Paskagankee (34 page)

Assessing the extent of Melissa Manheim's injuries was impossible, but the investigative reporter was breathing evenly. Mike felt for a pulse and found it strong and steady. Despite the gravity of the situation and the fact that both young women might still die before ever making it out of the forest, Mike couldn't help but marvel at how accurate Ken Dye had been about everything, right down to his guess that the spirit would not intentionally harm women, but rather would save its wrath for males, representing the men that had massacred her and her baby so many centuries ago.

Sharon groaned softly and stirred. Her eyes remained closed but she appeared to be regaining consciousness. Mike limped into the kitchen, the pain in his knee constant and white-hot. He found a clean glass and filled it with water from a sealed jug, then struggled back to where Sharon lay on the living room floor, surrounded by human body parts and death and destruction.

His knee screamed as he knelt. He ignored it. He lifted her head gently in his hands and poured a small amount of water between her cracked lips. Most of it dribbled down her chin, mixing with the blood drooling out her mouth and staining her shirt. Mike didn't care. A bit of it made its way into her mouth and she swallowed instinctively, her eyes fluttering open for just a moment.

Mike thought she showed a second's recognition and maybe even a faint smile before lapsing back into unconsciousness. He sat on the floor next to her with his injured right leg splayed out to the side and cradled her head in his lap, using his fingers to brush some of the matted blood out of her jet-black hair, and waited patiently for rescue.

56

THE HOSPITAL IN ORONO felt cool and comfortable to Mike, especially after the horrendous conditions inside Chief Court's house of horrors in the forest. He could hear the muted clop-clop-clop of visitors' shoes as they walked up and down the corridor outside, looking for the rooms of family members and friends. The vinyl tile floor was freshly scrubbed and redolent of ammonia and disinfectant. It smelled like life.

Mike sat perched on a tiny, uncomfortable plastic chair next to Sharon's hospital bed, his right leg encased in a cast from his toes nearly to his hip. Sharon's small form was barely visible under the covers, impossibly small and frail. She looked like an extra from “Night of the Living Dead.” A bright white bandage covered her head, protecting the hole doctors had drilled into her skull to relieve the pressure caused by swelling of her brain, presumably the result of being tossed head-first into a tree by the spirit. Both her broken arms had been placed in casts and protruded more or less straight out to the side as she slept, making her look like she was beseeching Mike for help. Intravenous tubes ran into and out of her body in various places carrying various fluids, accomplishing various important things, Mike assumed, but what they might be he did not know.

She looked like some high school kid's chemistry experiment gone horribly wrong. She looked like the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

Sharon had been drifting into and out of consciousness for two days, and after examination by numerous specialists, the general consensus was that her condition could continue without any discernible change for weeks, or she might wake up completely lucid at any moment. Or anything in between. One thing the doctors all agreed upon was that she should eventually recover fully. She could expect a long, painful and frustrating rehabilitation, to be sure, but ultimately a full recovery.

In addition to the swelling on her brain and her two broken arms, Sharon had suffered two broken ribs, one of which had punctured a lung causing her to hemorrhage such a copious amount of blood internally that her doctors told Mike she would not have survived much more than another couple of hours in the condition she had been found.

He thought about their rescue and the trip out of the forest back to Paskagankee and marveled at how fortunate the rescue team had been to find the cabin at all, traipsing through the thick forest in the middle of the night with only the vaguest notion of where they were going. It had taken more than four hours for the team to arrive, led by young Officer Pete Kendall, and when they reached the cabin they found Mike dozing fitfully on the floor next to Sharon, still cradling her head.

The hike out to civilization had been excruciating. Mike insisted on carrying one end of the litter holding Sharon's unconscious body, and even now he wasn't sure how he had managed to navigate the rough terrain, climbing over rocks and stumps and downed tree branches, traipsing through streams and around undergrowth so thick in places that it was practically impassable. All of it he had done with torn ligaments in his right knee.

His men had continually offered to carry his end of the litter, and Mike knew he should have let them. His injury undoubtedly made a long and difficult hike even worse, but he had sworn that he was going to save Sharon if he was lucky enough to find her alive, and he wasn't about to quit with the mission nearly complete.

The small band of officers burst out of the forest and onto Route 28 at just after three o'clock in the morning. A trio of ambulances stood by on the side of the deserted county two-lane, their bright red strobes giving the night an eerie, pulsing glow that the men could see from several hundred yards away, while still deep in the jungle-like woods.

One ambulance had returned to base empty. Mike insisted on riding to the hospital in the second one with Sharon, after the first had rushed away carrying the semi-conscious Melissa Manheim. He refused to consider having his knee examined until he knew Sharon was safe and pulled rank on the poor EMT's trying their best to steer him to the back of the third vehicle. The emergency medical technicians finally shrugged their shoulders in defeat, and packed up their equipment and went home. Mike knew they must be pretty unhappy to have waited for hours in the middle of the night in the frigid cold of the northern Maine woods, only to be sent away with nothing to do.

He knew it, he just didn't care.

Sharon had been mostly unconscious and unresponsive during the entire hike, a fact for which Mike was extremely grateful. Had she been awake and alert, he suspected she would have suffered enormously, bouncing around on the litter, being lifted over rocks and trees and occasionally jarred seriously when one of the men lost their grip on the handles.

For one magical moment, as they were nearing the road, after several hours of hiking and with the cabin and its horrors well behind them, she had suddenly opened her eyes, seemingly completely lucid, and looked straight at Mike, focusing her bright, blue laser beam eyes on him and saying, “I think I love you.” He was so surprised he said nothing, staring back at her in stunned amazement. By the time he had shaken off his shock sufficiently to respond, she had slipped back into unconsciousness, staying that way until long after her arrival at the hospital and her almost immediate brain surgery.

Doctors told Mike it was highly unlikely she would remember much of her ordeal when she awoke. In fact, they told him, her unconscious mind would probably banish it to the far reaches of her brain if the situation had been as horrific as they had been led to believe. Mike didn't buy that. He knew how tough she was and how much she had overcome in her young life, and he felt certain she would approach the memories head-on, like she seemed to do with everything, and because of that would be much more successful in putting the whole thing behind her than the doctors seemed to believe.

He glanced at Sharon's hospital bed, her prone figure looking so tiny and helpless, and did a double-take when he saw her staring back at him, her deep blue eyes clear and strong and shining like twin beacons of hope.

“I knew you'd come and get me,” she said simply and quietly.

Mike knew he should alert someone immediately to the fact that she was conscious and talking but couldn't bring himself to leave her for even the few seconds it would take to alert a nurse down the hall. He was so surprised, the thought of pressing the call button at the side of the bed never even occurred to him. “I'm glad one of us was sure,” he answered.

She smiled weakly. “What happened to Chief Court? How did he get so sick? And you're going to think I'm crazy when I tell you this one,” she said, “but I must have been even worse off in that cabin than I thought because I would have sworn he was floating in the air rather than walking, do you believe that?”

Nodding his head gravely, Mike said, “Yeah, Sharon, I do believe it because I saw it myself. You weren't imagining anything.”

She tried to sit up in bed and groaned, abandoning the effort and slumping back against her pillows, glaring accusingly at her two useless arms. “What the hell's going on in this town?” she asked.

“You mean, ‘what
was
going on in this town.' I'm pretty sure it's all over now,” said Mike. “But as far as your question goes, I don't have a clue. This is without a doubt the strangest murder investigation I've ever been a part of or ever want to be a part of, for that matter.

“I'll fill you in on everything I know in time,” he told Sharon, reaching for her hand and taking hold of it, “but for now I should let the doctors know you're awake. Then I think you probably need to get some rest.”

“Maybe,” she mumbled. “I do feel pretty tired.” She looked at Mike again. “Could you get me a mirror?”

“Listen,” he said. “Don't worry about mirrors for now, alright?”

“Just hand it to me.”

Sighing, recognizing defeat when it stared him in the face, Mike pulled a handheld mirror out of Sharon's travel bag, which he had hastily packed yesterday with everything he could imagine she might need when she woke up. He leaned forward to hand it to her and then realized she probably couldn't lift it to her face with her arms encased in twin sets of casts bent only about forty-five degrees at the elbows.

“Why don't you just wait a day or so…”

“Just do it,” she ordered, and Mike shrugged, lifting the mirror and holding it up to her face.

She stared in silence for a long time at her reflection; so long, in fact, that Mike began to wonder if she had perhaps slipped back into unconsciousness. Vivid purple and green bruises colored both cheekbones under her eyes, one of which was partially swollen shut. “Where's my hair?” she finally whispered.

“The doctors had to shave your head in order to do the surgery to relieve swelling in your brain.”

“Don't sugarcoat it or anything,” she said dryly.

“Sorry,” Mike answered, embarrassed. “I just think you should know how close you came to dying out there in the woods and how lucky you are to still be here. And by the way, for what it's worth, I think you look beautiful, with or without hair.”

“But my hair,” she said sadly. “It's just gone.” Mike put the mirror away and sat back down in the plastic torture device as Sharon drifted off to sleep, her features gradually relaxing as her breathing slowed and became smooth and rhythmic once again.

57

THE WIND GUSTED OUT of the northeast, driving sleet and freezing rain through the slate-gray sky, chilling Mike to the bone. He should have worn a heavy winter coat rather than the leather Paskagankee Police-issued jacket which was now flapping open unzipped as he struggled on his crutches up Professor Ken Dye's front walkway, but he hadn't realized how cold the day was going to be when he left his house.

He had finally been shooed out of Sharon Dupont's hospital room by the Orono Mercy Hospital nursing staff, all of whom seemed to agree a shower might be in order for the chief of police. After taking their not-so-subtle advice and cleaning up, Mike had called the police station and advised Gordie Rheaume he would be traveling to Professor Dye's home.

He wasn't sure what he expected to find but felt that walking through the house, which he and Sharon had visited for the first time barely more than a week ago, might provide some small clue as to exactly what had been happening in his little town. The drive from Paskagankee to Orono had been an adventure, with Mike's right leg immobilized by a full cast. He flopped the offending leg across the front bench seat of the SUV and used his left foot to drive, an act which would have earned any normal citizen a driving-to-endanger citation but which to Mike represented one of the few perks of being a law enforcement professional.

The frigid, early-winter wind whistled and moaned as Mike balanced on his good leg at Ken Dye's front door picking through keys. Mike finally found the proper key and lumbered into the foyer, grateful to be out of the cold. He stood for a moment soaking in the personality of the home. It already felt abandoned, although Mike reasoned he might be feeling that way simply because of the fate he knew had befallen the professor. The house was cool but stuffy, filled with an air of sadness and finality that Mike couldn't shake.

Walking through Professor Dye's home, Mike could see the man had been a meticulous housekeeper. His bed was made, crisp and fresh and wrinkle-free, the bedspread pulled tightly over the covers and squared away in a manner that would bring a smile of satisfaction to any Army drill instructor's face. No dirty dishes littered the sink or filled the dishwasher. A thin layer of dust covered the furniture, but aside from that, the interior of the house looked as though Ken Dye might walk through the front door at any moment.