Nightshade (25 page)

And again hesitated.

Matt was her friend, and she was supposed to be his! So what could it hurt, just to talk to him for a minute or two, and tell him she didn’t believe what everyone was saying about him?

She glanced up and down the street, and seeing no cars, made up her mind. Darting through the gate, she ran a few yards up the driveway, then ducked into the cover of the woods. A few moments later, when she knew she was far enough from the gate that no one could see her, she emerged from the trees and continued up the drive. When she came to the house, she ignored the front door, going around to use the back door the way she always had. She passed the carriage house and the shed behind it and was at the steps to the door leading to the mud room when she sensed something.

Something behind her.

Suddenly she wondered if maybe she shouldn’t have just stayed on the road and gone on home. But that was stupid — it was just Matt, or Mrs. Hapgood, or —

An arm slipped around her neck and tightened on it so quickly that her scream did not escape her throat. She tried to jerk away but lost her footing and fell to her knees.

In an instant, the arm around her throat was replaced by hands with a grip even stronger than the arm.

Desperately, she reached up, her own hands closing on the fingers squeezing her neck.

They felt cold to her touch, as if they were the fingers of a corpse. But their pressure was relentless, and no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t pry them loose.

Struggling to breathe, to fill her lungs with the air the hands around her neck had cut off, Kelly thrashed first one way, then the other.

Her heart was pounding now, and as her vision began to blur and she felt herself grow dizzy, the truth rose up in her mind:

She was going to die.

She was going to die right here, right now, and nobody — not her parents, not her friends — nobody in the world could help her.

Nobody even knew where she was.

Daddy!
she tried to cry out, but no sound emerged from her strangled throat. Darkness was closing around her now, and she felt the strength in her body ebb. Still she tried to pull at the cold, nerveless hands that gripped her, but her fingers were growing numb, and in another few seconds they fell away.

Kelly’s body went limp and the blackness closed around her.

They were right,
she thought as she gave in to the darkness.
They were right. . . .

*                                     *                                     *

FRED RUDMAN WAS about to close up shop for the evening, a process that wouldn’t take him more than five minutes, given that it involved little more than wiping down the work surfaces, turning off the lights, and closing the door that separated the shop from the rest of the house. There had been a time, back when he’d learned the art of taxidermy from his father, when the shop was a busy place. During hunting season his father would hire two assistants, and even working twelve hour days, they wouldn’t be able to keep up with the work. Nor had it just been deer, bear, and the occasional mountain lion that came through the door back in those days, for when Fred was a boy, the men of Granite Falls — at least the men of any kind of means — had hunted throughout the world, shipping their trophies home for Hans Rudman to mount. Lions, tigers, elephants, and giraffes. Polar bears, rhinos . . . even a hippopotamus head had once arrived. But as the big game dwindled away over the years — and as more people saw hunting as nothing more than the slaughter of animals for no other reason than to assuage the self-doubt of the hunters — the Rudman family business also began to dwindle away.

Fred had seen the trend coming years ago, and prepared for the future by investing what little money he earned in a dying industry in stocks that looked to him as if they were in their infancy. Thanks to the success of Microsoft and a few other companies, what had been the Rudman family’s source of income for four generations was now little more than a hobby for its last surviving member. And this season had been the slowest ever — since the death of Bill Hapgood, no one at all had come to the shop with a trophy to be mounted. Thus, Fred Rudman was surprised to hear the bell jingle just as he was about to go out front and lock the door.

When he stepped through the door from the workroom and saw Matt Moore, the boy’s shirt and pants stained with blood, Rudman’s surprise gave way to concern. “Good Lord, young fellow, what have you been up to? Are you all right?” His eyes shifted to the object Matt had put on the counter — a large garbage bag from which a pair of antlers protruded — and his concern shifted to uncertainty. “That’s not what I think it is, is it?”

“It’s the buck I shot,” Matt said. “How much will it cost to have it mounted?”

Instead of answering the question, Rudman gingerly picked up the bag and stepped back through the door to the workshop, jerking his head to indicate that Matt should follow him. “Let’s just have a look at this.” He set the bag down on the big stainless steel table, untied the drawstrings, and peeled it away from the buck’s head. The first thing he saw was the neat hole through the skull — exactly between the animal’s eyes — where Matt’s first shot had struck. There was a larger wound on the back of the head where the bullet had exited, tearing away a piece of the deer’s skull and a ragged patch of skin. Both were the kind of wounds he’d repaired hundreds of times before, and by the time the head was mounted, neither would show at all.

Then his attention shifted to the stag’s neck, where Matt had cut it free from the body. The skin was ragged and torn, almost shredded in places. “What did you do, try to cut it off with a pocket knife?” When Matt didn’t reply, the taxidermist lifted his eyes from the deer to the boy who stood on the other side of the worktable. Though Matt’s eyes were fixed on the buck, it seemed to the old man that he wasn’t seeing it. “You sure you want me to mount this, Matt?” he asked. For a moment he wasn’t certain Matt had heard him, and when the boy finally spoke, his eyes remained fixed on the grisly object that lay on the table.

“My dad wanted me to,” he said. There was a flatness in Matt’s voice that caught the taxidermist’s attention, and the frown lines in his brow deepened. Now he had no doubt that though Matt was looking at the deer’s head, he was seeing something else. The boy’s next words confirmed it: “My dad said it was going to be my first trophy.”

Finally he looked up, and as their gazes met, Rudman felt a chill. Matt’s eyes held an expression the old man had never seen before. There was a flatness to them — an emptiness — that made him take an instinctive step backward.

“Everyone thinks I killed my dad,” Matt said, his voice dropping so low that Rudman wondered if he even knew he was uttering the words out loud. “And maybe I did,” he went on. “Maybe that’s why I want to mount it — to remind myself of what I did.”

*                                     *                                     *

THE SLAMMING OF the back door made Joan Hapgood’s body jerk reflexively in one of those convulsions that usually occur only at the moment when both the body and the mind are on the very edge of sleep. Except Joan hadn’t been asleep at all — she was in the kitchen, thinking about what she and Matt might have for supper. Then, as she smelled the aroma of meat loaf wafting from the oven and saw how dark it had gotten beyond the windows, she felt oddly disoriented. How had it gotten so late so quickly? And when —

Her thought died as Matt stepped through the door from the mud room and she saw the bloodstains on his shirt. For a moment she could do nothing at all — neither speak nor move — as questions tumbled through her mind.

Where had he been?

How long had he been gone?

And what on earth had he been doing?

But a moment later the paralysis that had seized her passed. She took a hesitant step toward him, instinctively reaching out as if to help him. “Matt? What happened? What . . . ?” Her question faded to silence as Matt’s eyes narrowed and sparked with a glint of anger.

“I’m fine,” he told her, but the tension in his voice belied the words. “I took the buck’s head over to Mr. Rudman’s, that’s all.”

Joan felt dizzy. The buck? Then she remembered — the deputy who brought them home a few days ago had said something about putting it in the shed. But surely Matt couldn’t be talking about
that
deer.

“Dad said it was going to be my first trophy,” he said. The anger in his eyes was matched by the truculence in his voice.

Joan listened numbly, barely able to grasp what he was saying, as Matt told her how his clothes had gotten stained. Surely he couldn’t really want to have the deer’s head mounted? Just the idea of it hanging in the house made her queasy. To have it reminding them every single day of what had happened last week . . .

She shuddered.

And the sight of his clothes — the dark smears of blood —

“Take off your clothes,” she said, her voice trembling. “Don’t even take them upstairs. Just take them off and leave them on the washing machine.”

For a moment she thought Matt might challenge her, but then, as if he’d come to a decision, some of the anger drained from his expression. He disappeared through the door to the laundry room, and a minute later she heard him going up the back stairs. Only when his footsteps had faded did she go to the laundry room herself.

He had left the bloodied shirt and jeans on the washing machine, just as she’d asked. But eyeing the crumpled mass, she wondered if she shouldn’t just burn them instead.

Just take them outside to the old incinerator, put them in it, and burn them.

But even as the thought came into her mind, she rejected it. What had she been thinking? The clothes weren’t ruined — they only had a few stains on them. She would just put them in the washer, turn the machine on, and forget about it.

She reached for the clothes, but before her fingers could close on them, she hesitated again.

Did she doubt him? she wondered. Did she think he was lying? A chill passed through her as she remembered the doubt she felt when she found Matt in his room and he told her about the rabbit hanging on the shed wall.

The rabbit that hadn’t been there.

Stop it! He’s a good boy, and he wouldn’t hurt anyone or anything, and he wouldn’t lie. He’d never lie!

But even as she tried to reassure herself, the doubts kept flicking back at her. Flicking like so many tiny darts, picking at her, piercing tiny holes in the shield of confidence she was trying to build.

What had happened to the rabbit Bill had given Matt so many years ago?

What
could
have happened to it?

“No!” She spoke the word out loud, as if the sound of her voice could drive the demon thoughts from her mind. Snatching up the shirt and jeans, she opened the top of the washer and shoved the clothes inside, then added detergent and bleach.

She closed the lid and pressed the buttons to set the machine.

Finally, refusing to listen to the questions still spinning through her mind, she pulled the knob to start the machine.

CHAPTER
17

GERRY CONROE SLOWED his car as he approached the gates to Bill Hapgood’s house.

Not Bill’s,
he silently corrected himself.
Not anymore. Now it’s Joan’s. Joan’s and Matt’s.

But no matter how many times he reminded himself, it still didn’t seem possible. Bill Hapgood had been his best friend for as long as he could remember — they’d done everything together, from the time they were little boys right up until the night before Bill had died. They’d been as close as brothers — closer, in fact, since the only thing they’d ever disagreed on had been Bill’s decision to marry Joan Moore. His knuckles turned white as his fingers tightened on the steering wheel. Wrong! The whole thing was wrong! He’d told Bill he shouldn’t marry Joan. “It’s not really Joan,” he’d said when Bill told him of his plans. “It’s that boy of hers — we don’t know who he is — who his father was. What kind of stock he comes from.”

Bill’s expression had hardened. “We’re talking about a little boy, not a colt,” he said.

“But he’ll never be your son,” Gerry insisted. “If you ask me — ”

“I didn’t ask you,” Bill cut in, his voice taking on an edge that warned Gerry not to push the issue any further. “I asked you if you’d be my best man. And that’s
all
I asked you. So will you do it, or do I have to find someone else?”

That was the end of the argument, and for the last ten years Gerry had kept his misgivings to himself.

Now, ten years later, Bill Hapgood was dead.

Worse, it was starting to look like the boy would get away with it. Dan Pullman showed no signs of even arresting the boy, and the way things were going, the whole thing might be chalked up to a hunting accident.

Accident!

As far as Gerry was concerned, a direct shot to the center of Bill Hapgood’s forehead couldn’t have been an accident. And everyone knew how good a shot Matt was — Bill had taught the boy himself.

For just a second Gerry was tempted to turn in at the gates, drive up to Bill’s house, and confront Matt right now. Confront him, and get the truth out of him. But then he imagined what his wife would say: “It’s not up to you, Gerry. What you think doesn’t matter — it’s what Dan and the prosecutors think that counts, and they say they don’t have a case against Matt.” He could feel Nancy’s eyes boring into him as clearly as if she were sitting beside him. “Why are you so sure Matt killed him on purpose? What if you’re wrong?”

I’m not wrong,
Gerry told himself.
What happened to Bill was no accident.
But still he didn’t turn in at the gates. He continued to drive on to his own house, where he left the car in the driveway in front of the garage and went into the house through the back door. Nancy was in the kitchen, standing in front of the open oven door and poking gently at a roast whose aroma made Gerry’s mouth water. “I think another half-hour, and it’ll be done,” she said, glancing at the clock. “Dinner at seven okay?”