John Saul (30 page)

“You don’t have to be afraid of me, Joey,” the man whispered. “Come.” As Joey drew closer, the man reached out to stroke the boy’s cheek. The skin of his palm felt rough, but Joey made no move to pull away from the touch: his cheek, where the man’s fingers grazed his skin, seemed electrified. Suddenly something inside Joey felt different from how he had ever felt in his life.

He no longer felt alone.

“Joey? Joey!”

Rick Martin’s voice shattered the quiet of the moment, and Joey’s eyes widened in alarm. The man’s hand dropped away from Joey’s cheek and his eyes narrowed. “Go back, Joey,” he commanded, his voice dropping to a whisper. “It’s not time yet. When it is, I’ll come for you.”

Laying his immense hands—his nails thick and long, curling like claws from the ends of his fingers—on Joey’s shoulders, the man turned him around and nudged him, indicating that he was to go back the way he’d come.

Joey took a few tentative steps. When Rick Martin’s call rang out again, he turned to glance back at the man whose first presence he had neither seen nor heard, but had nonetheless sensed.

The man was gone, and the spot where he had stood only a moment before was now empty.

There was no sign that he had ever been there at all. Joey’s eyes raced over the whole area, searching for some proof that the encounter had been real, and not just another trick his mind was playing on him.

But there was nothing, and finally Joey turned away as he heard his name being called yet again. “I’m coming!” he shouted. Breaking into a run, he hurried back to the clearing.

“Where were you?” Rick Martin demanded. He had panicked
at the realization that Joey was gone, and now his tone was gruff.

“I-I had to take a leak,” Joey stammered. “I was right over there.” He gestured vaguely in the direction of the forest.

“Well, don’t do it again,” Rick admonished him. “I promised your aunt I wouldn’t let you out of my sight. I don’t want you making a liar out of me, okay?”

Joey nodded, saying nothing of the man he had just seen in the forest, but listening carefully to every word Rick Martin spoke as the deputy laid plans to bring Frank Peters and his bloodhounds up to the cabin.

By nightfall, Martin was sure, the dogs would have tracked down the man who lived here.

“I’ll be back to pick you up by three-thirty,” MaryAnne told her children, pulling up in front of the school and leaning across Logan to open the far door of the Range Rover. “If I’m late, just wait for me. Don’t take the bus. I don’t want you walking anywhere by yourselves.”

“Why do we have to go to school at all?” Logan began in a last ditch effort to be allowed to stay home that day. Before he could go on, Alison interrupted him.

“Will you stop being a baby, Logan? Mom’s got enough to—”

His pleading abandoned, Logan wheeled around to glare at Alison. “I’m not a baby! I’m ten years old.”

“Then stop acting like you’re four,” Alison broke in. She opened the back door and slid out. “Don’t worry, Mom. I’ll take care of him.” She waved at her mother as the Range Rover pulled away from the curb, then turned to start up the wide walkway that led to the school’s entrance. “Are you going to stand there all day?” she called back over her shoulder. Logan, after one last, longing look after the Rover, started up the walk.

“If you’d just kept your big mouth shut, I could’ve talked her into letting us stay home,” he groused.

Alison ignored her brother, and Logan, finally bowing to the inevitable, followed her up the walk. But he hadn’t
gone more than a few steps before he heard a voice calling to him. “Hey, Logan! Did you see him?”

Logan turned. Michael Stiffle’s lips were twisted into an unpleasant grin, and his eyes were fixed mockingly on him. “You didn’t, did you?” Michael demanded.

“Who?” Logan countered.

“Bill Sikes!” someone yelled. A crowd quickly began to form around Logan and his sister. “Did you guys get to see the body when they brought it down?”

Logan hesitated. All he’d seen this morning were some men coming out of the woods on the other side of the pasture. When they’d started toward the ambulance parked in the yard, his mother had made him stop watching. Now, though, he struggled to remember every detail of the glimpse he’d gotten of the large bundle the men had been carrying. Could it really have been Bill Sikes’s body? A shiver ran through him as he decided that it couldn’t have been anything else. “Sure, I saw it,” he told them. “It took four men to carry it, and it was all wrapped up in plastic.”

“But did you see the body?” someone else asked.

“We didn’t see anything!” Alison exclaimed before her brother could reply. Feeling slightly sick at her stomach, she took Logan’s hand and started toward the door, hoping to get inside before anyone could ask anything else. But before they were even halfway up the steps, Mike Stiffle grabbed Logan’s arm.

“Where’s Joey?” he taunted. “Have they taken him away yet?”

Alison turned to glare at Michael, whose twin sister was right behind him, grinning knowingly at her. Sensing what was coming next, she pulled her brother away. “Come on, Logan,” she said, dropping her voice so no one but her brother could hear her. “Let’s go inside!” But even as she approached the doors, it began:

“I bet Joey did it!” Michael Stiffle sang out. “I bet he killed Bill Sikes!”

“Joey’s crazy!” someone else called.

“Yeah! Everybody knows that!”

Alison wheeled around. “Stop it!” she shouted. “Just stop it! None of you know anything!”

“We know Joey!” Michael Stiffle yelled back. “We know—” His words died on his lips as the door opened and Florence Wickman stepped out onto the porch, Ellen Brooks beside her.

“That will be enough!” the principal declared in the forceful voice she’d developed years earlier to seize control of just such situations as this. “Nobody knows what happened to Bill Sikes, and there will be no more talk like that.” Her eyes fixed on Michael Stiffle. “Do you understand me?”

The boy stared at his feet, nodding silently.

“Then I suggest you all get ready for classes,” Mrs. Wickman told them. “And I don’t want to hear any more talk about Joey Wilkenson! One more word out of any of you, and you can count on spending the next month doing laps after school! I mean it! One month, no excuses!”

As the principal’s threat sank in, the murmuring among her students died away. Satisfied that the situation was under control, she turned and went back into the building. A few minutes later, though, when they were alone in Florence Wickman’s office, Ellen Brooks spoke not only for herself, but for all the teachers she had talked to that morning.

“What are we going to do?” she asked. “The only thing the kids are talking about today is what happened last night, and I can’t blame them. Did you hear Sam Gilman this morning?”

“He should be ashamed of himself,” Florence Wickman snapped. “And Milt Morgenstern, too. It’s as if they
want
to cause a panic!” She sighed, lowering herself into the chair behind her desk. “Still, I’m afraid Sam and Milt have a point. Until we know exactly what happened to Bill Sikes, the children should be scared. We should
all
be scared.”

MaryAnne paced nervously in the kitchen as she waited for Joey and the deputy to return from the mountains. From the moment she’d let Joey go, she was certain she’d made a mistake. Yet what choice had she had? As soon as Rick had begun talking to Joey—just as he’d gotten dressed and settled
down to try to eat something—she’d known where his questions were leading.

“Do you remember where the cabin is?” he’d asked. “Could you find it again?” Joey had hesitated, then nodded, and MaryAnne had listened in horror as the deputy suggested they go back up into the mountains immediately. Finally Rick had drawn her aside. “I’ve got two murders on my hands,” he’d explained, “and a woman in desperate shape in the hospital down in Boise. If there
is
somebody living up there, I want to talk to whoever it is right away. And if there isn’t anyone there, or if there isn’t a cabin at all …” He’d left the sentence dangling, but MaryAnne had instantly caught his meaning.

“Then what?” she demanded, her voice cold. “Surely you can’t be thinking that Joey had anything to do with the killings! My God, what are you saying? He’s only a child.”

“I’m not saying anything,” Rick Martin had insisted. “But I have to follow up on this, and the only way I can do that is with Joey’s help.”

Still MaryAnne had hesitated, but in the end, when Joey himself had pleaded to be allowed to lead the deputy up to the cabin, she’d relented, albeit against her better judgment. “You have to let me go,” Joey had protested. “If everyone thinks I’m lying, then everyone will think … they’ll think …”

Though Joey had been unable to say the words, his meaning was clear, and after Rick Martin had promised not to let the boy out of his sight, she’d finally given in. “But you’ll watch him every minute! Agreed?”

He’d agreed, and she believed him. But every minute since they’d left had been torture, especially the endless hour and a half that had elapsed since she’d dropped Alison and Logan at school. She went to the window one more time, glanced out, and felt a great wave of relief as she saw Joey coming across the field, Rick Martin beside him. Forcing herself not to run out to meet them, she waited by the door until they reached the house. When she looked anxiously at Rick, he was able to read her question as clearly as if she’d spoken it out loud.

“It’s there,” he said. “Right where he said it was, and exactly as he described it.”

Some of the tension drained from MaryAnne’s body. She slipped her arm protectively around Joey. “Was there anyone there?” she asked.

Martin shook his head. “Someone lives up there, though, but don’t ask me how.” He described the cabin to MaryAnne. “It looked like he was there not too long before we arrived,” he finished a couple of minutes later. “There was an empty coffee cup, still warm, and the fire had just been banked.” He stretched, trying to ease the knots in his muscles, knowing he could push himself no further until he’d had at least an hour or two of sleep. “I’m calling Tony Moleno and sending him up with Frank Peters and the hounds. If the rain holds off, the dogs should be able to track the guy pretty easily.”

MaryAnne started to say something, then changed her mind. “Joey? Why don’t you go up to your room and change your clothes while I talk to Mr. Martin?”

Joey gazed up at her, his eyes filled with suspicion. She was going to talk about him—he was sure of it! “Why can’t I stay?” he demanded.

Reading the fear in his voice, MaryAnne smiled at him. “Because I want you to put on clean clothes,” she told him. “We’re going to go see your doctor and try to find out what’s happening to you.”

Joey’s eyes widened. Was she going to make him go to a hospital? Was she going to send him away after all, even though she’d promised not to? “But you said—” he began, but MaryAnne gently put her finger over his lips, silencing him.

“It’s going to be all right, Joey. We’re just going to go see your doctor, and maybe he can help you remember what happened last night. I promise you I’ll be right there with you, and we’ll come home afterward.” As Joey still hesitated, she spoke again, her eyes fixing on his. “I promised to take care of you, Joey. I promised your parents when you were born, and I promised you this morning. I won’t break that promise, Joey, I swear I won’t.”

Joey gazed up at her, seeing nothing in her face to make
him think she might not be telling him the truth. But what if she wasn’t? What if she sent him away to a hospital somewhere? Then, even as the question formed in his mind, he knew the answer.

I’ll run away. If they send me to a hospital, I’ll run away, and go up in the mountains and find the man. I’ll find him, and he’ll take care of me.

Satisfied with the answer that had come to him, he left the kitchen and started up the stairs to his room. When he was gone, MaryAnne turned back to Rick Martin.

“There’s something I don’t understand,” she said. “If you think whoever lives in that cabin might have killed Bill Sikes, then why didn’t he hurt Joey last night?”

It was exactly the question Rick Martin had been puzzling over for the last half hour as they had climbed back down the mountain.

It was a question for which he still had no answer.

Joey opened the door of his room and whistled at his dog, who was stretched out on the bed, his head resting on his forepaws. But instead of bounding off the bed to trot over and greet his master, Storm only whined softly, then slithered to the floor and disappeared under the bed. Frowning, Joey dropped down to his hands and knees, peering into the chasm between the box springs and the floor.

Storm snarled and retreated a few more inches.

Suddenly Joey understood.

The scent of the mountain man was on him.

“It’s okay, Storm,” he whispered. “You don’t need to be afraid of him. He wouldn’t hurt me. He loves me, boy. He loves me.”

Once again he reached out to the dog, but the shepherd’s frightened whimper did not subside.

As the scent of the man who had laid his hand on Joey’s face filled Storm’s nostrils, his whole body began to tremble, and he shrank even farther away from the boy who had been his master his entire life.

A boy who, right now, he instinctively feared.

“W
ell, now, that wasn’t so bad, was it, Joey?” Clark Corcoran asked, standing up and coming around to perch on the corner of his desk. Built like a quarterback, Corcoran’s youthful look belied his forty-four years, and his easy manner had always made him popular with kids.

But Joey shifted nervously in his chair, and the worry in his eyes was apparent as he gazed up at the doctor. “You mean we’re done?” he asked.

Corcoran nodded. “All done,” he replied, instilling a heartiness in his voice that he knew wasn’t justified by the results of his examination of Joey. Still, he had reached some conclusions about the boy during the last hour, encouraging Joey to keep talking while he checked him over physically, knowing that with someone of Joey’s age, he would gain a lot more information from an informal talk than he ever would if they’d merely sat face-to-face across his desk.