Hell in Heaven

CHAPTER FOUR

Joan Delaney's guest room was covered in faded rose-print wallpaper. The bedspread on the single bed was a bright blue and yellow chintz. The bed and chair and the little desk were all worn with age, but there wasn't a speck of dust on any of them.

To Matt, it felt like home.

Not like any home he'd ever lived in. His parents had been partial to mid-century modern furniture, and his mother's interest only extended as far as buying the stuff, not so much keeping it dusted. This felt like the ideal of home, the one we all have in the back of our heads.

And Joan's welcome had made him feel like he was the one returning after years away. She'd apologized for not being able to offer him much for dinner, since she had been planning on eating at the big barbecue the town was preparing for her son's return. But she found a bowl of homemade beef stew in the freezer, and she said it wouldn't take long to heat it on the wood stove if that was all right with him.

"Only if you let me help," Matt said.

"I don't know how you can, unless you're planning on going back in time to when I made the stew," Joan said.

"Your wood pile is looking a little low," Matt said. The scuttle next to the stove was down to a couple of small pieces. "Let me refill it."

Joan put up a token objection, but Matt insisted. He went out to his bike and dug his grandfather's axe out of the saddlebag, then snapped the leather cover off its gleaming head and walked around to the back of the house, where a huge pile of stacked wood waited for him.

Matt picked a large log off the pile, placed it on the stump that a thousand gouges said was used for this purpose, and brought his axe down, splitting it in two. Tossing the pieces aside, he grabbed another log and split it, feeling the warm burn in his muscles as the halves skittered apart.

Even if Joan's scuttle had been full, Matt would have volunteered for this duty. He hadn't chopped a stick of wood since he'd been on the road, and as his arms rose and fell, placed a log and split it, brushed aside the pieces and grabbed another, he knew this was what had been missing from his life. Crazy as he knew it would sound to anyone else, the simple, repetitive motion of lifting the axe and letting it fall was the one thing he'd ever found that kept him centered. Now, when the rest of his life had been stripped away, he discovered that he needed this ritual more than ever.

Matt grabbed another log off the pile and froze. The pile had a hollow spot in it, a hole that reached all the way down to the ground. There was no way this was accidental; Matt could see that someone had used a few small sticks to keep the logs from falling in on themselves.

At the bottom of the hole, something gleamed whitely.

A bone.

And another. And another.

Matt bent down to peer into the hole. There was a stack of bones at least a foot high.

What kind of bones Matt didn't know. They weren't human; they were too small for that. But they seemed to come from all sorts of creatures. Matt imagined dogs and cats, but they could have just as easily been raccoons and squirrels. Some kinds of forest pests. Certainly there was nothing wrong with killing animals like these. For all he knew, people around here ate them.

So why were these bones hidden inside a secret compartment in a wood pile?

And why did they have teeth marks in them?

This could all mean nothing. There might be a perfectly natural explanation for it if you understood how these people lived.

But Matt had grown up in a time when you couldn't turn on the TV or pick up a paper without seeing a story about some serial killer or another. And the one thing they all seemed to have in common was that they started off by hurting animals.

If Matt Delaney had built this vault and stocked it with bones before he went off to war, then maybe his mother had been right to worry. Because if the boy had started out with a mind toward murder, he'd just spent two years perfecting its practice.

And now he was coming home.