Hard Truth Read online

  “Why are we talking about mice?” he said with the lowest wattage of intensity she’d yet seen him use, which wasn’t all that low by run-of-the-mill standards. “It has something to do with my kids, with Candace, doesn’t it? Mice. Rocky. My kids. Something about Fern Lake Cabin.”

  He’d done the equation in record-breaking time. Either he was the X factor himself or a real whiz at brainteasers.

  “We found thirteen dead mice there, nailed to the back of the outhouse,” Anna said. “They’d been nailed up alive.” Mrs. Dwayne squeaked in a mouse-like fashion and Robert Proffit flinched. Anna was unsure whether the sudden cringing was due to mouse phobia or guilt.

  “Who would do a thing like that to any one of God’s creatures, however lowly?”

  The words rang hollow, gutted either by revulsion at the deed or because they were the oft-repeated platitude of a hypocrite.

  “That’s what we were wondering,” she said as she rose. Proffit had had time to school his emotions and cool his febrile thought processes; she wasn’t going to get any more out of him. At least not in this interview. Time had come to shake up the variables. Mr. Sheppard, with his quelling influence, couldn’t be in two places at once. Since there was no legal way to send him out of his own chapel she decided to put him on edge. To Lorraine she said, “I think I’ll go outside, get some air.” The chief ranger nodded her permission.

  Once outdoors Anna realized how desperately she did want to get some air. The windowless room, redolent with stifled dreams and isolation, had begun to close in on her, a sense of poison pressing in through the pores of her skin. Taking off her hat she combed her fingers through her thick hair. It was grown long enough to fall in her eyes and curl at the collar of her uniform shirt. She’d let it grow because Paul liked it. After years of independence it was good to have a man worth catering to now and again, especially if there was a payoff. With Paul, so far, the payoff had been pretty good. Higher praise than that, Anna chose not to voice, even in the soundproofed rooms of her own skull. Hope and joy were double-edged things when their fulfillment depended upon another person.

  Like a horse ridding itself of flies, Anna shook off the toxins that had settled on her skin. Breathing deep of air so dry and thin it burned her lungs, she wondered why life wasn’t enough for most people, why they had to hide in cathedrals, mosques and temples and rehearse human-born fictions of something yet to come, practice infinite subtleties of castigation of flesh and mind, as if by limiting pleasure and freedom in their one guaranteed existence they might earn kudos in another, one from which no explorers had ever returned alive.

  “Ranger Pigeon?”

  The sound was but a whisper of air, soft as the voices one hears in the murmur of fast-moving streams. Anna might have thought she’d suffered a visitation but for the fact ghosts seldom called one by one’s formal title.

  Turning her face from the cleansing carcinogens of the sun, she replaced her hat. Mrs. Dwayne, looking older, frumpier and more careworn in the uncompromising light of day, had followed her out.

  “The girls aren’t doing so good,” she said in a whisper. A furtive look toward the chapel door confirmed Anna’s suspicions of just who was not to overhear this tête-à-tête. “Especially Beth. She won’t eat unless she eats with that crippled lady, and Mr. Sheppard doesn’t like that even though I’m always with her. That other one’s a woman doctor. They’ve not got husbands or kids, either one of them.” This last was unquestionably a condemnation of Dr. Littleton’s and Heath Jarrod’s moral and spiritual states. “But I keep on. Beth is so thin. And the dreams. Poor child tries to stay awake. I found her asleep on her feet in the doorjamb. She’d been walking so she wouldn’t fall asleep. Alexis too. But not so bad. But then she has her dad for comfort.”

  The last was said with such bitterness, Anna wondered what Mrs. Dwayne had against the ubiquitous Mr. Sheppard. Before she could finish her thought, the woman suddenly sucked her breath back into her lungs as if she would suck back the words she’d spoken with it.

  Anything she wasn’t supposed to know was particularly attractive to Anna. “She has her dad,” she echoed neutrally.

  “Mr. Sheppard. A father makes you feel safer. He’s a father to all of us. But especially some of us. Blood, you know.” Mrs. Dwayne was babbling, still in a whisper, overbright smile discordantly pasted on her face, hands animated; an amateur actor’s rendition of “Happy Talk.”

  Anna let her continue this peculiar whispering monologue till it was clear she wasn’t going to say anything she oughtn’t, then she interrupted, to Mrs. Dwayne’s obvious relief. “Have Beth or Alexis told you anything about where they were? What happened? Anything about Candace?”

  “Nothing. They say they don’t remember anything. I really think they don’t; even Mr. Sheppard couldn’t get anything out of them.”

  The inference was that Mr. Sheppard could pry the thoughts from a marble statue. Maybe he could, but Anna doubted the statue would have much market value after he’d done with it.

  “What do you think happened to them?”

  Mrs. Dwayne looked slightly startled that anyone would want her opinion on what had befallen her child. “Satan,” she said without hesitation. “He likes children best because they are precious to our Lord. This world is a battleground and he will use anything he can to get at God, he hates Him so. Even here, tucked away from the world, he is at work. Ritual tortures. Sacrifices. They are especially active around Halloween and Good Friday because that was the day they killed our Lord.”

  Anna was half sorry she’d asked. It crossed her mind to tell the woman that, because of persistent rumors, the FBI had done an extensive investigation of the satanic cults in America. The investigation was somewhat disappointing. They couldn’t find any. Like razor blades in Halloween apples, satanic cults with black Sabbaths and infant sacrifices were an urban myth. In the end she didn’t waste her breath. Mrs. Dwayne would not have been comforted, only alarmed that the belief system on which her world was based was being challenged. A grand battle between Lucifer and God with humankind as cannon fodder was more appealing than the unglamorous responsibility of dealing on a daily basis with petty, mean human evil.

  “Tell me about Beth’s dreams,” Anna said. She had little belief in the value of dream interpretation as a crime-solving tool—or a tool to solving the subconscious—but a scared girl might just tell things that were true as if they were only dreams, a way of communicating the forbidden.

  “They’re demonic,” Mrs. Dwayne said unsurprisingly, given her earlier revelation. “Beth wakes screaming and crying. She wet the bed—something she hasn’t done since she was three years old. Mr. Sheppard was firm about that. It’s just a matter of choosing the good over the evil. Beth talked about darkness and crying things and being sorry. She asked God to forgive her over and over. She dreamed of a wolf howling. Dreams of slaughter as in the end of days.”

  “May I talk with Beth? I’d like to see her.”

  Mrs. Dwayne shook her head. “No. Mr. Sheppard thinks it would only confuse the girls further. He says they are to stay at prayers until God sends his forgiveness.”

  “For what?”

  “We don’t know,” Mrs. Dwayne wailed, if wailing can be done in a whisper.

  Anna truly, deeply, sincerely wanted to smack her upside her little sheep’s head. Either the woman was as foolish as Robert Proffit was bright, or whatever gleam of good sense she’d once had had been sluiced away when her brain was washed.

  “Why did you want to talk to me?” Anna asked sharply.

  Mrs. Dwayne looked at her blankly.

  “Seriously,” Anna went on. “You followed me out. You are clearly agitated, afraid of being caught. It must have been important, yet you tell me nothing but ghost stories and dreams. Why did you want to talk to me?”

  A moment’s silence fell between them, a balm to Anna’s ears and spirit. Mrs. Dwayne’s eyes filled with tears. Anna was unmoved.

  “I wanted you to hel
p,” she blurted out finally.

  “I can’t,” Anna said bluntly. “Your daughter’s in a living hell, another girl is missing and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. You know these girls. You talk to them. You want to keep secrets from me, fine. But without you, without being able to talk to Beth, what do you expect me to do? Arrest Beelzebub on loitering charges and interrogate him?”

  Anna dropped the anger as suddenly as she had taken it up. It had done its work. Mrs. Dwayne was at least awakened from her trance of victimhood. Gently, Anna said, “Help me. Help me find out.”

  For the briefest moment Anna thought she’d gotten through, then the woman bleated, “Mr. Sheppard—” and feeling her way like someone in a blinding sandstorm, she turned to the house.

  “What’s his first name?” Anna called after her.

  Stopping, she looked back in surprise. “Mr. Sheppard’s?”

  “Yeah. What’s his first name?”

  “Dwayne,” the woman said.

  “That would have been my best guess,” Anna said.

  Mrs. Dwayne fled toward the chapel door.

  eleven

  Solitude had changed since Heath had broken her back. Once she’d loved it, craved it, savored it. Now she craved it, but when it was given her, she found her feelings in conflict. Before, she’d not known why people were scared to be alone. She wished she could have gone to the grave in happy ignorance of this knowledge.

  Still and all she was enjoying it, possibly out of sheer perverse willfulness. Gwen had taken the Cushman scooter—a retro-styled aqua and white one with matching helmet—and left the Rollin’ Roost to scoot the five or so miles into Loveland. Her excuse was groceries but for that she could have taken the RV. The truth was she and Heath needed time apart, just a breather. Only in solitude could certain places in the new psyche renew themselves. Or so Gwen was fond of saying, and so Heath had once believed. The other truth was that Heath’s Aunt Gwen loved her scooter. On it she became the wild red-haired American girl who’d ridden madcap through the streets of Florence in her college days, the girl who’d broken hearts, drunk too much wine, studied art and medicine, gotten her own heart broken and come home to Tulane University in Louisiana to become a healer of women.

  Though a seventy-one-year-old wild woman on a scooter in a herd of SUVs scared Heath witless, she never said anything.

  That could change, she thought as she looked at her watch. The sun had gone behind the mountains, the sky was drifting from blue to green to the soft gray that invited the first of night’s stars, and Gwen had yet to return. Refreshingly, Heath noted, she was concerned mostly with her aunt’s welfare. Being self-involved was more tiring than one would think.

  Sipping a mediocre but functional Merlot, she watched the purest fade of light in the east where night seeped out over the plains. A climber by inclination and trade—she’d taught at the wilderness skills training center in Colorado Springs for the past seven years—Heath had given the earth’s flat places short shrift. Unless they had a deep cave one might climb down in, what possible good were they?

  With wheels instead of crampons she would have to make her peace with a relatively two-dimensional world. That or get a job as an elevator operator, she thought wryly.

  Idly wondering if there were even any elevator operators left, she drank again, then lit a cigarette. Wiley, lying half a dozen feet from her chair, chin on paws, raised an eyebrow. Like most animals of good sense, he didn’t like the smell of smoke.

  “Don’t start,” Heath said and took a drag. She was smoking a little too much, drinking a little too much, but tonight they were comparatively happy excesses. “Joyous addicts are less tiresome than morbid addicts,” she said to the dog. He heaved a great and weary sigh and fell over on his side. One needn’t even be an anthropomorphist to assign attitudes to Wiley. A cell phone Heath had been resisting the temptation to use to check on her aunt tootled. Gwen had it trained to play Dixieland. It was her aunt asking permission to stay an hour later to attend a premiere in Loveland’s burgeoning art district.

  Worry over her aunt laid to rest, worry over herself drowned, Heath lit the kerosene lamp, poured a third glass of wine and settled into the universe. Darkness pooled in the east, bled west to the mountains. Night was complete. Heath was in a pleasant half-dreaming state, self-hypnotized by the steady fire of the lamp, when Wiley began to growl; the mean kind of growl that warns of intent to make the bite worse than the bark. At once alert, if not fully sober, Heath ordered him quiet. He’d come to stand guard near her chair and she closed her fist in the prickling fur of his ruff more to reassure herself than to restrain him.

  Nothing.

  “Coyotes,” she said. Because a pack of these most adaptable canines would tear apart a domestic dog, even one as brave and fierce as Wiley thought he was, she took his leash from her saddlebag, clipped one end to his collar and tied the other firmly around the arm of her chair.

  He didn’t growl again but neither did he relax. Heath couldn’t either. It was time to go in. She was leaning down to untangle her lap rug from beneath her wheels when a faint trickle of sound flowed into the campsite. High pitched, barely audible, it came from all directions and none. Voices heard from a distant playground. One at which the games were of pain and fear.

  She felt the dog go rigid under her hand. “Shh,” she whispered. The voices grew louder. Children’s voices. “Please, please, please. No.” The sound trailed off and Heath leaned forward unconsciously, trying to follow it. Again it swelled. “Please leave us alone. Please. Go away. Leave us alone.” That was the limpet’s voice, she was sure of it.

  “Beth!” she called into the darkness, then waited.

  “Leave us alone.”

  “Beth! Come out where I can see you.” Heath squinted into the darkness that had wound tightly around her camp. Mindlessly staring into the lamp had blinded her and phantom flames followed wherever she looked.

  “Leave us alone.” This so small, so weak, as if the child speaking—not Beth, Heath thought but wasn’t sure—was dying or fading away. Then, sudden and so clear, Heath screamed: “Leave us alone or I’ll kill you. I swear I will.”

  The kerosene lamp on the picnic table exploded. Goblets of fire flew into the air, rivers of fire poured over the tabletop and down onto the benches. Wiley shrieked and tried to run but he was tethered to the chair. As he hit the end of the leash, the force pulled the wheelchair over, pulled Heath into the fire running liquid beneath the table. Wiley was burning. The lap robe flamed up. The acrid bite of kerosene mixed with the smell of burning wool.

  Heath could see nothing but living fire. Her eyes and the backs of her eyes and her brain were burning. Wiley was barking, high and wild and desperate.

  Fear is essentially a tardy emotion, demanding the luxury of time. Apocalypse was happening too fast for it to take root. Not much giving a damn whether her worthless legs burned or not, Heath began pulling on the leash, reeling in Wiley. Her hands were on his fur, closed into fists. She pulled him to her chest and beneath her chest and smothered the flames that danced with such unholy glee along his back and left side.

  A lifetime’s worth of reflexes came to bear; she was kicking free of the burning lap rug. It was a shock when nothing moved. With a screamed curse, she grabbed at the blanket and threw it from her and her dog.

  The end of the world didn’t take as long as she’d thought it might. Within a heartbeat or two the fire was out. The kerosene had burned itself up. Neither table nor benches had caught. The world, presuming there still was one, was black and utterly silent.

  “Don’t make us do it,” hissed from the void, was made more terrible by the children lost within it. “Don’t make us do it!” Louder now. They were coming, the childish voices with their rain of fire.

  Heath could not regain her chair; could not even see her chair. Had she miraculously been reseated, she hadn’t the wherewithal to fiddle with ramp and sliding door. Murmuring four-letter words like panicked endea
rments into the ears of the dog, she unhooked the leash from his collar and, Wiley clutched to her chest, she wriggled commando-style underneath the RV. Once there, she curled herself around Wiley as best she could with no bend in her knees, no tuck in her thighs, and buried her face in his fur.

  Both were whimpering.

  Voices turned to laughter, unholy laughter of insane children, circling around the RV. Wiley struggled to get free. He barked to put the fear of god into whatever demons were attacking his mistress. Heath wouldn’t let him go.

  The laughter swelled, ebbed, drifted, cut. The sound of feet pattered around wheel to wheel. “Kill it!” a child screamed, and a stick or knife jabbed Heath in the back. “Kill it! Kill it! Make it die.” Again and again the stick jabbed at her. Little girls tormenting a caged cripple and a burned dog. Footsteps raining on the hard-packed earth.

  “Leave us the fuck alone!” Heath screamed.

  “Leave us alone,” a little girl’s voice mocked.

  Dust and the smell of diesel forced its way past the stench of burned hair stinging Heath’s nostrils. RVs burned like tinder, she remembered, their petroleum-based parts evaporating into toxic gases or melting into searing blobs. She hoped the fireworks, at least, were over.

  The poking stopped.

  Footsteps, laughter, taunts stopped. It took Heath a while—moments, minutes, she wasn’t sure—before she realized quiet had returned. She listened till her skull hurt with the effort. Her eyes had readjusted from the fire and she could see a faint difference between the starlit dirt outside and the shadow in which she lay. Wiley whined. She forced herself to loosen her grip lest, in an overabundance of fear and protectiveness, she smother him. She didn’t let go of his collar. Whatever had visited the campground was too evil to be driven away by one pure-hearted dog.