“Lucky to be alive,” another trooper muttered. “Probably would’ve found him staked out in the woods next.”
Steve pushed past him and kept walking.
Her car idled in the middle of the road. The motionless figure within just stared through the windshield, stared through the clot of people ahead, at the ruined thing at their feet, at red seepage in the sand.
“Athena?” She didn’t seem aware of him. Gently, he reached through the window, putting a hand on her shoulder. “’Thena?”
Madly battering at his vision, branches clawed at his jacket. His boots crashed through the brush. He looked back over his shoulder, and a tree knocked the cap from his head, but he never slowed, not even when his breath came in roaring stabs and his eyes felt ready to burst. He staggered and nearly collided with a pine but kept on with great stumbling strides, the sweat soaking through his jacket.
Spencer fled deeper into the woods. He’d seen the police approaching his home, seen their stealth and numbers, and had gotten out just in time.
Al knew revenuers when he saw them.
Though she’d been eating for some time, the bowl in front of her still seemed to be full. He watched her surreptitiously. Apparently engrossed with the soup, she never actually brought any of it to her mouth but solemnly spooned the dark liquid as though dredging for a corpse.
“Don’t you like it?”
“Gritty. Sorry. Not your fault. I swear I can taste sand in everything anymore.” At last, she put the spoon down. “It’s beginning to get dark. We should start to lock up.”
Water trickled loudly into the sink. He twisted the faucet shut and wiped soapy hands on his pants before touching her cheek with a damp palm. “Athena, it’s over. They got him.”
She said nothing, but studied his face with desperate hope.
He caressed her hair, dark with flickering lights trapped within its coils. He looked at her slim body beneath the man’s shirt that hung so loosely on her. He watched her face. “Don’t you understand? It’s over.”
In the dimming yard beyond the screen door, a cluster of starlings shrieked and flurried.
She closed her eyes. “Steve…” She laid her hand on his, trying to draw his sureness into herself. “There’s nothing out there? Getting closer in the dark?”
He simply took hold of her hand.
“I chew my nails,” she told him after a moment.
“So I see.”
“You got sunburned today.” She touched the side of his face.
He put his arms around her, and she laughed sadly against him. He pressed his lips to her forehead.
When the boy’s cries came, she gently pushed him aside, nothing on her face betraying the least surprise. Not moving, he just listened to her mount the stairs. Then he turned the heat off under the coffee and rubbed a hand across his eyes.
Leaving the kitchen and climbing the stairs, he followed the shouts to the attic.
“Pammy’s blood! My friend—Pammy’s blood comin’ outta his mouth!”
“It was a nightmare. Only a nightmare.”
Steve found her rocking the boy in her arms.
“My poor baby. It’s over. Oh Matty.” Forcefully, she repeated, “All over.”
Friday, August 14
Rattling the newspaper in irritation, she scanned an article about a local mayor’s involvement in a toxic dumping scandal. “Now there’s shocking news. A crooked politician. Imagine.” A boxed follow-up story just below it described New Jersey’s pollution problem in depressing detail. Continuing to mutter under her breath, Doris turned back to the front page and reread the account of the death of a serial killer at Munro’s Furnace. The paper really played it up big—right across from the headline about the record heat wave, above the bit about the red tide near Brigantine.
At least Athena’s safe now, she thought. Sighing, she lowered the paper and looked down at her bandaged foot. The trap had severed a muscle, which might easily take longer to heal than a broken bone. Her glance continued around the small hospital room, everything ice blue and smelling of disinfectant. The slanting windows looked down on a sun-pounded lot. Shifting on the bed, she tried to find a comfortable position and toyed with an unlit cigarette. She checked her watch: almost time for more medication.
She didn’t like taking it. It made her brain fuzzy, and lately there’d been nightmares about that last drive with Steve, that night he’d driven her to the hospital. She’d been practically fainting at that point, barely able to make out his words, but in her dreams she heard him clearly. He seemed to be speaking about Barry, about fighting with Barry the day he died. “…squeezed and his eyes got very large, and that made me feel, not happy exactly, but like release was on the way, and the harder I squeezed the faster it came, and the feeling ran up my fingertips to my shoulders and then spread to…”
Just a dream. A drug dream. No, no more painkillers. She gritted her teeth and wished Athena would call.
Gazing at the pile of well-thumbed magazines on the night table, she sighed again, in boredom this time, and reopened the newspaper, amusing herself by reading about another casino scandal. Then her eyes wandered to a tiny account of a tractor-trailer driver arrested for drunk driving on the turnpike. The rig had turned out to contain radioactive materials. “Swell. Wipe out half the state that way.” She began leafing through pages in exasperation, stopping at a headline that read grandmother kills boy in ritual. She skimmed the piece. After neighbors had complained of a bad smell, a woman in Newark had been arrested for murdering a four-year-old in some sort of exorcism. She read down a bit farther. The child’s body was badly burned, and police had taken scrapings from the walls of the oven.
People are crazy, she thought and turned the page.
The lumps in the pancake batter wouldn’t go away. Athena stabbed them with a fork. She stirred them furiously, tried squashing them under the surface as though to drown them, but they only stuck to the tines. “This doesn’t look right.” She glanced over at Matty to see if he was impatient for lunch, but he just sat at the table and stared out the screen door. She watched him without seeming to. He was so still, so quiet.
Dropping the fork, which immediately disappeared into the batter, she pulled a chair over and climbed up on it. She dug through the kitchen cabinet, trying to find where Pam had put the eggbeater. With one hand, she steadied herself against the wall—its texture like the flaking skin of an elderly lizard—as she crashed and rattled things around on the shelves. No eggbeater. She did, however, find a utensil that vaguely resembled a cross between a cheese grater and brass knuckles, the proper function of which she couldn’t imagine. “Oh well, maybe this’ll work.” Hopping down, she got the oil out from under the sink and put the large skillet on the burner, turning the flame way up.
The dog lifted his head from the floor and sniffed the thin odor of scalded metal.
She tried mashing the lumps, and batter dribbled over the side of the bowl. She glanced over at the boy, who continued to sit in silence, still apparently traumatized by Pamela’s…disappearance. She didn’t know what to do to help. As she reached for the wooden spoon on a hook, heavy objects in her pockets banged against the stove. “Oh, I forgot. Look what I found while I was cleaning your room, Matthew. It’s those stones you used to play with. Remember?” She hopped down, but he only stared impassively. “Don’t you want them?” She felt his forehead again—no fever—but those hot, sunken eyes disturbed her. She touched the metallic sheen of his hair, lightly stroked the curling blades. “I’ll just put them h ere for you.” She laid the stones on the table.