The Skull Ring (29 page)

“Luke chapter four, verse six. The devil said that to Jesus. I use it to remember to stay on my toes.”

Or maybe to remember who’s the real boss. 4:06, huh?

She closed the book and tucked it back under the seat. "We're going to have to tell the police."

"Julia, those
were
the police."

"They can't all be in on it. The sheriff's office, the State Highway Patrol, the S.B.I. The devil doesn’t own everybody."

"Maybe not, but how do you tell?" Walter kept glancing in the rear-view mirror. "We better guess right on the first try, or else we're in even deeper trouble."

Julia fished in her purse for her cell phone. "Can't we make an anonymous tip?"

"They screwed with your clock and VCR in ways I can't figure out. You reckon they won't be able to trace a phone call? For all I know they’ve planted a GPS tracker on my Jeep."

Julia glanced at the cell phone and saw that it had no bars. “Dead.”

“Not many towers way out here.”

The logging road widened as the slope became less steep. The forest was a blur of gold, red, and brown as the Jeep gained speed. Julia fastened her seatbelt and held on to the roll bar overhead to keep from being thrown around by the juddering. Walter slowed briefly, engaged the four-wheel drive lever, and accelerated down the muddy road.

The trees thinned out, and they came to a stretch of pasture bounded by a barbed-wire fence. A few cows gazed at them, not pausing in their cud-chewing. The Jeep crossed a shallow creek that intersected the road.

"They were after me in Memphis," Julia said over the roar of the engine.

"On your last trip?" Walter kept his eyes on the road.

"No. Before I moved here. I didn't know it until recently."

"What do they want?"

"I'm not sure. Either to shut me up or finish the job."

"Job?"

"My father was one of them. One of the Creeps. When I was four years old . . . "

She didn't want to tell the story again. She wanted to leave it undisturbed in the basement of her head, to let it gather dust and cobwebs until it was safely insulated, forever lost in shadows. Telling Dr. Forrest was difficult enough, but telling someone she'd only known a few days was impossible. She didn't want Walter to think she was crazy.

But Walter wasn't exactly unscarred, either. He'd suffered his own loss and harbored his own sorrows. But he still was holding something back, and she realized faith couldn’t be based on logic. She’d either have to trust him or jump from the Jeep and take her chances, and she was out of second chances.

"What happened when you were four?" Walter asked.

She studied his face. His jaw was set in determination, as if he were a man with a mission. He'd already made sacrifices for her. If only she could be brave enough, for once in her life, to let somebody reach her. And maybe help him in return.

Walter stepped on the brakes and the Jeep slid to a stop. "What's wrong?"

Julia put her hands over her face. "You wouldn't understand."

Walter grabbed her wrist and pulled one of her hands away from her face. "Listen here, damn it. I don't know what I got myself into. I just might be heading for a bullet, for all I know. I walked through hell to drag you away from the devil and now we're driving into who knows what. Don't tell me I won't understand."

Julia tried to look away from him, to the rolling hills, pastures dotted with barns, and stretches of woods that surrounded them. But she couldn't escape the magnetism of his anger. She gathered air to speak.

"They took the ring," she managed to say.

"Ring? You make it sound like some kind of elf quest or something."

"They gave me to Satan," Julia said, finally shattering, her tears erupting. But the panic quickly faded, became something new, transmuted into a calm, cleansing anger like lead changed into gold by a philosopher's stone. "My father gave me to the Creeps so they could cut me up as a blood sacrifice and have a party with my body. At least, I
think
that's what happened."

It was Walter's turn to look away.

"My father disappeared that same night," Julia continued, before Walter joined those who judged her a hopeless head case. "The police never solved the case. My injuries went on the record as trauma from trying to climb out my broken bedroom window. I spent the next ten years in foster care, going from home to home, trying to forget anything had ever happened. I got lucky for a teenaged foster kid, was adopted by a kind, well-to-do couple. They died in a car crash when I was nineteen, but left me enough money to finish college and not have to struggle to make ends meet."

Julia was surprised at herself because the story was falling out so easily. It had taken two years to tell Lance Danner that much about her past. Dr. Forrest had elicited such detail in a few months. Walter had drawn it out of her in two minutes, even after she'd promised herself not to tell him.

"Maybe you'd better drive on," Julia said.

Walter nodded, seeming grateful at having something to divert his attention. He put the Jeep in gear and continued down the dirt road. The vehicle smelled of grease and gum, foam spilling from splits in the vinyl seats, the windshield grimy with bug guts.

"I'd met Mitchell Austin during my freshman year, during a summer house party at my adoptive parents' country club," she said, realizing that refined world was totally different from Walter's rural, working life. "I know, boring old coots who play croquet and drink, it sounds more like a prison sentence than a vacation. But Mitchell was—"

She searched for the right word, fumbled over "pleasant," "trustworthy," and then found the most accurate one. "Reliable. He comforted me when my new parents were killed. He kept in touch while I finished college at Memphis State, and then asked me to marry him. That was about the time I started having my . . . little problems."

"Problems," Walter said. Not questioning, but not judging, either.

"Sleeplessness. Irritability. Forgetfulness. Fatigue alternating with periods of manic activity. Then it got worse. I broke out in a cold sweat when I was in cramped quarters or surrounded in a crowd. I'd have episodes of anxiety, when my heart rate doubled and my ears rang and I was afraid I'd never be able to take another breath."

Julia actually laughed. After all the give-and-take, the careful baiting, the strategic questioning of psychotherapy, she'd forgotten what it was like to just
talk
to somebody. Somebody real. She had so little left to lose that she had embraced this different kind of surrender.

"Panic disorder," he said, keeping his eyes fixed on the road. "Sort of like freaking out?"

"How do you know about that?"

"My wife started having that. Before she–"

His wife. Who had walked off the face of the Earth one night, just as Julia's father had done.

Julia was going to ask about his wife, despite the sadness in his eyes, when Walter whipped the Jeep to the right. A police car was coming up the road toward them, silent but with its bar lights flashing.

"Damn," Walter said. "They've cut us off."

He steered the Jeep into an open hayfield. The Jeep bounced over the rugged terrain, Julia holding on, tools rattling in the back. She looked through the rear window and saw that the police car had stopped at the edge of the road.

"Thank God they don't have four-wheel drive," said Walter.

"Do you think the whole department's in on it?"

He shrugged, heading for a copse of trees on the far side of the meadow. "Doesn't matter. Snead can put out an APB and get his people out in force."

They drove into the trees, and the police car was out of sight. The Jeep climbed a steep grade and, for one stomach-grabbing moment, Julia thought it was going to flip over. Then they crested the hill and reached the stream they had crossed minutes earlier, only now it was wider, the current slower.

"They've probably blocked the highway," Walter said. "But they don't know the back country like I do. Hang on, and say a prayer or two if you know any."

He steered the Jeep into the water and headed upstream. The wheels fought over the damp rocks, but the water was only a few inches deep. "I learned this from Clint Eastwood," Walter said with mock seriousness. "Except he used a horse."

"You'll have to work on your wounded squint."

Walter flashed her a bad-guy glare that actually made her giggle, a crack in the stress that had a manic quality to it.

"Gee, I really must be crazy," Julia said. "Here we are, being chased by who-knows-how-many Creeps and cops, and you're making goofy faces."

"It's normal to be crazy," Walter said. "If you're not crazy, something's wrong with you."

They drove about two hundred yards up the streambed until they came to a bridge. Walter veered onto the low bank. The highway was clear, and Walter gunned the engine, accelerating toward the east.

"Where are we going now?" Julia asked.

"Well, I think we can take our chances once we get out of Snead's jurisdiction. He might trump up a resisting arrest charge or something, but I'd bet he won't push it too far."

"You don't know how badly he wants me."

"I'm starting to get an idea."

"Snead was a detective in Memphis. He worked my father's disappearance. He was also in charge of several mutilation cases that were never solved. There was evidence of ritual activity."

"You mean Satan murders?"

"You said it, I didn't. A guy I work with at the
Courier-Times
thinks it's happening here, too."

"That body they found in the river last week?"

"Yeah. And what about that girl you said Hartley killed?"

Walter's hands were white from clenching the steering wheel. "There's something I didn't tell you. Something I've never told anybody."

Secrets. The asphalt hummed by underneath the Jeep. A few farmhouses stood off the road, with weathered barns and rusty tractor equipment.

"My wife was pregnant when she disappeared."

"I'm sorry," Julia said, realizing others had guessed the secret. "That must have been awful."

Walter rubbed at his eyes with one of his scarred hands. "I guess I should be over it by now. It's been seven years."

Julia gently touched his arm. "You can't escape the past. It lives inside you. You just have to let it out and make it harmless."

Jeez, now you're starting to sound like Dr. Forrest yourself.

Walter nodded as if he'd barely heard her. "The bones under your house . . . do you think those were human bones?"

"If Hartley was into ritual sacrifices, he might have done it more than once. I don't know how many times these Creeps think they have to please their idiotic Dark Master."

A pickup truck was in the oncoming lane, driven by a man in a green baseball cap. He waved as he passed. A goat was in the truck bed, chewing on the rope that tethered it to the tailgate. Julia stared at its curved horns, at the ragged beard and black eyes, until the truck went around the bend and out of sight.

"We're out of town limits now," Walter said. "I guess they've probably got my house under surveillance, too. But I bet they don't know that my cousin owns a piece of the mountains over this way."

"Do you think we're safe?"

"I don't know. I'm not even sure what we're running from."

Julia thought that Mitchell would have lied just then. Mitchell would have jutted his chin out and said, "Don't worry about a thing. I'll take care of you."

Yeah, he tried to take care of me, all right. With his fists.

They went three more miles down the winding road and came to a small gas station. Walter parked behind the building so the Jeep couldn't be seen from the road. "I'll put in a call to the sheriff's office," he said. "We should be able to tell pretty fast whether Snead's got to them yet."

"The pay phone's out front," Julia said. "More people know you here. I'm just a nobody. Let me make the call."

Walter opened his mouth as if about to protest, and then nodded. "If you see anything strange, get back here quick."

"That's what I had in mind," she said, shouldering her purse. She climbed out of the Jeep, her leg muscles sore from tension. She walked stiffly to the pay phone, studying the flaking antique signs nailed to the front of the store. A man in overalls came out, nodded at her, and went back inside. Only one car was parked by the pumps, a big Chevy from the days when gas was cheap.

Julia flipped through the phone book, glad that the pages hadn't been ripped out. She found the listing, pushed coins into the slot, and dialed the number. A woman who sounded like she'd been awakened from a nap answered the phone. "Sheriff's."

"Hello," Julia said. "I'd like . . . I need to report some bones."

"Bones? Did you say 'bones'?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"What kind of bones?" The woman yawned.

"I think they're human."

"This ain't one of them high school kids, is it? 'Cause you're going to go through this big long to-do and then I'm going to go, 'So where is these bones?' and then I bet you're gonna go, 'In the
graveyard
' and then you're gonna laugh like it was the funniest thing that ever was thought up."