Fear the Dark

Hubbard pumped the action. The bitter night wind blew her hair wildly about her face as she brought up the shotgun. Darby had no cover, but she had some distance. She had rolled off Williams, and into a bank of fresh snow, when Hubbard pulled the trigger.

The report echoed but Darby knew she hadn’t been hit – not yet. Nicky Hubbard screamed as Darby scrambled to her feet, and when she broke through a crust of snow, her face, hair and ears covered in white and burning from the freezing cold, she realized she had made a tactical terror. Wading through waist-high snow was about as productive as ru

But there was no need to run. Hubbard had dropped the shotgun; Darby saw it lying on the ground, smoking, before the backyard’s sensor lights clicked off.

She also saw what was left of Ray Williams. Hubbard had blown apart most of his chest.

Darby moved on to the path. She wasn’t wearing any gloves, and her feet and legs were bare. The woman who believed her name was Sarah – who believed that the man named Ray Williams loved her – sat in the bloody snow, cradling his ruined face against her chest, her wails of loss echoing through the dark woods, her torn soul searching for answers.

82

A nurse was standing inside Terry Hoder’s room in Brewster General, checking on the man’s various monitors and tubes, when the tall, good-looking FBI agent visiting him received a call on his satellite phone. The nurse, whose name was Maura, would later tell her friends that she had never witnessed such a transformative expression on another person’s face – one that started with the euphoric ecstasy of someone who appeared to have been granted a wish by God Himself and then ended with the tall man’s face stretched tight with fear.

The man hung up and seemed to sway on his feet.

Stroke, the nurse thought, moving around the bed as FBI Agent Hoder eyed him curiously. He’s going to have a stroke or a heart attack.

‘Sir? Sir, are you okay? Take that chair right next to you.’

‘I’m fine. Honest,’ the man replied. He had blond hair and differently coloured eyes, and he looked like he had slept in his clothes. ‘Would you please excuse us for a moment? I need to talk with Agent Hoder privately.’

The nurse left to find a doctor; she didn’t like the man’s colouring. Just as the door shut, she thought she heard him cry in relief, or possibly sadness, she wasn’t sure which.

By the time Denver SAC Scott called back, Coop had already made the necessary arrangements with Brewster General. As he climbed into the back of the ambulance, he told Scott about his short conversation with Darby and the few details he knew about what had happened at Ray Williams’s home.

An hour later, as the ambulance was slowing to a stop near the end of Williams’s driveway, Coop opened the back door, jumped out and started ru

An agent met him at the front door. ‘She’s upstairs,’ the man told Coop, stepping aside to let him into the foyer. ‘Door to the left of the stairs.’

‘How is she?’ Coop asked. Darby, naturally, had dodged the question on the phone. Just hurry up and get here, she had said and hung up.

‘She looks fine – although I can’t say that for sure, because she won’t let anyone get near her – and she refused to let us take her to the hospital until you got here.’

The foyer hall ran into the kitchen. Coop saw SAC Scott sitting at a small table with a shell-shocked blonde-haired woman dressed in a ratty pink bathrobe, her arms wrapped around her chest as though she were struggling to keep warm. She rocked back and forth, humming to herself, eyes puffy from crying and black from smeared mascara. Scott was the only one with her, but her gaze darted frantically around the kitchen, as though multiple voices were shouting at her.

The agent saw Coop looking at the woman and said, ‘Her name’s Sarah.’

No, it’s not, Coop thought, recalling the contents of Darby’s phone call.

‘Says she’s his wife, but people at the station are saying Williams isn’t married or was never married. It’s gets even weirder, if you can believe it. She’s in here cooking him a steak di

‘Sarah here told us she shot at McCormick because she was beating the shit out of her man. McCormick dodged the bullet and the lug ripped apart Williams’s chest, but I’m willing to bet he was already dead at that point, or well on his way to it.’

Then the agent scratched the corner of his eye. ‘McCormick did a real number on him first.’ He swallowed, grimacing when he said, ‘The guy’s face is unrecognizable, if you catch my drift.’

Upstairs, another federal agent stood by the bedroom door. It was open, and Coop saw Darby sitting on the floor in the corner and hugging her knees against her chest. The only thing she wore was an oversized wool sweater that barely covered her rump. Her legs and feet were bare, smeared with dried blood.

It’s her, Coop thought, suddenly afraid to move. It’s really her. When she called him at the hospital, he hadn’t believed it was her – thought that he was possibly talking to a recording. That someone was playing a sick joke. She had been missing for over a week, and his mind had already begun to accept that her body had been dumped in the rapids, never to be found.

But here she was, alive, and the relief and joy he felt was almost powerful enough to bring him to his knees.

Darby didn’t get up as he approached – didn’t look up either. Her gaze was riveted on the neatly made bed.

‘Hey,’ he said gently, balancing himself on the balls of his feet. ‘It’s me.’

Darby still didn’t look at him. He was about to touch her shoulder when she pulled away. ‘Don’t,’ she said, her voice cracking. ‘Not now.’

‘Okay. I’m just going to sit beside you. We don’t have to talk. I’m just going to sit here with you.’

Coop glanced at the federal agent by the door; he was whispering to one of the paramedics. Coop shook his head and motioned for them to leave. The agent nodded and had the good sense to shut the door to give them some privacy.

He sat next to Darby. Her hands and fingers were swollen, cut and caked with blood, and he wondered how many times she had hit Williams with her fists. The wind roared past the house, shaking it, and, as he looked around the bedroom, everything he saw was clean and meticulously organized. No pictures on the walls or bureaus. It looked like a single man’s bedroom, cold and sterile, not a feminine touch anywhere. Nothing to indicate that he had shared a bed with a woman night after night.

For thirty-one years, Coop thought, and the picture of Nicky Hubbard at seven, Nicky with her gap-toothed smile and T-shirt stained with spaghetti sauce, flashed through his mind. He compared the photograph with the pale and haggard woman he’d seen downstairs, and his mind couldn’t reconcile the two. But on the phone Darby had told him Nicky Hubbard was alive. Williams had abducted her and his mother had changed Hubbard’s name to Sarah, and Sarah had shared this home with him.

‘The shed,’ Darby said. ‘He brought them there.’

Coop turned to her. She still wouldn’t look at him.

‘There’s a trapdoor there. He did this to them,’ Darby said, and with her eyes locked on the bed she grabbed the sweater’s collar and pulled it down.

Her neck was covered with raw, red rings, the skin full of cuts and abrasions. Coop felt his face tighten and his stomach roil in anger and fear, as he conjured up grisly possibilities of how Williams had injured her. Coop wanted to say something but there was nothing to say, and he fought the urge to comfort her. He wanted to touch her – needed to, a part of him still believing that this was a dream, that the only way he could prove it wasn’t was to put a hand on her shoulder and pull her close to him. But trying to comfort her or to hold her, he knew, would be a mistake, because she’d shut down on him.