Come Little Children (32 page)

24

Night on the Water

T
he lake was darker and colder than it had been before. Plumes of smoke were rising off the waves in places where the ice was just beginning to form, and the howls of wolves in their hidden dens added an entirely different type of chill to the hinterland.

Camilla peeked through the boat shed door, surveying the backyard with eyes as erratic as a compulsive liar’s polygraph reading.

The RCMP car was still angled beside the house and the light in the cottage kitchen was on, which, thankfully, made it easier for her to see in than for the police officers and the Corys to see out. She didn’t know how late the Mounties planned on staying for, but she had a gut feeling it wasn’t much longer—the pressure was on to orchestrate a getaway. Fast.

She sprang out of the door and weaved through the reeds toward her only plausible escape pod: the canoe tethered to the dock. If she could steer the boat around the shed without being noticed, then she could load the twins’ bodies and row away to safety. It was a long shot, but it was possible.

Surging with adrenaline, she slunk to the waterfront and began attacking the rope that was securing the boat to the dock. It was tightly knotted and frozen all the way to the core; clamping her hands around the heavy threads, she blew a steady current of warm air to stop her fingers from seizing.

Bang!

Camilla whipped around and saw an RCMP officer stepping through the spring-loaded screen door at the house.

She was caught in the open, lying on the dock directly in line with the policeman’s view. Panicking, she concealed herself the only way she could think of: by slipping off the dock into the painfully cold water of Nolan Lake.

Instantly, all of the air was punched out of her. Every inch of skin was being stabbed with what felt like hundreds of her own scalpels, and she had to shove a fist into her mouth to stop from screaming.
Don’t make a sound, don’t make a sound, don’t make a sound
. As the officer stepped under a cold blue porch light, she tasted her own blood trickling out of her knuckles.
Don’t make a sound, don’t make a sound, don’t make a sound...

The officer paused. He stared directly at the dock, but it was too far away for a man with midfifties eyesight to spot anything floating in the dark. Still, he hovered, scrutinizing the waterfront.

Camilla tipped her head downward so he wouldn’t catch the whites of her eyes.

Suddenly she heard the
thump thump thump
of boots tromping over snow, and a sense of dread plunged into her frozen chest. Her body sunk deeper into the ghoulish tendrils of algae, which reached up and caressed her legs like the slimy fingers of pedophiles. The dread worsened, choking her, as she pictured the officer’s hand swopping in and grabbing her by the neck, either to yank her out or to force her under completely.

The boots stopped on the edge of the dock.

The officer was right on top of her. She could see his face through the floorboards, and if he looked down he would see her staring up just as clearly as she saw him.

Don’t look down…Don’t look down…Don’t look down…

But the officer’s sixth sense went off again and he did look down. His chin dropped to his chest, and just as his eyes came trailing in tandem, there was another loud
bang!
over at the house.

The officer’s head spun around, pulling his eyes away from the dock.

“You taking a leak down there?” the second officer hollered, coming into the yard with the two dogs. “Don’t freeze midstream.”

“Nah. Just thought I saw something.”

“What?”

“Beaver, probably. Fat one too. Made a hell of a splash.”

“Uh-huh. Well stop chasing critters and come give me a boost. It’s so cold I hear my lawyer has his hands in his own pockets for once.”

The officer on the dock laughed and ambled away. Camilla heard them start up their SUV and waited for what seemed like eternity while they boosted the other vehicle and scraped off their windshields. But she didn’t dare move, no matter how many limbs were going numb or how much heat escaped her blue, hypothermic lips, until the tires got rolling and faded off down the dirt road.

Finally she yanked herself back on the dock and gasped for air. Her body had never felt more frozen in her entire life, but adrenaline was still pounding through her veins, so she shot for the rope and didn’t quit tearing until it came loose and freed the canoe. By the time Mick came out of the house fifteen minutes
later, she was already thirty yards upstream, weak but alive, with both of the twins wrapped in oil towels in the grooves of the boat’s hull in front of her.

The journey on the lake was slow and wraithlike. Night had come, but the sky was glowing with the ghostly swirls of the electric northern lights. They were so bright that they shimmered on the glassy surface of the water and bathed the whole crater like a rippling rainbow flume. Camilla had forced herself to look away from the sky; she focused solely on watching her oars dip in and out of the lake, over and over again, in and out, as the vessel made its ghostly voyage along the river Styx and down the Acheron like Charon’s Underworld ferry. Staring at the cosmos was too dangerous for her current state. The infinity of outer space can appear even deeper and vaster than the curvature of the ocean to a disoriented castaway. At best, it makes a person dizzy; at worst, insane.

Camilla paddled by a sandbar that had one lone tree rising up from the rocky soil. An owl came beating its wings against the moon and landed on the tree’s highest branch, gazing at her with its massive, oily eyes. The bird was big and mean, but it simply sat there and stared, perhaps waiting to see if she would fall asleep, or maybe just coming to witness the dark purpose it had sensed on the wind.

She pulled harder on the oars and cruised gently past the sandbar. The tips of her fingers were starting to go purple, and every muscle in her upper body burned as she fought the current.

Give them back
, the Yukon seemed to demand.
Their lives are gone, their bodies belong to me now
.

All of nature was against her. The oily eyes in the forest’s shadows, the direction of the water, the gusts of the wind. Even
the northern lights seemed to be reaching down to guide the souls of the little girls up to the heavens.

They’re not yours yet
. Camilla bore down, glimpsing at the outlines of Erica and Stephanie swaddled in their mummy-like shrouds on the floor of the boat. The soaking-wet towels were already frosting over.
Not as long as I have them
.

And so she kept rowing against the Yukon’s promulgation. She rowed and rowed and rowed as late evening grew steadily into night and word of mouth spread among the galaxies, bringing multitudes of stars to gather around and watch her maiden voyage from thousands of light years away. At one point the lake tapered into a narrow inlet that was similar to Miles Canyon—a slender chute of volcanic rock that churned the waves through the coulee in a thick, soapy foam—and along wider, flatter stretch, the riverbanks became so crowded with spruce and aspen that it was impossible to spy anything through their palisading frontlines. Some places were as steep as the Golden Stairs at the Chilkoot Trail, and others were bald and level. Through it all Camilla rowed against nature and against the last thread of her own health, until finally the river curved right and brought the canoe to a shore on the north side of Nolan.

Using the rope from the Corys’ dock, Camilla managed to drag the canoe through an acre of backwoods right up to the Vincents’ courtyard. She abandoned the boat behind the farthest stretch of fencing and snuck into the house through the garage, hoping to remain undetected. As she slipped deeper into the house, out of the embalming area, she could hear her family’s voices coming from farther inside. Their conversation was too distant to decipher what any of them were saying, but her imagination filled in the sentences for her.

Where’s Camilla?
Her in-laws gossiped as they poured each other spirits and warmed their asses comfortably by the fire-place.
What is she doing that’s so important? She should be spending more time with Abby, poor little thing. Must think that her own mother doesn’t care about her
.

It boiled her blood just imagining it. Of course she cared about her family, she thought as she stared in the bathroom mirror at the reflection of an unfamiliar specter. Icicles hung from her hair like needles, and her face had turned an unnatural white with strokes of blue coloring in the cracks of her lips. She cared about her family—about protecting her daughter—so much that after she dried off in the bathroom and changed out of her soaking-wet clothes, she carefully selected the right sizes of suturing needles and snuck down to the one place that she swore she would never go again.

The lid of the forbidden chest popped open with little effort this time. Camilla plucked out two seeds and set them carefully on the metal cart beside the bone saw, the spool of thread, and the polished scalpels.

“Seeds, saw, thread, scalpels,” she whispered off the checklist.

Making a hammock with the front of her coat, she carried the instruments pilgrim-style up the long staircase and through the loading bay, then back into the bitterly cold courtyard.

Camilla peeled away the towels from the Cory girls and took her first look at the bodies in the moonlight.

She vomited instantly.

She had seen hundreds of cadavers, but never ones that had met such unfortunate endings as these. The identical twins were
crumpled up side by side with matching knife marks slashed across the fabric of their dresses. One girl’s eyeball had been crushed in like a baby tomato, and the other was missing three fingers from her left hand and one from her right. Even the quality of their skin was grotesque: loose and wrinkled from being submerged for so long, it seemed as though the slightest pull could peel it away in long, fleshy strips.

Tears rolled down Camilla’s cheeks and froze before they reached her chin. Any last hope that Abigail hadn’t committed this atrocity was gone. The dog’s scent at the Corys’ shed may have been contentious, but the black-and-purple outlines of her small hands on the girls’ necks condemned her. Camilla had known it, of course, even if she hadn’t admitted it until now. That’s why she was here, wasn’t it? That’s the only reason she had dragged the bodies across the river and through the woods and onto this miserable pond—to do what any brave mother would do, to protect her own child.
To cover it up
.

Camilla lifted the bone saw in her trembling hands and flipped its switch. The electric
whiz
screamed to life in the quiet backyard—
Fix it, Camilla, it’s your fault so fix it—
and she cut through the sisters’ chests, hurrying, before swapping the saw for a scalpel.

Even if this worked, she began to consider—even if she could bring the girls back and undo the Corys’ pain—how would that stop Abigail from doing it again?

The evil spreads like rotted fruit
, then Moira’s voice added from the back of her mind:
If a child goes bad, it must be abolished
.

Camilla dropped her scalpel at the word
abolish
, and it tinkled onto the ice. She wiped her forehead, picked up the blade, and then reached inside Stephanie Cory and cut a slit into her heart.

They won’t know. I’ll return the girls to the Corys and the Vincents won’t find out. Then I’ll talk to Abigail, ask her why she did it and tell her
she can’t do it ever again, or…Or what? Or else? Would Peter say the same thing? Give her a warning like—like a fucking dog we have to put down if it doesn’t stop pissing on the carpet?

Camilla’s hands were quivering so badly that she couldn’t pick up the seeds.

Maybe we’ll run away instead. I’ll pack everything tonight and get her out of bed before anyone else wakes up. We’ll take the van past Whitehorse and stay in some sleepy town that no one’s ever heard of. There could be a medical clinic, maybe even a hospital morgue I can get a job at…

Her runaway fantasy stopped. Another voice cut in, the voice of Sharon Mullard telling her about Dallas Whittaker.

Dallas grabbed his boy—all up in his hospital shroud and everything—and took him to the Vincents’ place
…
The next day Jack Swanson swore he saw the Whittaker truck heading north of Nolan with little Jesse sitting in the passenger seat, blinking out the window. Blinking like nothin’ ever happened
.

Camilla went whiter than she already was. She knew what happened to Dallas Whittaker after he tried running away with his son, Jesse.
He was murdered. Murdered by his own boy
.

She shook her head and lowered a seed into Stephanie’s heart.
No! Abigail would never do that. Ever
. But then she remembered Abigail’s eyes staring at her from across the dark bedroom the night before.

For you
, Abby had said.
The rope’s for you, mommy. I’ll hang you by your neck until your windpipe snaps and then dump you in the lake like those wretched Cory sisters
.

“Stop,” she muttered, shaking her head vehemently. “Stop.” She continued sewing in absolute silence, stitching the chests first before mending the various knife marks scattered across the twins’ bodies. When all the wounds were sealed, she got to her feet.

Whomp! Whomp! Whomp!

The tenth blow from the ax (which she had taken from the Vincents’ toolshed) crashed through the ice, and water bled up from the pond, bubbling out as Camilla struck it again to widen the opening.

She dropped the ax and knelt beside the sisters.

“Last time,” she whispered. “I promise.”

With a nod of deference, she dragged Stephanie into the water and watched her albino face sink deeper and deeper into the darkness. The process was repeated with Erica.

It was odd. The whole time Camilla was carrying out the ritual, she knew that Abigail was watching. She could feel her daughter’s eyes coming from Peter’s old bedroom on the third floor of the funeral home, but when she looked up, all she saw were the room’s curtains barely shifting behind the frosted glass. Still, she knew. She could feel the seven-year-old’s gimlet eyes weighing down on her and piercing the back of her skull whenever she turned around.