Page 5 of Forever Dark
Cheryl answered through a crackle of static.“Go ahead.”
“I’m inside St.Bart’s.Front doors were open.Candles lit.Possible break-in.Someone’s vandalized the place.”His gaze flicked behind him for a moment, to the writing on the wall by the altar.But its meaning continued to elude him.“Send Arnold, Cheryl.”
A moment passed.“You not up to this alone.”Cheryl was clearly joking, but Connor was not in the mood.Not now.
“Just send him.”
“All right.He’s on the way.”
Connor clipped the radio back to his shoulder and pushed open the stair door.
The hinges let out a long, miserable groan.
A narrow staircase curved upward inside the tower, boards worn smooth at the center from decades of feet that had long since stopped climbing.The smell there was different.Less dust.More iron.Wax.Something else under it that made the back of his throat go tight.
His light found the banister.
Dust coated most of it except for one streak where a hand had recently dragged across.
Connor started up.
Every step complained under his boots.The beam moved over old timber, flakes of peeling paint, a dead bird in one corner, scraps of nesting material tucked into the cracks.The air moved more here.Wind moaned faintly through gaps higher up in the tower.
Halfway up he stopped and listened.
No voices.
No hurried movement.
No breathing but his own.
He kept going.
The staircase narrowed before opening into the choir loft, a platform with now glassless windows overlooking the dark roof and body of the church below.The walls felt narrower here for some reason, with discarded pieces of church furniture punctuating the dark shadows, broken stands and a warped cabinet shoved against one wall.
A shape sat at the center of it all.
Connor’s light skimmed across the floorboards.
A shoe.
A chair leg.
The pale curve of a hand.
He stopped so suddenly the floor gave a sharp crack under his weight.
The woman sat in a straight-backed chair near one wall.Her head was bowed.Hands folded carefully in her lap.Dark hair spilled over one shoulder.A faded dress, once a cheerful color, perhaps, covered her knees.Candle stubs had been set around the chair and along the window ledge behind it, most of them extinguished.The remnants cast paltry light.
For one impossible split second he thought she was alive.
Then the flashlight found her throat.
A cut opened the flesh beneath her jaw, deep and black where the blood had dried.It had soaked the front of her dress and run down into the chair and onto the floorboards beneath.
Connor went cold all over.
He had worked death before.Wrecks.Shootings.A combine accident that had left him unable to eat supper that night.Bodies in this county usually came with accidental chaos attached.Panic.Drunkenness.Stupidity.Rage.
