Wellspring (Paskagankee, Book 3) (21 page)

And the
idea that Melton would somehow construct a secret room next to the Ridge Runner
and bury bodies in it, only to then dig it up himself and invent a story about
disappearing victims, was frankly ludicrous.

His
mind wandered back to the contentious meeting this morning with FBI Special
Agents Ferriss and Cooper. Something didn’t smell right about their interest in
the case, and while their story of a hush-hush missing-persons case was
technically feasible, it didn’t hold water. If the federal agents were really
working a case, why could they not share even the most basic details of it with
local law enforcement?

And their
demeanor was particularly perplexing. Their FBI ID’s were legitimate. Mike had
scrutinized them closely and had made a quick call down to the Portland field
office after this morning’s confrontation. But the behavior of Ferriss and
Cooper was unlike that of any federal agents he had ever encountered in nearly
eighteen years of law enforcement. FBI field agents tended to be buttoned-down,
terse and overbearingly polite.

The
exact opposite of Ferriss and Cooper, in other words.

Mike
wished now he had had more time to question the Portland SAC, but he knew he
would likely not have coaxed any significant information out of the man. They
were Feds and he was not, and that was a line of demarcation that was rarely
breached, especially where small-town police officers were concerned.

He
sighed and took one last look around Bronson Choate’s living room, then walked
outside to re-examine the exterior of the property, where his friend and fellow
cop Pete Kendall had been murdered.

Glancing
at his watch, Mike did a double-take. He had been inside the little cabin much
longer than he had planned to be. There was still a little time to do a
walk-through of the spot where he had stumbled over Pete’s body in the predawn
darkness roughly twelve hours ago, but then he would have to hurry back to the
station.

Choate’s
girlfriend, Jodie Miller, was due at three p.m. for a second, more in-depth
interview, one that Mike intended to conduct himself. She was the only person
he knew of who had come face-to-face with the killer and lived. She was lucky
to have escaped, and he was determined to go over every second of the encounter
in the hopes of uncovering some piece of evidence, some hidden memory, that
would help bring the murderer to justice.

Pete
Kendall had been his friend. His memory demanded it.

20

Rose wasn’t surprised when the
telephone began ringing again. She had been expecting it to. Annette Middleton,
her young assistant at
Needful Things,
was a natural caregiver, the type of person who, upon encountering a baby bird
with an injured wing, would nurse the thing back to health and then release it
back into the wild weeks later.

There
was zero possibility that Annette would let the issue drop when Rose didn’t
answer the phone the first time. Annette would allow a reasonable amount of
time for Rose to get her message and return the call, and if that didn’t
happen, she would try again. If a second call was unsuccessful, she would
probably close the shop and drive out to Rose’s home herself.

And
that was something Rose was determined to avoid.

Her
attacker had calmed somewhat, but the shrill jangle of the telephone’s ringer
caused him to stiffen in his chair and again look around the kitchen in a near
panic. After a moment, he seemed to recognize the ringer as the noise he had
heard before, and he turned his attention to Rose, eyes narrowed, waiting for
her to make a move.

“All I
have to do,” she said gently, “is answer the phone and get rid of the caller,” knowing
full well who would be on the line. “But if I don’t pick up, whoever is calling
might get concerned that I’m not answering. That person might then come over to
check on me. I assume you wouldn’t want that.”

“No
visitors,” he said tersely.

By now
the phone had rung four times. Rose’s answering machine was set to pick up
after three rings, but the machine had been smashed into several plastic pieces
by the stranger’s gun. Rose assumed her young assistant would be well aware of
the setting for her answering machine – she had called Rose at home many
times – and when it didn’t activate, she knew Annette would become even
more concerned than she already was.

“Alright,”
the stranger finally said with obvious reluctance. “Do what you have to do. But
don’t be stupid.”

Rose,
who had moved next to the phone, picked up the handset immediately. “Hello,”
she said, doing her best to sound unafraid, certain she wouldn’t be able to
manage it.

“Oh,
Rose, hello,” came the reply, in Annette’s sweetly innocent voice. “You had me
worried! I called a little while ago and your machine seemed to malfunction in
the middle of my message.”

“Yes,”
Rose said, eying the stranger, who had gotten up from the table and now stood
next to Rose watching her closely. He glanced nervously at the telephone
handset every few seconds. The man was jumpy and scared and Rose knew she had
to allay Annette’s fears and get her off the line as quickly as possible.

“I’m
sorry about that,” she said into the phone, wishing she were a better liar. Her
brother Bo could make up whoppers with the best of them, and then deliver the
lies with the sincerity of an altar boy, but that skill was one she had never
mastered.

“Uhh…my
machine died, I just noticed it. I’m not feeling well, so I decided not to come
into the shop today. I apologize for not calling,” she continued, knowing she
was beginning to ramble. She was rattled worse than she wanted to admit by the
dangerous man standing next to her and she hoped that fear wasn’t apparent to
Annette. “Just go ahead and close up the shop whenever you’re ready to go home,
and don’t worry about it. We’ll pick up our regular hours again tomorrow.”

There
was a long pause, and the stranger moved closer to her. He was now standing
right next to her, towering over her, his presence intimidating. She
concentrated on not retching from the awful stench rolling off him. After what
felt like forever, Annette said, “Ooookay. Are you sure you’re alright, Rose? I
can be over there in fifteen minutes if you need me.”

“NO,”
Rose replied without thinking. It came out much louder and sharper than she
intended, and even the stranger flinched in surprise. “I mean, thank you,
Annette, but I’m just a little tired today, that’s all. I’m perfectly fine.
It’s not necessary to drive all the way over here. In fact, I’d rather not
entertain visitors today.”

Annette
sighed and the stranger glowered. It was clear he had exhausted his patience
with this one-way conversation that he obviously did not understand. Rose
guessed he was seconds away from striking out with his pistol, with the
horrible dried blood and clump of hair, and either hitting her with it or
smashing the telephone. “I’ve really got to go now,” she said hurriedly.
“Goodbye, Annette.”

She
turned and replaced the handset on its cradle without waiting for an answer.
She hoped she had been able to deflect the young woman’s concern sufficiently
that Annette didn’t come running over here. Given her skyrocketing level of
fear, she thought she had done a pretty darned good job of sounding calm and
collected.

She
took a moment to compose herself, then turned and faced the stranger, who had
blessedly moved a few steps away. She wondered what would happen now. She
didn’t have to wait long. The man eyed her warily and, after a moment’s
hesitation, said, “Why’d you ask me about the date earlier?”

Rose’s
fear spiked and she froze in her tracks. “Uh, I couldn’t remember, that’s all. You’ll
find as you start to age that keeping track of things like the day of the week becomes
much more difficult, and even what month it is becomes hazy, and…” Rose knew
she was babbling and gradually her voice faded away to silence.

The
stranger’s eyes narrowed. “I ain’t talkin’ about the day of the week, I’m
talking about the year. Even folks who’re a little slow know what year it is.
Why’d you ask about the year?”

The man
had taken two shuffling steps toward her as he talked and now stood inches away
again, glaring down at her like an angry teacher at a truculent student. “Why
the year?” he repeated. “Answer me!”

“I…uh…”
Rose tried to think, to come up with some way to deflect the man’s suspicions.
Why hadn’t she let the issue drop? The stranger’s face began to redden and she
felt he was moments away from snapping.

So she
told him the truth.

“You’re
unfamiliar with telephones, and answering machines, and electric coffeemakers.
Your whole manner of speech strikes me as that of someone from…I don’t know…a bygone
era or something. I was just curious, I guess. I’m sorry, I wasn’t trying to pry
or to upset you.”

“Upset
me?” The man seemed genuinely taken aback by her statement, but the redness had
faded from his face and his eyes didn’t look quite so tight. He appeared to be
breathing a little easier. “
You
didn’t
want to upset me? Everything I’ve encountered in this damned town has upset me
since the minute I rode in here last night, or last week, or whenever the hell
it was.”

Rode in here? That’s an odd way to put
it,
Rose thought,
and
exactly what I’m talking about.
She debated whether to bring it up to the
stranger, but before she could open her mouth, he surprised her. He said,
“Okay, ma’am, I’m going to ask you the same question you put to me. What year
is this?” He said it slowly and in a tone that indicated he would accept no
waffling.

Rose’s
first thought was to pacify him, to lie and tell him it really was 1858, of
course it was, what other year would it be? But she abandoned the idea
immediately because she doubted she could pull it off. If her face, the tone of
her voice, or anything in her demeanor gave away the fact that she wasn’t being
truthful, she was afraid of how he might react.

She
reached up and ran her fingers over her bruised and swollen jawline and then
answered, her voice quiet but direct. “It’s 2013.”

The
redness returned to the stranger’s face, and his eyes, instead of narrowing as
they had done before, grew wide with terror. She tried not to react to the
massive explosion she feared was to come, but couldn’t help herself. She
cringed.

But the
stranger didn’t hit her.

For a
moment he didn’t do anything.

He stood
before Rose, his expression haunted. Then he backpedaled, keeping his
frightened eyes locked onto Rose’s. He shuffled backward until striking the
kitchen wall hard enough to jar his entire body.

He gave
Rose one last confused glare, then turned and sprinted out of the house. The
back door creaked open and then slammed shut and Rose could hear the heavy
pounding of running feet. After a moment the pounding faded away, and silence
rushed in to take its place.

21

Gordie Rheaume had been the
Paskagankee Police Department’s day shift dispatcher for decades. He often worked
the night and weekend shifts as well. Gordie had been on the job longer than
any other member of the department, and at the age of seventy-two, with a wife lost
to cancer more than a decade before and two grown children who had long since
moved away, he had let it be known he was more than happy to work as many hours
at the station as permitted.

Gordie liked
to think of himself as inquisitive. He knew most everyone else would probably
substitute the term “nosy,” but he didn’t allow that knowledge to bother him
much. In a tiny, out-of-the-way village hard by the Canadian border where
residents relied on one another to an extent unheard of in most other places,
it was only natural for folks to take a healthy interest in the goings-on of
their neighbors.

That
was Gordie’s theory, anyway, and in his case, without much else to do, it
seemed only natural to expand on that “healthy interest” a little. He knew which
residents were having marital problems and who had just purchased a new car. He
could recite the averages of every member of the Paskagankee PD bowling league,
updated weekly. He knew who had been laid off at the struggling paper mill down
in Millinocket and who had begun drinking too much of late.

So when
the caller ID at the switchboard indicated a call was incoming from
Needful Things,
Gordie knew immediately
the voice at the other end of the line would either belong to Rose Pellerin or
Annette Middleton. He knew further that Rose had been suffering from
respiratory problems recently, and that she feared the onset of lung cancer, which
had taken the life of her father many years ago.

He made
a mental bet with himself that the caller would be Annette, then he punched the
flashing button to activate the circuit. “Paskagankee Police,” he said, and
congratulated himself when a voice much too young to be Rose Pellerin’s answered.

“Yes,
hello,” the voice said hesitantly. “This is Annette Middleton over at
Needful Things.
”