Fury

  But he did not.

  He’d committed himself to finding out what had happened with the missing inmate and he was going to stay here as long as it took to make that happen.

  After returning to sublevel 3, he put on a pot of coffee, settled down in front of the computer monitors again, and went back to analyzing the footage.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-FOUR

  9:30 A.M.

  Daniel stood in front of the upstairs bathroom mirror at his friend’s house.

  On Friday night’s bus ride to Coulee High, he’d looked out the window and noticed a faint reflection caused by the dim lights inside the bus. The image had overlapped with what he could see of the moonlit landscape outside and the two had merged, becoming one in that pane of glass.

  Two realities filtering across each other.

  Becoming one.

  At the time, he’d reassured himself that he knew the difference between what was real and what wasn’t, but since then he’d become less and less sure of that fact.

  Despite himself, the wolves in Daniel’s heart snapped at each other.

  The protagonist can also be the antagonist.

  We all play both roles in our lives.

  A person can be his own worst enemy.

  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

  He stared at his reflection.

  It was just a mirror. No way to see through it. No way to see another world.

  But as he looked at himself and thought of Betty and the texts and the lighthouse and those words, “Lost Cove is the key,” he saw a wound open up on his neck, an ugly slit about six inches long. It began seeping blood and should have hurt terribly, but he couldn’t feel a thing.

  However, when he drew his hand across it and looked at his fingers, there was a smear of blood on them.

  Then the pain began.

  And not just from the ragged incision, but also from inside it.

  Something was moving around in there.

  Daniel leaned forward and tilted his head so he could get a closer look at the cut.

  As he did, a black worm emerged, thick and writhing and covered with a glaze of fresh blood.

  It was the same kind of creature as the ones that’d crawled off the sheet of paper Friday night and burrowed into his arm.

  This one started down toward the neckline of the T-shirt he was wearing, but he smacked at it and felt it squish to a juicy death beneath his fingers.

  Immediately, half a dozen more came out.

  He managed to brush them aside or crush them, but then a stream of others followed, teeming out of the cut, slithering across his neck and sliding down under the shirt. He gasped, ripped it off, and tried to knock them away, but others moved up the side of his head and across his chin toward his mouth.

  There were too many.

  “No,” he cried as one of them went for his ear.

  He snatched at it, but it broke in half and the part that was free wriggled in, disappearing into his ear.

  “No!”

  A knock at the door. “Daniel? Are you okay?”

  Kyle’s words sliced through the blur.

  Shattered it. Sent images fleeting into midair.

  The worms disappeared.

  Daniel blinked.

  Then again.

  Nothing there.

  He eyed himself in the glass. No bloody wound. No dark, squirming worms. Nothing out of the ordinary. The twitching, itchy sensations in his neck had gone away. He felt nothing in his ear canal.

  “Daniel?” Kyle repeated.

  “Yeah.” He did his best to keep his voice calm. “I’m good.”

  “You sure?”

  He was inspecting himself in the mirror as he ran his fingers across his healed, unscathed neck. “I’m sure.”

  Ever since his blurs had first occurred they’d seemed to be his subconscious’s way of telling him something.

  Okay, but what is that supposed to be telling you? A stream of black worms swarming out of your neck? Good luck deciphering that one, Daniel.

  Well, he knew this much: the writing from English class that’d come to life and become those worms had been about the lighthouse.

  So is this supposed to be your way of telling yourself to hurry up and go out there, or to stay away from the place for good?

  He didn’t know, but the weirder things got, the more he started to feel like he was just barely hanging on to the edge of a cliff, not sure how long he could hold on.

  And not sure what it would mean for his sanity if he happened to let go.

  When Daniel returned to the bedroom, Kyle informed him that Nicole had been able to rearrange her schedule and was set to babysit. “I told my mom I wanted to see you today. She heard you were in that hospital and she told me that it would be fine visiting you as long as Michelle was taken care of.”

  “At least you gave her the truth.”

  “Enough of it, anyway. She took off to meet with Glenn. Nicole should be here any minute. Oh, and I contacted my uncle—we’re good to go in Bayfield. He’s got a rowboat waiting for us. He said there’s some ice surrounding the island, but he thinks we’ll be able to get close enough to at least get a good look at the lighthouse, even if we can’t actually make it to shore.”

  “That might not be enough.”

  “It might be all we can do. I doubt the ice will be thick enough to walk across.”

  A few minutes later, the ringing doorbell told them that Nicole had arrived.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-FIVE

  As soon as she was upstairs in Kyle’s bedroom, she threw her arms around Daniel.

  It felt so good to hold her, like an anchor back to what was real. He drew her close and, at least for the moment, stopped thinking of blurs and mental asylums and his missing father.

  Here was something good, something right, and he didn’t want to do anything that would make it slip away.

  At last she stepped back and asked him breathlessly how he was feeling, how he’d gotten out of the hospital, if he’d heard anything about his dad, and how he’d managed to get back to Beldon.

  Kyle went to the living room to watch Michelle while Daniel brought Nicole up to speed.

  She listened intently as he told her about Mr. Zacharias and his theory that the man who’d been brought over from the prison had escaped and gone after his dad.

  “So,” she said, “this Zacharias guy transported that prisoner to the institute and now he’s working against them? Does that make any sense to you?”

  “I’m not sure how it all fits together, but I did get the feeling that he really does want to help me find my dad.”

  “He’s going to be okay, right? Your dad, I mean?”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll find him.” Daniel wanted to say more, wanted to promise her that his dad was going to be fine, of course he was, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to say it. In truth, he didn’t even know that they were going to find him at all, but he felt like he needed to tell Nicole something, and reassuring her at least a little bit felt like the right thing to do.

  “Yeah.” She nodded. “Okay.”

  “Kyle and I should probably get going.”

  He waited at the top of the stairs behind the banister while Nicole went down to get set with Michelle.

  The four-year-old knew Nicole from previous times when she’d babysat for Mrs. Goessel and now she went right up to her, took her hand, and asked if she wanted to see her new stuffed puppy named Penguin.

  “Your puppy is named Penguin?”

  “Uh-huh,” Michelle said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “I named him myself.”

  After the two of them were in Michelle’s bedroom and the door was closed, Kyle signaled for Daniel to join him.

  “Anything you need before we go?”

  The only clothes Daniel had with him were the ones he’d been wearing when he left the hospital. “If we’re going to be out on Lake Superior, I’ll need some warmer clothes.”


  As he and Kyle were about to head out the door, Daniel paused.

  He hadn’t spoken with his mom since his dad had disappeared and he felt like he should talk with her, fill her in—but when he brought it up, Kyle said, “What if she tells my mom that you called her? Don’t contact her yet. Just let it be.”

  “If she hasn’t found out yet, she’ll hear soon enough that I broke out of that psych hospital. She’s already got my dad to worry about. I don’t want her to be freaked out when she hears I’m missing too.”

  “Dude, she took off. It’s on her, not on you.”

  “She’s just at her brother’s house to celebrate Christmas.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “She has a right to know what’s going on. She is my mom.”

  “Well, she sure hasn’t been acting like it.”

  Sharp words. And just a few days ago Daniel might have said them himself, but when he’d spoken with his mom on Saturday she’d told him that she had left in order to protect him and his dad.

  She sees things too. She knows what it’s like.

  Daniel hadn’t gone into all that with Kyle earlier and he didn’t want to explain everything right now. “I hear what you’re saying, but there’s more going on here. I need to let her know I’m okay.”

  At last Kyle gave in.

  In order to keep his mom from finding out he was with Kyle, when Daniel put the call through he used the app that disguises the sender’s phone number.

  She didn’t pick up. When it went to voicemail, he left a quick message: “Mom, what they’re saying I did to Dad—it’s not true. I didn’t hurt him. I’m okay and I’m going to find him. I promise.”

  As he hung up, he realized that in the last five minutes he’d promised two people that he was going to find his dad, and he had no idea how he was going to keep that promise to either one of them.

  Sheriff Byers opened his eyes.

  He couldn’t see much, but with the light that slipped in beneath the door about twelve feet away he could make out that, apart from the bare metal cot he was lying on, he was in an empty, windowless room.

  He tried to sit up, but pain shot through his right side and he ended up dropping back onto the cot again.

  Looking down, he saw that his shirt was gone and his side had been bandaged, the place where he’d been stabbed covered with a fresh dressing.

  Someone had handcuffed his left wrist to the cot’s frame.

  How did you get here?

  He remembered being attacked, yes, but he didn’t know how much time had passed since then. However, he had the sense that he’d been wavering in and out of consciousness for quite a while.

  Maybe he’d been drugged.

  Since his torso was bandaged, it meant that whoever had brought him here was trying to keep him alive, at least for the time being.

  Interesting.

  A ransom?

  Possibly.

  Where are you? What’s going on? Get your bearings.

  The room smelled of pine, with a touch of wood smoke from a fireplace or wood burning stove, and in the faint light he could tell that the walls were made of logs.

  After working in law enforcement in this county for nearly twenty years, he knew a lot of the houses in the area. As far as he could tell, he’d never been in this residence before.

  It might have been any one of the dozens of cabins that surrounded the lakes in the region.

  Inspecting the cot, he saw that the legs had been nailed to the floor to keep him from moving it.

  He listened.

  Someone was in a nearby room. It sounded like he or she was going through a cupboard of pots and pans.

  On Saturday night, in the instant before he’d been stabbed, he’d recognized the man who was attacking him, and now he wondered if it was the same guy in the other room.

  Brandon Hollister: a killer he’d caught two years ago. He was in his twenties and had been one of the bad influences on Lancaster Bell’s son, Ty.

  But he was bright and had made it into medical school.

  One night when he was back home for the weekend, he’d stabbed a neighbor in a bar fight after they’d both had too much to drink.

  The victim had died, and Hollister’s claim that it was self-defense didn’t fly with the jury. He’d been sentenced to life plus fifty years for aggravated battery, first degree murder, and a slew of other charges related to fleeing and resisting arrest after the incident.

  How he’d escaped from the Derthick State Penitentiary was a mystery to the sheriff—and so was the fact that no news had come through dispatch about it on Saturday afternoon or evening.

  Why wouldn’t the warden have released word to the law enforcement community?

  Unless he didn’t know the guy was missing.

  But how would that have happened?

  And if Hollister is acting out of revenge for you catching him, why would he have bandaged you up rather than just letting you die?

  Sheriff Byers was tempted to call out to whoever was in the cabin with him, but realized that if it was Hollister, it might be better not to let him know he was conscious. Instead, he should probably spend some time assessing the situation and trying to find a way out of here.

  His gun and radio were gone, as well as the keys to the handcuffs.

  Okay.

  Priorities: lie still to keep the stab wound from tearing open, and try to figure out a way to pick those cuffs.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-SIX

  Kyle and Daniel grabbed a quick lunch on the way, and arrived in Bayfield at quarter to twelve. They parked in front of the Apostle Islands Sailing Adventures & Boat Rentals office on the Lake Superior shore.

  Just beyond the building, the lake stretched out dark and foreboding toward the islands. Daniel could see one of them a few miles offshore and even though he wasn’t positive which one it was, from studying the maps online yesterday, he guessed it was probably the one they were looking for—Madeline Island.

  Though most of the lake was still open water, there were some stray ice floes and it looked like a narrow strip of ice did encircle the island and also spread out from the shoreline near Larry’s business. Some of it was missing near his dock, where he’d apparently cleared it away so he could get his boats onto the lake.

  A skiff with an outboard motor waited for them.

  “Okay,” Daniel said as they approached the front door, “we can’t tell him he’s lending a boat to someone who just escaped from an insane asylum.”

  “Or someone who was found covered with blood at a crime scene where his dad went missing,” Kyle added.

  “That too.”

  Larry had joined the Peace Corps after graduating college with an agricultural degree. He’d volunteered in Africa for a couple of years before returning to the States and moving up here to work for the guy who owned this boat rental business. A year later, the man was killed in a snowmobile accident. He didn’t have any family and had left the business to Larry, who’d been running it ever since.

  Daniel had never met him, only heard about him, and now when Kyle’s uncle opened the door, he had the sense that he would have fit in better on the beaches of Jamaica than a small town here in northern Wisconsin. Wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt, and with dreadlocks and scholarly glasses, he looked like a mixture of a hippie beach bum and tax accountant.

  After a warm greeting, he invited them in.

  Kyle simply introduced Daniel as his friend—not as someone who had hallucinations, heard dead people talk, or went sleepwalking carrying hunting knives around the house.

  Better safe than sorry.

  “Right on,” Larry said amiably. “Well, there’s no wind today so you should be okay. It’s about two miles to Madeline Island. I checked the motor—she’s working fine but there are oars in the boat in case you run into trouble. You know how cold it is out there, so don’t do anything stupid. And life jackets: I want you both wearing them.”

  Kyle nodded. “Okay.”


  “Tell me again why you need to go to—no, wait, don’t tell me. I probably don’t want to know—or do I?”

  “It has to do with one of my relatives,” Daniel replied. “He used to be a keeper out there at the Lost Cove Lighthouse.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “That place hasn’t been in service in years.”

  “This was back in the thirties.”

  “Huh.” Daniel couldn’t tell what Larry might have been thinking.

  “No one really goes up there anymore,” Larry noted.

  “We just found out about him. We didn’t want to have to wait until spring to see where he worked.”

  That was true enough.

  “So, curiosity?”

  Daniel and Kyle shared a look. “Right,” Daniel replied.

  Larry nodded toward Kyle. “And your mother? She’s fine with this?”

  He opened his mouth as if he were going to answer, then closed it again.

  “Aha.” Larry evaluated that. “Well, clearly there’s more going on here, but I think I’ll opt for plausible deniability—as long as you guys promise to be careful out there.”

  “We will,” Daniel assured him.

  On the dock, Larry handed them each a life jacket, then indicated the rowboat. “It’s designed more for stability than for speed. Most people, they come up here and want to tool around the islands for a day or two. All I care about is them being safe.”

  “Right,” Kyle said.

  Larry dug a compass and a map of the islands out of his coat pocket. “If you’re just going to Madeline you shouldn’t need these, but there’s a chance of snow and the visibility might be limited. You should be fine, but if it does start snowing it’s pretty much a straight shot east. The lighthouse is on the northern tip of the island, on the other side of an inlet.”

  “Great.” Daniel accepted the map and compass. “Thanks.”