her as the long night had worn on. “They must have found them!”
Mary gazed anxiously at Barbara. “Are you sure?”
“It has to be,” Barbara replied. “Craig wouldn’t come back for any other reason.”
They ran across the lawn, coming to the dock just as the three boats pulled up.
“They’re safe!” Barbara cried, tears streaming down her cheeks as she ran out onto the dock. “Michael, what were you thinking of? Do you have any idea of how frightened I’ve been? You promised you’d stay within sight of your father!”
But like Craig’s, Barbara’s brief spate of anger dissolved at the sight of Michael’s grin, and she threw her arms around him, nearly toppling both of them into the water as his skiff shot away from the dock.
“Jeez, Mom! Let me get tied up before you drown both of us!”
A few minutes later they were all in the house, and Mary, seeing Kelly in the bright light of the kitchen, gasped.
Kelly’s clothes were soaked with mud, and her legs, scratched and bleeding, were covered with slime. “Darling, what happened?” she asked.
Kelly looked ruefully down at her ruined clothes, then up at her mother. “I–I guess maybe running away in the swamp in the middle of the night isn’t the best thing I’ve ever done, is it?”
Mary stared at her daughter for a moment, then the tension that had been building in her all night suddenly snapped and she began laughing. “Well, I guess it isn’t,” she said when she finally regained control of herself. “Go dump those clothes in the washer and take a shower, and I’ll get you a robe.” She hurried out of the kitchen, returning a few seconds later with her own favorite bathrobe, which she took to Kelly, who was already in the small bathroom Carl had built behind the kitchen so he wouldn’t have to track mud through the house when he returned from work each afternoon. When she came back, she sank into a chair across from Michael.
“How did you find her?” she asked.
Michael said nothing, knowing there was no way to explain the strange things that had happened to him in the swamp. Indeed, even after listening to Clarey, he. barely understood it himself.
“It don’t matter how it works,” the old woman had told him. “Alls I can tell you is I always know where the children is, and what they’s doin’. And I can call ’em, too, like I called Jonas tonight, and sent him out to get Kelly. And I was talkin’ to you, too, tellin’ you where to go, tellin’ you where to look.” She’d gazed deep into him then. “You think you know the swamp, but you don’t know half of what I know. So don’t you be thinkin’ you can always do anythin’ you want, you hear? I might not always be lookin’ out for you!”
“I–I guess I was just lucky,” he said at last, feeling the eyes of his own parents, and Kelly’s, too, on him. “I sort of pictured where she went into the swamp, and where she’d have had to go. I mean — well, there’s only so many places you can go on foot.”
Finally Kelly came out of the bathroom, her mother’s robe wrapped around her, and joined the group around the table. She tried to tell them everything that had happened, but when she came to the snake, she stopped, shuddering at the memory.
“Kelly?” Mary asked. “What is it?”
“A — A snake,” Kelly stammered. “It was a water moccasin, and it crawled right over my leg.”
Mary stifled a scream.
“What did you do?” Carl Anderson asked.
Kelly looked up at her grandfather. “I didn’t do anything,” she said softly. “I just held still. I didn’t move, and the snake went away.”
Carl’s eyes held on Kelly. She felt her flesh crawl as, just for an instant, a peculiar look came into her grandfather’s eyes. A look that somehow frightened her.
“How did you know to do that?” he asked.
Kelly hesitated for only a split second. “Michael told me,” she said. “Remember? A few days ago, when we went out into the swamp together? He told me that if I ran into a snake, I should hold still. He said it couldn’t see me if I didn’t move.”
Carl’s gaze held hers for a second longer, then he nodded. “He’s right. They can sense you, but they don’t strike at what’s not moving. If something’s not moving, they think it’s dead and they leave it alone.”
Once again Kelly felt her skin crawl, and when she glanced quickly at Michael, she was certain he was having the same feeling.
But neither of them said anything.
Finally Barbara stood up. “I have to go home,” she announced. “I’m not sure I’m going to be able to sleep, but at least I can go to bed and try to get some rest. I’ll go up and get Jenny.”
The group in the kitchen moved toward the family room and were just starting out onto the terrace when Barbara, her face ashen, appeared at the top of the stairs.
“She’s not here,” she said, her voice cracking. “Craig, Jenny’s gone!”
The chatter of conversation died as everyone in the room stared at Barbara in stunned silence.
20
“Wake up, Judd.” Warren Phillips spoke the words harshly, shaking the sleeping man’s shoulder. “Come on, Judd, it’s almost dawn.”
Judd groaned, pulling away, but when Phillips prodded him once more, his eyes opened and he groggily sat up.
The first thing he noticed was that the pain in his joints was gone. His limbs were once more as supple as they had ever been.
He looked at his hands; the liver spots had disappeared, and his cracked nails had smoothed out again. His knuckles, grotesquely swollen last night, were their normal size, and the skin on his fingers was that of a man in his late forties.
Rising from the sofa, he crossed to the mirror over the fireplace and stared in relief at his own reflection. His face had smoothed out; only the small crow’s-feet around the corners of his eyes remained. His eyes, dull and sunken only hours ago, looked perfectly normal, and when he spoke, there was no trace left of the crackling rasp that was all he’d been able to manage when he’d arrived at Phillips’s house a few hours earlier. He breathed deeply, feeling the rush of air into his lungs, then released his breath in a long clear sigh. He turned, grinning. “It worked. I feel great again.”
“Of course it worked,” Phillips replied. “It’s worked for twenty years — why wouldn’t it work now?” Without waiting for a reply, he began issuing orders to the deputy. “Jenny Sheffield is in the bathroom upstairs. You’re going to use the radio in your car to call the hospital and tell them you found her in the canal and you’re bringing her in.”
Duval shook his head. “Wouldn’t do that. I’d call for the medics. It’s procedure.”
Phillips’s lips curled in a thin smile. “If she’s already dead?”
The deputy stared at the doctor numbly. “You killed her?”
The doctor tilted his head toward the stairs in the foyer. “Why don’t you go take a look, and tell me what you think.”
Duval hesitated, but left the library, and with Phillips following behind, mounted the stairs. When he came to the landing, he glanced uncertainly around.
“Second door on the left,” Phillips said.
Duval moved down the hall, hesitated, then opened the door to the bathroom. For a moment he saw nothing, but then his eyes gravitated to the tub.
It was filled, a layer of ice cubes floating on the surface. But beneath the translucent ice he could make out the form of a body.
Jenny’s body, clad in jeans and a T-shirt, her hair floating around her head in the form of a grotesque halo.
“Holy Jesus,” Duval whispered, gazing in shock at the face that peered up from beneath the water’s surface.
