Paskagankee (26 page)

On top of that, the night had been uneventful and mostly boring, the sole exception being the fiasco with the two high school kids. As much as that boredom meant the townspeople were all safe, at least for the time being, maintaining her alertness became more and more difficult as the night dragged on. She tried counting the number of times she circled the big bonfire, but eventually lost track somewhere around twenty.

The three of them—herself, Mike and Professor Dye—had taken a break around ten o'clock, rendezvousing close to the fire in a mostly futile attempt to absorb some warmth. They resumed their separate positions, though, after only a few minutes, with Mike alternating between Professor Dye's patrol area and hers. They had had a couple of minutes by themselves to chat when their paths crossed a little while ago, but for the most part, the night had been a solitary exercise in boredom.

Now, feeling like a zombie as she circled the outer perimeter of the bonfire for the umpteenth time, Sharon found her mind wandering to her burgeoning relationship with Mike McMahon. She didn't know where things were going, or even if, in fact, they were going anywhere. After all, he was her boss and once the rumors about the two of them started being confirmed he might be forced either to give up his job or his girl.

But for now, she felt happy and excited, while at the same time marveling at how life sometimes takes the strangest twists and turns. Returning to Paskagankee was the last thing Sharon had ever wanted to do; she had returned only because her father was dying, and she couldn't bear the thought of breaking a promise to her dying mother. Now, after being back in town just a few months, along came this slightly older, handsome, world-weary divorced man who seemed to think she was a prize worth pursuing.

She wondered what Mike had heard about her, if anything. Her past was checkered, even beyond the history of drinking and partying she had confessed to Mike. The drinking and partying was true, of course, but the rest was simply too humiliating to admit to her new lover.

The real reason for her silence when they drove Earl Manning to jail a few days ago was because she had been scared witless he would spill the sordid details of their past right in front of Mike. It had been a one-time thing, and Sharon was drunk off her ass when it happened—a condition only too familiar for her back then—but she would never get over the fact she had sunk so low, spending a night with the slimy, drunken bastard Earl Manning while still a senior in high school.

Earl was two years out of school by then and had showed up at one of the teen partying spots with a case of beer, cans of which he had begun passing around to Sharon and her three girlfriends. It was obvious to all of them he was doing his best to get them drunk and for the same reason young men have been getting young women drunk for centuries.

But Sharon hadn't cared about his reasons. She wanted to drink and Earl Manning represented free beer. Later, as her friends prepared to drive home, she declined their pleas to get in the car and leave. There was still cold beer to be had and Sharon, at that point in her young life, was unwilling to see it go to waste.

So she had jumped into Earl's pickup, maybe even the same one he was driving so erratically when she and Mike pulled him over a few days ago. She really couldn't remember, although the likelihood that Earl had scraped together enough cash to buy a new one seemed slim. They had driven to the parking lot of the Ridge Runner where they finished off the rest of Earl's beer, sitting outside the bar getting trashed while her father was doing the very same thing inside it.

Sharon wasn't worried about her dad walking out and catching her, either. For one thing, by that time she was too drunk to care, and for another, her father was undoubtedly by then too drunk to notice. He could have stumbled right past the rusting, beat-up piece of shit truck on the way to his rusting, beat-up piece of shit car while she sat in the passenger seat of Earl's cab shotgunning a PBR and he would never even have noticed.

It was the same story a little later in the night when Earl did her in the truck, right there in the middle of the Ridge Runner lot—good old daddy dearest would never have noticed, and, even more horrifying, she didn't think he would have cared.

The frightening thing to Sharon—at least, looking back now it was frightening—was that at the time she thought that sort of behavior was normal. You wanted to get drunk, you slept with the dude supplying the alcohol, even if he was sort of gross and clumsy and had bad breath and his body smelled a little bit like overripe cabbage.

The hookup with Earl Manning had been a one-shot affair, but only because he had never brought beer around the party spot again when Sharon and her friends were there. She knew she would have slept with him again had the opportunity arisen and, indeed, there were other alcohol and drug suppliers she had been more than willing to have sex with in exchange for the proper party supplies.

So when Manning began taunting her from the back of the Paskagankee Police cruiser while Mike sat next to her, she had frozen in fear that he would blurt out the wrong thing and Mike would think the worst of her. It was out of character for her to freeze up like that. Normally she could handle losers like Manning without even breaking a sweat—it was like swatting a pesky mosquito—but when he started babbling in front of Mike her insides had clenched up like she was going to hurl right there in the police car.

She had no idea whether Manning even remembered screwing her in the cab of his pickup, although she figured he probably did. Even though he had been as drunk as she was that night, maybe more so, she doubted he had been able to coax many girls into that piece of shit truck, so he probably had every last detail of his few successful conquests etched indelibly in his filthy, slimy, cockroach brain.

Mike had sensed how upset she was when Earl Manning began playing his little game and had put a stop to it immediately, something Sharon knew
she
should have been the one to do but had been unable to manage. To his credit, even though he must have suspected there was more to the story than what she told him, Mike hadn't brought it up again. It was just one more thing about the man that intrigued her and set him apart from any of the others she had known.

A loud snapping noise came from somewhere off her left and brought Sharon forcefully back to the present. It was similar to the branch-breaking sounds the two high school kids had made earlier. She realized two things simultaneously: She had no idea how long she had been daydreaming, and much more importantly,
she had no idea where she was
. While she was busily watching her little mental movie about Earl Manning she had unknowingly wandered out of the perimeter of the bonfire, beyond the area where the orange glow remained visible through the fog and mist.

Turning a full three hundred sixty degrees in an attempt to get her bearings, Sharon thought she heard another furtive snapping noise. This one was quieter, less obvious. She wondered if it might be the two young lovers she had interrupted before or whether another couple of kids had decided to brave the cold and the fog and the mist to get a little time away from the prying eyes of the adults.

The problem was she couldn't tell exactly where the noise was coming from. The heavy shroud of moisture hanging over the field permeated everything and had the effect of masking the sound, making it seem like it was coming from the left one minute and from the right the next.

It was loud and then it was soft.

It was everywhere and nowhere.

It was terrifying.

Sharon pulled out her heavy cop Maglite, with the long steel handle that could double as a weapon, knowing it would be fruitless to shine the bright beam into the mist but trying anyway. As expected, the light refracted in a thousand different directions, accomplishing nothing but blinding her and pissing her off in the process.

“Where are you?” she said, her voice booming out louder than she had expected it to. “You kids have got to stay closer to the fire; it'd be really easy to get lost out here.”
Yeah,
she thought to herself,
it'd be really easy to get as lost as I am right now.

No answer. She decided to try again, a little more forcefully. “Come on kids, let's go. It's time to get back to the bonfire. I mean right now.”

Still nothing, not even the snapping sound that had drawn her attention in the first place. She began to question whether it had even been made by a person. Maybe an animal
was
wandering around out here. Sharon flashed on Detective O'Bannon's theory about a hungry bear and shuddered involuntarily.

She stopped moving and took stock of the situation. Her options were limited. She had no idea where she was in relation to the bonfire and wasn't sure any kids were out here at all. She should get on the radio to Mike and let him know what was going on but didn't want to look foolish. He had given her one simple job—walk around the fire and keep an eye on things—and she had screwed it up.

She took a deep breath and struck out boldly in the direction she thought (hoped) the fire should be. Since she really couldn't remember how long she had been walking while in her self-induced daze—who wouldn't lose track of time reliving those pleasant high school memories of Earl Manning?—Sharon realized she didn't know how far she should walk before determining she was traveling in the wrong direction. Her feet were cold, despite being encased in high-quality winter hiking boots and heavy wool socks, and she was getting sleepy. The gradually melting snow and ice on the ground was alternately slippery and slushy, making it difficult and energy-sapping to navigate.

Something touched her face.

A skeletal finger ran across her cheek. Sharon cried out, stumbling to the side in an attempt to escape the awful, bony touch. She tripped over a downed log on the ground and as she was falling realized it hadn't been a bony finger on her face at all, just the end of a bare tree branch.

She smashed to the ground and barely noticed; her brain was spinning out of control. How could it have been a branch? The edge of the forest was a good quarter-mile from the location of the bonfire. Could she have gotten that far off course while wallowing in her bad memories? Sharon didn't see how, but it was an incontrovertible fact that she had fallen at the edge of the thick forest surrounding Warren Sprague's out-of-the-way field. That was the only explanation for the scrape on her face.

Now she began to get concerned. It could take hours for Mike to locate her if he had to circle the gigantic field on foot. She cursed and finally admitted to herself that she was going to have to radio him and ask for help. It was the last thing she wanted to do, but there was no way around it.

Disgusted with herself for making such a careless rookie mistake, Sharon reached down to the wet ground to push herself up and her right hand fell on the log she had tripped over. The end of it felt slimy to the touch, even more so than what you would expect from a thick piece of wood lying on the wet ground during a snow/ice storm and then a heavy fog. Sharon snapped her flashlight on once more and screamed reflexively.

It wasn't a tree branch she had tripped over at all, it was a human arm, pulled free from its shirt and the shoulder to which it had until recently been attached, trailing bone fragments and ligaments and muscles and other gooey parts from the open shoulder end. The slickness she felt when she put her hand down was human blood; lots of it.

Sharon tried to get herself under control. She was panting heavily and felt a pounding in her temples.
Of course there's lots of blood, stupid. It's a human minus the rest of the body, what else would there be?
Hands shaking badly, she grabbed for her radio to call Mike, but her hands were slick from all that blood and the radio slipped out of her grasp and dropped to the wet ground.

Sharon didn't want to reach down to search for it. What if she touched the arm again? She retched and questioned her decision to enter the law enforcement profession as she grabbed her flashlight and clutched it fiercely with both hands like a Titanic survivor clinging to the last life vest.

Her hands were shaking so badly now that she was afraid she would drop the flashlight, too. Hell, she
knew
she was going to drop the flashlight, of course she was, it would happen any second now, and what would she do then? She would have to reach down in the pitch dark and the awful fog and feel around blindly to try to locate it, and then the human arm, with a hand at the end, a still-working hand, would clutch her by her own arm and pull her with inexorable pressure, it would be incredibly strong, and it would pull her into the forest and—

But she didn't drop the flashlight. She hung on for all she was worth and snapped the beam on and the light, the blessed light, the beautiful yellow artificial sun, flooded the area, merrily refracting away in its thousand different directions and Sharon didn't care, no she didn't, not even a little bit. She was shaking and breathing heavily through her mouth and nose, and she knew she had to get herself under control or she was going to hyperventilate. She couldn't do that, not here; she couldn't allow herself to hyperventilate and pass out on top of that awful arm.

She stood up and concentrated on breathing normally, on getting control of her racing thoughts and her panicked body. The radio could wait, as could the report of the disembodied arm she had found. After all, it wasn't like the person it belonged to was standing here complaining, demanding immediate action, right? In fact, it wasn't like the person was even still alive, was it? Of course not.