Skullbelly Page 5

  There was no way he could take the Crown Victoria over that mess. He’d puncture a tire and tear up the undercarriage. Stupidly, he’d planned for everything but this. Even the goddamn kids he was out here looking for had been smart enough to drive a goddamn Jeep Cherokee.

  The road was too narrow for the car to turn around.

  “Fuck,” he muttered, climbing out of the car.

  Around him, the wilderness was alive with sound—it seemed to rush at him from every direction, hover all around him and blanket the high canopy of trees like stars in space. He felt like he could breathe in the sound.

  Up ahead, past the gnarled jumble of roots that rainbowed out of the earth, he thought he could make out a cut in the trees. A clear swatch of space moving up the hillside…

  Pulling off his tweed sports coat and setting it on the Crown Vic’s hood, Jeffers continued down the road. Overstepping the roots that seemed to want to snatch him and trip him, the flora crowded around him on either side until the roadway became nothing more than a narrow footpath. Insects dive-bombed his face; the slaps he administered to his forehead, neck, and cheeks echoed throughout the forest.

  He reached the space between the trees and noted that it was the same rugged logging road in the photo with Megan Harper’s Jeep. The road cut sharply to the left and wended up a slight incline through a stand of enormous redwoods. There was a chain bolted to the trunks of two trees and draped across the road, a no trespassing sign hanging from it.

  Here, he thought. This is where the Jeep was found. And on the heels of that: This is where they went up into the forest.

  Jeffers crossed onto the logging road and stepped over the chain. One of his boots nicked the sign and rattled the chain like Marley’s ghost. He looked directly ahead of him, faced now with the optical illusion of a path that seemed to somehow lift off the ground and hover above it. He squinted, rubbed his eyes. It was only a forest mirage, reflections of the sky in puddles of rainwater.

  Jeffers continued up the logging road, his bum leg growing increasingly uncooperative as the steepness of the road intensified. Great ferns bowed as he hobbled by. Once, he smashed a bug roughly the size of a bottle cap against his palm after it landed on his right eyelid.

  The deeper he walked, the heavier the vegetation grew. Ground fog collected in wreaths around the bases of the great redwoods. They were tremendous, these trees, like nothing Jeffers had ever seen. The logging road took him through a grove of them, bristling with sunlight and permeating the air with tannins. Things dropped indiscriminately from the high boughs, striking limbs and pockets of leaves, before crashing to the forest floor. Birds sang and larger, hoofed mammals bounded through the underbrush. Wetness pattered constantly down on his head.

  In the distance he could make out an angular wooden structure, replete with vertical struts supporting a concave, slide-like appendage. One of the old log flumes, he assumed.

  Deeper still and the logging road turned to rich, black soil. A clearing opened up all around him. Jeffers examined the earth, the great sword-shaped wings of the ferns, the armor-like bark of the trees. A spotted salamander zipped across the top of his hand as he ran his fingers along the intricate grooves of the bark.

  On a few of the trees, heavy gashes had been slashed into the bark. In each instance they appeared in sets of three, and some of the gashes were deep enough to have drawn resin from the bark. The gashes did not look fresh and the resin had already dried to a collection of amber bulbs that ran down the trunks. The uniformity of the gashes troubled him most. What could do something like that? A bear? Detective Lyndon’s voice echoed in his head: There’s animals, Mr. Jeffers. Things with claws and teeth.

  “Claws and teeth, all right,” he muttered, his nose nearly pressed against the bark of one tree so he could get a good look at the cuts in the tree’s flesh.

  Something large dropped down from one of the trees behind him.

  Jeffers spun around, his gun in his hand and out of its holster before he even realized he had pulled it. A quick survey of the surrounding area showed no sign of anything larger than a few salamanders and beetles, although he supposed anything could hide without difficulty behind one of those massive redwoods.

  “Hello?” he shouted. Then, smirking, he called out, “Mr. Needles? Is that you? Have you come for my pecker?”

  Silence greeted him.

  There’s definitely something out there. I heard it come down from above, drop through the branches and leaves, and hit the ground. I felt it in the soles of my feet when it hit the ground.

  He hadn’t heard it scamper away, though, so where had it gone?

  It sounded big.

  Fuck. It really had.

  Steeling himself, he walked the full circumference of the clearing, cocking his head like an owl as he went. There were noises all around him so it was impossible to differentiate one from another—they had become a chorus to him now, flooding him in a barrage of sensory overload.

  Across the clearing, he heard something that sounded like thick claws scrabbling up one of the trees. He looked and saw nothing, but wasn’t unconvinced that the sound hadn’t come from the other side of the tree. The place he could not see.

  He hurried across the clearing and ditched around the other side of the tree. There was nothing on the ground, but as he looked up, bits of bark fell in his face. The boughs above swayed lightly and the leaves looked like they had just recently been disturbed. But he could see straight up to the sky, and to the rings of mists that encircled the tips of the trees like halos. There was nothing up there.

  Skullbelly, he thought suddenly, and felt giddy at the prospect. He nearly laughed out loud. Boogie-oogie-oogie!

  Still somewhat shaken, but also feeling a bit foolish, he holstered his handgun and mopped the sweat off his brow. The only thing he was going to find out here, bumbling around like a lunatic, was a heart attack. He crossed the dirt clearing and got back on the logging road, heading in the direction he had come, back toward the road. By the time he reached Summit Pass, he was winded and perspiring through his shirt. He negotiating over the twists and arcs of roots on his way back to the car and, once there, peeled his sopping wet shirt off his sweaty frame. Steam seemed to rise off him into the air. It was going to be a hot day.

  He threw his shirt and sports coat into the backseat of the Vic, cranked her over, then reversed down the Pass until the road opened up wide enough for him to make a three-point turn.

  13

  It was purely coincidental, but on his drive back to town Jeffers caught sight of a beer-gutted, khaki-clad man with a nickel-plated star at his breast come up over the berm with a fishing pole slung over one shoulder and a tackle box dangling from one hand. He looked like an extra from The Andy Griffith Show. Jeffers slowed the Vic to a stop, his window already down. The man’s bald head was beaded with sweat and he squinted as the sunlight reflected off the Crown Vic’s chrome and into his eyes.

  “Hey, there,” Jeffers said. “Are you Chief Horton?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “Goddamn, you really have been fishing, haven’t you?” And Jeffers laughed.

  “You that guy from Seattle?” The chief’s voice was much squeakier in person than it had sounded on his voice mail. “That private investigator fella?”

  “Yes, sir.” Jeffers climbed out of the car and extended a hand for the chief to shake. “John Jeffers.”

  The chief shrugged and did not set his equipment down. “I’m a little overloaded, as you can see.”

  “I do,” said Jeffers, dropping his hand. “I do see. How’s the investigation coming?”

  “I wish you’d stop harassing my detective.”

  “Miss Lyndon? She seemed nice.”

  “What is it that you want, Mr. Jeffers?”

  “A little closure,” Jeffers said. “Something I can go back and tell these poor people. They want to know why it seems like you don’t want to help find their kids.”

  “Because thei
r kids are dead,” Horton said flatly.

  “Excuse me?”

  “It was either some accident that did them in, or that Downing boy went off his rocker and did something to ’em. End of story.”

  “According to the medical reports, Tommy Downing is currently in a state of—”

  “I know what the medical reports say.” Now Horton did set his tackle box and fishing pole down. He put his small hands at either side of his wide hips. Instead of a gun, there was a can of bug spray in his holster. “Funny how you hound my department about what you believe to be missing from our reports but never once question what was left out of the medical reports.”

  This statement took him aback. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, Mr. Jeffers, was there a toxicology report done on Tommy Downing? Did they give him a blood test down in Brookings when he was admitted? Hair samples? Any of that?”

  “I don’t believe so. Why does that matter?”

  “Because when we found the kids’ Jeep, we also found phencyclidine.”

  “What’s—”

  “PCP, Mr. Jeffers. An hallucinogen. Drugs. That, and about enough marijuana in the glove box to bring down Caesar’s army.”

  Jeffers’s tongue suddenly felt too big for his mouth.

  “And that was the stuff they left behind. I can only imagine what they took with them up into that forest.” Horton thumbed a runnel of sweat out of his eye. He had the squinty, piggish face of a leprechaun. “Those kids went on a three-day narcotics binge in that forest. Frankly, it’s amazing even one of them found their way back out.”

  Jeffers could only stare at the man. When Horton bent and picked up his gear and, grunting, heading back up toward the road, Jeffers was still unable to move. By the time he turned around and climbed back into his car, there was no sight of Chief Horton anywhere at all.

  14

  He checked out of The Happy Brier and, even though Lee Colson made good on his promise to give him a grand discount on the room, Jeffers paid him full price. He thanked the old man, got into his car, and coasted down Front Street, past Redwood Outfitters, The Oval Tar, and The Lighthouse restaurant. He passed the police station, too, that archipelagic arrangement of weathered trailers connected by little wooden footbridges.

  He left Coastal Green in his rearview mirror, a sinking feeling in his guts.

  Back in Seattle, he spent the next twenty-four hours in his shitty apartment getting drunk and wondering what he would tell the parents. In the end, he supposed the best approach was the honest approach. He would tell them about the drugs and allow them to formulate their own impressions of what had happened.

  What the hell happened out there in that forest?

  It was a rainy and overcast morning when he finally telephoned the Downings and told them he had returned from Coastal Green with some information. He said he would be by later that afternoon. After he hung up, he shaved and showered and tried to eat a small lunch, but his stomach, that stubborn fist, was having none of it. He pulled on his sports coat then carried his accordion folder to the old Crown Vic that sat at a slant in the space out front of the building.

  When he got to the Downings’ house, Carl Downing answered the door and let him in. There was a fumbling, nervous energy about the man. He had been hoping for good news. Jeffers supposed the best news he could give him was that the Coastal Green police would probably not try to go after Tommy due to a lack of evidence.

  “How is he?”

  “The same,” Downing said. “Thanks for asking. Jennifer’s upstairs with him now.”

  Upstairs, Jeffers lingered in the boy’s bedroom doorway until Jennifer Downing stood and grinned wearily at him. She looked utterly exhausted.

  “Hello,” Jeffers said to the woman, moving reverently into the room. In the bed, Tommy Downing looked like a wax frame into which someone had pressed eye sockets and cut a lipless gash for the mouth. His frail chest heaved with his labored respiration beneath the clean white sheet.

  “What did you learn?” Downing said, putting an arm around his wife’s shoulder.

  “The good news,” said Jeffers, “is they will probably never have enough evidence to attempt to prosecute your son.”

  “Prosecute him?” Jennifer Downing said, incredulous. “For what? Being attacked?”

  “For having done something to the three other kids,” Jeffers said. “That’s one theory, anyway. He was the only survivor, he was covered in blood—”

  “He was injured,” she practically sobbed.

  “—and in his friends’ blood, too. Not saying that’s enough circumstantial evidence to convict someone or even accuse him, but it was always a possibility that he was a suspect.”

  “What’s the bad news?” Carl Downing asked. He seemed irritated.

  “The cops found drugs in the Harper girl’s Jeep. PCP and marijuana. There were probably more drugs at the campsite with them, though nothing was ever recovered, of course.”

  “Drugs,” said the boy’s mother, her voice inconsequential and trailing off as if she were fading into a dream. She turned and looked morosely at her son, whose eyes gazed sightlessly out across the room. Without looking at Jeffers, she said, “My boy didn’t hurt anybody. Something horrible happened to those kids up there, and happened to my Tommy, too. My boy didn’t do anything wrong, Mr. Jeffers.”

  Jeffers silently nodded.

  “What about the other kids?” Carl Downing asked him.

  “Nothing else to report,” he said with a sick finality to his voice. He told them about the places he visited and the interviews he conducted. He told them that he’d found the spot where the Harper girl’s Jeep had been and walked the logging road up into the forest. “But there was nothing there. I’m sorry.”

  He dug a pen and a folded sheet of paper from the inside pocket of his sports coat. “I’m writing down a telephone number for you,” he told them, scribbling from memory. “He’s a friend of mine, and a lawyer. I suggest contacting him the moment Tommy starts talking again. Because the police might want to come and ask him some questions.”

  “I don’t believe this,” Jennifer Downing whispered into her hands.

  Jeffers set the paper on the boy’s nightstand where it unfolded to an L shape. The windows in the room were cracked open a bit, and the paper flapped in the cool mid-afternoon breeze.

  “Thank you,” Carl Downing said. “That’s good advice.”

  “What now?” asked his wife. “Are you done, Mr. Jeffers?”

  “There isn’t much else I can do. I plan on stopping by and speaking with the other parents this afternoon. And, of course, if either of you need anything further from me, I hope you won’t hesitate to…”

  Jeffers’s voice faded. Jennifer Downing had been looking at him, but then her gaze had shifted over to her son’s bed. As Jeffers watched her face, her eyes widened and her mouth began working noiselessly.

  “Mrs. Downing?”

  Jeffers followed her gaze over to her son. The boy had turned his head and was staring at the partially-folded slip of paper Jeffers had placed on his nightstand. Suddenly there was lucidity in the boy’s eyes—wide, staring, but definitely conscious.

  Jennifer Downing began to tremble. “Oh, Tommy…Tommy…”

  Tommy did not acknowledge his mother. His eyes remained on the partially-folded bit of paper. Then, astoundingly, one of the boy’s hands slipped out from beneath the sheet and, quaking as it went, reached out for the paper. Jeffers saw an elbow like a knot on the trunk of a tree and fingers like splayed and bony tines.

  He saw, too, that he had absently written the lawyer friend’s phone number on the back of the drawing Del Finney had given him back at The Lighthouse in Coastal Green last night. The drawing of Skullbelly.

  Tommy Downing pinched the paper between two fingers then shakily brought it up to his face, unfolding it the rest of the way. The boy’s eyes widened even farther as he stared down at the drawing. It seemed like everyone in the room held their breat
h. Then the boy slowly brought his eyes up and stared directly at Jeffers.

  Tommy Downing began to scream. A blood-curdling, throat-ripping scream.

  “Tommy!” Jennifer Downing cried, rushing to her son’s bedside.

  “Tommy!” Carl Downing said, and he quickly leaned over the boy and held the boy’s arms down to the mattress, because now Tommy Downing was struggling to get up, to fight, still screaming and with his eyes so wide Jeffers feared they might explode out of his head.

  “Tommy!” the boy’s mother sobbed. “Oh, Tommy!”

  “Help us!” Carl Downing growled at Jeffers, struggling to keep his son down on the mattress. The boy’s IV stand clattered to the floor. Blood began to surface from beneath the bandage at Tommy’s chest.

  Trembling, Jeffers backed slowly out of the bedroom and shut the door on the madness. He stood there in the gloomy hallway for several seconds, listening to the terrified shrieks tearing up from the boy’s throat, the slamming of the headboard against the wall, and the frightened cries of the boy’s mother.

  After a bit, and when the screaming did not subside, Jeffers turned around, headed down the stairs, and blew out the front door of the Downing house as if he were nothing more than a gust of strong wind.

  About The Author

  Ronald Malfi is the award-winning author of the novels The Ascent, Snow, Shamrock Alley, Passenger, and several others. Most recognized for his haunting, literary style and memorable characters, Malfi’s dark fiction has gained acceptance among readers of all genres. He currently lives along the Chesapeake Bay where he is at work on his next book.