Devil's Oven (16 page)

The front door shut and he heard the jangle of keys.

“Danelle?”

 Anthony felt the air change. The man had found the woman. Anthony looked out the big glass door that opened onto the backyard. The other woman, the one he had come for, was still in the water.

“Red! Where are you?”

He heard the pounding of the man’s feet as he ran up the front stairs.

Anthony took one more drink from the jug of milk and set it back on the refrigerator shelf.

•  •  •

Lila’s first thought was that a cloud had drifted between her and the weak April sun. She opened her eyes. The sun wasn’t bright enough to put the man standing over her in backlit shadow, so she was able to get a good look at him. It seemed the two of them were locked together there—she, surrounded by water, her body bare, vulnerable, he—well, who in the hell was he, and what was he doing there? Should she be afraid? He was enormously tall, and his clothes were dirty, caked with mud and—
Jesus, is that blood?
  Her mind froze. She wouldn’t be able to recall until much later that he had initially seemed handsome to her, like someone she might flirt with at a party to make Bud jealous enough to take her home and give her the kind of loving attention she wanted. But by then she had seen his eyes, and the smile that made her want to make herself as small as possible and hide in some safe and secret place.

Before she could speak or move, she heard Bud scream at her to
get down!
His voice came from above her, maybe from one of the upstairs windows.

Thank God. Thank God for Bud, who loves me.

The man was already lifting her from the water when Bud took the shot. She trusted Bud. He would never miss, would never kill her instead of the man whose sure hands were squeezing the breath out of her so that she couldn’t even scream. She kicked at him, but she was nothing in his arms, and soon he was holding her in such a way that she couldn’t land her foot anywhere on him. She knew if she let him hold on to her, let him take her, she was already dead.

She clawed at his face and neck. His skin was waxy and stiff beneath her nails. They would use a special tool to dig it from beneath her fingernails when they autopsied her. She had seen it on TV, imagined the clink of the stainless on stainless as they finished and dropped the tool into a basin
.
Finally, she was able to scream, but the man didn’t flinch or even try to shut her up.

Then they were moving away from the house and she was seeing the world upside down and she could hear Bud screaming after them. Poor Bud. He sounded afraid for her. But there were no more shots. Then there was no more Bud. There were only the filthy heels of the man carrying her and the sudden, cold embrace of the forest.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Bud paced the kitchen, unable to sit. He could hear the troopers out in the hallway. They kept their voices low, but there was no mistaking the undercurrent of excitement. Danelle was lying out there, her blood painted in an almost perfect arch on the wall beneath the staircase. Her husband, Roy, was on his way to the house.

Bud wanted to roar into the hallway and blast them all out of there. He wanted Danelle to be alive and whistling the funny little tunes that drove Lila crazy. He wanted Claude back at his desk working the phones. He wanted everything back the way it was.

He had let Lila down. He’d had the chance to save her and he had let her down. Was she even alive? If she was, what was the bastard doing to her? Every muscle in his body tensed at the thought of what she might be going through. Lila wasn’t afraid of much, but he had seen her face as the creature dragged her out of the hot tub. The word
terror
didn’t begin to describe what he had seen there.

His carry piece sat empty on the kitchen table under the watchful eye of the patrolman guarding the patio door. Bud wanted to grab it like a lifeline and run out after Lila. She was somewhere on Devil’s Oven, but the troopers weren’t letting him leave, and they weren’t doing anything to find her. The way they had talked to him, he wondered if they thought he was involved. He would be damned if he was going to sit around any longer. He took out his cell phone to call Dwight as he headed for the front hall.

“Mr. Tucker?”

Detective Johnson made a hard stop in the kitchen doorway to keep from running into Bud. “I need another minute of your time.”

“I want a hell of a lot more than a minute of
your
time,” Bud said. “Do you know what could be happening to my wife while you people are screwing around down here? Where are the damn dogs? Is someone bringing dogs?”

The detective gave a look to the trooper by the door, and the man nodded. He went outside to join the technicians near the hot tub.

“Detective Burns is on his way. We’re putting a team together,” Johnson said. “Let’s you and me sit down for a minute.”

“I want your people to get their asses out there and find my wife.”

 “If they’re on foot, they’re not going to get very far, very fast. You said the guy was barefoot?” Johnson said. “The Dixon woman said the man who took her husband was barefoot.” He absently bit at a thumbnail and studied it. “Hell of a thing to be running around the woods in your bare feet.”

“My wife didn’t have
any
clothes on, Detective. Her hair was wrapped in a towel!” He didn’t like the guy’s attitude. Johnson was a pissant downstate trooper, but he carried himself like he had a camera trained on him twenty-four/seven.

Bud could smell peppermint on the detective’s breath as he pressed in close. He knew there was a chance he could get the guy’s 9mm in his gut, or—if another officer happened to see them arguing—a state-issued, .40-caliber piece pointed at his head.

“A fucking towel,” Bud said. “I’ll be damned if I see any humor in that.”

Johnson’s left eye twitched.

“The aggrieved husband thing only buys you so much patience,” he said. “You need to step away.”

Before Bud could respond, they heard shouts from the hallway. Roy cried out his wife’s name.

“Wait here,” Johnson said.

Bud didn’t much appreciate the detective’s tone. He followed him into the hallway, unwilling to be pushed around.

A pair of troopers held Roy by each arm. He strained forward, his face red and twisted with pain, trying to get to his wife’s body in the middle of the floor. He wore his farm coveralls and greasy ball cap, and looked as crazed as any drunk that Bud had removed from the club on a payday Friday night. Only, Roy didn’t drink. It was a picture that would stick in Bud’s head for a long damn time.

Roy and Danelle were good people. Claude Dixon had been good people, too.

Seeing that Detective Johnson and the troopers had their hands full with Roy, Bud backed slowly into the kitchen, then turned and ran up the back stairs two at a time, his footfalls masked by the thick carpet.

The troopers hadn’t yet gotten to the second floor of the house, and the bedrooms were all empty. The master suite opened onto the gallery overlooking the foyer, so he had to take care to prevent them from seeing him go in and out. It wasn’t like he was easy to miss, either. Fortunately, they were still dealing with Roy, and Roy wasn’t getting any quieter.

Bud found the 9mm in his bedside table, just where it was supposed to be, and made his way back downstairs.

With troopers and technicians in both the front and back of the house, the only safe ways out were the garage and the side door leading to the yard where Danelle hung the laundry.

The garage was closer to the woods.

•  •  •

Bud bent forward as he climbed, carefully negotiating the muddy incline that was glutted with trees from some long-past storm. The loafers he wore were no good for a run up a mountain, and after ten minutes they were caked with mud and leaves. He kept his eyes open for a sturdy branch or limb to brace him, but everything he tried to pick up crumbled in his hand. All he had was the gun, and it was more of a hindrance than anything at this point. But he couldn’t leave it behind. He had to be ready to take the shot.

Raised east of the Piedmont, not far from the lowcountry, he was wary of the mountains. He never could understand why Lila had changed her mind about coming back after they had been married a couple of years. They had made a life here, but he felt the presence of the mountains too fiercely. Their shadows smothered him. He had to get away from time to time, with or without Lila.

There was no clear path ahead. The creature—the man, whatever the hell he was—had been enormous, Lila tiny in his arms. It was unbelievable to Bud that he hadn’t busted a visible swath through the trees as he ran.
How could any human run so fast?

Judging that he was plenty far enough away from the house, he called out for Lila. He stood still for a moment, listening. The sound of a dog barking was all that came back to him.

It had been his idea to demand that the troopers get a K-9 unit onto the mountain to track Lila, but they hadn’t jumped on it. What were they waiting for?

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Tripp woke to the drone of an engine. A small plane? No, a deeper sound. A helicopter was crawling across the sky, above Devil’s Oven. Where was it going? Sometimes he forgot there was a world beyond the mountain.

He opened his eyes.

He was stretched over the couch in his living room, the cashmere throw that Lila had bought to match the couch laid neatly over him. Remembering the woods and the bloody visions, he pushed off the throw and tried to get up. But the pain in his head was like a wall that kept him down, and he fell back with a groan.

“Don’t.”

Soft fingertips gently pressured his temples, and the sharpest edge of the pain melted away. Jolene. The girl in his dream.
Also Jolene
.

I remember the woman. The dead man’s eyes. The taste of his hair on my tongue.

“I’m going to throw up,” Tripp said.

Jolene quickly stepped away. The small plastic trashcan from the bathroom sat beside the couch as though she had known what was going to happen. He felt her watching as he leaned forward to hold on to the can’s sides. He retched again and again, tasting bile, but nothing came. His body was in more chaos than it had been when he chugged a half-pint of tequila on a dare, back when he was training in the forestry program. He should have had his stomach pumped that night, but they had been forty miles from the nearest phone or hospital, and he’d just had to sweat it out.

When the heaving stopped and his breath returned, he sat back.

Jolene had retreated to the other side of the coffee table.
Wise move
. Whatever she had stirred up inside of him wasn’t letting go easily.

It whispered inside his head:
Again. Kill her again.

He shook his head, trying to dislodge the voice.

Now she came close and knelt in front of him just like she had at the cabin site, but this time her presence repelled him.

“Nobody knows when it takes hold of them. I promise you aren’t the first,” she said.

“Get out of my house,” he said. “I don’t know who or what you are, but you need to get the hell away from me.”

“It has you,” she said. “And the man who was dead. The man who killed Claude.”

When he laughed, it sounded so natural, so
right
to his ears. She was batshit crazy, this girl. He had screwed her and she had done something to him. Maybe her crazy had rubbed off. Crazy people were poison. He knew that well enough from the reprobate behavior he saw when the tourists and the meth heads came around. No wonder Lila didn’t like her.

“Come on,” he said. “You’re just screwing with me because you’re jealous of Lila. You’re just a piece of stripper ass from over the mountain looking to get some of what she’s got.”

He waited for her to answer and was satisfied when she didn’t even bother to deny it. Was that some kind of pity in her eyes? Pity from some little girl who had drugged him, then tried to make it seem like
he
was the crazy one? Fat chance.

“Let me guess. You’ve been messing around with Bud,” he said, talking faster and faster. “You think you’re going to get him away from Lila and he’ll buy you all the flashy shit you girls like? Playing the whore with him, hoping it’ll turn into Christmas.”

The pain in his head roared back, but he stood anyway. She looked small there on the floor below him.
Lying bitch.
She had made him unfaithful to Lila.

“He has Lila and she’s going to die,” she said. “Just like my brother. Just like my father.”

“Shut up,” he said. He wanted to kick her.

She wrapped a hand around his right leg as though she had read his mind. “Stop. Please,” she said. “It’s not you who wants to hurt me. Please,
please
listen.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

At the same moment that Tripp had opened his eyes, Lila opened hers. But she squeezed them shut again on seeing the man’s face above her, his dead eyes reflecting the tease of sunlight leaking into the cave. In the next second, she felt the jab between her legs. She screamed loud and long, wanting to wrap herself safely in the sound. Maybe if she could make the sound last forever, time would disappear.

She would disappear.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

“My mother changed in a day,” Jolene said. “She became someone else. I saw it. My father saw it, too.”

Tripp watched her face for signs of lies—the
tell,
they called it back in his law enforcement classes. She had told him she was born on Devil’s Oven over a hundred years earlier.
Bullshit
. No one lived that long. There were rumors of white oaks on Devil’s Oven that had been growing for twice that long, but he had never seen them, and he knew every inch of the mountain.

The screaming in his head had a voice now.
She lies,
it told him
. She thinks she’s an angel. Does she look like an angel to you? Look at those tits. Pretending to be a little girl with tits like that. She’s an abomination!