Wildwood Creek (29 page)

Blake’s hand found mine, his fingers a warm circle of flesh over flesh. “My granddaddy was an army chaplain in Korea,” he said, “so he always understood. I don’t think I knew how much the things he taught me really meant until I left home and went into the army. You end up in a situation where you might meet your Maker anytime, you think a whole lot about what you believe.”

Our fingers intertwined, and suddenly I felt very . . . okay. Strangely vulnerable about something I had always kept inside, but okay. Not an oddball anymore. There was someone else who really
got
it.

We fell silent, and that seemed natural too. I’ve never been with anybody that way. Okay to just be my confused, tangled, conflicted self, still struggling to figure out God and my own life. No longer feeling the need to hide behind a mask. I’d never spent a day so completely comfortable with where I was.

The afternoon was waning by the time we walked the girls down a path to see the tombstones that had begun to emerge about twenty feet offshore in a grassy cove. Moss-covered, tilted, and forlorn, their rounded marble tips protruded from the water, hinting at names and stories.

“Eeewww! Can we wade out there and look?” Wren was fascinated.

Blake pointed to a thin brownish snake swirling its way through the water. “Depends on how you feel about sharing the water with that guy.”

The other girls backed a few steps further from the bank, squealing about the snake, but Wren held her ground, fasci
nated by the stones. “I’m not afraid of him. He doesn’t even have a viper head—he’s a striped water snake. We learned that in safety class. He’s probably more afraid of me than I am of him.”

“Yeah, I bet he is,” Alexis piped up, and Blake laughed.

“If he’s got half a brain he is.” Laying a hand on Wren’s curly head, he checked his watch. “But, no, you can’t go out there. We need to head back so I can catch Alexis’s ghost-man tonight.”

Alexis huffed and braced her hands on her hips, her long, slim arms still glistening with drying beads of water. “Don’t even start with me.”

Blake used Wren’s head to turn her around and steer her toward Wildwood. “Okay, everybody’s had a look. Now we need to get home before the bears come out looking for an easy meal.”

“There aren’t any bears around here, and bears aren’t nocturnal,” Wren argued.

“She’s got a point there,” I teased, bumping Blake with my shoulder as we started back down the lakeshore.

“She’s too smart for her own good,” he joked. “You know what they say about curiosity and the cat.”

“Funny.” Wren cast a longing look over her shoulder toward the tombstones. “But are any of those from Wildwood?”

Blake shook his head. “Nah, they’re newer. I talked to a couple of local fishermen about it when I was down here patrolling the other day. They said that’s what was left of the original Mennonite settlement of Gnadenfeld. The Corps of Engineers flooded it when they built the lake.”

A shiver slid over me. It had nothing to do with the heat of the day finally fading. “And they just left the people’s graves?”

“Guess so.” Blake took my hand, and I contemplated the tombstones as we walked.
In the end, it makes little difference
what’s printed in granite when you’re gone. It’s what you do while you’re here that matters.

By the time we reached Wildwood, evening was settling in. On the ridge above, there was no sign of the faint glow of lights coming on in the crew camp.

“Looks like the power’s still out,” Blake observed as we stopped at the schoolhouse. “Hard to believe they haven’t gotten it back by now. I’ll walk the kids up the hill. I’m on shift tonight, so I want to do some recon and see if there’s anything to Alexis’s man in the woods. It’d be easier if we weren’t dealing with a power failure and all of our security cams down. Not that they’ve been doing much good. We keep realigning the cams, but if this guy does exist, we can’t catch him.”

He left me then, he and the three girls angling toward the Delevan house and crew camp, and me returning to the school, the warm comfort of the afternoon slowly fading into an evening that felt shadow-filled and strange. The nagging worry that had been circling all day came back, and it didn’t take long to identify the source. Kim, of course. I should’ve checked on her before now and retrieved the cell phone.

The light was slipping toward evening as I hurried to Bathhouse Row. Kim’s roommate was down at the spring, but she hadn’t seen Kim since earlier in the day. “Everybody’s everywhere, since we’re off schedule. Last thing I heard, the power company had some kind of massive software problem, they thought. But then I also heard that some farmer with a tractor plowed through the power lines coming onto the property here. So I don’t really know what’s true. Anyway, some of the girls went up to crew camp to play cards and eat normal food, since it’ll spoil with no power for the refrigerators, anyway. She’s probably there.”

I thanked her and started up the hill toward the trailers
to look for Kim. I’d just made it to the parking lot when one of the grips spotted me and hurried my way, looking slightly breathless and wide-eyed.

He gave my capris and T-shirt a quizzical look. “Please tell me you know where Kim is.” Squeezing his clipboard against his chest, he grimaced. “Mr. Singh wants us to make sure
everyone
is accounted for and back in place, in case they get the power on tonight.” No doubt this was Kim’s cell phone-charging guy. He looked like one of her usual victims: a little nerdy, a little too nice. Probably hoping that Kim would get over her fixation with Jake and decide a friendly grip just up the hill might be a better choice for a summer romance.

Right about now he was probably weighing the implications, should Kim be discovered downstream on a secret rendezvous aided and abetted by a forbidden cell phone and a neighbor on the crew. Rav would have this poor kid’s head in about a minute and a half if word got out. Grips were expendable.

“I haven’t seen her. I just checked the bathhouse and then came up here to look.”

The grip mopped his forehead. “She needs to show back up. Nobody’s seen her since noon. I’ve asked.”

A flash of neatly coiffed blond hair caught the corner of my eye, and I felt the instinctive flight response that indicated Tova was in the vicinity, even before I glanced toward the production trailer. She’d just come out the door, and she was moving in our direction at a rapid pace. I had a feeling our situation was about to go from bad to worse.

Her eyes narrowed as she took in my street clothes. “It looks like someone is drastically out of uniform.”

The grip sidestepped her approach, tripping over a twig and practically landing on his backside in the weeds.

Tova ignored him. “Strange, how that could happen, when
your belongings are still locked inside
my
trailer. Keeping a few forbidden items, are we, Allison? You might want to run back to your little schoolhouse before Rav sees you. He’s in no mood to have one of his little birdies flitting around doing her own thing.”

I backed up, a sense of impending doom seizing me by the throat. Before the grip could move away, Tova snatched his clipboard and thumbed through the pages. “Accompany Allison down to the village and make certain that her
extra
clothing finds its way to my trailer, where it
belongs
. We wouldn’t want Rav to think she’s been taking advantage of her
former
position in production to break the rules, now, would we? Such a thing could reflect poorly on those of us who have actually given our best efforts toward authenticity on this project.”

The grip’s eyes were like baseballs. For a moment, I was afraid that he was contemplating falling to his knees, confessing his crimes, and begging for mercy.

“Yes . . . yes, ma’am.” His voice trembled like a leaf in a frigid north wind. As soon as we found Kim and the cell phone, this whole stupid business was D-O-N-E, finished. Before we ended up in any more trouble.

But I had the nauseating feeling that trouble had already found us. Tova had scented blood.

“Well.” She smacked her lips apart, glancing up from the clipboard. “Look who
else
is missing. A certain ditzy person of vaguely blond nature. How peculiar, Allison, that it would be
your
friend.”

She shoved the clipboard at the grip, and he caught it in the chest with a muffled cough, quickly withering under Tova’s glare. “If you haven’t found her by dark, inform me directly. It isn’t
my
job to baby-sit, but Rav should be told if there is a problem.”

“I’m sure she’s here somewhere,” I piped up. “We’ve been offline for hours. People have been down to the lake and whatnot.”

Tova smirked at me. “And no one was supposed to be going any farther than the lakeshore, now were they? And the lakeshore has already been checked, has it not? I believe I saw a security guard on an ATV coming back from there, not fifteen minutes ago.” She swiveled toward the grip. “If she is here, you won’t have a problem turning her up. Either way, inform me.”

She turned on her heel and walked away, leaving the two of us to writhe in the pool of acid left behind.

“She’s gotta be here,” the grip whimpered, smacking himself in the forehead with the clipboard. “She said she’d only be gone a couple hours. She promised.”

“Okay, okay . . . Let me think a minute.” With Kim, reality so often defied logic. Would she take off with Jake? Go AWOL on purpose? She had to know what kind of trouble the rest of us would be in.

But she’d been so lovesick the past few weeks.
She wouldn’t, would she?

Possibilities began weaving a strange tapestry in my head. Several of them, actually. What if Kim had suffered some sort of accident on her way back to Wildwood? What if the guy that Alexis said she saw lurking in the woods was more than a figment of a teenage imagination? Someone real? Someone dangerous?

In reality, anyone could be in these woods . . . or under the highway bridge where Kim planned to meet Jake.

And there was one more scenario. One I didn’t even want to contemplate.

How well did Kim really know the man she had sneaked away to meet? The headlines were full of stories of women
who’d been duped by predators online. Men who hung around, looking to meet unsuspecting women on classified ad sites. Guys who seemed too good to be true.

“I have to go find Blake.” Like it or not, there was no choice but to confess this whole thing and ask him to get on one of those four-wheelers, go down to the river, and see if he could locate Kim before it was too dark to look.

A
LLIE
K
IRKLAND
J
ULY
, P
RESENT
D
AY

B
lake still hadn’t come back to his room. Tossing and turning in my bed, I listened for the night air to carry his footsteps through the screen. I wanted to talk to him, but things had been strained after he couldn’t turn up any sign of Kim. His security crew had spent hours frantically trying to make sure she wasn’t hurt or lost in the woods, even though that seemed unlikely. The river was easy to find and easy to follow.

At this point, it looked like she’d made a spur of the moment decision that she couldn’t quite own up to. In the morning, hopefully we’d hear from her. She and Jake had probably run off to some nearby wedding chapel, and they were spending their honeymoon night at a lakeside cabin.

I wanted that to be true, and at the same time, I wanted to kill her.

Didn’t she care about the trouble she was causing? About breaching her contract? About breaking her promise to me? Would my best friend really just run off without saying a word? The idea stung in ways I couldn’t stand to contemplate, but even that didn’t hurt as badly as the shocked look on Blake’s face when I’d confessed.

He’d stared at me like he didn’t know me at all. He’d looked hurt, and I didn’t have any idea how I was going to fix things.

This was such a mess, and it was my fault. I was the one who’d brought the phone here in the first place, who just had to chase after the story of Bonnie Rose, to hang on a little longer and see what else Stewart could come up with. Once again, letting my mind get lost in a daydream had produced a monumental screw-up in real life.

I just wanted Kim to be okay.
Please, please, let her check in tomorrow morning. . . .

A wildcat screamed somewhere in the hills, the sound splitting the night air, slicing through the screen, sitting me upright in bed. Shuddering, I rose, dipped a cup of water from the pot on my stove, took a sip. It tasted tinny and strange, but I drank it anyway, then stood at the window watching for Blake and listening to the cat’s cry. Resting my head on the sash, I swallowed the prickly lump in my throat, and my mouth felt dry again.

Blake wouldn’t be coming with coffee tomorrow. The whole thing was over. In the morning, security would no doubt be knocking on my door, but it wouldn’t be Blake; it would be someone telling me to pack my stuff and leave. Both of the men who’d gotten in the fight outside Unger Store had already been dropped from the cast, along with their families. They’d disappeared as quietly as the original citizens of Wildwood.

Sleep tugged at me, sudden, almost dizzying, insisting that I return to bed. The rope supports groaned softly as I pulled the quilt over the T-shirt and capris I’d kept on, unable to shed the feeling that I’d need to rise in the night and go find Kim. . . .

I dreamed of a day with my father. A perfect day, when he had taken me to the Santa Monica pier. A father-daughter
excursion filled with Ferris wheel rides and carousel horses, sand and surf, and time to build castles and watch them wash away in the tide. In the dream, I was small again. Safe because my father was near. . . .

Allie. Allie, wake up.
The voice was my father’s. He was shaking me. Trying to rouse me from a nightmare.

There’s a monster under the bed,
I whispered, still groggy from sleep.

His arms circled me, held me against his chest, made me safe.

Then he faded even as I tried to cling to him, even as my mind grasped for the precious memory.

Blackness slipped in and thickened until there was nothing more.

I was falling, spinning down, down, down. I tried to cry out, but there was no sound, only a surrendering.

And then, nothing at all.

My head pounded, the pain so incredibly intense that I only wanted to sink into the blackness again and make it go away. My eyes throbbed like they were bulging out of their sockets, and when I tried to open them, everything was filmy, blurry, and gray. Water dripped somewhere nearby, the sound echoing and seeming to drill into my brain.
Plink, plink, plink.

A shudder rattled through me, beginning in my stomach and radiating outward. I was so cold . . . shaking. My skin grated along something frigid, rough, and hard, my head bouncing against what felt like solid rock.

Where was I? What was happening? Was I still dreaming?

I blinked, then blinked again and tried to bring the world into focus, to decide what was real, but there was only a blur. My lashes tugged downward again. The blackness drew over me like a blanket, heavy, the weight suffocating.

Wake up, Allie-bear. Wake up,
my father demanded.

Daddy?
My voice was nothing more than an unintelligible groan. I looked for him in the darkness, but I couldn’t see.

Wake up, Allie-bear. Wake up now.

I pushed through the ink, swimming upward like a diver submerged in some immeasurable ocean, trying to find my way out, fighting for air and light before it was too late. The awareness of danger teased my senses, but I couldn’t define it. What was the last thing I remembered?

The night sky, the porch, the window. Blake wasn’t out there. . . .

I went to bed. . . .

Why was I on the floor now? No . . . not the floor.

My fingers slid over the dampness around me, discerned the cold unevenness of stone. And water. It was dripping nearby, splashing outward in tiny droplets. Icy cold.

Something was crawling on my arm. The sudden realization forced me awake. I jerked away, felt tiny legs dash across my wrist as I dragged my eyes open and tried to see.

Stone. There was stone all around. White sandstone, like the inside of the schoolhouse, but not blocks. No mortar. Just stone. My body was stiff and uncooperative. I hurt everywhere, the cold and pain a strange mix, sleep clinging to me, my stomach acid-filled. When had I felt this way before?

Yesterday. Yesterday when Wren came into the room and woke me.

Was that yesterday?

I was underground now . . . in a cave or something. Light flickered against the wall, barely enough to see by. Beyond its edges, impossible darkness swallowed any details.

A tiny creature skittered past the rim of my vision and disappeared under the tangle of red hair strewn beside my face. Gasping, I pushed upward, but the movement was slow
and clumsy. A centipede as large as my index finger tumbled out and dashed away. Another shudder traveled through me, rattling my teeth and making my head pound.

This had to be a dream. A nightmare . . .

Pain drummed in my head, and blackness closed around the edges, tiny sparks dancing in empty space as I struggled to my hands and knees. Blinking, I fought to shake it off, to see what was out there, to finally rise to my feet and stagger to the wall, then brace one hand to keep myself upright. An agony of pin prickles shot through my legs with each step. My bare feet were so cold, I couldn’t even feel the rocks underneath.

The source of the flickering light was nearby. A lantern sat perhaps ten feet to my left. Not an old kerosene lantern like the ones we used in the village, but the modern propane type. The guys in crew camp carried them occasionally.

Was this all part of the show? Some kind of weird, twisted punishment for what I’d done? Was Rav Singh behind it? Had this project, his obsession with Wildwood, somehow driven him over the edge? Had someone else in Wildwood finally completely lost it? How closely had they checked the backgrounds of the people here?

I opened my mouth to call out, then stopped. If there was someone nearby, I needed to stay quiet to figure out what was happening, discover how I’d ended up here. I was okay as far as I could tell, just chilled and bruised.

I had to find a way out. Now. Before whoever had brought me here came back. Was I alone?

What was hiding in the darkness outside the lantern’s glow? One step, then two, then three. I squinted into the void beyond. Was someone watching me even now?

A movement teased my ear as I reached for the lamp handle. The soft echo of a woman’s voice. It was gone as quickly as it
came, then, silence again, save for the water dripping. Maybe I’d only imagined it. . . .

The flame hissed and flickered as I grabbed the lantern. Its warmth melted over my stiff fingers, and I lifted it so that the light spread farther. Seeing more of my surroundings told me little more than I already knew. The chamber was perhaps twenty feet in height and roughly the same length, slightly narrower in width. Eerie shadows manifested on the walls, ghostlike as they outlined odd shapes carved into the limestone by flowing water at some time in the past. Nearby a small spring bled through the rock, its passage creating a waxy crystalline dome as it trickled downward and fell into a pool on the floor.

On either end of the chamber, darkness stretched toward what seemed to be narrower passageways. Which would lead out? How far was I from the surface?

The woman’s voice came again, faint and then gone. Was that someone outside I was hearing? Maybe someone who didn’t even know I was in here? I had to be near the lake or the river. Was it daylight out there? If it was, people might be close by, boating or canoeing, hiking or picnicking. Would they hear me if I called out?

The lantern flame danced and spit sparks as I inched toward the sound, shivering and crouching, picking my way carefully along the floor, slick and mossy beneath my feet. Something rustled in the shadows as I reached the room’s end and extended the light in front of myself so I could see down the tunnel. It was the larger of the two passageways, and it seemed logical that the larger passage might lead out, the cave narrowing as it went farther underground.

But there was no way to know. I could just as easily be going deeper.

Water trickled under my feet, icy as I crept along the shaft,
bracing a hand on the wall to keep my balance. I was still so dizzy, my brain slow and foggy.

There was another chamber ahead. No light, other than what the lantern cast. If this was the passageway out, I was still far from the surface, but the tunnel was widening again, the lantern painting a wavering half circle that grew as I moved. Too late, I realized it would announce my approach to anyone inside. Pressing close to the wall, I covered my mouth, trying to stop my teeth from chattering as the water grew deeper, covering my feet. My toe collided with something, and it rolled away. Bending over, I groped for it blindly, circled my fingers around it. A stick or rock, slightly curved. Not much of a weapon, but it was something.

Sound emerged from the chamber, louder, easier to make out now that I was closer. A woman moaning, trying to say something. The pulse in my ears sped up, pounded wildly. My senses became stark and acute, my thoughts focused on defense and survival.

The moaning increased in desperation as I stepped into the chamber. My fingers tightened around the stick, and the lamplight flickered outward. A rush of nausea and dizziness whirled over me, clouding my thoughts, making me struggle for balance, for reality. Around me, images spun like fins on a pinwheel. Limestone walls, strange shadows, bones, a remnant of fabric. Calico, the colors time-faded. A shoe—the black lace-up sort the women and children wore on the production, but this one was old, largely disintegrated, the layers of the sole fanned out like pages in a book.

A spill of hair, reflecting the light.

A groan.

Movement.

A hand covered with bleeding blue-white flesh.

I saw my own fingers, wrapped around something white
with a ball-shaped end. A socket. A bone. My fingers jerked apart. It fell, clattered.

The noise echoed through the room, escaped among the corridors, the vibrations telling me there was no way out of this place other than the passage that had brought me here. This was the end. The deepest part of the cave.

I turned toward the sound of the woman, letting the light discover her as her moans intensified.

Kim?

Her body lay splayed in the dirt, unnaturally twisted, her brown dress torn and bloodied.

“Kim.” I rushed toward her, set the light just beyond the spill of her hair, and knelt down. Her skin was like the water seeping from the rocks, damp and frigid to the touch.

“Leee,” she murmured. My name, I thought. Her fingers opened slightly, seeming to beckon mine.

Something chalky white at the edge of the lamplight caught my eye. A skull, resting against the wall like a movie prop, the remains of a bonnet still clinging to it, a ragged hole in the dome of the forehead.

I could only stare, clutch Kim’s hand, and think . . .
This isn’t real.
My mind searched for an explanation, any explanation, however irrational.

How could this be happening? How long had Kim been here? How long had I?

Someone had brought me here. But who? Why? Did Kim know?

I touched her face, tried to rouse her, but she barely responded. “Kim, wake up.” I checked her injuries. The blood seemed to be largely from scrapes and scratches and a small gash on her forehead. Beneath it, her skin was purple and swollen. Had someone hit her, or had she fallen? Her legs lay bent behind her body. Were they broken?