The Winslow Incident (44 page)

Now as she reached the second floor
landing of the servants’ staircase, she sensed things stirring. Decidedly
unfriendly things.

The hotel is too full.

A helpless sensation washed over
her.

The same helplessness she had felt
after she’d watched Randall get out of their bed and collapse, and her husband
was gone to her forever in the two seconds it took her to reach where he lay on
the soft pine floor. It’d been different with Lottie Mathers because of all the
blood. Sarah could never bring herself to remember how much blood there’d been,
nor could she ever stop mourning the loss of her friend.

The adage proved true that
summer
, she realized
.
Death came
in three: first Lottie then Hawkin Rhone then, worst of all, Randall.

Voices rose to Sarah from the
kitchen as she continued down the staircase from the second floor. She
recognized those of Honey Adair and Owen Peabody, but didn’t know to whom the
third voice belonged until she reached the bottom stair.

Fritz Earley, the distributor from
down mountain, sat eating at the table. Honey hovered over him, spoon in hand,
waiting to refill his bowl from the pot she cradled in the crook of her arm.

Squatted before the breakfront,
drenched in sweat and holding a stack of saucers, Owen was peeling off the
saucers one at time and placing them on the floor. “Ten. Eleven,” he counted.
Shards of porcelain surrounded his bare feet—broken pieces of Ruby
Winslow’s French china. He shifted position and left smears on the tile where
his cut feet had bled.

When the final step creaked
beneath Sarah’s weight, Fritz and Honey looked up in alarm, as though she’d
caught them in an illicit act. “Oatmeal?” Honey offered.

“No, thank you, dear.” Honey
looked even worse than the last time Sarah had seen her. Her dress sagged like
a hand-me-down from a much bigger sister, her brown curls wilted around her
face. So fond was Sarah of Honey and the boys that they were the sole reason
she kept The Winslow running. (Samuel Adair she could just as well do without
but it was a package deal.)

Only now she wished she hadn’t
kept the hotel open . . . wished she’d closed it for good after Randall died.
Boarded it up like the old mineshafts and left it to the ghosts.
Because
things are stirring
, she knew.
Things not properly laid to rest in the
past.

The sound of a saucer breaking was
followed by Owen’s “Oops.”

Sarah took the chair across the
table from Fritz Earley and quickly assessed his state. His face was bruised
but he was not ill. Nervous though. No—frightened. He looked at her with
the same critical eye and she doubted his conclusion was any different.

“What’s happening up here isn’t
right,” he stated the obvious.

“No, it’s not,” Sarah agreed.

“Where’s your son?”

“In the woods.”

“Isn’t he Sheriff?” Fritz Earley
kept eating. He appeared to be a man who ate often.

“Yes, he is.”

“Then where is he?”

“In the woods.”

“We need to do something.” His
eyes took on shiny panic. “Things have gone too far.”

“What are we to do?”

“People need medical attention.”
He continued to eat that oatmeal as if it were the last meal of a condemned
man. “
Immediate
medical attention.”

“And if they don’t get it?”

“People are going to die.”

He said it with such certainty
that Sarah knew it must be true.

“Four, seven, six, five . . .”
Owen kept on.

Honey moved to sit next to Sarah,
relinquishing the spoon to the pot and the pot to the table. Sarah could hear
Samuel rassle-frasseling upstairs. Arguing with someone, it sounded like.
Another piece of Ruby’s precious china shattered against the tile. It’d always
been intended that the set would go to Hazel.

“Rare nowadays,” Fritz was saying,
“but before anybody identified the cause, epidemics of ergotism weren’t
uncommon. Whole towns would go stark raving mad. People imagining that their
limbs are on fire, others hallucinating that they can see and talk to the dead,
others bizarrely compulsive.” He rolled his eyes Owen’s direction. “Obsessed,
even. Animals bashing their heads against walls as if possessed. Women accused
of witchcraft.”

“So I’ve heard,” Sarah said.
Randall had once told her about a convent that lost its collective mind after
eating ergot-contaminated bread. The nuns began to curse and spit and raise
their habits and make lascivious gestures. Their priest was accused of
bewitching the entire convent and for that, the sorcerer was burned alive at
the stake. The devils of Loudun, Randall had called the hysterical episode. And
Sarah had asked her husband where he got such stories.

“Happened in southern France in
the early 1950s,” Fritz continued. “Doctors thought it was food poisoning at
first. Took them a week before figuring out that the grain used to mill flour
for the bakery in the small village had been full of ergot. Bread of madness,
they called it.”

She watched him eat for another
moment, then asked, “How could you let this happen?”

“Look.” Fritz waved his spoon and
a clump of cereal fell to the table. “I’m just the middleman here. I don’t grow
the grain. I don’t harvest the grain. I don’t mill the grain. Hell—I
don’t even
see
the grain outside of the bags. And even if I did, how
would I know what ergot looks like?”

Sarah raised her eyebrows.
“Nothing more than a delivery boy then?”

“Distributor,” he corrected.

“So there was no way for you to
know.”

“No.” Fritz quickly looked away
from her, down at his bowl, then spooned in another mouthful. “But I
do
know that if ergot sickness goes left untreated—” He stopped chewing and
squeezed his brows together. Sarah thought he was considering the repercussions
of rampant ergotism but then he reached his thumb and forefinger into his mouth
and pulled out what looked to be a raisin. He held it up before his one
unswollen eye but could make no sense of it and tossed it aside, spooning more
oatmeal into his mouth before going on.

Sarah glanced down at Honey’s
hands, which lay like dead chicks in the lap of her apron. The very tip of her
right thumb was missing.

Things were stirring.
Things are coming back
to haunt us all.

B
en Mathers was reasonably certain he was
getting through to Samuel Adair. Ben had figured it might take some convincing,
except perhaps if the person he was attempting to persuade was given to
drink—was, in fact, plastered now—and had a propensity toward the
bitter and a willingness to take advantage of the situation. But for the moment
Samuel slept on the sofa, snoring loud enough to wake the dead.

’Cept the dead never sleep in
this wretched place
, Ben remembered. If
only they would.

Samuel had passed out in
mid-sentence (“Not my fault that—”), his gesturing hand dropping to his
lap before he slumped over on his side.

Thus here Ben sat in an
uncomfortable chair in the living room of the Adairs’ apartment on the second
floor of The Winslow, waiting for Samuel to come back around.

Ben had sworn he would never
return, since clearly the hotel intended to consume him too.
Murder haunts
here.
His father shot in the head, his aunt drowned, his wife poisoned and
stabbed, and now his granddaughter was sick and possibly dying.

But Ben had changed, his fear
shoved aside by his determination to finally finish what
she
started. So
when he’d approached The Winslow this time, there’d been no hesitation. Even
after he’d pulled up the driveway and the hotel glared its rapacious intent,
he’d maintained his resolve.

All out in the open now
, he’d thought as he strode through the yard without a
hitch to his step. Then he’d pushed open a heavy walnut door and marched up the
main staircase as though he had every right in the world to be here.

Clearly it’d been left to the
Mathers family to take control of this situation and get things back on track.
He’d have to stay out of Pard Holloway’s hair but that shouldn’t be
difficult—the man was preoccupied. No matter, Ben felt spryer than he had
in years and fully capable of finishing (once and for all) what was started a
long time ago.

Samuel stirred. “Huh, what?” He
blinked at Ben Mathers five times before it registered that the old man really
was sitting a few feet away, watching him. Samuel sat up and rubbed his face
with both hands while blubbering something incoherent. Then he announced: “I’m
awake.”

Ben leaned forward in his chair.
“Do you remember what we were discussing?”

“What do you want, Mathers?”

“We decided that with her out of
the way, it could be yours.”

Samuel grimaced as if he had a
rotten taste in his mouth. “Yeah—I remember.”

“That the way to rid ourselves of
this scourge is to clean the pest house,” Ben said. “Remember?”

“Yeah, yeah. Vile. The whole
stinking place.”

“Then you’re up to it, right?”

Samuel stared at Ben for a moment
before he threw up his hands. “To hell with it. Hope the roof caves in. Could,
you know? Nearly impossible to fix that dry rot. Who cares? It’s not my rotting
hotel, where the sick come to die and the dead won’t ever leave.”

Beneath the red in Samuel’s
bloodshot eyes, Ben thought he saw greed. “So you understand what we’re going
to do then, right?”

“Right, yeah,
yes
already.”
Samuel reached for his bottle of bourbon on the coffee table.

“Now isn’t the time to be
drinking,” Ben said.

“Now isn’t the time
not
to be
drinking.”

Ben stood, intending to tell
Samuel to lay off the booze, then thought better of it and left without another
word.

But he would need to recruit more
than Samuel Adair. And there was the possibility that Samuel could sober up and
reconsider. Tiny Clemshaw, perhaps; he didn’t much care for her either. Ben was
confident that Cal was on board. What about Doc Simmons? Maybe. Ben decided to
head first to the Mercantile to firm things up with Clemshaw. If he planted
enough seeds, some were sure to take root.

I warned her, didn’t I?

I
smell you . . .

It smelled of damp possum fur, and
urine.

Nate Winslow knew how to hunt. His
dad taught him like every good father teaches his son what he knows about
recreation and survival. But he’d never enjoyed killing. Even as a boy, he’d
felt custodial toward the wildlife in the forest.

This was different. This creature
meant them harm. This time he would relish the kill. And he would strap the
carcass across the hood of the Jeep and drive up Fortune Way and down Ruby Road
for everyone in Winslow to see how well he’s protecting them.

The revolver felt good in his hand
now, natural, as though the longer he held it the more it became a part of him.

Pausing along the trail that
parallels Ruby Creek, he quieted his feet, body, mind . . . and listened.
Except for the whir of bugs in the air and murmur of water running in the
creek, the woods were silent. He bent at the knees and scanned the forest
floor—looking for tracks, scat, clumps of fur, anything
peculiar—but saw nothing unusual.

Could be deer
, he’d supposed more than once. But he dismissed it again.
Judging by the trampled low branches he’d come across, it was larger than even
a mature buck. And there was that dank scent that reminded him less of deer and
more of an animal of prey.

He returned upright and popped
open the cylinder of the Smith & Wesson. Two rounds spent.
Where did
they go?
Maybe it wasn’t fully loaded to begin with? But he knew that
wasn’t true. Then he remembered being at Dead Horse Point with the chocolate
Lab, the Peabodys’ good sweet dog. He’d had to put her down. No other choice.
He retrieved two cartridges from his belt, loaded the cylinder, and pushed it
back into place.

Despite the old growth mountain
hemlocks shading his path, Nate felt the temperature rising and the air around
him growing heavy with heat.
The creek will be cooler
was his only
thought as he headed right, leaving the trail and tree cover for the banks of
Ruby Creek.

When Nate saw the deer lying
dead—half in, half out of the creek—his first thought was
I shot
it.
But as he got closer he knew he hadn’t. This was something else
entirely.

He crouched next to her. The young
doe had a foot-long gash in her side that still bled into the clear water.
What
did this?
Nate didn’t know what would do this. He could see clear into her.
It didn’t appear as though anything was missing; she remained intact. So this
kill was not for food.

Paranoia crept up on him. He
lifted his eyes to the shady woods, then back up the creek bed where the water
rushed toward him, threatening to overflow the banks. He swiveled to glance
over his shoulder at still more forest, more water.
It could be anywhere . .
. watching me. Lurking in that stand of hemlock, concealed behind that boulder.