Now
AS A RECENTLY sworn-in officer of the law, Beth had been given permission by Maxine Dupree to drive her patrol car to the party.
She’d parked it behind the dumpster, so Gideon wouldn’t see it upon his arrival, and was glad she had it now. Before leaving the gym, she’d grabbed her friend and off-duty nurse, Natalie Logsdon, who’d been in the bathroom when Mrs. Bigsby went down, and now wanted to check on her. Beth steered her toward the doors instead.
Deputy Lumpkin, who everyone in town called Lump, had been drunk before Gideon arrived, and was sleeping one off on a chair next to the dunking booth. With the Sheriff’s Department short on staff after recent budget cuts, Natalie would have to be her impromptu help. The two of them had slipped out of the gym when Archie Dupree’s phone had gone off, and now sped down Guthrie. Jax called, but she let it go to voice mail. Sheriff Meeks hadn’t responded to her calls, so at the moment, that was more pressing than Jax asking her to bring him home some food from the party.
All Sheriff Meeks did was work, especially since his wife passed away from ovarian cancer four years ago, and once said he’d be on call 25/7 if the Lord could squeeze in that extra hour. Either he was already on his way to the tunnel or something else had gone wrong. All Beth could think about as she drove was Simple Simon walking into the station with that sketch of the two murdered bodies he’d found outside the tunnel—bodies, once she and Sheriff Meeks had finally located them in person, so bloody and covered in blowflies that even her boss had gotten sick in the grass—and she prayed she wasn’t about to find a third.
Natalie rolled down the passenger’s window and welcomed the cold wind in her face, her long black hair flapping like a tattered kite.
“I feel like we’re Bonnie and Bonnie,” Natalie said. “Me and you.”
“Except we aren’t criminals running from the law.”
“That’s right. We are the law.”
“No, I’m the law.”
Natalie scoffed. “And I’m the sidekick?”
“No, you’re the drunk nurse,” said Beth. “I should have left you at the gym with Lump.”
“Lump’s got issues.”
“We all got issues.”
Natalie chugged a bottled water she’d snatched from the concessions before they left. She’d just finished her fourth glass of pinot before Mrs. Bigsby went down, and wanted to sober up before they hit the ravine. Navigating that wooded slope was tough enough sober, would be downright dangerous fully intoxicated.
“You gonna be okay?” Beth asked as she sped down the Reach’s main drag, north toward the gully and the old train tunnel. “You can stay in the car if you need to.”
“And let you go in there alone?” Natalie finished the water. “I’ll be fine in a minute.” She popped a stick of minty gum in her mouth, like fresh breath was going to help Doc, and then stuck her head back out the window, into the wind like a dog might.
Aside from those who either worked or resided in the hospital, the shut-ins, or the dozens of out-of-townies Mickey French had hired to renovate the historic Beehive Hotel, most everyone else in town had been inside the gym, which meant the streets were vacant.
Eerily so, Beth thought, knuckles bone white on the steering wheel.
Beth hadn’t known how the town would respond to Maxine Dupree’s party. Maybe a fourth of the town would come, she’d guessed. Half, if the town overachieved. Who could have guessed most the town would crowd inside that gym to celebrate the return of a young man many still blamed for what happened to Sully? In hindsight, maybe Beth should have predicted it, especially with how everyone had become so anxious now that the tunnel was open again. And that had only been enhanced by the two bodies recently found outside the tunnel. The town, not knowing the macabre details like Beth and Sheriff Meeks did, assumed the tunnel killings had begun again, but Beth didn’t think so. She knew the bodies had been dumped there, not killed at the tunnel, like all the other so-called tunnel killings throughout Harrod’s Reach’s sordid history, and Sheriff Meeks had agreed. What she’d also concluded, but had yet to discuss with her boss, was that she believed that the two victims had been murdered by two different people—despite the fact the corpses had been holding hands. The woman, quite possibly, by the Horseshoe Rapist who’d been plying his trade way east of here.
Regardless, Beth thought as she drove, stealing periodic glances at her rapidly sobering friend in the neighboring seat, the town is afraid.
And it’s only natural to want to gather together when afraid.
She looked at her friend and suppressed a laugh. There were parts of Natalie she envied, parts she didn’t. Maybe Beth needed to let her hair down and have some fun, like Natalie had been begging her to for years. But she didn’t drink, ever.
Maybe she could have used one now. Her heart beat too fast. The tall canopy of tree limbs overhung the road like a tunnel of its own. White Wall Cemetery on the right. Harrod’s Reach Park to the left. Mallard Street on the left, halfway up the Duprees’ historic home, known around town as the Smite House. Higher up on Mallard, the historic Beehive Hotel, where hammering echoed, renovations ongoing even now.
All of it grew small in her rearview.
The cold air Natalie was letting into the open window shook the car.
Natalie reeled her face back inside, settled against the headrest, and closed her eyes. They were only two miles from the ravine and One-Side Mountain. Natalie’s eyes popped open when they hit the Historic District and the bumpy part of Guthrie Street, the ten-block ribbon of old-timey cobbles, and Natalie did somehow look refreshed as they neared their destination.
“Have a nice nap?”
Natalie yawned. “How long was I out?”
“Ten seconds.”
Natalie rolled up her window, tied her long hair into a topknot—ready to roll.
All the other roads jutted off Guthrie in perfect angles and grids and manicured, tree-dotted squares. Fuzzy streetlamps and fancy wrought-iron benches. Trees soared like redwoods. Beth turned onto DuPont, and then another quick right onto Malloy, which began the two-hundred-yard track of sharp curves downward to the gully, to where the train tracks used to be before trees had swallowed them up.
Sometimes the best way to deal with the tunnel was to go down like it was no big deal when they all knew it was. Before she pulled her car to a stop at the small clearing of grass and weeds overlooking the ravine, where Sheriff Meeks’s patrol car was parked with the light bar flashing, sending smears of red and blue pulses out across the darkness of the tree-lined gully, Beth had hoped she could do just that. But all she could muster as she and Natalie got out of the car was, “Which one am I?” When Natalie looked at her, Beth said, “Bonnie or Bonnie?”
Natalie smiled. “Bonnie, for sure.”
Beth shined a flashlight as they started down the slope.
In the distance, an ambulance sounded, grew louder, closer, and by the time they’d navigated the dew-covered downslope to where the ground bottomed out below in a sea of weeds and brambles and tall grass, the ambulance arrived up above. The siren shut off, but the lights still flashed in strobes of red and white across the foliage-draped cliffs.
Beth focused on her flashlight beam, her careful footsteps, Natalie two paces ahead and moving like she’d been down here more recently than she’d like to have admitted.
Natalie moved a stray branch out of her path, looked over her shoulder, held it for a moment so it wouldn’t fling back into Beth’s face. She went quiet as they emerged in view of the fallen wall at the tunnel’s southern entrance. Nobody really knew where that part of the ravine got its name—One-Side Mountain—because if you searched hard enough, you’d find a second side. And the mountain-like outcropping through which the tunnel had been forged sure as shit had a second side to it, which was where Simple Simon had found the bodies.
Lantern glow flickered deep inside the tunnel.
Flashlight beams shone behind them—the medics had made it. About twenty yards before the tunnel’s arched opening, Natalie and Beth glanced at each other as they continued over the rubble, to where the bricks gave way to dust and grass and hard pack right at the opening. They stepped inside, felt the temperature drop, the sensation of entering a cave. Breezes blew, upturning dust and the stench of sealed-up grime. Water dripped from a ceiling too dark to see without shining a light up there, which Beth wasn’t about to do. Natalie mostly kept her eyes down. They were both aware of the story of Charlie Ponsetter, from back in the 1970s, who shined his light up there one night and swore he saw Leonard Stewart, the town barber, scaling the stones of the ceiling. Charlie was heavy into booze and pot, prone to making shit up, but something he’d seen inside the tunnel that night had turned his hair white out of fright. Something had left him more than a few cards short of a full deck for the next eight years, before he ended his life hanging from the oak tree in his stepmother’s front yard back in the autumn of ’82.
Lenny Stewart was questioned about it plenty in the years that followed. He’d chuckle it off. At the time, Lenny the Blade, as his loyal male customers liked to call him because of the close shaves he’d give after haircuts, was in his late fifties and fat. He wasn’t scaling any ceilings, let alone the grimy one in that long, cold tunnel. But nobody was laughing ten years later, when Lenny the Blade died of a heart attack, right when he was shaving Henry Calcutta’s right cheek. And nobody was laughing when Lenny the Blade’s oldest son, Joey the Blade—he was a barber, too—read his father’s will, which stated that Lenny believed he’d been possessed inside the tunnel by something called a Melino. Joey looked that up to find it was some underworld nymph thing from Greek mythology that manifested in weird forms and brought about nightmares and insanity, which fit the bill for Lenny.
But the will also said that he’d left a gift for the town of Harrod’s Reach in a cellar beneath his barn. Joey had found it first, and spent two days drinking scotch, wrangling whether to call the police, knowing what he’d found in that cellar would change the town’s opinion of his father. Eventually, he’d made the call. Detective Harrington, who’d been right in the thick of investigating the resurgence of murders in and around that tunnel—one of the tunnel’s many decades of Golden Years—carried out from the cellar of Lenny the Blade’s barn the bones of no less than two dozen dogs and over fifty jars of blood he must have siphoned from them. Blood, once they’d read through his journals and diary, that Lenny the Blade liked to drink from martini glasses on the rocking chair of his front porch whenever the moon was full—he truly believed he’d been possessed. The family had cremated Lenny’s body, scattering his ashes, just like he’d wished, over the ravine Beth and Natalie had just passed through, and inside the tunnel they’d just entered.
Legend said you could still hear Lenny the Blade crawling along the tunnel’s ceiling at night. And if you shined your light up at just the right time, and your eyes locked with his cold, dead ones, your hair would turn white like Charlie Ponsetter’s had done in the summer of ’76.
Beth held the flashlight in one hand and her gun in the other.
Lantern light flickered ahead, but no shadows moved in the hazy glow of it, no silhouettes cast large on the walls.
“Sheriff?” Beth’s voice echoed. “Doctor Bigsby?”
Water dripped from the ceiling, rippled in puddles.
“You hear that?” Natalie asked, giving Beth an I don’t like this look over her shoulder.
It was a chainsaw, not roaring like it was about to bite into a tree trunk, but purring. At rest, like distant thunder.
Beth caught up to her. She knew Doc had been ignoring the warning sign and clearing out rubble from the fallen walls. But why would he need a chainsaw? They walked side by side, now halfway through the tunnel, and after ten more yards Beth’s pace quickened toward the lantern glow.
The chainsaw purred louder now.
“Sheriff?”
Sheriff Meeks was on his knees, his back to them, facing the open north entrance Doc had been working on. He’d made an impressive dent in the rubble; trees gave way to a dark sky and full moon. Even on his knees, Sheriff Meeks loomed large. But he wavered, slumped to his left, and lay unmoving on the ground. The Stetson he’d been wearing for the past thirty years spun away from his head. Breeze turned the hat clockwise, one tic and then another, and then it too lay still.
“Grover!” Beth hurried to her boss. The chainsaw purred a few feet away, fresh blood dripping from the blade, bits of clothing and flesh stuck on the jagged metal teeth. Blood pumped from a wound in Grover’s abdomen.
Beth screamed for help.
Natalie doubled over, hands on knees, facing the shadows. From behind them, flashlight beams approached, found the walls, settled on them.
First responders from the ambulance.
Beth screamed for them to hurry, and then held Grover’s wrist for a pulse. Faint, but there. Grover’s eyes, set deep into the sculpted features of his walnut-colored skin, found her own. She placed her hands on his white-stubbled cheeks. “Grover, can you hear me? Who did this?”
The Ripper purred on the tunnel’s floor, growling like a rabid animal. But where was Simon? Had he duped them both by drawing that sketch days ago? Had they too easily cast aside his possible role in those murders because of his feeble mind?
Simple Simon, the town called him. One of those big teddy-bear boys who’d physically grown into a man by his thirteenth birthday. He was thirty-two now, and mentally still back there, way the fuck back there, Grover had said of Simon just last week, days before the north wall had crumbled, and exhausted after bringing Simon out of the woods yet again, this time after chainsawing his initials into yet another tree. SS he’d carved into the bark, for Simple Simon, instead of SB, for Simon Bowles, which had prompted Sherriff Meeks to swallow a finger of Jameson, wipe his mouth, and say to Beth, “There goes the question of whether or not he knows.”
“Knows what?” Beth had asked, eyeing the half-empty bottle of Jameson that Grover pulled out from his bottom desk drawer whenever the days began to wear on him. He’d pour two, offer Beth one he knew she’d decline, and then down both.
“What we call him behind his back.”
Come to think of it, Simon hadn’t been at Gideon’s surprise party.
Natalie bent over and emptied her stomach. Shadows darkened her up to the knees. Natalie wiped her mouth, pointed a trembling finger at the rubble, closer to the wisps of lantern glow. To the trail of blood marked by dozens of large boot prints, all of which could have been the size of Simple Simon’s feet, and then finally to what was left of Doc Bigsby.
To the severed arm still somehow holding the cell phone he’d used to text his wife.
And next to it, a set of antlers.