Wellspring (Paskagankee, Book 3) (20 page)

Rose steadied
herself with a deep breath. Her attacker was dangerous, but he was also clearly
confused and terrified. He might not be quite as afraid as she was, but Rose
guessed he was probably close. Speaking gently, she said, “That was Annette, my
assistant. I own a small curio shop in downtown Paskagankee. I’ve been rather
ill lately, and when I was late showing up for work today, she obviously became
concerned. She wanted to make sure I was alright, that’s all.”

“Where
is she?” He seemed to have relaxed slightly, but the fear still radiated off
him.

“She’s
at the shop. The ringing noise you heard was her calling on the telephone, and
when I didn’t answer, she left a message on the answering machine.”

The man
backed up a step. “Telephone? Answering machine?”

“It’s
all right,” Rose said soothingly. “Neither of those things will hurt you.
They’re just machines, designed to make life easier, although, to tell you the
truth,” she said with a smile, “many times they seem to have the opposite
effect.” She was trying to keep things light, to ingratiate herself with the plainly
unstable man and keep him calm, until she could figure out what to do next.

He
continued to gaze at her in obvious confusion, the concept of a telephone
foreign to him. “May I sit down?” she ventured. “As I said, I’ve not been
feeling well, and the day’s events have worn me down just a bit.” She didn’t
mention the part about being struck in the jaw and nearly choked to death. The
volatile stranger had finally begun relaxing, just a little, and Rose didn’t
want to do or say anything that might counteract the minimal progress she’d
made.

“I
could still use that food and coffee,” he mumbled. “I guess after that you
could sit.”

The
omelet had by now practically burned to the base of the pan, and when Rose
scraped it onto the plate, the bottom was charred a nearly uniform black. She
grimaced at it and told him she’d make a new one, but he waved her off. “Looks
fine,” he said gruffly.

He was obviously
ravenous, and by the time Rose poured a cup of coffee and brought it to the
kitchen table, the man had already worked through more than half the omelet,
burned and all. He nodded wordlessly at the chair on the opposite side of the
table, and she sat, grateful to be off her feet.

Rose
tried to imagine where on earth this strange man might have come from that he would
be so unfamiliar with a telephone its ringing would send him into a frenzy. She
couldn’t come up with a single guess, so she decided to ask. As gently as
possible, she said, “So, where are you from, Mr…?”

The
stranger looked up from his food blankly. For a moment she thought he would
refuse to answer. She began to wonder if he had even heard the question. Then,
between large bites of burned egg, he took a deep breath and said, “I was born
in Kansas City and moved to Texas as a young boy, but I left there a long time
ago. I’ve lived all over. Wherever my horse’ll take me, basically.”

Rose
furrowed her brow. Despite her fear and pain she was intrigued, though she took
note of his refusal to give his name. “Your horse? What do you mean? You raise
horses?”

The
stranger chuckled. “Raise ‘em? Nope, just ride ‘em. How else would I get
around?”

“Well,
by car, like everyone else. Do you own a car?”

“A car?
I don’t know what you mean.”

“You
know, a car. An automobile.”

The
stranger shook his head in utter confusion, and Rose Pellerin began to feel an
odd sense of…clarity…begin to sink in. As hard as it was to swallow – Rose
Pellerin had always been a pragmatic Yankee, a believer in things she could
see, feel and touch – this confused man’s lack of familiarity with
seemingly every modern convenience might not be due to
where
he grew up, she began to suspect it was due to
when.

She sat
quietly, watching the man eat and thinking about time travel, and about the
science fiction novels she had read and loved as a young girl, and about all the
secrets of the human brain that mankind has yet to unlock. She considered how
to proceed, and even
whether
to
proceed. For all his confusion and vulnerability, this uninvited and unwanted
houseguest was still extremely dangerous, as evidenced by the gruesome clump of
hair hanging off his gun and his frenzied attack on Rose, an attack that had
been precipitated by nothing more dangerous than a ringing telephone.

After a
silent but vigorous internal debate, she decided to ask her questions. She
realized with some surprise there had never been any real doubt whether she
would. The man would be finished eating soon, and then he would either move on,
or…not. What would happen to her if he chose the second option was something
Rose very much did not want to think about, but she doubted a few harmless
questions would affect his decision one way or the other. Her fate had probably
already been determined in his mind, anyway.

She cleared
her throat and said, as casually as she could manage, “Do you happen to know
today’s date, Mr…?”

“My
name’s Jackson,” he said, surprising Rose.

“It’s
nice to meet you, Jackson,” she said, knowing how ridiculous the statement sounded,
given the circumstances. “So, about the date…”

He
thought about it for a moment. “I dunno the exact date,” he finally said. “I
was…out of circulation for a time. Not sure about how long a time, but it may
have been several days. I assume it was more than a day or two, anyway, ‘cause
I’ve been so damned hungry since waking up. Anyway, I know it’s June, but
that’s about the best I can do.”

Rose
sat for a moment, wondering about his phrasing.
Waking up?
Then she decided to go for broke. What did she have to
lose? “Yes, it’s June, and what’s the year again?”

The
stranger had finished his omelet, cleaning the plate of every last crumb. If
Rose didn’t know better, she would have thought the dish had been washed and
dried and placed in front of the man empty.

“The
year?” He took a sip of coffee and eyed her over the top of the mug, plainly
convinced he had entered the home of a lunatic. “The year’s 1858, of course.”

18

Ward Cooper leveled a hard stare
out the windshield of the Bureau-provided Chevy Suburban, currently parked
along a desolate stretch of Paskagankee, Maine roadway. He chewed on a stick of
gum relentlessly, attacking it as if competing in a professional sport. “What
the hell do we do now?” he said sourly.

“Christ,
would you just relax already?” Alton Ferriss looked his partner up and down
with equal parts concern and amusement. “This is the biggest break we’ve gotten
in…well…ever, and you can’t even seem to enjoy it!”

“Enjoy
it? What’s to enjoy? We were this close,” he held up a hand with his thumb and
forefinger positioned an inch apart, “to getting that goddamned disk and now
it’s locked up tight.” He took a deep breath, his jaws working like pistons to
punish the offending stick of gum. “You think we can convince the boss-man to
pressure that hick cop to release the disk into our custody?”

“I doubt
it,” Ferriss replied. “The chief might be a hick, but he’s right about one
thing: the disk is evidence in a double-murder investigation. We don’t have
anything to trump him with. Hell, we don’t even have a real case; at least not
a law-enforcement case. That disk isn’t going anywhere.”

Cooper
chewed with renewed fervor. “What about breaking into evidence storage and just
taking it?”

Ferriss
shook his head disgustedly and stared down his partner. “Will you please pull
your head out of your ass? There’s always somebody at the station. How do you
propose to break into their evidence room without being seen?”

“Who
gives a shit about an eighty year old dispatcher? I think we could handle him
without too much trouble, don’t you?”

“Jesus,
get a grip! We’re not going to ‘handle’ an old man. That would bring us grief
we don’t need, not when we’re this close to getting what we want after all
these years. Just relax and use your head for once.”

Cooper
said nothing, but continued grinding his gum into submission. He didn’t seem to
have gotten the message about relaxing. He started impatiently out the
windshield at the expanse of Great North Woods looming just across the empty
pavement, looking like he wanted to climb out of the car and beat the crap out
of someone. Knowing Cooper, he probably did.

Ferriss
let his partner stew for a while. He knew his message would eventually sink in.
At last, Cooper turned and said, “Okay, smart guy. You want me to use my head?
Tell me how.”

Ferriss
smiled. He had known Cooper for so long he thought of him as a little brother.
“We don’t need the disk,” he said softly. “Healy’s scared and confused and has
no idea what the hell’s going on. Eventually, he going to come to the conclusion
his best option is to leave town and figure things out as he goes.”

“He’s
probably already reached that conclusion.”

“Maybe,”
Ferriss agreed. “But he’s not about to skip town without his precious disk. And
he doesn’t know it’s locked up safe and sound in the Paskagankee Police
station. He thinks it’s still in that big, muddy hole in the ground. All we
have to do is go there and wait. He’ll be along eventually.”

Cooper
thought about it for a while. Ferriss let him. For a long time, the only sound
was the popping and snapping of Ward Cooper’s overmatched gum. Eventually
Cooper turned and offered Ferriss a crooked smile.

Ferriss
started up the Suburban and executed a perfect three-point turn. Then he
accelerated slowly away, toward Route 28 and the Ridge Runner.

19

Mike McMahon stood motionless in
the living room of Bronson Choate’s small cabin, absorbing the sensations of
violence and death. The bustling activity of the active homicide crime scene
had ended, at least for the moment, with the departure of the crime scene
technicians and medical personnel and investigators, and he had the home to
himself.

As a cop
on the Revere, Massachusetts police force for a decade and a half, and then as
chief of the tiny Paskagankee force for nearly two years, Mike had been present
at dozens of scenes where violent crimes had taken place – rapes,
assaults, murders – and to his mind they always retained a subtle air of
tragedy once the victims, perpetrators and investigators had moved on.

This one
was no different. A butcher-block end table stood at a crazy angle next to a
small, worn couch. The smashed remains of a glass lamp littered the floor next
to it. A hard-backed chair stood empty in the middle of the room, a length of
electrical wire coiled messily on the floor behind it.

The
chair was where Choate presumably had been held captive by his attacker. He had
somehow managed to free himself from his bindings – the home invader had
used electrical wire to immobilize Choate, not the smartest move he could have
made – and tried to fight back just as his girlfriend arrived. The lamp
must have been knocked off the table and smashed during that struggle.

Choate
had made it as far as the front door, warning Jodie Miller off before being
struck in the head from behind with a blunt object, killing him in the open
doorway of his own home. Bronson Choate had quite literally saved his
girlfriend at the expense of his own life.

But
what was his attacker doing here? Why had he picked this house? Choate was
employed as a merchant marine engineer, spending weeks at a time at sea, and
had returned home from one of those stints only yesterday. Had his attacker
been squatting in the cabin and gotten surprised by Choate’s sudden return?

The
theory made sense but for one problem: Mike couldn’t get past the nagging certainty
that Bronson Choate’s murder – not to mention the subsequent similar attack
and murder of Pete Kendall – was somehow related to Dan Melton’s uncovering
of human remains next to the Ridge Runner and his insistence that there had
been
three
bodies lying on the floor
of the underground room, rather than the two that were presently being examined
by County Medical Examiner Jan Affeldt.

The
Runner was located no more than a half-mile north of this cabin, if you walked
a straight-line path through the woods, and Mike suspected that fact was
critical to understanding what had happened here. Someone had managed to steal
the remains of a human victim right out from under the nose of Melton – for
what reason Mike could not imagine – and then had hidden the remains
somewhere in the thick forest. That person had then started walking, stumbling
onto Choate’s cabin and holing up here.

The
question was, why? Why take the remains of one person from the pit and leave
the other two? And if that
had
happened, how did the mysterious thief/murderer even know Melton would uncover
the long-buried underground room in the first place? Could Melton have been
involved? And what about Bo Pellerin, longtime owner of the Ridge Runner?

Mike
considered all of these possibilities, walking aimlessly around Choate’s empty
cabin, and eventually eliminated both Melton and Pellerin as suspects. He had
had more than one run-in with Bo, the most serious one back when he was
investigating the disappearance of Earl Manning last year, but while he felt
Pellerin could be rude and dismissive and wouldn’t hesitate to skirt the law
where his bar was concerned, he also felt reasonably confident the man was nothing
more than a small-town bully who had been genuinely surprised at the discovery
of the bizarre underground room next to his business.