One jogger with a mongrel dog.
Had I been followed? I felt a chill spread through my gut.
Holding my breath, I lifted the wiper blade, took the squirrel by its tail, and tossed it into the trees. Though my hands were shaking, my mind was automatically taking notes.
Stiff. Not freshly dead.
Digging Bojangles’ napkins from the glove compartment, I cleaned the glass and slid behind the wheel.
Use the adrenaline. Go with it.
Gunning the engine, I shot up the road.
The jogger and dog were rounding the corner. I turned with them.
The woman was thirtyish, and looked like she should jog more often. She wore a spandex bra and bicycle shorts, and headphones with a small antenna framed a blonde ponytail. The dog was attached to one of those blue plastic leash feeders.
I rolled down the window.
“Excuse me.”
The dog turned, the jogger did not.
“Excuse me,” I shouted, inching forward.
The dog cut to the car, nearly tripping its owner. She stopped, dropped the headphones around her neck, and regarded me warily.
The dog placed front paws on my door and sniffed. I reached out and patted its head.
The jogger appeared to relax a bit.
“Do you know Mrs. Cobb?” I asked, the calm in my voice belying my agitation.
“Uh-huh,” she panted.
“While we were visiting, something was left on my windshield. I wondered if you’d noticed any other cars near her trailer.”
“Actually, I did. That road is a dead end, so it doesn’t get much traffic.” She pointed a finger at the dog, then at the ground. “Gary, get down.”
Gary?
“It was a Ford Explorer, black. Man at the wheel. Not very tall. Good hair. Sunglasses.”
“Black hair?”
“Lots of it.” She giggled. “My husband is bald. Balding, he’d say. I notice hair on men. Anyway, the Explorer was just parked there opposite Mrs. Cobb’s driveway. I didn’t recognize the car, but it had a South Carolina tag.”
The woman called to Gary. Gary dropped to the pavement, hopped back up against my side panel.
“Is Mrs. Cobb doing all right? I try, but I don’t get over to her place very often.”
“I’m sure she’d appreciate company,” I said, my thoughts on a black-haired stranger.
“Yeah.”
Tugging Gary from my door, the woman repositioned her headphones and resumed her jog.
I sat a moment, debating my next move. Talking myself down.
Lancaster and Columbia.
Short with black hair. Good black hair.
That described Wally Cagle’s coffee partner.
That described Palmer Cousins.
That described a million men in America.
Did it describe the Grim Reaper?
What the hell was going on?
Calm down.
I took a deep breath and tried Katy’s cell phone.
No answer. I left a message on her voice mail.
Lancaster and Columbia.
I phoned Lawrence Looper to check on Wally Cagle.
Answering machine. Message.
I phoned Dolores at the USC anthropology department.
Wonderful news. Wally Cagle was coming around. No, he was not yet coherent. No, he’d had no other visitors at the university.
I thanked her and hung up.
What would another trip to Columbia accomplish? Spook Looper? Spook Palmer Cousins? Locate Katy? Thoroughly piss off Katy for trying to locate her? Thoroughly piss off Skinny Slidell?
A trip to Lancaster?
Clover was halfway there.
Wouldn’t piss off Katy.
Skinny would get over it.
Cagle wasn’t coherent yet, anyway.
I headed south on 321, then east on 9, eyes constantly clicking to the rearview mirror. Twice I spotted what I thought were black Explorers. Twice I slowed. Twice the vehicles passed me. Though outwardly composed, the chill stayed with me.
Five miles out of Lancaster, I phoned Terry Woolsey at the sheriff’s department.
“Detective Woolsey isn’t in today,” a man’s voice said.
“Can I call her at home?”
“Yes, ma’am, you can.”
“But you’re not allowed to give me the number.”
“No, ma’am, I’m not.”
Damn! Why hadn’t I gotten Woolsey’s home number?
I left Woolsey a message.
“How about a number for the county coroner?”
“That I can give you.” He did. “Mr. Park might be in.” He didn’t sound like he believed it. “If not, you could try him at his funeral home.”
I thanked him. Disconnecting, I spotted another black SUV. When I looked up from dialing the coroner’s office, the vehicle was gone. The chill intensified.
The operator was right. Park wasn’t in. I left my fourth message in ten minutes, then stopped at a gas station to ask directions to the funeral home.
The attendant conferred with his teenaged assistant, a lengthy discussion ensued, agreement was finally reached: Follow Highway 9 until it becomes West Meeting Street. Hang a right onto Memorial Park Drive, cross the tracks, hang another right about a quarter mile down, watch for the sign. If you pass the cemetery, you’ve gone too far.
Neither could remember the name of the road on which the funeral home was located.
Who needed Yahoo!? I had my own pair.
But their directions were accurate. Fifteen minutes and two turns later I spotted a wooden sign supported by two white pillars. Embossed white letters announced the Park Funeral Home and listed the services provided.
I turned in and followed a winding drive bordered by azaleas and boxwoods. Rounding my ninth or tenth curve, I spotted a gravel lot and a group of structures. I parked and surveyed the setup.
The Park Funeral Home was not a large operation. Its nerve center was a one-story brick affair with two wings and a central portion that stuck out in front, two sets of triple windows to either side of the main entrance, and a chimney on an asphalt tile roof above.
Behind the main building I could see a small brick chapel with a tiny steeple and double doors. Behind the chapel were two wooden structures, the larger probably a garage, the smaller probably a storage shed.
Ivy and periwinkle covered the ground around and between the buildings, and tangles of morning glories crawled up their foundations. Elms and live oaks kept the entire compound in perpetual shadow.
As I got out, the goose bumps did a curtain call. My mind made an addition to the services listed on the entrance sign. Funerals. Cremation. Grief support. Planning. Perpetual shadow.
Stop the melodrama, Brennan.
Good advice.
Nevertheless, the place creeped me out.
I walked to the large brick building and tried the door. Unlocked.
I let myself into a small foyer. White plastic letters on a gray board indicated the locations of reception, the arrangement room, the pallbearers’ room, and parlors one and two.
Someone named Eldridge Maples was booked into parlor two.
I hesitated. Was “arrangement room” a euphemism for office? Was “reception” for the living? White plastic arrows indicated that both venues lay straight ahead.
I stepped through the foyer door into an ornately decorated hall with deep lavender carpet and pale rose walls. The doors and woodwork were glossy white, and white faux Corinthian columns, complete with rosettes and volutes at ceiling height, hugged the walls at intervals.
Or were they Doric? Didn’t Corinthian columns have capitals at the top? No, Corinthian columns had rosettes.
Stop!
Queen Anne sofas and love seats filled every inter-columnar space. Beside each, mahogany tables held silk flowers and Kleenex boxes.
Potted palms flanked closed double doors to my right and left. A grandfather clock stood sentry at the far end of the corridor, its slow, stea
dy ticking the only sound in the crushing stillness.
“Hello?” I called out softly.
No one answered. No one appeared.
I tried again, slightly louder.
Gramps tocked on.
“Anyone here?”
It was my morning for ticking clocks.
I was considering “arrangements” versus “reception” when my cell phone shrilled. I jumped and then looked around, hoping my skittishness hadn’t been noticed. Seeing no one, I scurried out to the foyer, and clicked on.
“Yes,” I hissed.
“Yo.”
My eyes did a full orbital roll. Had the man never learned to say “hello”?
“Yes?” I hissed again.
“You in church or something?” Slidell sounded like he was working on one of his ubiquitous Snickers.
“Something.”
“Where the hell are you?”
“At a funeral. Why are you calling?”
There was a pause while Slidell mulled that over.
“Doc Larabee asked me to give you a shout. Said he had feedback from the Questioned Documents section, figured you’d want to know.”
For a moment my mind didn’t link over.
“The note you and Doc found in Aiker’s shorts?”
I didn’t bother to point out the note’s correct provenance.
“Doc said to tell you that you were right about Columbia,” Slidell said.
Irrationally, I turned my back to the hallway entrance, as though dead Mr. Maples might pose an eavesdropping threat.
“The writer of the note was going to Columbia?”
“Looks that way. QD guys used some sort of voodoo light, managed to bring out a few of the missing letters.”
“Anything else?”
A door slammed in the vicinity of the chapel or garage. I cracked the entrance door and peeked out. No one was in sight.
“The only other word they could make out was ‘cousins.’”
My brain sparked like an electrical short.
No question. Cousins dirty. Heading to Columbia.
It was like being slapped awake.
A short, muscular man with thick black hair. A FWS agent who knew nothing about bear poaching.
Palmer Cousins.
Slidell was talking, but I didn’t hear him. I was flashing back to a conversation with Ryan. The privy remains were found on Tuesday. The Grim Reaper began his photo stalking on Wednesday.
Palmer Cousins was at the Foote farm that Saturday. He knew what Boyd had found.
Had Cousins placed the squirrel on my car? Was it another Grim Reaper threat? Was he following me? Did he have Katy? Would he hurt her to get at me?
My heart was pounding, my palm sweaty against the phone.
“I’ll call you later,” I said.
Slidell sputtered.
I cut him off.
Hands trembling, I jammed the phone into my purse and pushed through the front door.
And slammed into a chest like concrete.
The man was about my height, dressed in ebony pinstripes and a dazzling white shirt.
I mumbled an apology, stepped sideways to pass.
An arm shot out. Steely fingers closed around my biceps.
I felt my body spin, saw thick black hair, my face reflected off metallic lenses, mouth wide with surprise.
Fingers splayed across my left ear. My head shot forward and cracked against the door.
Pain screamed through my skull.
I struggled to free myself. The hands held me like a vise.
Fingers clawed my hair. My head whipped back. I felt blood and tears on my cheeks.
Again, my head shot forward and slammed into wood.
My neck snapped back yet again.
Forward.
I felt an impact, heard a dull thud.
Then nothing.
I SMELLED MILDEW, MOSS, A FAINT SWEETNESS, LIKE LIVER FRYING in a pan.
I heard geese overhead, or calling to one another on some distant lake.
Where was I? Lying prone on something hard, but where?
My brain offered only disconnected fragments. The Cobb trailer. A gas station. A funeral home. Someone named Maples.
My fingers groped the ground around me.
Smooth. Cool. Flat.
I caressed the surface, breathed in the odor.
Cement.
I moved a hand over my face, felt crusted blood, a swollen eye, a lump on my cheek the size of an apple.
Another mind flash.
Pin-striped black. Antiseptic white.
The attack!
Then what?
I felt panic start to rise in my chest. My tortured gray cells shot orders, not answers.
Wake up!
Now!
Drawing both palms beneath me, I tried to push up to my knees.
My arms were rubber. Pain sluiced through my skull. A spasm gripped my stomach.
I eased back down, the cold cement good against my cheek.
My heartbeat hammered in my ears.
Where? Where? Where?
Another barked command.
Move!
Rolling onto my back, I sat up slowly. White light fired through my brain. Tremors twitched the underbelly of my tongue.
I drew my ankles to my bum, lowered my chin, and breathed deeply.
Little by little, the nausea and dizziness subsided.
Slowly, I raised my head, opened my one good eye, and peered intently into my surroundings.
The darkness was like a solid thing.
I waited for my pupil to dilate. It didn’t.
Gingerly, I rolled to my knees and stood, groping the darkness, crouching, hands extended. Blindman’s buff and I was it.
Two steps and my palms hit vertical cement. I crab-walked sideways. Three steps to a corner. Turning ninety degrees, I followed the perpendicular wall, right hand in front of me, left hand Brailling the concrete.
Oh, dear God. How small was my prison? How small? I felt perspiration form on my face, my neck.
Four steps and my left toe jammed a solid object. I pitched forward. Both my hands shot out and downward into darkness, then slammed something rough and hard as my shin cracked against an edge of something on the floor.
I cried out from the pain and trembled from fear.
Again the tremors in my mouth, the bitter taste.
I had tripped over what felt like a stone slab. I was stretched across it, my hands and arms on the floor beyond, my feet back where they had made contact with the near edge.
I melted to the cement. A tear broke from my good eye and coursed down my cheek. Another oozed from the corner of my swollen eye, burning raw flesh as it slid across.
Cooling sweat. Burning tears. Racing heart.
More images, faster now.
A bulldog man with thick black hair.
Metallic lenses. A fun house reflection of my startled face.
A ricochet flashback. Forty-eight hours. An exchange between Slidell and a feisty deb.
“What did you see?”
“Myself!”
Dolores was referring to mirrored lenses!
Sweet Jesus! My attacker was the man who had visited Cagle!
Cagle, who’d spent the last week in a coma.
Think!
My cheek was on fire. My shin throbbed. Blood pounded in my swollen eye.
Think!
Kaleidoscope images.
A jogger in headphones. Mrs. Cobb. The cuckoo. The photos.
I caught my breath.
The matches!
I jammed my fingers into a back jeans pocket.
Empty.
I tried the other, broke a nail in my frenzy.
Both front pockets.
One tissue, a nickel, a penny.
But I put the matches there. I know I did. Mrs. Cobb asked me to. Maybe I wasn’t remembering correctly. Think through the sequence more slowly.
I had a sensation of walls compressing around me. How ti
ny was the space in which I was trapped? Oh God! The claustrophobia goosed the fear and pain.
My hands trembled as I kept thrusting them from pocket to pocket.
The matches had to be there.
Please!
I tried the small square at the top of the right front pocket. My fingers closed around an oblong object, thick at one end, rough at the other.
A matchbook!
But how many?
I flipped the lid and felt with my finger and thumb.
Six.
Make them count!
Six. Only six!
Calm down! Take it by quadrants. Locate a light. Locate an exit.
Orienting toward what I hoped was the room’s center, I spread my feet, detached a match, and dragged it across the striker.
The head tore off without igniting.
Damn! Down to five!
I detached and struck another, pressing the head against the friction strip with the ball of my thumb.
The match sputtered, flamed, illuminated my shirt but little else. Holding it high, I crept forward and took a mental snapshot. From what I could see the room seemed fairly large.
Crates and cardboard cartons along the wall I’d been following. Headstone that had taken a piece of my shin lay flat on the floor. Metal shelving, perforated strips holding the shelves in place. Gap between shelving and wall.
Fire burned my fingers. I dropped the match.
Darkness.
More Braille-walking. At the end of the shelving I struck my third match.
Wooden door in the middle of the far wall.
Angling the match downward so the flame rose, I searched for a light switch.
Nothing.
The flame went out. I dropped the match, strode toward the door, groped for the knob, and twisted.
Locked!
I flung my weight against the wood, banged my fists, kicked, called out.
No reply.
I felt like screaming in anger and frustration.
Stepping back, I turned toward three o’clock, took several steps, and lit my fourth match.
A table emerged from the inky black. Objects lined up on the tabletop. Bulky items stacked beside it.
The match died.
My visual recall centers pasted the three glimpses to form a composite sketch.
The room was about twenty by twelve feet.
OK. Manageable. My claustrophobia ratcheted down a notch. My fear did not.
Boxes and shelving along one wall, table or workbench opposite, storage beside that, door at the far end.
Recentered in the room, I turned my back to the door and inched forward, planning on a closer inspection of the back wall.