“Oh, it’ll be of interest when you hear the whole story,” The Stone said. “I can assure you.”
Peake knew The Stone was not the kind of man who rambled, knew all of this had some purpose, and he was eager to see where it was going to wind up.
“As I was sayin’,” The Stone continued, “two-thirds of the teachers and half the town were agin me, like
I
was the troublemaker. But in the end they turned up worse stuff about that history teacher, worse than givin’ and sellin’ drugs to some of his students, and by the time it was over, they were glad to be shed of him. Then, the day after he was canned, he showed up at the farm, wantin’ to go man to man. He was a good-sized fella, but he was on somethin’ even then, what you call pot-marijuana or maybe even stronger poison, and it wasn’t so hard to handle him. I’m sorry to say I broke both his arms, which is worse than I intended.”
Jesus
, Peake thought.
“But even that wasn’t the end of it, ’cause it turned out he had an uncle was president of the biggest bank in our county, the very same bank has my farm loans. Now, any man who allows personal grudges to interfere with his business judgment is an idiot, but this banker fella was an idiot ’cause he tried to pull a fast one to teach me a lesson, tried to reinterpret one of the clauses in my biggest loan, hopin’ to call it due and put me at risk of my land. The wife and I been fightin’ back for a year, filed a lawsuit and everythin’, and just last week the bank had to back down and settle our suit out of court for enough to pay off half my loans.”
The Stone was finished, and Peake understood the point, but Sharp said impatiently, “So? I still don’t see what it has to do with me.”
“Oh, I think you do,” The Stone said quietly, and the eyes he turned on Sharp were so intense that the deputy director winced.
Sharp looked down at the directions on the piece of paper, read them, cleared his throat, looked up. “This is all we want. I don’t believe we’ll need to talk further with either you or your daughter.”
“I’m certainly relieved to hear that,” The Stone said. “We’ll be goin’ back to Kansas tomorrow, and I wouldn’t want to think this will be followin’ us there.”
Then The Stone smiled. At Peake, not at Sharp.
The deputy director turned sharply away and stalked down the hall. Peake returned The Stone’s smile, then followed his boss.
23
THE DARK OF THE WOODS
Reeeeee, reeeeee, reeeeee, reeeeee
. . . At first the steam-whistle cries of the cicadas pleased Rachael because they were reminiscent of grade-school field trips to public parks, holiday picnics, and the hiking she had done while in college. However, she quickly grew irritated by the piercing noise. Neither the brush nor the heavy pine boughs softened the racket. Every molecule of the cool dry air seemed to reverberate with that grating sound, and soon her teeth and bones were reverberating with it, too.
Her reaction was, in part, a result of Benny’s sudden conviction that he had heard something in the nearby brush that was not part of the ordinary background noises of a forest. She silently cursed the insects and willed them to shut up so she could hear any unnatural sounds—such as twigs snapping and underbrush rustling from the passage of something more substantial than the wind.
The Combat Magnum was in her purse, and she was holding only the thirty-two pistol. She had discovered she needed one hand to push aside tall weeds and to grab convenient branches to pull herself over steeper or more treacherous stretches of ground. She considered getting the .357 out of the bag, but the sound of the zipper would pinpoint their location to anyone who might be seeking them.
Anyone. That was a cowardly evasion. Surely, only one person might be seeking them out here. Eric.
She and Benny had been moving directly south across the face of the mountainside, catching brief glimpses of the cabin on the slope a couple of hundred yards above, being careful to interpose trees and brush and rock formations between themselves and the large picture windows that made her think of enormous, square eye sockets. When they had been about thirty yards past the cabin, they had turned east, which was upslope, and the way proved sufficiently steep that they had progressed at only half the speed they had been making previously. Benny’s intention had been to circle the cabin and come in behind it. Then, when they had ascended only about a hundred yards—which put them still a hundred yards below and thirty south of the structure—Benny heard something, stopped, eased up against the protective cover of a spruce trunk that had a five-foot diameter, cocked his head, and raised the shotgun.
Reeeeee, reeeeee, reeeeee
. . .
In addition to the ceaseless cicada chorus—which had not fallen silent because of their presence and, therefore, would not fall silent to reveal anyone else’s presence, either—there was the annoyance of a noisy wind. The breeze that had sprung up when they had come out of the sporting-goods store down by the lake, less than three-quarters of an hour ago, had evidently grown stronger. Not much of it reached as far as the sheltered forest floor, barely a soft breath. But the upper reaches of the massive trees stirred restlessly, and a hollow mournful moaning settled down from above as the wind wove through the interstices of the highest branches.
Rachael stayed close to Benny and pressed against the trunk of the spruce. The rough bark prickled even through her blouse.
She felt as if they remained frozen there, listening alertly and peering intently into the woods, for at least a quarter of an hour, though she knew it must have been less than a minute. Then, warily, Benny started uphill again, angling slightly to the right to follow a shallow dry wash that was mostly free of brush. She stayed close behind him. Sparse brown grass, crisp as paper, lightly stroked their legs. They had to take care to avoid stepping on some loose stones deposited by last spring’s runoff of melting snow, but they made somewhat better progress than they had outside the wash.
The flanking walls of brush presented the only drawback to the easier new route. The growth was thick, some dry and brown, some dark green, and it pressed in at both sides of the shallow wash, with only a few widely separated gaps through which Benny and Rachael could look into the woods beyond. She half expected Eric to leap through the bushes and set upon them. She was encouraged only by the brambles tangled through a lot of the brush and by the wicked thorns she saw on some of the bushes themselves, which might give a would-be attacker second thoughts about striking from that direction.
On the other hand, having already returned from the dead, would Eric be concerned about such minor obstacles as thorns?
They went only ten or fifteen yards, before Benny froze again, half crouching to present a smaller target, and raised the shotgun.
This time, Rachael heard it, too: a clatter of dislodged pebbles.
Reeeeee, reeeeee
. . .
A soft scrape as of shoe leather on stone.
She looked left and right, then up the slope, then down, but she saw no movement associated with the noise.
A whisper of something moving through brush more purposeful than mere wind.
Nothing more.
Ten seconds passed uneventfully.
Twenty.
As Benny scanned the bushes around them, he no longer retained any vestige of that deceptive I’m-just-an-ordinary-everyday-real-estate-salesman look. His pleasant but unexceptional face was now an arresting sight: The intensity of his concentration brought a new sharpness to his brow, cheekbones, and jaws; an instinctive sense of danger and an animal determination to survive were evident in his squint, in the flaring of his nostrils, and in the way his lips pulled back in a humorless, feral grin. He was spring-tense, acutely aware of every nuance of the forest, and just by looking at him, Rachael could tell that he had hair-trigger reflexes. This was the work he had been trained for—hunting and being hunted. His claim to being largely a past-focused man seemed like pretense or self-delusion, for there was no doubt whatsoever that he possessed an uncanny ability to focus entirely and powerfully on the present, which he was doing now.
The cicadas.
The wind in the attic of the forest.
The occasional trilling of a distant bird.
Nothing else.
Thirty seconds.
In these woods, at least, they were supposed to be the hunters, but suddenly they seemed to be the prey, and this reversal of roles frustrated Rachael as much as it frightened her. The need to remain silent was nerve-shredding, for she wanted to curse out loud, shout at Eric, challenge him. She wanted to
scream
.
Forty seconds.
Cautiously Benny and Rachael began moving uphill again.
They circled the large cabin until they came to the edge of the forest at the rear of it, and every step of the way they were stalked—or believed themselves to be stalked. Six more times, even after they left the dry wash and turned north through the woods, they stopped in response to unnatural sounds. Sometimes the snap of a twig or a not-quite-identifiable scraping noise would be so close to them that it seemed as if their nemesis must be only a few feet away and easily seen, yet they saw nothing.
Finally, forty feet in back of the cabin, just inside the tree line where they were still partially concealed by purple shadows, they crouched behind upthrusting blocks of granite that poked out of the earth like worn and slightly rotted teeth. Benny whispered, “Must be a lot of animals in these woods. That must’ve been what we heard.”
“What kind of animals?” she whispered.
In a voice so low that Rachael could barely hear it, Benny said, “Squirrels, foxes. This high up . . . maybe a wolf or two. Can’t have been Eric. No way. He’s not had the survival or combat training that’d make it possible to be that quiet or to stay hidden so well and so long. If it was Eric, we’d have spotted him. Besides, if it’d been Eric, and if he’s as deranged as you think he might be, then he’d have tried to jump us somewhere along the way.”
“Animals,” she said doubtfully.
“Animals.”
With her back against the granite teeth, she looked at the woods through which they had come, studying every pocket of darkness and every peculiar shape.
Animals. Not a single, purposeful stalker. Just the sounds of several animals whose paths they had crossed. Animals.
Then why did she still feel as if something were back there in the woods, watching her, hungering for her?
“Animals,” Benny said. Satisfied with that explanation, he turned from the woods, got up from a squat to a crouch, and peered over the lichen-speckled granite formation, examining the rear of Eric’s mountain retreat.
Rachael was not convinced that the only source of danger was the cabin, so she rose, leaned one hip and shoulder against the rock, and took a position that allowed her to shift her attention back and forth from the rustic building in front of them to the forest behind.
At the rear of the mountain house, which stood on a wide shelf of land between slopes, a forty-foot-wide area had been cleared to serve as a backyard, and the summer sun fell across the greater part of it. Rye grass had been planted but had grown only in patches, for the soil was stony. Besides, Eric apparently had not installed a sprinkler system, which meant even the patchy grass would be green only for a short while between the melting of the winter snow and the parching summer. Having died a couple of weeks ago, in fact, the grass was now mown to a short, brown, prickly stubble. But flower beds—evidently irrigated by a passive-drip system—ringed the wide stained-wood porch that extended the length of the house; a profusion of yellow, orange, fire-red, wine-red, pink, white, and blue blossoms trembled and swayed and dipped in the gusty breeze—zinnias, geraniums, daisies, baby chrysanthemums, and more.
The cabin was of notched-log-and-mortar construction, but it was not a cheap, unsophisticated structure. The workmanship looked first-rate; Eric must have spent a bundle on the place. It stood upon an elevated foundation of invisibly mortared stones, and it boasted large casement-style French windows, two of which were partway open to facilitate ventilation. A black slate roof discouraged dry-wood moths and the playful squirrels attracted to shake-shingle roofs, and there was even a satellite dish up there to assure good TV reception.
The back door was open even wider than the two casement windows, and, taken with the bright bobbing flowers, that should have given the place a welcoming look. Instead, to Rachael, the open door resembled the gaping lid of a trap, flung wide to disarm the sniffing prey that sought the scented bait.
Of course, they would go in anyway. That was why they had come here: to go in, to find Eric. But she didn’t have to like it.
After studying the cabin, Benny whispered, “Can’t sneak up on the place; there’s no cover. Next-best thing is a fast approach, straight in at a run, and hunker down along the porch railing.”
“Okay.”
“Probably the smartest thing is for you to wait here, let me go first, and see if maybe he’s got a gun and starts taking potshots at me. If there’s no gunfire, you can come after me.”
“Stay here alone?”
“I’ll never be far away.”
“Even ten feet is too far.”
“And we’ll be separated only for a minute.”
“That’s exactly sixty times longer than I could stand being alone here,” she said, looking back into the woods, where every deep pool of shadow and every unidentifiable form appeared to have crept closer while her attention was diverted. “No way, José. We go together.”
“I figured you’d say that.”
A tempest of warm wind whirled across the yard, stirring up dust, whipping the flowers, and lashing far enough into the perimeter of the forest to buffet Rachael’s face.
Benny edged to the end of the granite formation, the shotgun held in both hands, peered around the corner, taking one last look at each of the rear windows to be sure no one was looking out of them.