Stone Maidens (9 page)

Prusik quickly assessed the field agent’s features. He looked strained. The crease between his eyebrows was deep, and his eyes looked tired. The case was getting to him too, no doubt.

“Have you been here long?” he said, picking up his pace to greet her. They shook hands.

“I just arrived.” A clap of loud thunder sounded nearby, and the sky grew suddenly darker. “Good thing you got an early start today,” she said. “I guess we shouldn’t stand so near tall trees.”

He nodded and allowed the corners of his mouth to turn up into a half smile. “Guess not.”

“Anything to report since we last talked?”

“I’m not sure really. You’ve probably seen the quantity we’ve scooped and bagged,” he said, removing his sunglasses and wiping his brow. “Did Brewster show you the feather we found?”

“Feather?”

“It was stuck in the bark of a fallen bough just above where the body was discovered.”

Prusik waited for him to say more. When he didn’t, she asked, “What makes you think it’s relevant? Connected to the crime?”

“I don’t know that it is. You’re the forensic anthropologist,” he said with a twinge of defensiveness. “It may be nothing. There certainly are plenty of birds in the vicinity.”

“I’m sure, Bruce, you wouldn’t bring it to my attention unless there was some reason to?”

“Again, I’m no bird expert. But in the last two days I’ve not seen a single bird with blue-green feathers fly overhead or perch anywhere near here.”

Prusik cleared her throat. “That’s very interesting, Bruce. I’d like to see that feather now if you wouldn’t mind.”

Inside the RV, Prusik angled the clear plastic evidence sleeve containing the feather under a high-intensity halogen lamp. The shaft appeared to be a wing feather cut and shaped on one end.
Not what she would’ve expected to find had it fallen from a bird’s wing midflight. Also, it was slightly bent in the opposite direction of its natural camber for flight. From a struggle? she wondered. And of most interest, it was bright blue-green. What kind of bright-blue-green bird flew over southern Indiana?

A line of sweat trickled down her temple. She wiped it away with her sleeve.

Blue-green plumage: she had read once that some farmers kept peafowl near chicken coops and sheep pens to warn of the presence of foxes and other predators. Peacocks had a very loud call that could be heard from miles away. Their prized tail feathers were an iridescent blue-green color. But there were no farmyards anywhere nearby, and this wasn’t long enough to be a peacock feather. The fact of its placement next to the crime scene deep down a wooded ravine was extremely significant.

“No outward appearance of any blood is visible,” she said, pondering the implications. Prusik would have Eisen swab it for human DNA anyway.

“Under the ultraviolet scope we picked up nothing either,” Howard replied. “It’s certainly out of place down there. Not what I would have expected.”

“I agree, Bruce. It is quite significant.” Beneath the small examining bench, and quite out of Howard’s sight, Prusik balled her fist and flexed her pinkie hard.

Her cell phone rang. “Good afternoon, sir.” It was Thorne wanting a progress report. Howard stepped outside and Stuart Brewster followed.

“Yes, yes, how is it going, Christine? Is it the same killer we’re dealing with?”

“Howard’s team has collected a large sampling from the scene, including an atypical bird’s feather—not of a type you’d expect to find in an Indiana forest.”

“How does it tie in, Christine?” The same cell phone distortion she experienced talking with Howard on the previous day
marred her call with Thorne, whose voice wafted in and out as if he were speaking through an elongated tube.

“I don’t know, sir. We’ll need to run lab tests back in Chicago. I’ve yet to examine the victim’s body.”

“Call me when you have any solid news to report.” Thorne clicked off.

Immediately Christine retrieved her pewter pillbox from her purse. She held the small metal container in her hand for a moment, deliberating. She’d been relying more heavily on her Xanax ever since the discovery of the first victim’s body. It wasn’t a good sign, to say the least. But she needed to manage her anxiety if she had any prayer of keeping her thinking clear. At least that’s what she told herself. She removed a small tablet and swallowed it dry.

The wind buffeted the mobile unit violently, spraying road grit against the outer paneling. A few large raindrops darkened the pavement. Stuart Brewster was nowhere in sight. Howard paced outside the RV’s side door, oblivious to the approaching bad weather. He was talking into his cell phone, and Prusik thought she heard him laugh. She distinctly made out the words “she just arrived” followed by more laughter.
What the hell was so funny?

A flash of lightning followed by a roll of thunder cleared her mind of the thought. The rain started to come harder. She had a body to examine, a case to solve. Prusik stepped into the darkening landscape and prepared herself for whatever was next.

Ever since he was a young boy, David Claremont had shown a penchant for carving wood. A set of shelves in his room displayed a vast assortment of wild animals, some carved from pictures in books, some from memory. Resting on the fireplace mantel downstairs was a matching pair of tigers that his mother loved, two of his finest creations. The image of the big cats had been imprinted
indelibly in his mind when his father took him to see a traveling circus years ago. A showman had stood in a cage between the two tigers, who were balanced on barrels, with only a bullwhip separating him from ivory teeth that looked ready to bite. The bullwhip cracked again and again. One beast had tensed, flattening its whiskered face, and then suddenly it had lunged skyward, hissing, sending a paw the size of a catcher’s mitt against the cage wire.

Shortly after his twenty-second birthday six months ago, Claremont’s interest had abruptly changed to carving rock. One morning he had imagined himself wandering a cavernous hall in which great columns rose high into the overhead shadows, not unlike Ely Jacob’s cave down the road, which was open to visitors. But in Claremont’s dream he wasn’t stumbling down rickety wooden steps in the dark. The great hallway was made of slab-smooth marble. Voices echoed off a domed ceiling as high as a cathedral. When he tried to remember what it was about the dream that was so riveting to him, all he could see in his mind’s eye was a series of small figurines carved of garnet, jade, and tourmaline.

Claremont had begun carving stone the very next day. He spent hours on collecting forays along the creek bottoms that ran through the ravines past his father’s fields. Sometimes he’d drive to better spots he knew. Obsessively he tumbled the stones in coffee cans filled with sand, rolling them down the driveway to smooth the chert, eventually turning out a finger-size figurine that his mother said was good enough for a chess set. Claremont hardly gave chess a thought. He didn’t like playing games. He liked carrying the carved stone around in his front jeans pocket. He considered it a lucky charm, like a rabbit’s foot, though he couldn’t exactly say why.

“David?” Lawrence Claremont’s raspy voice intruded. “You coming?”

A flutter came from high above in the old barn’s rafters, where an owl was napping. His father’s voice had disturbed it. David
vigorously ran the ribbed steel file back and forth between his fingers, not having to look. He knew from feel how much stone to remove. He had nearly finished another piece.

His father shuffled over the straw-covered floorboards toward David’s hobby-room door.

“David? Did you hear me, son? Your mother’s set to go.”

“I’ll be right there.” David held the stone up to the workbench light—a lovely translucent purple amethyst he’d unearthed from a nearby gravel pit.

“Come on, son. Her blood sugar’s on the fritz. You know that.” The old man slapped a barn post. “If we don’t get going to Beltson’s right this minute, she’ll be off the backseat after those blasted orange-slice candies she keeps hidden in the kitchen.”

David placed the carved stone on the workroom shelf, flipped off the light switch, and followed his father out to the double-cab pickup idling in the turnaround drive. His mother was fidgeting in the backseat, waving them on.

The road looked practically desolate. Lawrence stared out his side window over a great expanse of corn that reached to the horizon. The sun broke free of a low-lying cloud layer. Angling shafts of sunlight struck the windshield.

“Damn!” The old man scowled. “Flip your visor over, will you, son?”

David heeded his father, but a minute later blazing sunlight had found Lawrence’s face again. Hilda hunched forward, tidying her son’s collar.

“Now remember, David,” she spoke close to his ear. “If they ask you anything in the serving line about how you’re doing, always remember to smile. It’s the courteous thing to do. Even if they don’t seem pleasant.” This last was in reference to the fact that everyone in town knew he was having “trouble” and needed to go see a head doctor for it.

“You needn’t answer them if you don’t want,” she added. “No one expects you to carry on a conversation.” She patted his shoulder like a corner coach in a boxing match between rounds.

No one expects a crazy person to be able to do anything right. That was what his mother was thinking but hadn’t said. David turned his head sideways to acknowledge her, catching sight of the crease of concern between her eyebrows. Mostly, she was completely foreign to him, doting in ways he couldn’t really understand.

“Don’t let them bother you. You’re only looking to eat dinner like everyone else.” She folded her arms across her large midriff. “Don’t mind the looks. There’s always going to be some spoilsport trying to get a rise.” She meant that everyone in town would be thinking,
There goes the crazy man who collapsed on the pie-contest table at the Fourth of July farm show
.

“Oh, Hildy, don’t get the boy all wrought up!” Lawrence put in. “The bastards can whisper all they want to. The boy’s done nothing wrong. Besides, he’s seeing that doctor.”

Lawrence’s heavy hand came down on David’s thigh. “After dinner we’ll get back in plenty of time to finish chores, son. Probably be enough time to get back to that carving of yours, too.”

More of Weaversville appeared: a hodgepodge of sundry stores, an auto parts place. David’s chest heaved under his Windbreaker. The struggle to keep his anxiety in check worsened at the sight of downtown. Beltson’s Cafeteria was in the middle of an old block of brick-fronted buildings that showed their waterlines from the flooding of previous years. It was a pick-and-choose buffet-style restaurant, his mother’s favorite.

As they approached the restaurant, itchy heat built under David’s collar. His hands began to jitter. The ringing in his ears intensified.

His father parked on an angle, bumping the curbstone gently. Hilda shoved against the back of David’s seat, wanting out.

“Come on, come on,” she said. “I need something to eat.”

David stumbled out into late afternoon sun too bright for his eyes. That was a bad sign. The edges of buildings and cars, even the people sitting in the big front window eating, appeared to shimmer. His breathing became uneven. Another vision was coming. Or was it his conscience not letting him off the hook? Increasingly, he feared that he was leading a double life and that others would notice him out of sorts, put two and two together, and that would be the beginning of the end. But what could he do?

“Are you all right, dear?” Hilda’s clammy hand touched the back of his neck. “Why, David, you’re burning up.”

“I’m fine.” He cringed from her touch, from the whole world that suddenly pressed in on him. “Not that hungry.” He leaned against the side of the truck fender, almost sounding convincing.

The old man scooted ahead to hold the door for Hilda. Inside, she brushed past a waitress carrying a tray, nearly upsetting it. She quickly dropped her jacket over the back of a seat and made for the waiting bins of hot food with the urgency of a kid needing to pee.

David fell into a chair, cowering under the full press of another siege, his sense of sight draining into so many swirls and dots. The people will see! What could he do but take a seat?

“Pick up a tray and get some green beans,” his father bent over and whispered. “They’ll settle your stomach.”

David stood up, off balance. Someone behind him was murmuring; he glanced sideways at the blurring shadows of two women huddled at the next table. The murmuring stopped. They were staring. He was a spectacle already—proof that he was mad!

He followed the old man to the serving line. It was all he could do to navigate between tables without bumping into people. Hilda was at the far end already, happily facing an assortment of desserts, instructing a female server to ladle up an extra scoop of apple crisp.

It made him dizzy to look down. His tray began warping in and out. Someone said, “May I help you?” and sounded a mile away.
Hot flashes made his skin tingle. A revving heart sent him sucking for air. Everything was happening at once. He was descending a ravine again, chasing a screaming girl at a full run—with no say in the matter with this raging maniac inside his head.