Never Fear (4 page)

But he wasn’t heading to the church.
He was heading to the graveyard—and the hanging tree.

He couldn’t really believe
in devils!

Child services answered; Dakota
identified herself and gave the situation. She was passed around a
few times and finally spoke with a man who gave her an address in
Gainesville and asked if an officer was available to bring the
child to them.

Chancy wouldn’t mind; Dakota assured
the woman they bring the child. None of them was equipped to deal
with the little girl who had to be traumatized out of her
mind.

She had to take charge. Someone around
here had to stay sane.

Walking back into the office, Dakota
saw that now both Chancy and David were hunched down by the little
girl. They’d gotten her to talk.

“
What do you want for
Christmas?” Chancy asked.

“
Toys!” the little girl
said.

“
We’ll just find your
mommy and daddy,” David said.

Her eyes filled with tears. She
screamed; a terrible scream.

“
Oh, dear!” David
said.

Chancy picked her up and held her near
and rocked her. She looked over the little girl’s head, hoping
Dakota had information for her.

“
They’ve asked us to bring
her to them,” Dakota said.

“
I’ll go,” David and
Chancy offered simultaneously.

“
We should both go,” David
said. “If she... if she panics in the car, she could hurt the
driver.”

“
Makes sense,” Dakota told
him.

“
But, where the
hell—sorry! Heck!—did Declan go?” Chancy asked.

“
Don’t worry; the town is
crawling with law enforcement,” Dakota said. “I’m fine; you two
go.”

Chancy held the little girl; Dakota
tried to smile as she saw the angelic face over Chancy’s shoulder.
The little girl offered her a tremulous smile back. For a moment,
the Christmas lights in the office seemed to catch in her eyes and
they glowed.

Poor kid.

With them out of the office, Dakota
sat at her desk. Had Declan suspected that the killer—or
killers—had headed into the forest? He shouldn’t have gone off
alone. But, now, she was the only one at the station. She sat down
at her desk and drummed her fingers on the hard wood and felt
frozen for a moment.

She’d never expected anything so
horrible here.

County was on it; officers
with high tech and plenty of ability!

She picked up one of the
books on her desk.
The Curse of Hanging
Tree.

She hadn’t bothered with the book yet;
she’d been looking at real histories and tourist
catalogues.

It had been re-printed by some
entrepreneur who, according to the title page, had found the diary
at Hanging Tree. She started to flip through the pages. The book
was supposedly the diary of a young woman who had once lived in
Hanging Tree, somewhere around 1830. Dakota started to flip the
pages, and then found herself reading near the end.

“
Eleanor Grigsby
disappeared last night; her mother is frantic. She tells a strange
tale about a girl taken a decade before. That girl, I know was Mary
Easton; Mary, they say, ran off with a soldier. I don’t believe
Eleanor did the same. She was my friend; she told me that she was
haunted by memories of Mary! But, you know this town. They say that
the devil in the woods has been there since time memorial, changing
shape, becoming what it chooses. Only when one cries out to the
spirits of goodness and the hanging tree is burned to cinder will
the devil die, for its power lies in the terror of those who died
there. If they do not find Mary soon, I will burn that tree to the
ground.”

Dakota turned the page. It was the end
of the diary—an epilogue said that the author of the diary,
Charlotte Anderson, had disappeared one night and never been seen
again.

“
Oh, bull!” Dakota said to
herself, pushing the book aside. And yet, she couldn’t help but
feel a strange chill. Ridiculous. It was a beautiful Florida
December—the day temperature was seventy-five; at night, it fell to
the sixties.

And Chancy’s iPod was
still playing gentle tunes:
Oh, Holy
Night
.

She tried to log into her computer;
the Internet, like the phones, seemed to be out.

Swearing, she rose and headed out the
front door. She was going to call Declan and find out just what the
hell he was doing.

But she never even drew her phone from
her pocket. Down the street, closer to the business section of
downtown—as it was!—she heard a tremendous commotion. Then she saw
that people were running toward the police station.

“
What, what?”

“
Come, come quick!” A man
called. “There’s been an accident! A terrible accident!”

She started to run. Whatever had
happened was down, way down.

On the street that led to I-75. The
path Chancy and David would be taking to get the little girl to
Gainesville.

People were all out of the
street—leaving their business and homes behind to gape in
horror.

Dakota ran past them all until she
came to the dead center of the town, the circle where they had
raised a giant Christmas tree.

And then she saw. The official police
car with the Hanging Tree logo was now in the tree. And the car and
the tree were burning ferociously. She heard sirens from the fire
station; there was a rush of county cars from the scene they had
left that morning.

And there was... fire.

She burst her way through with the
firefighters who tried to push her back. As they fought the blaze,
she felt her stomach sink, felt a pain that squeezed around her
heart and tore at her lungs.

David and Chancy. She could see, even
as the firefighters pushed her back, even as others arrived, the
charred bodies of David and Chancy.

There’d been a child in the car. Now,
they wouldn’t have to wonder where she had come from; they wouldn’t
have to wonder what she’d seen.

“
Oh, dear God!” she
breathed.

Someone was next to her; someone from
county. Someone saying that she had to get away; county would
manage everything. She had to find her fellows from the town; she
was going to have to tell them the terrible truth.

Someone had an arm on her shoulder.
Someone was trying to lead her away.

Someone else was trying to get her to
drink something.

Whiskey.

Whiskey wasn’t going to
help.

She shook them off; she was the town’s
police lieutenant.

Declan. Where the hell was
Declan? Two people he cared about were dead, and...

Finally, not even sure how she really
got there, she was back at the station. She stood in front of it,
trying to reach Declan on her cell phone. He didn’t
answer.

She remembered then that child
services would be looking for someone to arrive with the little
blond girl.

“
Dakota! You all
right?”

She turned. It was Pastor Frank. He
looked horrible; he obviously knew that his day had gone from the
bizarre to the tragic, that people had died, that they’d been
brutalized just as the figures in the Nativity scene. And he knew
about the accident.

She nodded. “I’m okay, Pastor. I’m
just trying to call child services.” She choked on her words. “A
little girl was in the car with Chancy and David and...”

“
There was no child in the
car, Dakota,” the Pastor said. “No child.”

“
Yes, there was! That’s
why they were driving the car, they were taking her to
Gainesville.”

“
Dakota,” he said gently.
“They’ve just—they’ve just gotten to the bodies. There were two
people in the car. Just two.”

She swallowed. The world seemed to be
spinning.

She kept picturing the little girl,
the beautiful little girl. Toys! She had wanted toys for Christmas,
but didn’t all children want toys?

And yet those eyes of
hers...

That smile.

She was going crazy. Declan’s belief
in devils in the woods had made her mad.

“
I’m fine, Pastor Frank. I
need to reach out to fellow officers. I...”

She turned and walked back into the
station office. She saw the book where she had left it on her desk.
She walked back over to the book and slammed it shut.

She had to find Declan.

She checked her service weapon; she
was armed, her gun was fully loaded. At the very least, there was
an insane mass murderer out there somewhere! Even if the town was
swarming with seasoned officers from the county...

She left the office unmanned. She
didn’t know if the second shift would come in or not; she didn’t
care. She started out to find Declan.

Then she hesitated. David had still
smoked. He also kept a good lighter—one that was filled with
butane. Wincing against her own stupidity and thinking that the
deaths that morning and those of her two friends was making her
numb and stupid, she nevertheless got David’s lighter—and his
supply of butane. Then she headed out.

Night was falling. Apparently, the
second shift hadn’t come in.

Maybe they were dead, too.
Maybe Declan was dead, maybe she was heading toward her own
death...

No. There was sanity in the world. She
could still see all the county cars.

Yes, the town was crawling with law
enforcement.

She headed across the square and
started running again. She should have taken the car... no, she
couldn’t have taken the car. It had exploded. With David and Chancy
in it.

With no angelic little
girl.

She reached the church but veered
around it, heading for the graveyard and the hanging tree and the
forest beyond.

It wasn’t until she’d almost reached
the tree that she dead stopped. There was someone there. Someone
sitting on one of the marble sarcophagi toward the rear—it was that
of a soldier who had died in World War I. Old and beautiful,
inscribed...

It was the child. The beautiful little
girl. She sat there sobbing.

Impossible.

Before she could reach the child, she
saw Declan. He was walking from the woods, looking weary and
frustrated—and self-absorbed. Then, he apparently heard the crying.
He stopped and saw the child.

“
Hey, little one! What are
you doing here?”

He started to walk toward
her.

“
Stop!” Dakota shouted,
and Declan did so, looking at her with surprise, as if she’d lost
her mind.

Quite possibly, she had.

“
Don’t! It’s her—she’s the
devil in the woods!” Dakota said. Oh, they would lock her up,
certainly. There was a child—one who had witnessed terrible deeds,
one whose parents might have been dragged out and killed in the
woods or met their fate somewhere else nearby...

The girl cried harder.

“
Dakota, what the
fu—“

“
It’s her!” Dakota
said.

And then, the child changed. She
seemed to grow and alter almost imperceptibly until she was
different, entirely different; she was a beautiful young
woman.

“
Declan, help me, oh,
please, my love, help me!”

Dakota saw Declan’s face change. She
saw the way that he looked at the woman.

“
Marissa!” he whispered.
He started walking to the young woman.

Dakota had never run faster. She
streaked past the girl, running so hard and fast that she bore
Declan down to the ground. “No! She’s the devil in the woods!” she
cried.

This was so sad, so sad and bizarre!
He believed—she did not! And yet...

“
It’s Marissa,
Dakota—don’t you see? I didn’t help her then, I wasn’t here! I
couldn’t stop what was happening. And now...”

He was a powerful man. Even now, he
wouldn’t hurt her, though. He firmly set her aside, ready to go to
the woman. It was as if...

As if she had gotten into
his mind!

“
No!” Dakota cried. But he
was moving; he was approaching the young woman who was smiling, who
had a strange glint in her eyes. Her mouth moved as she looked at
Dakota.

Ah, yes, coming for you
next! Merry Christmas, Lieutenant Marin!

Dakota jumped to her feet. She needed
help from the county guys! But they were too far away, they were
running between the bar and the accident scene and she was in a
graveyard in the dark with a man who had been mesmerized by what he
saw as a sin in his past.

She felt the butane and the lighter in
her pocket.

Not enough for a giant
tree that was hundreds of years old.

And yet, she had nothing else. She ran
to the tree as fast as she could go. She shot butane over a low
hanging branch. Her fingers shook so badly she nearly dropped the
lighter. Finally, flame shot out. She glanced back. Declan was
almost to the woman; the woman was reaching out for him.