Last Wrong Turn (7 page)

Penny

One week later

I look up just as the helicopter swoops low and rushes over us. The sound of its blades is momentarily deafening, and I watch as it rushes off across the countryside on yet another search mission. Somehow, though, I can already feel in the pit of my belly that it isn't going to find a goddamn thing.

“We're focusing on this area here,” Detective Palmer explains as he unfolds the map and places it against the side of his patrol car. “We've basically set up a ten-mile zone around Wexham, and we're scouring every inch of the valley between these two roads. I'm telling you, Mrs. Latimer, if there's a farmhouse out there, we'll find it.”

“If?” I ask, stepping over to him. “Do you still think I'm making it up?”

“Of course not, it's just...” He pauses, staring at the map for a moment as if he expects some hidden answer to come leaping out at him. “Let's wait and see what the helicopter crew finds in sector five. Based on the description you gave, I think that's a promising area to search.”

“You've searched it five times already,” I point out.

He opens his mouth to reply, but I can see he has no answers for me.

“It's out there,” he says finally. “We'll find it. We have to.”

Turning, I see that the helicopter is now just a distant speck against the gray sky. I can see a couple of figures against the horizon, continuing the search by foot, but somehow the entire police operation is starting to feel increasingly impotent. It's now almost two weeks since the car crash, and the farmhouse seems to have somehow folded itself away so that no-one can find it at all. I'm a rational person, not someone given to flights of fancy, but I have to admit I've started to wonder whether we're dealing with something more than
just
a farmhouse. Out here, far from civilization in the heart of rural Kent, it almost feels as if the rules are different.

“Come in, base,” a voice says suddenly over the walkie-talkie on Palmer's dashboard. “This is Carmel. We're not seeing anything out here.”

Palmer grabs the walkie-talkie.

“Take another pass,” he tells the helicopter crew. “Keep looking.”

“We've already -”

“Just keep looking,” he continues, glancing at me with a hint of desperation in his eyes. “We've scoured every inch of the countryside around here, which means we must've flown right over the farmhouse and not seen it. Two people are still missing, and one of them's a newborn child. Giving up isn't an option.”

Setting the walkie-talkie down, he seems lost in thought for a moment.

“Maybe there's some kind of camouflage on the roof,” he suggests finally. “Some kind of sophisticated, military-grade anti-tracking capability.”

“They're dirt poor,” I reply with a sigh. “It's just a battered old farmhouse.”

“But if -”

“They barely even have electricity,” I add, to really hammer the point home. “Just a little wood-burning generator. It was almost like stepping back in time.”

He pauses, before nodding and turning to look back at the map. He's still searching for an answer, for a way to explain his team's consistent failure.

“We need to try something else,” I tell him, as I see the helicopter turning around in the distance. “Nothing's working so far. We're not doing this right.”

***

“This area here,” Palmer mutters later, as we sit at a table in the corner of the pub. It's dark outside now, and the search has been called off for the night. With his finger on the map, Palmer traces a large circle with Wexham more or less at its center. “This is the hotspot.”

“What kind of hotspot?” I ask.

“Over the past twenty years, there have been six car crashes that have involved the disappearance of passengers.”

“Disappearance?”

“Usually, all we find is the damaged car and the bodies of anyone who died in the crash. But then there's always at least one passenger who's missing, almost as if...” He pauses for a moment. “This is strictly off the record, okay?”

I wait for him to continue, but he seems strangely reluctant.

“This is just something that's whispered about from time to time,” he continues, “but it's almost as if someone gets to the crash-site before the police arrive, and removes anyone who survived.”

“Like... scavengers?”

“Officially, there isn't a problem,” he explains. “The hotspot is just large enough to fall into the jurisdiction of three separate police forces, which means the investigation has always been fragmented. Everyone tries to keep the situation from hitting the media, mainly because of the backlash we'd receive if people realized what might be happening. Trust me, this is
not
something that my colleagues like to talk about much. I mean, the idea of some kind of serial killer operating in the area, taking people from wrecked cars, is just too much for most of the force to believe.”

“But
you
believe it?” I ask.

I wait for an answer.

“You do, don't you?” I continue.

He sighs.

“If you don't,” I add, “then why are you telling me about it?”

“I'm keeping an open mind.” He points at another spot on the map. “That's the old Happy Eater restaurant that shut down years ago,” he continues. “Twice now, a survivor has been found there. You, and a woman just over a year ago. I think we need to assume that whoever's behind this, they can't be too far from that location. I think we can also assume that something must have changed. There never used to be survivors.”

“What kind of serial killer lets people live?” I ask. “It doesn't make sense. I mean, that girl must know that survivors will talk, and that there's a danger they might lead the police to the farmhouse. Unless...”

My voice trails off.

“Unless she's extremely confident that the farmhouse
can't
be found,” Palmer suggests. He pauses for a moment, before taking a sip of beer. “The other problem is that from your description, it sounds like this girl is less than twenty years old, which means she
can't
have been responsible for the earlier incidents.”

“There was an older man at the farmhouse,” I remind him.

“So maybe he started it, and she's taking over.” He sighs, and a moment later his phone starts buzzing. “Great,” he mutters, “the boss wants a progress report. I'm going to have to step outside for a few minutes.”

“I'll order food,” I tell him, as we both get to our feet. “Same as last night?”

Palmer heads outside to talk to his boss, and I make my way over to the bar. To be honest, I feel too wired and nervous to eat, but I know I have to keep my strength up for Hugh's sake. Leaning against the bar, I grab a menu and try to find something that seems appealing, and then I glance across toward the barmaid, who's dealing with a couple of other customers over by the window. Turning, I look at the fire that's burning in the hearth, and for a moment the flames seem somehow mesmerizing. Night after night, Palmer and I end up in this pub trying to come up with new ways to find the farmhouse, and night after night we fail. Tomorrow morning, bright and early, we'll set off on another wild goose chase.

The truth is, we're no closer to finding Pete and Hugh.

“You're wasting your time,” a voice says suddenly.

Looking along the bar, I see an old man sitting at one of the stools. There's a rifle leaning against the wall behind him, and a Jack Russell dog is sleeping contentedly at his feet.

“I'm sorry?” I ask.

“People have looked for that farmhouse before,” he continues, taking a sip of ale and then wiping his mustache clean. “No-one's ever had any luck. Those folk out there, they know how to keep themselves to themselves. You won't find them unless they want to be found, and why in God's name would they ever want that?”

Seeing that the barmaid is still busy, I step over to the man. I'm sure he's just some local drunk nutcase, but at the same time I'm willing to listen to anyone who might be able to help.

“Do you know who these people are?” I ask, still a little worried that he's trying to trick me. “The girl with the scarred face, and the old man, and the farmhouse out in the middle of nowhere?”

“I don't know anything about a girl,” he replies, “but I wouldn't be surprised if someone's grown up out there by now. It's a bad business, is all I know for sure. Best left well alone.”

“Do you know their names?”

He seems hesitant for a moment. Checking over his shoulder, he seems worried that someone might overhear us talking. “That farm has been in the Clare family for generations,” he says finally, turning back to me. “Everyone knows there's something not right about them. They've been rotten for years. Generation after generation, the lot of them have been up to no good. They stopped coming into the local villages a long time ago, stopped going to church, on account of not being welcome. For a lot of folk round these parts, that's enough. Out of sight, out of mind. They can fool themselves into thinking the Clares are gone, but some of us know better. They're still out there somewhere.”

“The Clares?”

“Couldn't drown a flea in the gene pool in that family,” he mutters, taking another sip of beer. “Doesn't surprise me if they eventually had to start kidnapping to keep the line going. There's only so much of that business that one bloodline can take, if you catch my drift.” He takes another sip. “Some folk even say old John Clare made a deal with the Devil all those years ago, to keep the family hidden from the rest of the world. I don't believe
that
part of it, but you've gotta admit, they know how to keep themselves tucked away. If you ask me, they just kept themselves so isolated, eventually they drifted away from the rest of the world.”

“Do you know where we can find their farmhouse?” I ask, before hurrying to the table and grabbing the map. “Can you show me?”

He sighs. “There's no -”

“They have my husband,” I tell him as I head back over, “and my child. They're lost up there and I have to get them back!”

He pauses, before straightening out the map and studying it for a moment. “There,” he says finally, poking at one particular spot near Wexham. “I can't be certain, but from what I heard when I was a boy, the farmhouse was somewhere round there. This land here, all through the valley, belonged to them. Not that they did much with it, mind. Just subsistence farming, if they even managed to grow anything.”

I shake my head. “We've searched there.”

“Of course you have. And you can search it again, but you won't find anything.”

“You must be wrong,” I continue. “That was one of the first places we looked, but we've gone over every inch of the land and the farmhouse definitely isn't there.”

“Yeah, well...” A faint smile crosses his lips. “If that's how they want it, that's how it'll be.”

“They can't make an entire farmhouse disappear,” I point out. “That's nonsense.”

“Who said anything about it disappearing?” he asks. “It just can't be found, that's all. Don't ask me how it works, but everyone in these parts knows about the Clare family. Of course, most of 'em won't talk to you about it, on account of not wanting to stir anything up.”

“But my son and -”

“I wish I could help you,” he continues, “but you're not the first person who's come up here looking for them, and most likely you won't be the last.”

“There's a police detective outside,” I tell him, glancing at the window and seeing Palmer in the car park, still talking on the phone. “When he comes back inside, can you tell him everything you just told me?”

He sighs. “There'd be no point...”

“You have to talk to him! You have to tell him everything! Even the smallest thing might help us find these people!”

He sighs again, and I can see that he's not convinced.

“They can't just vanish,” I continue, trying to stay calm even though I think we might finally be onto something. “I don't care about local folklore, it's
impossible
for this farmhouse to stay hidden.”

“I'll talk to your pal,” he replies, “but you have to understand, it won't do any good. The Clare family farm doesn't sit right with the rest of the world. You won't find it unless it wants to be found, and believe me, people like that definitely prefer keeping themselves to themselves.”

“My husband and son are lost up there,” I tell him.

“Then I'm sorry, but...” He pauses, as Palmer finally comes back inside. “People who disappear up there, they never come back.”

“
I
did,” I tell him firmly. “And that means it's possible. Please, you have to tell us everything you know!”

Penny

“We're wasting our time here,” I tell Palmer the following morning, as I follow him through the hospital's main door. “We should be out there with the others, coordinating the search.”

“This'll only take an hour. Maybe less.”

“But the information we got from the man in the pub last night -”

“Won't help us,” he mutters, stopping next to the elevators and checking the list of departments. “The psychiatric department's on the fifth floor,” he adds, hitting a button to call an elevator. “Don't worry, I called ahead. She should be ready to speak to us.”

“I really don't -”

“Lindsay Collins is the only other person who ever came back from that farmhouse,” he continues, turning to me. “It took a while to get permission to bring you here, but I figure we don't have anything left to lose. Maybe together, you two might remember something that'll help us. After all, you're the only two people who've ever gone there and made it back to the real world.”

***

“I remember that room,” Lindsay says, staring down at her own hands with dark, pained eyes. “It's like a storage room on the ground floor, with the metal table and the tools in the corner and... I remember waking up there, and then Enda cleaned me and...”

Her voice trails off. In fact, I don't think she's finished a single sentence since we started talking to her. Instead, every time she manages a few words, she seems to fade off into her own thoughts. Then again, if she's been a patient here at the psychiatric ward for the past year, I guess maybe it's difficult for her to keep herself focused. I've never met anyone before who seemed so completely broken inside, but Lindsay Collins is clearly struggling to cope.

“Enda?” I ask cautiously. “Is that her name?”

“The girl with the...” She pauses, before reaching up and running a finger down her face. “She has a scar,” she continues, “it's deep and...”

“It's okay, Lindsay,” says the doctor who insisted on sitting in with us. Watching from a chair in the far corner, he's clearly very concerned about her. “If this is too upsetting, you can go back to your room.”

“I'm fine,” she mutters, wincing slightly. “I'm...”

Her voice trails off again.

“Lindsay survived a car crash near Wexham,” Detective Palmer says after a moment, turning to me. “Her parents unfortunately died in the crash, but Lindsay was removed from the wreckage by a person or persons unknown. She was missing for a few days, but eventually she was discovered at the same Happy Eater where we found you.”

“How did you escape?” I ask, watching as Lindsay picks at her fingernails.

“She took me out of there,” she mumbles. “Enda...”

“Enda let you go?” I wait for an answer, before turning to Palmer. “Why would she do that? What kind of serial killer kidnaps people and then sometimes just lets them leave again? It doesn't make any sense.”

“She's not a killer,” Lindsay whispers. “She's...”

Again, I wait for her to complete the sentence. It's clear that whatever she went through at the farm, the experience left her broken and shattered. I can't help thinking that I'd probably be in the same boat, maybe locked up here on the same ward, if it wasn't for the fact that I have to get back and rescue my family. The drive to find Pete and Hugh is keeping me going, whereas Lindsay apparently has no-one.

“He did things to me,” Lindsay says after a moment, her face twitching with a hint of nausea. “He...”

“You don't need to talk about that,” Palmer tells her, jotting something down in his notebook. “Not if you don't want to. It's not strictly relevant to the -”

“He touched me,” she adds, interrupting him, staring down at the tabletop. After a few seconds, her face curls into a faint sneer. “He forced me to... He forced his way inside and...”

She pauses, before letting out a faint, painful gasp, as if she's reliving some kind of horrific ordeal.

“Who?” I ask, even though I hate to push her. “The father? The father's dead now, I think. He fell down the stairs.”

“No, the brother.” She shudders slightly, and finally a tear trickles down her cheek. “He hurt me. He climbed onto me and he...”

She pauses, seemingly holding her breath, before suddenly letting out a grunt of anger.

“He touched me all over,” she stammers, “and he pawed at me, and he dug his nails into my flesh and he pounded at me and pounded and -”

“It's okay, Lindsay,” Palmer says calmly, “we really don't need to go into detail.”

She glances at me. Her dark, ringed eyes are filled with pain. “It hurt so much,” she continues. “He tore me open and crushed me.”

We sit in silence for a moment. Palmer is clearly shocked and uncomfortable, while Lindsay's lips are trembling as if she's still reliving the moment. I want to go around the table and hug the poor girl, but she seems so wiry and scared, I figure I might just make things worse.

“I didn't see a brother,” I say finally, before turning to Palmer. “Maybe he was out, or maybe he was hiding, but I only saw the girl and the old man. I saw some crosses, though. Just homemade wooden things. Maybe they were graves.”

“My parents aren't coming back,” Lindsay continues, her voice trembling with fear. “I know that now. They died, and I'll never see them again, but Enda...” She pauses, before suddenly turning and grabbing a folder from one of the chairs. “I've been busy,” she explains, as if she's suddenly snapped out of her daze. With shaking hands, she opens the folder and slides it toward me. Now she seems filled with a kind of desperate energy. “I've been researching all the cases where people vanished in that area over the past fifty years. There are at least nine separate incidents.”

“We've only identified six,” Palmer tells her. “In our -”

“Then you've missed some,” she snaps, scowling at him. “Bunch of fucking incompetent idiots.” Grabbing the folder again, she flips through the pages until she finds a photo of a man and a woman holding a baby, which she shoves toward me.

“Who are they?” I ask.

“Donald and Alice Williams,” she explains breathlessly, before pointing at the child, “and their newborn daughter Victoria. The three of them disappeared in a car crash near Wexham, sixteen years ago.”

“Okay,” I reply cautiously, “but -”

“That's her,” she continues, jabbing her finger against the child's face. “I'm sure of it. She's the only baby who vanished in the right time-frame, and I'm sure Enda was started out as another kidnap victim. She's just grown up there on the farm, and now it's the only world she knows, but she wasn't originally one of those inbred fucks. She was normal.”

Staring at the photo of the baby, I can't help feeling that Lindsay has to be wrong.

“You think Enda's real name is Victoria Williams?” I ask. “This baby doesn't have the scar...”

“She got the scar in the crash,” Lindsay continues, almost tripping over the words. “I've been thinking about it, and it all makes sense if you line it up right. She was badly injured in the crash, and the old man, the one who pretended to be her father... I think he sewed her face up, and that's why it's such a mess. And then he raised her as his daughter, and he taught her the lifestyle they have out there, but she's not like the others. Maybe you didn't meet her brother, but I did and trust me, he's a piece of... He's a...”

She stares into space for a moment, as if the mere mention of Enda's brother has sent her mind back to whatever trauma she experienced.

“Can I draw her?” she asks suddenly. “Just to make absolutely sure we're talking about the same girl.”

“I don't think that's necessary,” Palmer replies. “We just -”

“Please,” she continues, staring at the pen in his hand. “We have to be sure, don't we?”

Palmer glances at the doctor, who nods.

“We met a man in the pub last night,” I tell her, as she takes the pen and starts furiously scribbling on a page in Palmer's notebook, “who said that there was a lot of in-breeding going on up at the farm.”

“Enda's different to the others,” Lindsay continues, still working on her sketch. “She could have let me rot up there, but she chose to get me away. She said she'd get punished for it, but she did it anyway. She saved my fucking life.” She pauses for a moment. “Enda isn't a monster.”

“She stole my baby,” I tell her.

“She's not in charge. Her father -”

“Her father's dead,” I add, interrupting her. “I think she's in charge up there now.”

“She's not a bad person. The rest of them are rotten, but Enda has a good heart.”

“She stole my baby!”

“She probably just wanted it for herself,” she replies. “She's not right in the head, not completely, but she's not evil! She let me go.”

I can't help sighing. “But she -”

“She let
you
go too,” Palmer points out.

Turning to him, I realize that he's right. Despite everything that happened up at the farmhouse, finally Enda dragged my beaten and bloodied body all the way to that Happy Eater restaurant. She could easily have killed me and maybe no-one would ever have found my body, but instead she went out of her way to save me. I even have a vague memory of her apologizing for trying to feed me to those pigs.

“You have to rescue Enda,” Lindsay says finally, holding up a crude drawing of Enda, complete with the scar on her face. “This is her, isn't it?”

“We're going to rescue my son,” I tell her, bristling at the sight of the picture, “and my husband.”

“And Enda,” she continues. “Please, she's not all bad. Get her away from that place. Give her a chance to live a normal life in the real world.”

“I think she might be a little beyond that,” I mutter.

“You'd better hope you're wrong,” she replies. “Because it Enda can't be helped, maybe by the time you find your son it'll be too late for him too.”

I open my mouth to argue with her, before looking down at the photo again and seeing the picture of little Victoria Williams. My instinct is to dismiss the idea that Enda started out as such a normal-looking baby, but there's something about the eyes, something that makes me wonder whether there could be a hint of some faint similarity.

“So you've really seen her, right?” Lindsay asks after a moment, her voice trembling more than ever as she holds the pen in her hands. “For the last year, I've felt like no-one really believed me. Even when they saw the...”

She pauses, before looking down at the pen and carefully removing the lid.

“I think this is enough for one day,” the doctor says cautiously, getting to his feet. “Lindsay, would you like to go back to your room?”

“You've been there,” Lindsay says darkly, staring at the pen-lid for a moment longer before glancing at me. “Finally everyone knows I was telling the truth, so there's no more need for me to keep telling them over and over.”

“I'm going back there,” I reply, feeling desperately sorry for her. “I'm going to get my husband and my son back.”

“I hope you do,” she says with a faint smile. “Good luck. God speed.”

And then, in the blink of an eye, I see a faint flicker of some other emotion cross her face.

Before I even have time to react, she slams the pen-lid's sharper end into the side of her neck. By the time the doctor gets to her, she's already stabbed herself several more times, and blood is spraying from one of the wounds. Letting out a scream, Lindsay pushes the doctor away and stabs herself again and again, gouging holes in the side of her neck as more blood splatters against the wall.

Getting to my feet, I reach out and try to stop her, but it's too late. She screams as she stabs the pen-lid into her neck one more time, and this time more blood erupts from the wound.

***

Leaning against the wall in the corridor outside the ward, I close my eyes and try to get my thoughts together. My whole body is trembling, and when I open my eyes again I see that even though I just spent half an hour in the bathroom cleaning my hands, I still have traces of Lindsay's blood dried at the edges of my nails.

A moment later I hear footsteps coming closer, and I turn to see that Detective Palmer has finished speaking to the doctor.

“She's going to live,” he tells me as he pushes the door open and leads me back out into the hallway. “Apparently that was her fifteenth suicide attempt in the past year, but her first for more than three months. They were starting to think she'd turned a corner. I guess they were wrong.”

“But she seemed -”

“He says her experiences at the farmhouse caused significant psychological and physical damage,” he continues, as he hits the button to call an elevator. “Doctor Atkins didn't seem very hopeful when I asked when she might get out of here. Apparently her response to therapy has been sub-optimal, even before today. Whatever the hell that means.” He glances over his shoulder, looking back toward the door that leads into the ward. “Did you hear the way she was screaming and yelling? I've never met anyone so broken before.”

He turns to me.

“Are you okay?”

I nod.

“Is that a lie?” he asks.