Forest of Shadows (19 page)

“Let’s move ’em out!” John said as he swiped the Jeep’s keys off the table by the front door. 

Jessica trotted out like a little soldier with Eve marching right behind her, cradling Liam. As they were loading the kids into the car, Liam reached out to grasp his mother’s shirt and managed to hook his wee-yet-strong fingers into both the v-neck of her blouse and the right cup of her bra. John, who was reaching over to clip Jessica’s seatbelt into place, caught a pleasant eyeful, tan lines and all. He knew it was wrong to look,
Jesus, it was beyond wrong,
but his eyes and head refused to listen to his brain’s commands. It had been a long time and Eve was, after all, a beautiful woman. 

Busy with getting a struggling baby into his car seat, Eve was slow to realize that she was now exposed. She shrieked with laughter when she looked down and quickly re-holstered her breast. 

Their eyes met and John knew he was busted, so to speak. His ears and cheeks felt like they were going to combust. 

“Gee, thanks Liam,” she said. “Well, I guess the cat’s out of the bag. Yes, I do have boobs.”

“And they’re big!” Jessica chirped. 

“Jess,” John scolded but Eve’s laughter caused him to ease off.

“I hope you’re not going to freak out. Living together with Mr. Probing Hands around, you were bound to see something sooner or later.”

“Hey, it’s not like I’ve never seen one before,” he replied, mustering up a shaky air of nonchalance. 

“Or at least two.”

He shook his head and climbed into the front seat. When they were nearing town and his face felt normal again, he joked, “Now that’s a pair to beat a full house every time.”

Eve smiled. 

Reb’s stationery-slash-camping goods-slash-hunting supplies store, aptly and simply named
Reb’s
, was located on the very end of the very small Main Street. The faded red brick building looked more like some old abandoned fort than a place of business. The front window was amber from years of collected dust and dirt, making it almost impossible to see inside. 

Reb was a dark-skinned, tall man with a beer gut that looked like it was on loan from a man twice his weight and half his size. His gray shoulder-length hair wildly pointed in every direction on a compass. He was reading a paper when they came inside, paused a moment to give them the once over, then went back to his paper. The interior of the store was mercifully in better shape than the neglected exterior. It took them no time to navigate through the aisles to find everything they needed, including rain slickers and heavy duty insect repellant, for the trip to Denali Park. John also grabbed a copy of the
Shida Gazette
, several packs of gum and a small bag of cigars that looked homemade in a wrapper that guaranteed “the sweetest smoke this side of heaven”.

When they placed everything on the counter, Reb sighed and dropped his paper. 

“You must be the new folks living in that fancy house,” he said as he squinted at price tags and jammed the numbers into his old cash register. 

“That would be us,” John answered. 

“Going on a trip?”

“Yes sir. We’re going to the Denali National Park,” Jessica said, her chin upturned to see over the counter. 

Reb stopped and looked down at her. His face broke out into a smile. “Hell, you’re pretty cute for a…” 

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to fill in the blank. Reb switched gears. 

“That’s a fine place to be going. Never been there myself, but I hear it’s nice.”

“Kind of like New Yorkers who’ve never been to the Statue of Liberty,” John said. 

“Huh?”

“Never mind. So, what’s the damage?”

“Seventy-five-forty-two.”

John tried to pay with his credit card.

“Only plastic thing that works in this store is the knee I got back in ninety.”

John pulled a hundred dollar bill out of his wallet. 

“Don’t take hundreds either. Too many damn counterfeits floating around.”

Eve narrowed her gaze at Reb. He was having a grand time jerking them around. 

John looked around the store, grabbed a cooler and said, “Then I’ll take this and you can keep the change. Have a nice day, unless you’ve made other plans.”

Once they were back in the car, Eve growled. 

“What a jerk!”

John waved his hand. “He could be worse. At least he didn’t ban us from the store or give us the evil eye.”

Eve smiled, though it seemed forced. 

As the car bounced around the semi-paved roads back to the house, John was buoyed by his calm at Reb’s. He’d always considered himself a rough and tough, tried and true New Yorker who could handle himself in any situation. It took coming to Alaska to remind him of that. 

Eve was equally impressed, more confident now that together, they could take on the town that didn’t want them. 

When they arrived back at the house, John was anxious to check the digital recorder he had left running in the empty room at the end of the hall for the past three nights. He had listened to the recording for the past two days to see if anything out of the ordinary had been captured. For the two days, all it captured was wind blowing through the trees outside, Liam’s crying and the natural settling of a house made entirely of wood. 

Undaunted, John slapped on a pair of padded headphones and got to work. As he listened, he watched the varying sound wavelengths jump and dive on the computer monitor. 

He suddenly bolted upright in his chair and clicked on the mouse to pause the playback. He pulled the cursor back to the point he had hastily bookmarked. 

Two hours into night three, he had struck gold. 

There were voices, paper thin and pleading.

“
Let us back…let us back…let us back.”

Days later, Judas pulled into the drive moments before they were ready to embark on their excursion to the state park. John was just closing the packed trunk when Judas jumped out of his pickup. 

“Leaving already?” He looked crestfallen. 

“Just going to Denali Park for a few days.” 

Judas’s face brightened. 

“Well, I just wanted to tell you that I haven’t made any progress, you know, as far as research goes. I’m persona non grata, but even the girl I asked to lend a hand hasn’t come up with anything. All we know is the Bolsters just up and disappeared one day and I don’t think anyone’s tried real hard here to find them. Odds are, they probably decided you can’t come home again and headed back to where life is good. Think I’ll stop by the library later to check up on Millie, the librarian, to see if she’s gotten anything else.”

John clapped a hand on his upper arm. “Thanks for trying. I bet you’re right about the Bolsters. Never heard of the paranormal making whole families disappear. I think I’ll do some of my own sniffing around when I get back.”

Judas craned his neck to look over John’s shoulder at the house. 

“You come up with anything, you know, in there?”

John leaned closer. “Between you and me, yeah, a couple of things have come up. So far, it’s inconclusive. I even took a bunch of recordings outside the house, but so far nothing but insect and animal noises that render everything useless. I have a lot more to do before I’m finished.” 

“Hi Judas!” Eve and Jessica called out in stereo. He waved back. 

“Call me when you get back. I can help you any way you want. I know I was scared shitless before, but now that you’re all living here and nothing’s happened to you, I know I could handle being inside.”

“You’ll watch the house for us while we’re gone?” Eve asked playfully.

Judas jerked his head. “Yeah, from a distance maybe.”

As she walked away to the car, Jessica tugged at his jacket. “You can go inside. That way the boy will have someone to play with.”

His skin went clammy as the innocent little girl climbed into her booster seat like she was scaling a minor cliff. 

“See you soon,” John said and shook his hand. 

He watched them leave and couldn’t shake the feeling that the house was watching him as well. 

Chapter Twenty-Two

The smell was something a man never got over. No matter how many times he’d been assaulted by it, the damn odor still made him gag. Especially in this case. 

Poor Millie must have been dead for almost a week. The Graves punk had found her after he did a little B&E to get inside the library. The way he told it, he came to the library yesterday like he always did and found the doors locked. Old Ben Hooter was just shuffling up the steps, hoping to read the paper for free like he always did, when he commented to Judas that the library hadn’t been opened for days. It was funny, if you shut down Phil’s Bar, the whole town would be talking. Close up the library for a month and only a few old timers and Graves would pay it much notice. 

Thinking he was some TV private dick, Graves went about investigating why the library was closed. A working man wouldn’t have time for such nonsense, but he was rarely employed for long. He went by Millie’s place and found mail piled up outside the door. Then he went behind the library and found her car in its usual spot. That’s when the moron decided to pop a window and take a look inside for himself. 

Well, he sure got an eyeful after following his nose. Teach him for playing amateur cop. Sheriff High Bear had a mind to bring him in for questioning, maybe scare the piss out of him. 

“He’s a dope but he ain’t no killer,” the sheriff said aloud as he knelt by Millie’s body. 

She lay crumpled across the threshold leading to the basement. When Judas had opened the door with his pocket knife, on account of the knob being several feet away on the floor, her body had tumbled on top of his feet. 

Gary High Bear squatted to get a better look at her face. 

Terror. It was a look of pure, unadulterated fright. And her hands. Every bit of skin had been scraped off her knuckles, exposing the bone. The inside of the door was painted brown with dried blood and covered in dozens of claw marks. Her lower body was bloated from the blood settling and her skin was an unnatural shade of gray and blue. 

The pungent odor of decay settled into his nose and deep into his brain, awakening memories he’d spent a good number of years trying to erase. 

The woman sat perfectly still, her hands tied behind her back, her eyes blazing hatred. A large red welt marred her perfectly pale face. The basement reeked of mold and desiccated mouse corpses. Outside, the storm raged on with a vengeance. It would take days to shovel out of this one. 

The man eyed her full breasts as they pressed against her blouse, thought of making a quick diversion before finishing the job at hand. 

“I told you not to stick around,” he said as he circled her. “But just like a white woman, you can’t take the advice of a man.”

“I don’t care what you do to me,” she snarled. 

“You don’t say.” He yanked her shirt open and pulled her bra down with one violent motion. “Now is it just me, or do you seem cold?”

“Go ahead and laugh, you limp dicked pig.”

Before the man could lash out, Gary’s gun exploded. The woman dropped in a bloody heap.

“That’s enough,” he sighed, tossing a shovel near her body. 

More death. Goddamn it. 

He pulled out a handkerchief to cover his nose but it didn’t do a lick of good. This was some mess. The M.E. from Fairbanks was going to have his hands full. 

As he went outside to get some fresh air, a passing thought grabbed his attention.

Did Millie always have so much white hair?

Maybe it was dyed. Kids her age did some crazy stuff. 

Judas was wasted on Wild Turkey and half a jay of some stinkweed he’d kept around in case of emergency. The truck started to veer to the other side of the road until Teddy yelled, “Jesus, man!”, and he jerked the wheel to the right, almost overcompensating and tossing them off the road. 

“Hey, why don’t you pull over and I drive?”

Judas kept his eyes on the road. He reached between his legs and brought the nearly empty bottle of Turkey to his lips. Teddy shook his head, sighed, and grabbed the bottle so he could finish it off. 

“I see her everywhere,” Judas said once they had left the center of town in the rearview mirror. “She’s standing by the side of the road but when I turn to look at her she disappears. And she doesn’t look like Millie at all. Shit, she looks just the way I found her.”

A single tear leaked from the corner of his eye. He snorted and wiped at it with the back of his sleeve. His head jerked to the side and the car jounced. 

“See! I could have sworn she was right there.”

“Take it easy, Judas. You saw something real bad yesterday. It’s okay. I’d be freaked out, too. Ain’t nothing wrong with losing it for a while. Just, how about we switch seats?”