Authors: Nicholas Wolff
Chuck leaned forward, pushing through the virgin snow. He stamped his way through a line of bushes that came up to his thighs, then found himself inside a circle of rustling birches. A cool breeze swept up from the floor of the little grove, and Chuck shivered, walking on. Now that the little stream was behind him, the sound of whispering grew in his ears once more.
It isn’t real
, he kept saying to himself.
I’m just nervous. Stop it, Chuck.
He saw a curtain of brightness ahead. The sun had come out from behind its cloud and was now shining down on the field that backed onto Mary’s house. The yellow light was so intense, in the way it often was after a rain shower, that it seemed to have set the field on fire. The burst of light was framed between two enormous birches that Chuck was now headed toward. A song came to him—“Rocky Mountain High”—and he hummed it tunelessly, his lips itchy with the vibration, to drown out the murmuring if it came back.
He came to the thick birch on the left, and he rested his forehead against it. The house looked so perfect, a deep bisque color with white trim nestled on its half-acre plot.
This is where I should have been
, thought Chuck. This was where he should have spent the last forty years, being happy and making love to the pert, gamine-eyed Mary Reddington, instead of locked in with Stephanie, who was so boring in bed and so uncharitable outside of it.
A shadow seemed to cross the sun, and a wave of dread seemed to wash the light out of the air. It was as if some huge invisible beast had come striding through the forest, sucking away the cheeriness and the warmth.
Chuck felt eyes on him. He
felt
them, from the west. But he would not turn to look.
Buck up, you fool. Nothing bad can happen if you keep your eyes on the house. Watch for Mary. She’ll be coming out of her shower soon and walking downstairs to start the coffee machine. Watch for her profile in the kitchen window. Watch.
A pain began to build in his head. It felt as if he were in a kind of pressure chamber and the dial was being turned up, up. Almost pleasant at first, but quickly becoming painful. Higher.
Goddamn it, make it stop.
Another notch. Chuck blew a breath into the air, leaning hard now on the birch.
Do not turn away from the house. Eyes on Mary. She will save you.
But the pressure inched up and his teeth gritted as if he were having a seizure. “Oh God,” he panted. He took a rasping breath and his eyes slid away from the house and he saw the thing immediately. Staring at him.
The man stood straight in the shadow of thick elm. He was wearing a uniform, a pressed khaki one that Chuck hadn’t seen since he was a boy. The man’s head was bare and the side of his face as pale as alabaster.
But the eyes . . .
They were snowman eyes, black as anthracite coal, with a tiny spot of orange at the center. Against the paleness of the skin, they seemed to spark with a cold light. The thing was looking at him with a hatred so intense, he felt it as a wave of hot, foul air.
“God, no,” Chuck cried out, but his feet were rooted to the ground and he couldn’t move.
An animal screamed from the woods to his left, and he heard the tread of it tearing through the underbrush. Chuck tried to scream, but his voice was lost in a smear of terror. His gaze was being pulled into the blackness of the man’s insect eyes, around and around the edges toward the tiny orange flame at the center.
The man’s lips, which had been set in a grimace, began to move silently. Chuck watched them, feeling as if he were in a trance. As the lips formed words, an echoing voice sounded clearly in his head.
The rope . . .
A tremor of fear loosened his knees, and he pulled his feet free and stumbled back before turning to run. He was moving in slow motion. He raced back toward the sound of water, pushing the tree limbs away from him, the needles stabbing his cheeks. Finally he reached the stream and headed toward the bridge.
The rope . . .
His right knee suddenly gave way. He fell heavily into the stream, and the sound of the running water blotted out the other noises around him. But he knew that the man was walking toward him. He could feel a cold spot in his back expanding outward with each passing second.
. . . is in the basement.
He couldn’t turn. If he turned and looked, the man would snatch his soul away.
Beneath the stairs.
In the burbling of the brook, he could hear other noises, heavy footsteps approaching and a strange moaning.
“Leave me be!” he cried out over his shoulder. He got up to run, freezing water streaming down his legs.
The voice spoke, and he flinched as if the lips had touched his ear.
The rope is in the basement.
His throat tightened.
Beneath the stairs.
The cry of an owl. Chuck looked up, and the sun was breaking through the clouds in the little circle of treetops. He knelt there, frozen, waiting for the man’s cold hand on his neck.
Buck up
, Chuck thought.
Not too late.
He staggered up and began to run again, reaching the path after a few steps, his boots striking the ground with the sound of a blow on thick leather.
If I don’t look, I’ll be safe, if I don’t look, I’ll be safe.
He saw the dun-colored fence of his own backyard rise up
out of the landscape twenty yards ahead, and his breath caught in his throat as he used his last bit of strength to race toward it.
If I don’t look . . .
He grasped the top of the wooden gate and swept it wide, forcing his freezing legs through the gap. The wind was whipping in little vortices, tossing leaves into the air in his broad yard and whirling them around in dissolving circles. Chuck stood up straight, the icy spot throbbing at the base of his spine, and turned slowly around.
There was nothing out there except trees and silence. If it had been following him back home, the apparition was gone.
CHAPTER SIX
J
ohn Bailey swung the old Crown Vic into the entranceway at Wartham and waved to the guard there, the same old man who’d reported Margaret hanging in a tree. The man was wearing the same pea green cardigan he had two nights before. He looked at John but didn’t wave back. Just licked his lips as John cruised past.
John felt a little out of his depth coming to Wartham, to be honest. He’d been out of college for thirteen years, and he knew how rich and secluded this place was. The old social awkwardness he’d felt since high school—which had made his friendship with Nat Thayer even more of a miracle—stirred inside him.
The press had been kept off the campus, for the most part, but they were baying like bloodhounds outside of it. The
Boston
Globe
had sent one of their better crime reporters, now ensconced at the local Red Roof Inn, and he’d taken to calling the department at least twice a day, demanding information. There were TV reporters doing regular stand-ups from the entrance to the college or just in front of the ash tree; John had passed one on his way in. Margaret Post’s parents would surely be filing a lawsuit once their daughter was buried and a suitably relentless attorney was hired. The longer the case remained unsolved, the more prospective students Wartham would lose to Smith and Holyoke, the more social media would produce wilder theories and fresher suspects, the more the department would look like a bunch of small-town yokels, and the worse John’s life would become.
He slowed down to 20 mph as he cruised through the twist
ing little streets on campus. Girls strolled by in their long winter coats, collars pulled up against the morning chill, some chattering in groups, others alone cutting fast across the quad. John parked in front of Smith Hall, where the Post girl had lived. Ramona Best lived in 2C. A single, John guessed, just like Margaret. He got out of the car, walked across the stiff frost-hardened grass that gave way reluctantly beneath his size-13 boots.
He thought of his first questions, but they only brought back the memory of Margaret’s face, the ash tree . . .
Blood everywhere. Blood soaking into the ground, running down the wormholes in a rush. Blood in your mouth and lungs, breathing it in.
He pushed open the door and walked into the first floor. Someone was playing “Positive Vibration” down the hall, and he could smell the faintest tinge of sinsemilla in the air.
Jesus Christ, nothing ever changes.
They must give every incoming freshman a Bob Marley greatest hits playlist and a nickel bag.
Some of the doors were propped open. A girl emerged from the last one in a ratty green bathrobe, her hair tied up, her legs naked below the knee. Bailey averted his eyes, but he’d seen the flush of red covering her neck. At least he had his badge hanging by a chain around his neck, which made it clear he was on official business.
Still, he felt like a damned rapist in here. Any man would.
John found the stairwell and climbed up to the second floor. The second door on the left had a plain black plate on it at eye level that read
2C
. John knocked. The Marley music from downstairs had switched to “Stir It Up.” John caught himself nodding along to the opening chords.
He knocked again.
The door opened suddenly and Ramona Best was staring at him. Black, bright-eyed, short, dressed in a green-and-white sweatshirt and jeans.
“Yes?”
“Ms. Best?”
“Ye-es. Can I help you?”
“I’m Detective Bailey with the Northam PD.” His ID was in his right hand, and the leather flap fell away to show his unsmiling picture. “I had a few questions about Margaret Post.”
Her eyes flicked down to the ID. “I spoke to the officer the night . . . the night of.”
“I know. And it was very helpful. But I have to ask a few more questions.”
She frowned, deciding whether it was within her rights to close the door. “Come in, I guess,” she said finally.
Bailey stepped inside what was a typical dorm room—a cluttered desk by the window, a tie-dyed sheet hanging on the wall with the name of some band he’d never heard of written on it, and a couple of plants dangling over a bookcase filled with paperbacks and course books.
There was a wooden desk chair with yet another plant on it. Ramona put it on the floor, then looked over her shoulder at him.
“Thanks,” he said.
The girl pulled out a second chair from under the desk and sat on it, facing him. Her face looked heavy, as if she’d been sleeping.
“I’m sure the other officer told you this,” John began, “but anything you can tell us—no matter how minor it seems—could really help. I just want to catch this guy.”
Ramona nodded.
“Can you tell me about Margaret’s friends?”
“You’re looking at her.”
“She didn’t hang out with anyone besides you?”
Ramona made a face. “This girl in the glee club, Tessa. You know, Margaret was a music geek—she’d always imagined coming to Wartham and singing glee and traveling to Yale and having
wild sex with sensitive poets there. That was before she realized that Wartham was just as bad as anyplace else.”
“Just as bad, how?”
“Cliquey. There are about twenty girls who can either make your life wonderful or make you want to kill yourself.”
“Was Tessa one of those girls?”
“No, not even close. Tessa is an outcast, just like us. But even she broke Margaret’s heart. She was supposed to take Margaret to her house for Christmas, but the invitation was mysteriously rescinded.”
“Was there anyone else? Men?”
Ramona shook her head.
“Not even . . .”
Can you even say
one-night stands
anymore?
“Casual acquaintances? Guys from town?”
The girl’s face wrinkled up, as if she’d smelled a skunk. “Guys from
town
?”
John felt his face flush. Ramona realized her mistake and looked horrified. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, her voice softer. “But, I mean, no.”
“She didn’t mention anyone?”
Ramona shook her head. “And believe me, she would have told me. She told me when the UPS guy looked at her more than three seconds. Margaret wasn’t getting noticed. She won’t be—” Ramona caught herself. “She wouldn’t . . . have . . . been until we graduated and got away from here.”
“What about her behavior? Did you notice a change lately?”
Bang.
Ramona looked like a gaffed fish.
“No.”
He said nothing for a few seconds, then: “Ramona.”
She got up and began to straighten up some books there. John could hear the first synthesizer chords of “No Woman, No Cry” floating up from the first floor. Ramona took a book from the bottom and placed it on the top.
She was working something out. Clearly Ramona was loyal to the dead girl. John liked that, respected it.
“You talked to Margaret’s parents, right?” the girl said finally.
“Yeah. I told them the news. They’re in Brazil, doing missionary work there out in the boonies. They’re trying to arrange a flight.”
“I don’t want any of this getting back to them.”
“We can do that.”
Ramona took a deep breath. “Margaret felt she was being . . . watched.”
John didn’t like the sound of that. What he wanted was a clean and simple stranger murder, a crime of passion. Not a stalker who might turn his attention to another Wartham girl. “Watched how?”
“She wouldn’t say. But she was scared. She said that she could feel someone . . . following her.”
“Did she ever give a description? This someone was male?”
Ramona nodded yes.
“Young, old?”
“That’s just it. She never actually saw him. But she was convinced he was out there. She couldn’t sleep. And then . . .”
“Yes?”
Ramona frowned and came around the chair and sat down. Her eyes had changed somehow. Were the irises smaller? Or was John imagining things?
She’s afraid
, John thought.
“I went over to see her last week. I hadn’t heard from her in three days or so, and that was unusual. She hadn’t even come over on a snack run at night, and Margaret was a stone-cold carbs junkie, especially after eight o’clock. Had to have something. I kept cookies for her over there.”