The Skull Ring (13 page)

Whitmore shrugged. "Hey, I was a cop for thirty-five years. I know anything's possible. But, you'd think at least one or two of the cult members would eventually become . . . now, what's that word I'm looking for? Disillusioned, maybe?"

"'Disenchanted' might be more appropriate."

He laughed. "Maybe you ought to be a writer or something."

"Or a reporter, maybe. So nobody ever came forward?"

"Not in my experience. But looking back, there's maybe a handful of unsolved cases that still give me the Creeps. The Mississippi floats up something ugly once in a while."

"Like an eviscerated corpse?" She told him about the Elkwood victim, and Whitmore's eyes opened wider.

"We had a couple of cases like that," Whitmore said, his voice soft. Julia had to lean forward to hear him over the noise of the gathering crowd and clinking glass. "Cut up just as you described," he said. "Come to think of it, one of them turned up a month or so before your father disappeared. Of course, there was no connection between the two, and no reason to think there might be."

"You've got a good memory."

He looked down at the bar, at the streaks of light in the polished oak. "A detective never forgets the cases he doesn't solve. Because, deep down inside, he never stops trying to solve them."

The guitarist had cranked his amplifier and strummed an ominous minor chord. The audience hooted, whistled, and drank. The drummer played a fill, checking the angles of the drum heads and cymbals. Ten years ago, the anticipation would have Julia electrified and ready to dance all night. Now, she preferred a radio so she could control the volume.

Whitmore looked similarly pained. "That's my cue," he said, heaving himself from the stool.

Julia gathered her purse, finished the last sip of her drink, and paid her tab. She walked Whitmore to the sidewalk and thanked him again.

"Doubt if I helped you any," he said. "Probably just made you more troubled than you already were."

"Trouble is only what you make of it," Julia said, reciting one of Mrs. Covington's mountain sayings. It sounded alien in that world of concrete and steel.

"I won't tell you that you'd be better off just letting the past alone, and getting on with your life," he said. "I'll bet you hear that enough already."

She smiled. "A detective never stops trying to solve them, right?"

His teeth gleamed in the streetlights. "Keep my number and give me a call if anything turns up."

She shook his hand and went up to her room, slightly woozy from the drinks. She lay on the bed and listened to the steady throb of traffic, the city's blood pumping through its monstrous asphalt veins.

Why hadn't Mitchell told her about the ring? Surely he knew that James Whitmore would mention such an unusual item. But he could have easily withheld Whitmore's number from her, he could have failed to mention the detective at all. She may or may not have found Whitmore through her own efforts.

By the time she fell asleep, fully clothed, she had convinced herself that Mitchell had only been trying to protect her. Mitchell didn't want her bothered by the past because he wanted a perfect future for her. As she drifted into a haze of jumbled imagery, she tried to pray but no words came, and neither did a response to her seeking.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Julia hadn't dreamed at all, at least as far as she remembered in the morning. She had a mild hangover, and she gave her reflection a hard time in the bathroom mirror.

"All it takes for you to avoid nightmares about bones is to slug down some eighty proof," she said, looking into her own red eyes. "You could be onto something there, girl. Something that doesn't sound like it leads to a happy ending. I believe I'd just as soon be crazy as turn into a lush."

Then she realized that probably only crazy people talked to themselves in the mirror, so she showered away the muscle aches and then dove into the Memphis phone book. She got the answering machine of her friend Sue McAllister, who had been a fellow reporter with
The Commercial Appeal.
Julia left a message that she was in town and wondered if they could get together tomorrow.

Mitchell called, and they met downtown for lunch. Julia glossed over her meeting with James Whitmore and didn't mention the skull ring. Mitchell had been a patient ally so far, and she didn't want him to turn on her. She concentrated on being pleasant, the kind of woman she thought he craved. But her mind strayed back to Elkwood, and halfway through dessert of lime Italian ice, Julia found herself thinking of the baseball cards Walter had brought her.

Mitchell's cellular phone interrupted his eating, and as he spoke into the mouthpiece, Julia studied his features. He was tan, with a strong jaw and cheeks that could raise a shadow by three o'clock. His hair was carefully trimmed, his sideburns cut even with his ears. Dark eyes, a nice mouth. Movie-star handsome, really. He could play the lawyer in a Grisham thriller.

She found herself comparing him to Walter, and she shuddered inwardly. She went after the dessert with renewed enthusiasm. Mitchell was her past, present, and future. Walter was the man who fixed her windows. End of reverie.

Mitchell closed his phone and gave that "tax-exempt status" grin that worked so well on civil-suit jurors.

"Will you drive me out to my father's old place?" she asked.

"The old place? What do you want to go out there for?"

"I haven't been there in seven years." She thought up a quick lie. "Dr. Forrest said it would be good for me, help me gain a sense of closure."

"What does this Dr. Forrest know? You've only been seeing her for a few months."

"Dr. Forrest is helping me. She understands me."

Mitchell pushed his plate away and looked out into the street. "And I don't, is that it? I suppose I should be grateful that at least you aren't seeing Lance Danner." He said the name in a mocking, effeminate manner. "Or are you on his calendar for this afternoon?"

"Will you take me or not? I can afford a cab."

Mitchell sighed, the exhalation of a tireless martyr. "Okay. Let's go. We can talk about the wedding on the way."

The house where Julia had lived was in Frayser, fifteen miles from downtown. The area was a bit run down, old industrial meeting up with the urban push of the outskirts, with working class families caught in between. They had a little difficulty finding the house because the area had changed so much, with new construction and the leveling of the giant maples that had once lined the road. The house still stood, its clapboard siding grayed by weather, a section of the gutter missing, grass high around the crumbled walk. A "For Sale" sign leaned in the front yard.

They walked around back, Mitchell carefully watching his step so his shoes didn't get scuffed. The fence along the back yard was missing some of its pickets and looked like a retired boxer's smile. The farm that had once stretched beyond the row of houses had been carved into lots, though a pasture and the warped barn remained.

"I used to play there," Julia said, looking out over the hayfield that was September-yellow. "Daddy wouldn't let me go in the barn, though."

"No wonder," Mitchell said, standing behind her and swatting at bugs. "The cow manure is probably six feet deep. Why in the world would anybody want to have animals wandering outside his house?"

Julia studied the barn. Something was odd about it, there in the stark light cast by the sun's zenith, the tin roof rusted, gray siding boards askew and pocked with knotholes. The image tickled the back of her mind. But that wasn't quite right. Her memory of the scene was nearly a negative, of the barn in a colder light. The barn against the darkness.

"Jeez, you’d think they'd buy a lawn mower," Mitchell said.

Julia bit her thumbnail.

"Now that's what I call progress," Mitchell said. He pointed off in the distance, through a gap in the red-leafed maples. Bulldozers and trucks were parked on a large leveled plain of dirt. "The city needs to expand the tax base out this way. They're running sewer and water at a few hundred a foot, but these crappy houses provide zilch for valuation."

Julia stared into the black throat of the barn.
What? What?

If only Dr. Forrest were here.

"Well, honey, look on the bright side," Mitchell said, walking away from her to the edge of the lot. "I mean, I know it's terrible what happened to your father, but at least you were lucky enough to be adopted by wealthy people. If you had grown up here, we probably never would have met."

The barn. Something from that night, the night of the skull ring and altar.

"Honey?"

The barn, stone, chanting, hoods. Bad people.

A hand touched her shoulder, and she yelped and turned.

Mitchell stood with his hands out, mouth open, as startled as she. "Huh?"

Julia put her hands over her face.

"Jeez, honey, why are you so jumpy? I knew we shouldn't have come out here." He stepped toward her. She moved away to the fence.

"Why can't you leave the goddamned past alone?" he shouted. "It's no good, and it never has been."

He adjusted his tie below his red face. "Why in the hell do you do this to yourself? Why do you do it to
me
?"

She looked away from him, out across the pasture. The barn's shape blurred with her tears. She felt on the edge of a great rift, her balance thrown, as if one of the earth's plates were breaking off and carrying her away. She gripped the fence, wanting to hang on to this world. Even with all its pain and troubles, it was the world to which she belonged.

If Mitchell came to her now, hugged her, she would let him. She would hug him back. She would leave this place and its memories, accept the safe life Mitchell offered, give up the senseless fleeing to Elkwood. She would go back to Lance Danner, no, she would get another therapist of Mitchell's choosing. And with the new therapist, she would only work on the present problems, the day-to-day ones that led forward to the future.

She would never look back. As much as she could avoid it.

"Maybe someday I'll understand," she said hollowly. "And someday I can make you understand."

"Someday," Mitchell mocked. "Well, we don't have a lot of 'somedays' left, so you'd better make up your mind."

She started to turn to him, to let him see the tears, but she knew that would weaken him and make him ashamed. Which Mitchell was real, the one that shouted at her or the one that caressed her tears away?

She continued staring across the pasture, at the golden-seeded grass that rippled in the breeze. It was a soft sea, a place that drowned memories. For only a moment. Because the barn floated like a dark ship on its surface.

She heard Mitchell stalk away and slam the door of his Lexus. She gave him a chance to drive away, knowing he wouldn't. She waited until the continents drifted back together, until the ground was stable under her feet. Then, without looking back at Mitchell, she stepped over the fence and headed across the pasture.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The interior of the barn was dim, even with the door open and the siding planks warped enough to admit slices of light. The support posts and boards were gray with age, and the hayloft floor sagged overhead. The place smelled of moldy hay and the dust from dried manure. Beneath that lay the odor of animal fur, even though the stalls had stood empty for years.

As she entered, the shadowy corners crawled toward her like legless things, dragging memories as if they were sacks of dead animals. Her feet moving across the dirt floor made a sound like the slithering of serpents’ tongues. She shivered even though the air was humid and still. Julia hugged her arms to her chest, afraid to go forward but unable to stop herself.

She had been here before.

The scars on her stomach throbbed.

She knelt, light-headed, as if she were going to vomit. Her ears rang with a high, piercing whine. Her heartbeat doubled its pace.

Panic.

The panic she had fought so hard to overcome. The panic that she'd managed to hide from Mitchell and her coworkers and even, while they were still alive, her foster parents. The panic that rose up and swallowed her on nights when the past drew too near, when the awful fingers came clattering and clutching.

The panic that Dr. Forrest insisted Julia could conquer.

But Dr. Forrest was in Elkwood, eight hundred miles away, and Julia was here, alone, on her knees in the dry crumbling hay. Julia closed her eyes and pressed her forehead to the ground.

The cloak of panic descended, swift and suffocating.

Deep breaths
, she told herself, but the thought was only one of many, crowded by death and a hot knife and the man with the skull ring and the cold stone and the bad people around her, the bad people touching her, laughing and chanting, the bad people, watching the blade touch her stomach and the silver slipping into flesh and red drops welling around its tip and the hand with the skull ring and the man with the hood and the face beneath the hood and—

She clawed forward, hands meeting a partition. A splinter penetrated her palm, but she kept her grip and pulled herself up, forced herself to her feet. The tears on her cheeks gathered the dust she had stirred. She sucked in a lungful of dirty air, trying to ignore her rapid pulse.