Cherie began to sob, and he put his arm around her, drawing her close against him.
The corpse continued to roll, and finally lay faceup in the water. The body was fully clothed — even the shirt was still tucked into the jeans, and for a moment, just an instant — Eric had the feeling that it wasn’t a corpse at all.
That it was moving.
That someone was playing some kind of horrible joke.
Then he realized it wasn’t a joke at all.
The body was real.
It was dead.
And it wasn’t moving.
It only appeared to be moving, because the shirt was rippling with the hundreds of crawdads feasting on the mortifying flesh beneath it.
The face was almost eaten away. Nothing remained of the eyes but empty sockets, the nose and lips reduced to shredded scraps of flesh and skin, and even the cheeks were mostly gone.
Four of the creatures were picking the meat from where the missing arm had been torn away.
Images flashed through Eric’s mind:
The bloody knot on the heavy branch in the woods.
Tippy’s guts hanging out of her belly.
And his own hands, plunging deep into the steaming entrails of—
His supper rose in his gorge, and he struggled to keep from adding his own vomit to the carnage in the water. Cherie was clinging to him now, crying into his shoulder, and he wanted to look away, wanted to look anywhere but at the grotesquery floating in the water, but he couldn’t. As if held by some unseen force, he kept gazing down into the empty sockets that had once held Ellis Langstrom’s eyes.
And even in their absence, those eyes accused him.
MERRILL BREWSTER GAZED numbly out the window of Ellen Newell’s car as Ellen slowly pulled out of the dance pavilion parking lot, which was jammed with police cars, an ambulance, and what seemed like the entire population of Phantom Lake. Eric was next to her in the backseat, and she was clutching his hand so tightly that her fingernails were digging into his flesh. But it didn’t matter. All that mattered to her was that he was there, and he was safe, and he was holding onto her hand as tightly as she was holding his.
Merrill had known something was wrong when Ellen had called less than an hour ago and said she wanted to go with her to pick up the boys. Her refusal to talk about what was going on during the short drive to the pavilion had been enough to set off every alarm in Merrill’s head. Then, when she saw the flashing red lights of the police cars and the ambulance, her alarm had escalated into terror, and she’d grabbed Ellen’s arm. “What’s happening here?” she’d demanded.
“They found Ellis Langstrom’s body,” Ellen replied. Knowing exactly what Merrill’s next question would be, she answered before Merrill could even ask it: “Our boys are all fine.”
Merrill had leaped out of the car before Ellen could park, frantically searching the crowd for Eric, but was stopped by a line of yellow tape and more police officers than she’d thought Phantom Lake had. Then everything had taken on a dreamlike quality. The crowd was silent, and the strobing police lights, flashing red and blue, cast a surreal glow over the scene. I’m going to wake up, she thought. I’ll wake up, and I’ll be on the sofa at Pinecrest, and everything will be all right.
And then Merrill saw Carol Langstrom, and she understood that it truly was a nightmare, but that Carol wasn’t going to wake up.
Rusty Ruston was holding Carol as she sobbed, keeping her from going down to the water’s edge. He tried to walk her back up toward the parking lot, but she struggled, finally found her voice, and screamed as she jerked away from Ruston and stumbled down to the spot by the lake where Ellis’s body was being zipped into a black bag. As Carol wailed her grief into the night, two medics loaded her son’s remains onto a gurney.
Two women broke through the crowd, and got to Carol just as her legs gave out and she slumped to the ground. They sat with her on the lawn, holding her, rocking her.
Merrill stared at the spectacle of the distraught woman and felt a pang of guilt at her relief that it was someone else’s son who had died rather than her own. A moment later, though, her fear for Eric overcame everything else, and she began pushing her way through the crowd, panic tightening its grip on her with every second that passed. Finally, after what seemed an eternity, Eric, along with Tad Sparks and Kent Newell, appeared at the top of the pavilion steps, and a moment later Eric was in her arms.
And she hadn’t let go of him since.
ERIC WAS BARELY aware of his mother’s grip on his hand. Rather, the image of Ellis Langstrom’s lifeless, colorless visage hung in his mind, and no matter where he turned, all he saw was that ravaged corpse. Beyond the corpse, flickering at the edge of his consciousness, were other images.
A bloody stick, thick and heavy, lying half concealed beneath a bush in the forest.
A hacksaw, its blade stained red, in a hidden room in the carriage house.
And fragments of dreams — dreams of things that couldn’t have happened.
A numbness almost as cold as death itself began to spread through him. Should he tell anybody about all the things churning through his mind, all the images that seemed to taunt him from the darkness outside the car?
But what would he say?
What
After what seemed like an endless ride, the car at last pulled up in front of Pinecrest. Ashley Sparks, who had stayed behind with a sleeping Marci, waited on the front steps, and as everyone piled out of the car, a babble of barely heard conversation began to swirl around Eric.
His mother, asking Tad’s mother to put on a pot of coffee.
And saying she was going to start to pack.
“Pack?” he heard Ellen Newell say. “Why?”
“What do you mean, why?” his mother replied. “I’m going home, that’s why! I’m certainly not staying here after a boy’s been murdered.”
The word seemed to reverberate in the silence that fell over the group huddled in the foyer of Pinecrest, then Ellen Newell spoke again, her voice taking on an edge of authority that finally cut through Eric’s numbness.
“We don’t know that anybody has been murdered,” she said. “And certainly nobody’s going anywhere, at least not tonight.” She began herding everyone into the kitchen, where Ashley Sparks was filling the coffeemaker.
“Poor Carol,” Ashley sighed, shaking her head as she added ground beans to the machine and turned it on. “I’ll call her tomorrow.”
“I’m calling Dan,” Merrill said as she picked up the phone. “And if I’m not driving home tonight — which I’m perfectly capable of doing — then none of you are going anywhere. You’re all staying here with me. Understand? All of you. I will not be alone in this house with just the kids.”
Ellen and Ashley exchanged a look, then nodded, knowing that argument would be useless, at least for tonight. “So we’ll all stay,” Ellen said. “The boys can sleep in Eric’s room, and I suspect the rest of us won’t sleep at all, given how strong Ashley makes her coffee.”
Merrill managed a wan smile and dialed home. To her relief, she heard Dan’s sleepy voice after only two rings, and she took the phone out onto the terrace, where only Dan could hear her.
“Does anyone know exactly what happened to the boy?” Dan asked, when she finished telling him what had happened at the dance.
“No, not yet,” Merrill admitted. “The thing is, he was just Eric’s age and—”
“And that doesn’t mean a thing,” Dan cut in. “For God’s sake, Merrill. Don’t make the discovery of a single body into a serial killer. You don’t even know what happened to him yet.”
“I still want us to come home,” Merrill said, her voice flat. She heard Dan sigh, could actually picture the look on his face, and knew that if he were here right now she’d want to slap him. How could he be so dismissive? Then, as she glanced back into the kitchen and saw Ashley and Ellen sitting at the kitchen table chatting as if
