The 13th (7 page)

Christy grinned, in spite of herself. “I’m sure you can find some good painters cheap in town. There are plenty of people in Castle Point looking for a job. Any job. Boondocks doesn’t exactly mean strong industry.”

“Unless you’re a logger,” he suggested.

She shook her head. “None of that out here. Nobody would allow them to ruin these hills.”

“Good,” he said. “Natural beauty should be preserved, not mined.”

He gestured for her to descend the stairs that they came to just ahead. “These lead right back to where we started,” he said. “Call it the back staircase.”

Like the last hall, these stairs had not been cleaned and polished to reflect the prosperity of the entryway. When they reached the bottom, there was a dark alcove to the right, and a shadowed hallway leading away. Christy looked at the door in the alcove, an old beat-up wooden door, which had something scratched into its surface. She stepped to look closer, when Rockford grabbed her arm.

“Old basement entrance,” he explained. “You don’t want to stick your head down there, trust me.”

Just him saying that, of course, made Christy
absolutely
want to stick her head down there, especially since it looked like the wood had been scored by a knife or some other sharp object. She’d been looking closer because the mark seemed to be in the shape of an
X.

She vowed to come back again and see just what Dr. Rockford’s basement held, preferably without his guided assistance.

For now though, except for a brief glance over her shoulder at the darkened door, she followed him back to the main reception area in the front of the building. He didn’t offer her coffee, or any further company at the end of the tour; both he and Amelia quietly escorted her straight to the door and waited for her to leave. In truth, she was fine with that; she was still battling inexplicable bouts of…well…horniness! And she really just wanted to get back to her apartment now and…take care of it. Apparently, it had been too long since she’d attended to
her baser needs. Christy thanked them and stepped out of the silent whispers of the fledgling sanitarium and into the warm whispers of summer on the ridge.

She took a deep breath, held it, and then let it go to take another, trying to clear her head. Then she walked down the short steps to the parking lot and opened the door to her car. The folded notes and photos of the missing persons she’d hoped to look for still rode heavily in her breast pocket, and she frowned at the thought of her mission gone sour. She hadn’t seen a single patient there today.

That’s two strikes,
she thought. Disgustedly, she slid into the car and revved the engine. In her head, she vowed that the third try would not end in a strike. She was going to come back to the lodge. After dark. With hardly any staff in evidence and a complement of patients who were apparently comatose most of the time, it should be fairly easy to move through the asylum undetected, if she could just slip inside. And the police had plenty of ways to gain entry to locked buildings. A smile grew across her deceptively innocent-looking face. Next time, she was checking out the patients, she thought. And, perhaps, the basement as well!

The silk curtains at the border window to the front door of the lodge didn’t fall back in place until Christy’s dust was safely downhill.

The car turned out to be fairly easy to get rid of. Billy had gotten under the hood and banged around with some wrenches trying to get it started again, while TG paced along the gravel shoulder, looking out for any distant headlights. But the car wouldn’t start. And at four in the morning, TG had no more patience for the business. He’d finally grabbed Billy by the shoulder and pulled him away from the engine.

“C’mon, Billy, we don’t want to be driving this piece of shit Nova back to the shack anyway. It’d only connect the bitch with us if the chief ever got his head out of his daughter’s ass and actually came snooping around our place. I’ve got another idea.”

“You wanna tow it?” Billy asked. He looked confused. “Where we gonna get a tow truck at this hour? Can’t hook it onto the Mustang.”

TG cuffed him on the side of the head. “No, you dipshit, we’re gonna use Mother Nature. Get that extra gas can out of the back of the trunk. Doc said we needed to burn off any evidence, and I’ve got the perfect way to do it.”

While Billy grabbed the gas, TG put the car in neutral, and rocked it back onto the road. With Billy’s help, he lined the car up with the edge of the road, and then they coated every surface of the car with splashes of gas. TG dropped Carrie’s clothes on the front seat and doused those with the last
dregs from the can, and then laughed. “Let ’em try to pull a print out of this fireball.”

Then he rolled up the car window, lit a match and tossed it onto the pile of clothes. The flame was instant, orange and hot. He slammed the door shut before it caught the outside, and then yelled, “Let’s go!”

He and Billy both pushed hard as linemen against the back fender, and as the inferno enveloped the inside of the car, they got it rolling slowly toward the edge of the road’s shoulder. It was a huge drop down after the gravel—hundreds of feet.

“Harder,” TG yelled, as the glass cracked on the driver’s-side window and black smoke began leaking out, followed by a thin tongue of reddish flame.

“The outside’s gonna go any second!”

With two grunting, screaming pushes, they rocked the car past the edge of the roadside, and the front end dipped over the edge into space. The flames did escape the cab then, and suddenly the entire frame of the car was enveloped in a blue fire runner, followed by a crackle of orange heat.

The two men fell back on their asses away from the car as it continued to creak forward and then went over with a crack of broken brush and hungry flame.

A handful of smashing sounds followed, and by the time Billy and TG were back on their feet and to the edge of the cliff, they could see the entire car engulfed like a flaming meteor crumpled against some boulders far below.

“Get the can and let’s get out of here,” TG said. “Probably nobody will see that smoke at this hour, but you never know. Either way, by the time anyone comes around, that fire should have gotten rid of any traces of our prints. If someone finds the car,
they’ll wonder what happened to the driver, but they’ll assume it was an accident—the car just went over.”

The Mustang tore away from the site of the “accident” as an orange glow rose from the rocks below. There was only one thing they hadn’t noticed, and that lay on the gravel of the road’s shoulder, where it had fallen off the edge of the hood of the Nova.

Billy’s large, pitted, yellow-plastic-handled Phillips screwdriver.

“I didn’t like the way that cop was snooping around here this afternoon,” Amelia said.

Dr. Rockford shrugged. “The only thing to do there was give her what she asked for. Let her poke around and see nothing. If you’d turned her away cold, she’d eventually have come back again, probably with some trumped-up warrant to search the place—strictly to ensure our safety, of course. You know what a
dangerous
building this is.”

The nurse laughed. “I don’t think they have any idea.”

“I hope not. Or we will be getting some more visits. But I don’t think the Castle Point PD has any real appreciation for the history of this place.”

Amelia used a disposable pad to swipe alcohol across the belly of a woman who was nine months pregnant, and then handed a needle to Dr. Rockford. The woman on the table was Angela Kirtch, a former manager of a dry-cleaning business, and a former
resident of Newton, West Virginia. She was twenty-eight years old and when she’d last walked out of the dry cleaners after a late night getting orders ready for Monday’s customers, she’d been neither involved with a man, nor pregnant.

But now she was hundreds of miles away, and, as she had been for most of the past nine months, out cold. She’d been one of their first recruits, and they’d harvested dozens of vials from her by now. Well, not her exactly. Her unborn baby. Regardless of how seamlessly a child healed in the womb, Dr. Rockford had no doubt that this child was extremely deformed by this point in the pregnancy. They’d gone to the well too often.

But that was okay. This child was never meant to come out of the well. Not alive anyway. Not for long.

“This may be our last session with Angela,” he said, as he stabbed the needle into the eye of the pregnant woman’s belly. The drugged body jerked, just a little, as the eye of the needle slipped through her belly button, poked through the amniotic sac and bit down into the soft, tissue-thin flesh of the unborn infant inside her. Dr. Rockford drew the stopper back, sucking fluid from the child out of the womb and into the vial in his hand. When it was full, he slid the long needle back out, and laid it on the sterilization tray in Amelia’s hands.

“I’ll miss her,” he said. “She’s been a model patient.”

Amelia nodded. “She has been a perfect donor,” she agreed. “But once we take her downstairs, our real work can finally begin.”

Rockford put a hand on Amelia’s waist and drew her close, careful not to upset the tray in her hand. He bent to brush his mouth across hers, and then with his tongue, traced moisture across her swollen pink lips.

“I know you’re impatient to begin,” he said. “But it’s close now, I promise. The first of our children is almost ready.”

She sighed and nibbled at his ear, whispering, “I want to put on the robes, at last.”

“You’ll have thirteen chances for that,” he answered, running a wide palm along her back, before squeezing her hip firmly. “Now c’mon, we have some other work to do first, or we won’t be ready when this one is.”

Rockford clicked off the light switch on their way out of room two, and pulled the door shut behind him.

On the bed, Angela Kirtch shivered as tremors rippled across the stretched skin of her abdomen. In her head, she saw visions of a gnarled child, with blackened skin and long needle teeth, climbing her from calf to thigh to middle. The creature had three eyes, though one of them hung useless from its melted face, an orb that blinked milky white blankness. The thing ripped open her thin robe and bent with its yellow dagger teeth to suck from her breast.

“Momma,” it growled. “Hungry.”

In her mind Angela cried at the pain and the warm spray of blood that dappled the sheets and ran in tiny rivers down her ribs. “Not me,” she moaned. “Not me.”

David slapped some more black goop down in the cracks of Aunt Elsie’s driveway. The July sun was out in furnace fury, and he could feel his back turning red. Still, he left the shirt on the front porch. Cancer warnings be damned; he intended to come back from this summer break both in shape, and deeply tanned. Maybe there wasn’t really time for girls in an athlete’s life during the on-season…but he wanted to at least provoke the opportunity to say no. Or yes. Who said he wouldn’t break the rules?

He used the dandelion-pulling tool his aunt had kept in the shed to dredge some more weeds out of the furrow that ran and branched across the bottom half of the drive. David liked to see results fast, so he’d gouge out a section, take a breath, and then fill it with tar before moving on to the next area for weeding. He guessed the exercise was going to take the entire afternoon. Elsie had a short driveway, but it sure had a lot of cracks.

Again his mind slipped back to the girl with the pink hair. Brenda. And the visit from the cop. At first he’d assumed Brenda had ditched him, but over the past couple days he’d realized that something else had happened. Something far more sinister.

After the cop had left, he’d called the number Brenda had given him, and on the fourth ring, it switched over to voice mail.

“Hey,” a bored-sounding girl’s voice drawled. “You got the Bean. But the Bean’s out bopping somewhere else. Or more likely, I’m asleep. So leave me yer action and I’ll get back to you after the dream is over. Or not. Girl’s prerogative, right?”

The phone clicked and David left his message, just saying he was the guy she’d helped walk it off the other night, and to give him a call.

When he hung up, he had, inexplicably, felt like crying.

Now as he scooped gunk from the bucket and filled up the cracks, he again saw Brenda’s semi-obscene T-shirt, and the spark in her eyes as she poked fun at the bartender, and him.

“Where did you go, Brenda?” he whispered. Maybe it was the fumes of the tar, or the heat of the sun, but at that moment, David vowed that he was going to find out.

It was early at the Clam Shack, and a Wednesday to boot, but there were already a few cars in the lot as David chained his bike to a water pipe on the outside of the bar. Some kids were trail-biking in the lot behind the bar, and their laughter echoed across the night. David felt a surge of melancholy in his heart as he watched them use the hills to accelerate on their way to a plywood ramp at the base of the trail.

He remembered when riding had just been for fun. He’d spent hours every day on trails like those, jumping ramps, nearly breaking arms and legs in bad landings. He’d ridden for miles on empty asphalt and taken to mountain biking for a change in adventure. But somewhere along the line, biking had become competition and work, not so much fun.

“Cool it, jag-off,” he chided himself. “You’re just trying to get out of riding tomorrow. And tomorrow, it’s time to get back on the ridge.”

Tonight, however, he intended to try to get some answers about what had happened the other night.

The screen door slammed shut behind him, and Joe looked up from behind the bar, an instant look of annoyance on his face. Then his features relaxed. “Oh, it’s you again,” he said, wiping a place clear at the bar with a dirty-looking white rag. “Come for another dose of Guinness, have ya?”

David sat down on a stool near the spot Joe had cleaned. “Actually yes, I think I will. But tonight I’m not drinking a gallon of it. That shit’ll kill ya.”

Joe winked. “Lightweight,” he said, pushing the pint of impenetrable stout across the bar. “That Brenda Bean drank you right under the table.”

“That’s what I came to talk to you about actually,” David said. “The police say she’s disappeared.”

Joe’s face lost its humor. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “They were already here. I told them she was here drinking with you. Sorry if that was a problem.”

David shook his head. “I didn’t expect to have to face the cops with a hangover the size of Montana, but no, it’s fine that you told them. You know I woke up alone at the table. But I’m trying to find out who she might have talked to while I was out. You know, before she left the bar that night.”

“I’ve already gone over this with the cops. It was busy that night, a lot of people going on. I lost track of you two after the first hour or so. Wasn’t ’til closing that I realized you were passed out over there. Brenda? No idea who she talked to that night.”

“Can you at least remember some of the people who were here? Maybe some of them would remember something.”

Joe laughed. “Yeah, sure I can,” he said. “But it’s not going to do you much good. Half the town was here that night, and you don’t know the names from Adam. If the cops can’t make tails of the list, you
certainly aren’t going to be able to. But I already told them the folks I could recall, and my memory was a lot sharper about that night a couple days ago than it is now. I know that Hank Fellers was here and Rhonda Beam. Jason, Brill and Brian all came down after the grocery closed, and Jill Sornholt and Betsy Taylor were on the make as usual. I think old man Briller stopped in at one point, and I remember the Terror Twins making a swing through. Then there was Maggie, Pete, John Jr., and Arnie Jenkins over in one of the booths, and I remember a coupla guys came in from Brookstone, though I don’t know their names.”

David had tried to scribble down as many of those names as possible on a pad he’d carried in his pocket, and he put up his hand to slow Joe down.

“Wait a minute,” he begged. “Do you know the last names of Jason and Prill and Brian?”

“It’s Brill,” Joe said, “And no. But they’re all stockers at the grocery. Easy to find.”

“What about Maggie, Pete and John?”

“Maggie Sawyer,” Joe said. “Pete’s her husband. Don’t ask me how John fits into things. He lives with ’em though.” The bartender winked at that.

“I don’t want to know,” David said. “Who are…the ‘Terror Twins’ did you say?”

Joe rolled an eye. “So-called. Coupla losers from out on the ridge. They’ve got a shack down the little road just before the cutoff for the Castle House Lodge. They come in here every week and roll out with a keg. Don’t know how they put away that much shit all the time, but then again, they don’t
do
anything else ’s far as I know.”

The door rattled behind him, and Joe waved. “Here are a couple of our regulars, if you want to check things out with them. But I’ll warn you, don’t get too close, or you may wake up with a very funny
feeling in your stomach when your drunk wears off. It’s called, ‘Oh my God. What did I eat last night?’”

“Clam Shack special?” David asked.

Joe winked, and then stepped over to greet the newcomers and put on a completely gracious smile. “How can I help you ladies? Stoli and soda?”

A haggard brunette slapped the stool next to her and said, “Sure Joe, and how about your ass on this seat.”

“Working, Jill, you know that.”

The other woman, who looked to be packing about 180 pounds around a five-foot frame moaned. “Oh c’mon Joe, you say that every night.”

“That’s ’cuz every night I’m working,” he answered and slid their vodkas across.

David took a deep breath. Was it worth this? Then he slipped off his stool and repositioned himself next to Jill.

“Hi,” he said.

“Mmmm, fresh meat.” Jill grinned, taking a sip of her drink, but not taking her eyes off of him. With one finger, she stretched the front neckline of her V-neck T-shirt a little lower, making sure that he could catch a glimpse of the ample cleavage there.

“Look,” David said, “I was here the other night with a girl I think you might know. Brenda Bean?”

“Yeah, yeah, I know her,” Jill said, holding up a hand to stop David from going any further. “And I already told the police I don’t know where she went that night. They talked to just about everyone they could find who was at the Shack the night Brenda disappeared.”

“Did you at least see who she might have been talking to?”

“Look sweetheart, keeping my eyes on the young sluts isn’t what I’m about when I’m here, okay? I don’t play that team, and usually, we’re working dif
ferent fields anyway. I know she was here that night, and now that I see you, I seem to remember seeing her with you a couple times. But that’s all I know.”

David backed off, thanking them, and drained the rest of his Guinness before putting it back on the bar.

“Getcha another?” Joe asked, instantly materializing to take the empty.

“Naw,” David said. “I got what I came for.”