Slice (31 page)

E
IGHTY

P
aulette applied a cold compress to Abby's right knee. “Nothing's broken,” she assured Jessie, who hovered beside the little girl's bed. “But she'll have quite a bruise.”

“Are you sure nothing's broken?” Jessie asked.

“Yes, I'm sure. She can move everything. She was lucky to land mostly on her bottom.”

Abby giggled a little.

Jessie sat down on the edge of the bed, stroking her daughter's hair. “How do you feel, sweetie?” Jessie asked.

“Okay now, Mommy,” Abby said.

Paulette let out a long sigh of relief. For a moment there, it had been terrifying. Abby had been sprawled on the grass, not breathing. As it turned out, however, she'd just had the wind knocked out of her. Her breath came back to her and the color returned to her face as Jessie lifted her from the ground and carried her into the house. It had been a frightful moment, but it looked as if the worst would be a bruise and a scraped knee.

Yet as terrifying as the moment was, something else had frightened Paulette even more, and this fear wasn't as easily abated.

As Jessie cooed over Abby, Paulette turned around once more to look at Aaron. The look on the boy's face was still there. He stood in the doorway of Abby's room, watching everything and everyone with eyes that seemed considerably smaller than before, eyes filled with hatred and resentment. Paulette had seen the look on his little face as he stood at the kitchen door watching Jessie run to Abby. It was a look that had transformed his features. It had been a terrible thing to witness, leaving Paulette cold. She shuddered again seeing that the look was still on his face.

As she watched him, Aaron turned and walked away from Abby's room. Paulette followed him into the hall. Aaron was descending the steps.

“Where are you going, Aaron?” she asked.

“Home,” he said sullenly.

“Don't you want to say good-bye to Abby?”

“No,” he replied, and disappeared down the stairs.

Paulette popped her head back into Abby's room. “Everything okay in here for the moment?” she asked.

“Yes,” Jessie replied. “I'm going to read Abby a story. I think she'll nod off.”

“A nap would be good for her,” Paulette agreed. “Give her more of that Arnica solution on the side of the bed in another half hour. I'm just going to run out for a moment. I'll be back soon.”

“Okay, Aunt Paulette.”

The older woman hurried down the stairs.

Outside, she caught a glimpse of Aaron as he walked through the grass toward the woods. The sun was dropping lower in the sky, sending long shadows of the bare trees across the yard. The air was getting chillier. But Paulette didn't have time to stop for a sweater. She didn't want to lose sight of Aaron.

Paulette followed at a safe distance. The boy didn't seem to be keeping to any particular path as he headed into the woods. He disappeared into the shadows, but Paulette hurried after him, spotting his small form through some bushes. She hoped to follow him to wherever he was living. Maybe his home would be, as everyone had been surmising, one of those new houses on the other side of the woods. Maybe Paulette would find the boy living there with a foster family, or maybe with some relatives who, from all appearances, were rather neglectful guardians.

Or maybe she'd discover something else: that Aaron was living with Emil Deetz, who'd somehow rooked the kid into spying for him on Jessie.

Paulette struggled to keep the boy in view. She caught a glimpse of the top of his head several yards away and endeavored both to follow him and to stay out of view.

She realized she was frightened. She didn't want him to turn around and see her. Now why should she be frightened of a little boy? It seemed absurd, but it was true that Aaron scared her. That look she'd seen cross his face—it had been chilling.

Paulette moved deeper into the woods. She glanced once over her shoulder. She could no longer see the place where she'd entered.

Looking back in front of her, she realized she couldn't see the boy. She'd lost him.

Paulette stood still, looking around. The shrill calls of crows in the trees filled her ears.

“Damn it,” Paulette whispered to herself. Aaron was gone. She tried to find him with her mind, to psychically follow him and maybe pick up his trail that way. But she was unsuccessful. Sometimes her gift worked. Sometimes it didn't.

So much for that. She supposed it had been foolish to even think she could follow the child through woods as thick as these. With a sigh, she turned around and headed back the way she came.

At least, Paulette
thought
it was the way she came. After walking for several minutes, she realized she was going the wrong way. She tried to tune in, to get a mental picture of where she was. She turned abruptly to the left. Her instincts were telling her to go in that direction, and she trusted her instincts. Her inner voice had rarely failed her.

For some reason, she had an image of Howard. Why should she think of the man she had loved and lost at this moment, out here in the woods?

Whose voice was that?

Paulette stopped in her tracks, realizing her heart was thudding in her chest.

“Get a grip, Paulette,” she told herself, shaking off the strange, inexplicable fear. She marched confidently through the fallen leaves, pushing past low-hanging branches and bushes. Just a few yards away, she knew, was Jessie's house.

But the woods only seemed to get thicker.

“This is crazy,” Paulette said out loud. She'd known these woods all her life. But she didn't recognize them. They seemed to extend indefinitely in every direction. And looking up at the darkening sky above her, at the strange gnarled fingers of the bare trees, Paulette thought they were higher than she'd ever remembered. The oaks and maples seemed to stretch for miles up into the air.

Once again she tried to tune in, to psychically find her way out of the woods, but all she saw was Howard—his helicopter exploding and falling to earth in a million colorful starbursts.

She began walking in a different direction, but after about five minutes she was suddenly convinced she was trudging deeper into the woods, and farther away from home. “Concentrate, Paulette!” she told herself forcefully, shutting her eyes and willing her mind to see the way out. But she saw nothing. And when she opened her eyes the sky was even darker.

Paulette strained to see lights through the trees. But there was only darkness. She was lost. It was impossible to believe, but she was lost.

“Howard,” she said in a tiny, tremulous voice.

That was when she realized something else. The sounds of the birds in the trees had ceased. Paulette was enveloped in complete and utter silence. The only sound came when she moved, as she crunched through the fallen leaves underfoot. Paulette's heart began to race faster. Terror seemed to surge through her veins in place of blood.

She started to run. The woods weren't infinite, even if they seemed that way right now. She would just keep running until she came to the end. She needed to find her way out of them—whether her side of the woods or the other side—before nightfall. Paulette did not want to still be trudging through these terrible woods when darkness closed in. Because now a new terror had entered her mind.

She wasn't alone.

Someone—something—was watching her.

She knew it instinctively. When she stopped running, she heard the almost imperceptible sound of someone else—some
thing
else—also coming to a halt. Without any sound coming from the trees, Paulette's ears were very attuned to what else she could hear. And she could hear breathing. She was certain it was not her own.

“I've got to get out of here,” she said softly.

The boy had led her in. He had known she would follow.

“And now he—or something—wants me dead,” she whispered.

Once more, Paulette began to run. She felt it was her only chance. She needed to reach the end of the woods—any end of the woods. She ran, mystified that no matter which way she seemed to go, she saw no lights, no break in the trees.

She stumbled over something, falling forward.

Fortunately, she was able to break her fall with her forearms, and the heavy blanket of newly fallen leaves cushioned the impact. Paulette was quickly back on her feet, looking behind her to see what she had stumbled over.

She gasped.

It was a body.

A dead man.

His face looked like a rotted pumpkin left too long outside in the rain. His dark purple cheeks had caved in and his eyes had sunken deep down into their sockets. The flesh around his mouth had largely decomposed, leaving a jagged, jack-o'-lantern smile. His throat had been cut so savagely that Paulette could see the bone of his neck. Maggots and flies swarmed everywhere, crawling all over his face and through his hair and out of his clothes.

It took several seconds, but Paulette suddenly knew the corpse was Bryan Pierce.

She screamed.

As she ran, she realized she could hear the birds in the trees again. Up ahead, she spotted the lights of Jessie's and Monica's houses. Paulette made a final sprint out of the trees. “Call the police!” she shrieked. “Call the police!”

It was Monica who emerged first, standing outside her house and looking toward the woods with a perplexed expression on her face. “Aunt Paulette?” she asked. “What the hell is going on?”

“Call the police!” she cried as she reached the safety of her niece's house. “I've found Bryan. It's another murder! And tell the police . . . I know who did it!”

E
IGHTY-ONE

“
Y
ou mean you're actually putting stock in what that fortune-teller says?” Chief Walters asked Patrick Castile in disbelief, as they stood in the middle of Hickory Dell. The road had been blocked off to public access by police. As the sun rose above the trees, casting an eerie pink glow over everything, a combined force of Sayer's Brook cops and FBI agents were combing the woods for evidence in the murder of Bryan Pierce. There were swarms of men wearing rubber gloves and a dozen barking dogs. Bryan's stinking, waterlogged corpse had already been removed late last night and sent to forensics.

Castile looked over at the chief with impenetrable eyes. “I think it's very possible that Emil Deetz is behind all these killings,” he replied emotionlessly.

Walters laughed. “But Paulette didn't say it was Emil Deetz who killed Pierce. She said it was the
ghost
of Emil Deetz. She said she'd sensed something
supernatural
out there in the woods. She said she'd somehow
tuned in to
it.” The chief rolled her eyes, humming a few bars from the theme music of the old
Twilight Zone
TV series.

The neighborhood was buzzing with people. Gert Gorin, of course, was trying to get past the orange police tape that cordoned off the search area, and had to be constantly told to step back. Mr. Thayer walked up to the scene with Todd Bennett, asked a few questions, then stepped back, shaking his head in dismay. So far no one had emerged from Jessie Clarkson's house, but word had spread through town, and a couple dozen people from nearby streets had begun congregating at the end of Hickory Dell, shouting questions to police, asking if they had any idea where the serial killer might strike next.

Walters had, of course, attempted to contact Heather Pierce. But Heather wasn't home; her car was gone, and no one answered the door when they knocked. They'd tried late last night when Bryan's body had been found, and again this morning. Apparently Heather had taken the kids and gone out of town. At the moment, officers were attempting to track down the Pierces' housekeeper to find out where the family might have gone.

“Look,” said Chief Walters, trying to get through to the stubborn FBI agent, “the only evidence, if you can call it that, of Emil Deetz still being alive comes from a very unreliable witness. Your own files indicate that Deetz was killed in a shoot-out in Mexico.”

Castile leveled her with another blank look. “There were parts of that report that were classified. If you had been allowed to see the whole report, you'd know that our agents had their doubts about Deetz being killed, as they were never allowed to inspect all the bodies. In the shoot-out, the building caught fire and most of the dead were burned beyond recognition.”

“So you're telling me . . . the FBI was never certain of Deetz's death?”

“That's what I'm telling you.”

“But something very different was told to us at the time.”

“We didn't want panic. We believed we had the situation under control.”

Walters felt her anger rising. “My department is pledged to protect this community. We shouldn't have been told that a man who'd killed one of our citizens was dead when he might not have been. And certainly you should have told Jessie Clarkson that Deetz might still be a danger to her.”

“I wasn't with the agency then, so I can't say how they might have proceeded differently, but it's possible mistakes were made,” Castile said. “But I can tell you that we have been monitoring the situation consistently, and have felt we had it under control. If Deetz had escaped death, we were confident he was not in the United States. A man in Mexico who we believed might have been Deetz was under constant observation.”

Walters narrowed her eyes as she studied the implacable face of Castile. “And is that man still under surveillance?”

“He has apparently left Mexico,” the FBI agent told her.

“So that's why you think these killings might be the work of Emil Deetz.”

“Indeed.” Castile looked off toward the woods. “I informed Ms. Clarkson of that fact this morning.”

“Well, this changes things,” Walters said. “But I'm still not convinced that John Manning isn't somehow involved. I've always suspected he's in league in Deetz.”

“Leave Manning to us,” Castile said, before moving off to confer with one of his agents.

Walters fumed. The arrogance of the young man infuriated her. How dare he withhold information from local police? Something was very, very wrong here, and Walters knew it. For one thing, her men had searched those woods, every inch of them, after Heather had reported her husband missing. How could they have missed Bryan's body? Unless someone had only recently put the body there . . . someone who had reason to prevent its discovery for as long as possible, so that any physical evidence might decay in the meantime. Someone who'd had a fight with Bryan right before he died, perhaps, and whose DNA might still cling to the corpse?

Emil Deetz might or might not be involved in these murders, but Walters wasn't ready to concede that John Manning was squeaky clean in the matter.

She marched over to his house and up to his gate. She rang the buzzer.

“Yes?” came a voice through the intercom. The chief recognized it as Manning's assistant, Caleb.

“I'd like to speak with Mr. Manning,” she said. “It's Belinda Walters.”

“Just a moment.”

Walters waited. For several minutes there wasn't a response, and she was about to buzz again. But then the gate opened, and John Manning stood there. He was wearing a black satin smoking jacket and sandals.

“Chief Walters,” he said.

“Just a couple questions, Mr. Manning.”

“Haven't you already asked me everything?”

“You're aware that Bryan Pierce's body was found in the woods last night with his throat cut?”

Manning closed his eyes, then opened them. “Yes. I spoke with Jessie on the phone this morning.”

“Well, it's about Jessie that I want to ask you, Mr. Manning. Why did you buy the property next to hers?”

“I think I answered that before. I liked the area.”

“Why are you pursuing a friendship with her?”

Manning looked peeved. “I'm not answering that question. In fact, I'm done answering questions for you. I suggest if you have any further things you'd like to know, you take it up with the FBI.”

He closed the door on her face.

Walters steamed.
Take it up with the FBI. . . .

“Leave Manning to us,” Castile had said.

What the
hell
was going on here?