Darkness Rising (The East Salem Trilogy) (36 page)

Tommy heard something in Quinn’s voice that reminded him of a game he’d played in college when his team was down by four touchdowns at the half, and his teammates acted like the game was over. “What part of
half
don’t you guys understand?” he’d screamed at them. “We have just as many minutes as they had to score four touchdowns. As far as I can tell, right now, we’re even. We just let them start first.” They won that game, and Tommy had understood from that point on that it was his job as team captain to recognize what defeat sounded like and throw water on it. He recognized it now.

“What’s going on, Quinn?” he said. “Something’s bothering you.”

“Something is,” he said. “Something deep inside me. Have a look.”

He pulled an image up on his screen of a cross section of a skull. Tommy knew what he was looking at without really knowing and said nothing.

Quinn looked him in the eye. “That, even though you have the good manners not to ask, is a midgrade infiltrating multiforme glioblastoma of the pons reticular formation—right about here,” he said, pointing to the lower rear part of his skull. “Near the cerebral peduncle.” He pointed at a spot on the screen. “This little guy right here. Right there in the middle where one simply cannot operate.”

“You’ve tried—?”

“I went for one course of chemo,” he said. “That was enough. I shouldn’t have let them talk me into that much. Do you want to go first, pointing out the abundant ironies, or should I? I am a neuroscientist who is well aware of the most minute biochemical processes inside my brain that nevertheless cannot be stopped or even slowed. I could break it down into its smallest components to tell you in great detail what’s happening, but that’s not the same thing as saying
why
it’s happening. Why me? So I don’t think about that all that much. I really don’t. But I think about what
I’ve done with my life so far, and I don’t think it’s very much. And I know I don’t have much time left to make up for it. So when Dani called, I thought it was a sign from God that someone needed me. That’s the thing—you want to know that the work you do, in the lab or in the field, will have an effect. Benefit mankind. All those future generations who’ve never lifted a finger for us. You want to serve somebody.”

“Do you have a . . . time line?”

“Thanks for not saying deadline, but that’s what it is,” Quinn said. “I’ll make this deadline, even if it kills me. Ha-ha. No, it’s growing rather slowly, but it could always speed up. If you notice me . . . changing, will you tell me?”

“I promise.”

“Thanks. Some people wouldn’t. They’d just pretend everything is okay.”

“I won’t tell Dani,” Tommy said, “but I think you should.”

“I agree,” Quinn said. “I just don’t want her to . . . After she lost her parents, I didn’t want to pile on, so to speak.”

“Would you mind if I prayed for you?”

“Actually, I was hoping you could show me how,” Quinn said. “I wasn’t raised in any religious tradition. One of those other intelligences where I come up short.”

“Prayer is just a conversation with God,” Tommy said. “You don’t even have to use thee’s and thou’s or get on your knees—though it’s okay if you do.”

Tommy said a short prayer thanking God for Quinn and asking for healing and for peace for his new friend.

“I know I have a lot to learn,” Quinn said.

“You’ll get it,” Tommy said. “You’re a quick study.”

“Speaking of which,” Quinn said, gesturing to the computer and changing the screen back to the molecular model. “I should get to work on your theory. Tick-tick-tick, after all.”

32.

Ben and Julian took the third shift, from four to six, but by five o’clock Tommy, Carl, and Quinn were up too, and soon Ruth was preparing omelets with eggs from Tommy’s coop. When she offered Carl a slice of strawberry-rhubarb pie to go with his breakfast, he politely declined, and Tommy saw the air leak out of her just a little bit. She took up her knitting and sat quietly apart from the others.

When they were done eating, Tommy armed himself with his automatic and gave Quinn Ruth’s handgun, along with a brief lesson on how to use it. He gave Carl the shotgun and asked him to stay behind to hold down the fort. “You’re in charge,” Tommy told his friend, “so remember—do everything Dani tells you to do.”

“Gotcha,” he said, which disappointed Tommy. Carl had once told him the secret to a happy marriage: “The man makes all the big decisions, and the woman makes all the little decisions—and in all the years we were married, there was never a big decision.” He made the joke every time the subject of marriage and the so-called Battle of the Sexes came up.
Every
time—that was what made it funny. How could Carl have missed such an obvious setup?

Dani was still in bed when Tommy, Quinn, and Ben loaded Otto into the back of Tommy’s Wrangler Sahara. Ben sat in the backseat with Otto, who instantly took a strong liking to his traveling companion. Ben talked
to the dog as if he could understand English. The sky was just beginning to lighten in the east when they reached the Gardener farm.

Ben asked Tommy to park short of the end of the driveway so that their footprints wouldn’t contaminate the area. Tommy tried to tell him that as far as they could tell, George had left in a 2004 navy blue Honda CRV. Regardless of how skilled the tracker was or how sensitive the dog’s nose, Tommy didn’t think a man and a dog could track a man in a car.

Ben shrugged. “You never know unless you try.” He asked Tommy to remind him how many people had been walking around the house the day they’d used the locksmith to gain entrance.

“As best as I can recall, only Frank DeGidio and his partner looked in the barn or the machine shed.”

Ben borrowed one of Tommy’s headlamps, tightened the straps, and stretched it around the toe and heel of his right cowboy boot, explaining that a light source low to the ground would give greater definition to any footprints in the dirt and gravel between the house and the barn. “They call the trackers down on the Arizona-Mexico border shadow walkers, because they do their work at sunup and sundown.”

Tommy and Quinn stood back with the dog while Ben circled from the house to the barn and back twice. He opened the barn’s great door and looked at the floor of the barn, bending low twice to brush away the dirt, pausing to think. He looked up at the hayloft doors. When he returned to them, he raised his eyebrows.

“I’ve got some good news and some bad news,” he said. “The good news is, I don’t think George took the car.”

“But it’s not there,” Tommy said.

“I won’t argue with you about that, but I found a set of footprints from the same shoes George was wearing when he got in the car—and I found them on top of the tire tracks.”

“I’m confused,” Tommy said. “How could he leave his footprints on top of the tire tracks while he’s driving the car?”

“That would be a good trick,” Ben agreed.

“Then what happened?”

“He drove the car somewhere and walked back,” Quinn said. “Maybe he moved it out of the barn, then got out to close the door, then got back in.”

“I thought of that, but that’s not what the tracks are saying,” Ben said.

“You said you had good news and bad news,” Tommy said. “What’s the bad news?”

“The bad news is that the Wendigo was here,” he said. “Do you have your gun with you?”

“I do,” Tommy said, patting his jacket pocket. “I have the scanner too. And the cookies Dani and Cass made, if we want to give it a stomachache.”

“Good. I don’t think you can kill it with a gun, but it might buy us some time.”

“Time to do what?” Quinn said.

“Say our prayers,” Ben said. “Let’s see what that dog of yours can do, Quinn. I found one of George’s T-shirts in the shed. That ought to have his scent on it. To be honest, it smells so bad I think I could track the man who was wearing it.”

“He had to have left over a week ago,” Tommy said. “Does that matter? Plus, there are scents from other people. Me, Dani, you, Casey, the cops . . .”

“Not to this dog,” Quinn said. “I’ve been practicing with him in Central Park. Just for fun. I had a friend try to lose herself in the middle of a huge crowd at a Paul McCartney concert on the Great Lawn, and Otto went right to her.”

Quinn explained that when he put the chest harness and leash on the dog, Otto knew it was time for work and not play. Ruth had given him a baggie of bacon scraps from breakfast to reward the dog. He made Otto sit, then took the T-shirt from Ben and pushed it up against Otto’s snout, saying, “Get it, boy! Get it! Go get it!”

Otto was on a twenty-foot lead. Quinn held the looped end, wrapped around his wrist several times, as Otto circled the yard.

“It can take him a minute or two to get a sense of direction,” Quinn said. “The tracking books say they don’t know how the dog knows to follow the freshest trail. Once he gets it, he tends to—”

Quinn was nearly yanked off his feet as the huge bloodhound found the scent, his tail sticking straight up to indicate he was on the job. They followed him at a pace faster than a walk but not quite a jog. Tommy worried that Ben might not be able to keep up, but soon realized the old man was as fit as guys half his age who worked out in Tommy’s gym.

Otto led them to the shore of Lake Atticus, then west on a footpath to where the Gardener property abutted The Pastures, a private country club where the sixteenth and seventeenth fairways hugged the water before heading up to the clubhouse for the eighteenth. They scrambled over the stone wall and made better time on the groomed golf course, where the grass was turning brown, the pins from the greens already in storage for the winter. They could see in the distance the grand clubhouse that had been the home of Andrew Siemans. Siemans was a nineteenth-century robber baron who’d tried to establish a leisure community of super-wealthy New Yorkers in East Salem—similar to the great camps in the Adirondacks built by the East Coast railroad and shipping magnates, financiers, and oil tycoons, but closer to the city. Siemans and his investors had created Lake Atticus by building a massive earthen dam at the far end of the lake. He’d stocked it with rainbow and speckled trout shipped all the way from Montana, and he had nearly two dozen families ready to move in until the Johnstown flood of 1889 in Pennsylvania killed over two thousand people when a dam just like the one Siemans had built burst. His investors pulled out. He ended up selling the property north of the lake to the county, and his home was turned into a golf course.

The dog worked around the edge of the lake until he brought them to the gravel road leading across the top of the earthen dam, dead-ending at a set of concrete Jersey barriers. They climbed over, lifting Otto’s hindquarters up by hand. They crossed a bridge over the overflow sluice and
continued until, in the middle of the dam, the dog stopped. He sniffed forward a ways, then turned around and sat, waiting for his treat. Quinn reached into his pocket and gave Otto a few pieces of bacon.

“Here?” Tommy said. “He stopped here?” Tommy looked out across the water, then turned around to look in the other direction, where a rocky slope led down to the valley below—a few farms, the campus of St. Adrian’s, and beyond that the town of East Salem, where he could make out the church steeple and the roof of the Grange Hall.

“Do you think he climbed down and went into town?” Tommy said.

“Otto wouldn’t have stopped if the trail continued,” Quinn said. “He only gets a reward if he finds the person or if he finds the end of the scent.”

Ben was twenty feet down the road, squatting on his haunches. He gestured for Tommy and Quinn to join him, then pointed at the gravel.

“Do you see this tire tread?” he said. “This is the same one I saw in the barn. It goes off the edge here, and here.” He pointed into the water, ten feet below. Tommy and Quinn looked but saw nothing.

“Hold on,” Tommy said. “This is going to be cold.”

He quickly stripped to his underwear, grabbed his Maglite, which was waterproof to fifty feet, took three deep breaths, and dived into the lake. He’d swum in the same waters, at the same place on the dam, dozens of times as a teenager. Twenty feet below the surface, he found what he was looking for—a navy blue 2004 Honda CRV. He used the flashlight to quickly search the interior before swimming to the surface. Quinn used the dog’s twenty-foot lead to help pull Tommy back to the top of the dam, where he quickly dressed.

“The car is down there,” he said, shivering and gasping. He shook his head to cast the water from his hair and smoothed it back with his fingers. “No sign of George.” He remembered what Carl had told him about bodies not floating when the water was cold. “He should come up sooner or later, but we might have to get some divers.”

“You’re too pessimistic,” Ben said. “Let’s keep going. This is a lovely lake, even if it is man-made.”

It was a shorter distance back to the Jeep and the farmhouse if they made a complete loop around the lake rather than retracing their steps. A hundred yards from where George Gardener docked his boats, the dog got excited again, his tail straight up and his nose and ears dragging along the ground, leading away from the house. Ben knelt to look at the ground, then asked Quinn to stop the dog for a moment.

“Here’s what I think happened,” he said. “I don’t think George’s body is in the lake. I think he drove to the dam and pushed his car over the edge. I saw some footprints there in the gravel that I think were his. Then he walked back around the lake the long way, the way we came, across the golf course, to avoid running into anyone who might have seen his car. The tracks on the other side of the lake were of a man who weighs maybe a hundred and forty pounds. But these tracks”—he pointed to the ground— “are the same shoes, but now the man weighs about two hundred pounds. They’re deeper. I think he went back to the barn and got some supplies, maybe a backpack, and then headed this way.” He pointed in the direction the dog wanted to take them. “Do you know what’s in that direction?”