Daemon of the Dark Wood (2 page)

All at once the cicadas stopped singing and the woods went completely silent. Judy Lynn stiffened in her seat, tingling with a sense of intense foreboding at the sudden change in the evening’s ambience. Her ears popped as if there had been a fluctuation in atmospheric pressure. Saliva surged around her tongue with a metallic taste of inexplicable fear.

Something came crashing through the underbrush to her left.

Something big.

Before she could move to roll up the window and lock the door, the eerie silence of the woods shattered, broken by a terrible screeching that seemed to go on forever. It was unlike any sound she had ever heard, and she suddenly had the crazy idea that it was neither animal nor human in origin.

Judy Lynn began to tremble. She lost control of her bladder, and warm urine pooled in her panties and leaked onto the car seat. The cell phone slipped from her hand. The darkness deepened.

The screeching finally subsided, and the terror it had engendered within her became something altogether different. Overcome with absolute awe, she removed herself from the wrecked vehicle and walked fearlessly into the woods to meet the one who had called to her.

* * * *

Arcadia County Deputy Sheriff Rob Rourke was hunkered over a pile of paperwork when the phone rang with an old-timey jangle. Ida Mae Harris was still in the bathroom, so Rourke got up, strode to the dispatcher’s desk and snatched up the receiver. “Sheriff’s office, Rourke.”

“Hey, Rob, how you doing?”

He recognized Jerry Grubb’s smoky voice. “Just fine, Jerry. What can I do for you?”

“Did Judy Lynn Bowen call y’all about that deer she hit up on Widow’s Ridge Road?”

“No, she didn’t. She okay?”

“She was all right when I talked to her. Just shook up a little. I sent my boy up with the wrecker after she called, but when Jack got there, she was gone. Her car was half in a ditch but there weren’t hide nor hair of the girl. Didn’t see no deer neither. Just a puddle of blood in the road.”

“She probably got a ride with somebody before Jack got there. And the deer’s probably dead or dying somewhere in the woods.”

“Maybe. But why would she leave her pocketbook and cell phone in the car?”

After a thoughtful pause, Rourke said, “I’ll look into it. Exactly where was this?”

“Jack said it was about a mile and a half up the mountain from Jackson’s General Store.”

“Where’s her car now?”

“We got it here. Front end’s all tore up and the windshield’s cracked. Them little Honda’s buckle like tin cans when they hit something solid. I wouldn’t have no little foreign car myself.”

Rourke ran a hand over his close-cropped hair and said, “Here’s what I want you to do, Jerry. Put the car in your bay and lock it down. Don’t touch anything any more than you have to. Is her purse still in the car?”

“Yep. I was fixin’ to put it in my safe.”

“No, leave it where it is. And don’t say anything to anybody else about this. We don’t know that she’s missing and I don’t want to start tongues wagging.”

As he dropped the phone in its cradle, Ida Mae returned from the bathroom down the hall. She cut a fine figure in her tailored khaki uniform—especially for a woman in her mid-forties. “I miss anything?” she asked.

He told her about the call, then asked her to phone Miss Bowen’s home in Widow’s Ridge and to try her parents’ home if there was no answer. While she worked the phone, Rourke poured himself a mug of aging coffee and went back to his desk to mull over the possible whereabouts of Judy Lynn Bowen.

A few minutes later, Ida Mae informed him that there was no answer at Judy Lynn’s home and that Mrs. Bowen had just returned from a friend’s house and hadn’t seen her daughter since yesterday. “I didn’t let on that anything was wrong,” Ida explained. “I just told her I needed to talk to Judy Lynn about the wedding. She’s marrying Josh Jordan, you know.”

Rourke nodded. He tossed down his pen, stood and grabbed his hat from a hook on the pine-paneled wall. “I’m gonna take a ride up the mountain,” he said. “I’ll keep you posted.”

His boot heels tapped a snappy rhythm on the hardwood floor and echoed in the empty hallway as he headed toward the rear door leading outside to the designated parking area for sheriff’s department cruisers. Boots were not officially part of the uniform, but Sheriff Gladstone always sported cowboy boots, and most of his deputies were happy to follow his example. The boots went with the western-style white hats. Good-guy hats.

The sheriff’s office was housed on the first floor of the courthouse building, one door down from the office of the District Attorney. The county jail was located just off Dogwood’s town square, on Confederate Avenue. Because Arcadia was the smallest county in North Georgia, its law enforcement arm was short rather than long; in fact, it was the smallest sheriff’s department in the entire state. And that suited Rob Rourke just fine. There was less bureaucratic aggravation in a smaller governmental organization.

He left the air-conditioned interior of the old courthouse, and the fresh air of the fine June night washed over him like a soothing balm. To his way of thinking, artificially conditioned air was one of many modern conveniences he had rather do without. His own modest home was cooled by an attic fan because a fan didn’t suck the moisture from the air and leave him feeling mummified the way central air-conditioning did.

Rourke took his hat off as he slid behind the wheel of Unit 3 and set it on the passenger seat. He checked the gas gauge, cranked up and pulled out of the parking lot. He drove across town, by-passed Dogwood Community College and turned onto Widow’s Ridge Road. The cruiser smelled faintly of cheap aftershave, stale tobacco smoke and greasy fast food. He fingered the buttons on the driver’s door armrest and let all the windows down, the welcome rush of night air blowing away the lingering scents—the territorial markings—of his fellow deputies.

Two miles up the mountain past Jackson’s General Store he found the apparent site of the accident, marked by shards of broken headlamp glass and a shining glaze of blood smeared on the blacktop. He parked on the shoulder of the road, turned on the cruiser’s rack of flashing blue lights and radioed his location to Ida, which she acknowledged in the nasal monotone she affected for her radio broadcasts.

He explored the area with his flashlight and pieced together what had likely happened. After the collision between animal and machine, the deer had been dragged to the side of the road, leaving a smeared trail of blood. There the trail ended, suggesting that the deer had been removed—probably thrown into the back of a pickup truck. It was, of course, remotely possible that the blood on the road was
human
blood and that Judy Lynn’s bleeding body had been loaded into a pickup, but Rourke had no reason to seriously consider
that
grim scenario.

After inspecting the area around the disturbed earth where the vehicle had obviously plowed into the ditch, Rourke returned to his cruiser, switched off the flashing blues and drove back to Dogwood.

It was quarter past ten when he arrived at Grubb’s Service Station. He found Jerry Grubb finishing up a paint job on an old Mustang in the body shop behind his gas station.

“Thanks for waiting for me, Jerry,” he said.

“Hell, I’d as soon be here working as falling asleep in front of the TV. You find her?” Grubb pulled a handkerchief from the back pocket of his bib overalls and wiped sweat from his receding hairline.

“Not yet. I want to take a look at her car.”

Grubb jerked his thumb toward the front building. “It’s in bay number two. I’ll have to unlock it for you.”

Rourke followed Grubb to the bay housing Judy Lynn Bowen’s damaged Honda Civic. Grubb unlocked a large padlock and rolled up the door with a metallic clatter, then he turned on the overhead light. “There she is. The pocketbook’s on the front seat. I didn’t touch it.”

Grubb went back to work on the Mustang, and Rourke began his examination of the vehicle. He put on a pair of latex gloves and opened the driver’s door. The car’s interior smelled of recent cigarette smoke and perfume, but it was another smell that troubled him—the unmistakable odor of urine. He bent down and sniffed the seat, then touched his bare wrist to the seat’s cloth upholstery and felt dampness there. Had the accident scared the piss out of her? Could a woman as young as Judy Lynn have a bladder-control problem?

He picked up the leather purse, set it on the hood and took a cursory inventory of its contents. Her wallet contained several credit cards and sixty-eight dollars in cash, ruling out any possibility of robbery. There was a small assortment of women’s makeup; a half-empty pack of cigarettes (Virginia Slims) and disposable lighter; a little stack of clipped coupons, bound with a paperclip; a ballpoint pen from Dogwood Savings & Trust; an opened roll of breath mints, wintergreen flavored; an oval packet of birth-control pills.

After replacing the contents in the purse, he checked the glove box and found nothing unexpected. The cell phone was on the passenger-side floorboard. He didn’t touch it. He looked in the trunk and noted that the tire iron was out of its vinyl sheath. He left it where it was and softly shut the trunk.

Grubb entered the bay, a cigarette dangling from his lips. “Find anything, Rob?”

“Nothing to indicate anything more than a typical vehicle-deer collision,” Rourke replied, lapsing into the language he would use when he wrote up his report.

Except the urine on the seat and the persistent scent of fear
.

* * * *

It was almost midnight when Dr. Trey Knott pulled up in front of Ridgewood Psychiatric Institute. Flashes of lightning in the western sky and the subsequent rumbling of thunder prompted Knott to put up the top on his convertible Jaguar before going inside to deal with the emergency admission. Thirty minutes earlier he had been slipping quietly into bed so as not to wake Susan, settling in for what he hoped would be a restful night of sleep when the bedroom phone cut loose with its irritating electronic warble. He picked up before the second trill, but he felt his wife stir beside him and knew she was waking from a shallow sleep. Her hand moved beneath the sheet and found his bare hip as the faraway voice of the charge nurse whispered in his ear. Carrie Sanders, the night-shift RN who was better at assessing patients than most of the physicians on staff, briefed him on the new female admission and suggested that he see her immediately rather than wait until morning for his initial visit. “I’ll be right there,” he said, just above a whisper. He kissed Susan good-night, dressed, and drove to the hospital in Goat Head Hollow, three miles south of Dogwood.

To an unschooled eye, Ridgewood’s “Big House” is usually mistaken for an old antebellum plantation house, renovated to accommodate mental patients; in truth, it was built in 1919 from the blueprint of a renowned mental hospital in Vienna. Dr. Browner had visited the Viennese facility in 1910 and had been so impressed with it and its director—the illustrious
Herr Doktor
Bruno Kesselring—that he vowed to erect a replica of the hospital back home in Georgia. By the early ’20s Ridgewood Psychiatric Institute was known as one of the finest private mental hospitals in the Southeast. Dr. Browner died the same year the stock market crashed, but the Browner family managed to hold on to it despite great financial difficulty, and the facility never shut its doors through the ten decades of its existence. In 1965 the Browner family built another hospital in Vinewood, Georgia, but the Graves County facility had always had trouble attracting good psychiatrists and administrators and never achieved the prestige of Ridgewood.

Knott went up the brick walkway, mounted the concrete steps, passed between the central white columns of the portico and used his key to unlock the front door. Haloed by fine mist, the ornate light fixture above the glass doors created a pool of murky, yellow light, and the nine cane rocking chairs arrayed in linear formation across the wide porch seemed to be floating in the nebulous pool. A rising wind set some of the rockers in ghostly motion as Knott entered the building. The receptionist’s alcove was darkened and deserted at this late hour, as was the well-appointed sitting room on the opposite side of the vestibule. He paused at the foot of the wide stairway and glanced down the shadowy corridors to his left and right—the north and south wings whose rooms had been converted to offices for social workers, physicians, and administrative personnel. While not completely dark, the corridors were just gloomy enough to send an unexpected chill up his back as the vivid memory of his childhood fear of darkness came fleetingly to the fore.

He climbed the carpeted steps, wondering why, after all these years, his old fear of the dark had reached out from the past to yank his memory chain.

Midway to the second floor, the wide stairway gave onto a landing beneath a high stained-glass window and branched left and right at 180-degree angles, the two narrower stairs leading to the second-floor landing and to twin doors which opened in front of the nursing station. The doors were locked electronically from the inside but could be opened freely from the stairway side; the patients could not get out unless one of the nursing staff disengaged the lock with a push of a button or a turn of a key. With a hand on the banister, Knott swung to his right and climbed the narrow stairs to the second-floor landing. He glanced through the small Plexiglas window in the door and saw Carrie Sanders writing in a chart. He opened the door and went inside.

“Oh, hi, Dr. Knott,” Carrie said in her whispery night-shift voice as she looked up from her charting. “Sorry to call you out so late, but I felt you would want to see Miss Rampling tonight.”

He waved off her apology. “I’m the doc on-call. Comes with the territory. I trust your judgment.”

“Right.” She smiled, her perfect teeth flashing brightly from the smooth ebony of her face.

Knott half-sat on the long desktop built into the nursing-station wall and leaned his back against the shelf of numbered slots filled with the medical charts of the current admissions. He folded his arms across his chest in a gesture at definite odds with those proponents of body-language correctness who maintained that such a posture denoted defensiveness and even hostility. Knott thought it was all psycho-hokum; for him it was a comfortable habit and nothing more. “What can you tell me about her?”