You Will Pay, Page 4

  Trysting spot? Seriously? Are you that deluded? You mean fucking place, don’t you? Because that’s what it is, a nearly decrepit building that’s rotting away, a hideout where you can screw Tyler’s brains out, all behind his bitch of a fiancée’s back. You came to this place with the intent of fucking him, and possibly or maybe even probably you figured you might get pregnant, even secretly hoped that it would be so. Right? In the back of your mind, you knew this might happen. Trysting spot? Oh, my God. Get a grip, Monica. Quit romanticizing it. What’s wrong with you? Call it what it is, for crying out loud!

  She turned away from the nagging voice and stepped around the clearing to what had once been a wide porch but now listed, the floorboards rotting, the gutters falling away.

  Would he be inside?

  Waiting?

  Thump!

  She jumped at the sound and whipped her head around.

  What the hell was that?

  Her heart started jackhammering.

  Was someone out here? Something? Some kind of wild animal? What? Deer? Elk? Cougar? Maybe just a skunk or rabbit or . . .

  Ears straining over her drumming heart, she held her breath but heard nothing more over the rush of the wind and the dull roaring of the surf. She stared into the surrounding forest, where wind-twisted trunks and spreading branches ringed the clearing in front of the abandoned chapel. Half a century ago, before the newer structure had been built closer to the other buildings of the campground, this had been the designated place of worship, the chapel in the woods.

  She saw no one.

  No dark figure moving stealthily in the shadows.

  No wild creature prowling through the trees.

  Not one thing.

  Whatever had made the noise was either gone, skulking off into the woods, or . . . silently watching and waiting.

  Waiting for what? You’re letting your paranoia and your guilt get to you.

  It’s nothing. Just your ridiculous imagination. Now, get on with it.

  Despite her rationalization, Monica’s skin was still prickling as she skirted the open area, keeping close to the edge of the woods as if unseen eyes were tracking her. Then, telling herself she was an idiot, she sprinted across a stretch of silvery dry dune grass and onto the sagging porch.

  Her shoes scraped against the sandy boards as she reached the double doors and tried one of the handles. The door fell open, squeaking as if in protest, but luring her into the even darker interior.

  “Tyler?” she whispered, crossing the threshold and hearing the whistle of the wind through the rotting roof. The interior smelled of moist earth, rot, and mold, the floor soft. “Ty?”

  No response.

  She yanked the door shut behind her.

  Swallowed hard.

  As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she focused on the wall behind the altar, where a tall stained-glass window rose to the ceiling. The curved top of the panes were tucked high under the rafters, but the window itself stretched nearly to the floor. A few of the panes were missing or cracked, but for the most part, the window was intact. Tonight moonlight slanted through the colored panes of a weeping Mother Mary.

  Monica couldn’t make out the Madonna’s features in the gloom, but she remembered them from the lazy afternoons or early twilight hours when she and Tyler had sneaked to this quiet, nearly forgotten church.

  “Ty?” she called again, moving slowly through the broken pews, toward the crumbling altar. “Are you here?”

  What a stupid question. Obviously, if he were here, he would answer.

  Nothing but the whistle of the wind.

  He’d stood her up? Or had he been the noise in the woods? Was he playing with her? Hiding in the shadows? Ready to leap out at her and scare the living hell out of her?

  “If this is a game, it isn’t funny,” she said. She listened hard and felt as if she wasn’t alone. She couldn’t see anyone, didn’t smell or hear anything that would suggest someone was nearby, but she sensed a presence. “Ty?” she whispered, his name sounding tremulous. She licked her lips. Nerves tight as bowstrings, she rotated slightly, peering into the umbra. From the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of a shadow, a fleeting darkness skittering across the colored panes of the window.

  Oh, Jesus.

  Her heart nearly stopped. “Ty?” she whispered again, and licked her lips. She was suddenly sweating, and she could barely breathe as she made her way up the aisle between the pews. Like a damned bride on the way to the altar, ready to pledge her life, her love to her groom. For a split second she envisioned it all, a real wedding, complete with Tyler standing at the altar near the preacher. Wearing a tux and his trademark cocky grin, he would watch her entrance and tears of joy would fill his eyes.

  But now, in this moldering chapel, her fantasy withered and died just as had the fragile little life she’d so recently carried. Her throat grew thick with tears, but she shrugged off the case of the blues over what might have been.

  “I’m not kidding,” she said to the still air. “If you’re here, Ty, we really need to talk. I have to tell you that—”

  The toe of her running shoe hit something hard that protruded into the walkway. She nearly stumbled, only catching herself by grabbing the back of a rotting pew. “What the—?” The rest of the aisle had been clear, but . . . She peered down at her feet but couldn’t make out the obstruction, then found her flashlight again and flicked it on, shining the beam on the floor.

  She was looking at a bare foot. A scream erupted from her throat as she quickly shone the light up the tanned, bare leg past the man’s limp dick and upward across a naked torso and neck to Ty’s face, his eyes fixed as if staring at the rotting ceiling over the Madonna.

  “Noooo!” she shrieked, dropping the flashlight, her stomach lurching. “No, no . . . Oh, God, no!” Hyperventilating, her gaze fastened to the still form, she backed up, her rubbery legs threatening to buckle.

  Get ahold of yourself. He may not be dead. You have to check! Don’t be a coward.

  But he was gone, she knew it, her fears confirmed by the dark red stain spreading beneath him. Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God!

  Shaking, she forced herself forward, inching toward his beautiful body. “Ty,” she whispered. “Ty . . .” She fell to the uneven floorboards and eased between the pews where his body was wedged. His flesh was still warm.

  This wasn’t happening! No way! Not to Ty. It had to be a dream—a fucking nightmare. That was it. Shaking, she touched his chest, springy hair beneath her fingertips. “Oh, God, Ty, please, please . . . don’t be . . . don’t let this . . .” Her voice broke and she pushed her head closer to his, resting her ear to next to his nose, silently praying for any indication of breath. Was there just a whisper of air coming through his nostrils? She squeezed her eyes shut, her scraped knee wet with his blood.

  Surely there was just the hint of a rasp, just a bit of air flowing? Please, God . . . please!

  “Ty,” she said next to his lips, but there was no response. Nothing. And the air she’d thought she’d heard escaping from his lungs ceased to exist. “Come on. Come on.” The blood was flowing slowly, so surely his heart was still pumping. Right? Wasn’t that what she’d been taught at that first-aid course? Or was it running because of gravity? Sliding on the listing floor. “Ty, it’s me, Monica!” She placed her fingers at his neck, searching for any sign of pulse, but he lay still. Unmoving. And she couldn’t find a damned pulse.

  No! No, no, no!

  He was gone . . . Dead. Never knowing that he wasn’t going to be a father.

  The knife. Jo-Beth. Oh. God. No.

  Fear coiled within her. She thought she might throw up. Ty! Oh, Ty! She had to go, to get help, maybe an ambulance, though she knew deep in her heart it was too late.

  “I’m so, so sorry,” she murmured, and tears welled in her eyes.

  How had this happened? Why?

  You know why. Jo-Beth found out. She came here with the damned knife and killed him. Oh, dear Christ
. . .

  Should she roll him over? Try to staunch the blood, or just leave and tell someone that—

  Scraaaape!

  Her head whipped up.

  What the hell was that?

  The noise sounded close. Inside.

  Her heart flew to her throat.

  Fear spurted through her blood.

  Friend or foe?

  Hands on the back of the pew, she pulled herself to her feet. “Who’s there?” she demanded anxiously, ready to sprint out of this place.

  “Monica,” a voice whispered from the shadows, from somewhere at the back of the chapel. Her skin crawled. Was there a smile, a sound of satisfaction in the low rumble? “I knew you’d come.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Cape Horseshoe

  Now

  Lucas

  Caleb Carter didn’t believe in rules. In fact, he considered anyone who followed a damned rule to be a gutless pansy-ass. And that went double for laws about huntin’ and fishin’ and livin’ off the damned land. The Federal government? Bunch of city-slicker, bureaucratic know-nothings in Washington, D.C., most of whom had never set foot in the goddamned wild, never lifted a .22 to a shoulder, never hoisted a crab pot over the side of a bridge, and damned well had never taken down a bull elk, much less dressed it and hauled it out of the woods.

  Pansy-asses.

  Damned politicians knew nothin’. Not about his life. Not about livin’ off the grid. Not about the West, for Christ’s sake. Pissed him off. And the fact that the little town he’d grown up in, Averille, had grown to the point that it had a goddamned McDonald’s, as well as the damned sheriff’s department, really chapped his hide. Of course there had always been the law, being the county seat and all, but hell, the department, as well as the town, had grown over the course of his lifetime too much. Too damned much. How many real-estate offices, insurance companies, and goddamned coffee shops did one town need? Fuckin’ yuppies with their fancy flavored lattes and the like? Sheeit, it burned his butt. He never figured the town for a boom, it bein’ inland from the ocean about five miles, but when all the sawmills and logging operations took off again, not only the millers and the loggers returned, guys who pulled green chains and set chokers, but their fancy-ass counterparts, engineers and lawyers and accountants and such, came right along with ’em, growing the damned town and the county.

  Worse yet, folks were markin’ their property and fencin’ it off, so as no one could hunt or fish on it. Who the hell did they think they were? God made this earth filled with plenty to be harvested, and Caleb got down on his knees every night, his rifle on the bed, as he prayed and thanked the Good Lord for all of the bounty.

  Despite those who would want to take it from him.

  Wasn’t the U. S. of A. supposed to be for the men who were citizens? Isn’t that what all the great forefathers had planned for? Sure it was, and no one was gonna take away Caleb’s way of life, not with any stupid sign bought at the local lumber yard and posted on a damned tree trunk.

  No siree.

  Angrily, he spat on the ground, sent a great spurt of tobacco juice into the nettles and berry vines that lined the path down to the cove, a secret spot where he harvested clams, in season or out of season, paying no attention to taking a “limit.” Sheeit, no.

  Along with his shovel and backpack, he carried his .30-06, complete with scope, just in case he saw a blacktail on his way through the forest to the beach and the sandy strip leading to the cove. This time in the morning, no tellin’ what you might find. So, yeah, you weren’t allowed to kill a doe and it wasn’t quite elk season yet, but who would be the wiser? And dates and seasons, made by some asshole in the wildlife department in Salem, meant nothing to him. And some law about not being able to hunt between the coast highway and the sea—was that even a thing? Who cared?

  Along the sandy path, hearing the echoing roar of the sea, he hiked downward and saw no game, nothing that would fill the freezer for the winter as the forest gave way to a tangle of driftwood lying fifteen feet thick at the base of the hill. He crossed it quickly, glanced out at the ocean on this, a foggy October morning just before dawn. He felt the spray of the sea, smelled the salt in the water, and felt energized. This here was God’s country. No doubt about it. And it was pretty much his own private hunting grounds, what with all the ridiculous legal restrictions and the rumors that the area was haunted by some gal who took a dive off of Suicide Ledge twenty years ago and died. Some people claimed her ghost still walked on this stretch of beach, never leaving footprints, mind you. She was, after all, a ghost.

  Bunch of hooey. Same with that damned story about a prisoner who got loose a couple of decades ago, a murderer no less, and was said to have been spotted in the woods. Around here. Sometimes carrying a bloody butcher knife, other times a machete—there was even a variation where he was hauling a severed and bloody head.

  Caleb snorted at the thought.

  Damned teenagers, drunk or high, makin’ shit up. But the scary stories worked.

  Saved the hunting grounds for him.

  Caleb figured he was just lucky to have been born around here, coming into the world in a tiny hospital thirty miles to the north. Or unlucky, whichever way you saw it. Caleb preferred to think that it was a blessing to have grown up in an area where game and freedom were for those who took it, but the downside had always been his father, a binge drinker who, when sober, was a fine, upstanding Christian man, but when drunk let his fists do his talking. Caleb had learned “respect” the hard way.

  But he didn’t think about his daddy now. The old man had died of liver cancer over a decade earlier, gone home to see if Saint Peter would let him through the pearly gates or if, as Caleb believed, Satan had received the son of a bitch in hell. Either way, it didn’t matter.

  Dawn was just beginning to erupt over the steep hillside, the sky lightening, small wisps of fog drifting in from the ocean to crawl across the sandy stretch of secluded beach leading to the cove. His were the first footprints breaking the smooth sand, maybe the only footsteps all day.

  He made his way to the water’s edge, spied a clam hole, slung his rifle over his back, and began to dig, quickly, the blade edge of his shovel honed sharp. Around the hole he worked furiously, then dropped to his knees just as the tide raced inland and an icy inch of water splashed around him.

  He felt the clam’s shell, pinched it with his fingers, and dragged the bivalve out of the sand. The foot was still digging, a white protrusion moving in and out of the golden shell. “Gotcha,” he said, and, still clamping the clam with both fingers, washed it in the receding tide, then tossed it into his pack. He climbed to his feet and spied another hole, dropped to his knees again, and repeated the process. This area, known only to a few—hell, maybe only to him—on private land was his own personal clam bed, and he could almost taste the fried razor clams as he pulled one long-necked bivalve after another from the sand, the sucking noise of the vacuum left by the clam as he yanked it from the shore music to his ears.

  By the time the sun chased away the fog as it crested over the ridge, he’d harvested fifteen of the buggers and had inched his way to the cavern at the far end of the cove. Here the sea raced inward, rushing and roaring through this deep niche that time and the surf had carved into the rock. He saw another clam hole beneath the ledge protruding over this protected space, and he grabbed his shovel one last time, forcing the blade into the sand, digging a ring, and then falling to his knees just as the surf returned. Inside the cavern the noise was deafening as he reached his hand and arm deep into the hole he’d created, felt the edge of the shell, and grabbed hold. He pulled and nothing happened, then tried harder, gritting his teeth and wondering just how big the damned thing was. He yanked hard as the frigid water swirled around him, pulled with all his strength until with a great whoosh the shell wrenched free. He nearly fell back on his ass as he hauled the thing to the surface and surveyed his prize, only to drop it as if it had burned him.

  He’d fou
nd no clam beneath the surface.

  No siree.

  And he felt his heart stutter as he bent over to look at it more closely.

  Sure enough, what he’d dragged from its hiding place was a jawbone, bleached white, free of flesh. And not of some marine creature, no way, he decided, examining the teeth and spying a silver filling visible in a back molar.

  No doubt about it: This bone was part of a human skull.

  A skitter of fear crawled up the back of his neck on spidery legs. He’d heard stories, of course, of dead men and ghosts that had inhabited this area of the cape, but he’d discounted them as the stuff of boyhood tales meant to scare the piss out of friends, but now, as the sea roared around him, echoing through the cave, he stared at the jawbone of a very dead human and wondered. He backed up, dropped the bone, and made fast tracks up along the hillside.

  “Goddamn . . .”

  Hell, he’d probably have to tell someone, but first he’d climb up to the ridge and have himself a smoke. Didn’t want to appear a pantywaist. Not even to that dick Lucas Dalton, well, especially not to him, but he was the law around these parts and they’d known each other for years.

  “Shit,” he said as he made his way up to the ridge and found a fallen log to drop onto. He’d have to stash the clams, of course. Maybe take them back to his house first. His fingers shook as he pulled a Winston from a crumpled pack and lit up. Taking a huge lungful of smoke deep into his lungs, he felt a little better, calmer as the nicotine began to make its way into his bloodstream.

  No reason to hurry. Not now. Not with the tide turning soon. The cove would soon be underwater again, the damned jawbone hauled out to sea. He could keep his mouth shut and no one would be the wiser.

  Another long drag and as he expelled a geyser of smoke toward the heavens, he thought of his mama, the damned church organist who never missed a Sunday service or a Wednesday Bible study meeting. She was dead now, of course, but he could still hear her shrill, tinny voice, just as loudly as if she were still standing at the kitchen stove, her back to him as she turned the fish in the pan, the hot oil sizzling in the tiny room, amping up the already soaring temperature another five or ten degrees. She’d been a tall woman. Rangy. With angular features and hair, until the cancer treatments, a deep red color in stark contrast to her knowing blue eyes.