Now
AS MUCH AS Beth wanted to accompany Natalie and the ambulances back to the hospital, she knew her presence there would not be helpful.
“Let the medical field do their job, Beth,” Natalie had said inside the tunnel, her hands gripping both of Beth’s arms at the elbows, fingers squeezing into her flesh to make her point, sober now that the crime scene had shocked her. “And you do yours.”
Beth had nodded, clearly shaken by seeing her boss’s gutted body. Grover Meeks was not only her boss, but her mentor, and for the past dozen years, her only father figure. He’d insisted on day one, when she was eleven and he’d first walked her into his home as her new guardian, that she call him by his first name. Had Harrod’s Reach not already been aware of how close they were, there might have been whispers about a recently orphaned teenage white girl now living with a black couple old enough to be her grandparents, but were actually her godparents.
Everyone knew Grover and Beth’s biological father, who’d been dying of colon cancer for two years, had been family friends for decades, and that Beth’s mother died tragically in a car wreck when she was six. Some said the cancer struck her father’s heart right there in the church, until it festered and slowly spread out all over the rest of his body as rotted heartache. Beth had held Grover’s hand during her mother’s funeral because her father had been too broken to do it. She looked up at him for comfort. His gold sheriff’s badge glowed that day, made her want to be like Grover. To do what he did. To put away bad guys and drunkards like the one who’d killed her mother in the car wreck.
A week after the funeral, on a playdate, she’d stared at the scar on Gideon’s upper lip. Grover told her he’d had surgery when he was little and it was fixed now, and to not stare at it. But she couldn’t help it. She’d known Gideon as long as she’d known anyone. They’d been born the same night, during one of the more violent storms to ever come upon the Reach. Their births had been talked about for weeks. Jax said she was only friends with Giddy-Up because they were forced to be. Like they were a weird set of twins born to two different couples. Beth told Jax to shut up, but it wasn’t too far from the truth. The newspapers back then had done a story on them. Their parents had known each other, and had a few times in passing joked about who would give birth first, but they weren’t yet the friends they would become after their children were born nearly simultaneously the night of the storm.
“Beth?”
Beth blinked away the reverie and stared at Natalie. “Go on. I’ll be fine.” Natalie’s coworkers had already taken both men out of the tunnel on stretchers.
“I’ll text you.” Natalie turned toward the tunnel’s southern exit and ran to catch up to the medics and the stretchers. Both men were still alive, but barely. Grover with a chainsaw wound through his gut. She’d taken pictures of every blood mark and footprint and fingerprint. The set of antlers that had looked real at first, but was made from branches and sticks crudely fastened together with tightly woven twine.
And Christ … Doc … his arm had been severed near the shoulder, the hand still holding his phone. His right leg had been severed at the knee and was still missing. Unlike Grover, whose wound was chainsaw-messy, Doc’s two wounds had seemed to be almost cauterized.
Beth pulled out her gun, stood atop the north wall’s brick rubble, stepped into the opening Doc had made wider, and entered the northern woods. She bypassed the crime-scene tape from the bodies found two days ago, following her flashlight beam, and forged a path through the trees. Simon’s cabin was a half mile northeast, a mile if she followed the real path toward Harrod’s Lake. Jax once told her the willows overhanging the lake were really weeping, that the tears that dripped from them created the steam so often seen skimming the water’s surface, the morning mist floating through the woods.
She checked her phone as she walked. Jax had called six times. She ducked under overhanging limbs, stepped over a trickling creek, and continued toward the true path that was fifty yards in front of her. She knew she should call Deputy Lumpkin for backup, but even if Lump had awakened from his passing out at the party, he’d be useless to her out here. She let Jax’s voice mails play on speaker as she navigated the forest.
Beth, bring me a plate of whatevs when you leave. Tell Giddy-Up I said hi. Chicken tenders if they got’m. If Mrs. Deats baked her brownies, grab some. Fucking love those things.
Beep.
Beth, call me, I think there’s someone outside …
Beep.
Beth, it’s me, I don’t know where you are, but call me back …
Beep.
Beth, what the fuck? Somebody just tried to break into the house. Not ours, here with … Jesus … The message ended.
Beep.
Beth forged on, oblivious to the branches hitting her arms and face as she listened to Jax’s voice: He’s awake, Beth, he’s fucking sitting up in bed, he’s talking … Here, listen … Beth stopped cold as she heard Sully Dupree’s voice clear as day: Run, Doc. Run! Beth’s hand shook so violently she nearly dropped the phone. Sully’s voice continued, softer now, more channeled to a certain purpose: Kathy Locks. Madeline Boyle. Reggie Gathers. Clinton Booth, Amy Shimp, Lauren Betts, Steven Farnsley …
What? Who are these people? Madeline Boyle? Why did that name sound familiar?
Jax’s voice again, with Sully reciting mostly names in the background: You see … he’s just calling out names, Beth. I don’t know what to do … Call me, goddamn it …
“Write them down,” Beth shouted into the woods. “Write them down, Jax.”
Beep.
Beth, he’s out again. I don’t know what’s going on. I can’t tell if he’s breathing … Jesus … Where are you …?
The messages ended as she broke through the woods toward the footpath to Simon’s cabin bordering the lake. The shortcut had saved her at least five minutes, but had left her with scratches on her face and arms. She tried calling Jax, but her phone had no service, out near the tunnel and the lake. She followed her flashlight beam through the turns of the dirt path. Moonlight blinked through the tree canopies above. Swirls of fog slithered around her ankles and dissipated like cigar smoke.
Something moved in the woods to her left, then from the shadows to the right.
She turned her brisk walk into a trot toward Simple Simon’s cottage, a small cabin with a centered front door flanked by two four-paned windows on either side. She’d been out to Harrod’s Lake plenty as a teen and a handful of times as an adult, and although she’d seen the cottage she’d never paid it much attention. But she wasn’t expecting to see what Simon had done to the dozens of trees all around it. He wasn’t just using The Ripper to saw down trees, but to carve sculptures.
And he was good. Damn good. In terms of art, he was an imaginative genius. It seemed that every tree trunk within a thirty-foot radius had been made into a wooden tree sculpture, like an army of chainsaw-carved totems. Some stood four feet tall, others as tall as ten to fifteen feet. Each trunk had been turned into something sinister, strange totems of animals and gargoyles and monsters she scanned with the hazy beam of her flashlight.
It was common knowledge he could draw with the best of them, but to do this?
She closed in on the cabin. Firelight flickered through grimy windows.
The front door was open a crack.
Beth called Simon’s name, waited a beat, and then nudged the door open with the flashlight. It felt like a furnace inside; a fire snapped in the hearth to her right. Upon closer inspection, a set of homemade antlers, reminiscent of the ones found inside the tunnel, burned in the flames, as if recently tossed in.
“Simon?”
A king-sized bed sat in the middle of the room. The bedsheets and covers were so rumpled she feared he might be hiding beneath them. She nudged them with her flashlight, and something skittered out from the folds.
Beth jumped back, pointed her gun at what appeared to be a rat at first, but wasn’t.
Maybe a squirrel, she thought, desperately scanning for it again, trying to convince herself that what she’d just seen hadn’t been fucking yellow. Or orange. Maybe it was the glow from the fireplace, but whatever she’d seen, the color of it had not been natural. Mounted on the wall above the headboard was another set of antlers, man-made as well but larger than the others.
She aimed her flashlight toward the wall opposite the fireplace. It was illuminated by two sconces and festooned with oddly colored animal pelts, mounted with nails. One from what might have been a deer. Another from a raccoon. Several squirrels and maybe a beaver. In between the pelts, Simon had drawn with chalk or white paint the same figure over and over, a tall, rail-thin monster with antlers. Sometimes he’d drawn it large, other times small, but the figures drawn numbered in the dozens.
The pelts and furs made no sense. The colors were wrong, all different hues of red and blue and green and orange.
He’s painting them. He’s catching them and painting them.
“Simon?”
Something moved on the bed again. The rodent she’d seen earlier jumped from the covers—it was sunflower yellow, for sure—and disappeared into the shadows, into a pile of clothes in the far corner of the room next to what she guessed was the bathroom.
That door was closed. Light shone through the uneven gap between the bottom of the door and the slanted floorboards. Steam slithered out like morning mist. She closed in on the door, heard running water, and then noticed tiny rivulets coming from beneath the door, finding grooves and whorls inside the floorboards to settle and puddle.
She knocked, jiggled the locked door. “Simon!” Again, no answer.
She kicked at the doorknob. The flimsy door splintered at the lock. A second kick broke it open. A steam cloud enveloped her as she stepped into the damp, humid bathroom. A gush of water splashed from the tub to her left, spilling across the tiles in a loud, clapping wave, soaking her boots and jeans to the ankles.
“Simon!”
The large man’s body floated beneath the water’s surface, fully clothed, his massive bare feet angled up from the water and braced against the tiled wall on either side of the faucet and knobs. His large, knuckled fingers clutched the side of the tub, not trying to pull himself out—holding himself in. His hair floated like seaweed from a head that seemed even bigger than normal, distorted by the water, brown eyes open and unblinking. Bubbles floated in torrents from Simon’s nostrils and mouth, pockets of air exploding at the surface. She reached in, clutched his shirt at the buttons. Simon was twice her size, but when she grabbed his shirt and hoisted with all her strength he lifted upward. She pulled and yanked until Simple Simon slumped over the side of the tub.
He cried out, heaving, terrified.
Beth beat him on the back. Water escaped his lungs, his mouth. She backed away, gave him space. He draped a trouser-soaked leg atop the tub’s siding and crawled from it, landing with an earthquake-like thump on the bathroom floor. He rolled to his back, coughing, beard soaked and bug-eyed.
“Simon …” She reached for her handcuffs. “Can you hear me?”
He stared hard at her, and then said, “Baa, baa …”
“What? Simon?”
“Black sheep,” he sang, voice still gargled with water. “Have you any wool …”
That voice. “Simon, I need you to stand up and come with me.”
“Yes, sir, yes sir. Three bags full …” He sat up, coughed out water, held his hands out in front of him to be cuffed, in complete cooperation. “One for the master, and one for the dame. And one for the little boy who lives down the lane …”
Excerpt from Detective Harrington’s notes
October 3, 1968
Harrod’s Reach
MOST IN TOWN said they heard it right at midnight, that sound of an ocean tide coming in, a sound that made no earthly sense in the middle of a heavily forested town, and, to most who’d heard it, it lasted for a good ten minutes before fading; but I’d heard it briefly, and perhaps with more subtlety, earlier in the day, when I’d been down at the tunnel investigating the disappearance of Bret Jones, only to see a pink seagull fly out from the darkness.
That shook me, for sure, but I wasn’t mentally prepared for what was found down there at the south entrance the next morning.
Loretta Bevins, at the Gazette, may have caught me smiling in the photo as I held up that weird, bright orange fish, but it was forced.
Truth was, I was scared.
Terrified, even.
Still am.