The Winslow Incident (29 page)

S
ean Adair held his hands before his eyes and
watched as fresh tremors seized them. Spasms had racked nearly every part of
his body by now. Making tight fists to stop the trembling, he raised his eyes
and refocused.

The world was a solid blind of
orange, which made it tricky to differentiate between objects. Except for the
crosses, lined stark on the rise against the deepening sky.

Though he had no memory of how
he’d gotten here, he knew where he was: the Winslow family graveyard on the
eastern slope of the hotel grounds, nearly overgrown with brambly bushes. The
blackberries smelled overripe.

Despite its low-slung position the
sun continued its assault.
I’m dried out
, Sean realized. His lips were
cracked and his tongue felt rough. Gazing at the pond at the base of the
boneyard, he weighed the wisdom of taking a drink.
Could I feel any worse?

Not likely, he decided, and went
to the edge of the pond.

Sean leaned down and scooped up a
handful of warm, murky water, sending soft ripples across the pond. Cupping his
hand to his mouth, he drank, relieving his parched throat. He reached for more—only
to snatch back his hand when he noticed long black hair floating a foot below
the surface. Enthralled, he watched the hair sway and fan out in the water.

He stepped away. “Just walk away,”
he told himself.

Instead, Sean picked up a fat stick
and crept back to the water’s edge. Against his better judgment, he bent
forward and poked at the hair, upsetting the surface of the pond with a sound
like falling leaves, creating small whitecaps on a miniature ocean. Then,
working his stick beneath the mushroom of hair, he pulled up.

“Patience?” His voice revealed his
sudden, sure dread.

A face rose slowly to the
surface—a lovely, pale face.

“Holy shit.” Sean felt instantly
paralyzed. His heart stopped beating and his mind screamed,
Don’t fall in!

Her arm shot out of the pond,
white and slippery, reaching for him, trying to pull him down into the dark
water with her.

Sean fell onto his back, still
gripping the stick, and the arm bone landed on his bare chest with a smack while
the wet hair draped over his belly. He struggled to claw the hair off but the strands
clung tight. Mud-thick revulsion poured through him and his skin crawled wherever
she was touching him.

He screamed and scrambled up, finally
figuring out that these horrors were attached to his stick. So he flung it. Neither
bone nor hair, he could see now. Just a harmless sapling with dangling roots.
It smacked into Ruby Winslow’s headstone and slid down, coming to rest in a
tangle with the blackberries.

“Damn . . .” Sean glanced down to
see if his heart really had exploded out of his chest or if it only felt that
way.

He
walked over and kicked the pale sapling away from the marble grave marker, then
he read the epitaph.

Ruby Waring
Winslow

Beloved Wife
and Mother

Not a thing
we could do

’twas the
Spanish Flu

1918

Nearly hidden in the weeds, a
shorter headstone stood several feet away. Curious since he’d never noticed the
grave before, he went over and smashed down brambles with his foot and brushed
away dirt, the granite grainy and cool to his touch.

His
blood turned to ice when he saw the inscription.

H. S. Winslow

No, he
thought.

Born 1993 / Died 2010

No.
He backed away, refusing to believe. Until he read the
final line.

Our Precious Hazel

No No No No No.
His lungs clamped shut so tightly he was certain he’d never
breathe again.

Dying flowers lay at the base of
her headstone. Ugly pink carnations.
Hazel would hate those
, he thought.
Hate them.

When
he turned to run he stumbled over a mound of dirt and fell into freshly turned
soil, his face inches from another engraved granite stone.

Aaron Samuel
Adair

April 2003 ~
July 2010

Sleep Little Lamb

“Oh, no.” Sean shook his head
violently. The mound was so small, so pathetically small. He pushed himself up
and away from the headstone.

Turning his back on the graves,
desperate to forget he’d ever seen these horrors, he pounded his thighs with
his fists. “Wake up! Wake up!”

Only he wasn’t asleep.

He kicked at brush and rocks,
stirring up stickers and dirt. “I should’ve told Zachary. I should’ve told him,
‘Screw your bacony breakfast and come take a look at this right now!’”

Sean glanced back at the
headstones. “I didn’t know,” he explained. “How could I have known?” Remorse
flooded him and he sank to his knees, drowning in it.

When a man cleared his throat,
Sean lifted his head to find his uncle standing before him.

“What’s got you so down, kid?”
Uncle Jim asked, holding a bottle of whiskey by the neck just like he always
had up until it’d killed him.

D
ogs are death. That Irish setter puppy showed
up in town only one day before Patience’s grandmother died. Nobody knew where
he came from, and then her Gram was gone. But the dog stayed. Dogs are omens of
death. And Jinx is Hazel Winslow’s familiar.

“She’s a bad girl, Patience,” Gram
Lottie said, “who plays games with people’s lives.”

“No,” Patience disagreed, at the
same time wondering if it might be true. And she wished the spiders would stop
crawling on her, pricking her skin with the tips of their spindly legs. For
hours she’d been sitting with Gram Lottie on the piano bench, their fingers
poised but silent on the ivory keys. The charms hanging from Patience’s
bracelet clicked against the honey-colored wood each time her hand shook. “No,”
she repeated. “That’s not true, it isn’t.” She reached out to touch Lottie, her
grandmother’s skin so dry it brushed away like powder beneath her fingertips.

“You told my fortune,” Lottie
spoke without breath, without warmth, without words. “You knew what was about
to happen to me. And now you know what is going to happen next.”

“It’s not true.” She refused to
face Lottie now; her Gram would know Hazel had hurt her, would see the shame
branded onto her cheek. Instead, she began to play her part of the duet and
Lottie joined in at once and the music was beautiful, so beautiful, that she
never wanted the song to end. When it did Patience said, “Let’s play it again.”

“Who are you talking to?”

Startled, Patience swiveled on the
bench. She hadn’t heard her grandfather come into the parlor and didn’t
understand his question.

“Who are you talking to?” Ben
Mathers repeated. He wore a mask over his mouth, goggles over his eyes, a cap
on his head, gloves on his hands.

He looked silly but even as she
smiled at him, her stomach churned with trepidation. “Why do you have all that
stuff on, Gramps?”

When she stood up from the piano
bench he yelled, “Keep back! Close enough!”

“Why?” Patience felt crushed.
Nobody cared about her. Not her parents, not her grandfather, not Hazel—
especially
not her. Like sisters, Patience had always thought. Until Hazel slapped her.

Cocking his head at her, he asked,
“Why the devil are you wearing that get-up?” The mask made it sound as though
Gramps Ben was actually in the next room. “You march home, Patience Charlotte,
and get yourself cleaned up.”

She glanced at the outfit she’d
changed into earlier, humiliation burning her face.

“And who were you talking to?” he
murmured through the mask.

Why did he keep asking that
question? Couldn’t he see? “Gram . . .” She gestured to where Lottie sat
sideways on the piano bench, watching them with keen interest.

His eyes looked surprised behind
his goggles. Then he backed farther away. “Patience, dear, listen. Your
grandmother passed on. It’s been five years. Don’t you remember?”

Patience shook her head hard,
deflecting his words away from her.

“The Winslows killed her. You
remember that, don’t you?”

Yes
, Patience thought but refused to say it out loud.

“That place is vile.” His mask
twisted on the last word.

She glanced down at her charm
bracelet, at the gold horseshoe Hazel gave to her on her sixteenth birthday,
and at the four-leaf clover Hazel had given to her not long after her Gram
Lottie died.

Then Gramps Ben said, “The
Winslows mean this town harm, dear. Ruinous harm.”

I told her!
Patience’s heart clenched painfully tight. Didn’t she tell
Hazel something really bad was about to happen? Madame Marcelle knew.
I
knew. Why doesn’t anybody ever listen to me?
Hazel should’ve never let Tanner
break that mirror. And she didn’t even help me take the pieces of broken glass
outside to bury them in the moonlight.
Why didn’t she help me?

More baby spiders hatched beneath
her skin; the pinching increased. “Gramps,” she tried to steel herself, “is
Hawkin Rhone back?”

Y
ou. Are. The sheriff. You. Are. In charge here.

Nate Winslow paced along the
precipice at Dead Horse Point. He strode ten feet, stopped, then turned back
the opposite direction. When he lost his footing, dirt and pebbles cascaded
down the side of the cliff until he recovered his balance and resumed pacing.

You’re weak
, he berated himself.
Weak and not performing your duty.

Peering directly into the
brilliant sun setting across the canyon, his gaze landed on the truss bridge.
He blinked to erase the glare spots from his eyes . . . to clear his vision so
he could see the bridge, so he could see what was happening down there.

Nobody’s coming.
He took a long, faltering breath.

Then his scalp crawled. Something
was watching him.

His pulse burst wild as he whirled
to face the woods at his back.

Nothing but trees. Incredibly tall
trees. Even the young bristlecone pines towered, growing fast and skinny,
reaching for their share of sunshine. He felt incredibly small.

Nate turned to look out over the
canyon again, swaying at its edge, the Lamprey River rushing by below. It’d be
better if he just fell over the side, he realized. Then it’d all be over. For he
was certain his incessant retching had by now ripped open his stomach to leak
its noxious contents and pollute the rest of his body. He felt as though his
every cell had been injected with poison.

He wondered when he’d feel better.
If
he’d feel better.

He wondered if he was thinking
straight at all.

He wondered if he’d completely
lost his mind.

He thought of his daughter Hazel,
a tough girl but still only a girl, with a dusting of freckles and delicate
features, and bright eyes that were all Anabel Holloway. Nate hoped Sean and
Hazel were looking out for each other. Despite some occasional undesirable
behavior, Sean was a good kid. And even though Hazel sometimes came home
red-eyed from drinking and what else Nate didn’t want to know, at least she’d
never come home pregnant.

He wished his wife were here to
help him worry through these things. What did he know about a
seventeen-year-old girl? Anabel was the only girl he ever really knew—
thought
he knew—and now this one was enough like her to scare the hell out of
him.

He’d given up looking for his wife
a long time ago. Why look for somebody who doesn’t want to be found? It’d
finally dawned on him like a cold slap to the face what a fool he’d been making
of himself in front of his fellow lawmen whom he’d enlisted in the search, in
front of his townspeople, in front of his daughter.

Now he thought too about his
mother Sarah and the rest of the townsfolk. If he felt this bad, might others
be even worse? If they were, they would be vulnerable. They would need him to
protect them.
It’s all up to you. If you don’t do something, people are
going to get hurt.

“Pull yourself together!” He shook
his head to try and clear it and in answer to his voice something stirred in
the woods behind him.

Again he spun to confront it,
drawing his revolver this time, and his boot heels sank into the loose dirt at
the edge. Only vaguely did he register that he was about to tumble backwards
over the side of the cliff. He threw his weight forward by dropping to one knee
and then he scrambled back up to take aim at the rustling.

After he fired off a round without
consciously pulling the trigger, the sound of cracking branches and fleet
footfalls over dry pine needles confirmed the creature’s presence. Visually
tracking its movement between the trees, Nate refused to get any closer.

Refused because the smell coming
from the woods horrified him: it was the scent of monster, of thick dank fur
and hot rapacious mouths with long tongues.