Homing (13 page)

She couldn't.

And yet, when she'd gone up to the hives looking for Otto, Carl Henderson had been there.

He'd been there, and ... what?

He'd spoken to her, and she'd said something to him, and... and after that, all she could remember were the bees swarming out of the hives she'd knocked over, surrounding her.

Even now she could still hear the hum of their vibrating wings and feel them crawling on her skin.

She shuddered, instinctively trying to brush them away.

But they weren't there! There was nothing there!

But she could feel them! She knew she could! Even as the panicky thoughts tumbled in her mind, the itchiness on her skin seemed to penetrate inside her, reaching all the way into her bones.

Terrified, she unlocked the door, pulled it open and stepped out into the hall, determined to tell her mother what was happening to her, how she felt, that she couldn't remember if Carl Henderson had done anything to her.

As she started back toward the examination room, she felt her strength slipping away, as if something inside her were sapping her will as well as her mind. When she Spoke her voice didn't sound like her own words. "I'm done," she said. "Can we go home now?"

Karen hesitated. A wave of relief washed over her that her daughter looked none the worse for what had happened, she had a terrible feeling something was wrong, Suddenly having recovered so quickly. Then she thought she understood:

Shock.

Julie was in shock.

"In a little while," she said gently. "But first, let's have Dr. Filmore look you over, just to make certain You're really all right, okay?"

A surge of hope rose in Julie. Despite her words, her mother hadn't believed her. Now the doctor would find out how sick she really was and would help her Eagerly, she smiled and nodded her agreement to the examination.

They went back to the treatment room. The men were no longer there, and Ellen Filmore was working on Julie's medical record. Glancing up from her work, she smiled briefly and was about to complete her notes when she suddenly found her eyes locking onto Julie, gazing at her in utter disbelief.

Only five minutes ago the girl had been on the examining table, unconscious, her neck grotesquely swollen, barely able to breathe, Now she was standing in the doorway, smiling, and looking perfectly normal. This, as far as Ellen Filmore knew, was impossible. "Julie?" she asked. "How do you feel?"

Once again Julie struggled to tell the doctor the truth, carefully formulating the words in her mind.

Fever.

Chills.

Nausea.

But when she spoke, the nightmare world closed in on her once more: "I'm fine," was all she could make herself say.

Ellen Filmore frowned. Fine? But that was impossible, given her condition a few minutes ago, and given what Russell had told her while Julie had been in the bathroom.

If Julie had been raped-or even come close to it-she might very well have gone into shock and closed down. "I think maybe I'll be the judge of how 'fine' you are," she told Julie gently, handing her an examination gown. "Why don't you put this on and lie down again, and let me have a look?" As Julie started undressing, Ellen led Karen out into the hall and pulled the door closed. "Why don't you stay with me while I look her over?" she asked. "And what, exactly, was Carl talking about when he said he guessed Otto had told you about him raping Julie?"

Trying to keep her emotions in check, Karen repeated what Otto had told them. "I asked Julie about it," she said.

"But she didn't really answer me."

"She could be in shock," Ellen Filmore told her, confirming Karen's own thoughts. "If what Otto said is true, she'll remember it sooner or later, and I suspect I'll also find some physical evidence of it. If not of actual penetration, at least there might be some soreness and bruises from a struggle." She smiled encouragingly, but privately reflected that another possibility existed as well. There was still the chance that, as Carl Henderson had insisted, Owen had completely misread the situation and there

was no truth to his accusations at all. Together, the two women went back into the examining room, and Ellen Filmore began her examination of Julie, sticking a thermometer under her tongue and wrapping the cuff of a sphygmomanometer around her upper left arm.

She examined Julie's tongue and peered down her throat.

She checked her eyes, and tapped her knees with a small rubber reflex hammer.

She examined her pelvic area for both penetration and bruises.

In the end Ellen Filmore shook her head.

"Well," she sighed when she was finished, smiling wanly at Julie. "I'm not going to pretend I know how that antivenom worked, but you're right. You are fine. And you're damned lucky, too. If Carl Henderson hadn't had that antitoxin, I'm not sure you would have made it at all, even if we'd been able to get you to San Luis Obispo."

Julie felt a chill of pure terror pass through her.

The doctor must have found something! She must have!

It wasn't possible to feel this bad and look perfectly normal.

And yet, as she slowly sat up, she realized that finally she really was beginning to feel a little better. The aching in her joints was still there, but not quite as bad as it had been before, and it seemed the fever was easing a little, too.

Her stomach still felt like she might throw up any second, but she had a feeling she wasn't actually going to do it.

Was it possible that maybe there really wasn't anything wrong with her, and that she was just feeling some side effects from the shot they'd given her? "You mean I can go home?" she asked, starting to get dressed, but still hoping the doctor would stop her, would refuse to let her leave the clinic.

Ellen Filmore hesitated. "Julie, do you remember if Carl Henderson did anything to you before the bees attacked?

Anything at all?"

Once again Julie struggled to remember something anything-that might account for what was happening to her. But all she could remember was talking to him-she couldn't even remember what had been said-and then being surrounded by the swarm of insects. She shook her head. "He didn't do anything at all," she said. "All he did was try to help me."

At last, hearing Julie's words, the tension that had been building in Karen through the examination was finally released. Apparently Julie really was all right, after all, and Otto, true to form, was just trying to make more trouble.

"Come on," she said, giving Julie an affectionate hug.

"Let's get home and thank our lucky stars Carl Henderson was there and had that medicine. Okay?" she asked, turning to Ellen Filmore.

"I don't see why not," the doctor agreed, though reluctantly, her eyes still on Julie. "But if anything happens-if she starts feeling anything unusual-you call me.-" She picked up the brown vial, which was still two-thirds full, and held it up for Julie to see. "If there are any side effects from this stuff, I want to know about them."

There are! Julie wanted to scream. Can't you see? Can't you see any of what's happening to me? But once again she found herself powerless to utter the words, felt herself nodding and smiling though every fiber of her body was screaming, Help me, help me.

One last time she tried to tell the doctor about the fever, the aching joints, the nausea and chills.

But all she could do was smile. Weakly, she repeated the lie once more.

"I'm fine."

Defeated by the strange and terrible power she felt inside her, Julie left the examining room and went out to the lobby, where Carl Henderson, his face pale, waited at one end of - the room, and her stepfather at the other.

She hesitated at the door, wanting to run to her stepfather, wanting to feel his arms around her, protecting her from whatever had invaded her body and her mind, wanting to beg him to help her.

instead, Against her own will, she found herself walking over to Carl Henderson. "Thank you," she heard herself say, the words coming from some part of her mind she hadn't known existed. "If you hadn't been there, I guess well, just thank you."

Carl Henderson managed to betray nothing of the terror he'd been feeling as he waited for the results of Julie's examination. He'd hoped she would die. She should have died! But she hadn't. Yet, now, listening to her words, he realized he was safe. Though the shot hadn't killed her, it had obviously done something to her.

She remembered nothing.

Taking her hand in both of his own, Carl Henderson squeezed it. "Any time," he said. "Any time at all." But even as he spoke the words, his eyes fixed on Julie's face once more, and once more that unfathomable fury rose up inside him.

Even now, right here in the hospital, he wanted to reach out and crush her.

Why? Why?

He had no idea.

Julie, seeing his eyes begin to darken, seeing once more that spark of hatred, felt the edges of a fleeting memory stir in the depths of her mind. She jerked her hand away, as quickly as the fragment of memory had come, it disappeared beyond her reach.

She hesitated, once more trying to grasp the fragile wisp of recollection, but then turned away.

The memory was gone.

A few minutes later, sitting in the backseat of the Chrysler between her mother and her sister, with Kevin and Russell sitting up front, Julie saw her stepfather peering at her in the rearview mirror.

"You're really sure you're okay?" he asked. "Maybe you'd better take it easy the rest of the day."

Once again Julie opened her mouth to try to tell her stepfather exactly how she felt.

Once again the words refused to come.

"I'm fine," she said yet again. "I really am."

But both her mind and her body told her she wasn't fine at all.

Something, she knew, had happened.

Something inside her had gone dreadfully wrong, and she no longer had any control over what she said.

How long, she wondered, would it be before she lost control over what she thought, too?

But what if it had already happened?

What if she was already crazy?

That, she realized, was the scariest thing of all. Because if she really had gone crazy, what would she do next?

Her eyes went to Molly, sitting beside her, her little hand clutching her own much bigger one.

She trusts me, Julie thought. She trusts me, but she doesn't have any idea what's happening to me.

What if I hurt her?

What if I kill her?

What if I kill everyone?

The thought seemed to expand in her mind, filling it up, slowly blotting out everything else.

Was this how the people she'd read about felt? The ones who suddenly started killing their friends, or their families, or even complete strangers?

Had they felt like they were dying, and not even been able to ask anyone for help?

Terror built in her once again.

What if I've gone crazy? What if I start killing every one?

Silently, fearlessly, giving no clue of what was happening to her, Julie Spellman began to cry.

Mark Shannon had been a deputy in Pleasant Valley for almost fifteen years. He and his partner, Manny Gomez, knew most of what was going on in the small community at any given time, and-or at least so Mark liked to think everything that was going on, given enough time.

Mark had come to Pleasant Valley from San Francisco, where after only five years he'd decided he'd had enough of being a big-city cop. He wanted to work somewhere where he was part of the community-where people would like him or dislike him simply because he was Mark Shannon, not because he wore a blue uniform.

Overall, it had worked out pretty much as he'd hoped.

He'd been absorbed into the life of the town years ago, and his only problem at present was that a couple of the kids he'd watched grow up-even coached in Little League-were turning into troublemakers, and he suspected that sooner or later he was going to have to arrest someone who only thought of him as a friend. On balance, though, it made his job easier that at least he and Manny were on a first-name basis with most of the local creeps and perverts.

Until that morning, Carl Henderson had not been on the C-and-P list, but after listening to what Otto Owen definitely a character, but neither a creep nor a pervert, so far as Mark knew-had to say, he wasn't averse to adding Henderson to the short list of people upon whom he and Manny would keep an eye on.

The problem was that even though Otto's story had sounded plausible, nothing else seemed to add up. Ellen Filmore, with whom Mark had talked for almost half an hour, had assured him that if any attack had been made on Julie Spellman, it couldn't have been nearly as violent as the scene Otto Owen had described. Julie Spellman was not only most assuredly still a virgin, but Dr. Filmore's examination had shown no signs of any kind of struggle, nor any bruises in her genital area.

Now, for the last half hour, he'd been talking to Julie herself, and the whole thing was becoming murkier.

He glanced at his scribbled notes. According to Otto, there was no question of what had been happening by the beehives. But according to Julie, nothing had happened, and her story had been backed up by Dr. Filmore.

His next stop would be Carl Henderson, for all the good it would do him. No matter what had actually happened, he couldn't imagine that Henderson was going to admit to an attempted rape.

And that was the weird part, as far as Mark Shannon was concerned, for despite what both Julie Spellman and Ellen Filmore had told him, he had this feeling that something had, indeed, happened up by the beehives. For one thing, there was a place on the ground where it sure looked as if there'd been a struggle: deep gouges in the hard-packed earth where the gravel with which the area was littered had been ground down under some force.

Of course, it was just possible that Otto had doctored the scene himself, Mark was as aware as everyone else in town of how much Otto hated Henderson. On the other hand, Otto himself had told the deputy how angry he'd been at Julie earlier that morning. "But just 'cause she was rude to me doesn't mean she should get raped," he'd grated as he made his report.