Blood Red

Chapter 9

He wanted to be truthful with the detectives, but he couldn’t, not even if it meant Angie’s life.

He knew that, and hated himself for it.

Brian Freemont came home to an empty house and at first thought Angie had finally decided to leave him. It didn’t take him long to realize that her clothes were still there, along with her suitcases and everything else she owned. Her purse was still exactly where she’d left it, on the edge of the couch. After that, it took about ten minutes of looking around to see the shreds of her clothes on the darkened porch.

He dialed 911 and sat down on the edge of the stairs leading up to his house. He wasn’t about to touch anything else until the detectives got there. His heart was beating too fast and he was sweating despite the late October chill.

When the phone rang on his hip, he jumped. His fingers scrabbled madly to answer the damned device, and he hoped beyond all of his wildly growing doubts that Angie was calling him.

“Angie?” His voice was trembling as much as his hands.

“No, Officer Freemont,” he knew the voice as soon as the man spoke, and he felt rage blossom in his chest. “It’s not your wife. I’m just calling to let you know that your accounts are back where they should be.”

“What did you do with Angie, you sick fuck!”

“Your wife?” The voice sounded surprised enough that Brian guessed the man either knew nothing about her disappearance or he was an actor with supreme skills. “I don’t know anything about your wife, Freemont. Maybe she found out about your extra job benefits.”

The man hung up before he could respond, and much as he wanted to hunt the bastard down, he was forced to put his cell phone away when the detectives showed up.

Boyd and Holdstedter got out of their car and moved toward his house, their faces lacking any of the usual expressions he saw on the department’s local clowns. The odds were good neither of the men had slept more than a couple of hours before he called for assistance. There were a total of four detectives in Black Stone Bay’s police department. The other two dealt with murders. These two dealt with everything else.

Holdstedter looked like the sort of guy who got women without even trying. Boyd, at five feet, eight inches tall, was thin and balding and usually looked constipated, even when he was having a good time. Currently both of them looked like sleep was the only thing on their minds.

Boyd nodded to him and asked, “Have you heard anything at all since you called it in, Brian?” Despite his gruff exterior, Boyd’s voice and demeanor were considerate to the point of being unsettling.

He shook his head. “I wish I had, Rich.” His stomach felt like it wanted to tear free of its moorings and make a run for it.

“You know I have to ask these questions, Brian.”

“You ask whatever you need to.”

“Have you been seeing anyone on the side?”

“No. No one.” The lie came out easier than he’d expected.

“Has Angie been seeing anyone?”

“No. Come on, Rich, she’s six months pregnant.”

Boyd shook his head and shrugged. “You’d be surprised how many people find that a turn-on, sport.” He looked around the porch and then looked at Holdstedter. “Danny? Why don’t you give the place a look-over?”

The Nordic cop nodded and moved up the stairs, his eyes suddenly cold and calculating.

“Okay, Brian. Can you think of anyone who would have a reason to harm Angie?”

The damnedest thing was that he couldn’t. She could be a complete bitch with him when her back was hurting or the bloating she’d been experiencing made her feel like shit, but other than that, Angie was one of the sweetest women he’d ever known.

“No. She has fewer enemies than Santa Claus.”

“How about you, Brian? Have you pissed anyone off lately? I mean bad enough for them to want to get back at you through your wife?”

And there it was: the other big lie. Had he pissed anyone off? Well, there was the guy already doing everything he could to fuck up Brian’s whole universe and about thirty or so women he’d blackmailed into sex that ranged from uncomfortable to borderline rape. Oh, and then there was that little rape and murder a few hours earlier. He couldn’t well forget about that, now could he?

He wanted to tell the truth, he wanted to do anything he could that would help bring his Angie home safely. What he wanted to say and what he finally said had nothing in common; Brian lied through his teeth. “The meanest thing I’ve done to a perp lately was write a ticket for jaywalking, Rich.”

“Why don’t you sit down for a few more minutes, Brian, and we’ll look everything over?”

Brian nodded his thanks and watched the man as he went onto the porch to talk to his partner. They were supposed to be very good detectives. He’d never worked with them, only run across them at the station. He didn’t often run across cases where people were missing. Well, he didn’t normally get assigned to them, being as he was a traffic cop and not a detective.

The two detectives very carefully looked over the area where he’d found Angie’s clothes, not touching anything for several minutes, until finally going back to their car to get cameras and other supplies for their investigation.

The sun finally rose around the time they were bagging her clothes and putting them into an evidence box. The detectives were good guys when he was around them and they were all kidding each other at the office. Hell, half of the practical jokes that were pulled around the department could be traced back to Boyd and Holdstedter.

They weren’t clowning around now, and he doubted they would be comfortable pulling any jokes in the near future.

And that scared him a bit. The detectives were looking into the disappearance of his wife. Everyone knew that in a case like his, he would be one of the prime suspects. And if they started looking too closely at the details of Brian Freemont’s daily activities, he had little doubt that they could come up with a few unusual discrepancies.

The only thing he had going for him was that he’d been on duty for ten hours. Unfortunately, that wasn’t much of an alibi these days.

Kelli spent a lot of time going to her classes with a renewed passion for education. Well, perhaps that wasn’t completely accurate: what she had a passion for was not sitting around an empty house.

There was always something she could work on, and she found new and interesting diversions. There were several reports and essays she could lose herself in, and she did, earning extra credits toward a better final grade. Her GPA was always good, but seldom excellent. She intended to rectify that.

Because, really, as long as she was busy, she didn’t focus on the dreams. For the last two nights she’d dreamt of Teddy standing outside her window in the Lister house and asking her to come keep him warm. He was barely even a shape in the darkness, a shadow against the night. But he sounded so cold and so miserable that she almost got out of bed and went to him. There was something frightening about him in the dreams. He wasn’t the little boy she’d helped raise for the last few years, but only something that seemed to look like him.

The first night the dream had been unsettling. The second night it had made her sleepwalk. She didn’t want to know what the third night would bring if she weren’t careful.

So, college work. She was going to study herself into exhaustion and hope that would be enough to keep her from dreaming anything else that disturbing.

Poor Teddy was missing and maybe dead. She knew that. She didn’t need dreams to remind her of the fact. The Listers had become strangers in a lot of ways. Since Teddy’s body had disappeared from the hospital, they’d given up all pretense of civility and gone on the warpath.

Kelli was in mourning. The Listers were on a revenge kick and the target of their collective wrath was the hospital. She could understand their anger, but wanted nothing to do with the couple when they were going into a self-destructive rampage.

Kelli wandered the stacks of the library, her eyes roaming from bookshelf to bookshelf in an effort to find anything that would keep her properly distracted. It was getting harder to focus, but she kept trying.

She found Ben Kirby sitting at the end of Sociology, his head in his hands. Ben was a good guy, even if he was so shy he made her look like a socialite. At the moment, he looked like he was ready to have a heart attack: his face was pale, his eyes were wide and he was staring off into outer space.

“Ben? You okay?”

He jumped when she spoke and looked around for a second before he focused on her. “Hi, Kelli.” He stared at her for several seconds without answering, and finally he shook his head. “No. I don’t think I am. I think I’m in big trouble.”

“Anything I can do to help?” Ben was never going to be the sort of guy she found attractive: he wasn’t nearly muscular enough for her tastes. He was, however, the sort of guy that made her want to mother him. If ever there had been a damaged person who was more likeable than Ben, she’d failed to run across him.

“No,” he frowned and stood up. “No, but thanks a lot for asking.” He moved past her before she could answer him and headed toward the library’s exit. Much as she wanted to see if he really did need her help, she couldn’t bring herself to follow him. His eyes were too haunted, and she’d seen enough of that sort of expression in the last few days; she saw it on the Listers and when she caught her face in the occasional reflection.

Avery Tripp was staying home for a few more days. His mother had already decided that. She was around constantly, and he didn’t mind at all.

Alan Tripp went back to work, dodging as many questions as he could and focusing instead on getting his job done. It was the sort of work he could do in his sleep, but he needed to get the hell out of the house before he lost his temper.

Avery was home, and that was a blessing, but his son was acting a little too strangely for his comfort. Something had happened to him while he was gone, but for the life of him, Alan couldn’t guess what it might have been. He’d been afraid of sexual molestation or the like, but there were no signs that he’d been misused that wretchedly.

But he wasn’t himself. And Meghan was exhausted from hanging around with him constantly. His wife was acting as strangely as her son, as if the idea of being separated from her only child for even a minute should be considered a sin. It wasn’t healthy and he didn’t like it. He needed her to calm down and he needed Avery to grow up. The problem was that he couldn’t articulate those facts without coming across like a monster without any feelings, and for that reason he was doing his best to avoid being home with them.

If that made him an insensitive bastard, he’d have to deal with it, because the notion of being around the two most important people in his life was making his skin crawl.

“I need to see a fucking shrink.” He stepped outside of the offices and moved to the smoke hole at the back of the building. There were times when his boss rode his ass hard for taking too many smoke breaks. At least for the present time, he was being allowed to come and go as he pleased.

Martin Sullivan was already outside when he got there. Martin was in the shipping and receiving department. He was a nice guy who was ten years younger than Alan and loved to go on and on about his sexual exploits. Alan would have taken offense, but Martin was just weird enough to make up stories that were humorous instead of just vulgar. Alan still got a chuckle whenever Martin went off about the female clown he’d scored with at the circus. Something about getting stuck in a clown car in a compromising position with a woman who wore more makeup than Tammy Faye Bakker. It was funny, but after the first few stories from Martin, everything sort of blurred together.

Today the man wasn’t smiling. His expression was anything but happy.

“How’s things, Martin?”

“Hi, Alan. Not so good.”

“What’s up?”

Martin looked at him and shook his head. “I think there’s something wrong with me.”

“Wrong how?”

“I’m having trouble keeping food down.” He looked more closely at Martin and wondered if the man might have caught a bad bug. He couldn’t have managed to look less energetic without being in a coffin.

“Maybe you need to take the rest of the day off.”

Martin nodded and, without another word, started walking toward the parking lot. It wasn’t Alan’s place to stop him, but he figured he could make the guy’s life a little easier and let his manager know he’d gone home.

Four more people went home early that day. In an office of only twenty workers, it was a noticeable difference.

Alan stayed until it was almost dark out before finally deciding that he, too, should get home at some point.

The house roads were relatively calm—they were almost always calm, except in the summer and on weekends when they had tall ship events in the bay—and he made good time.

But the house was dark when he got home, and for a moment he was filled with a deep, abiding dread. There should have been some lights on, somewhere in the place. Even if all the lamps were shut off, the TV screen should have been putting off a glow.

“Quit being an asshole,” he told himself as he climbed out of his Subaru. “So the lights are off. Maybe they’re taking a nap, or they went to see someone.”

He stood outside the door for almost five minutes, his fingers cold and thick, before he finally opened the front door. There was nothing but darkness to see until he finally fumbled for the light switch in the hallway and flipped it to the on position. The room came into view and he sighed with relief. There was a part of him that had expected the bulb to have been removed or shattered.

What the hell had him so paranoid? He couldn’t begin to imagine. All he knew was that the last time he’d felt this nervous without a reason was when he’d been standing at the altar and waiting for Meghan to walk down the aisle.

“Anybody home?” His voice seemed to echo through the hallway.

There was no answer at first, and the fine hairs on his neck rose. Then there was a noise from upstairs and he cocked his head to listen more carefully.

There it was again: a moan, soft and feathery faint.

He moved across the hardwood floors and up the long run of stairs as quickly and quietly as he could, barely even allowing himself the luxury of a breath as his mind was filled with images of what might have gone wrong. He saw phantasmal pictures of Meghan dead or held at the mercy of a rapist while Avery was forced to watch. He imagined Avery, dead and bled out across the floor of his bedroom, with Meghan’s cold body over his, her body used to shield her dead boy. As he moved up the stairs quietly, his mind painted a thousand scenarios in which he found his family murdered or simply missing amid signs of a struggle. He had no strength at all and was so afraid of what he might find; his legs felt like someone had carefully removed the bones and replaced them with fiberfill.

Avery met him in the darkened hallway, his body seeming little more than a stain against the shadows.

“Avery? Where’s your mom, son?”

Avery moved a little closer and looked up at him, his eyes glittering in the near darkness. “Hi, Daddy.” He pointed to the master bedroom. “Mommy’s asleep. She’s tired.”

Alan frowned. “Tired? What did she do all day?”

“I don’t think she feels so good. She looks a little green.”

Meghan was normally the last person to get a cold or even a case of the sniffles. She had a constitution like iron. “Well, I guess I better see how she’s doing, sport.”

“She’s tired.” He sounded like he was talking to a little kid.

“I got that, Avery. I just want to check on her myself.”

He moved past his son, unconsciously skirting any contact with his own flesh and blood. Something wasn’t right here and it was driving him crazy.

He entered the master bedroom and flicked on the light, his eyes aching in the sudden illumination. Meghan was on the bed, dressed in the same nightgown she’d worn to sleep the previous night. She didn’t look like she’d moved much at all since he’d left for work almost ten hours earlier.

“Meghan?” He moved closer, feeling that cold spot in the pit of his stomach grow a few degrees colder still as he looked down on his wife’s prone body.

She opened her eyes and took a few seconds to focus on him. “Hey.” Her voice was raspy and dry.

“Hi, angel.” He leaned down and ran a hand over her forehead. Her skin was cool to the touch, but felt a little sweaty. “Are you feeling all right? Avery said you looked a little green, and I have to agree, honey.”

“Jus’ tired.” She smiled, her eyes focusing on him with the same clarity that she always seemed to have, and he felt relief thaw the ice in his stomach. “Feel like I haven’t slept all week.”

Alan leaned over and kissed her forehead, the taste of her running over his lips. “That’s because you haven’t slept all week.” He leaned back away and pushed a few errant hairs from her brow. “You’ve been worrying too much about Avery and other things.”

She nodded and closed her eyes. “I’m gonna sleep now, baby, okay?”

“Of course it is. Don’t worry. I’ll get something set up for dinner. Do you want anything?”

“No. Just sleep.” Seconds after the words were out of her mouth she closed her eyes and drifted into slumber. He sat with her for a while and watched her, amazed by her as he always was.

Downstairs, in the darkness, his son was waiting for him. Alan stood and stretched and then got into more comfortable clothes. His little boy would want company, and he’d already promised Meghan that Avery wouldn’t be left alone.

There was a tension in the air that none of them would willingly acknowledge. There had been for several days and it wasn’t likely that the tension was going away anytime soon.

They were all independent men, the priests of the Sacred Hearts congregation. As a rule they worked together and then went their separate ways. But every Saturday night they got together and had a proper dinner. It was tradition and they never even discussed the matter anymore. It was simply a part of their regular routine and there was no reason for it to suddenly change.

Patrick was doing the cooking that particular Saturday and, as was often the case, he decided on pasta. The man should have been Italian with the way he went for pasta. Tonight it was lasagna and it very likely tasted as wonderful as it smelled. But all three men sat in silence as they ate, lost in their own thoughts.

And each and every one of them was remembering the girl they had seen in the church every Sunday for over a decade now, the girl who would be in the pews tomorrow and likely praying as fervently as she always did.

Each of them dreaded seeing Margaret Preston, the sweet-faced youth who had come to them and brought them pleasures of the flesh the likes of which they had never experienced before. She did so, as far as they knew, without provocation. She had surely never given any indication in the past that she found them attractive, and most assuredly she had never made advances before the week that had just come around. That she had been knowledgeable was a given. Maggie was talented and eager to teach things they had never willingly admitted to dreaming about, let alone ever expected to experience in their lives.

She had brought each of the men pleasure, deep abiding pleasure, and memories that would linger and haunt them for a long time to come. She had also brought each of them doubt. They doubted their own strengths and the strength of their faith in the Lord, if they were weak enough to give themselves over to a beautiful woman.

Each of the priests had thought of little else in their free time. The guilt was powerful and burned at them, as surely as her kisses had seared their flesh, as surely as their bodies burned for her, to be with her again, to experience the sensual gratification she had given to them once before.

They would see her at Mass and each of the men would remember what had happened. They would feel the guilt they shared more profoundly than ever and the desires as well. Each of the priests knew that this would happen but only knew it would happen for one individual. The men had often shared tales of their pasts during their Saturday night meals, and Donald Wilson had heard the confessions of his subordinates on many occasions.

There had been no confessions of their secret shared sins. Not a one of them ever seriously considered confessing. It was a secret, and it was a sin, but in each case, it was a sin that was still being savored.

And each of them had one more secret that they did not desire to share: despite the guilt involved, each and every one of them wanted to be with her again.

It was a silent meal that Saturday night. It was the last meal that all three men would share together. One of them would be dead before the week was over.

They ate in silence, lost in their sins and their urges. None of them even noticed. They were far too distracted to pay any attention to the men they ate with.

And that, of course, was exactly what Jason Soulis had been counting on when he hired Maggie: a secret shared is no longer a secret, and a sin held close to the heart is more often treasured than reviled.

Can you say Amen?

The night was starting to get long in the tooth and Boyd was beginning to feel married to Holdstedter, which wouldn’t have been that bad if the man looked as good as his sister did. Sadly, his partner was the wrong gender for him to even consider looking to get lucky.

“Are you thinking about my sister again?” Danny looked at him as he raised his mug of Sam Adams and smiled.

“Why would I be thinking about your sister?”

“You’ve got that look on your face that says you’re thinking about getting into the sack with a well-built blonde.”

“Only in your dreams, you loser.” That was another thing that annoyed him about his partner: the bastard could read him like a book and he didn’t like to be read.

“I can give you her number. She’ll probably chew you up and spit out the bones, but you’d have a good time.”

“Do you have any idea how wrong it is to hear you talk about your own sister that way?”

“Do you have any idea how wrong it is to know your partner is checking you out while you’re trying to drink yourself into a stupor?”

“You’re a sick man, Danny.”

“Yes, yes I am. Remind me never to change.”

“So how many are we up to for the day?”

“Seven. Seven more people who didn’t show up where they were supposed to or anywhere else. That’s seventeen to date, but who’s counting?”

“That prick we have to call sir.”

“O’Neill can eat my shorts.”

“He probably would. I hear he swings both ways.”

“That’s more than I need to know, Boyd.”

“Serves you right, talking about your sister that way.”

“You saying you don’t want to bang my sister?”

“What? You crazy? I’d fuck her through a wall. But that isn’t why we’re here.”

“No,” Holdstedter agreed. “We’re here to get drunk and bitch about the disappearing populace.”

“You think Freemont did in his wife?”

Holdstedter looked around to make sure none of the people in the bar was paying them any attention. No one was, except there was a brunette looking him over like he was a fine cut of meat. “I think he either did something to his wife, or he did something to someone else. He looked like he was ready to shit his pants when we pulled up.”

“Maybe. I don’t think he has the balls.”

“Listen here, Boyd, and listen well. Brian Freemont is a dangerous man. He gets into power.”

“Why do you say that?”

“He thinks too much like me, and I get into power.”

“Yeah? What do you do about it?”

“I have a beer and then hope I can get lucky. Nice game of hide-the-salami and I feel plenty powerful again.”

“You’re gonna have a kid that way, you know. You should wait until you’re married.”

“Yeah, that’s not happening.”

“So we put him down as a suspect?”

“Yeah, we do. I looked over dispatch’s records. There’s a while last night when he didn’t call in to report his location and he didn’t write a single ticket. He had time to get home and do something to her if he really wanted to.”

“You think it was that bad between them?”

Holdstedter shrugged his broad shoulders and got a sour look on his pretty-boy face. “I think anyone married to him would be miserable. I also think he looks at other women too much to be a good husband.”

“Nothing wrong with looking, Danny.”

“There’s looking and then there’s looking. If that boy had x-ray vision, every woman in this town would have reason to slap his face off.”

“Okay. We keep him as a suspect.” Boyd picked at the fries surrounding his burger and then decided to have a sip of beer instead. “So what the hell is going on in this town, Danny? How come we have so many missing people and not a body anywhere?”

“Maybe they’re all leaving town.”

“Some of them, sure. I can see that with the college girl and all, but ten-year-old corpses don’t walk away. And whatever the hell happened with the Falcones, I can bet they didn’t climb out of that car and skip their asses out of town for a little fun.”

“Yeah,” he grinned and took another sip of beer. “So a few maybe stayed here, but other than the corpses and car-crash victims, maybe they just left town.”

“That’s what I like about you, Danny. You’re an optimist.”

Maggie was feeling a little tender when she got back to her apartment. The Baptist minister apparently liked his women submissive and he liked to fuck like a bunny on Spanish fly. Maggie visited him right after the Presbyterian. She was almost done with the list. Part of her was happy about that, because it was a lot of work with men who apparently weren’t getting any regularly. She was also a little saddened because she was having a good time with the whole lot of them.

Ben was outside, sitting on the ground near his front door. His head was hanging low and his knees were up so high they almost reached his shoulders.

“Ben? What are you doing out here?”

He looked up slowly, and she saw that he’d been drinking. He was ripped.

Ben shrugged his shoulders and waved his hands around aimlessly. “Thinking I maybe fucked up.”

He didn’t normally curse, and he wasn’t exactly a legend around school for his drinking habits. She walked over to where he was sitting and looked down at him. “What’s wrong?”

“That damned cop.”

“Oh, shit, Ben. He didn’t find out it was you, did he?”

“No. His wife is missing.” He looked miserable.

She shook her head. “What’s that got to do with you?”

“He said it was my fault. Accused me of doing something to her.” He shook his head with the slow, deliberate actions of a drunk who didn’t want to lose everything in his stomach.

“Did you do anything to his wife?”

“What?” He looked up sharply and immediately regretted it. Ben leaned back against the wall, his eyes moving fast behind closed lids and his face an unpleasant shade of green in the darkness. “No, Maggie. I don’t even know what she looks like.”

Maggie squatted down on her haunches next to Ben and tried to look into his eyes. His face was tear-streaked and he was sweating alcohol in the cool night air. She reached out her hand and touched his cheek, making him look at her.

“Then you didn’t do anything and he’s just a dick, Ben.”

“But maybe she left him because of me.”

“What? Because you hid his money and put it back?”

He nodded his head and simultaneously leaned his face against her palm. “Yeah. ’Cause I’m a bastard and hid his money.”

“Ben, he was blackmailing girls and raping them; they didn’t want it, but he made them do it. The only bastard here is him. If she left him because of anything, it’s because she finally saw what you saw.”

He shook his head and blinked his eyes several times. His bottom lip jutted out and pulled toward his chin. He was on the verge of tears over something he had no control over, because he’d been doing something genuinely nice for a girl he barely even knew.

“Still my fault. Maybe he deserved what I did, but what did she ever do?”

“Honey, for all you know she’d been hearing about everything he did and never reported him. Some people are like that.”

Ben shook his head again and rolled his eyes around until he could look in her face. “Why are you so nice to me?”

“Because you’re a nice guy, Ben.”

“No I’m not.”

“You just stop being a nutcase, okay?” She sighed. He really was a nice guy, but he was also a very drunk nice guy who was depressed as all hell.

“Tom is lucky. He knows that, right?”

“Let’s not talk about him, okay?” The last thing she wanted to think about was Monkey Boy. “Let’s get you back inside your place.”

Ben nodded and managed to stand on the first try. She’d expected him to fall on his ass. It still took almost five minutes to navigate into his apartment and move him toward his bedroom.

She helped him get his shoes and socks off. After that he was on his own. He didn’t try to get undressed.

As she was leaving he called out to her. “Maggie?”

“Yeah, Ben?”

“Thanks. Sorry to be a pain.”

“You’re not. Get some sleep. Feel better tomorrow, okay?”

“Okay. Good night.”

She let herself out and crossed the courtyard to her own place.

After she’d cleaned up and gotten comfortable, she lay back on her own bed and thought about Ben for a moment. He had a few homemade posters on his walls, and one of them looked very familiar. It was a poem by Byron; the same poem that she had pinned to the wall above her desk.

She drifted to sleep thinking about the poem and about the boy next door.

The view from his new home was spectacular, but not good enough for what he needed to see, so Jason Soulis lifted into the air and rose until he could properly view the entire town of Black Stone Bay.

Their faith was like a beacon to him, a light that shone brightly even in the darkest hours of the morning. Through the centuries, he had seen many of the powerful auras on thousands of people.

These days it happened less and less. That suited him very well.

Inevitably, there were the ones who served their god with undying devotion and they were always a burden to him. Most times the truly devout served in a church, either in an official capacity or as a volunteer. They were the ones who could make his life uncomfortable. Through their piety, they served to protect the holy places from his influence and to protect their unwitting associates from his needs.

His eyes scanned the town, looking for the places of worship that had nearly blinded him when he first came into Black Stone Bay. There had been several places that were painful to see when he arrived. Most were barely noticeable anymore.

He smiled, looking to the buildings that had grown dark, pleased that his suspicions had been correct. It was not the building so much as those who attended to the structures that provided them shelter. Faith was a fleeting thing when laced with sin and guilt.

Every place that Maggie had visited had been tainted, not by the acts committed there but by the crisis of faith the acts had brought about.

Throughout Black Stone Bay people slept and, in some cases, worked. The proud were here in abundance, as were the wealthy and the vain. That was true in most towns. The difference was simply that the faithful were becoming an endangered species.

In the far distance a siren called out, an ambulance racing to save some fool driver who’d hit another vehicle and was now pinned in the metal that folded around his body on impact.

Slowly, very slowly, he descended back to the earth below and finally settled on the lawn of his home. He moved to the Cliff Walk, staring out at the ocean and the increasingly violent waves.

Somewhere below, deep beneath the waves, he could feel them as they moved about, growing stronger and more desperate. They were his now, to use as he saw fit, or to discard as they became redundant.

Soon they would be freed, but for now they suffered, lost in darkness and growing tired of their prison.

“Soon,” he promised them. “Soon, but not just yet. The way has not been cleared.”