Brood XIX

Present Day

"Have you told anyone else about this?"

Trey stood and turned a slow circle. Murky, stagnant water surrounded him on all sides, save for the random islands that poked up over the surface of the bayou. They were packed with cypresses with lazy branches that draped down nearly to the water. Spanish moss bearded their boughs. Mangroves grew directly from the slough, their stained trunks memorializing the history of the water table. Clouds of insects swirled near the banks.

It had taken him nearly an hour by motorboat, winding a strange, circuitous route through shadowed channels where snapping turtles fought for basking space in the precious few rays of sun that reached the ground. The fact that the man standing uncomfortably at the edge of the sloppy bank had made this particular discovery at all was a stroke of luck.

"Not a soul," Gareth Ressler said. He wore that deer-in-the-headlights expression that underlined the truth of his words. He was a small man, and not the brightest by anyone's definition. His chest waders were crusted with mud, his flannel shirt patched at the elbows. There were so many wrinkles on his leathered face it appeared as though he hadn't spent a single day indoors in his life. He shifted his weight nervously from one foot to the other, partially because of what he'd found, but primarily because of the gator he'd poached, Trey imagined. Its carcass was stashed twenty yards across the swamp under a pile of branches torn from the tree above it. Presumably, Gareth was going to return and collect it when no one was looking. Trey was going to have to leave it alone. For now. He had bigger problems at the moment. "I did exactly what you said. I waited right on this spot until you got here. Didn't touch a thing. Didn't speak a word to no one."

Trey nodded and looked Gareth directly in the eyes. The man's gaze darted unconsciously toward where he had concealed the gator, then back.

"Get out of here," Trey said. "There'll be a deputy waiting at your trailer to take your statement."

"Yes, sir, Deputy, sir."

"And don't you dare open your mouth. I hear you so much as told that wife of yours and you and I are going to have a long chat about our scaled friend over there."

Trey knelt in the mud, which released the vile stench of flatus. It soaked right through his khaki slacks, unnervingly warm against his skin. He should have brought his hip waders, but he hadn't been thinking clearly. When the call came in, he had flown out the door without a word to anyone. He'd been praying for any kind of development for the past two years, all the while fearing that this would be the one he got.

An outboard motor coughed and belched, and then with a buzz, it carried Gareth back toward town.

Trey looked down at the muck. The brownish crown of a skull breached the surface. There was a depressed fracture of the occipital bone from which jagged fissures originated. The cranial sutures were rough and sealed with mud, not thoroughly united. A scapula stood erect a foot away like a shark's dorsal fin. Other sections of bone were visible as well where the soil had begun to erode away from them. The posterior aspect of a calcaneus. The distal ends of the radius and ulna. The pebbles of the carpals. The spinous processes of the thoracic spine, like the spikes along an iguana's back.

Tears welled in his eyes, but he wiped them away before they could overwhelm his lashes.

The bones were so small, the growth plates only partially fused.

It was the body of a child.

Vanessa rolled over in bed so that the window was at her back. The sunlight speared through the gaps around the blinds as though sent solely to torture her. She couldn't sleep, and yet she didn't feel like getting up either. It was another day like every other. She inhaled Warren's scent from the pillow beside her. It had now faded to the point that it didn't so much smell like her husband, but rather conjured the memory of it. She couldn't bring herself to wash it any more than she could force herself to box up all of his belongings. His clothes still hung in the closet and filled his drawers. His medicine cabinet was still packed with toiletries. She hadn't been able to remove his stack of medical journals from the bathroom. His dresser-top was exactly how he had left it. A pile of change next to his comb. His stethoscope resting on the crumpled tie he had shed before changing for the last time.

She couldn't bear to look anymore and flopped onto her back. Everything, no matter how inconsequential, was attached to a memory. They were all good and she enjoyed reliving them, but they all inevitably led to that night at the fairgrounds, to the viewing at the funeral home, and finally to his interment. She could still feel the texture of the handful of earth she had thrown down onto his lacquered maple casket in her palm.

Buddy stirred at the foot of the bed. He released a single bark and scampered out of the bedroom. His nails clacked down the hallway toward the kitchen, where she knew he would lap water from his bowl and resume his slumber against the kitchen door where he could better monitor his territory.

The ceiling fan twirled slowly overhead, its shadow a rotating X that passed over eggshell-cracks in the plaster.

She heard a soft crunching sound.

Muffled. Subdued.

It almost sounded like someone eating popcorn on the other side of the wall behind her head. But beyond the second story wall there was only a five-foot gap of air between the siding and the branches of the trees.

The room again fell silent.

She stared down the length of her body toward the opposite side of the bedroom. The television was dark, the wall behind it lined with as many framed photographs as she could make fit. The three of them as a family. Her husband and her daughter. Smiling faces from a better time. From a different life entirely.

Her thoughts drifted to Emma. Where was she now? What was she doing? Did she remember her mother?

Was she even still alive?

Vanessa shivered at the thought. Emma was still alive. Somewhere. She had to be. A mother would be able to tell instinctively if her daughter was dead...wouldn't she?

The crunching sound resumed.

Vanessa listened more intently. It was more of a skritching, grinding noise.

She sat up and turned around to face the wall. The oak headboard rested against it. On the left side, a touch-lamp with floral-patterned glass. On the right, a jewelry box with ornate windows through which gold and silver glimmered. In the center, a glass display case containing the crumbling remnants of a teddy bear crafted from weeds and mud. She had decided to encase it in order to prolong degradation. It was the last thing her daughter had given her, and she would cherish it for as long as it lasted. It reminded her of a special moment she meant to separate from the night that followed. It was a part of Emma. The oils and microscopic flakes of skin from her hands were molded into the crusted dirt. She had tied kinetic energy into the knots in the graying grass. And she had infused it with imaginary life that came from a heart more radiant than the sun.

Vanessa leaned closer to the wall and tilted her head to the side to better isolate the origin of the sound.

More crackling.

Were there termites behind the drywall?

As she neared the plaster, she realized that the noise wasn't coming from inside the wall as she had initially suspected.

More skritching.

She looked down.

The crunching sound was coming from inside the glass cube.

She stared at the bear her daughter had made with her tiny hands. The outer layer of dirt was cracked and crusted, the grass bindings desiccated. Most were frayed. Some had snapped like guitar strings. The leaf-ears had folded forward and turned black.

Crackling.

Slowly, she raised her hand and pressed her fingertips against the glass.

The noise ceased.

Trey paced a ring around the crime scene techs as they worked the remains. The way he was wearing the ground, if they didn't finish soon there would be a trench around them. It had taken them more than three hours to get there from the Crime Scene Response Section of the Dallas Police Department. Trey could have had his own men collect the evidence and ship it to Dallas for a complete forensic workup, but he couldn't afford to take the chance of anything being mishandled or contaminated in transit. Not with this one. He couldn't risk a screw-up, not that he wasn't already confident of whose body it was. They needed to nail whoever did this, and they needed everything to be by the book. No way was he letting this monster get off on a technicality. This was Texas, and he wanted this son of a bitch to fry.

His stomach roiled. Again he managed to quell the revolt of his last meal. Not because of what he saw, but because he knew what he would have to do soon enough and it was tearing him up inside. He was going to have to tell his big sister that her child was dead. He was going to mercilessly crush her hopes, destroy the only thing that gave her a reason to get out of bed in the morning. And then he was going to have to watch her slowly die of a broken heart. The only thing he would be able to offer her was retribution, which wouldn't forestall her eventual deterioration.

The techs had excavated the scene like archaeologists. They had carefully used trowels to clear the mud from the bones. The decomposed tissue formed a black corona where the flesh had once been, a process that had been expedited by the larvae that teemed in the soil. The corpse had been buried facedown. Not laid to rest, but hurled down into a shallow grave. The techs estimated the grave had maybe been two feet deep based upon the erosion patterns of the surrounding bayou. A rush job, they had called it. But it hadn't been for fear of being caught in the act. Not out here. It had been the final insult to injury, of which there had been more than any child should have to bear. There were multiple fractures of the tibias and fibulae and the femora. One of the knees was deformed. A portion of the bone had broken away to reveal a coarse black crater. The entire pelvis was shattered. The spinal column was crooked and broken, the rib cage cracked along the lateral margins so that it collapsed in upon itself, the jagged ends clasped like interlaced fingers. The humeri were fractured in multiple places, the forearms snapped through and through in such a way that the hands were no longer attached.

They had photographed, documented, and removed the intact sections one by one until all that remained was a child-size indentation in the earth that would soon enough be washed away by the elements until there was nothing left of her at all. The worst had been when they extracted the cranium. It had come away like half of a broken vase, leaving the fragmented remains of the face behind. The facial bones had been destroyed, broken into hundreds of pieces that would be nearly impossible to reconstruct. Chipped teeth pocked the sludge. Despite the obliteration of the maxillae and the mandible, the techs were confident they would be able to mold the teeth into a cast to compare against dental records. They would also be able to extract DNA from the long black hair they had teased out of the mud. They understood the personal nature of the situation and promised to expedite matters from their end. The law enforcement community took care of its own.

Trey didn't have to ask how the body had come to be in such a state. It was obvious to all. Whether peri- or postmortem, the child had been kicked repeatedly. Over and over with such ferocity that the bones had snapped. Children's bones are designed for resilience, to bend significantly before breaking, almost like rubber. For them to have snapped like this, an inordinate amount of force would have to have been applied, the kind of force that can only be generated in the heat of a blinding rage.

He wandered away from the site, trying to appear nonchalant, and vomited into a shrub once he was out of sight. His eyes blurred with tears and he fought the urge to scream at the top of his lungs. He had never felt so helpless, so useless. So victimized. So furious.

They had interviewed everyone in attendance at the carnival that night two years ago. They had funneled them through an interview bottleneck that had kept all of the deputies busy until the first hint of dawn graced the sky. Those that remembered seeing Emma hadn't witnessed any signs of duress. No one had seen a struggle or heard her scream. The only detail that had stood out was the mention of a giant sucker that her mother had insisted they hadn't bought for her, but they had raised Emma not to be lured away by strangers with candy, which could mean only one thing.

Emma had been abducted by someone she knew, someone she trusted.

And it was his fault. He had been on duty and he had failed the only family he had.

He imagined the expression of horror and betrayal on his niece's face as an unknown man with a familiar face set upon her, kicking and kicking, until there was nothing left of her but a ruined sack of bruised flesh filled with jagged bone fragments like broken glass.

The setting sun bled the sky crimson behind her, casting her shadow over the barely perceptible hump at the foot of the plain marble headstone. Vanessa imagined herself lying in the shadow's stead, six feet---as close as she would ever again be---from the only man she had ever loved. The grass had filled in nicely. For a time, there had been patches of dirt that had refused to accept the lawn, as though to do so was to forgive its violation. Now it was impossible to tell that the sod had ever been slashed and rolled away, the ground impregnated with a husband and father for whom the end had come too soon.

She swept the accumulated debris from the foot of the headstone and wiped away the grime with a handful of tissues, carefully tracing each of the engraved letters.

Warren Francis Snow

April 19, 1977 -- August 2, 2011

Loving Husband and Father

His Memory Still Endures

Through the Lives He Touched

To allow the paltry monument to lose its luster, she feared, was the first step in the process of forgetting. And while remembering hurt, she couldn't let that happen. It was the pain that kept her going. All she had now were her memories. To lose them would be to lose herself. And whatever hope she clung to that Emma would one day return to her.

There were still no leads in the case, no clues to identify the person who had killed her husband and stolen her daughter, who had robbed her of her entire life. There was no one to be held accountable. Except for her. She had let Emma out of her sight and she had been the one who sent Warren to his demise. It should be her down there in the darkness. It still would be...soon enough. In one of the two vacant plots to her right, where her family would eventually be reunited, if only in death.

"I'm sorry," she whispered for the thousandth time.

She held out the single yellow rose she had brought with her. It was the same kind that Warren had surprised her with on their first date. He had been a first-year resident at the University of Texas Hospital in San Antonio. She'd been an elementary-level substitute teacher who'd been clumsy enough to slam her finger in her car door. They'd talked while he splinted her injury, and she had fallen in love with him right then and there. He had appeared as if by magic after school two days later, holding a single yellow rose behind his back. And her life had never been the same again.

There was a crunching sound, like the crackle of dead leaves under an invisible tread, and then the breeze blew it away.

She surveyed the area around her. As usual, she was alone in a sea of emerald with cresting waves of granite and marble, some foamy with moss, at the rear of the cemetery where it met with a wall of cypresses.

The shadows grew longer on a day that would end like every other, with the same whispered promise under the same lonely twilight.

"I will find her."

The crunching sound resumed. It was close, and yet far away at the same time. All around her.

She leaned forward and tossed the rose at the foot of the headstone.

The noise grew louder. It was coming from the trees, from the embankment ahead that bordered the bayou and the manicured knolls between the rows of gravesites. Not a single branch moved, and yet the sound continued.

She stood, turned away from her husband's grave, and walked alone back toward the setting sun with the crackling sound of unseen footsteps all around her.

Trey waited in his office through the evening and into the night. It seemed as though all he ever did was wait. The Sheriff was long gone. Travers was the only deputy formally on the clock, and he was out on a call. Lorna was up at the desk with the dispatch radio and computer, drinking coffee and watching reruns of the day's soaps, giving him a wide berth. They all knew about the child's body. About the condition in which it had been discovered. They knew what it meant and figured it best to give him his space. There were no stock platitudes or Hallmark cards for Sorry your niece was kicked to death and dumped in the bayou. He didn't blame them. He had no idea what he was supposed to say either.

Emma's dental records and her x-rays had been couriered to the Crime Scene Response Section in Dallas nearly ten hours ago now. Dr. Carlton Matthews, the town dentist, had been more than happy to take care of the details on his end. After all, he and his wife had a daughter Emma's age who they schooled at home. Last Trey knew, the evidence technicians were in the process of creating a plaster mold using the teeth they found at the site under the direct supervision of a forensic odontologist. The teeth would be aligned by the observed wear in the enamel and then radiographed and evaluated for existing caries and previous fillings. According to Vanessa, Emma had three separate silver fillings toward the back of her mouth, two on the top and one on the bottom. The comparison with existing records would be able to conclusively determine whether or not they had been Emma's teeth. If not, they would have to begin attacking the database of missing children in hopes of generating a match. If so, he was going to have to deliver the worst news imaginable to his sister. He prayed the news that they had found a child's corpse didn't leak before then.

A polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, test of the hair they removed from the shallow grave would allow them to create a kind of DNA fingerprint they could compare against the samples obtained from Emma's old hairbrush, but that would just be the icing on the cake. The dental records alone would hold up in a court of law. Of course, fingerprints would have made all of this irrelevant, but there hadn't been a scrap of tissue left. There were enough insects in that swamp, especially now, to clean the remains as efficiently as a school of piranhas.

Trey's desk phone rang. He snatched it from the cradle before the second ring.

"Walden," he answered.

"This is Packard at the CSRS."

Trey's heartbeat accelerated. He realized he was holding his breath and made a conscious effort to regulate his respirations.

"What do you have for me?"

"I just emailed the test results to you. Feel free to call back if you have any questions, but I think the files speak for themselves."

"Conclusive?"

"See for yourself." Packard released a long sigh. "You have our sympathies. Let us know if there's anything else we can do for you."

Packard terminated the call with a click.

Trey held the phone against his ear and stared blankly at his computer screen until the dial tone startled him. He hung up and opened his inbox folder. The file from the CSRS was already waiting for him. He opened it with a tap of the mouse and perused the attachments. They had scanned in the dental x-rays. Even a layman like him could see they were nearly identical. Maybe the alignment was slightly skewed as a result of the reassembly, but the filled cavities were in the right places and there were small, dark unfilled caries on the same surfaces of the same teeth. The PCR results looked like side-by-side, out-of-focus bar codes. They matched perfectly. Lines had been drawn between them to denote specific points of comparison along the genomes. Notes in technical jargon filled the margins.

He buried his face in his hands. His palms became wet and his shoulders shuddered.

First thing in the morning, he was going to have to break the news to Vanessa.

He might as well shove the barrel of his pistol in her mouth and pull the trigger for her.

Vanessa woke with a start. Or had she even been asleep at all? Time lost all meaning in the dark and she had grown accustomed to drifting in and out of consciousness all night. Her waking thoughts and sleeping dreams were the same anyway. A curious little girl wandering just a little too far ahead of her through a crowd. A man collapsed on his chest in a field of his own blood. Throwing a handful of dirt over a velvet rope onto a maple box six feet below her. A man made of shadows doing inexplicable things to a much smaller figure. A child crying for her mommy in the darkness.

An arc of moonlight bisected her bedroom from the gap in the curtains, alive with swirling motes of dust, blurred by her tears. The digital clock produced a weak red glare. Buddy's collar jangled from the foot of the bed when he perked up his head.

There was a soft crunching sound above her head.

She listened to it in the still room. The droning noise was almost comforting.

The sound grew louder.

Buddy poked his gray muzzle up over the end of the bed and whined.

Vanessa reluctantly sat up and turned around. There was no doubt that the sound was coming from inside the glass case. The decayed bear stared back at her through lifeless stone eyes that glinted with moonlight.

The crackling, skritching noise grew louder still.

She reached up and pressed her fingertips against the glass. It vibrated almost imperceptibly.

The slightest hint of movement caught her eye.

She leaned closer, until the tip of her nose touched the small pane. Surely the shadows had conspired against her. They shifted in such a way as to mimic motion. The dirt bear's chest swelled as though it were taking a deep, slow breath. Fine grains of sand shivered loose and dusted the surface of the wooden base. One of the dried grass bindings snapped and unraveled. More dirt crumbled away, revealing thin, dark tunnels. She turned the case around. The back of the bear was covered with trembling brown insect exoskeletons. Wingless nymph carcasses. As she watched, they split like baked potatoes and small white bodies emerged.

Vanessa recoiled. They appeared to grow as they molted. The crisp exoskeletons stayed attached to the dirt while thick albino insects clung to them, testing long, clear wings fringed with gold. They had blazing scarlet eyes with black splotches where the head met the thorax. Spindly, articulated legs barely long enough to support the weight of their bodies.

Several more bands of the grass that held the bear together broke. Clods of packed earth calved away. One of the bear's ears fell off with half of its head. There was a clatter as the pebble-eye bounced on the base. A dozen pale bugs crawled over what was left of her daughter's creation before dropping onto the mounds of dirt and coiled blue fescue blades on the bottom.

The crunching sound faded to a dull clicking.

Had those insects been in the bear this entire time? Growing? Molting?

The remainder of the bear broke apart and fell to ruin, leaving only the metal post and the bracket that had been rigged to hold the construct upright.

She reached out and pressed her palm against the glass.

Her heart rate accelerated. Her breathing slowed. Was it possible she was still asleep and dreaming?

The white bugs scurried toward the front of the enclosure and scaled the glass. They aligned their bodies with her hand so that she could no longer see them.

A loud noise filled the room. A combination of the crackling sound of high voltage run through overhead power lines and the chirping of so many crickets.

She recognized it immediately and withdrew her hand.

The insects stayed where they were in a perfect imitation of her palm print, a spectral hand reaching for her, unable to pass through the clear barrier.

Vanessa scooted away from the display case.

Buddy whimpered.

And the cicadas continued to sing.

Vanessa sat at the kitchen table with the rising sun streaming through the window behind her. The glass enclosure was centered right in front of her. She'd been staring at it for hours now, watching as the white imagines darkened to their formal adult coloration. Tomato-red eyes. Thick black bodies ribbed with timbals. Long membranous wings like cellophane stretched between bright yellow veins. Short antennae. Legs reminiscent of those of a crab. They clung to the glass and the center apparatus that had once held the now-crumbled bear, their abdomens alternately swelling and contracting as they produced an amazing high-pitched clicking sound as loud in the room as a tea kettle come to boil.

She remembered them from her childhood. As a girl of about four years old, swinging in a park as a cloud of them descended into the surrounding trees. Their bodies had been nearly the size of her palm, their song deafening. Her father had called them Magicicada, which was one of the reasons she remembered them so well. She had interpreted it at the time as magic cicada, and they truly had seemed magical. They appeared again the summer before she left for college. Hundreds of them clinging to the screens over the windows and the front door. Their frenetic song coming from the depths of every tree. They'd been everywhere for several weeks, and then they'd vanished almost overnight.

There must have been larvae in the mud Emma had exhumed to form the bear. She must have packed them right in there. And after two years they had wriggled out of the dried earth as nymphs and molted for the final stage of their life cycles. As adults. Imago.

A few minutes on the internet had taught her that these individuals were part of one of thirty distinct North American broods, Brood XIX specifically, colloquially termed The Great Southern Brood. They emerged from deep in the soil every thirteen years for a mating frenzy that lasted less than a month. The females would carve shallow grooves in tree branches in which to lay their eggs. When they hatched, the larvae fell to the ground and burrowed more than a foot down, where they survived on the roots of plants for exactly thirteen years before all of them erupted in a synchronized uprising, climbed into the canopy, and molted into the terminal stage of their development.

It was as though Emma had somehow breathed life into her creation. She had left a parting gift that proved that a miracle could be birthed from decomposition and apparent death. There was no way the nymphs should have survived. And yet they had.

Vanessa believed it was a message of hope, a portent.

What was two years when a cicada waited thirteen to spread its wings and live for but a single month?

She was going to find her daughter.

And she was going to bring her home.

It felt like a great weight had been lifted from her soul, as though a ray of sunshine had cut through the fog through which she'd been blindly stumbling since Emma's disappearance.

The hint of a smile curled the corners of her lips.

She heard a knock at the front door and rose from the table. Even her step felt lighter as she strode across the living room. For the first time, she thought that everything just might work out all right. Or at least as well as it could.

Vanessa opened the door.

The feeling fled as quickly as it had arrived.

"Hi, sis," Trey said.

He had paced on her porch for more than ten minutes before he finally found the courage to knock. Part of him had hoped that Vanessa would still be asleep, that he would have to return later. It was selfish, he knew. He should have called her the moment they found the remains, but he had needed to be certain. And now that he was, he wasn't sure he was going to be able to vocalize the words. He couldn't even bring himself to look her in the eyes.

Vanessa stood silently in the doorway as he shifted nervously from side to side, the porch planks creaking under his weight. He forced himself to look up from his toes. Her pale cheeks were already wet with tears.

She must have read the news from his expression, his posture.

"When?" she whispered.

He finally summoned the nerve to look her in the eyes and saw only fathomless pits of pain.

"Yesterday," he said. "We found her body in the bayou. Half a mile from Caddo Lake."

"How long?"

"Two years."

"How did she...?"

"Vanessa..."

"I need to know."

Trey reached out and took her hand.

"I need to know!" she screamed and jerked her arm away.

Trey eased closer and opened his arms. She balled her fists and hit him on the chest over and over until he was able to draw her into his embrace. She continued to pound on his back until she eventually ran out of adrenaline and collapsed into him, sobbing.

They slumped to the floor right there in the foyer. He held her tightly and willed whatever strength he had into her. Tears streamed from his eyes as well. He leaned his cheek against hers and whispered directly into her ear. He told her everything. From the discovery of the corpse through the identification process. He described the condition of the body. The broken bones. The lack of flesh from decomposition and insect consumption. The teeth. The hair. He spared no detail. Vanessa needed to know and it would only hurt worse if she had to hear it from someone else in bits and pieces doled out over the coming days and weeks. He needed to crush her now to know if she would be able to survive it.

She cried until there were no more tears, her head on his shoulder, her fingers clenching his shirt. He held her in the silence for what felt like hours, unable to offer any words of comfort. She had heard them all before and they sounded hollow coming from him. He thought she had drifted off to sleep or fallen into a state of catatonia when she finally spoke.

"Will you...?" She paused to dampen her dry mouth. "Will you take me to see my husband?"

Vanessa sat at the foot of Warren's grave. Her brother waited patiently in his car fifty yards away on the sizzling ribbon of blacktop that meandered through the low hills crowned with lush grasses and carefully tended copses of trees. Right now, she needed her husband more than ever before. She had never felt so alone. Even after Warren's death, there had always been the promise that her daughter was out there somewhere and it was only a matter of time before they were reunited. And now that promise had been found broken and abused, cast aside like refuse in the swamp.

"There's nothing left for me here," she whispered.

The cruel sun beat down on her. She would have felt the skin on the back of her neck burning were she able to feel anything at all.

She heard the deafening chorus of cicadas from the cypress trees looming over the row of headstones, the same trees from which the crunching sounds had previously originated. There had to be thousands of them in that one stand alone. Predator satiation, they called it. Produce more offspring than its enemies can consume and the species will survive. The individual is nothing. Expendable. The same rules applied to humanity.

Vanessa crawled over the faint lump until she was close enough to touch the headstone. She ran her palm over the smooth marble surface. The polish was beginning to pit. She traced the letters with her fingertips. It was as close as she was going to get to the physical consolation she so desperately needed from the man she loved.

"Would you forgive me? If I just went to sleep and woke up there with you? Wherever you are. Would you be able to forgive me?"

The cicadas sang even louder, their amassed voices making the leaves shiver.

"I can't do it anymore. I don't want to do it anymore. I want to be with my family again."

A gentle breeze from the east rustled the trees and the cicada song abruptly ceased. It was replaced by the buzzing sound of thousands of wings as a cloud of insects rose from the cluster of cypresses. They swarmed above her, whirling like a cyclone, casting strange dotted shadows. The air stirred around her at the behest of so many wings, like fingertips just grazing the fine hairs on her body. A lover's touch.

And then the cloud descended.

Chitinous bodies assaulted her from all sides. She threw her arms up over her head and shrieked in surprise. Cicadas tangled in her hair. Wings tapped her skin. Tiny feet poked like so many needles. They scurried up her sleeves, down the back of her shirt. Across her lips and her tongue. She spat and forced her mouth closed as tightly as she could. They clicked in her ears as they tried to squeeze into the canals. Then, one by one, they took to flight again.

The buzz of wings metamorphosed into the high-pitched squealing and clicking sound.

Cautiously, she lowered her arms and eased herself up to her knees. She couldn't even hear herself think over the cicadas. It sounded like they were screaming from inside her head.

She plucked several stragglers out of her hair, where they had become hopelessly entangled, and brushed herself off. It still felt as though they were crawling all over her. She looked up at her husband's headstone and gasped.

The entire surface of the marble was covered with the large insects, pressed shoulder-to-shoulder, climbing all over each other. They covered her husband's name, the dates between which he had graced the world, his identity as a loving husband and father. The singing cicadas even obscured the majority of his epitaph, save for two small gaps where no insects crawled.

Two words were clearly framed between the writhing bodies. Not once did a single insect so much as crawl across either.

Vanessa leaned closer, her heartbeat racing to catch up with the rhythm of the cicada song. She focused on the words of the epitaph:

His memory still endures

Through the lives he touched

She could only read two words between the scrabbling insects:

still

lives.

They didn't speak as they rode back to Vanessa's house. Trey had seen the cloud of cicadas descend upon his sister from the driver's seat, but by the time he reached her, the swarm had settled and she was ready to leave. Sure, he remembered seeing the insects swarm years ago. Just not like that, not directly around someone. They had walked to his car in silence, a silence that hung between them until they were nearly to her house before she finally spoke.

"Is it possible the body they found wasn't Emma's? I mean, is there any way the identification could be wrong?"

He glanced at her from the corner of his eye. She seemed strangely composed, as though he was returning with an entirely different person than the one with whom he had left. Her eyes were glazed, focused on nothing in particular, her posture almost relaxed. He debated the merits of sugar-coating the truth, but he couldn't bear to offer her false hope.

"No," he said after a long pause. "The comparisons of the DNA from her hair and her dental records were conclusive."

"But they didn't test the body itself, did they?"

Trey's Cherokee coasted to a halt in front of her house. Vanessa climbed out without another word and walked up the path toward her front door. She didn't wave, didn't even look back in his direction. Just opened the door with her key and vanished into the darkness.

He sat there under the glow of the streetlamp. Small dark shapes swirled around the light, casting strange, shifting shadows. He heard the distant hum of cicada song from the ancient trees lining the lane.

Vanessa needed help, just not the kind of help he could give. He was worried about her. Terrified for her. She could simply walk straight to her medicine cabinet, grab a bottle of pills, and curl up alone in bed one final time. Was it possible that he had just seen her alive for the last time? Would their next encounter require him to break down her door to find her dead in her bed?

He grabbed his cell phone and flipped it open. The small screen stared back at him. He debated calling someone to stay the night with her, but he was all she had now and there was no way she would allow him to baby-sit her. He thought about calling a shrink or a pastor, someone who could help her sort through her feelings, who could convince her not to do anything to harm herself. But she hadn't appeared suicidal. In fact, she almost seemed more at peace than she had been in a long time. Was it possible her doubts were justified?

In the end, he settled on a different number entirely and listened to the phone ring until someone eventually answered.

"Packard?" he said. "Walden here. From Jefferson. I'm glad you're still there. Remember when you said if there was ever anything else you could do for me...?"

Vanessa passed through the dark living room and entered the kitchen. Her thoughts were a chaotic mess and she was emotionally spent, yet at the same time, she felt remarkably calm. Memories assaulted her. The bear her daughter had made crumbling as the cicadas emerged from their molted skins. A ghostly hand pressed against the glass. The swarm descending upon her from the trees at her husband's grave. Covering the headstone with the exception of two conspicuous gaps.

"Still lives," she whispered to the shadows. It was a homophonic interpretation, a verb instead if a noun.

It couldn't all be coincidence, could it? Any one of those events could have been an anomaly, a random freak of nature, but together they formed a message. And there was no denying what that message was.

Perhaps she was only seeing what she wanted to see. Maybe something deep inside of her had finally broken under the weight of her loss. Or maybe, just maybe, her interpretation was correct. Regardless, there was only one way to find out for sure.

She flipped on the kitchen light and stared at the table. The glass case lay in ruin. The base was still flat on the surface under a mound of dirt. The support post stood erect from it like a little metal cactus. But the panes were shattered. Gleaming shards littered the tabletop. She glanced up at the overhead fixture, at the window that overlooked the back yard. There was no sign of the cicadas anywhere.

Vanessa headed back through the living room toward the staircase and ascended into darkness. She was exhausted, but she knew there was no way her brain was going to shut down long enough for her to sleep. She didn't feel like trying anyway. Those two words repeated over and over in her head.

Still lives.

Still lives.

Was it possible they were true? That Emma was somehow still alive?

She contemplated the evidence as her brother had described it. The dental records had proven that the teeth had been Emma's based upon comparisons of a forensic odontologist's physical reconstruction and the existing x-rays. Could the films in the file have been switched? Could another child's teeth have been filled to pass for Emma's? And then there was the DNA. The hair they pulled from the shallow grave had been identical to the sample she had procured from Emma's hairbrush herself. Was there any way the samples could have been switched in the lab or somehow contaminated?

Everything boiled down to one simple question. With the preponderance of easily verifiable physical evidence, had anyone formally evaluated the body itself?

She turned left at the top of the landing and started down the hallway. Her transferred weight made the floorboards creak, startling the hidden cicadas. Their song reverberated from the walls, creating the impression that it came from all around her at once. She passed Emma's bedroom on the left and switched on the light. It was exactly as her daughter had left it. Dirty clothes on the floor at the foot of a rumpled bed. Muddy shoes in the corner beside a short table still covered with crayon drawings on butcher paper and a film of dust. A rainbow array of teddy bears lining the tops of her dresser and bookcase. But not a single cicada clinging to the window or swirling around the overhead fixture.

Vanessa crossed the hall and checked the bathroom. Emma's hairbrush, toothbrush, and half-squeezed tube of toothpaste were still on the counter next to the sink, her smudged fingerprints on the corner of the medicine cabinet mirror. She saw hazy shapes through the opaque glass of the shower stall at the rear: bottles of shampoo and conditioner stacked on the edge of the tub. Used towels hanging on the rack. It still smelled like Emma's soap.

The noise definitely originated from farther down the hall.

Her bedroom---the master she had once shared with her husband---was to the left. Directly ahead, a small linen cabinet barely large enough to hold some towels and cleaning supplies. To the right was a bedroom slightly smaller than Emma's that they had converted into Warren's home office. The sound was coming from in there, on the other side of the door that was always kept closed. She hadn't been able to bring herself to go in there since his death. She knew that once she did, she would have to begin boxing up and clearing out his belongings, which would ultimately lead to erasing his existence from a house that would no longer feel like her home.

She took a deep breath and opened the door. The office still looked like he had just stepped out to refill his mug of coffee or use the bathroom, as though at any moment he might slip past her through the doorway and plop down on his worn leather chair. From time to time, she opened the door long enough to allow the air to circulate and imagined him sitting there at his desk, combing through his records on the computer in anticipation of the coming day's appointments, researching test results, and following up on the financial end of his practice. Billing was contracted out to an agency, but the bottom line was that he and his partner were responsible for keeping their office in the black. It was a small practice in an even smaller town, which meant that maintaining any kind of profit margin required constant oversight. Warren could have easily made twice as much over in Dallas; however, it had been important for her to stay in Jefferson, where she had been raised and where she wished to raise her child, and so it had been important to him, as well. Besides, he liked the idea of being a small-town physician. Half of the town relied upon him. It made him feel necessary, gave him a greater sense of worth. And like old Dr. Patterson, from whom Warren had purchased the practice upon his retirement, he got a kick out of making the occasional house call to the outer fringes of the city limits, just like real doctors used to do back in the day. When it had been a noble service profession, and not an assembly-line, treat'em-and-street'em job.

She flipped on the lights.

The cicadas were crawling all over the keyboard and the computer monitor on the antique maple desk. Their fat bellies filled and deflated as they sang.

For the first time in two years, she crossed the threshold. It smelled of dust, but there was still the faintest hint of Warren's aftershave and the hazelnut coffee he loved so much. She felt as though she were stepping into the past, into a better time when the future was only a dream.

She nudged his chair aside and watched the black and gold insects scurry over the keyboard and the monitor, their eyes like twin globules of blood. Those on the screen took flight and buzzed around her head. She waved them away as those on the keyboard continued to sing.

Several cicadas alighted on the mouse. Warren must have only put the computer into sleep mode, for even the slight application of their weight brought the monitor to life, bright even through the skein of dust.

The screen displayed a page from a website called RapiDx, a site for physicians that featured tools to aid in the diagnosis and treatment of a wide array of skeletal and physiological maladies using primarily radiographs and lab values from blood draws.

This was the last page Warren had ever viewed, the last diagnosis to occupy his mind.

The page showed x-rays of knees that appeared swollen and deformed, the cortices of the distal femora bowed outward to accommodate patchy black lucencies that lent an almost moth-eaten appearance.

Osteosarcoma.

Trey knew it was a fool's proposition. There was just something about the way Vanessa had asked, about the aura of what could have passed for serenity exuding from her, that gave him pause. Between the dental records and the DNA match of the hair samples, there was more than enough concrete evidence to guarantee the proper identification had been made, but the more he contemplated it, the less convinced he became.

He sat at his desk with the forwarded dental files open on the screen in front of him. The monitor showed the two sets of x-rays, side-by-side. On the left, the broken and reassembled teeth. On the right, the film from Emma's last visit to the dentist prior to her abduction. The fillings, the unfilled caries...they matched up perfectly. So perfectly that none of them had noticed the obvious. All of the teeth had been broken at the roots. Most of them were chipped or cracked in some fashion. All of them, in fact, with the exception of the three with metal fillings and the two with existing cavities. Factoring out the sharp breaks along the root-line, they were otherwise intact. The exact teeth they had needed to determine the identity...and they were so well preserved they might as well have been bagged and tagged before they were buried.

Then there was the hair. Had there been enough of it there to completely cover a child's head? With the complete dissolution of the flesh, there had been no scalp to confirm that the hair had ever been attached to the body. Was it possible that the teeth and hair had been planted in order to make the identification of the remains so simple that no one ever bothered to investigate the skeleton itself? The bones had been so badly broken in so many places that there had been no reason to delve deeper. The cause of death been had fairly apparent, but had the child really died from the beating, or was the condition of the body just another part of the deception like the teeth and hair? Even if this burgeoning theory held water, why would anyone go to so much trouble to hide the identity of a different dead child? Why take the risk of abducting another little girl if only for her hair and teeth? And none of this implied that Emma was still alive. For all he knew, she was buried somewhere out there in the bayou, as well, with larvae feasting on her carcass and gnawing the marrow out of her bones.

The phone on his desk rang. He recognized the number on the Caller ID and had it to his ear before the second ring.

"Walden."

"What do you know that we don't?" Packard asked.

"Not a thing. I was following a hunch. I take it you were able to compare the DNA from the bones."

"Yeah."

"I'm too tired to play Twenty Questions. Out with it already."

"Let me ask you a question first. Remember how the right knee was misshapen?"

"You mean that crater that looked like it had started to rot where it was broken?"

"We weren't paying close enough attention. Usually, some of the best DNA samples can be extracted from a slice of the femur. We cut just above the crater and exposed a generous portion of the cortex and cancellous bone, which clearly revealed that it wasn't a traumatic fracture. What do you suppose it was?"

"I have no idea."

"Neoplastic cells with osteoblastic differentiation."

"In English."

"A tumor, Walden. A massive osteosarcoma. Did your niece have cancer?"

"Not that any of us were aware of," Trey whispered. He was already running through the implications in his mind.

"You would have known. A tumor like that? She would have been in a great deal of pain. The survival rate of a cancer like this is only about two in three, even with aggressive chemo and radiation treatments."

"What about the DNA?"

"The bone didn't match the hair. As far as an ID, I can't tell you who it is without another sample to compare it against, but I can definitely tell you who it isn't."

There was a long moment of silence. Static crackled across the distance.

"The body isn't Emma's," Trey finally said.

"Nope."

"So where in the name of God is she? Why would someone stage the burial to make us think the remains were hers?"

"We need to start with whose body it really is. Now, let me give you something else to chew on. The broken bones? The lack of periosteal reaction suggests that the breaks were inflicted postmortem. This girl was already dead before someone decided to kick the crap out of her corpse. What kind of monster throws a dead child on the ground and stomps every bone in her body, boots her in the face, and dumps her in the swamp with another child's teeth and hair?"

"If she was dead before all of this happened, do you have a formal cause of death?"

"Without the viscera, it's purely theoretical."

"But?"

"We x-rayed the rest of the bones and found them riddled with mets."

"The cancer killed her."

"Probably, but not very long before someone set about destroying what was left of her."

"To make it look like Emma's body and that she'd been bludgeoned to death."

Trey thanked Packard, hung up, and stared at the ceiling. He suddenly had more questions than answers, the most urgent of which was where was Emma?

Was it really possible that she was still alive?

Vanessa clicked through the previously viewed pages while the cicadas crawled over the top of the monitor, the keyboard, and the desktop. All of the sites her husband had visited prior to his death related to palliative, end-of-life, and hospice care for patients in the terminal stages of cancer, specifically for children with osteosarcoma. He appeared to have been working on placing one of his patients at the Children's Cancer Center at the MD Anderson Cancer Center of the University of Texas. But why? Wasn't that the responsibility of the patient's parents? As a physician, it was his job to follow through on a referral, not go to such lengths on his personal time to do it for them. Why had he taken it upon himself rather than coaching the child's family through the process? The problem was that Warren believed so strongly in a separation of his personal and professional lives that he very seldom talked to her about it, and on those rare occasions when he did, his sour mood had haunted him for days before she had finally been able to pry his frustrations out of him.

And most importantly, on which patient's behalf had he been doing the research?

As one of two general practitioners in Jefferson, he treated roughly half of the population. That was more than a thousand patients right there, and surely more than a quarter of them were children.

Vanessa couldn't see the immediate connection between her daughter and another child dying of cancer, but she couldn't shake the feeling that she had been led here, to this computer and these websites, for a specific reason.

She brushed several of the large insects off of the cordless phone and lifted the handset of the separate line he used to handle his work affairs from home. The service had been terminated years ago, but as she had never found the courage to even attempt to clear out Warren's belongings, the phone itself had never been unplugged. She scrolled through the memory of the Caller ID. The most recent numbers all had the same area code and prefix. She wrote them down on a dusty sticky-note and compared them to the sites he had viewed. They matched the MD Anderson Cancer Center.

She contemplated calling the numbers to find out if they remembered her husband's calls or the name of the proposed patient, but even on the off-chance that they were able to recall the details from more than two years ago, the rules of confidentiality prohibited them from sharing.

So what was the significance? Why had she been guided to this information?

She closed her eyes and leaned back in the chair. The emotional upheaval had taken a physical toll. She was beyond exhausted. Her head ached. Her body ached. Her brain ached. Maybe if she just managed to slip in a few hours of sleep, things would make more sense. Maybe---

The cicada song grew louder.

Her eyes snapped open. All of the insects were clinging to the computer screen and producing as much sound as they possibly could. But they alone couldn't account for the sheer volume, which felt like needles driven through her tympanic membranes. She turned toward the window that afforded a view of the front lawn and the street beyond. At first, she thought a storm must have rolled in, that a thick bank of clouds blocked out the moon and the stars. But no clouds could smother the light from the streetlamp.

And then she noticed movement. The darkness outside shifted like a black sea viewed from underwater.

She rose from the chair and crept hesitantly toward the window. As she neared, her eyes drew contrast. Cicadas covered the window from the outside, pressed so tightly together that not a single ray of moonlight penetrated their ranks. She raised her hand and touched the glass. It vibrated with the ferocity of their song.

Vanessa recoiled and hurried out of the room. The cicadas that had been in her husband's office followed her, swirling around her head, tapping her cheeks. She ran down the hallway, descended the stairs, crossed the living room, and threw open the front door.

The sound that accosted her was like leaning the side of her head against a jet engine. Her vision trembled.

She stepped out onto the porch and turned in a circle.

The entire front of the house, the hedges lining the front façade, the pecan tree beside the walk, the dogwoods at the edge of the driveway...everything was covered with cicadas. The air was alive with swarming insects.

And then as one they took to the air and the song ceased, replaced by a furious buzzing sound. They swirled around her like a tornado before exploding upward and outward.

The entire swarm hung over the street for a long minute, then funneled down the lane to the east.

After a moment's hesitation, Vanessa started off after them.

Trey needed answers, but he didn't know exactly where to start. The first priority was to figure out whose body had been buried in the swamp and why someone had gone to so much trouble to conceal its identity. He prayed that Emma was still alive out there, somewhere, and not just waiting to be discovered in another shallow grave. Worse was the alternative. He imagined his niece being forced to kneel on the mildewed earthen floor of some dank cellar beneath the copper glare of a lone exposed light bulb, connected to the exposed joists overhead by swaying cobwebs, one faceless shadow yanking out clumps of her hair by the roots while another punched her repeatedly in the face to knock out her teeth. The image was more than he could bear. When he found whoever was responsible---and he would find them---he was going to take immense pleasure from returning the favor.

He hoped that Warren had left boxes of files or access to some computer database that he would be able to search in hopes of finding the child with the osteosarcoma diagnosis. Maybe Warren hadn't treated her personally. If that was the case, then his partner, Dr. Gerald Montgomery, must have. Of course, that assumption was predicated on the belief that the dead child had been treated locally. Trey had to believe as much for now. Otherwise, that child could have come from anywhere in the country, and with four hundred new diagnoses every year, the odds of pinning down one were poor. With any luck, Vanessa would be able to help him access the records and it would be easy enough to find the right child. If not, then he had no problem banging on Montgomery's door and dragging him out of bed and down to his office.

Something was wrong.

He recognized it the moment he pulled to the curb in front of his sister's house. The front door stood wide open, the light from the foyer stretching across the porch and onto the lawn. The second-story window of Warren's office was illuminated and he knew his sister barely ever opened the door, let alone went inside. He threw the Jeep into park, bounded out onto the asphalt, and ran toward the front door.

"Vanessa!" he called as he passed through the entryway and into the living room.

He glanced into the kitchen. Light on. Empty. The living room, dining room, and main floor bathroom were vacant as well. No one in the family room.

"Vanessa!"

He charged up the stairs into the hallway. The light was on in Emma's old room. Same with the bathroom across the hall. The next doorway on the right was open. Light flooded into the hallway from a room in which he hadn't set foot since Warren's passing.

"Vanessa?"

Still no response.

He ducked his head into her bedroom to confirm that she hadn't passed out in bed, so overcome by grief that she didn't realize she had left the front door open, then returned his attention to the study. Vanessa wasn't in there either. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket, dialed his sister's mobile, and listened to it ring as he stepped into the room. A pall of stirred dust hung in the air. A screensaver scrolled across the computer monitor on the desk. The mouse rested slightly askew from the pattern of dust that had accumulated on the mousepad around it.

Vanessa's voice answered on the fourth ring, but it was only a recording asking him to leave a message.

Nothing else in the room appeared to have been disturbed.

He leaned over the desk and tapped the mouse to kill the screensaver. The screen flashed black, and then a web page opened.

"Jesus," he whispered. How the hell had she found out?

There was no way Vanessa could have known that the child they exhumed had osteosarcoma. He had barely heard the news himself maybe fifteen minutes ago. No one from the CSRS would have called her directly. He was certain of that. So how had she figured it out?

He paused and stood stock-still with the dust settling on his shoulders and hair.

She couldn't have. No one could have told her. She didn't know that the victim had cancer, so she obviously had to have come to that conclusion from a different angle. He tried to focus, tried to imagine his sister entering a room she had treated as a sanctuary and opening a website on a computer that didn't look like it had been used in years. What could have drawn her in here? Why tonight? Why right now?

It was Warren's office.

Warren was a physician, a general practitioner who treated adults and children alike.

It hit him like a blow to the gut.

Warren had treated the dead girl in the bayou.

And now Vanessa was missing.

The front door had been standing ajar and half of the lights in the house were still on. He hadn't seen any signs of a struggle. If she had taken her car, the garage would have been open instead.

That left only two options.

Either she had set off on foot or someone had come for her and split in such a hurry that there hadn't even been time to close the door. Maybe she was just taking a walk to clear her head. It had been a rough day for her after all. But that wasn't how his sister worked.

He looked again at the monitor.

No. The osteosarcoma link ruled out the possible element of coincidence. Vanessa had made some sort of breakthrough that he hadn't yet. She had known the body in the swamp wasn't Emma's long before he did. She had been convinced that her daughter was still alive, and if she'd somehow figured out the true identity of the corpse or that of Emma's abductor, she would have done whatever it took to find her daughter and bring her home again.

Vanessa was in terrible danger. He could feel it in the pit of his stomach.

She had told him Warren didn't keep any files at home for legal reasons, but Trey tossed the room anyway. He pulled the boxes out of the closet and dumped them, knocked every book off of the bookcase, and scanned the computer for anything resembling patient records.

He was wasting time.

His sister was out there somewhere, and possibly in desperate need of help.

He never should have left her alone in the first place.

Never.

Trey dialed Vanessa's cell phone again and sprinted for his car.

He couldn't hear the muffled ringtone from inside the purse on the corner table.

Vanessa walked on the sidewalk until it eventually gave way to a dirt shoulder narrowed by the proliferation of the impregnable forest. Spanish moss hung from the branches of trees packed so tightly together she rarely saw the hint of moonlight reflecting from the stagnant marsh beyond. Somewhere nearby, amphibians croaked and predatory birds shrieked, but there was no way she could hear them over the deafening song of the cicadas. They filled every tree and every inch of airspace over the gravel road. Buzzing around her head, between the cypresses. Groups of them lagged behind and then raced back ahead of her and waited in the boughs for her to catch up. She had never seen a million of anything, yet she was certain that there had to be at least that many cicadas. The world around her had become a living swarm, as though the individual molecules of oxygen had been replaced by the red-eyed bugs.

They guided her onward into the night, swept up like a drowning body carried out to sea by the tide. No headlights pierced the roiling darkness, not that she expected to see any. Not this late at night, and not in this unincorporated area. The tracts of land out here were all multi-acre lots situated primarily on marshland, designed for complete privacy. Rutted dirt drives forked from the road every half-mile on the right hand side. To the left lay nothing but uninterrupted bayou that stretched clear to Louisiana. The houses out here were a mixture of ramshackle trailer homes set into the deep woods and sprawling estates that were so secluded from one another as to negate the socioeconomic differences. These were reclusive families that valued nothing more than isolation and wouldn't soon be organizing any neighborhood picnics. Vanessa knew several people who lived out here, but hadn't visited enough times to recognize their patches of wilderness in the dark.

She wondered why she was even out here. Why in the world was she following a swarm of locusts anyway?

The answer was simple.

Hope.

Maybe she had finally relinquished the slippery grasp she held on her sanity. The rational part of her mind, now a distant voice calling from the bottom of a deep well, insisted that she turn around and abandon this absurd course of action, but her heart was persistent. It demanded that she try anything, no matter how irrational, if there was even the slightest chance of finding her daughter. It forced the blood into the legs that carried her onward of their own accord, diverting it from the brain that struggled to make sense of the senseless.

She had lost track of time. There was only the darkness and the shrill cacophony of cicadas. She didn't know how long she had been walking when the swarm closed in upon her so tightly that she was forced to stop and cover her head with her hands to shield it from the insects. After a moment, they again ascended and buzzed off down a shadowed driveway into the forest. The mailbox at the junction was dented and rusted along the metal creases. It bore only five numbers. No name, just 10782.

If there was a point of no return, she had reached it. To follow the private lane meant trespassing and admitting that she had placed her fate in the hands of a swarm of cicadas. To turn around was to acquiesce to the fear and live with the ramifications of abandoning all hope.

There really was no choice at all.

She mounted the dirt drive and wended into the morass. Standing water, gray with algae, winked at her through the tree trunks to either side of the mounded track, which grew subtly steeper with each step. Eventually, it opened into a broad clearing, at the center of which was a knoll crowned by a Spanish-style hacienda with a red ceramic-tile roof and porticos flanking either side. That was the extent of the detail she could glean through the mass of cicadas that covered every available surface. They filled the ring of trees around the manicured yard and turned the formerly white house black. All of them had settled. Not a single insect flew through the air. They just watched. She felt millions of blood-red eyes focused upon her.

And none of them made a sound.

The silence was so intense that every noise, from the scuff of her feet on the dirt to the thrum of her pulse in her ears, seemed amplified a hundredfold.

She recognized this place. It had to have been more than five years since she had been here last, but there was no doubt about to whom the house belonged.

And her heart broke.

There was no way that her daughter was here. These were normal people, albeit more reserved: an educated husband, a domestic wife, and a pampered child.

Tears rolled down her cheeks. She had allowed herself to hope, allowed herself to believe that some greater power had sent the cicadas to lead her to Emma. Instead, she found herself face-to-face with the grim truth.

Emma wasn't here.

She was undoubtedly buried somewhere in the bayou where the gators and snapping turtles had laid waste to her flesh. Her husband was gone. She was lost and alone. There was nothing at all left for her in this life, and the time had finally come to end it.

Vanessa was just about to turn around and embark upon the last long walk that would end with an overdose of Sominex when something caught her eye. At first, she hadn't noticed it with all of the black insects on the house.

She walked silently across the lawn.

Countless crimson eyes followed.

The majority of the houses built at the edge of the swamp didn't have basements. The water table and the shifting soil forced most to be built upon aboveground foundations. This elevated crest must have provided the necessary stability to support the garden-level basement that featured windows set nearly flush with the ground. From the distance, she had assumed they were hidden behind a living skin of cicadas like the rest of the house...until she caught just the faintest hint of reflected silver light.

As she approached, it became clear why she had been led here. Decorative iron bars capped with florets had been bolted over the windows. Behind the glass, a sheet of metal had been affixed from the inside.

They hadn't been there before.

She thought about the couple who owned this house, about their family...a mirror image of her own.

They had been friends.

Something stirred inside of her, an instinct she hadn't felt this strongly in two years.

Suddenly, everything made sense.

The dying child.

Emma's abduction.

Warren's death.

She needed to get inside the house.

Her daughter was in the basement.

And she was still alive.

Trey gave up on reaching his sister on her cell. It was readily apparent she wasn't going to answer. He had settled upon a plan. Jefferson was a small town. He could cruise the length of every street in under half an hour. If Vanessa was out there on foot, he would find her in no time at all. Only the diner stayed open twenty-four hours, and there was nowhere else to go. If he didn't find her by the time he reached South Maple Street at the edge of town, then he would call Dr. Montgomery and make him drag his weary ass out of bed and guide him through the clinic's records, even if he had to do so at gunpoint. But what then? Did he propose reading through every file? It wasn't like there was some kind of search function that would allow him to sort through the entire population by disease. He needed to take a step back and evaluate it from scratch, narrow the field to a manageable number.

What were the facts? Whoever buried the child's body had expected it to be found. Why else go to the trouble of planting the clues that would lead to a false identification? Whoever staged the scene had to have a fairly comprehensive understanding of genetics, had to know that the police would be satisfied with two separate means of identification so they wouldn't need to test the skeletal remains separately. The corpse needed to be displayed in such a manner that there would be no doubt about the mechanism of death, the level of violence so stunning and obvious that there would be no reason to suspect anything else.

So what kind of suspect pool did that create?

A cop would be an easy choice, but all of the sheriff's deputies had been accounted for the night of Emma's disappearance. It was possible that one of them might have been in collusion with an unknown party, however unlikely. Trey had looked each of them in the eye every day in the intervening years and just couldn't imagine how they could have fooled him so completely. He couldn't afford to rule out anyone at this stage, but he needed to consider every potential angle. What about medical professionals? A doctor would have the knowledge base to pull it off and free reign over patient records. Montgomery would have been able to access the correct file, and Emma would have known him well enough to walk away with him without causing a scene. He could have just playfully scooped her up and been on his way before anyone---

Then it hit him.

The dental records.

Trey had recognized that the teeth were part of the setup. All of them had been badly broken, with the exception of the five that were necessary to generate the positive identification. They were chipped and fractured, just to nowhere near the same degree. Anyone could have seen which teeth had been filled. But only one person could have known which ones had cavities that had yet to be filled.

Dr. Carlton Matthews.

What had he said?

He had been more than happy to take care of the details on his end. After all, he and his wife had a daughter Emma's age who they schooled at home.

Trey jerked the wheel to the right and pinned the gas. The clinic was only three blocks away, and, if he was right, he didn't have the time to waste trying to rouse Montgomery and force him to open the doors.

Buildings flew past. He blew through stop signs without a sideways glance and locked up the brakes in front of the clinic. The office was dark. He could see the reception counter through the twin glass doors, a dozen empty seats, and tables littered with magazines.

He leapt out and raced up to the doors. A tug on the handles confirmed they were locked. If given the proper tools and enough time, he probably could have picked the lock, but he had neither. A quick survey of the seams around the doors revealed no wires or magnetic strips. No alarm. He raised his right foot and kicked the glass. Hard. Once. Twice. It shattered on the third try and he barreled through, nearly slipping on the shards covering the floor. The door beside the registration desk was unlocked, and the computer behind the counter had only been put to sleep. He jostled the mouse and brought the screen to life. There were a dozen icons. He double-clicked the one labeled RECORDS. It asked for a medical records number rather than a name. He closed it and opened the SCHEDULING program. This one allowed him to enter the last name Matthews. He tabbed to the FIRST NAME box, which gave him three options in a drop-down menu: Carlton, Sandra, and Chelsea. Sandra was the wife's name, so he populated the box with Chelsea. The screen filled in with her biographical data: birth date, social security number, address, phone number, insurance code, and a nine digit MR number. He grabbed a pen, scribbled it on his palm, and opened the RECORDS folder again. He typed the number at the prompt and waited.

A string of minimized reports popped up on the left side, labeled by date. The most recent was from twenty-six months ago. He clicked it and saw his brother-in-law's name listed as the treating physician. Several words jumped out at him from the body of the report.

Distal femoral osteoblastic activity.

Metastasis.

End-stage.

Osteosarcoma.

The body they had found belonged to Chelsea Matthews. She'd been six years-old, the same as Emma. Warren had been unable to save her. She had died of her cancer, leaving behind grief-stricken parents unable to rationalize the loss of their only child. Matthews had been Emma's dentist. She would have trusted him well enough to wander off with him. She would have seen him as safe, as a friend.

Did the Matthewses blame Warren for their daughter's death?

He had been more than happy to take care of the details on his end. After all, he and his wife had a daughter Emma's age who they schooled at home.

Was it possible they had somehow snapped and figured that if they couldn't have their child, then neither could the man who let theirs die?

If that was the case then...

Trey jumped up from the desk and sprinted out of the office.

The Jeep's engine roared and its tires screamed on the asphalt as he sped away from town toward the remote area where the Matthewses lived.

Vanessa pried at the bars over the window, but they didn't budge in the slightest. The windows on the main floor were out of her reach. That meant she either had to use the front or the back door, and surely both were locked. She hadn't thought to bring her cell phone and she was unarmed. She didn't even have a set of keys to hold between her knuckles, but now that she had found Emma, she couldn't bear to leave her here a second longer.

She had come for her daughter, and she wasn't leaving without her.

Vanessa walked right around to the front porch and ascended the short slate staircase. She stood an arm's length from the door. The cicadas scurried away from the door. Heart pounding, she raised her fist and knocked.

The sound echoed hollowly away from her.

She knocked again, harder this time, and listened for approaching footsteps.

Nothing.

She pounded again and again.

The cicadas broke the silence. Their song was deafening. It grew faster, more insistent, raising the hackles on the backs of her arms.

She didn't hear the deadbolt disengage. The door opened inward and a shadow stepped into view. She caught the glint of moonlight from a long blade in time to throw herself backward.

The knife sliced through the air in front of her.

She hit the porch on her back and tumbled down the stairs, twisting her arm underneath her and hitting her head.

A black silhouette stood above her, knife at its side. The face was a wash of shadows, framed by a riot of tousled hair.

The cicada song died.

In the silence, she heard the man breathing.

He stepped down onto the first step.

And then the next.

Vanessa screamed and tried to scrabble away.

The insects took flight at once and the night filled with the buzzing sound of wings.

One moment, the man stood three steps above her, and the next he was swallowed by a dark cloud of cicadas. The blade flashed through the swarm. She heard him scream as he swung the knife. His exertions only served to topple him off-balance. He missed the next stair down and fell toward her.

She rolled out of the way just in time.

There was a loud crack and the screaming stopped.

The insects swarmed around her for several moments before finally lifting, leaving behind a crumpled heap of humanity. The man's legs trailed him up the staircase. His arms were pinned under his body. The tip of the knife stood from the center of his back in an expanding amoeba of blood. His head was cocked to the side at a severe angle. Fluid trickled from the corners of his mouth and his eyes stared blankly through her. She recognized him immediately.

Carlton Matthews.

Her daughter's dentist.

She struggled to her feet, swayed until she found her balance, and mounted the staircase.

The front door was wide open.

There was only darkness beyond.

Cradling her injured arm to her chest, she crossed the threshold and stepped into the silent house.

The cicadas were already ahead of her, clinging to the walls, the furniture, the ceiling...as though giving life to the house itself.

The Cherokee slewed from side to side on the gravel road, trailing an angry fist of dust. Trey watched the mailboxes hurtle past until he saw the one he was looking for and slammed the brakes. The car skidded sideways and he used the momentum to turn a one-eighty without stopping. He hit the driveway at thirty miles an hour, but didn't dare push it any faster. Miring the vehicle in the swamp wouldn't help anyone. The road wound fairly tightly, and he didn't want to prematurely betray his approach either.

The trees fell away to either side as he drove into the clearing. The first thing he noticed was the open front door. The second was the body collapsed at the foot of the stairs.

He drove right up onto the lawn and braked hard. Turf flew from the rear tires. He was out of the car before it hit the ground.

Trey ran around the hood and crouched beside the body. He didn't need to check for a pulse to know that Matthews was dead. The knife had been driven straight through his chest and the vertebrae of his cervical spine formed lumpy, bruised knots where they had broken and separated from the column.

Drawing his service pistol, a Beretta 92FS, he crept up the stairs toward the front door. The only sound was the soft scuff of his shoes. He sighted the darkness down the barrel and cautiously entered the house.

Vanessa didn't waste any time searching the main level. She needed to reach the basement. It pulled her onward like an iron filing to a magnet.

The formal living and dining room off the foyer to her right was empty; the hallway leading toward the bedrooms to the left deserted. She found the staircase between a comfortably furnished family room and a kitchen ripped straight from the pages of Better Homes & Gardens. The carpeted steps creaked subtly as she descended. The stairs doubled back upon themselves when she reached the landing. Were it possible, it was even darker down there still. She gripped the railing and pressed on. The damp smell of mildew greeted her, and beneath it something else.

Sweat.

Ammonia.

Fear.

She heard something shuffle ahead of her. A swishing sound, like soft-soled shoes or slippers across carpet. Then the quiet click of a closing door.

Tiny legs scurried across the back of her hand. She brushed the wall when she jerked it away, grazing slick insect exoskeletons.

At the bottom of the stairs, she stopped to gather her bearings and allow her eyes adjust to the darkness. She was standing in a small recreation room. The faint seepage of light around the sealed window showed the vague outlines of furniture, maybe a rocking horse and a toy box on the floor. A hallway led away from her to either side, shadowed and indistinct.

Clicking sounds from her right. She turned and ran her palm along the plaster, knocking off dozens of cicadas. Their wings caught them before they hit the floor. They buzzed around her head before alighting on the wall once more.

Vanessa held her arms out in front of her as she walked. She listened for the shuffling sound to repeat, but heard only the clicking all around her.

Her hands met with resistance and she managed to stop herself before she collided with what felt like a door. She traced the surface until she found a knob and turned it with both hands. The door was heavy, crafted from solid, metal-reinforced wood that dragged on the carpet. She had to lean her shoulder into it to open it wide enough to squeeze through.

The room reeked of Lysol, which didn't quite mask the lingering stench of body odor and waste matter. Wan squares of light framed the aluminum sheets bolted over the windows. She could barely discern the shape of the canopy over a small bed, the top edges of a dresser and a rocking chair. A small table in the center.

She heard shallow, whispered breathing. The sound of a peacefully sleeping child.

Her heart fluttered and whatever control she had maintained over her emotions fled her. She started to cry and pawed at the wall in search of a light switch.

"Emma? Emma! Mommy's here!"

She flicked the switch and the overhead bulb bloomed. The sudden influx of light was blinding, forcing her to bat her eyelids. She saw snippets of the room, like a slideshow of the same image flipping past too quickly. The walls and the ceiling were covered with cicadas. A rocking chair in the right corner, situated across the low table from its much smaller twin. Books on the table: arithmetic and phonics. A television with a DVD player on a stand, stacks of movies underneath. Piles of teddy bears and dolls. A steel eyebolt was set into the middle of the floor. The thick chain attached to it led up under the covers on a four-poster bed with a lace canopy. A sleeping form under a mound of linens. A spill of short blonde hair on the pillow.

Short...blonde...hair.

Vanessa's heart shattered. She grabbed at the pain in her chest. The room started to spin. This wasn't her daughter. Emma had always had the most beautiful ebon hair.

Vanessa fell to her knees and crawled toward the bed.

She had been so sure, so convinced that Emma was here.

The cicadas...why else would they have led her to this house? To this very bedroom?

She hauled herself up onto the edge of the bed and pulled the covers off of the child. Her size was incongruous with Vanessa's memory. This child had to be at least four or five inches taller than the Emma that lived in her memory, the chubbiness in the arms and legs completely absent.

With a moan, she swept the child's hair away from her face.

She had to know for sure.

The little girl stirred and furrowed her brow. And then she opened her eyes. The most beautiful shade of blue she had ever seen. They were the same eyes that stared back at her from the mirror every day. Her eyes.

Emma's eyes.

"Emma!" Vanessa sobbed. She drew her daughter to her chest and held her as tightly as she could. She inhaled Emma's scent, savored the sensation of her daughter's cheek against her own, reveled in the texture of her dyed hair.

"Mommy?" Emma whispered.

"I'm right here, baby. I'm going to get you out of here. Take you home."

Emma's whole body shook and she started to cry. Her lips parted and Vanessa noticed that Emma only had four front teeth in both her upper and lower jaws. Only gums behind, where the teeth had yet to grow in.

"I'm so sorry I let you out of my sight." Vanessa adjusted her grip so she could lift Emma out of the bed. "I promise...I will never let it happen again. Ever."

"Mommy!" Emma screamed.

The cicadas erupted in song, so loud in the confines that even the air appeared to tremble.

A shadow fell over Vanessa from behind. She saw the expression of horror on Emma's face, the terror reflected in her eyes.

Clinging to her daughter, she threw herself to the side.

A knife flashed through her peripheral vision and embedded itself in the mattress. It was trailed by a thin, feminine arm.

Emma screamed directly into her ear.

Vanessa rolled over to shield her daughter with her body. She glanced up at her assailant from the corner of her eye.

Sandra Matthews towered over her, only it wasn't the Sandra she remembered. This woman's hair had gone prematurely gray and was tangled and unkempt. Her eyes were wild, her teeth bared. She held the knife above her shoulder, the muscles and tendons showing through her emaciated arm.

The cicada song ceased, leaving an oppressive silence that made the air feel somehow heavier.

"Let go of my Chelsea right now," Sandra snarled. "Get your hands off my daughter!"

She took a step closer and raised the knife.

Vanessa turned her face away, looked directly into Emma's eyes, and cringed in anticipation of the searing pain to come.

Trey thundered down the stairs into the basement when the screaming started. There was just enough illumination from the seams around the windows to limn the cicadas on the walls. They seethed as though the plaster had begun to boil. He had never seen so many insects in one place, let alone inside of a house. Pistol at arm's length, elbows slightly flexed to absorb the kick, he reached the bottom of the staircase and veered toward the source of the light.

The cicadas started to sing. The sound was physically painful.

He walked in his shooting stance, finger tightened on the trigger, prepared to fire at the first hint of movement.

The entire hallway was black with bugs. The walls. The ceiling. The partially open door at the end.

And then the sound suddenly died.

He heard a growl that could have been words from slightly to his left as he slipped past the door. It looked like a child's bedroom, only there was an eyebolt in the center of the torn carpet attached to a length of chain. He followed it with his eyes to where it terminated in a manacle bound around a tiny, pale ankle. Vanessa covered the child with her body.

Another woman reared up over his sister with a knife in her hand.

"Drop the knife!" he shouted.

The woman looked over at him with a twisted expression of rage and anguish.

"Drop it now or I'll shoot!"

She turned back toward his sister, who had seized the opportunity to drag the child to the furthest reaches of the iron tether. Vanessa still had her back to the woman, who screamed and strode after her.

The cicadas erupted from the walls, as though the entire room were imploding. They flew directly at the woman, hitting her, swarming around her. She wailed and lunged forward.

Trey lined up his weapon through the swirling insects and took his shot.

Blood spattered the far wall, climbing it in arcs and dots.

The woman spun and was launched backward against the wall at the foot of the bed. She slumped down, chin hanging to her chest. The entire left half of her shirt near her shoulder was crimson.

Trey could barely see her through the swarm, which slowly dissolved. The cicadas flew straight at him. He ducked his head against the barrage as they funneled past him down the hallway.

When he reached his sister, only a blue cloud of gun smoke hung in the air.

All of the cicadas were gone.

Vanessa rolled over and looked up at him, her eyes filled with tears.

Trey kissed her on the forehead, smiled down at his niece, and began working on the lock of the manacle.