John Saul (18 page)

“Joey?” MaryAnne said, her voice gentle. “Joey, why are you sleeping out here? Why aren’t you in bed?”

He frowned slightly, then his expression cleared. “It—It’s just something I do sometimes,” he stammered. “Sometimes I just can’t sleep in the house. So I come out here, sometimes, and sleep with the horses.” Then, more aggressively: “Mom and Dad never minded. They let me do it whenever I wanted.”

“I see,” MaryAnne said, though she didn’t see at all. She wasn’t quite sure she believed what the boy had just said. It didn’t make sense that Audrey Wilkenson would let her son curl up in a horse stall. And yet, if Joey said his mother had let him do it, how could she argue with him? How could she ever know what Audrey had let Joey do, and what she hadn’t? “Well, come on back to the house, all right?” she said. “Alison and Logan are up, and we’re going to make cocoa. How does that sound?”

Leaving the blanket where it lay, Joey stood and brushed the loose straw off his disheveled clothes. The strange feeling—the frightening sensation of nervousness that had seized him earlier in the evening, finally driving him out of the house into the darkness of the night—was gone.

Something—something of which he was totally unaware—had released him from the torment of his own mind.

The
whup-whup-whup
of the helicopter blades drew closer. Rick Martin instinctively ducked as the downdraft of the great rotor struck him. A cloud of dust and pine needles swirled around him, and he shielded his eyes, peering up into the glare of the chopper’s landing lights. From the belly of the machine, a rope was dangling; at its end hung the stretcher into which he and Tony Moleno would lift the torn body of Tamara Reynolds.

“You’re fine!” he yelled into the radio, hoping the pilot could hear him above the din. “Hold position, and lower away!”

The stretcher began its slow descent, and Rick moved
away for a moment to cheek on the young woman who still lay in the wreckage of the tent where they’d found her, unconscious. Her wounds were clumsily bound with bandages from the first-aid kit in his squad car, but fresh blood was already oozing through the white gauze. “How’s she doing?” he asked Moleno, who was crouching beside her, his fingers pressed against her neck.

“Still got a pulse, but her breathing’s getting worse.”

“If she’s still alive when we get her up there, she’ll make it down to Boise,” Rick replied, coming out of the tent. As the basket touched the ground a few yards away, the deputy glanced up at the man who had arrived in the village an hour ago to report the attack in the campground. Now he was standing at the edge of the campsite, a sheen of sweat glimmering on his skin in the firelight, despite the chill of the night. His arm was around his wife, who leaned into him heavily, seeming on the verge of collapse. Their children, a boy of about five and a girl a year younger, clung to their mother’s legs. “Give us a hand!” Rick yelled. The man glanced at his wife as if he wasn’t certain the words were actually being directed at him, but then realized there was no one else there. Leaving his wife to look after the children, he hurried over.

“Get the sling off the basket,” Rick called to Tony Moleno, and while the assistant deputy ducked out of the tent, he told the young man—whose name had already escaped him—what they were going to do. “All three of us will lift her at the same time. I’ll be at her head, and you take her feet. The idea’s not to move her any more than we have to. Got it? Once she’s on the stretcher, we’ll take her out to the basket, strap her in, and she’ll be on her way.”

By the time he was finished, Tony Moleno was back, and the three of them carefully moved Tamara Reynolds—still unconscious—onto the stretcher, then carried her out of the wreckage of the tent. The basket sat on the ground, the line to the hovering aircraft hanging slack. The three men placed the stretcher in the basket, working against the blast of the chopper’s downdraft. Rick Martin fastened the strap to hold the stretcher securely in place, then stepped back and waved the helicopter away. The line tightened, and the
basket lifted off the ground, swinging as the helicopter moved slightly forward.

“Shit!” Tony yelled above the din of the engine as the basket moved toward a stand of tall lodgepole pines at the edge of the campsite. “What’s he doing?”

The three men on the ground stared in horror as the basket swung closer to the trees, but then the helicopter rose straight up, the basket soaring above the treetops as the winch hauled it in.

“Jesus,” Tony said as the racket of the chopper’s blades began to fade away. “Don’t ever make me ride in one of those things, okay?”

Rick ignored his partner as he studied the man who had reported the attack on the campsite. “Is there anything else you want to tell me? Anything you’ve left out, Mister …?”

“Jenson. Peter Jenson.” He shook his head. “There isn’t anything else to tell, really. We were sound asleep—the kids were in our tent, and Peg and I were outside. I was sound asleep, but Peg woke up. She thought she heard something, and woke me up. We listened, and didn’t hear anything at first, but then just as I was going back to sleep, there was this sound. Not a scream or anything—more like a moan. Anyway, when I heard it again, I decided to go take a look. Peg went into the tent with the kids, and I took my flashlight and came over here.” He glanced at the ruined tent, the carnage brilliantly lit by the halogen headlights of the two squad cars parked at the edge of the site. He flinched as he saw Glen Foster’s torn body still lying where he’d found it, half covered by the remains of the ripped sleeping bag. “I didn’t know what to do. I yelled at Peg to stay in the tent, then headed down to our car.” He shook his head uncertainly. “Maybe that was kind of a dumb thing to do, huh? I mean, whatever did this is still out there somewhere. But what else could I do? The woman was still alive.”

Rick Martin laid a reassuring hand on Jenson’s shoulder. “Seems to me like whatever did this wouldn’t have hung around here afterward. And the parking lot’s only half a mile down the road.”

Jenson’s lips twisted wryly. “If you’d of asked me tonight, I’d have said it was more like ten miles.”

“What about these two people?” Rick asked. “Did you know them?”

“I talked to them when they showed up, but that’s all. Other than that, I’ve never seen them before.” He glanced toward his wife, who had moved to the picnic table near the fire pit, her children still flanking her, her arms wrapped protectively around their shoulders. “Look,” Jenson went on, “would it be possible for me to bring my car up here tonight? I’d like to pack us up and get out of here. No way the wife and kids are going to go back to sleep—not after what happened.”

Rick nodded. “There’ll be a whole crew coming up tomorrow. For tonight, I’m gonna have to leave the body where it is.”

Jenson stared at him, a shiver running over him at the thought of the dead man, being left in the tent until morning. As if he’d read Jenson’s mind, Rick Martin’s lips tightened into a grim line.

“Not much else I can do. No way the crime boys from Boise can get up here tonight, and I’m not gonna touch this site until they’ve gone over it with a fine-tooth comb. All I can do is post a guard for the rest of the night. If you want, I can give you a lift down to the parking lot. I’ll just leave the gate open tonight with a police tape across it.” He was silent for a moment, then spoke again. “I guess you know there’s going to be a lot of people wanting to talk to you, the next couple of days.” He kept his eyes on Peter Jenson, looking for any sign of discomfort his words might have caused the man. But Jenson only nodded.

“You’ve got my name and address.” He took a deep breath, then let it out in a long sigh. “Hell of a way to end the summer, huh? We came up here for one last quiet weekend, and …” His voice trailed off, then he shook his head. “Why do you suppose it was this tent that got hit?” he asked. “Why wasn’t it mine?”

It was the same question that had been running intermittently through Rick Martin’s mind ever since Peter Jenson had first described the horror he’d discovered. But he had
no answer, nor would there be any possibility of an answer until the crew from the crime lab had searched the site.

Had something attracted the attacker to this particular tent, this particular couple?

Or had it been a random attack, Rick wondered, as he’d assumed the earlier one against an empty site had been?

He didn’t know, and deep down inside wondered if he ever would. But there was one thing he was sure of, with no doubt at all.

Coyote Creek Campground—the most beautiful in the area—would be closed.

Closed for the rest of the year, if not forever.

T
he skies were leaden the next morning, and a steady drizzle had begun to fall, soaking the meadows and washing the trees free of the summer’s dust. There was a new bite to the air, a dank cold that seemed to have plunged the Sugarloaf Valley into the coming fall virtually overnight.

“Why do we have to go to school today?” Logan complained in a last-ditch effort to put off his annual autumn agony for twenty-four more hours. “Nobody’s going to be there! It’s pouring outside, and I bet the creek’s going to flood, and—”

“Everybody’s going, and you’re going, too,” MaryAnne told him. “Now, do you want to go with Joey and Alison, or do you want me to drive you?”

Logan’s eyes widened at the threat of going through the humiliation of having his mother take him to school. Hurriedly, he shoved his arms into the sleeves of his worn jacket. “What if I freeze to death?” he asked, seeing no reason not to try a parting shot. “I should have gotten a new jacket yesterday. They had a really neat one! It’s leather, and lined with fleece, and—”

“And you’re not going to freeze to death,” MaryAnne interrupted, cutting off Logan’s monologue just as he was getting warmed up. “Now go, or you’re going to miss the bus and have to walk all the way to town.”

“I still bet nobody else is there,” Logan muttered darkly, but he already knew that none of his arguments was going to work. He slouched to the back door, pulling the hood of his jacket over his head, then ran to catch up with Alison and Joey, who were already disappearing around the first curve in the driveway.

Fifty yards farther along, Joey veered off onto a path that led to the left.

“Where are you going?” Logan asked.

“It’s a shortcut,” Joey explained. “Come on.”

Alison and Logan glanced at each other uneasily, the same thought in both their minds. Yesterday, when the sun had been shining brightly, it had been fun walking through the forest, hearing the pine needles crunch under their feet and playing along the banks of the stream.

This morning, though, in the drizzle of rain, with the overcast sky cutting off the light, the forest seemed to have closed in on itself; trees that only yesterday had offered shade from the brilliant sun had now taken on an oddly threatening aspect, as if something dangerous might be lurking just out of sight.

“M-Maybe we better stay on the road,” Alison suggested. “I mean, what if we get lost?”

Joey’s lips twisted scornfully. “We’re not going to get lost. I always go this way.” His grin broadened. “You’re not chicken, are you?”

Logan’s eyes narrowed at the slur on his sister’s courage. He made up his mind. “I’m not,” he declared, marching down the path that led into the woods. Under his feet the soggy pine needles squished damply, as large drops of rain splashed down onto the hood of his jacket from the dripping branches that spread over his head. “Come on, Alison,” he pleaded. “It’s neat.”

But Alison still hesitated, wondering once more what the police cars had been doing up in the campground last night. Though neither her mother nor Olivia Sherbourne had told them anything, Alison had been almost certain the veterinarian had known something.

Something bad—or why wouldn’t she have told them about it? To her, the woods now looked sinister, and she stood her ground. “I think we should stay on the driveway,” she insisted. “It’s going to be all muddy in there.”

“Chicken, chicken!” Logan sang out. “Alison’s a chicken!”

Her brother’s teasing washed away the trepidation Alison
was feeling. “All right, let’s go,” she challenged, striding off the driveway into the dripping forest.

The trees closed around them, the narrow path twisting and turning as they moved farther from the driveway, both Alison and Logan beginning to feel uneasy.

Strange sounds—sounds they hadn’t heard before—came at them from every direction, and though Joey insisted it was nothing more than water dripping off the trees and squirrels rustling through the underbrush in their constant search for food, Alison startled when she heard the sharp snap of a twig.

“What was that?” she demanded.

“Wh-What?” Logan asked, though he’d heard the sound himself, and it had set his heart pounding.

“It wasn’t anything,” Joey replied. “Probably just a deer.”

“What if it was a bear?” Logan piped. “What if it was a grizzly?”

“I’m telling you, it wasn’t anything like that,” Joey insisted. “Will you guys come on?”

They started walking again, but now Logan stayed close to his sister, slipping his hand into hers. The rain eased, but the trees kept up their constant dripping. Alison thought she could hear the sound of something moving through the forest a few yards to their left. She stopped again, her hand tightening on Logan’s.

“What is it?” Logan asked, his voice dropping to a whisper.

“Shh!” Alison hissed, holding her finger to her lips. “Listen!”

Now Joey, too, had stopped, frowning as he strained his ears for the sound that had caught Alison’s attention.

It came again.

A sharp snap, as if a twig had broken under a shoe. Then another snapping twig, followed by a rustling in the brush up ahead and to the left.

The three children stared at the spot where they’d heard the sound. An aspen shook, though there was no wind, its leaves shimmering as a mist of water fell from them. They froze.

Then they heard the voice: “You’re going to die, Joey Wilkenson.”

Her heart racing, Alison pulled Logan closer to her, slipping her arms around him protectively as he pressed himself against her. Joey, though, glanced around, then stooped to pick up a rotting stick from the forest floor.