John Saul (19 page)

“I’m coming for you, Joey,” the voice whispered. “I’m going to get you.…”

There was another rustling movement in the brush. The aspen trembled again as something shook its trunk.

Bringing his right arm back so quickly Alison hardly saw what he was doing, Joey hurled the stick in the direction from which the threat had come. It whirled into the underbrush, then struck something with a soft thunk. A voice cried out. “Jeez! You could have hurt me!”

“Come out here, and I’ll beat the shit out of you!” Joey challenged, his voice trembling with fury.

Now there was a loud rustling in the bushes, and a moment later two children, a boy and girl about the same age as Alison and Joey, pushed their way through the brush and appeared on the trail. Both of them had pale blue eyes and blond hair, and both were clad in blue jeans and denim shirts under their open slickers. Alison recognized them from the funeral the previous week, where neither of them had done more than nod to Joey. Nor had Joey been friendly to them. Now the boy was glaring angrily at Joey and rubbing his shoulder where the stick had struck him. “You’re really nuts, Joey!”

Joey’s jaw set, his eyes glittering furiously. “If I’d wanted to hurt you, I would have,” he declared. “And I wasn’t scared of you, either.”

The girl’s eyes rolled heavenward in scorn. “You almost threw one of your fits, creep.” Turning away from Joey, she cocked her head to gaze quizzically at Alison. “You’re Alison Carpenter,” she said. “And he’s your brother.”

Alison, her heart still pounding with the terror she’d felt when she heard the voice whispering out of the forest, managed to nod her head.

“I’m Andrea Stiffle, and this is
my
brother, Mike. We’re twins. We live up that way.” She gestured toward the north,
but Alison could see nothing beyond the thick stand of aspens that surrounded them. “There’s trails all over the place,” Andrea explained, flashing a smile at Alison. “This one starts at your driveway, but most of it’s on our property.
You
can use it, though,” she added, pointedly excluding Joey.

Alison remembered the group of kids who had blatantly snubbed Joey yesterday. Now, with Andrea and Michael Stiffle treating him with the same hostility, she wondered if she shouldn’t just ignore both the girl and her brother. Before she could make up her mind, Logan piped up.

“How come you were trying to scare us?”

Andrea Stiffle’s eyes mocked him. “ ’Cause we figured after what happened last night, it would be easy. And it worked, didn’t it?”

“After what happened last night?” Alison asked, remembering the guarded looks her mother and Olivia Sherbourne had exchanged while they were drinking cocoa the night before.

Andrea and Michael glanced at each other, then both of them started talking at once.

“Some guy got killed up at Coyote Creek—” Michael began.

“They had to fly the woman down to Boise,” Andrea chimed in. Their voices tumbling over one another’s, the two Stiffles repeated what they’d heard from their parents at breakfast that morning, while Logan Carpenter, his eyes wide as he pictured the dead man in the torn tent, pressed closer to his sister.

“But what was it?” Alison asked anxiously, the forest once more seeming to close in around her, and her curiosity overcoming her instant dislike of Andrea Stiffle. “What attacked them?”

Michael Stiffle shrugged. “No one knows. It might have been a bear.” His voice dropped mysteriously and his eyes fixed on Logan. “Or it might have been something else.”

“L-Like what?” Logan stammered, not sure he wanted to know, but unable to resist asking.

Michael Stiffle peered down at the little boy. “Maybe it
was a Sasquatch,” he whispered, raising his arms and drawing himself up so he loomed over Logan.

“What’s a Sasquatch?” Logan quavered.

“No one’s ever seen one up close,” Andrea said, instantly picking up the story from her brother. “But they live up in the mountains, and they’re seven feet tall.”

Logan shuddered, his eyes darting to the thick underbrush as he imagined what might be lurking there. “That’s not true,” he said. Then, his voice small: “Is it?”

“It’s just a story, Logan,” Alison assured him, though the skin on the back of her own neck was starting to crawl as she, too, wondered what might be concealed in the tangle of vegetation that crowded the path on both sides.

“Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t,” Michael teased. Then he called out to Joey, who had moved ahead, away from the little group. “Hey, Joey! Is that what got the people up at the campground? Was it a Sasquatch? Or was it you?”

Joey’s face flushed scarlet, but he said nothing, only turned to shoot Michael Stiffle a dark glare. Michael snickered, and nudged his sister, who made a face at Joey’s back.

Alison’s mind whirled. What was Michael talking about? Was he kidding? He
had
to be! And yet there had been something in his voice that almost sounded as if he was serious. But what had Joey ever done to them? Before she could figure out how to ask Andrea Stiffle why she didn’t like Joey, they came to the road. The school bus was pulling up to the stop fifty yards farther on, and Michael and Andrea broke into a run, each wanting to be the first to tell whoever might already be on the bus about the gory events at the campground the night before. Alison and Logan fell in beside Joey, but none of them said anything until they, too, got onto the bus, and were greeted by a burst of laughter from a cluster of kids at the back.

Kids who were listening intently as Michael and Andrea Stiffle whispered to them.

Every one of them, Alison noticed, was staring at Joey.

Feeling suddenly protective of the boy, though she’d known him barely a week, Alison slipped her hand into Joey’s.

He made no move to pull away from her. The smile that came over his face, and the slight pressure of his own fingers on hers, made her heart beat faster. For the rest of the ride down the valley, they sat close together, their hands entwined, both of them pretending they didn’t hear the whispers drifting from the back of the bus.

Maybe I should have stayed home, MaryAnne thought. She was sitting in the front seat of Olivia Sherbourne’s pickup, her right hand clutching the armrest on the door to steady herself as the vehicle bounced up the rutted road to Coyote Creek Campground.

Maybe I should really go home—home to New Jersey. Just pack up the kids and get out of here as fast as I can.…

As Olivia maneuvered the truck up the track, MaryAnne’s thoughts spun out of control.

A man had died horribly in the campground last night, and this morning the woman who had been with him was in intensive care in a hospital in Boise. And ever since Olivia had told her late last night what had transpired in the campground, MaryAnne had been unable to reject the suspicion that kept crawling into her mind—the nagging idea that the campground attacks were somehow connected to the deaths of Audrey and Ted. Over and over, as she lay sleeplessly, tossing in bed, she’d told herself they weren’t, that her friends’ deaths had been nothing more than freak accidents, unfortunate, even bizarre events, linked to one another—for had Ted not been kicked by the horse, Audrey would never have been on the cliff that night—but not linked to this … this horror.

Yet the questions still gnawed.
Something
must have spooked Sheika, for in the week she’d been on the ranch, MaryAnne had gotten to know the gentle mare, and the horse had never so much as shied away from her, let alone shown any signs of aggression. Could whatever—whoever—attacked the campground last night have been in the barn as well?

How close had she come to being attacked herself the other night, when Joey was missing and something—
something that had snarled and lunged at the door—had been lurking inside the barn?

She’d finally given up the quest for sleep as the gray dawn had begun to break. By the time she pushed herself downstairs to the big kitchen, the rain had started, only adding to her sense of gloom. Then, when the children had finally left for school and Bill Sikes had gone about his chores, the emptiness of the house began to set her nerves on edge, and she found herself prowling through the rooms, hearing sounds she couldn’t identify, imagining some presence skulking through the house, stalking her.

The idea of going back to New Jersey—even to Alan—had begun to appeal to her.

When Olivia Sherbourne arrived, slamming the door of her truck and darting up the front steps with her head ducked low against the rain, MaryAnne had felt a sense of relief far out of proportion to the mere appearance of her neighbor. Opening the front door, she’d made no attempt to cover her pleasure at seeing Olivia, but the veterinarian had shaken her head at MaryAnne’s offer of coffee.

“I’m going up to the campground. I just thought I’d stop in and see how you’re doing.” When MaryAnne registered surprise that the veterinarian would be going up to the scene of the murder, Olivia quickly explained. “Rick asked me to meet him up there and help look for tracks. Believe it or not, I’m a pretty good tracker. Anyway, it struck me you might be feeling kind of weird here with no one around except Bill Sikes.” She glanced toward the barn and the field, then turned back to MaryAnne. “Sikes
is
still here, isn’t he?”

MaryAnne nodded, remembering the few words the handyman had spoken that morning when he’d appeared briefly at the kitchen door before setting about his chores. “Seems to me things are goin’ from bad to worse around here,” he’d said. “You might be wantin’ to think about gettin’ out.”

Now, MaryAnne smiled thinly at Olivia. “Bill Sikes is here, but I’m not sure for how long. He came in this morning suggesting that I might want to ‘get out,’ as he put it.”

Olivia’s brows had risen a notch. “And is that what you’re thinking?”

MaryAnne had sighed. “I wish I knew what I’m thinking.” Of one fact she was certain: this morning she didn’t want to be alone in the house. “Look, why don’t I go with you, and then maybe we can go into town for lunch. That is, if you have time.”

While Olivia paused, considering, MaryAnne had grabbed a jacket from one of the hooks in the foyer, and started outside, leaving the house before Olivia could protest and before she’d really had a chance to think about what she was doing.

Now, the truck hit a deep pothole, causing Olivia to curse under her breath while MaryAnne braced herself against the dashboard. They had reached the campground. There seemed to be men everywhere. Olivia shook her head as she watched the activity around the ruined tent, from which Glen Foster’s body was just being removed. “I sure hope they took a lot of pictures before they started tramping around. There can’t be much left in that mud hole by way of tracks.”

The two women got out of the truck. Though Olivia immediately strode toward the clump of men gathered around the body, MaryAnne hung back, knowing that if she let herself look at the wounds the man had suffered, the image would remain etched in her mind for years. Wishing she hadn’t come at all, she went to the picnic table, brushed a layer of moisture off the bench, and sat down, stretching her hands toward the sputtering flames of the fire the guard had kept burning all night.

“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” she heard someone say. “I’ve looked at a lot of bodies, but these wounds are new ones on me.”

As MaryAnne turned away, trying not to hear the descriptions of Glen Foster’s injuries, Olivia slipped into a space between Rick Martin and Whit Baker, who had been the county coroner for the last twenty years. “No tooth marks,” she observed, gazing down on the pale form that now lay on a gurney next to the county ambulance. The corpse lay facedown, its back deeply lacerated by what
looked like claw marks. The throat, too, had been laid open, but it was instantly clear to Olivia that if a knife had been used, it had not been sharp, for the tears in the skin were rough and irregular, the muscles beneath the skin mangled.

“That’s what’s bothering me,” Whit Baker agreed, nodding a greeting to the veterinarian. “I’ve never seen an animal attack where there weren’t any signs of bites.” He glanced up questioningly. “That’s what animals do, isn’t it? When they attack, they use their teeth.”

“As far as I’ve ever seen,” Olivia replied. “Bears will use their claws as weapons, but once they’ve knocked down their prey, the first thing they do is go after it with their mouths. If they don’t rip it apart, at least they drag it off somewhere.” She bent closer, examining the lacerations that had ripped open Glen Foster’s back from the shoulders all the way down to the waist. “You ever seen anything like this before, Rick?”

The deputy shook his head. “Sure looks like claws did it, but what kind? Spacing’s not right for a bear, but what else does something like this?”

“Cougar?” Whit Baker suggested.

“That might be possible,” Olivia Sherbourne said, her voice betraying her doubts. “It just doesn’t look right, though. If it were a cougar, the lacerations would be deeper. And look at this,” she went on, leaning forward to touch a discoloration on the right shoulder. “Doesn’t this look like a bruise?”

“Looks like it would have been, if he’d lived long enough,” Whit Baker agreed. “It almost looks like someone squeezed his shoulder. But those cuts sure don’t look like any fingernail scratches I’ve ever seen.”

“What about the tent?” Olivia asked.

“Come and take a look,” Rick Martin suggested, nodding to the two medics as the coroner and the vet straightened up. “Any reason not to get the body down to the morgue?” As Whit Baker shook his head, the two aides slid the gurney into the ambulance. By the time the group had moved to the tent site, the vehicle was already turning around to start back down the road to the valley floor. With its departure,
MaryAnne Carpenter finally trusted herself to join Olivia, Rick Martin, and the coroner.

“This is weird,” she heard Rick say as she joined the group around the tent. “It’s just like the tent that got torn up last week. It’s as if someone ripped out the netting at the back window, then just tore the nylon open.”

“So at least we know it was a man,” Baker commented. “An animal would just start tearing at it from anywhere. It wouldn’t know to start at the window.”