He was almost back to the farmhouse when he saw two huge red eyes glowing at him through the fog.
A second later a car engine started up. Not eyes, taillights.
Dale ran, bat in hand, sure that someone was stealing his truck. The taillights glowed crimson a moment and then shut off as the vehicle drove quickly away through the fog.
Dale slid to a stop on the muddy turnaround area. His Land Cruiser was still where he’d parked it. He beeped the security system. It had been locked. But it seemed to have sunk into the mud. . .
“God damnit,” growled Dale as he stepped closer. All four of the tires were flat. Dale assumed that they had been slashed again.
Dale walked out in front of the house, bat raised to his shoulder and ready to swing. He could hear a truck driving away on County 6, moving much too quickly for the foggy conditions.
There were tracks in the gravel and mud driveway—one pickup truck from the looks of the wheel tracks.
“Not funny, Derek,” yelled Dale into the fog. “Not one bit fucking funny. You assholes are going to jail this time.”
Tracking mud, Dale went into the farmhouse and looked around.
I’ve been here—what—three weeks, and how many dozen times have I had to search this fucking house?He searched it again.
No muddy bootprints except his own. No sign of anything missing or disturbed.
Except the fucking laptop. The ThinkPad was on again, the screen black except for three lines of white letters burning after the C prompt. This time Dale was sure that he had shut the computer off before leaving.
Disgusted, he walked over to flick the power off, not wanting to read another irritatingly cryptic message. But the stanza form of the message made him read, and the content made him pause. This was no High Middle German or Old English—Dale Stewart, Ph.D., even recognized the source. It was from Sir Walter Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Canto VI, if he remembered correctly. Clare could tell him. She had been auditing the graduate-level Eighteenth-Century Literature seminar the last time he’d taught this poem. Clare remembered everything. But Clare was not around to remind him, and odds were overwhelming that she never would be again.
>For he was speechless, ghastly, wan,
Like him of whom the story ran,
Who spoke the spectre hound in man.
Still disgusted, knowing that he would have to walk a couple of miles in the fog just to get his cell phone to work in order to call the Oak Hill garage to get his truck fixed, furious that he would have to deal with C.J. Congden again, knowing in his heart that these punks were never going to be caught or punished, feeling that the mystery of the blood in the chicken coop had been solved in the all-too-mundane fact of the tire slashings, tired of this hacker bullshit, Dale pushed the OFF button and watched the computer screen wink to a point of light and then die to black.
THIRTEEN
BOY, I hate movies like that.”
“Movies like what?” said Dale. It was late on Thanksgiving Day. Duane’s farmhouse smelled of turkey and stuffing and a dozen other cooking smells. Dale had ended up doing the shopping for the turkey and the wine, but Michelle Staffney had done most of the cooking that day. By early evening, Dale and Michelle had eaten a good portion of the twelve-pound turkey, had drunk a couple of beers before dinner, and were on their second bottle of white wine. They had washed the dishes and returned to the dining room. Dale had lugged all of the ancient learning machines out to a shed, but there had been no dining room table, only the benches on which the machines had sat. Dale had done his best, dragging the benches to the basement, moving the kitchen table into the dining room for the big day, and covering it with an ancient linen tablecloth he had found in the hall closet. Now the sunlight had faded away, but only a couple of lights were on in the house. Music from the console radio wafted up the stairway from the basement.
“You know,” said Michelle, holding her wine glass in both hands. “I hate those formula scary movies. Horror movies. Slasher movies. Whatever.”
Dale frowned. He had been telling her about the events of the past week—the blood in the chicken coop, finding his truck with flattened tires, the other truck driving off in the fog—something he probably wouldn’t have talked about unless he’d had too much wine. “You comparing my life to a slasher movie?” he asked, pretending to be indignant—and actually feeling a bit indignant beneath the friendly buzz of the wine and beer.
Michelle smiled. “No, no. But you know—I always hate that part in the movies where the people know that something scary’s going on but they stay anyway. And then the monster comes out and gets them. You know, like in the old Poltergeist or that mess of a remake of The Haunting or those slasher movies with the guy in the hockey mask or whatever.”
Dale shook his head. “I intended to leave. But I thought that those idiots had slashed my tires again.”
“But they hadn’t.”
“No,” said Dale. “After I hiked all the way to Elm Haven in the fog, called the Oak Hill garage, and waited more than two hours for the guys in the tow truck to show up and drive me back to the farm, we discovered that someone had just let the air out of all the tires.”
“But you thought they’d been slashed again.”
“Yeah.” Dale smiled ruefully and drank some wine. “I was stupid. The garage guys helped me get the tires inflated. At least I didn’t have to deal with Sheriff Congden again.”
Michelle poured more wine for both of them. Now she was also shaking her head. “C.J. Congden a sheriff. I remember him from high school here. What an asshole.” The redhead held up one manicured finger. “But you stayed. They fixed your truck. . . but you stayed here.”
Dale shrugged. “Well. . . it seemed silly to leave after all that anger at slashed tires that weren’t really slashed. . . just a stupid practical joke. And I was still working on the novel and this seemed like the right place to write it.” The only place to write it, Dale thought. He looked at her. “And besides, we had this date for Thanksgiving.”
Michelle smiled. Her smile in sixth grade had been dazzling. Now, forty years and thousands of dollars of Beverly Hills dentist bills later, it was flawless. “So did they catch them? The skinheads? I assume that they were the ones who let the air out of your tires.”
“Nope,” said Dale. “It turns out that the one kid I knew by name—Derek—had an alibi. He was in Peoria with his aunt, Sandy Whittaker.”
“Sandy Whittaker!” said Michelle. “My God. Do people just stay within five miles of home here until they die? Sandy Whittaker. I bet she got fat and married a Realtor.”
Dale slowly shook his head. “Not quite. She got fat and became a Realtor. Anyway, the sheriff’s deputy I talked to on the cell phone the next day wasn’t too interested in trying to track down some kids who just let the air out of some stranger’s tires. So I dropped the whole thing.”
“And what about the blood?” said Michelle. When she leaned forward as she was doing now, Dale could see her full breasts press together down the low neck of her green silk blouse. Her California tan had begun to fade, and the freckles on her chest blended into the softest-looking white skin imaginable.
“What?” said Dale.
“You said that there was all this blood in your chicken coop. Do you think that the skinheads who let the air out of your tires threw this blood around your chicken coop?”
Dale held his empty hands out. “Who knows? The deputy I talked to said that it just wasn’t in the Sheriff’s Department’s charter to be chasing down foxes and stray dogs who kill chickens.”