Stone Maidens (35 page)

“Look, Doctor, it is my expectation from your mention of this twinning bond that Holmquist—the name of our killer—will seek out his brother, in earnest—”

“Yes, yes. But that’s just the point, my reason for calling,” the doctor interrupted her. “It has to do with you. You were Claremont’s arresting officer?”

“Howard technically was, but yes, I interviewed Claremont.”

“He knows your name, what you look like, and probably has a fair idea where you work. It would be easy for this other twin, the presumed killer, to find out about you should he make contact with Claremont. You represent a real threat to him, Christine. I’m concerned for your safety. You’re heading into unknown territory, assuming we’re not just talking poppycock.”

Christine swallowed hard. The killer
did
know about her. The feather under her windshield wiper, hidden until she’d turned the wipers on, proved that.

“I’m just on my way to a speaking engagement,” she said, preferring to ignore the threat of the feather for the moment. She was uncomfortable enough as it was concealing from Katz the truth of her present status with the bureau.

“Keep your line open. I may want to call you back again. You’re a good egg, my dear. Don’t go out on a limb without backup. Promise me?”

“I promise. Thank you, Doctor.”

For an instant she flashed on the service revolver tucked away under a sweater on the closet shelf in her apartment, but said nothing to Bill. There wasn’t enough time to collect it and still make her flight. She’d have to make do on cunning and gut instinct. It had gotten her this far.

Dennis Murfree met Prusik at the Crosshaven airport at three thirty. The troop meeting was scheduled for four thirty at Echo Lake State Park, a good thirty- to forty-minute drive, according to Murfree. The old rattletrap accelerated poorly. Passing through Crosshaven, there was no sign of the sheriff’s Bronco in front of his office. Ten miles farther south, Murfree cut onto a secondary dirt road. It was nearing four o’clock.

Prusik replayed in her mind Katz’s call and was touched that he had cared enough to call. What if he called Thorne afterward and found out the truth of her dismissal? How humiliating. She shook her head. The whole situation was an unmitigated disaster. After she spoke to the Brownies, she’d have to find a way to get someone to listen to her.

Suddenly, the car engine chuffed. Murfree goosed the gas pedal a few times to no avail as it slowly died.

“Must be flooded,” he mumbled. They glided to a halt along the gravel roadside. He whined the starter motor a few times without success.

“What seems to be the problem, Dennis?”

“It acts up sometimes.” He scratched his bald crown. “First time today, though.”

After a few more unsuccessful attempts he lifted the hood. The wretched car, Prusik thought. Her watch read 4:05 p.m. “About how far is it to Echo Lake?”

“Better part of five miles yet.” He stayed hunched over the engine, fiddling and wheezing. “Give or take.”

Prusik tried McFaron’s number. Still out of the area. Restless, she pondered the wisdom of making a run for it. She grabbed her purse and cell phone.

“Listen, Dennis, I’ve got to make this speaking engagement. The girls are counting on me. If I start out on foot, any possibility that someone’ll pass by and give me a lift?”

Murfree looked up and blinked a few times. “It’s possible. I wouldn’t go counting on it, but it is definitely possible. People do drive by.”

Christine nodded, her mind made up. “OK. Do me a favor and notify the sheriff’s office.” She gave him a twenty-dollar bill and started jogging down the road. “Keep the change.”

“Yes, ma’am. Sorry about...” But he was talking to the wind, watching Prusik’s short locks disappear around a bend, shaded by the dark boughs of overhanging hemlock. He decided he’d wait a good fifteen minutes for the flooded engine to clear. In the meantime, he could pass along Prusik’s message. He radioed the sheriff’s office on his two-way, using the police frequency.

“Murfree’s Cab Service calling. Mary, you there, darling?”

The radio dial spun, stopped, and spun again. The driver was searching the airwaves the same way Claremont liked to. To Claremont it seemed as if he himself were driving, but he was pretty sure he wasn’t. In fact, he was pretty sure he was crammed uncomfortably in the backseat. The car smelled new; there was something ominous about it. The whole thing wasn’t right. The ringing in his ears made him feel uneasy, too; he wasn’t exactly sure why. He couldn’t seem to move other than to blink. He couldn’t see out the windshield, either. The shadows of trees whizzed by overhead as the car bounced heavily over ruts.

The dial lingered on an old rock tune.
Break on through to the other side
. Claremont hummed the refrain, a favorite of his. He heard it being hummed from the front seat, too, the driver lightly tapping the steering wheel now.

The song ended. Claremont recognized the DJ’s deep-throated voice. The radio was tuned to WTWN, the station for the twin cities of Weaversville on the Indiana side and Metamora, which straddled the Illinois banks of the Wabash River. It was the station he liked, too. The DJ read the daily calendar of announcements.

“Quilt show down at Cave Springs Baptist Church has some mighty fine bed throws to see. Doors open to the public at two o’clock sharp, folks.”

After an ad break for Henderson Galoshes came a news flash announcing the escape of the suspect David Claremont. The
driver flicked off the radio and tossed the green tweed rain hat he was wearing down on the passenger seat. He twitched his neck left and right and vigorously vibrated a forefinger in his right ear, reaming it out good, the same way Claremont dealt with an itch. The man blinked with enough force to dance his cheeks up and down, which triggered an identical tic in Claremont. It was as if an invisible cord were stretched between them. But something wasn’t right. Claremont’s churning stomach told him so. Still, he couldn’t take his eyes off the hands that played freely over the top of the steering wheel, pitter-pattering and then constricting around the grip. It was also a habit of his.

That bitch FBI agent thinks she knows it all.
The unspoken words streamed into Claremont’s head, words he couldn’t control, words that made no rational sense. The man up front was having himself a little interior chat.
Where to go next—Paoli, Blackie, or back to Delphos?
The clamoring in Claremont’s head became deafening.

The driver tilted the rearview, glancing over a pair of gold-rimmed glasses that rode low on his nose. He gave Claremont the once-over. Squinted harder. They were familiar-looking glasses; Claremont had seen them before, the same wire rims.
Dr. Walstein’s!

Claremont’s throat went dry. He
hadn’t
imagined anything. He hadn’t been crazy. It
was
this other person all along. Claremont’s mind raced down the years, the chain of puzzling events, the minor gaps in time that had seemed so bewildering. He remembered riding in the backseat of his father’s truck when he was a youngster, then suddenly starting to gag. He’d banged on the passenger door, signaling his distress. His father stopped along the dusty shoulder. David had felt an inexplicable rawness in his throat from something hard to swallow and a peculiar sense of being punished—abhorrent feelings he now realized had come from the man driving the car.

The driver made a silly face, kindling a return smile across David’s own—the symmetry of it sent pinpricks showering across
his chest and back. He made a move to sit up, but something was preventing him. He concentrated on the ache, the only thing he could do. Somehow he had to make the bastard stop. But how?

He focused between the front seats on a notepad holder fastened to the dash with handsome printing along the top edge: Irwin Walstein, MD. His eyes grew wide.
Walstein’s car! The doctor’s wire rims! His tweed hat!
He fought to hide his labored breathing.

“What did you do to the doctor?”

The driver’s mouth drew to a razor slit. “Me? You mean what did
you
do, don’t you?” He tightened his grip around the steering wheel. “He was calling out
your
name in that barn as I recollect.” He poked one forefinger into the roof liner to punctuate his point.

“It’s you, brother, not me, splashed all over TV and the radio. Them who sow thorns will not reap roses.” The man blinked vigorously for emphasis. The hollows of his eyes burned back at Claremont.

“He’s in the trunk,” he added matter-of-factly. “Ain’t going nowhere. Neither are you, brother.”

Painful cramps knotted David’s calves as the car jounced hard over washboard dirt. They were traveling fast, taking a back route. A muffled tweet intruded. The driver reached across the seat and punched open the glove box. Louder tweeting sounded.

“Well, looky here—a police scanner,” he said. A transmission was in progress, something about an FBI woman on foot to Echo Lake. An agent named Prusik.

“Copy that. I’ll report it to Sheriff McFaron,” the dispatcher said. “Over and out.”

The driver gunned the motor and met David’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “What’s that you say?”

Claremont hadn’t said a thing, but he’d recognized the agent’s name.

“Don’t lie to me. She’s the one after you about all them girls?” Without warning, he turned and lunged over the seat.

“You been talking to that FBI lady about me?” His hot breath hit David’s face. He wasn’t watching the road or giving a damn about where the car might be headed. “Don’t think I’m not onto you, brother. Like white on rice.”

He quickly checked out the windshield, then flung himself right back into Claremont’s face. In the split second it took, the man’s face had morphed from fury to joy; his cheeks stretched upward enough to reveal the ends of yellowed teeth. For the moment he was a changed man.

“Ever get so you can barely hold on to the wheel? Nearly wreck yourself before even getting started?” he said, giddy as a kid. He rapped Claremont’s shoulder with the back of his wrist as if nothing bad had come between them.

“Nothing like gaining the upper hand, is there, brother?” The man twisted his neck this way and that, loudly cracking vertebrae, then rubbed the back of one arm hard enough for David to hear. “Get that prickly-pear skin all over you just thinking on her running through the woods.”

His words knifed through David’s gut. Sweat coursed down his cheeks. “Leave me alone!” he screamed. “Leave them alone!”

The driver leaned back over the seat and grabbed Claremont by the throat. “How many other coppers did you tell? Huh? Just that FBI woman? How many?”

He released Claremont and accelerated the car around a bend. They were headed east, toward Echo Lake, on another mission. Claremont worked his wrists behind his back, digging the twine through his flesh till it stung. He had to find a way to stop the visions from ever happening again. He had to find a way to stop the killing.

The car slid to a stop, and the demon was upon him again, as if sensing Claremont’s growing determination. His fingers cinched tightly around Claremont’s larynx.

“You was supposed to be dead already, Mother said. She told me you was dead.” Now he was pinching off Claremont’s air. “You
were planning this all along, weren’t you? Planning to bring me down.”

Claremont’s eyes rolled back. The light faded. When he regained consciousness, heaving raspy breaths, he arched his neck, gulping precious air. The car’s ceiling panel swirled with dots. The driver’s words loomed large—David was supposed to be dead, his mother had said.

“Sometimes I don’t think you get my meaning at all.” The driver spoke in a halting voice. “Like I wasn’t sorry or something. Like I didn’t try harder. To be more like you.”

Claremont stared into the sad face of his twin, all signs of anger now drained away. The man seemed closer to mournful than to getting even. And closer to Claremont than anyone else on earth.

“We got our troubles, don’t we?” A tear crept out the corner of the man’s eye. He sat forward in his seat, resolute for the moment, content with his final assessment. As if no truer brotherhood existed.

A disorienting sensation—old familiar ground—suffused Claremont’s mind with a diplopic effect—as if he were experiencing double vision. He saw himself muttering up front, knowing it was this other, and yet, at the same time, from somewhere deep inside, Claremont’s very own shame was directing him to open his mouth. The driver turned, stretched over the seat. Obediently Claremont sat up. Without a word said between them, the driver fingered out of his pocket a small stone and placed it on Claremont’s obliging tongue.