Matt grabbed another log off the pile and froze. The pile had a hollow spot in it, a hole that reached all the way down to the ground. There was no way this was accidental; Matt could see that someone had used a few small sticks to keep the logs from falling in on themselves.
At the bottom of the hole, something gleamed whitely.
A bone.
And another. And another.
Matt bent down to peer into the hole. There was a stack of bones at least a foot high.
What kind of bones Matt didn't know. They weren't human; they were too small for that. But they seemed to come from all sorts of creatures. Matt imagined dogs and cats, but they could have just as easily been raccoons and squirrels. Some kinds of forest pests. Certainly there was nothing wrong with killing animals like these. For all he knew, people around here ate them.
So why were these bones hidden inside a secret compartment in a wood pile?
And why did they have teeth marks in them?
This could all mean nothing. There might be a perfectly natural explanation for it if you understood how these people lived.
But Matt had grown up in a time when you couldn't turn on the TV or pick up a paper without seeing a story about some serial killer or another. And the one thing they all seemed to have in common was that they started off by hurting animals.
If Matt Delaney had built this vault and stocked it with bones before he went off to war, then maybe his mother had been right to worry. Because if the boy had started out with a mind toward murder, he'd just spent two years perfecting its practice.
And now he was coming home.
CHAPTER FIVE
Joan's beef stew was the best meal Matt had eaten in as long as he could remember. They stayed up into the night, drinking homemade blackberry wine and talking about her son.
Not exclusively, of course. Matt had lots of questions about the town of Heaven. But Joan didn't have any real answers for him. She didn't even seem to understand the questions.
"Do people dress differently here?" she said, surprised, when he asked about the people's clothing. "I guess I never really noticed. It's just the way things have always been."
"That was kind of my point," Matt said with a smile. "Everywhere else I've ever gone, the way the things have always been has always changed. Maybe not for the adults, but kids want to follow fashion."
"I'd like to say it's because our people are driven by such a strong moral core that we don't let outside influences change us," Joan said, matching his smile, "but it probably has more to do with how isolated we are."
"I didn't think that kind of isolation was possible anymore," Matt said.
"You've got to work at it a little," Joan said.
"No TV?" Matt said.
"I think Ruth Stalmaster has one," Joan said. "Her mother used to watch it for hours on end. Of course there was nothing on the screen but snow and static, but Ermajean Stalmaster was well into senility by then. Aside from that, there's really no point. No one's going to string hundreds of miles of cable to bring TV to a handful of homes."
"They have satellites now, you know," Matt said.
"They've got a lot of things out in the rest of the world," Joan said. "That doesn't mean we need them to make our lives complete."
"So it was a conscious choice?" Matt said. "To shut the world out?"
"That sounds so… inhospitable," Joan said. "I think we just chose to keep ourselves in. We live simple lives filled with simple pleasures. I don't think any of us believes that we're superior to anyone else because of it. We're not some crazy religious cult, no matter what you may think about people who don't watch TV."
"I never said anything like that," Matt said.
"But you thought it," Joan said. "And no, we're not a secret race of telepaths, either. Saw it on your face."
"Guilty as charged," Matt said.
"This is our town, and this is our life," Joan said. "God knows it's not for everybody. But it makes us happy."
Matt thought back to those faces he'd seen on the main street – hard, desperate, tired faces – and wondered how true that really was. But he was a man who got his greatest pleasure from chopping wood every morning. Who was he to say what made other people happy?
"I guess people don't come and go very often," Matt said.
"Every once in a while someone goes," Joan said. "I don't remember anyone who left and came back."
And now she was waiting for the return of a boy who had been sent overseas to kill people, Matt thought. No wonder she's concerned.
"So your son is going to be the first?" Matt said.
A troubled frown crossed her face. "I never really thought about it that way."
"And he's not just coming back from the next town over," Matt said. "If he's been in Afghanistan or Iraq -"
"I don't know where he was stationed," Joan said. "He was never allowed to tell me."
That didn't sound good to Matt. Soldiers on regular duty didn't have to keep their locations secret. What was the kid doing that was so terrible it had to be classified? And how bad would that mission turn if Mr. Dark got involved?
"Maybe you should tell me a little about him," Matt said.
Joan did. Matt Delaney had always been a quiet boy. Of course, that probably had a lot to do with the fact that there were so few other children for him to be noisy with. But he'd always preferred books to toys. Mostly what he liked, though, was helping other people. Joan had a framed picture of him at age five struggling with a broom twice his height, trying to sweep the front porch of the Heaven Market. He was remarkably handy, and he'd spent his teenage years helping everyone in town with any repair they couldn't do for themselves. He'd never told his mother what made him run off and join the army, but she believed it was because he was looking for a way to help the entire country.
That's why everyone in town had gathered on Main Street to welcome him back that day, and why they'd be out the next one, too. Everybody loved Matthew Delaney.
As Joan talked about her son, Matt felt the same strange sense he'd had when he first saw the banner welcoming Matt Delaney home. The other boy's early life sounded so much like his own, although in a happier, more successful retelling. It was almost like she was trying to convince him that he had actually grown up here.
Joan pulled out a book of photos, and Matt studied them carefully. At least the most recent ones. He didn't care what her son had looked like when he was a child. He needed to know the face of the young man who was coming back.
Because Matt suspected he wouldn't be able to see much of it when they actually met. If the Delaney kid had changed in the way his mother thought, his face probably wouldn't be there anymore. The skin would be rotting off, eyeballs drooping from their sockets, great festering sores spreading across his blackening tongue.
And Matt would be the only one who would be able to see it.
But that didn't mean he had any idea what to do once he saw it.
If the kid was infected, Matt knew one thing. He was going to protect Joan Delaney from the creature that had been her son.
How he was going to do it – a total stranger warning a small town against the young man they'd all loved for years – he had no idea.
But he'd been given this power, and if there was a reason for it, then this had to be why.