The keys were in the ignition.
For half a second Heath eyed them, then heaved her weight up on arms still rubbery from her rolling sojourn, to maneuver herself into the other seat.
Sharon's head appeared in the driver's side window with the alarming suddenness of a Jack-in-the-box.
"Patty! Keys. Keep 'em till I get back."
The little girl grabbed the keys from the ignition and retreated back behind the seats.
"You might be killing your sister," Heath shouted, too angry to care whether she was motivated by a belief that honesty would change things or just wanton cruelty.
The honesty didn't work. The cruelty did. Sharon looked as if she'd been slapped.
"I won't be a minute," she whispered and staggered off, trying to run on feet too long unused.
Heath pivoted her seat so she could see Patty. The little girl, looking like a lost member of Bob Cratchit's brood in her mismatched old-fashioned clothes, sat on the edge of the sofa opposite the tiny kitchen area.
"Give me the keys," Heath said none too gently.
"She'll only be a minute. She promised," Patty replied miserably.
"Wiley is a trained attack dog," Heath said. "Give me the keys or I'll sic him on you."
"No sir. Wiley's not mean like you."
Heath gave up. She just wasn't cut out for terrorizing children. And Sharon would only be a minute.
She promised.
thirty-two
Being terrorized by a child was more unsettling than Anna would have thought. Had it ever entered her mind to envision such a thing. The utter wrongness of it jarred the brain, like being devoured by butterflies. If Candace had taken joy in her cruelty, even of the maniacal sort, it would have been easier. Then there would have been the visible specter of mental illness to stand between Anna's eyes and the ruinous child.
Candace showed neither anger nor glee but jabbed Anna with the fierce concentration of a novice 4-H'er working on her first apron hem. The jab was experimental, tentative. Anna kicked it aside.
The next was not so amateurish. With her hands tethered above her head, Anna's soft white underbelly was exposed. No way could she curl down, take cuts with shoulders, back or upper arms. Any lucky hit could pierce an organ. Candace came two steps closer, not close enough Anna could reach her, but close enough she could do some real damage. Feet planted firmly, one a bit behind the other, she thrust her spear hard at Anna's gut. Bracing spine and buttocks against the ladder, Anna swung a sideways kick with her right leg, connecting hard with the spear's shaft.
The makeshift weapon flew from Candace's hands, clattering across the worn plank flooring.
For a moment the girl stared at Anna, the muscles of her face tensing as thoughts came and went, and Anna dared hope the violence had bro-ken through her robot-like state.
"You could have killed me," Anna said gently. Words were a risk when their context and denotations had been so radically altered for one of the parties. This risk did not pay off.
"Right. Could have killed it. Too soon," Candace muttered, a child at her lessons. With no change of expression, the wisp of a girl retrieved the homemade weapon, returned to position and planted her feet as before. This time she gripped the spear more tightly.
Before she set about her work, Anna had just time enough to wonder how long the thirteen mice had lived before succumbing to their final crucifixion on the outhouse wall.
Not wanting to kill "it" too soon, Candace concentrated jagged thrusts at Anna's legs and feet. The paring knife was sharp, but short of a direct stab, couldn't cut through the heavy canvas and leather of Anna's hiking boots, and she focused on catching the knife with the soles and sides of her feet. Twice the narrow blade slipped above the boots. Blood began to flow. Anna was glad for her cordovan-colored socks. She had no desire to know how much damage she was taking.
Each kick grew more difficult. Her legs and back were already tired from the push down from Loomis. Fortunately Candace had taken that same road. On top of that, the girl had been starved and tortured till she had scarcely any strength left. The spear thrusts weakened rapidly as her pencil-thin arms tired. To compensate she began taking little runs at Anna, spear held fast to her side. These were easier to gauge and so avoid. Once, she got close enough Anna managed to land a bloody boot on her shoulder and knock her down.
The macabre scene wore on Anna as much as the sheer physical force required to keep lifting and swinging legs grown heavy and unresponsive as wooden prosthetics. Sweat she could not wipe away blinded her, yet she dared not blink too long because child-of-Satan would be coming at her again.
Candace did not sweat-probably too dehydrated and malnourished to spare so much as a drop of water or a pinch of salt-but she gasped for breath. Anna began to lose track of who Candace was torturing, the ranger cuffed to the ladder or the abused child holding the spear.
After a couple minutes, she didn't care. The two of them, like Pro-metheus and the vultures, seemed locked together in an eternity of misery.
So engrossed was Anna in this hellish pas de deux that when the front door banged open it took her completely by surprise.
Alexis and Beth were soaked from head to toe, hair streaming water down their backs and faces. Buddy was wet from the chest down. His duty belt had been slung around his neck to keep it dry. Fern was a fishing lake-too cold for swimming-but the waters were clear. The package with the body would have had to be stored out a ways in deeper water.
"Buddy," she cried, never before so glad to see a corpse-bearing serial killer. In her moment of distraction, Candace rushed in. Pain so deep it encompassed the marrow of her bones, and the fillings of her teeth screamed through her. It wasn't a cry, it was the shriek of an enraged and hurting animal.
Candace fell back. Buddy and the other two girls dumped the drip-ping body bag they carried between them.
Candace's spear stuck out from Anna's leg where the tip of the paring knife was embedded in her shin bone. Anna tried resting the shaft on the floor but it only brought another tide of pain so rapacious it nearly took her consciousness.
"My, my," Buddy said. "How fast they grow up. Before you know it they are off killing people of their own. Interesting, isn't it? How there is no baseline of decency, honor, compassion-God, if you like-sugar and spice grows up with a knife."
Anna could barely hear him through the clamor inside her head. His smug self-satisfied smirk conjured up a rage so intense, for the briefest of moments, it anesthetized her to the knife embedded in her bone.
"Let me give you a hand," Buddy said solicitously, enjoying the role of sane, kind man every bit as much as he did that of giggling monster. With him, they were one and the same. He stepped in front of Anna and leaned down to pull the spear from her leg.
This was it, the one chance. Slim as it was, she took it. Calling on what reserves she had, Anna wrapped her legs around him and locked her ankles. No time to find the perfect position, she held him around his waist and his left arm in an awkward scissor grip. With a twist of hips and back she levered him off of his feet. Luck, so long conspicuous by her absence, threw Anna a bone: the gun belt flew from his neck and slid into the relative darkness at the kitchen end of the room. Setting her jaw; she squeezed with the strength of someone who has no need to save anything for later.
He bellowed with surprise and began hammering at her. She ignored the blows from his free right arm. They were of no significance at the moment. She couldn't hold him more than fifteen or twenty seconds. Half a minute at most.
"Kill him," she screamed at the girls. "Do it. Do it. Kill him. Fucking kill him." Candace stood motionless, the robot switched off. Alexis and Beth looked first to one another then the cabin door. "Now. Quick. Chairs. Logs. Kill him," Anna begged. "I can't hold him much longer."
Her legs were weakening. Buddy was moving, squirming. He had his feet back under him.
"Run," she yelled at Beth and Alexis. "Run away!"
For some reason they both looked at the corpse of Robert Proffit on the cabin floor. The sight of the black plastic, running with water, black and shiny and elemental in the ugly light from the Coleman lamp, threw a psychic switch. As one they ran at Buddy, screaming and clawing. They kicked and bit. Beth grabbed the fire poker and, two-handed like a base-ball player at bat, laid into his back and legs. Several of the blows struck Anna and he fell from her scissor grip to the floor. Alexis took up a cast-iron frying pan. Again and again she brought it down on his hands, head, arms.
Buddy curled up in a ball. The girls were crying, weeping, shrieking, uttering visceral grunts that, before this night, Anna would not have believed could come from the throats of twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls. Then Buddy was still.
The pounding didn't stop.
"Enough," she yelled, perhaps a bit later than an upstanding law-enforcement officer should have. Beth and Alexis were past hearing.
Candace reappeared from the edges of Anna's vision and snatched up the homemade spear that had fallen from her shin in the struggle.
Whether Candace intended to dispatch or defend her master, Anna hadn't a clue. "Look out," she yelled at no one in particular.
The paring knife poked Alexis' thigh, then Beth's shoulder. The beating stopped and the three children-schoolmates, playfellows, confidantes- stared at one another over the curled-up body of their tormentor.
Blood seeped from Beth's and Alexis' wounds. Candace was spattered with Anna's blood and that which she'd shed in the long fall from Loomis Lake to Fern Lake Cabin.
Anna saw not children but maenads, the women from Greek mythol-ogy said to go mad on the day they worshipped the god Dionysus. They'd run wild in the woods. Any man they caught was torn to pieces, the gob-bets of flesh used to festoon their dresses and hair. The myth of the in-toxication of revenge and violence must have had its roots in the same bottomless well of hatred Anna had witnessed.
"Candy," Beth whispered. The first human sound in what seemed a very long time.
The ersatz spear fell to the floor. Candace ran for the cabin's back door, then was gone into the thinning darkness at the ass end of the night.
thirty-three
Frying pan held at ready, hatred narrowing her wide blue eyes, Alexis stood guard over the unconscious Buddy while Beth fished his spare handcuff key from his shirt pocket and freed Anna from the ladder.
The temptation to fall in a heap was sufficiently powerful in both body and mind that for several long breaths before she dared move, Anna had to hang on to one of the rungs she had come to loathe. The bits of her that weren't numb, hurt. Both categories suffered exhaustion. She believed her lifetime's supply of adrenaline to have been used up till Buddy groaned.
Before he could move an eyelash she was upon him, rolling him to his stomach, one knee in the small of his back, one on the nape of his neck. Using the cuffs she'd worn most of the night, she secured his hands behind his back. In haste and fear she ratcheted them down too tightly. The steel cut into the flesh of his wrists. They'd cause him a good deal of pain.
She didn't care. It was because she didn't, because she would have enjoyed his pain, that she loosened them. Evil wasn't the thought; it was the deed. She chose not to identify with his acts, chose not to let the girls see her doing so.
The first order of business was to get help. The base radio was of no use. Rising with difficulty from the prone person of Buddy Ray Stephen, she backed into the darker kitchen area to retrieve his weapon and portable radio.
The floor was bare. In a small space with nothing to slide under or behind, the fact, unpleasant as it was, couldn't be denied. Candace had taken them. She was a frightened child, a brainwashed serial-killer-in-training, and she had a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun, three magazines of ammunition and a radio.
"We can't stay here," Anna said. "We're hiking out."
Alexis and Beth had hiked in from Bear Lake. They'd been half drowned, terrorized, beaten and kicked, but they said not a word of protest. They wanted out of the cabin and away from Fern Lake as much as Anna did. More.
Anna doused Buddy with water. He came to with a theatrical sputter-ing that led Anna to believe he'd been conscious for a while. Playing possum. Lying in wait for an opportunity.
She wasn't going to give him one.
In an act that, though not strictly by the book, was imminently sen-sible, she chose to hobble him. As she searched for a light, strong, cotton rope in the tool room, Beth watched her.
Through the doorway Anna kept an eye on Alexis and Buddy. Alexis straddled a chair behind and out of reach of their prone captive. She held Anna's service weapon trained at his head. The pistol wasn't all bluff. A single round remained in the chamber when Buddy took the magazine.
