Kitteridge, still uncertain about what Barbara meant, turned to Craig. “Can you tell me what this is all about?”
As calmly as he could, Craig tried to explain to the police chief what first Barbara, and then the two of them, had discovered that morning. “We don’t have any idea what it’s all about,” he finished. “But we know that there seem to be a lot of men around here who don’t look nearly as old as they are. I’m talking about men who don’t seem to have aged a day in the last fifteen or twenty years.” He ticked off half a dozen names. When he came to Carl Anderson’s, Kitteridge suddenly stopped him.
“Carl had changed this morning,” he said. “According to Ted, he’d gotten old overnight. I mean, realty old. When Ted saw him this morning, he looked like he was ready to die.”
Suddenly, for the first time in weeks, he remembered George Coulton. George Coulton, whose body — if it was his body — even Amelie had been unable to identify.
He warn’t that old, she had said. He warn’t much older’n me.
But the body — the body he was certain in his own mind was George Coulton — had looked at least eighty, maybe even older.
“What the hell is going on around here?” he said almost under his breath. “It sounds like Phillips must have found the fountain of youth or something.”
In Craig Sheffield’s mind it all came together. “No,” he said. “It’s worse. He’s found out how to take the youth away from our children and sell it to his friends. That’s what he needs the babies for. To take something out of them and use it himself.” Suddenly he remembered one other name, a name he’d left off the list he’d just recited to Tim Kitteridge.
“Where’s Judd Duval?”
Kitteridge looked at him blankly. “He’s in the swamp,” he said. “He’s looking for Carl Anderson and the kids.”
Craig was silent for a moment. Then, his voice hollow, he said, “You’d better hope he doesn’t find them.”
29
As dusk began to settle over the swamp, Judd Duval felt the first icy fingers of fear brush against him, making the hairs on the back of his neck rise up and his skin crawl as if tiny insects were creeping into his pores. He’d been in the swamp most of the afternoon, and as the day had worn on, an intangible sense of impending danger had come over him. Part of it, he knew, was simply the swamp itself. Despite having lived in it all his life, his fear of it seemed to grow steadily, and today he felt its thousands of eyes watching him from every direction.
Yet no matter where he looked, he saw nothing.
Nothing except the moss-laden trees, the twisting vines, the black impenetrable water.
And the creatures.
Water moccasins slithered silently through the waterways, leaving only the faintest ripples behind them, and the ever-present alligators and crocodiles basked in the mud, their cold, glittering eyes seeming to fix hungrily on him as he passed.
An hour ago he’d wound his way through the swamp rats’ scattered settlement, and found a difference there, too.
The houses had seemed deserted, with no women sitting on their porches, no children playing at their feet.
He’d seen no men mending their fishnets or patching their boats.
Yet he’d sensed their presence inside the houses, felt them watching him.
It was as if they knew something, were hiding from some unseen danger that, though invisible, lay like a palpable force over the wetlands this afternoon.
Now, as the light began to fade, Judd found himself staring at a small island that loomed ahead of him. A single dying pine tree rose up out of a thicket of undergrowth, its branches silhouetted against the reddening sky like beckoning arms. Judd slowed his boat, letting it drift forward on the slow-moving current until the prow scraped against the bottom.
Judd’s eyes left the tree, scanning the soft land along the shore line.
Reeds were broken, and footprints showed clearly in the mud.
Footprints that led toward the thicket around the soaring pine.
His heartbeat quickening, his sense of dread gathering around him like the cloak of darkness that was falling over the swamp, Judd got out of the boat and followed the tracks.
He came to the tangle of brush around the pine tree and paused, his skin prickling. Every nerve fiber within him sensed that something vile was hidden within those bushes.
A memory flashed into his mind, an image of the body in the swamp, to which Amelie Coulton had guided him.
He pushed the memory aside and thrust himself into the dense foliage, forcing the branches aside.
And saw Carl Anderson’s body, stretched out on its back, already crawling with insects. A vulture, perched on Carl’s face, one of his eyeballs clutched in its beak, screamed with indignation at the interruption of its feast, then leaped upward, its wings beating as it scrambled into the sky.
Judd stared at the carnage that had been Carl Anderson’s chest, torn open, congealing blood filling the cavity with a reddish brown ooze.
He gazed at the ruin of Carl’s face, the eyes torn from their now empty sockets, only a few remaining scraps of skin still clinging to the bones of the old man’s skull.
Knowing now the truth of the danger he sensed, Judd backed away, then turned and fled to the safety of his boat. Starting the engine, he pulled away from the island, the image of the defiled corpse still fresh in his mind.
He turned the boat homeward, intent only on reaching his cabin, where, perhaps, he could lock the doors and windows against the terrible fear that was building within him. But even as he left the island where Carl Anderson lay, his panic began to peak, for moving through the gathering darkness, there were boats.
Not boats filled with the other men who had come out with him to search for Carl Anderson’s body.
Boats filled with children.
Strange, silent children, their eyes staring straight ahead, as if they were following some invisible beacon that only they could see.
As they passed him, Judd Duval’s heart began to pound, and an icy knot of pure terror took form in his belly, spreading slowly outward, threatening to paralyze him.
Only when the last of the boats had finally passed did he start the engine of his own skiff and turn the other way, intent only on getting away from those mute, menacing children with their empty eyes.
• • •
Barbara Sheffield felt her frustration reaching the breaking point. All afternoon she had tried to convince Tim Kitteridge that he should be searching Warren Phillips’s office — his house — anyplace where they might be able to find proof of what she was certain he had done.
But the chief had been adamant. “I can’t do it, Mrs. Sheffield,” he’d told her only half an hour ago, with a patronizing tone of long-suffering forbearance in his voice that had made Barbara want to slap him. “Right now I have other things to worry about. According to your own son, there’s a body somewhere in the swamp, and now we’ve got those two kids missing as well. When we’ve taken care of that, I’ll start looking into Warren Phillips.”
What he hadn’t told her was that he also had nothing with which to justify a search of Warren Phillips’s premises. Until he’d had an expert study the birth certificates that Barbara and Craig Sheffield claimed were forged — and who might give him some evidence that Phillips had been the forger — he couldn’t even go to a judge for a search warrant. And despite the pleas of the Sheffields, he wasn’t about to commit himself to an illegal search of anything. That, he was certain, would leave him defending himself against a lawsuit for the rest of his career.
But when Carl Anderson’s body was found, it might be a different story. For if Carl looked as Kelly and Michael — and even Carl’s own son — said he did, Kitteridge would have sufficient reason to talk to Phillips about what condition he might have been treating Carl for, and what drugs he had administered. But until the body was found, he had only secondhand impressions of Carl’s condition.