A Killer in the Wind

  “Mm.”

  Properly reprimanded, I sipped my coffee. It was strong, solid, no-nonsense stuff, appropriate to the woman.

  “In any case,” she went on, “my powers to save Adam were limited. And her powers . . . her money . . .”

  “The Fat Woman, you mean. Sadie Trader.”

  “She corrupted everybody. Absolutely everybody. I don’t imagine there were ten people in that town who didn’t know what was going on—or who couldn’t at least have found out if they’d wanted to or allowed themselves to. That was her trick, you see. Her secret. She made it so you didn’t have to see. You didn’t have to know unless you wanted to, unless you made the effort—and who would? All you had to do was look away and take the money—or the investment or the job or the donation or whatever it was you needed from her. And that was how the town thrived—on her money. Her ill-gotten wealth. That was why, when it was over, and the new highway came, it was so easy for all of us to just leave the old places behind and go on to the new homes and stores we’d already built in the better locations. I suppose we were trying to move away from what we knew, but of course that was foolish. We took it with us. In some way, this whole town is still hers, Inspector Champion. This whole town is built on what we never admitted to ourselves. What we never saw happening right in front of us—but what we knew nevertheless, every single one of us.”

  I had been raising my coffee mug again but paused with my hand half-lifted. “There must’ve been . . . To declare her dead like that. To make it stick. It must’ve taken so many people.”

  Mrs. Longstreet lifted her slender shoulders. “Not so many really. My husband was the only doctor, as I say. For miles and miles. We were in the middle of nowhere then. Bob Finch and the rest of the police, of course, had to protect themselves . . . As I say, everyone was involved. By the time they got her to the hospital in Sawnee, they had given her a false name. She had prepared for that. She had any number of aliases ready, complete with social security numbers and so on. Not surprising, when you think about it. All those children who disappeared. All those little souls who fell into her clutches. Then my husband or Bob made up some story about her . . . There was another woman in the Trader house who had survived the fire . . . Something like that. Adam never told me the details, and I never made much of an effort to find them out. But it was all apparently much simpler than you would think.” She drew a long, unsteady breath of steam. “My husband always insisted he only went along with it to insure your safety—protecting the police in return for making sure you and the little girl would be taken care of. But of course . . .”

  “. . . it protected him too.”

  “Yes. And me. All of us.”

  I brought the mug the rest of the way to my lips—and froze again, just holding the mug there, not drinking, feeling the heat of the coffee on my face, my mind three decades away.

  “I remember her hand moving,” I murmured.

  Mrs. Longstreet observed me from her critical height.

  “No, I do,” I said. “On the stretcher. As they were taking her to the ambulance. I remember seeing her lift her finger. I didn’t tell Samantha. Samantha was crying and she kept saying, ‘She’s dead, she’s dead, she can’t hurt us anymore.’ I wanted her to go on believing that. So she wouldn’t be afraid.”

  “Of course.”

  “But I saw her finger move. That’s how I knew. All this time—I knew she was alive, I knew she was still out there somewhere, still in the wind. That’s why I was hunting her. Without even knowing it. I didn’t remember, but I knew.”

  For a long while after that, we both sat there without speaking, both of us holding our mugs on the counter, both of us gazing distractedly into space, into our own thoughts and memories.

  “If it’s any consolation,” Mrs. Longstreet said finally, “it finished him—my husband. That night—it killed him as surely as a bullet. The drinking after that—it became outrageous. Truly, it beggared belief. It only took him a year to make an end of it.” She frowned. “I felt that very deeply. If that’s any consolation. I took his death—his suicide really—as a personal failure. I suppose it sounds horribly old-fashioned now, but I had tried to make a better man of him. I felt it was my duty as his wife. We still did that then in these backward parts.” She shook her head at something I couldn’t see. A strand of silver hair fell across her brow. She lifted a finger and set it back in place—an unconscious gesture, girlish and appealing. “I did always intend to make it right, you know. To tell someone. The state police. Or some newspaper somewhere. Somehow, there were always so many . . . considerations. Loyalty to my husband. Just . . . the number of people involved. One wondered sometimes if one even had the right to clear one’s conscience at the expense of so many other people. Especially after they became old and were sick and suffering, so many of them. Most of them are gone now—the key players . . .” Her hand rose absently to touch the silver cross at her throat. “And so the days go by . . .”

  With a sharp intake of breath, she came back from whatever distant place she’d been, and I came back, as far as I could. She sipped her tea. She smiled very faintly, a sad smile. I remembered when I’d been sitting in the house alone, waiting for her, how the house had seemed to have a personality: dignified and self-possessed and melancholy with time. It was her personality, I realized now.

  “And here we are,” she said.

  “Here we are.”

  She cocked her head a little and regarded me in what I thought was an odd sort of way, inward and distant. “So then . . . what else?”

  “I need her name,” I said. “The alias your husband gave her. I need to know what it is.”

  “Oh, I don’t know that,” said Mrs. Longstreet. “I never did. You’ll have to go to the hospital to find it. St. Mary’s.”

  “St. Mary’s,” I echoed in a low murmur. I remembered the words scrawled on Samantha’s notes.

  “In Sawnee. It was the closest place with a burn unit, where they thought they might be able to help her. They’ll have her alias there. They’ll have everything you’re looking for.”

  I shook my head. “A patient’s records. They’re confidential. They won’t give them to me. And it was thirty-one years ago. They might not even have them anymore.”

  She smiled at me—a strange smile too, I thought. Gentle, but somehow . . . just strange. “They’ll have them. They’ll give them to you. Trust me. It isn’t far. A hundred miles or so.”

  I found myself gazing at her. I felt she was trying to tell me something—that there was something hidden beneath her words. But she spoke again before I could think it through.

  “Are you a merciful man, Inspector?” she asked me.

  I thought about it. “Not really. More of a justice guy, I think.”

  She lifted her chin. It made her look regal—even more regal. “You’re going to kill her, aren’t you? Sadie Trader. That’s your plan, isn’t it?”

  I figured it was just as well not to answer.

  “And so it all just continues,” Mrs. Longstreet declared. “The violence, the cruelty—it all just goes on and on.”

  “I guess that’s one way to look at it.”

  “Is there another?”

  “Sure,” I said. “She’s evil. And soon she’ll be dead.”

  “And the world will be a better place.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  She smiled again, that same, strange smile. Then she startled me by reaching out her hand toward my face. The gesture took me aback. I recoiled from her, at first. But it was just her hand, an old lady’s open hand, and I came forward again in my seat and she laid her palm against my scarred cheek. Her skin was soft with age and warm from the mug of tea.

  “Go to St. Mary’s,” she repeated, quietly but firmly. “You’ll find all the answers there.”

  14

  St. Mary’s

  I SHACKED UP FOR the night in some hellhole or other. The Roadside Cottages, I think it was called. I checked into a
little box of aluminum, plywood, and linoleum with a bed like a board and a bathroom the size of a sink. I went into the bathroom and coaxed the faucet into coughing some cloudy water into a cloudy glass. I washed down half a tablet of Z. I was hoping to taper off the stuff slowly this time, hoping to ease my way clean without all the craziness of going cold turkey.

  Fat chance. I went to sleep, fully dressed, on the stiff bed, and almost instantly found myself walking in a nightmare world more real than reality. I was a child again. I was lost in a forest. There was a wind moving through the spring leaves, making a high, eerie singing sound. I turned to look beside me and there, suddenly, was Samantha—Samantha as a little girl—holding my hand, watching me, her eyes wide and staring.

  “What’s that noise?” I asked her.

  “It’s the dead children,” she explained.

  So it was. They were all around us, I noticed now, gray figures here and there among the trees, some even sitting in the branches. That high eerie singing sound was the sound of their voices. They were reciting their stories to the empty woods, each repeating a fragment of the whole, the sentences overlapping into a single, simultaneous narrative . . .

  They kept me alive a long time . . .

  I wanted to be dead but when they killed me, I was afraid . . .

  I want to be dead now, every day, but I still have to live . . .

  I cried every night for my mommy, but they said she didn’t want me and she would never come back . . .

  I turned my eyes from one to another of them, discovering each gray form as if it were appearing suddenly among the gray mazes of branches and vines. As the weird whispered song of their laments went on, another sound, another whisper rose beneath them, growing louder by the second.

  I searched the forest for the source of that other noise until my gaze rested on Samantha again, little Samantha staring up at me.

  “The fire is coming,” she said.

  Then the fire came, from all around us, a circle of flame eating in from the periphery of the forest, closing over the trees, devouring the trees and devouring the ghostly forms of the children standing among them. Very quickly, I could taste the ashes on my tongue. I felt the harsh, raw, rasping smoke in my throat. The circle of fire closed on itself, consuming the trees and the children and everything but me and Samantha, who were at its center . . .

  And then it closed in on us, the heat raging . . .

  I woke with a wordless cry. I lay gasping for breath, my eyes wide, my heart pounding. I stared up into the shadows, into the low, dark cobwebbed rafters of the Roadside Cottages. It was a long time before I calmed down. Then, sweating, I turned my head on the pillow.

  Stark—the skull-faced killer—sat in a chair right beside me.

  He grinned. Casually, he lifted a Glock and pulled the trigger, firing a slug into my stomach. I doubled over in agony, clutching myself . . .

  But it was all just part of the dream. All just part of the process of withdrawal.

  I had another flash of vision in the morning, on the road to Sawnee. I had taken another small dose of Z just before setting out. Now I was driving on a two-lane past a patch of woods dappled by sun and shadow. I saw a figure watching me as I went by. I turned back to scan the woods. There was no one there. But I had taken my eyes off the road too long. When I faced forward, I was heading toward a ditch at the shoulder. I wrenched the wheel—too hard. The tires screamed. The car skidded and spun, the rear fishtailing away as the front went into the oncoming lane. I just had time to catch sight of a truck—coming out of nowhere—speeding toward me. I kept turning the wheel, fast as I could, into the skid. The Mustang did a one-eighty. I forced it back into the right lane, going backward—back the way I’d come—just as the truck thundered by my window, inches away, air horn blaring. The car shivered with its backwash. Then the truck was gone—speeding away. I eased my foot down on the brake, bringing the Mustang under control.

  I guided the car off the road, onto the shoulder. I cracked the door open and stumbled out, nearly falling into the ditch myself.

  I leaned against the side of the car, my head bowed as I fought to catch my breath. Then I lifted my head—and there was Samantha.

  It was not the child Samantha. It was the woman. Walking toward me through the woods. She was wearing a flowered dress that blended with the scene. She gazed at me steadily, a slight smile playing on her lips, as she passed through beams of sunlight and into fields of shadow and out again. She looked so solid, so real, that even after I understood what she was, I could barely believe it—and I couldn’t turn away.

  I stood there watching in fascination as she stepped into another column of light, closer now, smiling now more fully, serene and kind and lofty and beautiful. Another step and she was once more in the blue shadows of the forest, melding with the blue shadows, becoming one of them. She did not come out of them again. She was gone.

  I knew by the way I ached with disappointment that I still loved her. I had loved her ever since we were kids, I guess, and I had never stopped. More than that: We were part of each other. I understood that now. Maybe it was because we’d gone through hell together, or maybe that was just the way we were made from the beginning. Like Stark when I killed his brother, I had lost a piece of myself when I lost her, when they took her away from me after the fire, when they sent her off to her foster homes and me off to mine, so that we never saw each other again . . .

  How did I hallucinate her as a woman then? I thought suddenly. If I only knew her as a child, how did I know what she would look like as a woman . . . ?

  I shuddered as a chill, eerie feeling went up my spine.

  I pushed off the car and got back in behind the wheel and drove on.

  St. Mary’s Hospital. There was a sign by the side of the road. There was a pair of stone gateposts nearby leading onto a driveway that curled out of sight up a tree-lined hill.

  Right away, I knew by the look of the place that something was wrong.

  The town of Sawnee lay behind me. It had probably been a nice little place once. But the farms around it had died and the town itself was ailing. The cluster of brick stores at the center of it were black with grime. Some of their windows were boarded. Most of the cars by the curb were old. The houses on the outskirts were uncared for, many of the windows dark, many of the lawns unmown.

  Beyond that, there was a winding road. A motel or two. A forest. Nothing. Then the sign: St. Mary’s.

  I turned the Mustang up the hospital drive. I passed between the gateposts. There was still a wrought-iron gate on one post—only on one—green with verdigris, chained back, half off its hinges. There was a rusted sign on the other: No Trespassing. Something wrong.

  The road twined through the trees, a long way. Sunlight and shadow played on the Mustang’s windshield, the reflections of the forest flashing on the glass. The haze of the drug was passing, but my thoughts were still jumbled and uncertain. As I felt myself getting closer to the hospital, I felt a rising anxiety. I caught glimpses of the building now through the trees: a large red-brick structure. But something wrong . . . I thought of the look on Mrs. Longstreet’s face—that strange smile of hers. Go to St. Mary’s. You’ll find all the answers there. What was she trying to tell me? What did she know that she wouldn’t say?

  Or was I being crazy, paranoid? Withdrawing from the Z, even slowly like this, had to have an effect. The dreams. The hallucination by the side of the road. Maybe this dread I felt was just another symptom.

  I came around the last bend in the drive and saw the place head-on. It was a massive brick ziggurat, the first four stories three broad wings across, the next two stories narrower, the next narrower still, and then a structure on top like a pyramid’s peak, as if the place were some sort of ancient temple.

  There was a cul-de-sac out front. I stopped the car at the entrance to it. I could see even from there that the hospital’s broad glass doorways were chained shut. The glass was opaque with dust and overrun with climbing vines
—where there was glass. Some of the tall panes had been replaced with plywood boards. I bent forward to look up at the building through the windshield. Window after window, rising up to the highest story, all dark. Some of the glass broken.

  The place had been abandoned.

  I shut off the car. Got out. The quiet of the day folded over me. A spring breeze whispering in the forest below. Traffic noises whispering somewhere in the distance. And then emptiness—that high hum of emptiness—surrounding everything.

  I thought of my dream. The voices in the forest. The gray ghosts of children standing among the branches. Telling their sad stories in a song like a breeze. The thought made me shiver.

  I walked up the cul-de-sac, my eyes lifted to the louring, deserted building. Its shadow fell over me and the air grew cool.

  Go to St. Mary’s.

  Why did the old woman say that? Was it some kind of trick, some kind of trap? Was Stark behind it all, somehow using Mrs. Longstreet to lure me to this abandoned spot?

  But no, I didn’t believe that. I didn’t believe she was speaking under duress or playing a role. She struck me as just an honest lady with an old sin on her conscience. I thought she wanted me to know the truth . . .

  Then another idea came to me—an idea that made more sense: Mrs. Longstreet had known who I was. It had to be because Samantha had told her. Maybe Samantha had also told her to send me here . . .

  I stopped. I stood still in the building’s shadow, the old hospital looming over me. I looked up and scanned the dark windows slowly.

  Finally—as happened so often since I’d started taking the drug—I caught a movement at the corner of my eye. I turned to it—to a window on the second story.

  And there was Samantha. Standing behind the glass. Watching me.

  The moment I saw her, she sank back into the darkness of the building and was gone. I was so crazy with the drug and the memories, the dreams and the visions and all that, I had no idea —no clue—whether she had been real or not.