The Narrows(24)

“Hey, Maggie,” he said. “How’re you doing, hon? You okay?”

“Jesus. Yeah, Ben. Hi. Sorry.” Her voice had the squeaky, broken quality of a badly dented trumpet.

“Nothing to be sorry about.” He looked to Eddie, who shrugged his shoulders. “What happened here, Maggie?”

She told him—she’d been coming down the road when, in a split second, someone jumped out in front of her car. “I think…” She stuttered and quickly averted her eyes. Her whole body trembled. Then she met his eyes again. “Whoever it was just came right out of the woods. I tried to stop, but then the car started spinning.” Her voice hitched. “Did you find anyone out there?”

Ben shook his head. He could hear sirens in the distance. “You have a few drinks tonight?”

“Earlier I had a few.”

“How much earlier?”

“I don’t remember. Maybe around seven o’clock? I was down at Crossroads.”

“Were you alone?”

Her brow furrowed. “At Crossroads?” Her voice was paper thin. She appeared to chew over the answer to his question. “Yes,” she said finally.

“Okay. Any chance what you hit was a deer?”

She looked directly at him then. Those eyeless pits in her skull stared straight through him, chilling his blood to ice water. It was only after he realized she had mascara smeared around her eyes that he released a slow and weary breath.

“It looked like a person,” she said in a low voice then immediately dropped her head again. “I mean, I saw…I think…it was a little boy, Ben. I mean, I think it was.”

A wave of heat radiated through Ben’s body. “You think?”

“I’m almost positive…but…”

“But what?”

“No hair,” she said. “The kid didn’t have any hair.”

Without missing a beat, Ben thought about how he had fished a hairless boy out of the cold waters of Wills Creek last week. The boy had been in the water for an unknown period of time, the color leached from his flesh and the hair shorn from his scalp. Thinking about it now made Ben Journell uneasy.

“When the ambulance gets here, have ’em give Maggie a once-over, then have them wait around until I can do a better search of the surrounding woods,” Ben told Eddie.

“You got it,” Eddie said, stuffing his notebook back into the breast pocket of his shirt.

Ben got back into his cruiser just as the whirling lights of the ambulance approached in his rearview mirror. He pulled around the Pontiac then slowly coasted up the shoulder of the road, shining the windshield-mounted searchlight into the trees. He clicked on the high beams too, though all that seemed to accomplish was to give substance to the clouds of exhaust clogging the air. Fat, white moths swirled in the funnel of light. He was looking for anything—busted tree limbs, trampled underbrush, perhaps some blood on the bark of a tree. But he could see nothing.

Eventually he brought the car to a stop and put it in Park. When he stepped out, he first thought that the temperature had dropped another ten degrees, but then realized he had been sweating to death in the cruiser. Beneath his uniform, his Kevlar vest seemed to weigh a thousand pounds.

Clicking on his flashlight again, he stepped off the road and into the tangled underbrush at the cusp of the woods. Each exhalation clouded before his face and he could feel the sweat on his forehead and at the back of his neck freezing in the night. He crossed several yards into the trees, the network of bare branches crisscrossing the moon above his head. Beneath his heavy boots, dead leaves and fallen tree limbs crunched like potato chips. He paused, scanning the area with the flashlight’s beam. Everything moved—the trees, the twiggy shrubs, the shadows. The world was alive with the chorus of countless insects.

The longer he stared at a spot of darkness, the more he could convince himself that things were moving within. At one point, Ben thought he could hear a high-pitched keening coming from somewhere far back in the woods—a distant falcon screeching from a branch.

“Ben?” Eddie said, coming up behind him.

“Christ. Don’t sneak up on me like that.”

“The EMTs want to know what they should do. They checked over Mrs. Quedentock and said she looks fine, she’s just a little freaked out, you know? She doesn’t want to go with them, says she doesn’t need an ambulance and just wants to go home. The EMTs are just sitting there, waiting. What should I tell them?”

“Tell them I got some extra flashlights in the trunk of my car,” Ben said. “They can go home after we check the other side of the road.”



5



They searched the woods off Full Hill Road for nearly two hours but found no evidence of a person having been struck by Maggie Quedentock’s car. The EMTs became quickly annoyed and said they had more important things to do than traipse around the woods for what would probably amount to an injured deer, and they soon left. Ben didn’t blame them. He was just relieved that no victim had been found.

It was after three in the morning when the cruiser pulled into the empty parking lot of the police station. At this hour, even Shirley was gone. Any emergency calls would be rerouted to a dispatcher in Cumberland. With the exception of the floodlight that cast an unwavering beam on the American flag in the front yard, the entire building was dark.