Shadow Stations: Unseen (6 page)

* * *

I lay in the dark for hours after I returned to my bedroom, obsessed with the rock the prisoner had left in the trap. Somebody was going to come after him for that one.

Eventually I gave up on sleep, googled monkeys, and found a photo on Wikipedia that looked like the silvery brown creature I’d seen. A macaque. At least ten subspecies lived in Southeast Asia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and islands in the Pacific. That didn’t exactly narrow anything down.

The device gleamed in the moonlight. It took everything in me not to pick it up again.

I drank my cold tea and pulled the blanket around my shoulders. The wind shook the trees against the house as if it were an evil force, but whatever terrors nature could come up with, they could never equal the darkness inside the human heart. I had to find out the name of the island. I knew it was a real place.

Chapter 9

“
You want to go out for breakfast?” Mike asked me when the sun came up. He leaned against the kitchen counter with the same concerned look he’d had the night before. The short haircut really did make him look like a cop. He already had the nosiness. All he needed was a gun and a pair of aviator sunglasses.

I poured myself a cup of black coffee, careful to keep my wrists inside my sleeves. They looked even more horrible than they had last night.

“
I’m going to skip breakfast and take the dogs out,” I said.

“
If you’re still sick I can drive you to the doctor.”

“
You don’t have to hover over me, Mike.”

He looked embarrassed. “I’ve just been worried about you. You don’t seem like yourself. So you’re going to walk around here?”

“
No, Devil’s Den.” I intended to stay off the public road near the professor’s house in case John Savenue took a joyride to Fairfield.

“
I’ll come with you,” he said with that same stare.

I hesitated. I’d been friends with Mike for a long time and wasn’t sure what was happening between us. To be fair, I did throw up, and my wrists did look awful, and he was a caring guy. He cared about everybody all the time, not just me. And the Devil’s Den area of the battlefield was deserted this time of year. It might be a good idea if he came along.

“
Okay, you can walk Luna,” I told him. “That would be a help.”

We put on our coats and unlocked the Camaro. The immaculate car looked like an animal had never set foot inside it, but I could clean it afterwards. The dogs jumped in and settled down together.

“
What happened to your Jeep?” Mike asked.

I avoided his eyes. “Nothing. Professor Wu wants me to drive their cars around.”

The classic Camaro was a dream to sit in. Once I put my hands on the steering wheel, I really fell in love with the beautiful car. We took the Fairfield Road for ten miles, turned onto the battlefield, and passed endless fields with pale monuments to the soldiers who’d lost their lives there centuries ago.

Mike kept looking at my hands. “How’re your wrists?”

“
They’re okay,” I lied. “Seriously, you don’t have to hover over me every second.”

He didn’t answer, but I caught him watching me from the corner of his eye. We drove by the rocky slopes of Little Round Top, an innocent-sounding name for a gruesome hill where thousands of soldiers had shot and bayoneted each other into oblivion. The road forked. I headed into the parking lot for Devil’s Den and parked alongside a formidable jumble of boulders that cut across the land.

We were the only ones there.

“
Luna’s easy,” I told Mike. “She’s old. She won’t try anything.”

He wasn’t a dog person. His face said he was doing this for me and would make the best of it. Luna hobbled along with him, ears alert, while Nikki and I walked beside them.

The four of us took the shortcut up a narrow stone staircase through the boulders to the top of the hill, where a lone oak spread its massive limbs. The oak was so old and gnarled that it could have been the Tree of Life standing over the valley. Before us, the wind poured over a low stone wall that enclosed the Triangular Field, rumored by the locals to be haunted, and rattled the dead leaves in the woods behind the wall. The snow-filled field sloped beyond the wall to distant farms and more woods on the horizon.

“
I’m going to take the road to the Rose Farm,” I said. “It’s about a mile.”

Mike put a hand on my shoulder. “Have you thought any more about transferring?”

I stepped away from his hand, pretending to adjust Nikki’s collar. That’s all he’d done all morning, ask questions and stare and try to touch me. And the answer was no, I hadn’t thought about transferring. I’d been so caught up with the prisoner that I hadn’t thought about anything else. The nightmarish island had even distracted me from my grief about Ben.

But when I glanced at Mike, I knew he wouldn’t believe me if I told him about it. Mike wouldn’t even get it if I turned on the device in front of him. He wouldn’t see the evil.

“
I haven’t made up my mind,” I began.

“
Hey, wait a minute, stop,” Mike shouted at Luna. The old Husky bounded down the field and over the stone wall, trailing the red leash through the snow.

“
Luna,” I called. “Luna, no.”

She raced down the remnant of the trolley line into the open brush. I was stunned to see her run. Then I shook myself into action and pounded over the field.

“
She’s after a rabbit,” Mike panted behind me.

“
Luna, stop!” I scrambled across the rocks, whistled, and shouted, but she ignored me, sprinted toward the woods, and disappeared into the brush again. When she appeared a moment later, a streak of white and gray fur on the far hill, Mike barreled past me and grabbed her neck.

“
Hey, hey, stop,” he shouted, sliding across the ground.

I caught up with them. “Shit, she lost her leash.”

Mike kneeled down with his arms around her. The old Husky was panting like crazy, but her eyes were bright. “She just took off on me. I didn’t see it coming.”

“
Her collar’s gone, too. This is awful.”

“
I’m sorry, Amy.”

I shook my head. “The collar has all her tags, her ID and her rabies and license and I don’t know what else. I can’t believe this.” I took Nikki’s leash and collar and fastened them on Luna, who looked like she’d run out of steam, but I didn’t trust her now. Nikki would stay with me without a leash.

“
I’m really sorry,” Mike said for the five-hundredth time. He took off, scrutinizing the weeds, but after twenty minutes we couldn’t find anything and gave up.

He kept apologizing all the way back.

* * *

“
I’ll pay to replace everything,” Mike told me in the driveway at the professor’s house. He’d climbed into his truck and was lingering with the window down.

I shook my head. “They’ll show up. I’ll go out there later and look for them again.”

He turned the ignition. “You let me know if you want some company.”

Dark clouds moved across the sky. If it stormed, the rain would wash the snow away and give me a chance to spot the collar. After Mike finally drove off, I made coffee, grateful that at least nothing had happened to Luna, but before I realized what I was doing, I found myself in front of the hall closet.

I’d hidden the device in the coat before we left. With hushed anticipation, I slipped my hand inside the pocket. The evil thing was still there. The cool metal felt as if it belonged in my hand. I took it out and weighed it, and then, with every ounce of will that I possessed, put it back in the coat and shut the door.

The dogs followed me into the living room, where I did what I’d wanted to do all morning. I opened my laptop and googled the Grasslands, determined to come up with something.

“
We expanded here this year,” John Savenue had said when I met him on Long Lane, but what did “we” mean? His personal family, a crime family, or a business group?

Dozens of newspaper articles showed up, but they didn’t mention John Savenue, only TriSphere International and a John Sun, who seemed to be their spokesman. No photos.

When I ran a search on TriSphere, development projects in the Appalachian mountain chain appeared from Pennsylvania through New England where the mountains changed names, split up, and branched into the Canadian wilderness.

Some company. They were huge and mostly investing in rural areas fifty to a hundred miles outside major cities.

I went back to an earlier article that mentioned plans for South Central Pennsylvania, but it didn’t spell out any details. Some local towns showed up: Fairfield, Gettysburg, Biglerville, McSherrystown, and a string of other tiny boroughs in the middle of nowhere, and Hanover, which wasn’t all that small. The new West Hanover Mall that was opening at the end of November showed up in an article that said TriSphere had purchased it in the spring. Fifteen articles and no John Savenue. All of a sudden I came across Ben’s accident and couldn’t breathe.

Explosion Kills Reporter in One Car Accident
, the ugly headline said. There it was, the photo of Ben’s blackened car upside down in a deep ditch. Over six weeks had passed since the paper had run the horrifying picture, but it might have been yesterday by the way I felt.

Ben Weikert, a 22 year old reporter for the Adams County Courier, died last night in a one-car accident near the site of the future Grasslands resort off Route 15. Weikert was on his way to interview Joe Goode, the owner of a farm next to the Grasslands, when his car went off the road. Police and Fire and Rescue responded to the scene and found the car engulfed in flames at the bottom of an embankment. Weikert was pronounced dead at the scene. He worked for the Adams County Courier for two years and was a student at Gettysburg College, where he was majoring in journalism.

The article continued with personal stories about Ben, but I couldn’t bear to read them. It also included a headshot of Ben and a photo of the farmer he’d been on his way to interview. I refused to look at Ben and focused instead on Joe Goode’s weathered face. The camera caught deep lines across the old man’s forehead, a huge gouge on the left side of his skull, and the sharp edge of the metal plate holding his head together. Ben told me before the interview that the farmer was selling his land because he’d been in a bad accident.

But I couldn’t help myself and eventually I met Ben’s eyes. His face gazed out from the page, clear-eyed, intelligent, warm. My Ben, my best friend, my love, the man I’d planned to marry. The memory of that nightmare night gripped me. I couldn’t finish the article and began to sob. Then I screamed and threw the couch cushions across the room.

Chapter 10

“
Here’s the black dress,” I told Karin that afternoon. “I forgot to pick it up from the cleaners. And here’s the watch.” I handed her the dress in a dry cleaning bag and put the watch on the coffee table.

Karin broke into a smile. “Oh, wow, thanks. I love this dress. It’s perfect for the photo.” Her gold earrings matched her gold ballet slippers. Karin and I were twins, but she’d inherited every single strand of decorating DNA.

“
You can keep it, too. I don’t want it anymore.”

“
You’re sure? It’s beautiful.” She lifted the dress out of the plastic bag. “You don’t want this? I mean, it’s gorgeous and it has a jacket and everything.”

“
I’m tired of it.” The dress was bringing the whole funeral back, so I took the watch out of the box to keep my face from giving me away. “Look at this. They did a good job on the inscription.”

“
Nice.” Her eyes grew huge. “Oh, my God, what happened to your hands?”

I pulled the gloves down over my raw wrists. “Some bleach. I had a reaction.”

“
Oh, my God, and you’re trying to cover them up.” She gingerly lifted one of my gloves and cringed. “Bleach did that? Amy, they look horrible.”

“
I know. They’re awful. I had an allergic reaction.” I tugged the glove down.

“
Does it hurt?” Her eyes were full of pity.

“
Yeah, a little bit, but they’re okay. They’ll clear up.”

That was it. I couldn’t take the way she was looking at me and so I left. The sharp ache in my hands was really bothering me by the time I started up the Camaro. The ache had changed over the last hour to a pressure that ran through my bones and up my fingers until even my nails hurt. I peeled off the gloves before I swung into the street. My wrists looked about the same, bruised and purple, but my hands seemed swollen now, unless I was imagining it.

Five miles down the Fairfield Road I had a terrible thought. What if the probe was poisoning me?

I made a U-turn and headed to the Walmart on the far end of Gettysburg. Rain hit the windshield. I’d just pulled into the parking lot when the storm broke wide open and pounded across the asphalt.

Covering my face, I ran for the doors and pushed through the sea of shoppers to the crowded pharmacy aisles. An antibiotic cream might work, or a cream with aspirin, or even a burn ointment. I grabbed a box of homeopathic drawing salve for splinters, boils, and insect stings. Maybe it would take the swelling down. I could try them one by one.