Lost Among the Living(105)
Mary Hand, Mary Hand, dead and buried under land . . .
Faster, faster. Don’t let her catch you.
She’ll say she wants to be your friend . . .
Ahead, the trees were thinning, the pearly light of the half-moon illuminating the clearing of the sports field.
Do not let her in again!
The girl’s lungs burned, and a sob burst from her throat. She wasn’t ready. She wasn’t. Despite everything that had happened—or perhaps because of it. Her blood still pumped; her broken body still ran for its life. And in a moment of pure, dark clarity, she understood that all of it was for nothing.
She’d always known the monsters were real.
And they were here.
The girl looked into the darkness and screamed.
CHAPTER ONE
BARRONS, VERMONT — NOVEMBER 2014
The shrill of the cell phone jerked Fiona awake in the driver’s seat. She lurched forward, bracing her palms on the wheel, staring into the blackness of the windshield.
She blinked, focused. Had she fallen asleep? She’d parked on the gravel shoulder of Old Barrons Road, she remembered, so she could sit in the unbroken silence and think. She must have drifted off.
The phone rang again. She swiped quickly at her eyes and glanced at it, sitting on the passenger seat where she’d tossed it. The display glowed in the darkness. Jamie’s name and the time: three o’clock in the morning. It was the day Deb would have turned forty if she’d still been alive.
Fiona picked up the phone and answered it. “Jamie,” she said.
His voice was a low rumble, half-asleep and accusing, on the other end of the line. “I woke up and you were gone.”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“So you left? For God’s sake, Fee. Where are you?”
She opened her door and swung her legs out into the chilly air. He’d be angry, but there was nothing she could do about that. “I’m on Old Barrons Road. I’m parked on the shoulder, at the bottom of the hill.”
Jamie was quiet for a second, and she knew he was calculating the date. Deb’s birthday. “Fee.”
“I was going to just go home. I was.” She got out of the car and stood, her cramped legs protesting, the cold air slapping her awake and tousling her hair. She walked to the edge of the road and looked up and down, shoving her free hand into the pocket of her windproof jacket. Back the way she’d come, she could see the road sign indicating thirty miles to Burlington and the washed-out lights of the twenty-four-hour gas station at the top of the hill. Past the hill, out of her sight, she knew there was the intersection with the North Road, with its jumble of fast-food restaurants, yet more gas stations, and a couple of hopeful big-box stores. In the other direction, ahead of the car’s hood, there was only darkness, as if Old Barrons Road dropped off the face of the earth.
“You didn’t have to go home,” Jamie was saying.
“I know,” Fiona replied. “But I was restless, and I didn’t want to wake you up. So I left, and I started driving, but then I started thinking.”
He sighed. She could picture him leaning back on the pillows, wearing an old T-shirt and boxer shorts, the sleek muscles of his forearm flexing as he scrubbed a hand over his eyes. He was due on shift at six thirty; she really had been trying not to wake him. “Thinking what?”
“I started wondering how much traffic there is on Old Barrons Road in the middle of the night. You know, if someone parked their car here and left it, how long would it be before someone drove by and noticed? The cops always said it wasn’t possible that Christopher could have left his car here for so long, unseen. But they never really tested that, did they?”
And there it was: the ugly thing, the demon, coming to the surface, spoken aloud. The idea had been niggling at her for days as Deb’s birthday approached. She’d tried to be quiet about it, but tonight, as she’d lain sleepless, her thoughts couldn’t be contained.
“This isn’t healthy,” Jamie said. “You know it isn’t.”
“I know,” Fiona said. “I know we’ve been over this. I know what my therapist says. I know it’s been twenty years.” She tried to keep the pleading from her voice, but it came out anyway. “Just listen to me, okay?”
“Okay,” he replied. “Shoot.”
She swallowed. “I came here and I parked by the side of the road. I sat here for”—she checked her watch—“thirty minutes. Thirty minutes, Jamie. Not a single car passed by. Not one.” By her calculations, she’d been here for forty-five minutes, but she’d been asleep for fifteen, so she didn’t count those. “This is the same time of night that Deb’s body was dumped. He could have parked here and done it. The field at Idlewild Hall is only ten minutes through the trees. He would have had plenty of time.”
On the other end of the line, she heard Jamie breathe. They’d been together for a year now—a fact that still surprised her sometimes—and he knew better than to say the usual empty words. It doesn’t matter. This won’t bring her back. He’s already in prison. It was twenty years ago. You need to move on. Instead, he said, “Old Barrons Road wasn’t the same in 1994. The old drive-in was still open on the east side of the road. It didn’t do much business by the nineties, but kids used to party there, especially around Halloween.”