Nightshade

CHAPTER 22

THE SKY WAS incongruously bright the next morning. there should have been clouds — roiling thunderheads as black and heavy as his mood. Matt felt as if he hadn’t slept at all; his body ached with a fatigue that ten minutes under the hot shower, followed by a minute of ice-cold needle spray, did not alleviate. Nor did the towel he’d heated over the radiator while he stood under the steaming water do anything to thaw the chill in his body, for the cold he was feeling came not so much from the exhaustion in his body as the confusion in his mind. The dream — the terrible dream in which he’d made love to Kelly Conroe, only to kill her a moment later — was still so fresh in his mind that he shuddered as he stood with the towel wrapped around him.

Though he wanted to go back to bed, to hide from whatever the day might bring, he knew it was impossible. To stay at home — to hide in his room — would only make things worse, and whatever reality awaited him, whatever accusations he would have to face at school, couldn’t be worse than the dream that was still etched in his thoughts. Throwing the soggy towel in the hamper, he went back to his room, dressed, and headed toward the stairs. But as he came to the closed door to the guest room, he paused.

The dream came back to him, his aunt’s voice whispering to him, urging him on as he tightened his hands around Kelly Conroe’s throat. But his aunt was dead — he’d never even met her! So how could he know it was her voice he’d heard? He reached out, twisted the knob, and pushed the door open. In an instant, his nostrils filled with the musky odor of her perfume, and strange images began tumbling through his mind.

His father, caught in the crosshairs of the telescopic sight of his rifle.

No! Not his father! It was a deer he’d shot!

His grandmother, moving down the hallway, calling out to someone who wasn’t there, following her long-dead daughter down the stairs.

And Kelly, struggling to free herself from —

No! He tried to reject the images, to separate the memories from the dreams. But his mind was as tired as his body, and even as he tried to sort them out, they tumbled together again. He stood frozen in the doorway, unconsciously holding his breath, his eyes fixing on the portrait of his aunt, the scent of her perfume hanging around him.

He could almost feel her now, and then more images leaped out of his subconscious.

She was in his room — in his bed — touching him, pressing her flesh close to his —

But it hadn’t happened! He’d only been dreaming!

His mind reeled, and then, suddenly, he felt it again.

Her touch.

Her body against his.

Her voice, whispering in his ear.

Recoiling from the images he was certain could have come only from his dreams, from the scent of the perfume in the air, from the whispering in his ear — and most of all from the touch of the dead woman’s flesh — he slammed the door shut and spun around.

And there she was — so close that he nearly lost his balance as an involuntary sound erupted from his throat.

“Matt? Matt, what is it?”

His mother! Not his aunt at all, but his mother. “I–I — you just surprised me,” he stammered, flustered. “I was just — ”

His mother’s eyes shifted to the door he’d just slammed closed, and when she spoke, there was a harshness in her voice Matt had never heard before. “I’m going to get rid of all that stuff,” she said. “I’m going to get rid of it today.”

“But what if Gram comes — ” Matt began, but the words died on his lips as his mother’s eyes narrowed.

“I don’t care,” she said, her eyes fixed on the closed door to the guest room. “It doesn’t have anything to do with — ” Matt waited for her to continue, but she didn’t. Then, at last tearing her eyes from the door, she smiled at him and laid her hand on his cheek. “It doesn’t have anything to do with you,” she said, this time finishing what she’d started to say a moment before.

* * *

WHEN HE LEFT for school an hour later, Matt’s mood was as dark as when he’d gotten up. At the foot of the driveway, before turning toward town, he automatically glanced in the direction of the Conroes’ house, to see if Kelly might be coming along the road to meet him. But then he remembered that she wouldn’t.

If she had come home late last night, someone would have called to tell his mother. If not the Conroes, then Dan Pullman. The chill he’d felt when he got up that morning gripped him again, and the image of the dream rose in his mind. But this time there was something else: the gap in his memory of yesterday afternoon, when he thought he’d only walked over to Mr. Rudman’s, left the stag’s head, then come home.

In fact, he’d been gone an hour, for what should have been a fifteen minute errand.

Where had the other forty-five minutes gone?

And why had he looked for Kelly at the waterfall?

A few minutes later, standing across the street from the school with no memory of the walk that had brought him there, he felt a wave of panic.

Was it the same thing that had happened yesterday, when he lost forty-five minutes? But no — today he’d been walking along a route so familiar he could have done it in his sleep, and his mind was so occupied with other things that he’d simply paid no attention to where he was going.

As he crossed the street, Matt felt the other students’ eyes on him. But it wasn’t like yesterday, when they had watched him suspiciously, turning away when he looked directly at them. Today they were glaring at him, and he could see the anger in their eyes.

They think I did it, he thought. They think I killed Kelly.

Killed. The word, straight out of the dream, hung in his mind.

Again the images tumbled through his mind.

Which were memories?

Which were dreams?

Worst of all, which were real?

As he stepped through the doors of the school, Matt knew that wherever he turned, wherever he went, he would hear people whispering accusations that he knew, deep in his heart, he could no longer deny.

* * *

CALL HIM BACK! Call him back now, before it’s too late!

The urge was almost irresistible, but even as Joan thought it, she knew she wouldn’t do it. Besides, it was already too late — Matt had disappeared around the bend in the driveway minutes ago, and by now was on his way to school.

Leaving her alone in the house.

Except she wasn’t alone. She knew it now, knew it with a terrible certainty that could no longer be denied. The strange words she’d heard her sister speak before she’d gone to bed last night were echoing in her mind when she awoke this morning: Everything you have is mine… I’m taking it back… I’m taking it all back.

The sour taste of fear had remained strong in her mouth, and her mind felt bound up with a panic she hadn’t at first been able to identify. Then the terrible memory of her sister’s visitation came back to her, and the panic had grown.

She was losing her mind.

A paralysis came over her then, and she wanted nothing more than to sink back into sleep, to disappear into unconsciousness. But as she lay in bed, Joan knew that unconsciousness would be no escape.

It didn’t happen, she told herself. It was impossible — it was only a dream!

Cynthia couldn’t be in the house, couldn’t have talked to her, certainly couldn’t have touched her. But as she denied the possibility, she heard her sister’s mocking laughter.

Laughter that followed her into the bathroom as she tried to wash the sour taste of fear from her mouth.

Laughter that taunted her as she made coffee and tried to eat a piece of toast in the kitchen.

Laughter that turned to victorious peals as Matt left for school.

Laughter that had kept her pinned against the window like a bug in a display case.

How had it happened? How had Cynthia escaped from her grave?

What did she want?

But Joan knew the answer to that. Cynthia had told her last night: “Everything you have is mine… I’m taking it back… I’m taking it all back.”

The words lashing at her, Joan spun around as if to face her tormentor. “No!” she screamed. “It’s not true! It’s not!” And realizing she was screaming at an empty room, she fell suddenly silent, her eyes flicking over the kitchen like those of a trapped animal searching for its stalker.

But Cynthia’s mocking laughter still hung in the air.

Joan fled from the kitchen, bursting through the door to the dining room, knocking a crystal candelabrum from the sideboard as she passed. It crashed to the floor, shattering into a thousand pieces, but Cynthia’s laughter drowned out the sound as Joan pushed through into the entry hall, slamming the dining room door behind her.

“Doors can’t shut me out,” Cynthia’s voice whispered. “But you don’t understand, do you? You never understood!”

“Leave me alone!” Joan screamed, and fled through the living room, then into the library. But Cynthia was there too, her laughter echoing off the walls.

Joan felt her mind beginning to crack. “Bill?” she called out. “Bill, help me. Please help me…”

But as she called out her husband’s name, something sounded wrong. Her voice was muffled, as in a nightmare in which she tried to call out for help but the words died in her throat, and no matter how hard she tried, no sound emerged from her mouth.

“He won’t help you,” Cynthia whispered. “Why would he help you? He didn’t love you — he never loved you!”

“He did,” Joan sobbed, sinking onto the wingback chair next to the fireplace. “It’s not true. He loved me… he always loved me.”

Her sister’s voice turned venomous. “He didn’t,” she whispered. “Nobody loved you, Joan. Not Mama, not Daddy, not Bill — not anyone!”

“They did,” Joan protested, but even as she uttered the words, she knew they weren’t true.

“Daddy left us.Don’t you remember? When you were still a baby, Daddy left us! He left us because of you! That’s why Mama hated you!”

“She didn’t,” Joan cried. “It isn’t true — none of it is true!” She covered her ears, trying to shut out the sound, but she couldn’t blot out her sister’s relentless voice.

“It is true. You know it’s all true!”

“No!” Joan screamed, rising to her feet. “You’re lying! It’s all lies!” She stumbled toward the door, but there was no escape from her sister’s voice.

No escape from her terrible accusation.

“Your fault, Joan,” Cynthia whispered. “Your fault! All of it is your fault!”

Joan shambled through the living room, then came to the foot of the stairs. Cynthia’s voice was coming from everywhere, and now she could see her too: standing at the top of the stairs, gazing down at her, her lips twisted into the cruel smile Joan hadn’t seen since she was a child. “I’ll kill you,” she screamed, staring up at the looming visage. “I swear to God, I’ll kill you!”

As peals of Cynthia’s mocking laughter filled the house, Joan started up the stairs.

And with every step she took, she felt a little more of her sanity slipping away.

* * *

IN HIS FIRST year as Chief of the five-man force, Dan Pullman had discovered that the ire of those who considered themselves the town’s leading citizens wasn’t reserved for those they perceived as underlings, such as his deputies. “In the end, you’re responsible,” the Gerry Conroes, Marty Holmeses, and Bill Hapgoods of the town had explained during the years he’d headed the department. On the other hand, he’d noticed that though they held him responsible for anything they considered a failure on the part of the department, they rarely gave him any credit for its successes. He’d been smart enough never to complain about that, which he thought was probably the reason he’d held the job of police chief longer than any of his predecessors.

So now, though his mood was as foul as a mid-winter storm, and had been since the tongue-lashing he’d taken from Gerry Conroe the evening before, Dan Pullman understood that no explanation of why he couldn’t immediately devote his entire energies to searching for Kelly Conroe would satisfy Gerry. Not as editor and publisher of the local paper, and certainly not as the missing girl’s father.

But what did annoy Pullman, and accounted for the mood he was in this morning, was the continuous stream of phone calls that had ruined his chances of getting any sleep at all last night. And he’d needed the sleep.

From the moment he left the Conroe house last night, he’d been examining Kelly Conroe’s disappearance from every angle. Despite his reassurances to Gerry and Nancy, which were at least statistically accurate, he agreed with them that Kelly probably hadn’t simply taken off somewhere. Over the years, he and every man on the force had come to know each kid in Granite Falls, and whenever something happened — some minor theft or vandalism — the town’s cops usually knew where to look first. Most of the problems stemmed from only a handful of kids, while the rest rarely got involved in anything more serious than the traditional — if illegal — keg party that invariably followed high school graduation. And until now, Kelly Conroe had never been in any kind of trouble whatsoever. Her family was stable, and it would be hard to find a soul in Granite Falls who wished her ill. So, despite what he’d told Gerry and Nancy last night, Pullman figured the odds of her having simply run away as being somewhere between slim and none.

Still, as he drove home last night, he knew it wasn’t feasible to mount an effective search effort until morning. And then, after being kept awake by considering where Kelly might have gone, his sleep had been interrupted by the constant stream of phone calls from irate parents demanding action.

Before midnight, the callers had identified themselves, and were at least somewhat rational. They were worried, and though Pullman was careful not to say anything that would make them more worried, he tended to agree that they might have something to worry about.

After midnight, the calls had been anonymous, and the message varied only in the number and variety of obscenities the callers used to make their point: “If we can’t sleep tonight, why should you?” Pullman, using the caller I.D. feature of his phone, mentally noted which of the crank callers were rudest, but had not bothered to actually write down any of the names. Still, by the time dawn broke, he’d had no sleep, and figured out he was thoroughly pissed off at about ten percent of the town’s population. Had he been in a mood to reason more clearly, he would have calculated the true figure as closer to a tiny fraction of one percent. On the other hand, most of the callers were related to at least a few dozen other people, every one of whom would be urged to vote against him come next election.

Unless he found Kelly Conroe. Alive. This morning.

And that, he was one hundred percent sure, was not going to happen.

As soon as it was light enough he called Tony Petrocelli, and the two of them went over the route Kelly would have followed from the school to her house, searching for a sign that she’d run into trouble — a dropped book, maybe a handkerchief, anything that might have been hers. They examined both sides of the road leading from the edge of town out to the Conroe house and found nothing. In the town itself, it would have been nearly impossible for Kelly to have run into trouble without someone noticing; if not from a car, then from one of the houses.

Now, like Eric Holmes and Pete Arneson — and Matt Moore — Pullman was out by the waterfall, repeating a search that was eerily similar to the one for Emily Moore that had been abandoned only the day before. As they had with the road, Pullman and Petrocelli split the area in two, each of them searching half of it, then switching and searching the area the other one had already gone over. The only signs of violence they saw were a few spatters of blood in the area where the fight between Matt and Pete Arneson had taken place. As Petrocelli photographed the area, Pullman carefully collected as many samples as he could scrape from the rock. The lab in Manchester would quickly tell them if any of the samples could have come from Kelly Conroe.

Once they were finished with the area immediately adjacent to the pool and falls, they began working their way along the trail leading to the Hapgood house.

“But if I were Matt, and I was dragging Kelly Conroe, I wouldn’t use the trail,” Tony Petrocelli objected. “Anybody could have come along.”

Pullman shook his head. “That’s the whole point — according to Matt, he was looking for Kelly, not carrying her or dragging her. And if he was looking for her in the dark, he’d sure use the path. Which means we should find footprints going both ways, and they should be very fresh, and they should match the shoes Matt was wearing last night, which looked like Doc Martens, maybe about a size nine, or ten.” He stopped abruptly. “Like these,” he said, squatting down.

Petrocelli hunkered down beside him, and both men studied the clear imprint that a deeply cleated shoe had left in the soft earth. It was recent enough that the brand name and a logo were clearly visible, along with the sole pattern. It took only a moment for Pullman to decipher the mirror image of the brand name: Redwing. The logo, set in the center of the heel, looked like a spider, or maybe a large tick. Pullman sighed. “Well, so much for my theory that they were Doc Martens.”

“Nearly the same thing,” Petrocelli replied. “Redwings are Australian — good for hiking, and look almost like Doc Martens.” He carefully placed his own size twelve foot alongside the print. “About the right size too.”

They moved farther down the path, searching for more prints, and now that they knew what they were looking for, it didn’t take long to find them.

And every one of them pointed toward the Hapgood house, not away.

“So if these match Matt’s shoes,” Petrocelli said as they came in view of the house, “then we know Matt used the path only to go home.”

Pullman said grimly, “Time to see if we can find the shoes Matt was wearing last night.”