Andi let go of the big hospital door as soon as she squeezed through the opening and it closed all by itself behind her. She hated doors like that with the big arm on the top that pushed against you, trying to keep you from opening the door in the first place and then closing it quick so nobody else could come in.
Uncle Jack was right outside and the door closed in his face. But he wouldn’t push it open again. He’d stay there with Becca until Andi and Theresa were finished talking. He’d agreed to let her come in by herself because…why had he let her? It was like he understood it was something she had to do without her even saying so. She loved that about Uncle Jack. He listened when you said how things were with you and heard a whole lot more than you said out loud.
She crossed the room to where Theresa lay under white sheets that made her black skin shine like that black onyx stone she’d seen all polished up on display when she and Mommy and Daddy had gone to the Smokey Mountains that time. She tried not to think about things like that because the memories made her sad.
Theresa had her eyes closed, but Andi wasn’t sure she was asleep. Maybe she was playing possum so she wouldn’t have to talk to anybody. There was a straight-backed chair next to the bed, but Andi didn’t sit down in it. She used it as a step stool, climbed up on it and sat down on the edge of Theresa’s bed. She took Theresa’s hand in hers, the one that didn’t have a bandage on it. She could see only a couple of other bandages, but she was sure there were lots of others she couldn’t see.
Uncle Jack had said rats had bitten her, tried to make it sound like there were only two or three of them, but Andi knew from the expressions on the grownups’ faces that it was way worse than that.
“It hurts,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
Theresa opened her eyes and looked at her then and Andi could tell she’d been awake the whole time. She tried to smile and did manage to get the corners of her mouth to turn up like a smile, but there was nothing smiling about her face.
“It does some,” Theresa said. Her voice was deep and hoarse. “But they’s little bitty bites, so it ain’t bad.”
“I don’t mean the bites.” Andi tapped her chest. “It hurts in here.”
Theresa just looked at her.
“That’s what she said, the Lady made out of Light.” Princess Buttercup had come to her last night, but Andi hadn’t told anyone about the visit. “She said that your heart hurts worse than the bites.”
Princess Buttercup had been standing by the window in her bedroom after Uncle Jack tucked her in. Uncle Jack didn’t know how to do it, though. He didn’t sit down on the edge of her bed and pull the covers up around her neck and tell her a story. He didn’t even say she ought to say her prayers. If she hadn’t mentioned it, he would have walked right out of the room without doing it. But he was trying really hard and she loved him for that.
Andi had sat up in bed, propped herself on pillows, and Princess Buttercup came over to the bed and sat down on it next to her.
“Why’d God let Ossy attack me and scratch my face?” Andi asked. “And why’d he let rats bite Miss Theresa?”
“I don’t know,” said Princess Buttercup. Oh, Andi knew that wasn’t really who she was. In fact, she ought to tell her that it was okay now, that she was a big girl and the angel could be an angel—whatever that looked like—because Andi didn’t need her to look like somebody out of a movie anymore.
“You don’t know why? Then who does?”
“God.”
“Can’t you ask him?”
“If God wanted me to know, I wouldn’t have to ask. He’d tell me.”
“Can you ask him for me, then? I want to know. Why does he let such bad things happen?”
“Like letting your mother die?”
Andi sighed. “It’s that same thing again, isn’t it? Like with Mommy. God has a reason and He’s not required to tell me what it is.”
“Something like that.”
“Yesterday, we went to this little town called Bradford’s Ridge, where Daddy and Uncle Jack and Miss Becca and Miss Theresa used to live. And it was all dark there, like a black fog. And above the town were ugly clouds that weren’t fluffy at all and swirled around and around. The darkness was coming out of holes in the ground.”
“That’s a dark place, sweetheart. The veil between this world and the demons’ world is very thin there. The evil is strong and powerful. It’s a scary place, but I’ll be close by.”
“Really? You’ll be there?”
She nodded.
“You need to be kind to Theresa,” Princess Buttercup said. “Especially kind. She hurts really bad in her heart. The goodness in you will help her get better.”
Theresa was looking at her now and Andi hoped she saw goodness there.
“Your angel talked to you last night?”
“Uh-huh. She told me she’d be with me, help me later when I need it.”
“I’m glad she’s gone be there, sugar, ’cause I’m not. The rest of you folks is gone have to carry on ’thout me. You’ll do just fine.” Theresa patted Andi’s hand.
“God will let you do that?” Andi asked. “Just…not do this, fight this demon?”
Theresa looked uncomfortable. “It ain’t about God lettin’ me step aside. I got to, and that’s the plain truth of it and…God understands.”
“But you said he gave you, gave all of us this thing to do, that we didn’t have to be qualified, just willing—”
“How do you know I said that? You was watchin’ Prin—”
“I was listening,” she said, then plunged ahead. If she was going to get in trouble for eavesdropping, it would have to wait until later. “You said it was our job. If God gives you a job to do, can you just…not do it?”
“Why sure you can, sugar. God tells lots of folks to do things they don’t do. In fact, don’t none of us ever do all the things he’s told us to do, and we do a lot of things he said not to do.”
“He didn’t let Jonah out of it.”
Theresa stared at her but said nothing.
“He told Jonah to go to…Niven-eth—”
“Nineveh,” Theresa whispered, like it was a secret she didn’t want anybody to hear.
“Yeah, Niven-eth. But Jonah went the other way instead, so God sent a big—”
“A fish. I know about that. Fact is, I might have been the one told you that story in the first place. But God ain’t gone send no fish after me. It’s all different now. The way things were in Bible times, it’s not like that anymore.”
“How? Well, except for the fish part. I guess if he still sent fish after people, you’d hear about it on the news. But it’s the same thing, isn’t it—you and Jonah? He didn’t want to go, but God wanted him to and…Jonah didn’t get to decide. Why do you get to decide, Miss Theresa?”
Theresa said nothing, just looked at her like she saw something Andi couldn’t see.
When Daniel stepped out of the shower in his room at the Maple Tree Motel on Saturday morning, the television he’d switched on was awash with news accounts of a restaurant bombing in Phoenix the night before. Nineteen people were dead, forty-six more injured. The news reporter, from a local station, was standing in front of a film clip of a burning building.
“Agents from half a dozen federal agencies have descended on the city, where the mood is fearful and uncertain. Sources tell me that officials are looking into the possibility that this bombing is connected in some way to the explosion two days ago at the Mall of America in Minneapolis. As yet, no one has claimed responsibility for either attack.”
The president came on then, urging calm and steadfastness. Daniel shook his head. That man could urge everyone in the country to stand on their heads and whistle Dixie through their left nostrils and fully half the population would be upside down inside thirty seconds.
Daniel brushed his teeth as he listened to the Weekend Today Show’s hosts interviewing the top contenders from both parties about the events of the night before. Two of the front-runner presidential wannabes declared their belief that al-Qaida was behind both bombings; the third picked a terrorist group called ISIS that was gaining power as US troops were pulling out of Iraq. Daniel was about to turn off the television when he heard Chapman Whitworth’s melodious voice. Clearly, his candidacy had achieved a level of legitimacy that made Daniel’s skin crawl.
Whitworth’s striking face, with its hard lines and the burn scar he wore as a permanent badge of courage, filled the screen. He talked about making America safe “from enemies without and within”—which had become his mantra, and then he spoke into the camera as if he were speaking directly to those responsible for the bombings.
“Your cowardly acts of terror will engender courage, not fear, will leave us stronger, not weaker. We will defeat you by the power of our national character as well as by the force of our laws. We will crush you beneath our heels, and when all of you and your kind have been brought to justice, we will stand strong on our own soil once more, safe from within as well as without.”
Alone among the candidates, Whitworth asserted that the terrorism was homegrown. Though he stopped short of blaming any particular organization, the most likely culprits were the extremists in the Freedom Nation. But Orson Blount, spokesperson for the organization, had adamantly denied they’d had anything to do with it.
“Why would we want to kill children?” he’d said when a reporter had questioned him after the Mall of America bombing. Daniel had believed him. But then, he believed Chapman Whitworth, too, until he stopped talking. As soon as his voice left Daniel’s ears, the spell of it fell away, and he—along with most other Americans, he assumed—grasped the absurdity of Whitworth’s claim that American antigovernment fanatics were responsible.
Daniel and Crock walked to the restaurant where they were to meet Sheriff Lincoln for breakfast, afoot until Jack returned with the car. But they’d never have found a place to park a car even if they’d had one. Bradford’s Ridge’s main street was blocked at both ends in preparation for the community’s annual Spook Festival, held every year on the last weekend before Halloween. The Spook Festival would kick off on Main Street tonight with a giant costume party/dance called the Monster Mash. All day tomorrow, adults and children dressed in their Halloween costumes would roam the booths selling Frankenstein frankfurters, horror-burgers, ghost cluster cookies complete with green slime, spiderweb cotton candy and ice scream. Children under age eight could bring their Halloween bags and trick-or-treat at all the businesses that lined the street. The weekend festival was birthed by parents who didn’t want their children out after dark trick-or-treating on a school night.
He and Crock picked their way around trucks unloading the makings of festival booths and swarms of volunteers putting up decorations to Boca on Bond Street, where they’d had dinner the night before. It was the only non-fast-food restaurant in walking distance from their motel. When Daniel explained to the sheriff that Jack and Andi were in Cincinnati—and why—the big man had listened in horror and revulsion.
“Still, it’s not altogether a bad thing that Jack’s not here,” the sheriff said, looking uncomfortable. “If you’re looking for information, folks’ll be a whole lot more willing to talk to the two of you than—”
“To a man accused of burning down the Twin Oaks Nursing Home when he was twelve years old,” Crock finished for him.
“He didn’t do it!” Daniel said.
“He didn’t deny it and I gave him the chance,” the sheriff countered, sounding defensive.
“He can’t deny what he doesn’t remember. That whole summer was wiped out of our minds. We only remember little pieces here and there, snippets.”
“I didn’t grow up in Caverna County,” the sheriff said, “but my uncle was a teacher here, junior high school. You’re about the right age—you could have been in my uncle’s class. He taught shop and all the boys took it—required, I think. His name was—”
“I could have been his star pupil and I wouldn’t know it,” Daniel said. “The memories are gone. That’s why Jack doesn’t know—”
“It’s been my experience,” Crock said, looking full into the sheriff’s face, “that sometimes when you don’t have all the information, you have to go with your gut.” He paused. “What’s your gut tell you about the kind of man Jack Carpenter is?”
The sheriff was silent.
“Not the kind who’d burn down a nursing home full of old people,” he finally admitted.
“Mine says the same thing. That settles it, then. The internal organs of two law enforcement officers can’t be wrong.”
He and Crock spent the morning pouring over the map of Caverna County in the courthouse basement, figuring out the nearest cave entrances to the dozen or so places the three children frequented. The sheriff was making arrangements for them to question the children tomorrow morning.
Daniel stood up from the table where the map was spread out and stretched. He longed to take a walk, spend some time alone to clear his head. There was a park only a few blocks away, straight down Bond Street, and Daniel decided he was willing to chance the dicey weather for some fresh air.
With Crock’s gimp leg, he wasn’t interested in a walk, so he headed toward the newspaper office, instead, to poke around. Never knew what you’d find in the archives of a small-town newspaper.
The park entrance proclaimed Hardwick Memorial Park on an archway. It was the only opening in a solid wall of bushes that looked as impenetrable as the ones that lined the roads in rural England, where Daniel had hitchhiked for a summer after he graduated from college.
A walking track followed the inside edge of the hedge and there was a large playground area in the center. Between the playground and the hedge were clumps of bushes, stands of trees and neat flower gardens. Daniel was surprised to note that the old-fashioned playground was exactly as he remembered it. No rubber mats beneath the monkey bars, the jungle gym or the slide. Just dirt, where the grass had been worn away by countless little feet. There was an old-fashioned merry-go-round, too, a creaky wooden one.
Wouldn’t want to pay the liability insurance on that puppy!
The park was deserted, not surprising given the threatening clouds. Daniel was glad, grateful for the solitude. He took a deep breath of air scented with fresh-mown grass, autumn mums and coming rain and set off around the path. He hadn’t walked a hundred yards before he turned a slight bend in the trail and heard it. At first, he thought it was a kitten or a puppy, but he quickly realized the sound was a crying child. He couldn’t quite locate the source of the sound, though. He looked around but could see nobody. The crying seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere. He hurried farther down the trail where it snaked among huge azaleas and neatly trimmed burning bushes. The sound was louder but still directionless. The crying had ramped up by then, had gone from pitiful tears to heartbroken sobbing.
Daniel became mildly frantic, unable to find the crying child. He searched behind and beneath bushes as if he were hunting for Easter eggs. Then he saw her—sitting right in the middle of the walking path only about fifty feet farther down. A little girl, seven, maybe eight years old, with long red braids hanging down her back. She sat Indian style on the mulched trail with her head in her hands, sobbing.
But the thing was, he would have sworn he could see that section of the trail from the other side of the bushes and she hadn’t been there before.
Well, clearly, she was there now, so he approached her—not too fast, didn’t want to spook her. She’d likely been warned not to talk to strangers.
The sky grumbled and rumbled. Distant thunder sounded strangely menacing, sending a chill down Daniel’s spine that had nothing to do with the cold wind that tugged at his shirt and pushed dry leaves tumbling across the ground with an unpleasant scuttling sound.
When he was about twenty feet away from the little girl, he spoke to her.
“Are you all right? If you’re lost, I’d be glad to help you find your mommy.” He held out his hands in front of him as he approached her slowly. “I’ve got a little girl about your age, only she doesn’t have pretty red hair like yours. Her name’s Andi.”
The little girl didn’t acknowledge his presence in any way, maybe hadn’t even heard him approach. She simply continued to cry, great heaving, wrenching, brokenhearted sobs.
She still hadn’t looked up when he reached her, so he got down on one knee, put out his hand to touch her and then thought better of it and drew it back.
“Honey,” he said, calm but loud. She had to hear him, he was less than three feet away. “I don’t know what’s wrong, but I’d like to help if I can.”
She stopped sobbing. Didn’t crank down into crying, whimpering, then sniveling. Just stopped, like turning off a faucet. But she kept her face buried in her hands.
“Are you lost?”
She slowly lifted her head and looked at him. Blue eyes in a face so covered in red freckles if she’d had even one more, she’d have had to hold it in her hand. She blinked and big tears ran down the freckled cheeks. She got to her knees as if to stand.
And then she lunged at him.
The little girl hit him square in the chest with such force that even if he hadn’t been off balance on one knee, he’d never have been able to stand up to the blow. The impact bowled him over onto his back with her on top of him, hammering his face with her fists, emitting a rumbling sound deep in her throat that sounded like the growl of a wolf or a mad dog.
Daniel put his left arm up in front of his face to shield it and grabbed her with his right hand. But he couldn’t hold on. Victor Alexander had broken his wrist, snapped it like a twig the day he shot Emily. Untold hours of physical therapy in the months since had restored much of the use of the hand, but his wrist was still weak. The little girl buried her teeth in the forearm he was using as a shield, bit down through the fabric of his long-sleeved shirt into his flesh, and a lightning bolt of pure pain rocked him.
He tried again to grab her, maybe get hold of her braids. He understood now what he was dealing with. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen this kind of superhuman strength. But still…he couldn’t hit her! She was a kid. Too quick for him to grab, she dodged his hand and caught the side of it in her mouth and bit him again.
He tried to roll over, to roll her off him, batting at her, but she was relentless. She hammered a fist into his right eye and he couldn’t see. He grabbed her arm, held onto it this time and fought to catch the other one when something smashed into the side of his head so solidly he lost his grip on her arm and she wiggled free. Something hit him again, in the forehead this time. A rock, she had grabbed a rock and was hammering him in the face with it.
He got a snapshot of her then, an image. Her freckled face was smeared with his blood where she’d bitten him, and she had the bloody rock raised above her head to slam it down on him again. Her eyes, pretty blue eyes, were the eyes of some wild, deranged animal.
Rain began to fall, coming down in a sudden torrent, and splashed in his face as he lay on his back with the little red-haired girl astride his chest, pounding a rock into his forehead. He felt himself losing consciousness, fought it, but he couldn’t escape the shroud of darkness that enveloped him.