A movement startled him and he jumped back, bumping the bedside table. He waited for the hand to reach out.
Instead, a coal-black cat bounded from the trunk.
In its mouth, Jesse saw a small bone.
“No,” he muttered, taking a step toward the cat. But he stopped as the cat lifted its gaze to his.
Its eyes were uncannily human. He almost expected the cat to open its mouth and speak.
It didn’t, but darted passed him and out the door.
He did not chase it, but followed it into the hallway.
He thought he heard the patter its feet overhead, but couldn’t be sure.
When he returned to the room, he gazed at the trunk, guilt-ridden that he hadn’t done better to protect the body inside it.
“I’ve done a lot wrong in my life,” he said. “But maybe I can do right by you, Veronica. Maybe I can bring you home to your momma and brother.”
He closed the bedroom door and walked down the stairs, calmer than he’d been in days.
He had options. If he called the police, they’d find the body, check the teeth or whatever they did to match her to the missing girl. Veronica’s family could bury their daughter in the plot next to her father. It was the right thing to do, but once he’d done that, it was over. His search, the house, his purpose.
He wanted to follow it first, see if he could give them more than the body. Maybe he could give them the killer, too.
He believed Liv was his key, the daughter of the man from the Stoneroot Forest.
If anyone could find her, it was George Corey.
Liv
Liv stayed with the cat as she darted through the forest, leaping over decayed logs and scampering up trees if something rustled close by.
When she reached Spellway Road, Liv urged the cat to slow and wait. The better part of the night had passed and dawn crested the horizon before a pick-up truck headed for Traverse City slid into view. Liv felt the cat’s pace quicken as the truck slowed at a stop sign. The cat ran and sprang into the bed of the truck, slithering between two barrels. She laid down, panting, and rested the bone on her forelegs.
Liv pulled her spirit from the animal.
Slowly, as if she drifted on a wave, she rolled back into her own body. The bowl rested beneath her fingers and she slid it aside, reclining on the bed. Though she hadn’t so much as taken a step, she was exhausted. Sweat ran along her brow and the rapid beat of the cat’s heart seemed to flutter beneath her ribs.
She closed her eyes and willed her body to sleep.
Chapter 37
Liv
The day passed in quiet anticipation.
Liv heard the hospital abuzz with patients and doctors, nurses and orderlies rushing about. She imagined plucking off the roof and watching them scurrying up and down the hallways.
The room contained no windows.
Stephen had left a lamp lit by the door. It cast streaks of light on the white plaster walls.
In the tile floor, she saw a drain and noticed a clump of something dark — hair, she thought, cringing.
When Stephen finally lumbered into the room, Liv knew the sun had set over the dense asylum forest.
Sweat rolled down his face and soaked his collar. His black hair was mussed, his face unshaven, and she smelled him from across the room. It was not merely that he’d skipped his shower that morning. His body knew what his mind refused to accept: he was in danger, fight or flight was at hand. But Stephen forged on, refusing, or perhaps incapable, of knowing when to stop.
“You don’t look well, Stephen,” Liv murmured, but he seemed not to hear her.
He dug a photo from a leather bag, and then picked up a straitjacket with his free hand.
“Look,” he commanded, thrusting the photo in Liv’s face.
Liv gazed at a young woman and two small girls — sisters, she thought, based on their matching Christmas dresses.
“Who are…” but she didn’t finish. As she gazed at the girl’s mother with her soft blonde curls framing her heart-shaped face, she knew. Arlene. Her own baby sister, now grown into a woman and a mother.
“That’s right,” Stephen nodded. “Take a good look. You fight me,” he held up the straightjacket, “and I’m going for them next, Liv. Understand? You know I’ll do it.”
Liv pressed her lips together and nodded.
She had not intended to fight him.
His demise would come from within.
Mack
Mack slipped from the behind the willow, stealthily avoiding twigs and dried leaves as he crept behind Stephen Kaiser.
Liv had spotted him. He saw her eyes widen slightly.
As Dr. Kaiser fumbled with a wall of brush, she mouthed the words ‘not yet’ at Mack.
He nodded and hung back, watching curiously as a dark hole opened in the foliage. A secret door lay within the bushes.
As Kaiser pushed Liv, bound by the straightjacket, ahead of him into a dark hallway, Mack sprang to the doorway and shoved a stick in the opening before it closed.
The heavy door slid shut, and for a moment Mack though the stick would snap and Liv would disappear into the darkness. Somehow it held.
Liv
“I thought I had to keep you alive. All this time,” Stephen laughed. “But if you’re… if you’re gone, Liv. The nightmares will be gone and the voices and the… the…” He stopped, hands braced on the table, breathing hard.
She could see the outline of his ribs through his sweat-stained shirt.
“Shut up,” he screamed suddenly, head jerking up as he spun around and flung a hand out as if to grab something that wasn’t there.
“Who haunts you, Stephen?”
He continued to gaze feverishly at the emptiness before him, and then he turned and glared at her.
“You,” he hissed.
Stephen took a while to gather himself, but soon he bustled around the room, focused. Liv watched him open a plastic crate.
He lifted out the corpse of a large muskrat. The rotted body released a noxious stench, and Liv closed her eyes and looked away.
“The spell called for an otter, but this is close. It’s close enough,” he mumbled to himself.
He laid the carcass on a wooden table he’d arranged with other things: candles, feathers, a series of stones, and a jar of blood.
“And let’s not forget this,” he uttered.
He turned to face Liv and lifted the poison ring. She knew he’d taken it. She’d left it for him to find.
“She used to threaten me with this,” he said, turning the ring back and forth. The ruby glittered in the firelight. “Open your mouth, she’d scream, and I did it. A hundred times I must have opened my mouth and waited for her to dump the poison in. After a time, I wanted her to. Once, I even dared her.” A hollow, angry laugh erupted from him. “She left the room and came back a moment later. Told me again to open my mouth. I did, and she poured the powder in.”
Stephen lowered the ring, glaring at it.
“What happened?” Liv asked, unable to forget that long-ago boy she had loved, unable to cut off her pity for the man he’d become.
“It was borax,” he whispered. A look of disgust pressed his features ugly, and he licked his lips as if something bitter coated his tongue. “She’d taken the poison out and replaced it with laundry soap. I spit it out, and she slapped me. Told me to clean the carpet where I’d spit. And then I spent two nights in the cellar.”
As he spoke, his back curved, his shoulders hunching forward as if trying to protect the heart within his chest. Though it was too late for that now. All the good had gone from him.