Dead Right (Stillwater Trilogy #3)(90)
Author: Brenda Novak

“Six ninety-nine,” she said.

He remembered his mother piercing his sister’s ears using an ice cube and a needle. That method would work for more exciting body parts as well, right?

He couldn’t see why not.

Putting them on the counter, he got out a ten-dollar bill. “I’ll take some sewing needles, too.”

The knocking reached Madeline through a deep haze. She was in a coffin, buried alive. Buried next to her father. Her mind seemed to float freely, to see them both from some vantage point above, lying side by side. She, chalk-white but perfectly whole; her father, a macabre skeleton with only a few tufts of hair and bits of decaying skin. He looked gruesome, as gruesome as he’d ever looked in her nightmares. But now he didn’t frighten her. There was nothing she could do to get away from him, anyway. She couldn’t move. Her body remained immobile. Dead. As immobile as Bubba, lying prostrate on his living room floor…

But Madeline didn’t care. The pain was gone. So was the fear. There was no Ray, no threat, no motion or movement.

Just that persistent knocking. Where was it coming from?

“Hello? Brian Shulman here. I’m with the property management company and I’m with someone from the Sevier County Sheriff’s Department. Anyone home?”

The voice filtered through Madeline’s head, sounding distorted and surreal and evoking an odd flutter of expectation in her stomach. Sheriff’s Department. That was good, wasn’t it? Something told her she should respond to it, but she couldn’t find her voice, wasn’t even sure why she needed to.

Besides, what if it was a trick? What if it was really Ray? He’d said that if she tried to escape, he’d punish her severely.

She was better off staying where she was, hidden in the dark…hidden in the closet.

Closet? A memory surfaced—Ray forcing her to swallow some pills, moving her into the bedroom closet and piling blankets on top of her before shutting the door—and she realized she wasn’t in a safe place at all. She wasn’t dead, either. She was in danger because he was coming back. He’d promised he would. And he’d tighten the collar when he did.

Madeline could feel the weight of the leather around her neck. He’d moved it one notch, so she wouldn’t suffocate while he was gone, but it still cut into her skin. That was why she’d swallowed the pills, which had left such a terrible, bitter taste in her mouth. She’d been trying not to, but she could hardly breathe, had already been on the verge of blacking out.

She tried to remember what’d happened in those last few seconds. Where had Ray gone? When would he be back? And what should she do now?

She couldn’t think straight. She felt numb, groggy.

“Sheriff’s Department,” a different voice said. “Hello? Anyone here?”

Me! She tried to scream that one simple word but no sound came out. She could hear someone moving around, opening doors, striding down the hall—and imagined whoever it was directing a flashlight around each room.

“Mr. Harper? Anyone here?”

The man who possessed that voice opened the door to her room. Madeline told herself to move, to hit her head against the wall, to shift, to kick—anything to let him know where she was. But she was completely paralyzed. There wasn’t a muscle in her body that would respond to her brain’s command, despite the intensity of her efforts.

She tried again to speak, but the gag was back. She hadn’t felt it a moment before but now the cotton fabric cut across her mouth, making it impossible to move her jaw. It must’ve been there the whole time.

Groan! Scream! Anything!

The door to the closet slid open. Madeline prayed that some part of her was showing, that Ray had left a strange object behind, something that would make the sheriff or whoever had come from his department search more thoroughly. But the door shut almost immediately.

“Find anything?” someone else called from the doorway.

The floored creaked as the man who’d opened the closet walked away. “An empty bed and a bunch of bedding.”

No! Madeline was hyperventilating now and sweating profusely. She’d never felt more helpless or vulnerable in her life. She couldn’t move or speak. She could only hear. And getting upset wasn’t helping. Her panic brought unconsciousness drifting toward her again. The harder she tried to move or speak, the closer it came.

The last thing she remembered was a man saying, “Someone’s been here recently, but everything looks fine. No kidnap victim.” He repeated those words into a radio that hissed and sputtered.

Then a single tear rolled down Madeline’s cheek and the darkness swallowed her whole.

Hunter sat in the passenger seat of Clay’s truck and tore the package off the magnifying glass he’d just bought.

“What’s that for?” Clay had been mostly silent ever since they’d left Harper’s trailer. Determined to make the seven-hour drive to the string of cabins in about half that time, he was speeding and weaving in and out of traffic, but Hunter didn’t mind. The more he thought about Ray, the more frightened for Madeline he became. He was even becoming suspicious of Bubba Turk’s death. It was one thing for Bubba to die of a heart attack. But who killed the cat?

How bad was this guy? He wouldn’t kill Madeline, would he? It was Barker who’d probably killed Katie, Barker who might’ve killed Eliza, too. He’d had so much to lose if the truth ever came out.

But what about Rose Lee? She’d committed suicide in Ray’s trailer. And she’d been naked when she was found, which hadn’t made sense to Hunter from the beginning.

Now he was afraid he knew why…

“Are you going to answer me?” Clay asked, impatient when Hunter didn’t respond.

Hunter retrieved the pictures from his coat pocket. “I want to take a closer look at these.”

Clay switched lanes. “What’re you looking for?”

“I don’t know yet. Anything that might tell me more about what was going on and who was involved.”

“I can tell you where most of them were taken.”

“Where?”

“My stepfather’s office at the farm, or his office at the church.”

“And the rest?”

“They don’t show the background. They’re too close to the subject.”

That was true. The distortion in those photos suggested that Barker had held the camera out and snapped the pictures of himself. Others he’d stood back and taken of each girl or both of them together—all in various compromising positions. The pictures made Hunter so angry he found he couldn’t blame Irene or Clay if they’d done something to stop Barker. He couldn’t even ask Clay what had happened because he suddenly didn’t want to know the details, didn’t want the burden of telling Madeline the truth, if she asked him, or the burden of deciding whether or not he should go to the police with the whole sordid tale.