In the living room, broken glass skittered across the floor.
He’s in the house. Get out. Get out now.
She slipped out the kitchen door and quietly closed it behind her. Found herself standing in a small garage. Moonlight filtered in through a single window, just bright enough for her to make out the low silhouette of a rowboat cradled in its trailer. No other cover, no place to hide. She backed away from the kitchen door, shrinking as far into the shadows as she could. Her shoulder bumped up against a shelf, rattling metal, stirring the smell of long-gathered dust. She reached out blindly along the shelf for a weapon and felt old paint cans, their lids caked shut. Felt paint brushes, the hairs shellacked solid. Then her fingers closed around a screwdriver, and she snatched it up. Such a pitiful weapon, about as lethal as a nail file. The runt cousin of all screwdrivers.
The light under the kitchen door rippled. A shadow moved across the glowing crack. Stopped.
So did her breathing. She backed toward the garage bay door, her heart battering its way to her throat. Only one choice left.
She reached down for the handle and pulled. The door squealed as it slid up the tracks, a shriek announcing: Here she is! Here she is!
Just as the kitchen door flew open, she scrambled out under the bay door and ran into the night. She knew he could see her moving along that pitilessly exposed shore. She knew she could not outpace him. Yet she struggled forward along the moon-silvered lake, the mud sucking at her shoes. She heard him moving closer through the clattering cattail reeds. Swim, she thought. Into the lake. She veered toward the water.
And suddenly doubled over as the next contraction seized her. This was pain like none she had ever known. It dropped her to her knees. She splashed down into ankle-deep water as the pain crescendoed, clamping her so tightly in its jaws that for a moment her vision went black and she felt herself tilting sideways, toppling. She tasted mud. Writhed, coughing, onto her back, as helpless as an overturned tortoise. The contraction faded. The stars slowly brightened in the sky. She could feel water caressing her hair, lapping at her cheeks. Not cold at all, but warm as a bath. She heard the splash of his footsteps, the snapping of reeds. Watched the cattails part.
And then he was there, standing above her, towering against the sky. Here to claim his prize.
He knelt beside her, and the water’s reflection glinted in his eyes in pinpoints of light. What he held in his hand gleamed as welclass="underline" a knife’s silvery streak. He seemed to know, as he crouched over her body, that she was spent. That her soul was only waiting for release from its exhausted shell.
He grasped the waistband of her maternity slacks and pulled it down, revealing the white dome of her belly. And still she did not move, but lay catatonic. Already surrendered, already dead.
He placed one hand on her abdomen; with the other, he grasped the knife, lowering the blade toward bared flesh, bending toward her to make the first cut.
Water fountained up in a silvery splash as her hand suddenly shot up from the mud. As she aimed the tip of the screwdriver toward his face. Muscles taut with fury, she drove it upward, the pathetic little weapon suddenly launched with lethal aim at his eye.
This is for me, asshole!
And this is for my baby!
She thrust deep, felt the weapon penetrate bone and brain, until the handle lodged in the socket and could sink no deeper.
He dropped without uttering a sound.
For a moment she could not move. He had fallen across her thighs, and she could feel the heat of his blood soaking through her clothes. The dead are heavy, so much heavier than the living. She pushed, grunting with the effort, repulsed by the touch of him. At last she rolled him away and he splashed onto his back among the reeds.
She stumbled to her feet and staggered toward higher ground. Away from the water, away from the blood. She collapsed farther up on the bank, dropping onto a bed of grass. There she lay as the next contraction came and went. And the next, and the next. Through pain-dimmed eyes she watched the quarter moon wheel across the heavens. Saw the stars fade and a pink glow seep into the eastern sky.
As the sun lifted over the horizon, Mattie Purvis welcomed her daughter into the world.
THIRTY
TURKEY VULTURES TRACED LAZY CIRCLES in the sky, the black-winged heralds of fresh carrion. The dead do not long escape Mother Nature’s attention. The perfume of decomposition draws blowflies and beetles, crows and rodents, all converging on Death’s bounty. And how am I any different? Maura thought, as she headed down the grassy bank toward the water. She too was drawn to the dead, to poke and prod cold flesh like any scavenger. This was such a beautiful place for so grim a task. The sky was a cloudless blue, the lake like silvered glass. But at the water’s edge, a white sheet draped what the vultures, circling above, were so eager to feast on.
Jane Rizzoli, standing with Barry Frost and two Massachusetts State Police officers, stepped forward to meet Maura. “Body was lying in a couple inches of water, over in those cattails. We pulled it up onto the bank. Just wanted you to know it’s been moved.”
Maura stared down at the draped corpse, but did not touch it. She was not quite ready to confront what lay beneath the plastic sheet. “Is the woman all right?”
“I saw Mrs. Purvis in the ER. She’s a little banged up, but she’ll be fine. And the baby’s doing great.” Rizzoli pointed toward the bank, where tufts of feathery grass grew. “She had it right over there. Managed it all by herself. When the park ranger drove by around seven, he found her sitting at the side of the road, nursing the baby.”
Maura stared up the bank and thought of the woman laboring alone under the open sky, her cries of pain unheard, while twenty yards away, a corpse cooled and stiffened. “Where did he keep her?”
“In a pit, about two miles from here.”
Maura frowned at her. “She made it all this way on foot?”
“Yeah. Imagine running in the dark, through the trees. And doing it while you’re in labor. Came down that slope there, out of the woods.”
“I can’t imagine.”
“You should see the box he kept her in, like a coffin. Buried alive for a week-I don’t know how she came out of it still sane.”
Maura thought of young Alice Rose, trapped in a pit all those years ago. Just one night of despair and darkness had haunted her for the rest of her short life. In the end, it had killed her. Yet Mattie Purvis had emerged not only sane, but prepared to fight back. To survive.
“We found the white van,” said Rizzoli.
“Where?”
“It’s parked way up on one of the maintenance roads, about thirty, forty yards away from the pit where he buried her. We never would have found her there.”
“Have you found any remains yet? There must be victims buried nearby.”
“We’ve just started to look. There’s a lot of trees, a large area to search. It’ll take time for us to comb that whole hill for graves.”
“All these years, all those missing women. One of them could be my…” Maura stopped, and looked up at the trees on the slope. One of them could be my mother. Maybe I don’t have a monster’s blood in my veins at all. Maybe my real mother has been dead all these years. Another victim, buried somewhere in those woods.
“Before you make any assumptions,” said Rizzoli, “you need to see the corpse.”
Maura frowned at her. Looked down at the shrouded body lying at her feet. She knelt and reached for a corner of the sheet.
“Wait. I should warn you-”
“Yes?”
“It’s not what you’re expecting.”
Maura hesitated, her hand hovering over the sheet. Insects hummed, greedy for access to fresh meat. She took a breath and peeled back the cover.
For a moment she didn’t say a word as she stared at the face she’d just exposed. What stunned her was not the ruined left eye, or the screwdriver handle jammed deep into the orbit. That gruesome detail was merely a feature to be noted, mentally filed away as she would file a dictated report. No, it was the face that held her attention, that horrified her.