’t know how to reach me without giving herself away. But she knew I would follow the same path she had. She knew I would find Mrs. Longstreet. Because she knew my mind. Because we were part of each other . . .

That was the hope anyway. But I remembered too that Stark’s hired gun had tracked me to the ghost town outside Washington Falls. Maybe tracing my credit cards. Maybe trailing my car. I didn’t know. I didn’t even know how much of that had been real. But there was always the chance that it might be the skull-faced murderer or one of his goons who was waiting for me here, hiding somewhere in these dark hospital halls.