Homing (37 page)

It was the urge to return to the hills, to the cave he'd never seen before yesterday.

Return to Julie.

But why? What force was it that was drawing him to her?

Though he had no understanding of what the force was or how it might work, he knew there would be no way for him to fight it.

He started toward the back door, then hesitated.

When the rest of the family woke up, when Molly came down ...

The promise he'd made to the little girl last night echoed in his head.

The urge to leave the house and go back up into the hills growing stronger by the second, he quickly went to the counter and scrawled a note on the pad that always sat by the telephone:

Dad Had an idea-went to look for Julie.

Back by lunchtime.

He reread the note, then pinned it to the refrigerator with a magnet. He left the house, pausing when he was fifty yards away to look back.

Despite what he'd written in the note, he had a strong feeling that he wouldn't be back by lunchtime.

Indeed, he had a very strong feeling that he wouldn't be coming back, for as he'd started away and seen the golden brown hills ahead of him, a peculiar sensation had come over him.

A sensation that he was going home.

But why?

Where had the feeling come from?

Home wasn't up in the hills. And it had nothing to do with the cave he'd seen yesterday, where Julie, her body enormously swollen, stood with a cloud of insects swarming around her.

Yet even as that vision of Julie came into his mind-a vision whose reality had terrified him when he'd first seen it yesterday-he felt himself being drawn to her all the more strongly.

Something inside him wanted to be close to her, to bask in her presence.

As he moved up into the hills, his step quickened.

Mark Shannon rolled over, groped for the alarm clock next to his bed, and jabbed groggily at the button that would silence the alarm.

A second later the insistent ringing sounded again, and he finally opened his eyes to glare balefully at the telephone, his mind still fogged from the extra hours he'd put in last night, first cruising around the town, then going out to the motel to check out the register and the rooms, then finally settling in at the Silo, where he'd perched on a bar stool until closing time, lubricating the voices of every customer who came in with drinks he would charge to the county.

No one, of course, had known anything about the missing kids.

As the telephone jangled one more time, Shannon reached out and picked it up. I-This better be important," he growled.

"I think you better get down here," Manny Gomez told him. "I got a whole office full of people, and they all want to know the same thing-how come we haven't found any of those kids yet."

Mark Shannon groaned. "What time is it?" he asked.

"Six-thirty," Manny replied, then began to list all the people who were crowded into their small office around the corner from the city hall.

The name that finally goaded Mark out of the comfort of his bed was that of Marge Larkin's boss, Jim Chapman.

If the editor of the paper was there, then everyone else in town soon would be as well. "Okay," he sighed. "I'll be there in fifteen minutes." Hauling himself out of bed, he stumbled into the bathroom, turned the shower on cold, then stepped under the icy spray. instantly, his head cleared and most of the hangover was driven out of his body. regulations were going out Obviously, the department the window on this one, he thought as he shaved, and he was going to have to organize a search party. He'd been skeptical at first, but it was now clear that three kids were missing. There was something very strange about Andy Bennett having taken off the same morning that Julie Spellman and Jeff Larkin had disappeared. Two kids-one boy and one girl-was one thing. In fact, it was pretty obviously explainable to anyone except the parents involved, who never wanted to think their adolescent children might just want to take off and spend a night together.

Andy Bennett, though, added a twist that didn't make any sense. According to Marian and Chuck, he hadn't even talked to either Jeff or Julie since the night they'd all gone to the movies together.

Shannon put on the cleanest of his four uniform shirts, pulled on the same pants he'd worn yesterday, then added his belt, holster, gun, and badge. Ten minutes after the phone had jarred him out of sleep, he was in his squad car and on his way.

And half an hour after that, leading a caravan of four teen cars filled with what seemed like every relative and friend the Bennetts and Marge Larkin had, he set out for Russell Owen's farm to begin the search.

When he got there, though, Karen Owen informed him that the search ad already begun: both Russell and Kevin were already up in the hills. "Kevin left before breakfast,"

she told him, handing Shannon the note she'd found on the refrigerator door. "Russell went after him as soon as we found out he was gone."

Mark Shannon scowled deeply. "I wish you'd called us-" he began, but Karen cut him off.

"I called you yesterday," she reminded him, her voice quavering. "I even came to see you, for all the good it did me."

Abashed, Shannon turned away from Karen to study the hills behind the house. Covered with short grass that was already turning brown under the summer sun, they were crisscrossed everywhere with a tangled maze of tracks and paths. A few of them were man-made, but most of the trails had been worn into the earth by grazing cattle and foraging deer. To try to follow anyone up there would be nearly impossible. Still, a plan was already formulating in Mark Shannon's mind.

"Okay, here's what we're going to do," he told the crowd of men who had gathered around him. "I want you to spread out-you all know these hills even better than I do, so let's break up into groups of two. Then we'll stretch a line as far as we can without completely losing sight of each other, and we'll start up into the hills. Anybody sees anything anything at all-start hollering. I'll be about a third of the way from the north end, and Manny Gomez'll be about a third of the way from the south end Shouldn't take more'n a few minutes for one or the other of us to get the message." Then an idea struck him. "How many of you guys got cell phones you can take?"

Half a dozen hands went up, and Shannon began splitting the group into teams, spreading the men with cellular phones as evenly along the line as he could. "If anyone with a phone sees anything, call 911, and the dispatcher can patch me or Manny in on the radio. Okay?"

No more than fifteen minutes after the caravan of cars had driven up her driveway, Karen found herself standing behind the house, tightly clutching Molly's shoulders as she watched the cars leave again, this time moving slowly along the rough dirt track that edged the foothills, kicking a cloud of brown dust high into the air.

Russell paused on the crest of the hill to use the bandanna he habitually carried in his hip pocket to wipe the sweat from his forehead. The sun was high in the sky now, and the cool wind coming in from the sea only a little while ago had shifted, turning hot and dry and promising that by this afternoon the temperature might rise to over one hundred degrees.

And still no sign of either Julie or Kevin.

Why hadn't the boy given them some clue of what his idea had been? couldn't he have at least provided a hint of where he might have gone? To attempt to "follow" Kevin into these hills, with their labyrinth of tracks Russell realized, was futile. Yet he couldn't bear to give it up and head home.

If he kept at it-if he climbed to the top of just one more hill-he might find them.

Or, more likely, he would find himself gazing once more, as he was now, over a series of grassy hills, an endless vista broken only by scattered stands of scrub oak and an occasional outcropping of rocks. Turning slowly, Russell scanned the full horizon once more, just as he had from the top of every hill he'd stood upon this morning.

Suddenly he froze as a figure appeared on a low ridge to the east where he himself had stood only twenty minutes ago. Though the figure was too far away for him to recognize, Russell was almost sure it was neither Kevin nor any of the three missing kids.

Cupping his hands around his mouth, Russell filled his lungs with air, then bellowed a single word: "Hello!"

The figure waved, and a moment later Russell heard faint words drifting back to him, almost lost in the building wind. "Find anything?"

Understanding that he was no longer the only person searching for the missing teenagers, Russell started back down the hill, almost breaking into a run in his eagerness to find out how many people had joined in the hunt.

He was nearing the bottom of the slope when he stopped short, his attention caught by something he'd barely glimpsed out of the corner of his eye.

For just a moment he stood frozen as the fragmentary image in his mind coalesced into a dark vision that made his skin crawl with dread.

Certain he must be wrong, praying that what he'd seen had been something else either-perhaps the bones of some kind of animal-he braced himself to gaze directly at the object that had set his skin crawling.

Even as he looked at it, part of his mind screamed out that he was mistaken, that what he was seeing wasn't what he believed it to be at all.

A human skeleton, only partially concealed by a clump of brush.

The bones were intact, except for the lower portion of the left leg, which wasn't there at all. Though the bones were picked clean of flesh, Russell could see they were fresh-not totally dried yet, they glistened in the mornings light. His gaze moved slowly, reluctantly, over the denuded frame, and finally, as he stared directly at the skull, he winced.

Ants were swarming over it, milling with seeming aimlessness, but as the focus of Russell's eyes sharpened, he saw the tiny fragments of matter gripped in their mandibles, infinitesimal scraps of brain tissue that they were taking back to their nest.

Maggots, their pale white bodies squirming grotesquely, writhed in the empty eye sockets.

But what gripped Russell's attention, what made him feel numb in his soul and nauseated in his belly, was the hair.

Still flowing from the scalp that was intact on the skull was a mass of dark, wavy hair.

Luxuriant hair, which, even though covered with dust, still bore traces of its original luster.

Julie's hair?

A sound boiled up from somewhere deep inside Russell Owen, partly a groan of terrible anguish, partly a pleading cry for help.

After a moment that seemed like an hour, Manny Gomez appeared next to Russell. Only the deputy's strong grip on his arm finally brought Russell out of the trance in which the grisly skeleton held him. At last, he tore his eyes away from it to turn and face the other man.

"How am I going to tell her?" he asked. "How am I going to tell Karen?"

Manny Gomez was silent for a few seconds, his dark eyes perfectly reflecting Russell Owen's anguish, but then his expression hardened as his features settled into the demeanor of a professional. "Let's not get ahead of ourselves, Russell," he said. "We don't know that this is Julie."

"Don't we?" Russell asked, his voice hollow.

As Manny spoke into his radio, quickly telling Mark Shannon what they'd found, Russell's gaze returned to the remains on the ground.

The leg.

What had happened to the missing leg?

A coyote, probably, roaming in the hills last night.

Maybe he'd heard it himself, howling over the meal it had discovered before gnawing the bones loose to drag them off to its hidden den.

He shuddered at the thought, then once more felt Manny Gomez's hand on his arm.

"Come on, Russell," the deputy said, the gruffness in his voice betraying his own emotions. "You don't know who this is. You don't know who it is at all." But even as he said it, Manny knew he believed, as Russell did, that these hideous remains had only two days ago been pretty, lively Julie Spellman.

Ellen Filmore had been fielding telephone calls all morning. it started the moment she walked into the clinic, arriving early just in case Barry Sadler or the professor at Cal Poly called. The phone had rung even before she put down her purse, and she snatched up the instrument on Roberto's desk, cradling the receiver Against her shoulder while she hunted for something with which to take notes.

It had not been the biologist from Cal Poly, but Lucy Meyers, wanting to know about rumors she'd heard of some kind of sickness being passed among the teenagers in Pleasant Valley. "I heard Karen Owen's daughter brought something up from Los Angeles, and now they're all getting it. Suzanne Munson says she's not letting Shelley go out at all." Lucy's voice dropped slightly. "Is it true that those fine kids aren't missing at all, but that they're locked up in the hospital in San Luis Obispo?"

I only wish it were, Ellen Filmore thought silently. But when she spoke, she tried to reassure Lucy Meyers.

"There seems to be something going around, but so far it doesn't look too serious. Even the kids who've caught it aren't really sick. They just get a little pale."

"That's not what I've heard," Lucy replied in a tone that let Ellen know that as far as Lucy was concerned, the information she'd gotten from her friends was a lot more reliable than anything a mere doctor might offer her. "I tell you, I'll be keeping my kids inside for the next few days."

"That's probably a good idea," Ellen said, realizing too late that within twenty minutes Lucy would have called at least ten other women to report that Ellen Filmore was now advocating a quarantine. "Not that I think there's really anything to be too concerned about," she hastily added, deliberately lying rather than risk adding fuel to Lucy Meyers's already panicky state.

No sooner had she finished talking to Lucy than someone else had called, and after that, someone else. By the time Roberto Munoz had arrived, both lines were ringing steadily, and finally Ellen began to worry that the biologist from Cal Poly would not be able to get through to her at all. She cut each caller shorter than the one before, but by mid-morning rumor was running rampant through the town. Around ten, as she was trying to decide if Jan McLaughlin fretting about Sara should be taken seriously or not, Roberto motioned frantically to her through the glass panel that separated her office from the reception area and mouthed the words "Cal Poly."