Onyx Webb 10 Page 3

  “So what?” James asked.

  “I’m guessing he used the formaldehyde, and then resealed the boxes,” Maggie said.

  “To look like they were full,” Newt said.

  “Okay, what am I missing?” Pipi asked.

  “The boxes are camouflage,” Stormy said.

  “Yep,” Maggie said, “To hide this…”

  Maggie turned and rapped her knuckles against the wall—which sounded hollow.

  It was another hidden door.

  Once the boxes were removed, Newt placed his hands on the wall.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to do that?” Stormy asked.

  “Trust me. If he’d wanted to blow us up, we’d already be dead,” Newt said.

  Newt leaned forward and pushed. The wall gave way and swung open.

  “Sweet Jesus,” James said.

  The question as to what the Leg Collector did with his victim’s legs had just been answered.

  CRIMSON COVE, OREGON

  DECEMBER 22, 2010

  WHAT ON EARTH are you doing?” Onyx asked when Noah emerged from the shed with an old, rust-covered shovel.

  “Is this the best shovel we have?”

  Onyx was caught off guard by the question and found herself smiling—not because Noah asked about the shovel, but because he’d used the word we. Not you.

  We.

  It was a small thing, but sometimes the smallest things were the most meaningful. As were the small moments.

  Like this one.

  It was almost Christmas, and she was with Noah. Eve, and she was with Noah. And there was no need to go shopping for a tree. They were surrounded by hundreds of them.

  Onyx sat on the lighthouse steps and watched as Noah placed the point of the shovel into the ground next to the front door of the caretaker’s house. The dirt was soft and wet from the previous night’s rain and went in easily.

  “I asked you what you were doing,” Onyx said.

  “It’s a surprise,” Noah said as he flung dirt to the side and pressed the shovel into the ground again.

  “You know I hate surprises,” Onyx said.

  “Don’t worry,” Noah said. “You’ll like this one.”

  “You’re not planning on killing me and burying my body,” Onyx said playfully. “You know that would be a waste of time, right?”

  “Yes, Onyx,” Noah said looking up. “I’m very aware of the fact that you’re already dead.”

  It took three hours for Noah to dig all twelve holes—six holes on each side of the door to the caretaker’s house—eighteen inches between each hole.

  Now Noah needed to drive into town, check on Carlos, and make the forty-mile drive north to the nursery in Lincoln City and get there before they closed.

  “What time will you be back?” Onyx asked with a touch of irritation in her voice.

  “Two hours, tops,” Noah said. “Go paint something, will you? Or play the piano. Keep yourself busy.”

  Noah leaned forward to kiss Onyx, but she turned her head to the side at the last second, and the kiss landed on her cheek. “I’ve been keeping myself busy for seventy years, Noah,” Onyx said.

  “Then two more hours isn’t going to make much of a difference now, is it?”

  Onyx felt the time dragging, watching as the sun lowered itself toward the ocean. Under normal circumstances, she’d have cut a piece of canvas from one of the rolls in the caretaker’s house and taken it to the top of the lighthouse to paint yet another sunset. Today she simply wasn’t in the mood.

  She didn’t want to paint.

  She wanted to spend time with Noah.

  Onyx looked at the clock, something she rarely did. After all, what was the point? But now she found herself counting the minutes, feeling butterflies in her stomach as the minute hand made its way closer and closer to the two-hour mark.

  And then she knew. She was in love.

  Really, honestly in love.

  Not simply in love with the notion of being love, but in love—as much as a ghost could be.

  ATLANTA, GEORGIA

  DECEMBER 22, 2010 – 1:13 P.M.

  WYATT SCROGGER’S LAWYER sat behind his desk, reading the morning paper—a significant portion of which contained articles about himself.

  And why he’d tried to kill his client.

  And speculation that the district attorney would be filing charges against him for his actions—even if they did save his client’s life.

  Whatever.

  The phone rang, and he answered it.

  “Yes?”

  “The prison warden just called,” the lawyer’s secretary said. “Wyatt has regained consciousness.”

  CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA

  DECEMBER 22, 2010 – 1:29 P.M.

  THE SHOCK OF finding an entire room of severed legs floating in formaldehyde inside three-foot-tall glass containers had not worn off. But the group had to move along and get into the upstairs portion of the house.

  Pipi instructed Agent James to stay behind, photographing every pair of legs, paying special attention to the names written on masking tape, which had been stuck to the front of each glass container.

  One container was labeled Elva Kass Gray. Newt quickly realized the names on the containers weren’t the victim’s real names, but anagrams.

  Newt assumed Elva Kass Gray was Savannah news reporter Skylar Savage, whose legless corpse had been found posed on the porch swing of a house in Monterey Square.

  ELVA KASS GRAY

  SKYLAR SAVAGE

  Newt’s suspicion that the Leg Collector had taken a pair of legs with him was confirmed when the count of containers came up as forty-two. According to what he knew, there should have been forty-three sets.

  One set was missing.

  Probably those from the first victim.

  Juniper Cole.

  Newt’s initial observation that the Leg Collector was disorganized was further confirmed when he, Pipi, Maggie, and Stormy reached the top of the stairs leading from the basement to the first level of the house. It was right out of an episode of Hoarders. Junk was piled up everywhere, some of it in boxes, stacked up precariously high from floor to ceiling. Phonebooks, trash, newspapers, magazines, you name it. And the smell was atrocious, as if an animal climbed under one of the piles of junk and died there.

  The only thing missing were cats.

  “This is going to take a month to go through,” Pipi said.

  “We have no choice,” Newt said. “The one clue we need may be buried in here somewhere.”

  “Are you thinking he’s OCD?” Maggie asked.

  Newt shook his head. “No, I think it’s something else. Some kind of psychological disorder.”

  “Being obsessive compulsive is a psychological disorder,” Pipi said. “That’s what the D stands for.”

  “I mean as the result of something physical,” Newt said.

  “Like a blow to the head?” Stormy asked.

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  “Hopefully we can take him alive, so we can study him,” Maggie said.

  Pipi ventured down the hall and stepped in the kitchen, and then she stuck her head out. “You want to see something strange? Come here.”

  Newt, Maggie, and Stormy walked down the hall and turned into the kitchen and stopped. “Holy crap,” Maggie said.

  Everyone stood silently, taking in the scene around them. The kitchen was totally clean. Spotless. Not a dish in the sink, not a crumb on the floor—gleamingly immaculate. It was as if two people lived here, one of whom was a neat freak and the other an out-of-control pig.

  “Look over on the table,” Stormy said.

  Newt walked over.

  On the center of the kitchen table, propped up against a large plastic cup filled with Scrabble tiles, was an envelope.

  The front of the envelope had a single word written on it.

  Spider Boy.

  “Seems he knew you were coming,” Maggie said.

  Newt nodded. The spi
der and the fly, Newt thought. They were all standing in the spider’s parlor—only the spider was no longer there.

  The spider was on the run.

  But the game was still being played.

  MT. PLEASANT, SOUTH CAROLINA

  DECEMBER 24, 2010

  KODA STEERED THE yellow McLaren across the Ravenel Bridge, which connected downtown Charleston with the suburban city of Mt. Pleasant on the other side of the Cooper River.

  “And they didn’t say why they wanted you to come?” Robyn asked.

  “All they said was that it would only take five minutes, and it couldn’t be done over the phone,” Koda said.

  Koda followed the GPS until they reached the destination and parked at the curb.

  “Do you want me to come in with you?” Robyn asked.

  “Of course I do,” Koda said, leaning toward Robyn and giving her a kiss that lasted a bit longer than either of them expected.

  Special Agent Robert James greeted Koda and Robyn at the door. They’d come to know each other well over the last seventy-two hours since the ghost attack.

  “Thanks for coming,” James said. “Good to see you too, Robyn.”

  “What’s this about?” Koda asked as a feeling of nervousness swept over him.

  “Come down to my office,” James said. “I’d rather not discuss it in the lobby.”

  “We need a sample of your DNA,” James said once the three of them were inside the office.

  “My DNA?” Koda said. “What for? Am I a suspect of some kind?”

  James shook his head. “No, no, nothing like that.”

  “Then what do you need it for?” Robyn asked.

  “All I can say right now is that it’s important,” James said. “I wouldn’t have asked you to drive out here if it wasn’t.”

  Moments later, the office door swung open, and a woman in a white lab coat, wearing plastic goggles and rubber gloves, entered the room. The woman looked at James, and he nodded. The woman opened a small plastic bottle and removed a cotton Q-tip from the container.

  “I’ll be taking an oral swab to capture a sample of buccal cells from the interior of your cheek,” the woman said. “Four samples actually. Open your mouth, please.”

  Koda opened his mouth, and the female agent inserted the Q-tip, moving it back and forth several times against the inside of his cheek. Then she dropped it in the plastic container. She repeated the procedure three more times, sealed the container, and left.

  “That’s it,” James said.

  “I still don’t understand what you need my DNA for,” Koda said.

  “I wish I could say more,” James said. “We’ll contact you.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Koda said as he started the McLaren.

  “Yeah, I’m tired,” Robyn said. “I really need a nap.”

  “No, I mean, let’s get out of here,” Koda said. “Tomorrow is Christmas. Let’s go away—take the plane and just get the hell away.”

  “Okay,” Robyn said, taking Koda’s hand in hers. “Where should we go?”

  “I was thinking the Bahamas maybe,” Koda said. “Or Bermuda.”

  “Your plane. You pick.”

  Then Koda went quiet.

  “What is it?” Robyn asked.

  Koda remained silent.

  “If you’re worried about this DNA thing, I’m sure it’s nothing,” Robyn said.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Koda said as he put the car in gear and pulled into traffic. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  But he knew it wasn’t nothing.

  The FBI doesn’t ask for your DNA for no reason.

  CRIMSON COVE, OREGON

  EARLY CHRISTMAS MORNING

  SURPRISING SOMEONE on Christmas morning was easy for most people—all you had to do was stay up late on Christmas Eve after the other person went to sleep, or you got up before they did that morning.

  But Onyx never slept.

  Which left Noah with only two options.

  Option one: Ask Onyx to leave the lighthouse for a while, which wasn’t going to happen. Or…

  Option two: Tell Onyx to stay at the top of the lighthouse and not look out the window until he said it was okay to come down.

  “Why? What are you doing?” Onyx asked when Noah told her to stay in the lighthouse until he said to come out.

  “I told you. It’s a surprise.”

  “And I told you I hate surprises.”

  “Yeah, well, too bad.”

  The moon wasn’t full like it had been on the night of the solstice eclipse four days earlier, but there was enough light for Noah to navigate his way to the caretaker’s house. Once inside, he turned on every light and opened the windows to get the rest of the light he’d need.

  Noah went to the shed and began taking the rose bushes he’d bought from the nursery several days earlier and dropped them in the holes he’d dug. Once he got all twelve in place, he shoveled the dirt back into the holes around the roots.

  Once the rose bushes had been planted, Noah went about the process of preparing the Christmas lights.

  Noah had no intention of stringing Christmas lights on the rose bushes until he discovered the rose bushes had no roses on them—and wouldn’t for several months.

  And he’d already dug the holes.

  And, contrary to Onyx’s outward protestations, Noah knew she really did like surprises—and what kind of surprise would the rose bushes be if there were no roses on them?

  That’s when he thought of the Christmas lights.

  The only problem with the lights was that only one out of every five bulbs was red. So Noah bought five times as many strings of lights than he needed, and spent forty-five minutes swapping lights from string to string until he had several that contained all red bulbs.

  Finally, Noah strung the lights with red bulbs on the rose bushes, connected them to an extension cord, which he ran into the house through a crack in the window.

  Noah turned off the lights inside the caretaker’s house and looked at his watch. It was 6:20 a.m. Sunrise was still an hour off.

  It was time to get Onyx.

  Noah made Onyx close her eyes as he led her by the hand through the door of the lighthouse into the clearing.

  “I can’t imagine what you’ve been doing,” Onyx said.

  “That’s the idea,” Noah said as he got her into position. “It wouldn’t be much of a surprise if you could.”

  “When do I get to open my eyes?” Onyx said.

  “Now.”

  Onyx opened her eyes and raised her hand to her mouth. The lights on the newly planted rose bushes glowing red in the darkness was one of the most beautiful things she’d ever seen.

  CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

  DECEMBER 27, 2010

  STAN LEE WASN’T SURE what motivated him to drive to the Dunning Asylum in Chicago, but now he was there.

  But Dunning wasn’t.

  The asylum was gone, replaced by a junior college, a mental health care center, and a cheesecake factory—not the chain restaurant, but an actual factory where cheesecakes were made—called Eli’s.

  Stan Lee stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts on Narragansett Avenue. He was dressed in a pair of khakis, a down-filled coat, and a Cubs hat he’d bought at a gas station rest stop on the highway. The hat was 75 percent off, either because it wasn’t baseball season or because the Cubs hadn’t won the World Series in 102 years. Stan Lee was pretty sure it would be another century before they did.

  “What happened to Dunning?” Stan Lee asked the young girl behind the counter as she put his donuts in a bag and rang up the purchase.

  “Dunning?” she asked quizzically.

  “The asylum?”

  The girl shook her head and made no further attempt to continue the conversation. Neither did Stan Lee. She was a classic airhead—but she did have great legs.

  Stan Lee drove the van around the neighborhood one last time and was just about to leave when he spotted the tree. It was a tree he recognized—an enorm
ous oak, probably a hundred years old. Bigger than when he’d seen it last, of course, but unmistakable nonetheless.

  Then he saw the gateway with the iron arch overhead, with letters across that said READ DUNNING MEMORIAL PARK.

  Stan Lee pulled the van to the curb and followed the concrete pathway into the park.

  The park itself wasn’t all that large, covering only a small portion of the twenty-plus acres the asylum originally occupied. Other than the entryway sign and a few concrete markers on the ground, there would be no way for anyone to know an asylum had once been there.

  “Thirty-nine thousand,” someone said behind Stan Lee. He turned around and found a woman who looked to be in her ‘70s standing there.

  “Excuse me?” Stan Lee said.

  “That’s how many people they say are buried here. Figured it out from the asylum records,” the woman said.

  “You seem to know a lot about the place.”

  “I should. I headed the committee to have the state dedicate this parcel of land as a memorial to the people who suffered and were abused here,” the woman said. She held out her hand. “My name is Grace.”

  Stan Lee took Grace’s hand and shook it. “Stan Lee,” he said, using his real name without thinking.

  Stan Lee sat on the sofa in Grace’s living room staring at the sunset while the woman made tea in the kitchen.

  “Do you take sugar?” Grace called out from the kitchen.

  “No, just a bit of cream. Light,” Stan Lee said.

  Grace returned carrying a tray with two teacups and a ceramic container filled with cream, which she set on the coffee table. “So, what’s your connection to Dunning?”

  “This is a big house,” Stan Lee said, ignoring the woman’s question. “Certainly you don’t live here all by yourself.”