Nowhere to Run (27 page)

Joe nodded. As he studied the photo, it hit him. He jabbed at the shot with his index finger. “Oh, man,” he said.

On Diane’s left arm was an iPod in a pink case.

“This looks
exactly
like the case Caleb had in his daypack,” Joe said softly.

“Bobby made the connection,” she said. “He said he asked you about it when you were in the hospital.”

“Yes, he did.”

“Brent was supposed to show that to you today, but he was so upset he forgot. That’s why I came back.”

Joe shook his head. What was the possibility the case he’d seen in Caleb’s daypack was similar but different? Given the remoteness of the tableau, the odds were tremendous they were the same item.

He looked up. How to say it without upsetting her? “Mrs. Shober, they look the same. Yup, they do. But that doesn’t mean she’s up there with them. I told you I was probably mistaken. And there’s the possibility they found this case on a trail or even stole it from a car or something.”
Or found it on her body and took it
, he thought but didn’t say.

He started to hand the photos back, but one of them nagged at him. He flipped through the stack again to a shot of Diane in a heated discussion with two other women runners in what was obviously a track meet at a stadium. All three wore uniforms that looked the same. Joe looked up for an explanation.

“Oh, that one,” Jenna said. “It’s from college. I have that one in there because I think it shows Diane’s passion. Those other two girls are on her team, and one of them had lost a race because a competitor tripped her deliberately. Diane was
so
angry. . . .”

But what Joe was struck by was the gesture Diane was making: stabbing her right index finger into the palm of her left hand to make a point.

“Your daughter,” he said, “has she always been blond?”

Jenna laughed. “Since high school, anyway. She dyes it religiously.” Joe took his index finger and placed it along the brow of Diane’s face in the photo, creating bangs. “So if she doesn’t color her hair, it turns back to the original dark brown,” he said.

“Yes.”

Joe looked up. “Do you know the name Terri Wade?”

Jenna looked back quizzically. “Of course I do. She was our housekeeper when Diane was growing up. Diane loved her, we all did. But she left us years ago. She and Brent had a disagreement. . . .”

Joe’s jaw and shoulders dropped. He flashed back to that moment when he saw the faces reflected in flame.

Jenna saw his reaction, said,
“What?”

“Mrs. Shober—I saw Diane. She’s using the name of your old housekeeper,” he said. “A name she’s comfortable with. She let her hair go brown and she dressed frumpy so I wouldn’t recognize her. But at one point outside that burning cabin, she turned away and then turned back. The angle of her face or the way the fire made her hair look lighter and her face look younger and resembled the photo on all the flyers. It made me think there were two women when there was only one.” He thought back again to that scene in the woods, that one quick glimpse of the “fourth face.” Wade turning away into the darkness, then the flash of one he’d thought was a different woman. Except it hadn’t been. It had been Diane all along. He shook his head in amazement. “And she’s got the brothers thinking her name is Terri Wade because they used it when they talked to her. I told you earlier I was probably mistaken but I don’t think so now. She was alive when I saw her last. So you need to know that. But . . .”

Her expression didn’t change but her eyes glistened with tears. “So you won’t help us?”

He couldn’t look into her eyes any longer. He handed the photo back and said, “I’m sorry.”

She started to say something, but her throat caught with a sob and she snatched the photo back and turned angrily away.

As she shoved the photos back into the envelope, Joe stared at the ceiling, the window, the floor. Anywhere but at her.

“Joe?” It was Marybeth, from behind him. He hadn’t heard her come into the house from the garage and place her briefcase on the kitchen table. And he didn’t know how long she’d been there in the doorway to the kitchen, or how much she’d heard.

He turned.

“Go,” she said. “Go find her.”

 

 

 

A MINUTE AFTER a sobbing and grateful Jenna Shober left their house, Joe said to Marybeth, “But I promised you.”

“You promised me when we didn’t know it was really Diane up there,” she said. “And when I put myself in Mrs. Shober’s shoes, if Sheridan or April or Lucy were missing . . .”

Joe nodded. “If you’re sure . . .”

“Take Nate,” she said.

“Of course.”

 

WHEN THE DOORBELL RANG, Joe expected either Brent or Jenna Shober, not the FedEx driver. He signed for a medium-sized box that wasn’t as heavy as it looked.

From the kitchen, Marybeth said, “What is it, Joe?”

“Dad,” he said.

THEY WERE RIDING BLIND, STILL BEARING WEST TOWARD THE high rim of the last cirque, Parnell in the lead, when Farkus said, “So all this time we were tracking a deer?”

Parnell didn’t answer. He glowered, though. Farkus thought the man was humiliated but didn’t want to show it.

Farkus said, “What I gather is these guys are
the
Cline Brothers? Of the Cline Family? What was their mother’s name? The one in the news?” It came to him and he answered his own question: “Caryl Cline. I remember seeing her on TV. She had a following out here, you know. But why did the game warden say their name was Grim?”

“Because I’m sure that’s what they told him.”

“Why would they do that?”

Parnell started to answer as he approached the edge of rim, but he suddenly reined his horse to stop with a violent pull. “My God! There’s someone down there.”

“Is it one of the Clines?” Smith asked. “Did you see him? Did he see you?”

Parnell shook his head slowly, “It isn’t one of them. You are
not
going to believe the scene down there.”

Intrigued, Farkus, Campbell, and Smith nudged their horses forward. As the horse walked, Farkus stood in his stirrups and strained to see over the rim. With each step of the horse, he could see a little more terrain below as it opened up to him. He was careful not to expose any more of himself than he had to. He was certain that the rim dropped away into a sheer rock wall. On the other side of the cirque, the wall wasn’t as steep. There was a trail through scree on the other side of a pure blue mountain lake. And then he saw her.

“It looks like a naked woman,” he said, a smile stretching across his face. “Finally, something good has happened.”

 

IT TOOK HALF AN HOUR for the four horsemen to circumnavigate the last cirque to the trail down to the lake. Occasionally, as they rode near the rim, Farkus would rise up and catch a glimpse of the woman. It was too far to see her clearly, but what he could see was as interesting as it was baffling. She was swimming. He wondered if the water was as cold as he remembered. He caught flashes of pale white skin, long dark hair fanning in the fantastically clear water, a glimpse of bare shoulders and small breasts and long limbs. There was a pile of clothing in the rocks near the shore of the alpine lake.

“I feel like I died and went to heaven,” Farkus said. “I been hunting up here all my life just hoping to see something like this. D’you suppose she’s alone?”

“Don’t let her see you,” Parnell said. “There’s something oddly sirenlike about this situation.”

“Sirenlike?” Farkus said. “You talk in code, Parnell.”

“Shut up, Dave,” Smith said. “You obviously don’t know your classics.”

Parnell ignored them both, said, “We’re staying just long enough to find out if she knows anything about the Clines.”

THE TRAIL DOWN to the lake was wide enough at first that the horsemen could ride two abreast. Parnell and Smith led; Farkus rode with Campbell. The trail narrowed about twenty yards from the lake and slivered between two large boulders. As they descended, Farkus could catch glimpses of the surface of the water on the far side of the lake and the high rock face that led up to the rim where they’d first seen the woman. But because of the size of the boulders on either side of the trail, they couldn’t see her yet.

The steel shoes of the horses clicked on the crushed rock of the scree. Farkus could feel his heart beat faster. He reluctantly held back on the reins so Parnell and Smith could squeeze through the opening in the boulders first. He wondered if she would scream when she looked up and saw four men coming toward her on horseback. He kind of hoped so. He also hoped he could get to the pile of clothing before she did.

But the whistling sound he heard was not a scream, and he looked up to see a thick green branch slice through the air on the other side of the boulders at chest height. On the end of the branch was a two-foot pointed stake. Farkus caught a flash of it in the air streaking toward Parnell and it thumped into the man with a hollow sound. While the fire-hardened stake didn’t penetrate Parnell’s body armor, the velocity of the impact threw him backward off his horse and he hit hard on the rocks in front of Farkus.

“Ambush!”
Smith hollered ahead of him a half second before a shotgun blast blew him out of the saddle.

Farkus’s horse reared and bellowed and he flew backward out of his saddle, hands windmilling through the air as if to find a hold. He landed hard and facedown in the loose shale, and grit was jammed into his nose and mouth. Inches from his face, a horse’s hoof slammed into the rocks, and another right behind his head.

Two heavy
booms
came from behind a man-sized slab of rock to the right of the boulders, and he was crushed under Campbell’s dead body as it fell on him, pinning him to the ground under the man’s weight.

The last thing he saw before his eyes closed was the figure of a very tall man rise out of the rocks. There was something wrong with the man’s face, like there was a dried red rose on the tip of his chin. The man was thin and gaunt. His face was pale and sunken and flesh peeled away from his nose. He wore a red plaid shirt with big checks, and a white slouch hat pulled low over his eyes. Farkus watched him limp over from where he’d hidden in the rocks to where Parnell was writhing on the ground, trying to get breath. He shot Parnell point-blank in the head. Parnell’s body thrashed with the muscle spasms of the dead.

Then he heard, “You all right, Caleb?”

The response was a cross between a goose honking and a calf bawling.

Farkus turned his head toward the voice and saw the same man who’d spoken first. He thought he was seeing double.

And from the lake he heard a scream. Or was it a shriek of joy?

He thought
: Wendigo. And there’s more than one of ’em.

 

“OPEN YOUR DAMNED EYES,” a voice growled. “I know you ain’t dead.”

Farkus felt a pure terror course through him like a cold electric shock. He hoped his facial muscles didn’t twitch, didn’t betray him. But he was afraid they had.

For the past hour, he’d lain still on his back. Campbell’s heavy dead body crushed him, and as the time went by it seemed to get heavier. Campbell’s body lay crossways across Farkus, facedown. Beneath him, several sharp stones poked into his lower abdomen and thighs and the nose of a boulder pressed against the left side of his skull. His arm—which was trapped behind his back under Campbell’s body—was numb from lack of circulation.

He’d spent the time since the ambush trying to play dead. He kept his eyes closed and tried to keep his breathing relaxed while his other senses roared with fear.

He’d heard a few voices. One of them, female, asked, “Who are they? Are they the ones from Michigan?”

And Caleb or Camish say, “Yup, I recognize two of ’em. The other two I don’t know. That one doesn’t look like he should be with them.”

There were other conversations, but the roaring of blood through his ears blocked them out. He tried to stay calm, play dead. Tried to recall stories he’d read of victims of mass firing squads or massacres who survived by pretending they were killed. Wondering how in the hell they were able to pull it off when he felt like screaming.

Then the voice telling him to open his eyes. He was
caught
.

Something sharp tugged at the skin on his cheek and he flinched. There was no way of pretending anymore.

He opened his eyes as the brother with the dirty compress on his chin—it wasn’t a red rose after all—withdrew the point of a knife. Both brothers hovered over him, looking down. Their faces were in shadow because the sun was directly over their heads and beating down. Farkus squinted, trying to see them. They were mirror images of each other, except for the bandage on the face of one of the brothers.

“This probably isn’t going to be your best day ever,” one of them said in a flat midwestern accent.