The Winslow Incident (55 page)

Jinx growled.

Shooting her head up, she expected
to see his red muzzle in her face, yellow teeth barred.

Nothing stood on the trail. She
blinked sweat from her eyes. She didn’t think the dog was capable of stealing
her bracelet, yet she wouldn’t put it past him either. He was clever. He was
having no trouble tracking her through the woods. Whenever she’d stop crawling,
she’d hear his paws crushing pine needles.

She seesawed a few more feet down
the path. Maybe Hawkin Rhone swiped her bracelet. He was tricky too.

She had to find it. Without her
charms, she was defenseless. And she needed protection against what she knew
waited for her farther up the path—her shame burning so intensely that
she no longer had any choice but to take it there and douse it.

Patience sat up on cut knees,
wiped sweat off her face with dirty hands, and surveyed the woods. She couldn’t
remember at which point her bracelet went missing or when she’d gotten so lost.
She had no idea which part of the Winslow woods she wandered now.
Why can’t
I see the hotel anymore?
Her thirst was extraordinary.

The dog’s next low, deep threat
shook her frame.

“Go away!” she screamed.

Then she saw it.

A few feet off the path, something
glistened. She leaned forward for a better look. Several wet drops shone red in
the dirt. Looking closer, she saw a slight rivulet snaking along the forest
floor, bending and curving around rocks and slugs. Still bent at the waist, she
pushed herself up and followed the flow but couldn’t determine its source.

The flow trickled wider. Fear
snatched at her.
Where’s my bracelet? Which way is out?

Again, she felt the same choking
panic that had plagued her ever since Gramps Ben told her Hawkin Rhone was back
in Winslow.

She spun around on the path. Which
way had she come? She felt trapped and exposed at the same time. She hugged her
arms across her chest. She had no means to protect herself.

Now the red flowed in a small
stream down the middle of the trail and she stepped carefully back and forth to
either side of the path to avoid getting her feet wet. But then she cut one
side short and her left foot splashed in, immersing her leg up to mid-calf. And
seeing it on herself, running down her white skin in narrow squiggles, she
understood.

It’s blood.

“Help me,” she cried, splashing
through the widening stream that grew deeper with every high step. Up to her
thighs now, she tried to climb off the trail, only there was nowhere to go as
it welled up on both sides and she realized she was going to drown in this
river of blood.

Her shame forced her forward,
wading thickly through, and soon the level rose to her waist. And the roar of
it swirling around her—it felt like
through
her—deafened
Patience to everything except Sadie saying, “Come into the pond.”

Choosing to join Sadie at last,
Patience marveled at the sensation of liquid wrapping around her legs and
running between her toes. Weak arms fluttering, she turned in a slow, heavy
circle. The forest floor was gone. Everything had disappeared but the red and
the wet and the trees sticking out of the rushing blood that splashed against
their trunks and sent crimson spray high up into the branches. Dripping back
down off the pine needles, the sun caught the drops, lighting them like
thousands of brilliant rubies, and Patience thought,
It’s beautiful.

When the level reached her chin,
she finally accepted what Sadie had been telling her all along:
This is our
fate
,
and she succumbed to its warmth and inevitability.

T
racking the creature that butchered the doe and
Melanie Rhone, he’d thought—for one brief hair- and gun-raising
moment—that he’d finally found it. But when it had turned out to be
Patience, he had dropped the revolver to his side, grateful he hadn’t shot the
girl.

Nate hadn’t felt right approaching
her and ordering her to leave the woods. She was already scared, that was
plain. But his job was to protect and he would not allow the creature to harm
her as well. So he’d trailed quietly behind as she’d sleepwalked (it seemed to
Nate) and then crawled on her hands and knees toward the ponds.

When she leapt into the deep pond,
he had to move fast, because he knew Patience Mathers had never learned how to
swim.

There was no getting her out
without going in himself so he tossed the gun and shed his shoes as he ran to
the water and then plunged in feet first. Putrid and warm, the pond was thick
with roots and slick twigs of every size and he had to fight just to keep
moving toward her.

She hadn’t been under long so he
was surprised when he reached her to see that she wasn’t even struggling.
Holding his breath, he dipped down a few feet and grabbed Patience around the
waist and pulled her up until both their heads surfaced out of the water. Then
he gripped her beneath her arms and dragged her through the muck.

Climbing out was a
challenge—the edge of the pond was soft mud—but Nate managed to carry
Patience out in his arms like he used to carry Hazel upstairs to bed after
she’d fallen asleep in Anabel’s overstuffed chair.

Once clear of the water, he set
Patience on a thatch of ferns just as he’d done with the doe and as he did, she
coughed and sputtered and groaned, much to his relief. Then he plopped down
beside her and there they both sat, the girl spitting up foul water and Nate
catching his breath, and he wondered if maybe the bad blood between the
Winslows and the Mathers had finally been cleansed. If perhaps Ben Mathers
could now find his peace.

Once his breath was caught, Nate
stood, dripping wet, to search for his revolver. After finding it in the shadow
of a boulder, he returned to Patience and sat back down, gun at the ready, intending
to wait out the heat and their exhaustion, listening for suspect footfalls in
the woods . . . until his mind drifted off to a pleasant place where creatures
do not hunt and the sun does not scorch.

Upon his mental return, Patience was
saying, “The unburied are cooking up terrible things for us.”

“Unburied?” Nate did not like that
word, or the frightened intensity in her eyes.

“The creeks are full of rain. Old
murders boiling over. Gram and Sadie—”

“You’re not feeling well,
Patience. It’s all in your mind.”

“Sterling Mathers and little Missy
Rhone.”

Those bad apples
, Nate shivered. “It’s only in my mind.”

“Do you see the trouble coming in
your mind, Sheriff Winslow? Trouble in threes.”

The delicate tendrils holding
Nate’s sanity in place were losing their grip. “Trouble?” he croaked.

Leaning close to his face, black
hair wet and stringy, cheeks scratched red through the mud, she breathed,
“Blame burns there.”

Unwilling to ask where, he
shivered again. “That’s enough, Patience.”

“Cows on fire. Bread on fire.”

“Enough.”

Abruptly she stood. “Then I’m
going.”

“I can’t go with you.” Nate rose,
slowly scanning the ridgeline. “It’s out here. I can’t leave these woods until
I catch it.” He looked at her. “Stalk it. Find it. Kill it before it hurts
anybody else.”

She nodded her understanding.
“He’s been following me. Dogs are death.”

“I can protect you.”

“I have to go there. She’ll need
me.”

Nate watched Patience Mathers
dribble pond water onto the trail and then disappear.

Later he would regret staying in
the woods. Because he was not there to help his daughter. And later he would
discover no peace was found. To the grave it goes.

A
fter talking to Fritz Earley about the bread of
madness, after seeing bloody footprints across the kitchen floor just as
there’d been that night Lottie died, and after hearing what could only be that
old brown car pulling up the gravel driveway again, Sarah Winslow had once more
retreated to the safety of her broken furniture and dusty memories in the attic
of The Winslow.

Facing the pull-down stairs
attached to the hatch door, Sarah sat tensely on the vanity stool, shotgun
across her lap, and listened. Listened for footsteps pounding up the servants’
staircase, listened for accusing voices in the circular room just below the
attic, listened for any indication that, right or wrong, they were coming for
her too.

They had come for Hawkin Rhone in
the dead of night.

Sarah’s husband Randall had wanted
no part of it, insisting it wasn’t their place to mete out frontier-style
justice. But Jules Foster had been the only one to agree with Randall.

The rest took up arms—all
too eagerly, in Sarah’s opinion—and marched through the night certain
that two wrongs could make a right. Even after they roped the man’s wrists
behind his back while his young son protested in horror, even as they escorted
the penitent man from town, his head hung low with a remorse that could not
have been made any greater no matter how they devised to punish him, even then,
they remained certain that his suffering would somehow bring tragedy to an end.

Sarah thought then, as now, that
placing blame and enacting punishment only made it all worse—made
everyone guilty to one degree or another.

“All are guilty,” Randall used to
say, including once to his granddaughter after he discovered her trying to set
fire to the gazebo. Then he’d winked at his wife before scolding Hazel in a mock
grave tone, “But some are guiltier than others.”

Sarah sighed, missing her husband,
as always, with a painful longing made worse still by her blossoming fear. She
wondered if his heart had hurt this bad right before he died.

I can’t handle this alone,
Randall. Why did you have to go without me?

Faint at first, the unmistakable
sound of footsteps climbing the wooden staircase quickly grew louder, more
urgent, until Sarah heard the door to the room below her rattle in its frame.
She raised the shotgun with trembling hands. Earlier, she’d dragged a chair in
front of the door and propped it under the knob as she had seen done in movies.
But the crashing noise she heard next told her the chair had only held for a
moment.

Her breath was coming in quick,
shallow gusts; blood coursed rapidly through her veins.

Heavy footsteps were crossing the
room, approaching the attic hatch.

She had pulled up the stairs
behind her and secured the hatch, but the pull-down door couldn’t be locked
from inside. Her only solace was the fact that few people were aware the attic
even existed, and even fewer knew about the folding stairs. Her son and
granddaughter knew, perhaps Honey, and, of course—

“You up there, old woman?”

—Samuel Adair.

S
ean ran a hand across his torso. His ribs
protruded, his stomach was sunken.
I starved to death
, he thought.

Then he remembered he wasn’t dead
yet.

Normally he ate a lot of food:
huge sandwiches that Owen Peabody let Hazel make for him at the Crock, stacks
of his mom’s blackberry pancakes, donuts when Zachary wasn’t around.

But now he was too pissed off to
be hungry.
James Bolinger. Seriously?

Sean stomped down Prospectors Way
into Matherston, the spectral figures of Dinky Dowd and George Bolinger on
either side of him. As they passed the livery stable, Gunner Spainhower burst
out the door onto the street and performed a jig, churning up dust and
screeching like his feet were on fire.

“Havin’ a difficulty, kid?” Dinky
asked.

“Red-hot!” The boy bobbed and
jerked. “Red!” Bob. “Hot!” Jerk.

“Hot as a whorehouse on nickel
night,” Dinky agreed. They continued past and Gunner moved his hoofing up to
the boardwalk where he proceeded to make an even louder racket.

It had been Hazel’s fury at
Matherston Cemetery that made Sean realize he and Patience weren’t dead
yet—she wouldn’t have reacted that way to two forlorn ghosts. And his
sense of loss had been so deep his bones ached with it. Until she confessed what
happened here in Matherston.

The red dog loped across the dirt
road to Sean and sniffed his pockets as if hoping that Sean might have an apple
fritter or two hidden inside.

“What’s up, Jinx?” Sean kneeled
then to examine the rip in the dog’s ear—and his anger exploded. “Who did
this to you?”

Jinx didn’t answer and Sean rose,
feeling irate now that he knew someone had hurt the dog.

“C’mon.” Sean and his ghosts and
the dog continued past Holloway Harness to Hank’s Boarding House, where more
ghost miners streamed in and out of busted-out windows.

George leaned across Sean to tell
Dinky, “Haven’t been back here since you shot me in the Never Tell, you filthy
bastard.”

“I do apologize for that,
Georgie.” Dinky grinned. “But I’ll be damned if she wasn’t worth it.”

“Dreadful pretty,” George agreed.
“Like a Mathers woman, only without the crazy.”