The Skull Ring (8 page)

She patted Julia's hand.

"I only hope this doesn't spoil my appetite for dinner," Julia said, before lifting another forkful.

"A girl your age ought not worry about what she eats. There's a lot of that going on, I hear, girls throwing up and wasting away because they're scared of getting fat. A real man doesn’t mind a little meat on the bone."

Julia grinned. She wasn't called a girl very often, not at twenty-seven. "No need to worry. I'm not afraid of a few extra pounds."

Only other things. Lions and tigers and bears and Satanic cults, oh my.

"Mrs. Covington—"

The woman held up a wrinkled hand. "How many times do I got to tell you? Call me 'Mabel.'"

“Okay, Mabel.”

“Walter Triplett’s been around a right good bit lately.”

“He seems like he knows what he’s doing.”

“A real fix-it man," Mrs. Covington said. "Fixed everything up real nice. Got away with murder, some say.”

“Murder?”

"I shouldn't be airing out nobody else's dirty laundry," Mrs. Covington said, as if she didn't get the opportunity as often as she liked. "But a body ought to keep themselves informed. So it ain't gossip, it's more just passing along information."

Julia gripped her purse tighter. The falling dusk suddenly felt like a suffocating blanket, a funeral shroud for the living. The cat jumped into Mrs. Covington's lap, barely visible except for the green glow of its eyes. The woman stroked it and resumed rocking.

"Walter lost his wife about eight years back. When I say 'lost,' that's exactly what I mean. They was out camping on Cracker Knob yonder." The woman waved a trembling arm toward unseen mountains. "And Walter came back the next day and said she had disappeared. Just up and walked off in the middle of the night. Of course, they rounded up a big search team, every man what could walk and even a few women, and went over every square inch of that mountain. Never was no sign of her."

The chair's squeaking was amplified by the silence of the night. Julia noticed for the first time how softly night descended, how it crept up around you, drifted from the trees, rose like smoke while simultaneously descending like dark snow. Insidious, slow, and determined.

"Walter swears up and down she was right next to him in their little tent, sleeping one minute, gone the next. Didn't take her hiking boots or nothing, just whatever clothes she was wearing at the time. And she was a Stamey, old family. Not the sort to do foolish things, raised to know a little bit about the woods."

"Poor Walter," Julia found herself saying. So that was the thing she had seen in his eyes, the bit of gray haunting the brown of his irises. A sadness buried deep.

"Poor Walter, maybe. But poorer for her, I'd say. 'Course, there is all kinds of caves and cliff edges on Cracker Knob where a body could meet the Maker, but a mountain girl would know to watch out for such dangers. And a mountain girl wouldn't wander off in the dead of night no way."

Mrs. Covington spoke as if looking through the mist of years. "Some say Walter kind of helped her along in her disappearing act. That he helped her over a cliff, if you know what I mean. Or maybe strangled her and tucked her in some of those rock crevices on the north slope."

“He seems okay to me. He’s polite.”

“Well, I hate to speculate on things I don’t know for sure, but I hear the Stamey girl was pregnant when she went missing.”

The pie felt like a lump of wood in her throat as she imagined a scared young woman wandering lost in the wild mountains, with their granite rock shelves and laurel tangles.

"Of course, that ain’t too surprising, since they hung out with Hartley," Mrs. Covington asked.

The name clanged a faint but disturbing bell. "What about Hartley?"

"Deke Hartley lived in that house for five years. A strange old coot. Burned the lights through the night, came and went at all hours, never seemed to settle into a routine. I never trusted nobody who didn't have a routine."

"What's that have to do with weird noises in the woods?"

"All the Hartleys is rough, but Deke managed to stay out of trouble. Some said he was up to funny business, though. I never was one to snoop in other people's affairs, myself, but a body tends to hear gossip."

Despite her unease, Julia hid a grin behind another bite of pie. She suspected she was about to hear everything Mrs. Covington didn’t want to talk about.

"I reckon he was into drugs," Mrs. Covington said. "The strangest smells used to come from that house. People would come by to visit in the dead of night, and you'd never get to see their faces. About drove me batty, trying to keep up with the coming and going."

"Mr. Webster told me the former tenant ran out on his lease, and that the house had been sitting empty."

"He ran out on
everything
. Left all his clothes, the television on, food in the fridge, like he just up and walked off the end of the earth. His car was sitting in the driveway for three weeks, never moved, when I finally called the police. I reckon they've still got him down as a missing-persons case. That was about two years back, if I remember right. About the time that little girl got killed."

Julia wondered why Mr. Webster hadn't told her any of this. Maybe he was scared she would have backed out of signing the lease. And the fate of the previous tenant wasn't the type of thing one usually inquired about when house hunting. Julia didn't believe that houses could be haunted, whether the ghosts were dead things or only memories. The house had been a good choice, solid and cheap, despite these revelations. Just enough peace to allow her time to think, and just enough people around to avoid a sense of total isolation. Even if the neighborhood boxer enjoyed spreading little land mines around.

She scooped up the last of her dessert, a bit of crust softened by the ice cream. "You don't think he's missing, do you?"

Mabel Covington's eyes flicked left and right. "I hear things myself, sometimes. When it's dark, people coming through the woods. See, I think they stashed some drugs or money or something, and they want to get it back. Only they don't want to get discovered by having somebody file breaking and entering charges, so they're waiting for the right time. I got a feeling Hartley
likes
to be missing."

And I thought I was paranoid. Maybe SHE could use an hour or two in Dr. Forrest's office.

Julia wiped the corners of her mouth with a napkin. "Thank you for the pie," she said. "That was the best I've ever had."

"You do my heart glad," the old woman said. "I won't even share no credit with the corporation that boxed it up."

Julia made a show of checking her watch. "Well, I'd better run. I've got some work to do."

Plus it will be dark very soon. And even though my house is only fifty yards away . . .

Mrs. Covington walked Julia to the door. "Didn't mean to scare you none. About Hartley and all that. It's just best to be informed."

"Yes, ma'am," Julia said. She reached down and petted the cat that rubbed against her leg.

"You come on back any time."

"Thank you, Mrs. Covington."

"And call me 'Mabel,' hear?"

Julia nodded, waved good-bye, and headed across the grass. The sun was large and golden in the west, just touching the blazing mountainsides. A sudden gust rattled the leaves like paper skeletons. The hint of coming frost rode on the wind.

Julia crossed the woods into her own yard and circled back behind her house, just to set her mind at ease. Not because she really expected to find anything.

Below her bedroom window, on the ground, was a set of footprints.

Her heart crawled into her throat. She ran blindly for the front door, found her key, rammed it home, and burst inside. She slammed the door closed behind her and stood with her back against it, chest heaving, as daylight ebbed inside the house and every creak was like the lifting of a coffin lid.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Call the police?

The phone waited across the room.

Think, think, think.

Julia tried to calm her breathing, tried to slice through the crippling blackness that enwrapped her brain like a sheet shrouded a mortician's meal ticket.

A Creep had walked up to her window. Maybe peeked in. The tracks outside had looked fairly fresh, though a couple of leaves had covered part of one heel print.

But a Creep is the least likely culprit. Because Creeps don’t exist, remember?

Who else had business that might have brought him to the rear of the house?

Think, don’t panic
.

The electric meter was on the side of the house, clearly visible from the drive. Whoever read the meter wouldn't need to look around back. Same with the phone line. The water supply came from a well at the rear of the property, so there was no water meter.

Then she remembered Walter.

The handyman had probably checked the outside of the windows as well. The prints looked as if they were made by boots with a thick tread, someone with a large foot. Walter was well over six feet tall.

That was it. Sure.

She relaxed against the door, her muscles limp.

No Creeps, no calls to the cops.

The Memphis police had responded to her calls four times in the last year before her moving. All false alarms. They were always patient, except for the fourth call, when the same thin, sneering cop from her first call had shown up.

"What's it this time?" he'd said.

"Someone under my bed," Julia said, already feeling foolish.

The cop had nodded wearily, waited until she unlocked the door, and brushed past her. He went into her bedroom, rummaged around in her closet for a moment, peeked into the bathroom, and waved Julia into the apartment.

"I . . . I swear I heard him. I came in and—"

"All clear." He glared at her. "Same as last time. Did you have the door locked?"

She nodded.

"Then how's a burglar or rapist or whatever going to get
in
?" He flipped the lock on her sliding glass door and removed the security bar, slid the door open on its track, and stepped onto the small balcony. He looked out over the Wolf River four stories below.

"I heard him. I swear."

"Sure you did. I checked on my way over. This is the fourth call since last July. I don't know what you're after. Some like the attention, some are cop groupies"—he’d given her a leer that made Julia want to push him over the railing—"and some just want to screw the system. Whichever reason is yours, filing a false report is a crime."

"I really heard him," Julia said, near tears but not allowing herself to cry in front of that monster.

"Yeah, well, next time, do us a favor and call a private investigator," he said. "We got people out there with
real
problems."

After he left, Julia cried for a half-hour. She never again called the police, even when she was trailed while walking two blocks home one evening, even when she found scratch marks near the lock as if someone had tried to jimmy open her door. And she was determined not to start the same sort of thing in Elkwood. When she called the cops to her new place, she wanted some solid proof to show them.

Except, even in Memphis, you were never really SURE that you heard anything, or that you were followed, or that some Creep had a hot-drool thang going for you. How are you going to convince anyone else when you can't even trust your own mind?

Julia's fear slewed into anger. She slammed into the kitchen, washed the dishes with a great deal of rattling and water-sloshing, and took a shower. She walked nude into her bedroom without bothering to see if the curtains were still closed. She read Spence until he put her to sleep.

She dreamed of bones again.

This time, she was lifting the boards from the floor, prying them up with a long sharp tool. The floor insulation was like yellow cotton candy and had been pushed to the side. She lowered herself between the floor joists to the dirt below. The soil was dark, soft and dry.

Julia dug into the ground with the tool. The first bone was several inches beneath the surface. She cleared it away with her fingers, and held it to the strange, amber dream-light. It was a femur, long and pitted with nicks and cuts, the color of bleached ivory. She placed it on the floor and dug again, coming up with a skull this time.

She picked it up and held it as if she were Hamlet about to reflect on Yorick's demise. She stared into the skull's empty eye sockets. The dark blank eyes had just begun staring back when she awoke.

Lasers of the sun sliced through the trees into her window. Julia blinked against the sudden light, confused, lost in that wasteland between dream and dawn. It was late. Her alarm should have woken her just before the sun crept over the horizon.

Heavy with sleep, she rolled over and reached for the clock. Her hand froze inches away from it.

4:06.

Red digits, simultaneously ice cold and hell hot.