Cold on the Mountain Read online

  Wendy studied him. She saw the sadness in his eyes. “Why, Denny? Why couldn’t you draw?”

  “I was too deep in debt,” he said. “Hell, I might not be able to draw this year. We’ll have to wait and see.”

  Phil shook his head in disbelief, a little smile on his face. It was all he could do to keep from shouting his frustration. He looked at his wife, saw the tears in her eyes. “Denny, I need you to run this back for me one more time. I’m not a stupid man, and I think I’m starting to get this thing figured out, but please…feel free to correct me if I’m missing something.”

  He took a deep breath.

  “You’re telling me that I’m trapped in this rat’s nest…filled with, with psychos, and I mean stuck here with my family, and that I have to work my ass off for the right to even have a tiny chance of ever getting home?”

  Big Wren, his hands in his pockets and his head down, gave a little nod. “That’s the long and short of it, I’m afraid.”

  Phil stopped short. He stood in the road, fuming, before reaching down and snatching up a stone, taking a huge crow hop, and throwing it as far down the alley as he could.

  Wren’s mouth fell open in horror as they waited for the rock to hit home. After an agonizing five seconds, it clattered off of a shed, landing harmlessly on someone’s back lawn.

  “Christ, Phil!” Wren hissed. “What the hell are you doing? You break a window and there goes this year’s pull—right down the drain in salary! You’ll be lucky to afford a lot the next time the door swings open!”

  Wendy now wore an expression of panic as well. “Phil!” she hissed. “Watch yourself! We need to get out of here!”

  A gate opened in a shoulder-high cedar fence three houses down and a man with a muscular build crunched out into the alley. He had vulpine features and dark hair that he kept swept high off his forehead with pomade. It was like he’d just stepped out of the 1950s. When the man smiled at them, Wren turned away.

  “Look, Albert,” Wren said, eyes down, “he didn’t mean anything by it. All of this is new to them. It’s a shock, is all. It won’t happen again, I swear.”

  The man nodded. He narrowed his eyes at Wendy, turned them on Phil, who was still fuming, nostrils flared. “What’s that old saying about rocks and glass houses? You, uh…you got any skeletons in your closet, mister?”

  Phil shook his head and spat on the ground. “Leave us alone,” he said. It was utterly unlike him to be so aggressive, but the absurdity of the situation had flipped a switch somewhere deep inside. He held the man’s eyes for a long minute, and then the fellow named Albert grinned and looked away. He sauntered down the alley.

  “Better mind the rent, Denny,” he said, stepping into the doorway to his back yard. “You put these folks up much longer than a night, and it’ll all be a moot point again for you this year.”

  He winked at Wendy, a lewd promise embedded in it, and Phil stepped in front of his wife. “Leave…us…alone,” he warned.

  “Oh, don’t mind me, Phil,” the man said, “just ask Big Wren there. He’ll tell you—I like ‘em much older.”

  He closed the gate and they heard him whistling nonchalantly back up to his house before he slipped inside.

  Wren sighed. “Watch your temper, Phil. You have to keep your cool. We can’t go pissing anybody off. And…we need to get you work. I’m sorry…I know it sounds crazy, but we need to do it. And I’m talking today.”

  Phil just stood there, defeated. He put a trembling arm around the stooped shoulders of his wife. “Fine,” he said. “Fine. Take us to go get jobs.” He laughed, a high, tinkling sound. Criminy, he was on the edge of losing it.

  Wren forced a smile and they turned and headed back toward his house.

  “Who was that man?” Wendy said, when they were well out of earshot of his yard.

  “Albert DeSalvo,” Wren replied. “You folks just met the Boston Strangler.”

  ELEVEN

  It began to snow on the way back into Bishop. Wells handled the SUV expertly in the accumulation on the road, and she dropped them at the foyer of their hotel with a smile on her face.

  “Thank you for trusting me,” she said, “for trusting us. I have a really good feeling about you two.”

  Kelli returned the smile. “We appreciate that you reached out to us, Anna. This…well, it’s hard for me to wrap my mind around what’s happening here, but we’ll do whatever we can to help. Should we just wait for your call?”

  Wells nodded. “She hasn’t confirmed it, but I think Miriam is considering going back to Adrienne. She senses that the time is soon—that the door will swing open again before too long. I think…I think she has unfinished business on the mountain, and she wants to help those that are stuck there. Including my fiancé.”

  “Okay, then. We’ll just hang tight until we hear from you,” Bo said. He closed the door and Wells left them there, the snow sifting gently through cones of light beneath the street lamps. “Dinner?”

  “Yeah. I could use a stiff drink, too,” Kelli said. She went to Bo and wrapped her arms around him. Beneath her winter coat, he could feel the tension in her body. She was trembling.

  “Hey,” he said, holding her close. “Hey, Kel. You okay?”

  She nodded, the fear plain in her eyes. For about the tenth time since they’d arrived in Bishop, he thought about the ring he’d hidden in his dresser back home.

  “I’m just so thankful for you, Bo; and I’m glad we’re here. Wendy and Phil and the girls…I just can’t imagine what they’re going through.”

  He kissed the top of her head. “I know, Kel. We’ll get ‘em back. Let’s go grab that drink.”

  They were almost out of the hotel parking lot when the police cruiser pulled up. Tasket rolled the window down. “Hello there!” he called.

  Bo and Kelli leaned in. “Sherriff,” Bo said.

  “How are you two holding up?”

  “Okay,” Kelli said. “Have you heard anything about Phil?”

  “Well, Billy Carden runs the filling station out at the edge of town. He definitely saw your brother and his family, Mr. Benson. Remembered ‘em the second I showed him the photograph. That’s good news. It gives us a timeline, and it helps us understand the direction they were headed. I, uh…I poked around a little up in the high country. Logging roads and the like. There’s lots of places to get turned around up there. I’m thinking of taking a few deputies up tomorrow, do a bit of a more formal search. That’s if the weather cooperates. You two want to come along?”

  Bo looked at Kelli, who nodded eagerly. “Sure do,” he said. “What time?”

  “Come by the station around eight. We’ll make a plan that steers us clear of any nasty weather.”

  “Will do, Sherriff,” Bo said. “Thanks.”

  Tasket waved and pulled out into the street.

  “What about waiting on Anna and Miriam?” Kelli said.

  Bo shrugged. “Anna’s got our number. There’s no sense in not helping out, the way I see it. I don’t care if it’s a matter of pulling together a simple search team, or it’s some paranormal recon mission…I just want to get my brother and his family home. No reason we can’t cover both angles.”

  They found a place called Whiskey Creek, where they split a pitcher of Coors and ate burgers and salads. The restaurant was filled with warmth and laughter, and it gave Bo pause as he considered where his brother might be spending his evening.

  An entire town, filled with monsters. He shook his head.

  “Do you believe it?” he said when he was finished with his burger. He studied her over the top of his glass, the skepticism plain in his expression.

  She sighed. “I don’t know. I mean…I guess I do. Some things…they just can’t be explained. Did I ever tell you about my friend Rachel? From back when I was living in Texas?”

  Bo shook his head.

  “I was maybe nine or ten when she passed away. Rachel Trent and I were best friends. She lived close to our house, and we did everything
together. We sat together on the school bus, spent the night at each other’s houses, played soccer together. Everything. And then one summer, there was a boating accident and she drowned. It was…god, Bo, it was so surreal. I remember attending her funeral. I remember going back to school in the fall, and she wasn’t there anymore. But I didn’t cry—at least not at first. I don’t know why, but I didn’t.”

  “That’s a hard thing for a kid to process. Maybe you just didn’t know how to respond to that kind of loss. Seems pretty natural to me.”

  She nodded. “That’s what my parents said. Anyway, just before Rachel had left on vacation that summer, she’d given me a necklace. It wasn’t anything expensive—just a little silver chain with a few charms on it. I still have it, actually. Anyway, I wore that necklace every day, up until I lost it. I had it one day, and it just disappeared the next. I tore the house apart searching for it, but it was gone. And that’s when it finally hit me, Bo. Losing that little dime-store necklace did it.” Her lip trembled, and Bo took her hand.

  “So when I realized that I’d lost her gift, I just fell apart. I finally let go of all my grief, and I thought about all the good times we had together, and I just started bawling. It finally occurred to me that Rachel wouldn’t have any more birthdays—not ever. No more movies with her parents, or trips to the lake with her friends. No more sleepovers. No graduation, no wedding, no family. No hugs from her mother when she was frightened. I went downstairs and slid into my mom’s lap, and I just fell apart. She took me and held me, Bo. It’s one of the best memories I have, being held by my mother like that. And after I’d cried it all out, after I’d finally let go of the grief that had been welling up inside of me, I saw something.”

  She was quiet for so long that Bo thought that she might not continue. “Kelli? What did you see?”

  “It was her, Bo. I only saw it from the corner of my eye, and I had been crying, but I noticed a movement. I saw the swirl of a dress—a lacy white dress, just like the one she’d been buried in—and a flash of black patent leather. She was there for just an instant, and then she left the room. I stood and I called out to her. My mother—bless her heart—she probably thought I was going crazy. And maybe I did, just a little. Anyway, I ran after her, shouting her name—begging her to wait for me.

  “I ran down the hall, up the stairs, and back into my bedroom. There, on my dresser, sitting right there in plain sight, was the necklace that she’d given me. Bo, I had torn that room to shreds searching for it, and there it was. She’d left it for me…again.”

  Kelli finished her beer. She pushed the plate with her half-finished burger into the center of the table, tears tracking down both cheeks.

  “It was her?” Bo said.

  “It was,” Kelli replied. “I’m convinced of it. There are things in this world that simply can’t be explained. But miracles do happen. People do reconnect with the ones that they’ve lost. I think…I think that Wendy and Phil and the twins are in real danger. And I think we need to do whatever it takes to get them home.”

  Bo nodded. “Come on, then. Let’s go get some rest. Be a long day tomorrow, I think.”

  He paid the tab and they walked back to the hotel, where they took hot showers before slipping into bed to watch a movie on HBO.

  “I love you, Kel,” Bo said before turning out the light.

  “Love you too, Bo,” she replied. She was off into the world of dreams quickly, but Bo couldn’t sleep and he lingered there in the darkness, thinking about the swirl of a lacy dress while the Sierra winds rattled the thin window panes of their hotel room.

  TWELVE

  “So how do we do it?” Wendy said. “I mean, is there some kind of employment agency here in town?”

  Wren chuckled, then winced. “Yeah. Yeah, actually there is. I got to tell you, this place—it has a weird sense of circularity to it. Folks that come back…I mean recent folks—they tend to fall into jobs that are similar to what they did when they were back out there in the world. The, uh…the lady that runs the Adrienne Department of Employment is,” he swallowed thickly, “well, she’s kind of an odd duck. She used to work for the postal service, if that tells you anything.”

  Phil snorted. It took Wendy a second longer to get the connection. “Going postal?” she said. “Wait…seriously? Is that what we’re dealing with here?”

  “Afraid so,” Wren said, running a hand through his hair. “Just be calm. Smile. Humor her. We’ll try to be as efficient as possible. She’ll be expecting us, so let’s hope we can just get in and get out.”

  “What about the girls?” Wendy said. “Surely they don’t need to work?”

  “Oh, of course not. In fact, we can drop them by the Providence Center on the way. It’s...well, it’s kind of an oasis. Whatever malignancy created this place can’t touch it. I think it’s the innocence of children that protects the place. The pedophiles. The crazies. They can’t even go inside, and the center is located right in the heart of Adrienne. I think that even the monstrous energy that sustains this place respects the purity of youth.”

  “But these monsters were all children once,” Phil said. “Right, Denny? Some—maybe even most—might have been abused growing up, but I’m sure that many were also beloved by their parents. Heck, some of the people here—those two kids I saw in the bar, for instance—aren’t much more than children themselves.”

  “You’re right, Phil. We do tend to forget that. We see the killer in full, and we loathe them in that form. We never think about them in their youth—in their own stages of innocence. But you and I both know that these people—well, they just aren’t the same as the rest of society. Somewhere along the way,” he shrugged, “something else bubbles up to the surface. It takes over.

  “At any rate, they lost whatever goodness they had in them a long, long time ago. I’ll admit that it’s difficult for me to wrap my brain around the idea that some of these people were born with the darkness already there, but when you’ve seen some of the things I’ve seen, you can’t let that possibility go. I used to have an idea about what I believed on the topic of good and evil. Now? Well, all that’s changed.

  “But you can both rest assured. They can’t go inside; when your girls pass through those doors, they will be safe.”

  Phil and Wendy communicated with their eyes, in that strange way that only those who share children can. Wendy finally nodded. “What else can we do, Phil? We have to work.”

  “Okay, girls!” he called into the other room. “We’re going to go meet some other kids to play with. Would you like that?”

  Carrie smiled. Camille frowned. She gave just a barely perceptible shake of the head—No, Dad! I want to stay here, it said.

  “It’s going to be fine, Cammie. You’ll have to trust us, okay? We’re…your mom and I are going to do whatever we can to get back home, okay? But we need you kids to help us out here by doing just as we say. Sound good?”

  “Okay,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “We’ll see you tonight?”

  “Of course,” Wendy said. She pulled her girls into her arms, squeezing them tight to her chest. “Of course we’ll all be together tonight. So…what did you two make? Will you show me?”

  They led her into the other room, and Phil heard the girls explaining their creations with enthusiasm.

  “Hey? What happened to my picture?” Camille said. “Daddy, did you move it?” She appeared in the doorway, the confusion plain on her face. Wendy and Carrie followed, with her twin sister carrying her own finished drawing.

  “I didn’t touch it. We were outside the whole time, Cammie.”

  “Well, something happened to it! It was a picture of the beach in California. I just had it!”

  Phil turned to Wren, who merely shrugged. “You’ll have to get used to it. Things here…they just go missing from time to time. Not sure why, or where they go. It happens—usually more often the closer we get to the lottery.”

  “Come on,” Wendy said. “We have time to d
o another one. Let’s go, girls.”

  “That’s bizarre,” Phil said. “But no crazier than anything else you’ve said, I guess. So let’s talk about work. What are our options, Denny? What kind of jobs are there here?”

  Wren shrugged. “We’ll have to see what she says. To be honest, it’s kind of like a lottery as well. This lady…she’s crazy as an outhouse rat, Phil. Straight loony tunes. Don’t…look, whatever you do, don’t laugh at her.”

  Phil just shook his head in disbelief, and then they were shrugging into their coats and plunging out into the bright, cold day. They passed a smattering of people on the street. Wren spoke warmly to a few, but simply avoided the majority. Phil began to get a feel for the ratio of unfortunate “normals” stuck there in Adrienne.

  After about a fifteen-minute walk, they came to the edge of a snow-covered park. In the center stood a modern recreational building. “Come on. They’ll be excited to meet you,” Wren said.

  They crunched across the field and stepped into the warmth of the lobby. “Big Wren!” an older woman called from behind her desk. She hurried over and threw her arms around him. She had a sturdy build and curly white hair and she wore glasses and a thick sweater with a row of garish snowmen in the center. Phil liked her instantly.

  She released Wren and turned to the girls, her hands on her knees. “Girls! My, my…you’re both so pretty! We’ve been very excited to meet you!”

  “Hi,” they said in unison—Carrie with excitement, Cammie shyly.

  “And you are?” she beamed, turning to Wendy.

  “I’m Wendy Benson. This is my husband Phil. We’re…new here.”

  The woman offered a sad smile. “I know, dear. And I’m so sorry about that. I’m Gwendolyn Broadmeyer, but please—just call me Gwen. I run the school here in Adrienne. Your children are in a safe place for as long as they are with us. You have my word.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Gwen,” Wendy said. “We really appreciate that there is a space here for them just to be children.”