Paskagankee (27 page)

A minute passed. Two. Finally Sharon felt she might actually be able to talk to Mike without her voice betraying her sheer terror. Then she literally jumped straight into the air as two events occurred in rapid succession. The radio crackled to life, loudly, as Mike called for her to check in.
The volume knob must have twisted as the radio fell,
she thought,
turning the stupid thing all the way up, because that's about as loud as I've ever heard a police radio.

Before she had a chance even to react to the call, she heard another loud snapping noise immediately behind her This time, the noise sounded much closer than before, and as she turned her head in an instinctive reaction, Sharon glimpsed a flash of dull red, saw a large, misshapen figure approaching fast, and then the air exploded out of her lungs with an audible
whoosh
as the impossibly large entity blasted her in the gut with one powerful blow.

With a second of agonizing clarity, she thought to herself,
what the hell was that?
And then the huge figure struck again, flinging her small, limp body effortlessly into the tangled branches of a stout oak tree with just a flip of an arm.

Sharon heard the bones break before feeling any pain, but the gruesome sound of the shattering bones ended almost before it began, whereas the pain kept building, growing and mushrooming until it constituted her whole world, her entire existence. The pain was white-hot and intense, eventually enveloping her, pulling her down and down into a black hole that Sharon welcomed wholeheartedly because it put an end to the fear and the pain.

Oh, God, the pain.

43

MIKE MCMAHON PUNCHED THE radio's transmit button with an insistence born of frustration. “Come in, Sharon,” he called for the dozenth time. Ten minutes had passed since she was due to check in and he hadn't noticed she was late until just now because he had been caught up in a conversation with Detective Shaw (surprise, surprise, the man actually
could
talk), who had lost track of his partner, the asshole O'Bannon.

Mike told Shaw the man was probably halfway to Portland by now and that if Shaw was so in awe of his partner that he wouldn't speak up about the obvious dereliction of duty on O'Bannon's part, he should probably just hop into his car and follow him on down the road.

“Can't,” Shaw replied simply and with his characteristic lack of emotion. “He's got the only set of keys to the Caprice.”

Mike shook his head and laughed out loud. How could he respond to that? Shaw refused to be baited into an argument, which, Mike decided, was probably a good thing. Getting into it out here in the middle of the night with one of the guys hand-picked by the attorney general (read: the governor) to come up here and white-wash this entire bizarre affair was probably not any kind of winning strategy for the new Paskagankee Police Chief, anyway.

Mike simply held his tongue and told Shaw that if he ran across O'Bannon, he would let the man know his partner was looking for him. “But don't hold your breath,” he said. “I don't think O'Bannon and I will be exchanging Christmas cards any time soon. If he sees me coming, he'll probably head off in another direction. Of course with this fog, I suppose I might stumble over him without even seeing him until it's too late. For both of us.”

Following the testy exchange, Mike checked his watch and began calling Officer Dupont's radio. He then called Professor Dye to be sure his transmitter was working properly and heard it squawk to life right next to him, as the two men were in the process of walking together around the fire for what felt like about the hundredth time of the evening.

“What the hell,” he muttered. “She knows she's supposed to check in with me.” “Sharon, come in,” he called again.

“Perhaps her receiver has gone on the blink,” Dye suggested.

“Maybe,” Mike answered, although his tone of voice indicated his opinion regarding the likelihood of that scenario.

The gigantic bonfire was finally starting to wane, although it would continue to burn through the night and well into tomorrow. The number of people clustered around it had begun to decline noticeably over the last thirty minutes or so, as most townspeople succumbed to the miserable weather conditions and called it quits.

The feeling of unease in Mike's stomach began blossoming again the moment Shaw mentioned he had lost track of his partner. Mike's response notwithstanding, he knew there was no way the detective would just have taken off for Portland without gathering Shaw first. Now, with two unexplained disappearances in the last two minutes, Mike's senses were telling him things were going horribly wrong. A look into the worried face of Ken Dye told him that the professor was thinking the same thing.

“What do we do?” Dye asked.

“Good question,” was the best Mike could come up with. He knew as Paskagankee Chief of Police and a man with fifteen years of law enforcement experience he should be able to manage something better, but he was well and truly stumped. “Searching the woods in this fog would be suicide, not to mention we could walk within five feet of seeing . . . something, and completely miss it, the way the mist is playing havoc with the flashlight beams.”

The two men stood shoulder to shoulder, staring out into the murky night. The grey mist shifted and danced in front of them, seemingly alive with malevolent intent. “Let's take a walk around Sharon's perimeter,” Mike finally suggested. He knew it was probably pointless and a complete waste of time, but at least they would feel like they were doing something productive. Professor Dye agreed immediately.

The night's pervading blackness enveloped the two men as they trudged along the outer ring. As expected, the heavy shroud of fog served to prevent any insight into what had happened to Sharon or where she might have gone. Mike cursed himself for allowing the rookie officer to walk the outermost perimeter. Obviously, Professor Dye had to stay close to the fire, but why hadn't Mike reserved the more remote outer ring for himself?

The search for Officer Dupont was conducted mostly in silence, the two men lost in their own thoughts. Mike could see tracks in the muddy snow, presumably made by Sharon as she had traipsed around and around, but there was also a confusing array of other footprints, with no indication of who they might belong to or what they were doing there.

After nearly an hour of searching, creeping forward at a snail's pace and looking desperately for evidence that might explain Sharon's disappearance, the pair arrived back at their starting point. They were cold, wet, and tired, and had been completely unsuccessful. Mike glanced at the professor and saw a bleak look in the man's eyes that he knew must have reflected in his as well.

By now it appeared everyone had departed, as it was nearly two o'clock in the morning and even the hardiest of the partygoers had finally succumbed to the miserable conditions. There was no sign even of Warren Sprague, and Mike assumed the farmer had retreated to his home after bidding the last of the revelers goodnight, not knowing where Mike was and assuming he would find his own way out if he had not already done so.

The once-raging bonfire had burned down to a massive pile of red-hot glowing embers. Waves of thick black smoke curled off the top of the pile and disappeared into the fog. Mike and Ken started off to the Paskagankee Police Explorer without a word. What was there to say? They had come to the gathering to protect the townspeople, and now one of the supposed protectors was missing; two if you included the possibility that O'Bannon had vanished as well.

Mike was determined not to assume Sharon's disappearance was related to the string of bizarre and deadly occurrences of the last week until he saw evidence to the contrary, but he knew deep down inside that the likelihood of the events being unrelated was practically nil. He was angry and frustrated and exhausted. He could barely stand the thought of having to wait for sunrise to begin looking for Sharon in earnest.

44

MIKE SAT AT HIS desk and studied Professor Dye, engrossed in his work on a computer in the otherwise empty squad room. It was a few minutes after six in the morning, and the day shift officers wouldn't begin arriving for almost another hour. Mike still had the feeling there was something Dye wasn't telling him, that there was more to his story about dead Native American mothers, and spirits inhabiting human host bodies, but he couldn't imagine what the professor might be withholding.

It seemed clear the man was trying his best to help. He was genuinely stricken that Sharon Dupont had disappeared right from under their noses. The moment they arrived at the empty municipal building this morning the professor had asked to work at a computer terminal with Internet access, immediately losing himself in his work.

The two men had ridden in near-total silence, exhausted and depressed, to Mike's apartment after leaving the site of the bonfire. They stopped for a moment at Warren Sprague's home, finding him still awake, sitting at his kitchen table sipping a cup of tea before bed. Sprague had invited them in, but they declined. Mike wanted only to ease his growing paranoia and ensure the farmer was not missing too, as well as receive the landowner's permission to search the vast, remote field early the next morning. The farmer readily gave it, even volunteering his assistance, but Mike told him he didn't want one single person in that field who didn't have to be there.

The pair fell asleep almost immediately upon arriving at Mike's apartment, the professor dropping onto Mike's couch and, as he had done at Sharon's house, steadfastly refusing to consider taking Mike's bed. “Let me use the couch,” Mike demanded. “It's the least I can do, considering all the help you're giving me,” but Dye wouldn't consider it, and Mike was just too damned tired to do more than put up a perfunctory protest.

For Mike's part, rest was difficult to achieve even though sleep came quickly. He found himself tossing and turning, suffering strange, terrifying dreams. He would wake drenched in sweat and shaking with fear, but the nightmares receded into his subconscious the minute he was able to wrench himself out of his uneasy slumber. He assumed the dreams were born of the guilt he felt for failing to protect Sharon, but knowing the cause of the nightmares didn't make them any easier to take.

By five a.m. Mike finally gave up on the idea of getting any real rest and rose for the day. He padded into the kitchen to put on some coffee before jumping into the shower to try to scrub away the exhaustion, frustration and fear. It didn't work.

After dressing, Mike sat quietly at the kitchen table sipping his coffee, eventually hearing stirring in the living room indicating Professor Dye was awake as well. The man stumbled into the kitchen and sloshed coffee into a cup. His hair protruded at odd angles from his head, making him look vaguely like a scarecrow and almost drawing a smile from Mike, despite the circumstances. He sipped his steaming coffee and turned to face Mike with eyes red-rimmed and bleary. “When do we go to work?”

Despite his fear and exhaustion, this time Mike did manage a weak smile. “Not until after you finish that coffee,” he said. “You look like shit.”

“Thanks,” the professor said with a grimace. “And this coffee tastes like shit. What do you use for grounds, squirrel droppings?”

“Nah, too bitter. I use cow pies.”

Ken Dye dumped the coffee down the sink. “Then I guess it's time to leave. Could we maybe stop by the diner on the way to the station?”

Now, the man was engrossed in his work on the computer, sipping his Katahdin Diner coffee and holding it reverently in two hands like it contained the secret of life. At this point, Mike figured, after just a couple of hours of fitful sleep, maybe it did.

Dawn would break in a few minutes, at which time Mike intended to pull the professor away from his research, or whatever the hell he was doing, and move the party back to Warren Sprague's field. The fog this morning looked just as thick as it had been last night, perhaps even more so, but Mike hoped the watery daylight trying to fight its way through the low overcast ceilings would allow them to see well enough to complete a more thorough search of Warren Sprague's field.

Sharon didn't just disappear into thin air,
he thought.
Even a disgruntled Native American spirit can't make someone vanish, so there has to be evidence out there that will point me in the right direction.
He refused to acknowledge the worm of fear twisting its way through his belly or listen to the voice whispering relentlessly in his ear that Sharon was dead; she must be dead and probably torn into a dozen pieces by now for good measure. The spirit or whatever the hell it was had snatched her right out from under Mike's nose, and now she was gone, slaughtered, but not before suffering a terrifying and incomprehensibly painful death.

“NO,” he whispered fiercely, pounding one hand on his desk in frustration before realizing, too late, that he was no longer alone in his office. Professor Dye stood awkwardly in front of him, clutching a sheaf of printer paper tightly in his hand. “I'm sorry for intruding,” he said, “but I think you will want to see this.”

45

SHARON GROANED AND ATTEMPTED to roll over. She failed. She was lying on her belly with her arms pinned beneath her limp body and she was freezing her ass off. The surface was cold and hard. A cement floor maybe? Hard-packed dirt? She couldn't tell because wherever she was, it was pitch-dark, and she couldn't see a thing. In fact, when she had first awoken, just a couple of minutes ago, she felt a sharp pang of sheer terror that maybe she was blind or even dead.