The Backwoods

(I)

“It’s all beyond belief,” Byron said in a very low voice over the phone.

Patricia was looking blankly out the window as she talked, her cell phone to her ear. “I know,” she said. “I feel useless. I don’t know what to do. I came out here to help my sister, but now I don’t even know where she is.”

“Well, enough is enough. You have to come home now.”

She chewed her lower lip. She did want to go home now, but how could she? “Byron, Judy is missing. I can’t leave until I know she’s safe.”

Byron’s dissatisfaction could be sensed over the line. “At this point, I don’t even care. All I care about is you being back here with me. I want you here now, in our house—safe. I don’t care about Judy, I don’t care about those nutty Squatter people, I don’t care about docks and lean-tos burning down. People are getting murdered there, Patricia. So you get in your car—right now—and drive home. Now. This minute.”

It was rare for Byron to be this bent out of shape; he was even mad, something rarer. “I want to come home, too, Byron. But I can’t leave until I know Judy’s all right—”

“She probably passed out drunk in the woods!” Byron exploded. “Whoever’s doing these burnings—these drug people—they could burn Judy’s house down next, with you in it!”

“Honey, calm down,” she tried to pacify him. The sun from the window glared in her eyes. He was right, and by now . . .

By now, I’m sick to death of Agan’s Point and hope I never see the place again. “I’ll be home soon. . . .”

“Damn it! You’re so fucking stubborn!”

I know I am. But I can’t leave yet. “I’ll be home in three days, no more. I promise.”

“What if you can’t find her by then? What if she’s dead? I’m sorry if that sounds insensitive, but I don’t give a shit about your sister compared to you!”

Patricia sighed. “I’m sure she’ll turn up by then.”

“But what if she doesn’t?” Byron blared.

“Then I’ll come home anyway. I’ll come home Sunday no matter what.”

Now Byron sighed, too. “I just miss you so much, and I love you. I want you home, away from that crazy place.”

“I’ll be home, honey. On Sunday.”

He calmed down in a moment, and they said their good-byes for the moment, Patricia promising to call him several times a day until she left. Indulging me is wearing him out, she realized. I’m not being much of a wife, am I? She remembered her failed antics with Ernie, her drunkenness, and her complete disregard toward Byron since she’d been here. Yeah, I’ve been a really lousy wife lately. About the only thing she could look forward to was making it up to him.

Did she hear sirens in the distance? She wasn’t sure. Don’t tell me something else was set on fire. . . . She called the town police station, inquiring, “Has Judy Parker been located yet?”

“No, ma’am,” a woman replied quickly.

“What about Ernie Gooder?”

The receptionist seemed hurried. “He hasn’t been found yet either, and neither has Chief Sutter.”

“Is Sergeant Trey available now?”

An exasperated sigh. “No, ma’am. He’s out helping the state police look.”

“Well, if anybody turns up, could you please call—”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, I have a radio call. I have to go. Call back at five or six. Sergeant Trey should be back by then. Have a good day.”

Click.

The little bit of radio squawk Patricia had heard in the background sounded urgent. Maybe those really were sirens I heard. . . .

She showered and dressed, feeling awkward, even uneasy. I’m the only one here, she reminded herself. Last night she’d slept fitfully, the only one in the house then, as well. But she’d been sure to wear her nightgown this time, and close and lock the window and her bedroom door. She’d refused to admit to herself that she was afraid.

The beautiful morning outside should’ve heartened her, but it didn’t. What’s happening here? she thought, driving through some of the town’s side roads. Modest homes from sparse yards looked back at her. Yes, the town appeared normal, quaint, and very sane. But this past week assured her of the falsehood of appearances. Who knows what’s going on behind some of those doors? she thought.

She took the Cadillac off the Point, vaguely heading in the direction from which she thought she’d heard sirens. An ambiguous nausea flirted with her stomach, and it took her a few moments to realize why: this was roughly the same direction as Bowen’s Field. . . .

Forget about it. You’re long over all that.

And she did feel long over the incident, just as Dr. Sallee had explained. And miles before the road would lead to Bowen’s Field, she saw a state police car turning down a trail into the woods.

Something is going on out here, she realized.

The road wound down to a rutted dirt lane. Around the bend, she stopped short, startled. My God! What happened here? An ambulance and three police cars sat parked with their lights flashing. Sergeant Shannon, the rugged state trooper she’d talked to yesterday, stood with the other officers, arms crossed and looking down toward a fingerlike estuary cutting into the woods from the bay. Shannon turned at the sound of her tires, then broke from the others and approached.

“Ms. White,” he said, holding up a cautious hand, “you don’t want to come down here.”

“What happened!” she blurted, heart racing. She spotted two EMTs dragging a gurney from the ambulance. One of them also unfolded a black body bag. “It’s not my sister, is it?”

The trooper blocked her way. He looked a little pale. “No, it’s not. It’s one of the other missing persons—Ernie Gooder. I’m afraid he’s d—”

Patricia pushed past him, wild-eyed. No! It can’t be! But even as the plea left her lips, she knew the worst.

Her eyes shot down at the water. She blinked. Then she jerked her gaze away.

“I told you you didn’t want to come down here, Ms. White,” Shannon said. “There is some rough stuff going on in this town.”

Rough stuff. What Patricia had seen in the several seconds she’d actually been able to look was this: Ernie’s dead body being dragged out of the shallow water . . . or, it could be said, something significantly less than his dead body.

From the chest down the body looked corroded, or even eaten. All the skin and quite a bit of muscle mass was absent, leaving raw white bones showing. The waist down was the worst—there was essentially nothing left but tendons and scraps of muscle fiber along the leg bones and hips: a wet skeleton. Skeletal feet pointed up at the ends of the lower leg bones. Ernie’s sodden shirt had been torn open and hung off the shoulders, while his pants looked congealed at what was left of his ankles. Some arcane process had whittled away the flesh, leaving this human scrap, and in the final second of her glimpse, Patricia realized what that process was.

At least a dozen very large blue crabs let go of those skeletal legs when the body had been pulled out, whereupon they skittered back into the water. Ernie had been used for crab bait.

Patricia wanted to throw up. She felt dizzy at once, and braced herself against a tree. “My God,” she wheezed.

“Sorry you had to see that,” Shannon said. “These drug wars can get down and dirty.”

“Iknew him very well,” Patricia mumbled over the nausea. “He simply wasn’t the type to sell or use drugs.”

Shannon seemed convinced otherwise. “We found crystal meth in his room, so how do you explain—”

“Sergeant Shannon?” one of the EMTs called out. He knelt at Ernie’s horrific corpse, as gloved cops prepared to slide it into the body bag. “Found some CDS in his pants pocket. Looks like crystal meth. You’ll want to bag it as evidence.”

“You were saying?” Shannon said back to Patricia.

When she heard the bag being zipped up, some morbid force caused her to steal one last glance. Ernie was now mostly in the bag, but his head hung out, neck craned back. That was when she saw . . .

His teeth . . . My God, his teeth . . .

“You all right, Ms. White?”

“His two front teeth are missing,” she croaked. “It’s impossible for me to not have noticed that in the past.”

“Ever hear of false teeth? They probably fell out when his attackers were putting him in the water.”

Patricia didn’t hear whatever else he said before he departed and went to secure the drug evidence.

His two front teeth are missing. The words droned in her head. It was the one thing she’d never forget: the man who’d raped her over twenty-five years ago had been missing his two front teeth. . . .

Patricia could barely maintain her composure. She stood up at the end of the road with Shannon. They both watched in silence as the ambulance and other police cars drove away, leaving a veil of road dust hanging in the air. When the last vehicle had left, Patricia stood in numb shock, the cicada sounds beating in her ears.

“I can tell you,” Shannon began, “nothing will ruin a town and its people faster than dope. It’s happening everywhere. And half the time it’s the people you least expect.”

“It’s just . . . Ernie,” she said. “He wasn’t the type at all.”

“All it takes is one hit off a meth pipe and you’re done. Every addict I ever busted says the same thing. It changes you overnight. And once the stuff tips you over, you’re making it or selling it just to maintain your own supply. It turns decent people into thieves, killers, criminals—human animals. And good luck making it through rehab. This stuff and crack? The success rate is so low it’s not even worth bothering with. You can put a meth-head in prison for ten years, and he’s back with the pipe the first day he gets out. That’s how addictive this stuff is.”

Patricia shook her head, looking out into the woods.

“So you knew this guy pretty well, I take it,” the trooper observed.

“I thought I did. I grew up with him as a kid. I live in D.C. now, but I came back to Agan’s Point for a visit—the first time in years.”

“Well, now you can see what happened to him over those years.”

“I guess I knew something was wrong—I couldn’t imagine he’d gotten involved with drug people. He wasn’t the type.”

“There isn’t a type. It can happen to anyone. You experiment with something like this, think, ‘Oh, I’ll just do it once to see what it’s like.’ Then you’re never the same. We’re pretty sure Ernie Gooder was the person who burned down the docks two nights ago.”

“What time did you say the fire occurred?”

″Three thirty.”

Patricia smirked. “He was peeping in my window around quarter after.”

“Really?” Shannon said. “You’re lucky that all he did was peep. Anyway, it’s obvious what’s going on out here—a meth war between two gangs. Ernie and some of these other locals are in one gang, and a bunch of these Squatters are in the other. And now they’re duking it out. It might seem impossible for a place like this, but like I said, the same thing’s happening all over the state.” Shannon shrugged. “Chief Sutter being missing doesn’t look good either.”

“So you think he’s involved with drugs?”

″A cop, especially a police chief, is the kind of power person any dope gang will pay to work for them and protect their runs. You wouldn’t believe the kind of money a crooked cop can make.”

“Is that what you really think? That Chief Sutter is working with a drug gang?”

“It’s either that or he got killed trying to make a bust. A police chief doesn’t just disappear.″

Even in her civilian naïveté, Patricia was coming to grips with Sergeant Shannon’s suspicions.

The heat was steepening, the humidity drawing beads of sweat on her brow.

“And I’m sorry I’m the one to tell you this, but I’m sure you’ve already considered it anyway,” Shannon told her. “There’s a pretty big chance that your sister was involved in some of this too. She’s also missing. There’s a good chance—″

“I know, Sergeant.” Patricia faced the facts. “My sister’s probably dead. Her body’s probably lying in the woods somewhere.”

Shannon didn’t say anything after that.

When he went back on his rounds, Patricia headed back toward town. She drove aimlessly, cranking the air-conditioning up. What am I thinking? she asked herself. That I’m just going to see Judy walking down the road? She’s going to wave to me, with a big smile? She knew that wasn’t going to happen.

She drove through more of the town proper, and then the outskirts. I’ve never seen anything like this, she thought; Agan’s Point looked abandoned, evacuated. Not even one person out walking their dog . . . When she pulled into the Qwik-Mart, she found the little parking lot empty, noticed no one in the store, then spotted the SORRY, WE’RE CLOSED sign.

Hours passed without her notice. Patricia tried to keep her mind off what was becoming the greatest likelihood. Eventually, she forced herself to admit why she was driving so pointlessly.

I don’t want to go back to the house.

The comfortable old house she’d been raised in now seemed utterly haunted, not just by her dour parents but by murdered people she didn’t know, and by Judy, by Ernie, by every dim, sad memory, and as she pulled up the long cul-de-sac out front, those memories massed and urged her away. She drove to the southern end of the Point. . . .

Where the town looked evacuated; the tract of land that comprised Squatterville looked evacuating. It’s a mass exodus now, she saw. She wondered how many Squatters actually had been involved in drugs. Just those few? Or had the Squatters become a secret drug culture of their own?

We’ll never know. They’re all leaving now.

In small salvos they trudged up the hill and away, beaten suitcases and sacks of possessions in tow; Patricia thought of refugees leaving a bombed city. Where they go next is anybody’s guess, and it’s not like anyone cares anyway. . . .

The sun was sinking. Patricia drove the loop around the crab-picking house and then winced at the burned pier. The boathouse had been reduced to cinders, while the boats that had been burned had been moored ashore, the hulls like blackened husks. She could still smell the char in the air, thick as the cicada trills.

Out in the bay she saw the pale wood plank sticking up: the Squatter graffiti, their good-luck sign. The plank appeared to overlook the ruined docks, a symbol now of the clan’s bad fortune, not good fortune.

The inevitable approached quickly, like a beast running down a fawn. The sun had now been replaced by a fat yellow moon that stalked her back to the dark house.

She parked the Cadillac out front, then sat for several minutes staring, the engine ticking beneath the hood. I don’t want to go in. There’s nobody there anymore.

She trudged up the steps, frowning at the odd door knocker that was a half-formed face. The fantasy beckoned her: that she would walk in, smell homemade biscuits baking, and Judy would look up from the oven and explain where she’d been the last two days, and it would all be so innocent, and they’d laugh and hug and everything would be okay again.

Patricia’s hands were shaking when she entered and crossed the foyer. Darkness saturated the house. She walked around downstairs, wide-eyed, snapping on lights, but the illumination she sought only made the house feel bigger . . . and emptier. Her feet took her listlessly to the kitchen and no, the air didn’t smell of biscuits; it smelled sterile, lifeless. Instinct urged her to call out for Judy, but she didn’t bother.

Her sister wasn’t here, and probably never would be again.

She checked the answering machine. Had anyone called? Had the police left a message to relate that Judy had been found, had been rushed to the hospital for an appendectomy or something, and was recovering now and waiting for her?

“You have . . . zero . . . messages,” the machine’s generic voice told her.

She turned and went to the refrigerator for some juice, but her hand froze in midair. A strawberry magnet held a note to the door—Things to get: flour, milk, eggs, coffee—a shopping list in Judy’s unruly scrawl. Patricia stared at the list and began to cry.

She wore her clothes to bed, too unsettled to undress. The bedroom window stared at her. It was locked now, its curtains drawn, but just knowing what Ernie had been doing on the other side of it several nights ago gave her a grim fright. A dead man’s sperm is on my windowsill, she thought absurdly. Just a few feet away . . . The notion knotted her stomach. She could go sleep in another room, but that idea distressed her as well. Which room would she take? Ernie’s? Her sister’s? Or what about her parents’ old room upstairs? No, they were all chock-full of ghosts now.

She stared up at the ceiling, at the room’s grainy darkness. Were faces forming in the grains? The window, the window, part of her mind kept whispering to her.

There’s nothing there, so forget about it and go to sleep! she shouted back at herself, but she couldn’t take solace even in her own sense of reason. Eventually she threw back the sheets, sighed to herself, and pulled back the curtain.

See. No one there. No peeping Toms, no monsters. Beyond the glass the yard looked normal, sedate. Night flowers in the expansive garden opened their petals to the night. The moon had risen higher now and turned white, flooding the backyard with a tranquil glow. There was nothing out of the ordinary for her to see.

Back under the covers, she curled into a ball. Did she hear the hall clock ticking? The house frame creaked a few times, causing her to flinch. Please, Judy. Please come home. Please be okay, she prayed, drifting off.

The maw of a nightmare opened wide. She was in the same room, in the same grainy darkness and on the same bed, only naked now, splayed. Moonlight flooded the room and, in turn, her bare flesh. It painted her in a translucent lambency: bright, sharp-white skin, the rim of her navel a shadow dark as black ink. Her legs were spread to the window, her furred sex shamefully bared.

She couldn’t close her legs for the life of her.

She couldn’t cover herself.

How can there be moonlight in the room? she thought. The curtains are closed. I know they are. I just closed them. But of course she thought that, for it didn’t occur to her yet that this was a dream. . . .

She thought on through a tingling fear, concluding her question: Someone must have opened the curtains.

Then:

The window . . .

She was determined not to look, but just as she’d given the order to herself, some force—the ghost of her father’s hand, perhaps—pushed her head up and made her look.

She looked straight ahead between the mounds of her breasts, down her stomach, through her spread legs. The tiny tuft of pubic hair drew a bead like a gunsight to the window.

The curtains weren’t merely open; they were gone. The moonlight shimmered in an unwelcome guest now. She felt humiliated, ashamed. If someone was outside, they could look in and see her totally bared, the most private part of her body displayed as if on purpose. What would they think of her, lying on the bed like that, utterly naked?

But . . .

Thank God. There’s no one there.

The hall clock began to tick louder than normal, and more rapidly. She kept looking down her body at the window, saw her breasts rising and falling faster now, her flat abdomen trembling, and then, beyond the ticking, she heard something else.

Crunching.

Footsteps, she knew.

Patricia’s paralysis intensified; she felt made of cement, a prone statue. When the shadow edged into the window frame, her scream froze in her chest.

It was Ernie.

Cadaverous now, he leered in with a rotten grin, his eyes like raw oysters, his skin fish-belly white. He was masturbating, his dead hand shucking a rotten penis with vigor. Worse than the act—and the dead, wet gleam in his eyes—was the gap that shone through the grin: the two front teeth missing. At one point he pushed a black tongue through the gap and wriggled it.

Soon another figure joined him: David Eald and his dead young daughter, both blackened corpses, the Hilds now naked, gut-sucked stick figures. Chief Sutter, as bloated in death as he was in life, his dead face the color and consistency of cheesecake, with two thumbholes for eyes. And finally Judy herself, naked and sagging, the skin of her face stretched across her skull like a stocking mask, the steam of rot wafting off her flesh.

Yes, they’d all congregated now—this cadaverous clique—to paint Patricia’s nakedness with their spoiled grins. Ernie painted the windowsill with something else, his bony hips quivering and cheeks bloated—putrid semen spurting. In his enthusiasm, Patricia noted that he’d actually wrung the skin off his penis at the climactic moment. She also saw that maggots frenzied in the sperm as it shot out.

Thank God the window’s locked, Patricia thought.

Then Ernie’s and Sutter’s cheesy-dead fingers began to open the window. First they’d reveled just to see her, but now they were coming to touch. . . .

When the stench poured into the room, Patricia wakened and screamed loud as a truck horn.

Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God . . .

Was she going insane? Her hand shot to her chest; her heartbeat felt like something exploding in her. But at least her clothes were on—at least now she knew it had been a dream.

The grainy dark hung before her, a veil. The hall clock ticked but was back to its normal, quiet pace. When the house frame creaked again, she actually found it comforting—because she knew it was real.

The window seemed to beckon her, though. Of course its curtains remained closed, just as she’d left them. But . . .

Her paranoia raced back to snare her. Damn it, she thought. Damn it, damn it! She needed to know, just to be sure. . . .

She swung her feet out and rose, giving herself a moment to fully come awake. When the time came to move, she faltered. Come on, Patricia. What are you thinking?

What was she thinking? That she’d pull the curtains back to find a cluster of dead faces leering in?

Ridiculous.

But still, she had to prove it to herself; otherwise she’d get no sleep at all.

There! See? She was almost ecstatic when she looked behind the curtains to find nothing there. The backyard faced her exactly as it had earlier. No movement, the night flowers standing open, moonlight shimmering.

Then her heart slammed once.

Wait a minute. . . .

There was one thing outside that hadn’t been there when she’d looked before. At first she hadn’t seen it.

Ernie’s pickup truck.

The first foot of its front end protruded into her view. That’s impossible! She closed her eyes and took several deep breaths. Ernie’s dead. I saw his dead body. And his truck wasn’t there before!

She was certain, absolutely certain it hadn’t been there before.

And next the thought exploded:

Oh, my God, maybe it’s Judy! She must’ve borrowed his truck earlier and gone off somewhere! And she came back but didn’t wake me up when she came in!

Now it was joy that propelled her out of the bedroom. “Judy! Are you back?” She raced down the hall, out to the foyer, and up the stairs. She swung into her sister’s bedroom and snapped on the light.

“Judy?”

The bed lay empty, neatly made.

Then she’s downstairs somewhere! Patricia felt convinced. She has to be! That’s the only thing that could explain Ernie’s truck being in the backyard. She’s downstairs right now in the kitchen, getting something to eat!

Patricia collapsed when she burst in and flicked on the light. Her knees thudded to the floor. She shrieked.

Judy was in the kitchen, all right. But she wasn’t getting anything to eat. A cane chair lay tipped over on the floor, along with two sandals. Judy was hanging by the neck from a kitchen rafter.

The rope creaked, a sound not unlike the house frame. Judy’s face ballooned, bright scarlet tinged with blue, tongue sticking out. She wore the flowered sundress Patricia remembered her wearing at the clan cookout. To make it worse, the process had snapped the neck entirely, and now beneath the noose, the neck stretched a foot. Lividity had turned her sister’s bare feet something close to black, and the lower legs too, veins bulging fat as earthworms.

Oh, Judy . . . Oh, my God, my poor sister . . .

She’d never been that stable to begin with, and she’d never liked change. That was why she’d stayed with Dwayne so long, even in the midst of all that abuse, and that was why she’d never left this house. She was happy only when things were the same.

But suicide? Patricia dragged herself up, the horror replaced by the reality of the despair. Squatters betraying her, selling drugs while they took a paycheck from her? Police on the property every other night for murders and burnings? Yeah, things have definitely changed around here.

It was inexplicable, but it happened every day: people killing themselves. It was the only cure to a horrid symptom they had to live with for God knew how long, and with nobody else even knowing there was a problem.

I have to call the police right now, Patricia realized. Knowing that her sister’s body hung dead behind her couldn’t have been more distressing, but Patricia simply didn’t have the strength to take her down herself. She turned for the phone—

—and almost collapsed again.

Sergeant Trey stood in the doorway to the laundry room, as if he’d just come in through the back. He seemed as startled as she.

“Damn, Ms. White. Ya scared the bejesus outa me.”

Patricia looked at him, confused.

“I just come in from outside. About an hour ago I was looking out the station window and thought I saw Ernie’s truck drive by, with Judy drivin’ it,” he explained. “So I run out and jump in the cruiser, but the damn gas tank was on E, so I had to fill up at the station pump. By the time I was done with all that, Judy’d already got back to the house and—”

He looked up the the body.

“You . . . saw her driving?” Patricia’s question faltered.

“Yeah, and I’m really sorry. If my damn tank hadn’t been empty, I probably coulda gotten up here in time to stop her.”

“But . . .” The information bewildered Patricia. “But what were you doing walking in just now? You didn’t seem surprised to see that she’d committed suicide.”

“I already knew. I found her about five minutes ago.” He explained more details. “So I went back out to the cruiser to call the state cops on my radio. Then I walked back in and found you standing here.”

“Oh.” Patricia continued to look at him. Something wasn’t right. “But . . . your radio’s right there on your belt.”

Trey’s eyes darted down to his gun belt, the Motorola heavy in its leather holder. “Well, yeah, sure, but that’s just my, uh, my field radio.” Trey’s eyes shifted. He bit his lip a moment, but by then his cool delivery was falling apart. “S-see, this radio ain’t got the, uh, the state police frequency on it. Just the station frequency and the county.”

“Why the county and not the state?”

Trey blinked. “That’s . . . just the way the . . . bands work.”

Patricia didn’t consciously decide to say what she said next. She simply said it. “I don’t believe you. You’re acting like you’re lying. You’re acting like a prosecuting attorney who knows his case is bullshit.”

Trey blinked again, blank faced. Then he sat down in the chair by the kitchen table, but by the time he did so, his gun was drawn and pointing right at her. “Holy ever-livin’ shit, Patricia. Why couldn’t ya just leave it?”

Patricia’s heart hammered so loud she could hear it. “You killed my sister, didn’t you?”

“Fuck,” Trey muttered. The expletive was directed toward himself, not Patricia. “Yeah. Wanna know what I did? I snatched her after the Squatter cookout, kept her tied up for a day at one a’ old shacks way out at the Point. Fucked the daylights out of her a couple of times, then hung the bitch in the woods.” He shrugged non-commitally. “Then I throwed her in the back a’ Ernie’s truck and brought her here and just threw the same rope over the kitchen rafter. Easy. And who ain’t gonna believe it? Alcoholic and a head case to begin with, been depressed since Dwayne got offed. Looks like a typical widow who just couldn’t stand to live no more without her man. Happens every day.”

“She wasn’t the only person you murdered, was she?”

Trey snorted. “These hayseeds out here? Squatters? No-accounts like Ernie? They don’t mean shit. But you’re different. You can’t just disappear. You can’t wind up dead with a pocketful a’ dope. No one would believe it. You ain’t no redneck; you’re a big-city lawyer. Someone would come snoopin’ around.” He shook his head in the chair, suddenly exhausted. “You fucked everything up.”

Trey’s attentions seemed diverted inwardly; he wasn’t really looking at her. Patricia had backed up against the wall, the entranceway to the foyer only a foot away. But when she edged aside an inch . . .

Trey cocked his pistol. “Don’t think I won’t do it. Shit, I been killin’ folks for a month.”

“You and who else? Sutter? He must have been helping you.”

“Naw, the fat ol’ boy just wouldn’t turn crooked, even as bad as he needed the money. It was me ’n’ Dwayne at first. The idea was to make a few Squatters disappear—to scare off the rest of ’em. But it wasn’t enough, so we had to start gettin’ rougher. We did the job on the Hilds and flaked ’em with the crystal, started makin’ it look like two dope gangs in a turf war. Then we burned up the Ealds with enough shit in their shack to look like a meth lab.”

“So the state police would think the Squatters were one of the gangs?” Patricia asked.

“Sure. And it was workin’. It was Ricky ’n’ Junior Caudill we paid for the rough stuff. They come on after Dwayne got killed.”

Patricia somehow kept her fear in check. “And let me guess. Gordon Felps is the ringleader.”

Trey looked up, duly impressed. “Yeah, the money man. Don’t you get it? Agan’s Point is a shit town full a’ shit people goin’ nowhere, and I’m one of‘em. But Gordon Felps was gonna turn this place all around, turn the Point into somethin’ special, with some big payoffs for whoever helped him. Shit, all your sister had to do was sell the land to Felps and everything woulda been fine. But no, the dumb bitch couldn’t turn her back on the fuckin’ Squatters—like they were her fuckin’ little sideline family, her orphans. Like one a’ these crackpot old ladies ya read about, takin’ in all the stray cats.” He pointed up to Judy’s hanging body. “Well, this is what she gets for her loyalty to the fuckin’ Squatters. We couldn’t let her stand in our way. When little folks stand in the way of big things, they get run over. I’m tired of small-time. I’m tired of bein’ town clown on a no-dick two-man department in a shit-for-nothing town. But once Agan’s Point booms, gets all full-up with rich folks buyin’ Felps’s fancy waterfront condos? I’ll finally be a big-time police chief. It’s still gonna happen. Don’t think it won’t. We just have to adjust the game plan a little.”

“Because of me,” Patricia realized.

“Uh-huh. I think tomorrow you’ll be drivin’ back to Washington.”

“What?”

“You’ll be drivin’ back to Washington, and you’ll have an unfortunate accident in that nice Caddy of yours. Far enough away from here that your people in D.C. will believe it.”

“They’ll never believe it, Trey. And I’ve already told my boss and my husband that I suspected you and Felps of having something to do with all these murders.”

Trey smiled. “I know shit when I hear it, and what just came outta your mouth is a crock of it.” He took a breath and stood up. “Come on. Fun time first.” He stepped right up to her.

Patricia’s heart began to slug in her chest. “I have a lot of money, Trey.”

“Not enough.”

“Don’t be stupid. If you kill me, someone will find out.”

“No, they won’t.” And that was when his hand blurred upward and smacked the side of his pistol across her temple.

Was it the dream again, the nightmare? Patricia lay on the bed, naked, splayed before the window. The curtains were open now, the moonlight pouring in.

It’s the dream again, she felt sure, the dream I had before I found Judy’s body. . . .

But in the dream there’d been no curtain at all, and the clock had been ticking madly, whereas now it ticked normally. In the dream she’d been lying paralyzed on the bed, but now . . .

She craned her neck in four directions and saw that her wrists and ankles had been lashed to the bedposts. She felt as if she were drowning in dread, remembering the scene from the kitchen. Trey had murdered Judy, then staged the appearance of suicide. He and his cohorts had been doing all the killing, not a drug gang, to frame the Squatters, to get them off the land, thinking Judy would finally sell out to Felps.

But Judy didn’t, so they killed her too. . . .

Patricia gulped, nauseous.

And now it’s my turn.

Trey would probably strangle her here, then stage some kind of car wreck. But not before he had some fun with her first.

He’d been standing there all along, hidden in the shadows of the corner of the room. He took several steps until the darkness expelled him into the blaring moonlight. He was shirtless, and unbuckling his gun belt now. Then he took his pants off. Patricia was grateful there was only moonlight and not the lamp; it reduced the details. Trey’s body was lean, like a jackal’s. The thrill of murder—and of what was to come—had already erected his genitals.

“Good, you’re awake,” he said. “Ain’t no fun pluggin’ a gal who’s unconscious. Let’s see if you’re a screamer like your sister. Yeah, baby, that turns me on. And ya can scream all ya want, ‘cos there ain’t no one to hear ya.”

Now the dread was piling up on her like a physical weight. Tears drew lines from the corners of her eyes. I should’ve gone home to my husband days ago. Why did I have to stay?

The moonlight painted one side of his body icy white, and left the other half black. He pointed to the window. “Bet‘cha don’t know that a buncha’ nights since you been back, I come up here and watched ya through the window. You are some sight, I’ll tell ya, all naked and tossin’ and turnin’, playin’ with yourself in your sleep. Dirty girl.”

Her nausea trebled. “Jesus, and I thought it was Ernie.”

Trey sputtered. “Ernie? That shuck-‘n’-jive piece a’ shit? I busted his back before I lowered him in the water . . . so he could. see the crabs eatin’ him alive. The fuck.”

“But he was helping you too, wasn’t he? He burned the docks last night—the state police told me.”

Trey frowned. “That redneck couldn’t burn shit. I burned the fuckin’ docks. He tried to stop me, so I whipped his ass, flaked him with dope, and let the crabs have him.”

Even in her horror, Patricia felt astonished, even relieved. “I-I didn’t know that.”

“Bet‘cha don’t know somethin’ else too.” Trey’s voice darkened. He reached up toward his face, and then . . .

Patricia squinted in the dark.

He took his denture piece out, a bridge of some sort. Patricia came close to swallowing her own vomit at the recognition.

Now Trey’s two front teeth were missing.

“You remember me now, don’t’cha?” Trey guttered.

“My God,” she choked, “I thought it was Ernie. His two front teeth were missing when the EMTs were taking him out of the bay.”

“Aw, shit, that ain’t nothin’. When me ’n’ him got ta fightin’ on the docks, I knocked a couple of his teeth out, busted a rib too, ‘fore I jacked him out the rest a’ the way. I don’t like Ernie gettin’ credit for my balls—so make sure you know that. It was me who split your cherry on Bowen’s Field that night.”

Patricia wished she could just die now.

“I done saw ya skinny-dippin‘in the water,” Trey admitted. “Couldn’t help it—hell, I was a young buck myself back then. Chick skinny-dippin’ in the woods at night, all by herself? She’s asking for it.”

“You make me sick,” Patricia managed, her muscles tensing against the bonds.

“You were quite a prize back then, and still are,” Trey said, feeling her body up with his eyes. “’N fact, you’re a damn sight better-lookin’ now. And ya know what else I remember, baby? I remember how much you liked it. . . .”

Trey stuck the tip of his tongue through the gap in his teeth, and then the rest of the disgusting memory swamped her: her clitoris sucked through that same gap over twenty-five years ago when she lay lashed to the ground in the middle of Bowen’s Field, much the same way she lay lashed to this bed now.

“Yeah, you liked it then, and you’re gonna like it again tonight,” he promised. “You ain’t gonna be alive much longer, so you might as well just lay back and get into it.”

He began to walk toward the bed. . . .

“Wait a minute,” she said. “Answer me one thing.”

He chuckled. “Guess it’s the least I can do.”

“Set me straight on something. You’ve been killing the Squatters and making it look like drug dealers were killing them. Right?”

“Yeah. And it worked.”

“So you’ve been killing them,” Patricia repeated. “But who’s been killing you?”

Trey fell silent in the moonlight.

“Come on, Trey. Tell me the rest of the story. Dwayne was murdering Squatters; then someone murders Dwayne. Junior Caudill murdered the Hilds; then someone murdered him. Right?”

Trey hesitated but said, “Yeah.”

“And what about Junior’s brother? He was working for you and Felps, too—you said so in the kitchen. He killed the Ealds, didn’t he?”

“That’s right. Burned ’em up in their shack.”

“Why do I have this funny felling that Ricky Caudill is dead now, too? Is he?”

Trey nodded. “He died in the town jail cell, some disease.”

“Some disease? What happened to him?”

Trey was growing flustered. “I don’t know—I ain’t a doctor. It had to have been some disease or somethin’. Nobody killed him—he was in his jail cell when it happened.”

“When what happened?” Patricia insisted.

“He lost all his blood, it looked like.”

“Really? And Dwayne lost his head, but there was no evidence of a wound, and Junior lost all of his internal organs. I saw Junior’s autopsy, Trey, and the inside of his body was empty. But there was no sign of an incision. How do you take a man’s organs out of his body without cutting him open first?”

“I don’t know,” Trey said.

“Ricky Caudill lost all his blood. Were there any cuts on him? Did somebody cut his veins?”

“I didn’t inspect his fuckin’ body; all I did was bury it.”

“You said he died in his jail cell. So I guess his blood was all over the cell floor, right? Right?”

“No!” Trey yelled. “The floor was clean, and there weren’t no cuts on him!”

Silence.

The clock was still ticking, and outside Patricia could hear the cicadas’ drone. “Answer me one more thing, Trey.”

“No. Fuck it.” He grabbed a pillow off the bed. “I got me a piece a’ your ass when you were sixteen—that’ll have to do. I’m just gonna smother your ass right now and be done with it.”

He raised the pillow and was about to position it over her face, then began to lower it.

“Did Ricky Caudill get a letter on the day he died?” Patricia blurted.

The pillow froze, then fell away.

“How did you know that?” Trey’s voice ground out.

“He did, didn’t he? A sheet of paper with one word on it, one handwritten word. Wenden, something like that, right? It looked like it was written in some kind of dust or chalk. That was the letter he got, wasn’t it?”

Agan’s Point’s new chief of police just stood there in the moonlight. He didn’t reply.

“Dwayne got a letter like that, too.”

“Bullshit!”

“He did. I found it in the garbage can in the den. The postmark was the day he died. Go look if you don’t believe me. It’s probably still there. And Junior Caudill got a letter just like it, too.”

“No, he didn’t!”

“Yes, he did, Trey! I saw it in an evidence bag at the county coroner’s.”

Now Trey stood with his jaw dropping and his eyes wide, contemplating something in utter dread.

“Trey?” Patricia asked.

Trey just stared.

“Trey?”

He looked down at her almost beseechingly.

“Trey, did you get a letter like that too? Did you get one today?”

Trey’s Adam’s apple bobbed when he gulped. “It’s in my pants pocket. The postman delivered it today. No return address. But I know who it’s from, and I ain’t afraid.”

“Who’s it from, Trey? Is it from—”

“It’s from Everd Stanherd, that little shit. Just some a’ his backwoods superstitious bullshit, tryin’ to scare us. But I ain’t afraid.” He gulped again. “I don’t believe in black magic or whatever fucked-up mumbo-jumbo he thinks he’s pullin’.”

Now it was Patricia’s jaw that began to drop. “Everybody who got one of those letters died. They died because something was taken from them. Blood, organs, Dwayne’s head.”

“Ain’t nothin’ been taken from me.” But even then his words began to slur. . . .

“Trey,” Patricia implored. “I think you should turn on the light and look at yourself in the mirror. Something’s happening to you.”

“Ain’t nothin’ haplen-in’!”

But what was it? Patricia’s eyes were riveted.

“Ain’t blow-one play-ken bluthin’ flum me!” Trey shouted. He turned shakily, tried to stride out of the room, but as he did so, he wobbled in his gait. When he reached out for the doorknob, his fingers turned limp as cooked pasta; then his arm slowly bowed, then fell, tentacle-like.

Before he fell over altogether, Patricia saw his head . . . collapse, as though his skull had dissolved within the sack of his face.

A few seconds later the door creaked open, figures entering. Some held candles made from rendered fat, and in the flickering light Patricia recognized the face of Everd Stanherd.

“Wenden,” came the bizarre word from the even more bizarre Squatter accent. “It’s from our holy language, from a time even before that of the druids. . . .”

Patricia had been untied, dressed in a robe, and carried out. Then they’d driven her to someplace in the woods, for the woods truly were their home.

Everd Stanherd, his wife, and a few of the elders sat with Patricia in a circle, their candles guttering.

“We owe you no explanations, for they are all secrets. But remember this: long before Christ, God said ‘An eye for an eye.’ ”

Patricia was still regaining her senses. I’m alive. And it wasn’t a dream. . . .

“You’re a wizard or something,” she managed.

“No. I am the sawon—it means seer,” Everd intoned. His face was barely visible—all of them were.

The moonlight shimmered through the branches.

The cicadas thrummed.

“Sawon.” Patricia remembered the word. The Squatter on the pier had told them. “You’re, like, the clan wise man, some kind of ancestral leader?”

“It means . . . seer,” he repeated.

“What does wenden mean?” Patricia asked next.

One of the other elders’ voices fluttered like a death rattle. “It means gone.”

Gone. Patricia thought. Dwayne’s head. Junior’s innards. Ricky Caudill’s blood. And Trey’s bones . . . all . . . gone.

“You cursed them,” Patricia observed. “Any of them who harmed the Squatters. It was magic.”

“We can say no more,” Marthe Stanherd whispered.

Patricia couldn’t resist. “But . . . how?”

“We can say no—” Marthe began, but Everd leaned forward, overriding her. He held something in his crabbed hand. A jar? Patricia wondered. A clay pot of some sort, the size of a masonry jar. A cross adorned with the familiar squiggles and slashes of Squatter artwork had been etched into the pot.

“The burned blood,” Everd told her. “It’s our sacrament, from the sawon before me. And when I am dead, my blood will suffice for the next sacrament, for the sawon who is to follow. One of these men here tonight.”

Several of the faces in the circle looked startled when Everd removed the strange jar’s lid and passed it to Patricia.

She looked in and saw . . .

Dust?

Brownish dust. The dull chalklike substance with which the death letters had been written? There was very little left, just enough to form a rim around the bottom.

Burned blood, Patricia repeated in her mind.

“It’s consecrated,” someone said.

And someone else: “Through faith older than any religion . . .”

Patricia was confused, but she also knew that there were some things she was not meant to understand. No one was.

“I’m dying,” Everd said next, through a smile that seemed to float around them in the dark. “I will soon become the next sacrament. I will soon be wenden. I will soon be gone.”

They were all getting up now, blowing out their gullfat candles.

“You’re a good woman.” Everd was the first to walk away. “Continue to be good.”

“But where will you go?” Patricia blurted from where she sat

“From whence we came: nowhere. Everywhere. Anywhere.”

Like shifting ink spots, one by one they disappeared amongst the trees, blending into darkness.

But a final question assailed her. “Wait a minute! What about Gordon Felps?”

A hand patted her shoulder. The creviced face of the final elder whispered, “Don’t worry about Gordon Felps. We took care of him.”

When Patricia looked again, they were . . .

Gone.

It was an hour before daybreak when Patricia pulled through the gates of the compound. A sign on the fence read: FELPS CONSTRUCTION, INC. BUILDER OF FINE HOMES FOR LUXURY LIVING.

This seemed the most likely place to check first; she had no idea where Felps was staying in town. From the road she could see his truck parked in front of the office trailer.

Gravel crunched under her feet when she walked across the lot. She climbed the short wooden steps before the trailer, then paused. It occurred to her to knock but . . .

She tried the knob. The door clicked open.

He must not be here, she deduced. Darkness seemed clotted in the trailer. For some reason she wasn’t afraid of what she might find.

“Felps? Are you here?”

A voice rattled back. “Who is it?”

“Patricia White.”

A pause. “Thank God.”

“Trey’s dead. I know what happened, your plan, the people you paid to frame and murder Squatters, all of it.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

He must’ve been at the very back of the trailer; she couldn’t see anything. And his voice now was beginning to scare her. Something about it sounded so hopeless.

She felt around the wall for a light switch but couldn’t find one. Damn, I can’t see!

“Please come over here,” Felps stoically begged her. “There’s a gun in the top drawer of the desk. I want you to take it out and kill me. For God’s sake—please. Kill me.”

She never found the light switch, but in the little bit of moonlight coming in through a tiny window, she saw a flashlight sitting atop a file cabinet.

“Please,” Felps pleaded.

She snapped on the flashlight, pointed it, and . . .

Stared.

Gordon Felps looked normal at first glance, sitting in a comfortable office chair. But then Patricia noticed . . .

Oh . . . shit . . .

His sleeves were empty. She lowered the flashlight. The legs of his pants were empty as well. On the desk before him lay the letter she didn’t even need to look at now. Wenden, she thought. Gone. Gordon Felps’s arms and legs were gone.

“Don’t leave me! I can’t live like this!” he shouted.

But she was already backing out of the trailer.

“Come over here and get this gun and shoot me in the fucking head—I’m begging you!”

Patricia turned the flashlight off. She walked out of the trailer, closed the door quietly behind her, and walked back to her car.