Shadow Creek (36 page)

“Why don’t we just torch the place?”

“Oh, yeah, that’s really smart. Why don’t we take an ad out in the papers while we’re at it, huh? Let the cops know exactly where we are.”

Nikki felt herself surprisingly close to tears. “Why are you being so mean to me?” she asked in the little-girl voice of her childhood. It was a voice she barely recognized, one she thought she’d buried long ago.

“What are you talking about? I’m not being mean to you.”

“Yes, you are. Ever since you found out about that girl, you’ve been acting … I don’t know … all weird.”

“Hey,” Henry said, dropping a bunch of beaded necklaces
he’d found in the top drawer of the dresser to the floor, sending beads spraying in all directions. He walked slowly toward her, cocking his head to one side, like a mischievous puppy. “Is that jealousy I’m hearing?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“ ’Cause you’re acting kind of jealous.”

“I just want to kill the stupid girl and get out of here.”

“You sure you’re not just a tiny bit jealous?” he asked playfully, his hand creeping up underneath the oversized dress she was wearing. “Is that why you’re in such a hurry to kill her?”

“I’m not jealous.”

“You’re not wearing any underwear either.” His other hand moved to her breast.

Nikki smiled. “Glad I finally got your attention.”

“Oh, you got it, all right. The question is, what are you gonna do with it?”

Nikki fell to her knees in front of him. “I’ll show you.”

“ISN’T BLACK FLY season supposed to be over?” James asked, slapping at his neck.

“It
is
over. These are
deer
flies.” Melissa scratched behind her ear. When she withdrew her hand, she saw blood underneath her fingernails.

“Lovely,” James said. “A fly for every season.”

Jennifer was bringing up the rear. If the deer flies were bothering her, she gave no sign. “Does anybody have any idea where we are?”

Val spit an errant mosquito out of her mouth into the back of her hand. She marveled that anyone could continue to look so lovely under such trying circumstances. No wonder Evan had been so smitten. “The creek should be around here somewhere,”
she said, recalling the times she and Evan had hiked through these very woods. “I think we should keep going in this direction …”

“Where are the rangers?” James asked accusingly. “Aren’t they supposed to be searching the area?”

“Like I said, I don’t think Brianne is their top priority.” Then, in the next breath, “Brianne! Brianne, can you hear me?”

“Brianne,” Jennifer echoed. “Brianne … Brianne!”

The chant was taken up by Melissa and James, but even after five minutes of continuously shouting out her name, there was no response.

“What’s this?” Jennifer asked, suddenly stopping.

“What?” The others quickly gathered around her.

“Look at the way the ground is flattened down over here, kind of like somebody was lying down …”

“Someone or some
thing
,” James said with a noticeable shudder and yet another glance over his shoulder. “Like a bear, maybe?”

“Oh, my God!” Melissa was pointing at something several feet away. “Is that a shoe?”

“What?” Val lunged toward the mud-covered object on the ground, one hand lifting it into the air, the other furiously scraping the caked earth from its thin, high heel. “It’s Brianne’s. It’s her shoe.” She spun around. “Brianne … Brianne! Where are you? Can you hear me? Oh, God. Where is she?” She spun around, holding the shoe close against her chest, her eyes scanning the surrounding trees. “I know there are cottages. There has to be a road …”

“How far are we talking?” James asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe another mile. Maybe less. Maybe more.”

“Then I’ve got to have a little rest.” James looked around,
finding a log on which to perch, then gingerly lowering himself down. “Sorry to be such a diva, but these legs are definitely not what they once were.”

“You’re not a diva.” Val sat down beside him. “You’re wonderful.” She looked toward Melissa and Jennifer. “You, too. All of you.”

Jennifer’s eyes filled with tears. She quickly turned her head away.

The scream started slowly, building gradually, before exploding into the air. At first Val wasn’t even sure what the sound was or where it was coming from, and it wasn’t until she saw Jennifer’s face, and her eyes wide with terror, that she realized the scream was coming from her mouth.

“What is it? What happened? Jennifer, what the hell happened?” she repeated when Jennifer failed to respond.

“Oh, God. Oh, God.”

Val began spinning around in circles, trying to pinpoint the cause of Jennifer’s outburst. And then she saw it.

“Please tell me that’s not what I think it is,” James whispered.

Val’s throat was suddenly void of all saliva. The words scraped painfully along the sides of her larynx as she moved closer. “It’s a hand.”

“Is it …?” Melissa asked, unable to finish the sentence.

“It’s a
man’s
hand,” Val said, crouching down to examine it, and then bursting into tears. “It’s not Brianne’s.”

“Thank God.”

“Don’t touch it,” James said. “Whatever you do, don’t touch that awful thing.”

“What does it mean?” Jennifer asked.

“It means we’re getting out of here right now,” Melissa said.

Val pushed herself back to her feet, one hand still clutching
Brianne’s shoe to her breast, and they started walking, slowly at first, and then faster, faster, until they were running, barely aware of the twigs snapping underfoot or the overhanging branches slapping at their faces.

“Do you think the hand could be David Gowan’s?” Melissa asked when they stopped to catch their breath.

“Do you think a bear got him?” James asked. “Or, dear God, something worse?”

“What do you mean?” Jennifer asked. Then, as if she could read his mind, “No. No. That’s impossible. It’s impossible,” she repeated, looking to Val for confirmation.

Val didn’t have to ask what impossible she was referring to. She knew exactly what Jennifer was thinking, what they were all thinking. She’d been thinking the same thing all morning, ever since Jennifer had announced that the Henry Voight she’d met the previous evening didn’t match the Henry Voight whose picture was hanging on the wall at ranger headquarters.

They were thinking of the murders in the Berkshires.

Was it possible the killers they’d been hearing about on TV and on the radio, those monsters responsible for the murders of those elderly couples in the Berkshires, had left Massachusetts for the higher hills of New York state? Were they even now roaming the Adirondacks in search of more prey? Had they killed David Gowan and the real Henry Voight? Had Brianne and Tyler met a similar fate?

No, don’t be absurd, Val castigated herself. Even if the killers
were
in the area, and the likelihood of that was beyond remote, their targets were old people. What would they want with David Gowan or Henry Voight? Surely they’d have no interest in Tyler or Brianne.

Except what of that poor young man whose body had been found—in pieces, dear God, in pieces—near the site of one of
the slaughters, a young man the police suspected had been a victim of nothing but circumstance, someone whose extreme bad fortune it had been to stumble onto the scene of the crime, and paid the ultimate price? What if Brianne had stumbled upon a similar scene? What if she’d …?

What if … what if … what if?

Stop it, Val told herself before she could finish the thought. Stop it right now. “Okay, look,” she said to keep from screaming. “We can’t let our imaginations get the better of us.”

“You’re right,” Melissa agreed. “We’re getting way ahead of ourselves here.”

“Brianne’s just fine,” James said, with perhaps a bit too much conviction. “Once she got rid of those damn high heels, she’d have had no trouble making her way out of here. She’s probably back at the campsite, wondering where the hell everybody went.”

“God, I hope you’re right.”

“There’s no reason to suspect foul play,” Jennifer said. “That hand …”

“… has probably been there for weeks,” James continued.

“Some poor slob got eaten by a bear,” Melissa said, with a nod of her head for emphasis.

“We should go back to the camp,” Jennifer told them. “We have to notify the park rangers about this right away. We have to tell them what we found.”

“Yes,” Melissa said.

“We have to let them do their jobs,” James agreed.

“Val?” Jennifer asked, looking to her for confirmation.

“Yes. All right,” Val said. “Okay.” After all, what choice did she have? The discovery of Brianne’s shoe had been one thing, confirmation that Brianne had indeed been wandering these woods. It was a reason to keep searching. But finding the
hand had changed everything. Whatever the cause, animal or human, it was too dangerous for them to continue. They had to inform the rangers of their grisly discovery immediately. They had to let the professionals do their job.

“Maybe we should go back to the car,” James suggested.

“That’ll take too long,” Val said. “It’ll be faster this way.”

“You sure there’s a road?” Jennifer asked.

“Evan and I used to hike through these woods all the time,” Val told her, watching the younger woman wince, although not for the reason Val initially suspected.

“He should be here for you,” Jennifer said, catching Val by surprise. “It’s not right that he’s not here.”

They continued walking in silence for another ten minutes, Val clinging to Brianne’s shoe as if it were a lifeline, as if it were keeping her upright. And perhaps it was, she thought, as she noticed bits of sky filtering through the trees. “I think that might be the road through there.”

“Thank God.”

In a few more minutes, they found themselves out in the open, at the side of a long, winding dirt road, Shadow Creek perhaps a hundred yards in front of them, stretched out lazily, like a serpent in the sun.

“What’s that over there?” Jennifer squinted as she brought her hand to her forehead and pointed. “Is that a cottage?”

“I say whatever it is, we forget it and head straight back to the camp,” James said, reiterating their earlier decision.

But Val had already turned and started walking—a silent prayer on her lips, Brianne’s muddy shoe in her hand—toward the cottage at the far end of the road.

S
OMEBODY’S COMING.”

“What?”

“You heard me.” Nikki pressed her forehead against the cottage’s front window. “Down at the end of the road. Looks like a whole bunch of people.”

Henry was immediately at her side, yanking on her arm to pull her out of the way.

“Ow,” she said, noting that he’d changed out of his ranger uniform into a pair of better-fitting jeans and a T-shirt bearing the craggy likeness of Keith Richards, cigarette dangling from his lips. The dead ranger’s gun lay discarded on the sofa where he’d tossed it earlier.

“Get down,” he told her now, peering through the front window. “Shit.”

“Is it the cops?”

“I don’t think so.” He snuck another peek through the window. “They’re too far away to tell for sure, but one of them looks like Jennifer.”

“Jennifer? Who the hell is Jennifer?” Was there yet another woman she had to worry about?

“The one I met last night. The one who called here this morning to tell me about Brianne.”

“You told her where to find us?”

“Of course not. Don’t be stupid.”

Nikki felt her entire body bristle. How many times had she begged him not to call her stupid? He was the dummy in the group, not her. If he’d listened to her, they would have been long gone by now. “Who’s she with?” she asked, returning to the window.

“I don’t know. Probably Brianne’s mother and her oddball friends. They’re definitely not cops.”

“So which one is Jennifer?” Nikki asked as the ragged-looking foursome drew closer.

“What difference does it make? Get down,” Henry ordered again. “Do you want them to see you?”

“They can’t see anything. They’re still too far away. Is she the one with the long blond hair?”

“I don’t remember,” he said, but his tone said otherwise. “I told that bitch to stay put.”

“Doesn’t look like she was paying much attention.”

“If she’s talked to the park rangers, if she told them about talking to Henry Voight …”

“You think she’s pretty?” Nikki asked.

“What the fuck difference does it make?”

“She doesn’t look like anything special from here. Looks like a million other girls. Pretty ordinary, if you ask me.”

He waved aside her assessment with an impatient hand. “Nobody’s asking you.”

“I’m just saying …”

“Shut up for a minute, will you? I gotta think.”

So now he was telling her to shut up. Nikki bit down on her lip to keep from crying. “It looks like they’re heading right this way. Shouldn’t take them more than a few minutes to get here.”

“Shit.”

“I’ll go lock the door.”

“Nah. Don’t bother. They aren’t going to go away, and a locked door isn’t going to stop them.” He glanced toward the gun on the sofa.

“What—you’re gonna shoot four people?” Nikki asked incredulously. “Have you ever even fired a gun before? What if you miss? What if one of them gets away? It’s way too risky.”

“Since when do you get to decide? Now shut up and let me think.”

That was twice he’d told her to shut up. “I’m just saying,” she said, trying to still the anger building inside her, “that they’re almost here. And the state troopers could be right behind them. If we take off right now, we can be gone before they get here.”

He seemed to consider this for several seconds. “What about Brianne?” he asked.

“What about her? We don’t have time to deal with her. We just go.”

“Or we take her with us.” He was already sprinting toward one of the bedrooms at the rear of the cottage.

Nikki was right behind him. “What? No. We decided this already.”

“Change of plans.” He approached the bed where Brianne lay sleeping on top of the quilted spread, a handful of leaves
still clinging to her dirty clothes. “Come on. Give me a hand.”