Wolfwraith (36 page)

He changed course slightly and soon came across her, still sitting where the steeple had been. The water came nearly to her shoulders. Bits of waterlogged cardboard boxes, empty cans and other debris floated around her, including the partially submerged front wheel of Frank’s bicycle.

He bent over and reached down through the water, his numb fingers clumsily loosening the unseen knots. They weren’t very tight; apparently the soaking had loosened the rope.

“I can’t believe it,” Lorene said as he worked at freeing her. “You beat the son of a bitch! He had you on the ropes, but you won! I couldn’t see it all—the steeple was toppling—but I saw something fly through the air. What did you throw at him?”

“A right cross,” Shadow said. Her ankles came free and he helped her up. She managed to stand unaided; the ropes hadn’t cut off the circulation in her legs. He stepped behind her and began to work on the cord around her wrists.

“What?”

“Never mind. I’ll explain later. Let’s get you untied and prove we’re not too dumb to get out of the rain.”

“He came up to the car all bent over, wearing your raincoat.” Lorene babbled as he tugged at the rope. “When he reached my window, a hand came out of the sleeve with a gun and he shot poor Dave twice. The gun went off so close to my face, I thought I was deaf for a while. Anyway, he had the gun out already, and there I sat—still in the fucking seat belt, thank you very much—and there wasn’t a thing I could do. And then—once he got my gun—the bastard put another round into Dave’s head. He brought me here and spent the night calling me a bitch and a whore.” Her voice broke. “I thought I was dead for sure.”

The last loop came loose and he pulled the lashings from her wrists.

She turned around and hugged him, her eyes brimming with tears. “I was afraid you were a goner when the steeple bowled you over.”

He winced. “So was I.” Disengaging himself, he took her by the arm. “Let’s go.”

“No, I have to see him first. I have to know in my heart the bastard is dead.”

Shadow shrugged. They supported each other while they waded to Frank’s body, which was rapidly drifting away with the wind and tide.

She looked down at the corpse for a moment, then said very slowly, “A...right...fucking...cross!” She began to laugh—no, cackle. He held her up as she leaned into him and shook with spasms of hilarity. She tried to talk a couple of times, but couldn’t stop laughing. Shadow didn’t fail to see the humor, but he was too exhausted to join in.

Finally, the laughter died off and she straightened up. She looked into his face and grinned as she said loudly, “Shadow, you crazy, damned son-of-a-bitch, I owe you big time.” She hugged him and pressed her cold lips to his.

Damn, why did she have to keep hugging him? He pulled away, his back throbbing where she had squeezed him. “Let’s survive the hurricane first. I parked the Terra-Gator outside the trees. We can ride the storm out in the cab.”

“Wait!” Lorene reached down as though to retrieve the wolf’s head. “We need evidence. It might get washed away by the storm.”

Shadow grabbed her arm. “No! Leave it.”

She looked at him curiously. “But...”

“Don’t touch it.”

“Uh, okay.” She was staring at him as though he had gone mad. “If you say so.”

Shadow saw a board from the steeple floating by and sloshed over to get it, figuring he could use it to pick up the wolf skin without touching it. He waded back to retrieve the headdress. It wasn’t there. Frank’s body still drifted around inside the old church ground, but the headdress had disappeared. There was no sign of it. Sunk, or maybe drifted off in the strong current.

He threw the board down and put his arm around Lorene. “Let’s get out of here.”

They made their way across the grounds of the long-ago church, heading toward where he’d left the Terra-Gator. Noticing a floating, soggy box stuck on a fallen branch with a few cans of food inside, he remembered he hadn’t eaten for a long time. He picked it up. The bottom sagged, so he put it under his left arm.

They walked with the wind gusting into them from the right, holding each other up against the storm and the surge of the water, which was flowing against them. When they had stumbled their way over the sunken foundation wall in the crotch-deep water, Shadow suddenly felt better. He’d nearly forgotten about the sensation of evil he’d been enduring for so long, but now relief swept over him as the aura faded away.

He stopped and looked across the space where the church had once stood. He saw something floating on the other side of the foundation from them. The wolf’s head! It was drifting away, toward the bay, looking no more dangerous than road kill in a ditch along the highway. Maybe he should go after it.

Suddenly, a nearby tree broke off with a sound like cannon fire and splashed into the water. They needed to get to shelter. He guided Lorene on, although he may have been leaning on her as much as supporting her.

The short journey seemed to take forever. Shadow’s feet were like ponderous stumps; he kept picking them up and putting them down, plodding ahead through the current. When they finally reached the Terra-Gator, Lorene climbed the ladder to the cab first. Shadow passed the box of food up, and laboriously followed. He nearly fell inside the cab. The door still hung open, but a comparative calm enveloped them. They were out of the wind, though the interior of the driver’s compartment was soaked with rain and rocking with the force of the hurricane.

Shadow felt like he was wearing a mitten when he turned the key, but soon the Terra-Gator’s motor was purring. He summoned the last of his strength and tugged the door closed between gusts. Soon the heater began warming the cab. As the water continued to rise, the Terra-Gator abruptly floated free on its buoyant tires. Luckily, they drifted quickly into the tangled branches of a fallen oak and stopped. Shadow knew he should turn off the engine, but didn’t. He needed the heater on.

They sat quietly, holding hands, for several minutes while rain peppered the cab like birdshot. The windstorm howled like banshees around them, reminding Shadow of the shipwrecked, drowned children who supposedly rested nearby.

Unexpectedly, Lorene pulled away. “You’re bleeding.”

“Doesn’t surprise me none. But I don’t think it’s too bad.”

“Not too bad, hell!”

He shrugged, but it hurt. “There’s a first aid box behind your seat.”

She leaned around and took out the metal box, then opened it. “This’ll help,” she said. “Plenty of disinfectant here; the water is probably septic as all hell. We’ll call for a helicopter as soon as the weather breaks.”

Lorene pulled up his shirt and gasped. “Jesus, your side is all swollen and bruised. He sliced the holy shit out of you.”

Despite the way he felt, Shadow grinned. “Always the optimist, aren’t you. Am I bleeding much?”

“No, not so bad. But...”

“Just spray me with disinfectant and bandage me up,” he said. “Help will be here soon.”

As Lorene began cleaning his wounds, Shadow began to talk. He told how he’d been ambushed by False Cape Frank—embarrassed to tell her how careless he’d been—and left to tell the authorities of Frank’s scheme to use Lorene as hostage. Then Shadow recounted how he had freed himself and wound up outside the door of the steeple, scratching with a stick. Finally, he sighed. “That crazy old bastard! He didn’t care how often he killed, if it would keep people away from the cape.”

“Damn right he was crazy—paranoid for sure.” Lorene agreed. “He actually thought there was a wolf. Said he sort of turned it loose when he saw a chance to kill.”

“He told me he didn’t do the actual killing, which is bullshit,” Shadow said, stiffening and grunting at an unexpected sting of antiseptic. “Unless the headdress somehow took over his mind and he didn’t remember what he’d done. In his mind he became the wolfwraith.”

“The what?” She began bandaging his shoulder. “Shadow, he was nuts. When he put on the wolf’s head, he looked like he was hypnotized or something.”

Despite his exhaustion, Shadow enjoyed the touch of her soft fingers on his bare skin. “You saw him put on the headdress?”

“Yeah. You know, he seemed pretty normal until he put it on—although he treated me like shit—but his face went hard as stone once he had it on. He looked really weird in that corny get-up, though, didn’t he? Like a kid playing dress-up.”

This doesn’t make sense, Shadow thought. “Uh, what did you see when we were fighting?”

“Just you and that crazy old bastard with a stinking skin on his head, wielding a knife. It was crazy, though, how he could fight like that—so savagely—without ever changing expression.”

The knife! Shadow suddenly realized Jonesy must have come upon Frank right after he’d killed Jenny. If Frank had taken the wolf’s head off, it would have been one man against another. It would explain why Jonesy had been killed differently.

The way he guessed it, Frank, as the wolfwraith, would hold the girls down with his powerful arms while the wolf’s jaws clamped down on their windpipes. Once they’d suffocated to death, the wraith would rip their throats out.

“That’s all you saw? An old man wearing a wolf’s head?”

It was a moment before she replied. Shadow thought he could feel her hand tremble. “Well, once, for an instant, I thought I saw something.”

“What?”

She gave an odd laugh as she finished and pulled down his shirt. “Never mind. It was hard to see both of you with all the rain and I couldn’t wipe the water from my eyes with my hands tied. Anyway, once he knew you were coming and put that thing on, it was like he became a zombie.”

“Knew I was...! How did he know I was outside?”

“He had an alarm system.”

“Alarm system?” Shadow tried to jerk around but stiffened as torn muscles cried out in protest.

“After he took me to the steeple, he set up a couple of strings on sticks around the door. When a stick was pulled over, he knew right away someone was there and he figured it had to be you. So he put on the wolf’s head and went out to ‘deal’ with you, as he put it.”

Shadow knew his mouth gaped open. Finally, he said, “I knew he was sneaky, but—so that’s it! That’s why he was ready for me when he opened the door.”

“Mmm-hmm.” She was examining the gash on his head now. “Not too bad, a scratch really. But still...” She sprayed it with antiseptic.

Shadow winced, then said. “That’s what I kept getting a premonition from, you know—the wolf’s head that is—since the start of all this. Some of its aura must have remained with the murder victims.” He shuddered. “If you only saw an old man, maybe he didn’t know how to call on the whole power of the headdress. Things could have been even worse.”

She began wrapping his head in a bandage. “Worse? He killed six—no seven—people, for God’s sake. Come on, Shadow. He wasn’t some evil spirit. That old man was nothing more than a nut case with an old, preserved wolf’s head and skin.”

Shadow was astounded. “Are you saying you didn’t feel anything at all when you were near that wolf’s head? Couldn’t you sense how evil it was?”

“Of course not. Don’t be silly.”

Shadow gingerly rubbed the bandage over his scalp injury, which had begun to itch. “You know, last night Frank told me he’d been only ‘indirectly’ involved. I thought he must have a partner and even wondered if Commissioner Barnett might be involved somehow, but I couldn’t see the two of them cooperating.”

Lorene looked puzzled. “Barnett? Why would you think he’d be involved in murder?” She finished with Shadow’s head wound and began to examine his injured arm.

“Mostly because I don’t like—or trust—the guy. I don’t know, I had a lot of time to think last night while I was trying to get free. I thought maybe Barnett was killing people and setting Frank up for the fall. Or maybe he didn’t kill all of them, but only had Helen murdered because she’d been investigating him and he tried to make it look like Frank did it.”

“Barnett wasn’t in on the killings.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I told you; Frank talked to me and said he—or rather the wolf—had killed Helen Parsons and all the others, except Jonesy and Dave, of course. Besides, Frank hated Barnett, he said Barnett had offered him money for any land rights he might have.

Shadow grinned maliciously. “Well, I guess Barnett and the governor are still going to have problems now they’ve been found out, and the park will be…oh, what about Tony Jennings? His DNA linked him to the one killing.”

She grimaced. “No, you were right about that, too. Jennings story was verified yesterday. He was having an affair with the Brandon woman. Detectives found a few people who’d seen them together—being very chummy—at restaurants and such, days before she was killed. She apparently stopped by the garage for a little sex with Jennings before she jogged that day.”

“So he’s out of the picture, too. But it leaves one big question mark in my mind.”

“What’s that?” She asked while she finished bandaging his arm.

“Where’d he get the wolf’s head?”

“I have no idea.”

“Damn, I was hoping he’d said something to you about it.”

“Nope.”

“Hmm.” Shadow rubbed the two-day stubble on his chin as he thought. “The first time I talked to False Cape Frank, he was putting shells on the grave of Mamie Bunch.” He nodded in the direction of the cemetery. “I found out later she was a witch—or at least considered to be one. He must have been related—that’s right!”