The Backwoods Part 28

Forget about it. You're long over all that.

And she did feel long over the incident, just as Dr. Sallee had explained. And miles before the road would lead to Bowen's Field, she saw a state police car turning down a trail into the woods.

Something is going on out here, she realized.

The road wound down to a rutted dirt lane. Around the bend, she stopped short, startled. My G.o.d! What happened here? An ambulance and three police cars sat parked with their lights flas.h.i.+ng. Sergeant Shannon, the rugged state trooper she'd talked to yesterday, stood with the other officers, arms crossed and looking down toward a fingerlike estuary cutting into the woods from the bay. Shannon turned at the sound of her tires, then broke from the others and approached.

"Ms. White," he said, holding up a cautious hand, "you don't want to come down here."

"What happened!" she blurted, heart racing. She spotted two EMTs dragging a gurney from the ambulance. One of them also unfolded a black body bag. "It's not my sister, is it?"

The trooper blocked her way. He looked a little pale. "No, it's not. It's one of the other missing persons-Ernie Gooder. I'm afraid he's d-"

Patricia pushed past him, wild-eyed. No! It can't be! But even as the plea left her lips, she knew the worst.

Her eyes shot down at the water. She blinked. Then she jerked her gaze away.

"I told you you didn't want to come down here, Ms. White," Shannon said. "There is some rough stuff going on in this town."

Rough stuff. What Patricia had seen in the several seconds she'd actually been able to look was this: Ernie's dead body being dragged out of the shallow water . . . or, it could be said, something significantly less than his dead body.

From the chest down the body looked corroded, or even eaten. All the skin and quite a bit of muscle ma.s.s was absent, leaving raw white bones showing. The waist down was the worst-there was essentially nothing left but tendons and sc.r.a.ps of muscle fiber along the leg bones and hips: a wet skeleton. Skeletal feet pointed up at the ends of the lower leg bones. Ernie's sodden s.h.i.+rt had been torn open and hung off the shoulders, while his pants looked congealed at what was left of his ankles. Some arcane process had whittled away the flesh, leaving this human sc.r.a.p, and in the final second of her glimpse, Patricia realized what that process was.

At least a dozen very large blue crabs let go of those skeletal legs when the body had been pulled out, whereupon they skittered back into the water. Ernie had been used for crab bait.

Patricia wanted to throw up. She felt dizzy at once, and braced herself against a tree. "My G.o.d," she wheezed.

"Sorry you had to see that," Shannon said. "These drug wars can get down and dirty."

"Iknew him very well," Patricia mumbled over the nausea. "He simply wasn't the type to sell or use drugs."

Shannon seemed convinced otherwise. "We found crystal meth in his room, so how do you explain-"

"Sergeant Shannon?" one of the EMTs called out. He knelt at Ernie's horrific corpse, as gloved cops prepared to slide it into the body bag. "Found some CDS in his pants pocket. Looks like crystal meth. You'll want to bag it as evidence."

"You were saying?" Shannon said back to Patricia.

When she heard the bag being zipped up, some morbid force caused her to steal one last glance. Ernie was now mostly in the bag, but his head hung out, neck craned back. That was when she saw . . .

His teeth . . . My G.o.d, his teeth . . .

"You all right, Ms. White?"

"His two front teeth are missing," she croaked. "It's impossible for me to not have noticed that in the past."

"Ever hear of false teeth? They probably fell out when his attackers were putting him in the water."

Patricia didn't hear whatever else he said before he departed and went to secure the drug evidence.

His two front teeth are missing. The words droned in her head. It was the one thing she'd never forget: the man who'd raped her over twenty-five years ago had been missing his two front teeth. . . .

Patricia could barely maintain her composure. She stood up at the end of the road with Shannon. They both watched in silence as the ambulance and other police cars drove away, leaving a veil of road dust hanging in the air. When the last vehicle had left, Patricia stood in numb shock, the cicada sounds beating in her ears.

"I can tell you," Shannon began, "nothing will ruin a town and its people faster than dope. It's happening everywhere. And half the time it's the people you least expect."

"It's just . . . Ernie," she said. "He wasn't the type at all."

"All it takes is one hit off a meth pipe and you're done. Every addict I ever busted says the same thing. It changes you overnight. And once the stuff tips you over, you're making it or selling it just to maintain your own supply. It turns decent people into thieves, killers, criminals-human animals. And good luck making it through rehab. This stuff and crack? The success rate is so low it's not even worth bothering with. You can put a meth-head in prison for ten years, and he's back with the pipe the first day he gets out. That's how addictive this stuff is."

Patricia shook her head, looking out into the woods.

"So you knew this guy pretty well, I take it," the trooper observed.

"I thought I did. I grew up with him as a kid. I live in D.C. now, but I came back to Agan's Point for a visit-the first time in years."

"Well, now you can see what happened to him over those years."

"I guess I knew something was wrong-I couldn't imagine he'd gotten involved with drug people. He wasn't the type."

"There isn't a type. It can happen to anyone. You experiment with something like this, think, 'Oh, I'll just do it once to see what it's like.' Then you're never the same. We're pretty sure Ernie Gooder was the person who burned down the docks two nights ago."

"What time did you say the fire occurred?"

Three thirty."

Patricia smirked. "He was peeping in my window around quarter after."

"Really?" Shannon said. "You're lucky that all he did was peep. Anyway, it's obvious what's going on out here-a meth war between two gangs. Ernie and some of these other locals are in one gang, and a bunch of these Squatters are in the other. And now they're duking it out. It might seem impossible for a place like this, but like I said, the same thing's happening all over the state." Shannon shrugged. "Chief Sutter being missing doesn't look good either."

"So you think he's involved with drugs?"

A cop, especially a police chief, is the kind of power person any dope gang will pay to work for them and protect their runs. You wouldn't believe the kind of money a crooked cop can make."

"Is that what you really think? That Chief Sutter is working with a drug gang?"

"It's either that or he got killed trying to make a bust. A police chief doesn't just disappear.

Even in her civilian naivete, Patricia was coming to grips with Sergeant Shannon's suspicions.

The heat was steepening, the humidity drawing beads of sweat on her brow.

"And I'm sorry I'm the one to tell you this, but I'm sure you've already considered it anyway," Shannon told her. "There's a pretty big chance that your sister was involved in some of this too. She's also missing. There's a good chance- "I know, Sergeant." Patricia faced the facts. "My sister's probably dead. Her body's probably lying in the woods somewhere."

Shannon didn't say anything after that.

When he went back on his rounds, Patricia headed back toward town. She drove aimlessly, cranking the air-conditioning up. What am I thinking? she asked herself. That I'm just going to see Judy walking down the road? She's going to wave to me, with a big smile? She knew that wasn't going to happen.

She drove through more of the town proper, and then the outskirts. I've never seen anything like this, she thought; Agan's Point looked abandoned, evacuated. Not even one person out walking their dog . . . When she pulled into the Qwik-Mart, she found the little parking lot empty, noticed no one in the store, then spotted the SORRY, WE'RE CLOSED sign.

Hours pa.s.sed without her notice. Patricia tried to keep her mind off what was becoming the greatest likelihood. Eventually, she forced herself to admit why she was driving so pointlessly.

I don't want to go back to the house.

The comfortable old house she'd been raised in now seemed utterly haunted, not just by her dour parents but by murdered people she didn't know, and by Judy, by Ernie, by every dim, sad memory, and as she pulled up the long cul-de-sac out front, those memories ma.s.sed and urged her away. She drove to the southern end of the Point. . . .

Where the town looked evacuated; the tract of land that comprised Squatterville looked evacuating. It's a ma.s.s exodus now, she saw. She wondered how many Squatters actually had been involved in drugs. Just those few? Or had the Squatters become a secret drug culture of their own?

We'll never know. They're all leaving now.

In small salvos they trudged up the hill and away, beaten suitcases and sacks of possessions in tow; Patricia thought of refugees leaving a bombed city. Where they go next is anybody's guess, and it's not like anyone cares anyway. . . .

The sun was sinking. Patricia drove the loop around the crab-picking house and then winced at the burned pier. The boathouse had been reduced to cinders, while the boats that had been burned had been moored ash.o.r.e, the hulls like blackened husks. She could still smell the char in the air, thick as the cicada trills.

Out in the bay she saw the pale wood plank sticking up: the Squatter graffiti, their good-luck sign. The plank appeared to overlook the ruined docks, a symbol now of the clan's bad fortune, not good fortune.

The inevitable approached quickly, like a beast running down a fawn. The sun had now been replaced by a fat yellow moon that stalked her back to the dark house.

She parked the Cadillac out front, then sat for several minutes staring, the engine ticking beneath the hood. I don't want to go in. There's n.o.body there anymore.

She trudged up the steps, frowning at the odd door knocker that was a half-formed face. The fantasy beckoned her: that she would walk in, smell homemade biscuits baking, and Judy would look up from the oven and explain where she'd been the last two days, and it would all be so innocent, and they'd laugh and hug and everything would be okay again.

Patricia's hands were shaking when she entered and crossed the foyer. Darkness saturated the house. She walked around downstairs, wide-eyed, snapping on lights, but the illumination she sought only made the house feel bigger . . . and emptier. Her feet took her listlessly to the kitchen and no, the air didn't smell of biscuits; it smelled sterile, lifeless. Instinct urged her to call out for Judy, but she didn't bother.

Her sister wasn't here, and probably never would be again.

She checked the answering machine. Had anyone called? Had the police left a message to relate that Judy had been found, had been rushed to the hospital for an appendectomy or something, and was recovering now and waiting for her?

"You have . . . zero . . . messages," the machine's generic voice told her.

She turned and went to the refrigerator for some juice, but her hand froze in midair. A strawberry magnet held a note to the door-Things to get: flour, milk, eggs, coffee-a shopping list in Judy's unruly scrawl. Patricia stared at the list and began to cry.

She wore her clothes to bed, too unsettled to undress. The bedroom window stared at her. It was locked now, its curtains drawn, but just knowing what Ernie had been doing on the other side of it several nights ago gave her a grim fright. A dead man's sperm is on my windowsill, she thought absurdly. Just a few feet away . . . The notion knotted her stomach. She could go sleep in another room, but that idea distressed her as well. Which room would she take? Ernie's? Her sister's? Or what about her parents' old room upstairs? No, they were all chock-full of ghosts now.

She stared up at the ceiling, at the room's grainy darkness. Were faces forming in the grains? The window, the window, part of her mind kept whispering to her.

There's nothing there, so forget about it and go to sleep! she shouted back at herself, but she couldn't take solace even in her own sense of reason. Eventually she threw back the sheets, sighed to herself, and pulled back the curtain.

See. No one there. No peeping Toms, no monsters. Beyond the gla.s.s the yard looked normal, sedate. Night flowers in the expansive garden opened their petals to the night. The moon had risen higher now and turned white, flooding the backyard with a tranquil glow. There was nothing out of the ordinary for her to see.

Back under the covers, she curled into a ball. Did she hear the hall clock ticking? The house frame creaked a few times, causing her to flinch. Please, Judy. Please come home. Please be okay, she prayed, drifting off.

The maw of a nightmare opened wide. She was in the same room, in the same grainy darkness and on the same bed, only naked now, splayed. Moonlight flooded the room and, in turn, her bare flesh. It painted her in a translucent lambency: bright, sharp-white skin, the rim of her navel a shadow dark as black ink. Her legs were spread to the window, her furred s.e.x shamefully bared.

She couldn't close her legs for the life of her.

She couldn't cover herself.

How can there be moonlight in the room? she thought. The curtains are closed. I know they are. I just closed them. But of course she thought that, for it didn't occur to her yet that this was a dream. . . .

She thought on through a tingling fear, concluding her question: Someone must have opened the curtains.

Then: The window . . .

She was determined not to look, but just as she'd given the order to herself, some force-the ghost of her father's hand, perhaps-pushed her head up and made her look.

She looked straight ahead between the mounds of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, down her stomach, through her spread legs. The tiny tuft of pubic hair drew a bead like a gunsight to the window.

The curtains weren't merely open; they were gone. The moonlight s.h.i.+mmered in an unwelcome guest now. She felt humiliated, ashamed. If someone was outside, they could look in and see her totally bared, the most private part of her body displayed as if on purpose. What would they think of her, lying on the bed like that, utterly naked?

But . . .

Thank G.o.d. There's no one there.

The hall clock began to tick louder than normal, and more rapidly. She kept looking down her body at the window, saw her b.r.e.a.s.t.s rising and falling faster now, her flat abdomen trembling, and then, beyond the ticking, she heard something else.

Crunching.

Footsteps, she knew.

Patricia's paralysis intensified; she felt made of cement, a p.r.o.ne statue. When the shadow edged into the window frame, her scream froze in her chest.

It was Ernie.

Cadaverous now, he leered in with a rotten grin, his eyes like raw oysters, his skin fish-belly white. He was masturbating, his dead hand shucking a rotten p.e.n.i.s with vigor. Worse than the act-and the dead, wet gleam in his eyes-was the gap that shone through the grin: the two front teeth missing. At one point he pushed a black tongue through the gap and wriggled it.

Soon another figure joined him: David Eald and his dead young daughter, both blackened corpses, the Hilds now naked, gut-sucked stick figures. Chief Sutter, as bloated in death as he was in life, his dead face the color and consistency of cheesecake, with two thumbholes for eyes. And finally Judy herself, naked and sagging, the skin of her face stretched across her skull like a stocking mask, the steam of rot wafting off her flesh.

Yes, they'd all congregated now-this cadaverous clique-to paint Patricia's nakedness with their spoiled grins. Ernie painted the windowsill with something else, his bony hips quivering and cheeks bloated-putrid s.e.m.e.n spurting. In his enthusiasm, Patricia noted that he'd actually wrung the skin off his p.e.n.i.s at the climactic moment. She also saw that maggots frenzied in the sperm as it shot out.

Thank G.o.d the window's locked, Patricia thought.

Then Ernie's and Sutter's cheesy-dead fingers began to open the window. First they'd reveled just to see her, but now they were coming to touch. . . .

When the stench poured into the room, Patricia wakened and screamed loud as a truck horn.

Oh, G.o.d, oh, G.o.d, oh, G.o.d . . .

Was she going insane? Her hand shot to her chest; her heartbeat felt like something exploding in her. But at least her clothes were on-at least now she knew it had been a dream.

The grainy dark hung before her, a veil. The hall clock ticked but was back to its normal, quiet pace. When the house frame creaked again, she actually found it comforting-because she knew it was real.

The window seemed to beckon her, though. Of course its curtains remained closed, just as she'd left them. But . . .

Her paranoia raced back to snare her. d.a.m.n it, she thought. d.a.m.n it, d.a.m.n it! She needed to know, just to be sure. . . .

She swung her feet out and rose, giving herself a moment to fully come awake. When the time came to move, she faltered. Come on, Patricia. What are you thinking?

What was she thinking? That she'd pull the curtains back to find a cl.u.s.ter of dead faces leering in?