The Meridians (23 page)

Until tonight. When he had heard the name of the boy in the van, a thrill had gone through him, as though he had just put his finger in a light socket. The feeling was electric, exciting, and accompanied by a single, frightening thought:

I've found him.

And so now here he was, carrying boxes inside the house with a group of other men who had been roused by Gil and his brother and shanghaied into coming in the middle of the night to unload the moving truck of a stranger.

The boxes under his arm said "K Bedroom," which Scott almost used as an excuse to wake Lynette up, since none of the boxes thus far had said anything like that. They had all been clearly labeled things like "Bathroom" or "Living room" or "Kitchen" in large, easy to understand letters. But none had been yet found labeled "K Bedroom."

But even so, even though a part of him wanted desperately to wake Lynette and hear her voice again, he knew that it would be pure selfishness on his part, so didn't do it. "K Bedroom" clearly meant "Kevin's Bedroom," and since he already knew which bedroom belonged to Lynette, it was an easy bet that the sole other bedroom in the house belonged to Kevin.

Besides, there would be time enough to wake Lynette when they got down to the actual furniture and needed her to advise them as to where to put it all.

So Scott marched into the house, a box under each arm, and headed to the still-empty bedroom that would soon serve as Kevin's bedroom.

The door was mostly shut, but a crack around its edges told Scott that it was not latched or locked, so he nudged it open with his foot and marched in.

As soon as he entered the room, the hairs on the back of his neck and on his arms all stood up on end. They stood at attention, prying goosebumps loose from his flesh as they stood straight and tall.

Scott felt as he had only felt a few times before in his life, and each and every time had brought danger.

He immediately put down the boxes and kicked the door shut behind him. Not that he didn't think he could use some help from any of the burly men currently swarming in and around Lynette's house, but he did
not
want to put any of them in danger, if danger there was to be had in this place.

And something told him that danger
was
, in fact, very near.

He again reached for his gun automatically, as had when confronted by John Doe in his office, and once again his fingers touched only empty folds of cloth. He still owned a weapon, it was true, even had a concealed carry license. But that meant only that he could carry it in the glove compartment of his car, not on his person.

He dropped his hand and looked around, every muscle vibrating and alert for the quietest sound, the merest hint of peril.

Nothing. The room was empty. Empty and dark.

He flicked on the light switch, and the recessed light in the middle of the ceiling turned brightly on.

The room was empty.

So why was Scott still as jittery as he had been his first night as a rookie cop, feeling like there was danger around every corner, like every person he saw was a potential life-threatening menace.

He looked around the room again. Still nothing.

But there was the closet.

Normally closets did not worry Scott. In spite of the loss of his family, he had not turned into a paranoid lunatic who saw threats in every shadow, terror in the corner of every room. But this closet carried with it a definite air of death. As though a dark shadow had settled around the bright room only in the location of the closet.

As though someone might be hiding inside.

Scott thought momentarily about calling for Gil or Gil's brother, Brad, then decided against it. Though both men were famous for their big hearts and generous natures, neither was particularly famous for letting an opportunity to harangue a friend go by, and Scott was in no mood to be constantly joshed for having a case of the silly-willies in the event that the closet should turn out to be harmless and empty.

Besides, he didn't want Gil or Brad - or anyone else - getting hurt if the closet
was
in fact a source of some kind of threat.

So he went to the closet alone.

He sidled up to it and waved a hand in front of it, half expecting someone inside to see movement through the cracks in the French-style doors and start shooting.

But nothing happened.

He reached out a hand to grasp the doorhandle, again tensing as though ready to be shot, or to have a knife slice through the crack between the doors and attempt to cut him wide open.

Again, nothing happened.

His fingers curled around the handle.

He took a deep breath.

And threw open the door.

No one was inside.

But movement
did
catch his eye.

A piece of paper fluttered slowly to the floor of the closet, as though it had been sitting on the small shelf and the door opening had created a vacuum that sucked it off its resting spot.

Scott leaned over to pick up the paper, and as he did the hackles on his neck rose even further, if that were possible. He looked around as he bent down, half expecting some nameless assailant -

(
Mr. Gray
)

- to come rushing at him brandishing an axe or a crowbar or some equally threatening weapon.

But there was no one. He was still alone.

So why was his long-dormant cop sense tingling so loudly he felt like Gil would have to come at any moment and ask what that strange noise was?

Scott picked up the paper.

He looked at it. And his heart fell. Down, down, down, plummeting through his ribcage and seeming like it fell right out of him and continued its plunge until it came to rest well beneath the surface of the earth.

There was writing on the paper.

Thick, black scrawl. Childish, as though a kid had written it in the midst of a seizure...or a rage so severe that the pen could not even be properly held.

"I found you once, Kevin," said the paper, "and I'll find you again."

The paper, the lettering, everything but the words themselves were the exact mirror of the paper that Scott had found in his own apartment in L.A. so many years ago.

"I'm still here, and I'm coming for you and Kevin," that first note had said.

And now it had a brother.

Scott glanced around again, expecting now to see Mr. Gray in the room with him, knife in hand, ready to cut Scott's throat and then to find little Kevin in the cab of the van and do likewise to him.

There was no one.

Scott was alone, alone in a room with nothing but two boxes and a note that had been written by a madman determined to kill him, and to kill Kevin.

"I found you once, Kevin, and I'll find you again."

Mr. Gray had been here.

***

24.

***

Meridian was all that it had promised to be in those opening hours: warm and inviting and a place where Lynette instantly felt at home. True to Scott's prediction, after the men of the neighborhood moved her boxes in - they then helped her position all her furniture and were done and gone by three in the morning - she was awakened the next morning by the neighborhood "Welcoming Committee." The Welcoming Committee was a group of six women who showed up at her house with a breakfast of donuts and scones and who insisted on coming in to answer any and all questions that Lynette had about Meridian.

Lynette let them in with some sense of worry. Kevin did not tend to react well to strangers, and especially not to large groups of them. And more than that, she knew that most strangers did not react well to Kevin. So when he ambled out in the morning, looking at the floor and refusing to speak a word, then bolted back into his room when he realized that there were strangers in the house, Lynette was prepared to lose all of her new "friends."

Surprisingly, however, not a one of them so much as blinked. Instead, one of the ladies - Gil's wife, a woman named Brenda who was equal in size and heart to her husband - looked her straight in the eye and said without hesitation, "Autism or Asperger's?"

Lynette was shocked, and Brenda laughed, a great, deep belly laugh that started at her toes and climbed up her legs and through her body until when it finally emerged it was so loud and joyous that it sounded like she was laughing at the funniest joke ever heard. It was such a loud laugh that Lynette would have worried that she was being made fun of if she couldn't see that the woman clearly had nothing but good feelings in her heart.

"Girl, you're in
Mormon
country now. We raise lots of kids and if we're not related to someone with a developmental disability, we've probably watched someone with one in one of our congregations. We have a young boy with Asperger's in our ward - that's what we call the congregations, we call them wards -
and
a little girl with autism. I know, I know," she continued without so much as pausing for breath, "girls with autism are rare, but we have one, the most darling little girl named Emma Kathleen Johnson, you'll meet her sooner or later I'm sure, she and her family just live about five houses down, you'll be right at home here, don't you worry..." and Brenda prattled on and on and on and spoke so fast and in such a friendly manner that Lynette barely noticed it when the woman moved her vast girth into Kevin's room, knocked quietly on the door and went in.

Lynette started to tell her not to bother, but before she could Brenda was kneeling in front of Kevin, not looking directly at him - a sure sign that she
had
, in fact, had experience dealing with autistic children - but rather talking to the side of him, as though his invisible twin stood right next to him. "Kevin, honey," she said, "I'm Auntie Brenda, and I know you probably don't much want to chat with me, but I'm your friend, and anything you need I'll be sure to help you with, okay?" And then, instead of engulfing Kevin in a huge, grandmotherly hug the way Lynette expected the woman to do, she had merely stood and left, again seeming to know intuitively that Kevin would not take well to the tactile sensation of a Brenda-sized embrace.

It was one of the best interactions that Lynette had ever experienced between her son and a stranger. It was so effective in fact, that Kevin actually came out of his room not five minutes later, sat down with his computer, and began typing as though the Welcoming Committee were not present at all.

Lynette was a bit worried when she heard the word "Mormon," thinking that perhaps these women had all come over in some kind of effort to convert her on her first day in Meridian, but aside from Brenda's first mention of it - and the fact that four of the six members of the Welcoming Committee nodded in assent when Brenda said that they were in Mormon country - no one else mentioned anything church related or tried to entice her to be baptized. No, that wasn't quite true. They did ask what Lynette's religion was, but when she told them they didn't pronounce hellfire and brimstone as her fate, but instead just told her where the nearest churches were of that denomination, and that was the last of it.

Gil and Brenda quickly became nearly constant figures around her house...along with their eight children. At first she thought that would overwhelm Kevin, but he seemed to enjoy the sense of rambunctious fun that the kids - who ranged in age from fourteen to three - brought with them whenever they came to visit. Lynette took to keeping a store of Oreos in stock for when "the horde," as Brenda jokingly called her brood, descended on her house.

"What about the man who called your husbands?" asked Lynette shyly during one of the rare breaks in Brenda's machine-gun quick conversational pattern.

"What, Brad?" asked one of the women, Jonelle, who was cut of the same cloth as Brenda and was clearly Brad's wife. "He farts too much and he cusses when he thinks I'm not listening, but other than that he's okay."

"No, you silly nit," said Brenda with a roll of her eyes. "She's talking about...Scott."

There was a pause in the conversation then, as though everyone was gathering their thoughts to tell her something important.

"He's quite something," Jonelle finally managed. "Quite something."

"Does he live on this street?" asked Lynette.

"No, dearie," said Brenda, patting her hand as though delivering bad news. "He lives a good three or four miles away."

"Then what was he doing driving around at one a.m. last night?" asked Lynette, feeling once again the familiar cold grip of fear in her belly. She had no need to escape from a supernatural fiend into the clutches of a natural one who was no less dangerous, and the fact that Scott was wandering around in the middle of the night did not speak well for his normalcy.

The women of the group again fell silent before Brenda, clearly their de facto leader, spoke again. "Probably just out wandering, poor dear."

"Wandering?" said Lynette.

"No one knows -" began Jonelle, speaking almost in a ghost-around-the-campfire voice.