The Devil's Footprints

Six

Adamant, Arkansas

Christmas Eve

The temperature dropped after dark and it had started to mist. Ashe shivered in his lightweight jacket as he glanced yet again over his shoulder, making sure he couldn’t be spotted.

An unnecessary precaution, because the house was on a two-acre lot at the end of the street. Even if the closest neighbors should glance outside, they would see only a shadow beneath the DeLaunes’ living room window.

Nor was there any need to worry about passing cars. The streets were deserted. He couldn’t see anything but the kaleidoscopic blur of twinkling lights in the distance. On Christmas Eve, the good citizens of Adamant were home celebrating with their families.

But the night was like any other to him. He felt nothing more than a fleeting twinge of regret that no one knew or cared how he spent his Christmas Eve. He didn’t dwell on his loneliness, because being invisible had its compensation.

Shrugging off the disquiet, he turned back to the window. It was nearly midnight. Everyone except Sarah’s father had gone up to bed, and he sat dozing in an easy chair in front of the fireplace. Blissfully unaware.

Earlier, the family had gathered around the Christmas tree to exchange presents. The window was open a crack to allow the smoke from the old man’s pipe to escape, and Ashe had been able to hear their voices so clearly it was almost as if he were a part of the celebration. He’d followed the conversation with avid fascination, even though his eyes had been riveted on Sarah.

Dressed in jeans and a pale yellow sweater, her dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, she’d sat cross-legged on the floor, opening her gifts with a brooding scowl that had irritated her father. The contrast between her sister’s girly squeals as she tore into one package after another had finally become too much for him.

“I’ve had enough of this.” He got up and strode over to Sarah, grabbed her by the arm and yanked her to her feet. “If you want to sit there and sulk, you can damn well do it in your room. You’re not going to ruin the evening for the rest of us.”

Her mother nervously rose to her feet. “James—”

“Stay out of this, Anna. I should have taken care of this at dinner when she was being so rude and aggressive with her sister. She’s an ungrateful little brat, and I’m not going to sit here and tolerate this surly behavior any longer.”

Still clutching her arm, he marched Sarah out of the room and up the stairs. He was gone for a long time, and when he came back, he looked flushed and angry.

“Daddy, are you okay?” Rachel asked softly.

He smiled, his anger melting when he looked at her. “I’m fine, princess, don’t you worry. I’ve got something that’ll make us both feel better.” He plucked a tiny package from his jacket pocket and placed it on the table beside his chair. “Come have a look.”

“Another present?” She gave a little laugh as she tore away the ribbon and paper with frenzied excitement. From Ashe’s place at the window, he saw a flash of fire from the open box before Rachel threw her arms around the old man’s neck. “Daddy! Diamonds? Are they real?”

“Of course they are. Would I give my princess anything but the real thing?”

“But I thought…Mama said I should wait until next year and get them for graduation.”

“And I say you should have them now.”

“Thank you, Daddy. Thank you…thank you…thank you!” She planted a kiss on his cheek after each thank-you, then hugged him tightly. He clung to her for a moment before she got up and ran over to show her mother.

“Mama, look! Have you ever seen anything so beautiful? Isn’t Daddy just the sweetest thing?”

Her mother murmured something Ashe couldn’t hear, and then she watched her oldest daughter gather up all her presents and rush upstairs to try on her new earrings.

After she was gone, Anna walked over to the fireplace. “Why didn’t you tell me about the earrings?”

“Since when do I need your permission to get my own daughter a gift?”

“Sarah’s your daughter, too, James. Why didn’t you give her something special?”

“Because it would have been a waste. Nothing we do is ever good enough for that girl.”

“That’s not true. She’s just going through a difficult stage. I wish you’d try to be a little more understanding—”

“A stage?” He gave a bitter laugh. “Don’t kid yourself, Anna. She’s always been like this. That girl has always had problems. She’s a liar and a thief, and I should have done something about it a long time ago.”

Sarah’s mother sat down on the hearth and folded her hands in her lap. “You’ve always been so hard on her.”

“She’s out of control and you damn well know it. I’m sick to death of dealing with her problems. I hate to think what she’ll be like in a few more years. I see kids like her come through my courtroom all the time. Something needs to be done, and soon, or we may all live to regret it. I’m beginning to think Lydia Mason was right. St. Stephen’s is the best place for a girl like Sarah.”

“I hardly think Lydia Mason is an expert on what’s best for our daughter. I can’t believe you took her to see that woman behind my back.”

“She’s the only therapist in town.”

“You could have talked to the counselor at school or consulted with someone in El Dorado. Why did it have to be her?”

“What’s really got your goat here, Anna? The prospect of sending your daughter away to school, or what Lydia might tell that preacher husband of hers about you? I know how highly you value his opinion.”

“This has nothing to do with Tim. I’m not sending Sarah away. I don’t care what anyone says. She’s only thirteen years old!”

“Will you calm down? It’s not like we’re abandoning her. St. Stephen’s is only an hour’s drive from here. You can visit her whenever you want.”

“I’ll never agree to this. She needs me.”

“And what about your other daughter? What about her needs? I swear to God, the way that girl looks at Rachel sometimes makes my blood run cold.”

“She resents Rachel because of the way you treat her. She knows Rachel is your favorite. Everyone knows it. You don’t even try to hide it.”

“Rachel is a beautiful young woman with a brilliant future ahead of her. I’m proud of her. Why should I have to hide it?”

Sarah’s mother stared down at her hands. “If I’d known it was going to be this way—”

“What would you have done differently?” he goaded. “Go on, say it.”

“She’s just a child. What I did is not her fault.”

“Maybe not. But I can’t help how I feel.”

“Yes, you can. Why won’t you just admit it? This isn’t about Sarah. It’s about punishing me.”

Ashe’s blood pumped fiercely as he watched Sarah’s mother rise and rush from the room. His curiosity was at a fevered pitch. He thought he knew everything about Sarah, but here was a new morsel, a secret that would need to be uncovered then studied and savored.

He returned his attention to Sarah’s father and felt something dark gathering inside him. The old man had no idea what waited for him as he stared broodingly into the flames.

After a while, he nodded off, and Ashe thought how easy it would be to slide up the window, slip into the house and take a stick of firewood to the old man’s skull. Or a knife to the thick, beefy neck. He could almost feel the warm blood spew over his hands, and for a moment, the desire was almost too much to resist.

But vengeance was worth waiting for and the time had to be right.

After all, the worst punishment wasn’t death. It was losing the thing prized above all else.

Seven

By mid-morning on Tuesday, the temperature had climbed twenty degrees, and the trees around Esme Floyd’s house were dripping from the melting ice. The sun was finally out, but the wind still carried a sharp bite.

Shivering, Lukas Clay reached back inside the squad car to grab his heavy jacket. A cup of coffee would have hit the spot, but he wasn’t about to turn around and drive back downtown. The sooner he got this over with, the sooner he could head home and catch a nap.

His job as chief of police in a town of barely three thousand people was normally uneventful, but the past thirty-six hours had been intense. An ice storm in this part of the country was always serious business. Very few drivers or vehicles were equipped to handle the treacherous roadways, and overhead power lines were always susceptible to falling tree branches.

As soon as the bad weather set in, Lukas had mobilized a task force consisting of two full-time and four part-time officers to patrol the outlying areas to make sure no one, especially the elderly, got stranded in the freezing temperatures. He’d been out all night himself and had just been on his way home when Esme Floyd’s call came in. There’d been a disturbance at the DeLaune place the night before.

Lukas folded his sunglasses and slipped them in his pocket as he glanced around. Backed up to an old pear orchard, Esme’s cottage was raised off the ground on brick pillars and underpinned with weathered lattice-work. Eyes gleamed from the darkness beneath the house, and a second later, an orange tabby shot through the slats and leaped to the top of a woodpile, where a black-and-white tomcat lay sunning.

Smoke curled up from the brick chimney, and as Lukas tracked the wispy stream, he spotted a buzzard circling the woods behind the orchard.

Something dead back there.

He watched for a moment, his eyes watering in the wind. As the vulture floated serenely on the air currents, a shotgun blast startled a flock of blackbirds out of the treetops and halted Lukas in his tracks.

The echo of gunfire vibrated against his chest. His heart jumped once, twice, three times before settling back to its normal beat.

Jesus, get a grip. Just somebody out hunting rabbits.

He’d been stateside for, what? Nearly two years and still the sound of gunfire—or a revving car engine—could propel him straight back to the war.

An army psychiatrist had assured him that it wasn’t uncommon for the effects of PTSD to linger or even worsen over time, but Lukas had finally figured out for himself how he needed to deal with the aftermath. He’d have to find a way to compartmentalize his time in Iraq, the same way he had everything else in his life. It was just like cleaning house. A place for everything, and everything in its place.

Some of those memory boxes—like his childhood—were to be opened rarely and with great caution, although he supposed he hadn’t had it any rougher than a lot of kids. Southern boys were raised with certain expectations. Once you accepted your place, once you mastered the pursuits deemed manly enough by a culture still mired in the past, you were rewarded for your trouble with jealousy and bitterness because your old man suddenly saw in you the passing of his own youth. Your triumphs became his failings, and he would do anything to prove he was still the better man even if it meant breaking you in ways you could never have imagined.

Sometimes the rivalry lasted well beyond the grave. How else could he explain his decision to come back here? Lukas wondered. Or even his career choice. Why follow in his father’s footsteps if the idea of besting the old man’s accomplishments didn’t still hold some twisted appeal?

Not that it was going to be easy to live up to—let alone surpass—his father’s reputation. William Clay had been a legend in Union County for as long as Lukas could remember. He’d served as county sheriff for the better part of twenty-five years, and in all that time, only one major case had gone unsolved.

Lukas glanced over his shoulder, a momentary spurt of adrenaline nudging away his fatigue. Fifty yards behind him, the DeLaune house rose like a stately specter, its pale walls and gleaming windows a constant reminder of the town’s darkest secret.

Sixteen-year-old Rachel DeLaune hadn’t just been murdered. Her body had been mutilated, the crime scene desecrated with satanic symbols. And in spite of his father’s best efforts, the killer had never been caught.

Not yet, at least.

A thrill of excitement slid up Lukas’s backbone even as he shuddered in dread. Something about that house always gave him the creeps. He couldn’t explain it. It was a fine old place, beautiful in the spring and summer when the roses and crepe myrtle were in bloom. But in the dead of winter, surrounded by an army of skeletal trees with their limbs quivering in the wind, the house looked cold and bleak and abandoned.

Some said it was haunted. Some even claimed they’d seen Rachel’s ghost at an upstairs window staring down at them as they passed by on the street.

But Lukas didn’t believe in ghosts. Not the kind that came back from the grave anyway. The only thing that had ever haunted him was his past.

Which was why he’d locked it away.

Turning back to the cottage, he stepped up on the concrete porch and knocked on the door. As he waited for someone to answer, he watched the buzzard’s spiral tighten over a spot in the woods where the quarry lay dead or dying.

After a moment, Esme Floyd drew back the wooden door and peered at him through the storm door. She was tall and thin with posture as straight as a yardstick and eyes that snapped with intelligence. The cotton dress she wore was crisp and spotless, her hair an improbable shade of silvery blue.

“Miss Esme, I’m Lukas Clay. I hear you reported some kind of disturbance at the DeLaune place last night.”

“Lukas Clay? Well, Lord have mercy. I liked to not recognized you.” She slipped on her glasses as she examined him through the door. “You used to take after your daddy, but I swear, you the spittin’ image of your mama nowadays. Except for them eyes. Dark as muscadines. You got your daddy’s eyes, all right.”

She fumbled with the latch, then pushed open the door for him to enter. Stepping into her little house was like crawling into a blast furnace. The warmth was a welcome respite from the wind and cold at first, but after a few minutes, Lukas felt as if someone had cocooned him in a thick layer of wool. The cloying heat took his breath away, and he quickly peeled off his gloves and unzipped his jacket.

“Better take off that coat,” Esme warned. “Else you freeze to death when you go back outside.”

Lukas shrugged out of his jacket and she hung it on a hook near the front door.

“So you knew my mother?”

“I was acquainted with her,” Esme said. “She was a real fine woman.”

His mother had died when Lukas was seven, and he’d always been fascinated to hear about her through others. The box that held his memories of her had been put away for so long, he couldn’t seem to find them anymore.

“Your daddy and Mr. James used to be big fishing buddies,” Esme reminisced. “They’d go off on trips, sometimes stay gone for a week or more at a hitch. Your mama’d come by the house to pick him up when they got in. You’d always stay in the car, but I’d see you out there now and then, peeking out the back glass.”

Lukas smiled. “I can barely remember those days.”

“You were just a little thing, real quiet and shy. After your mama died, God rest her soul, your daddy quit coming around so much. I guess he had his hands full raising you.”

Or maybe he’d found other pastimes besides fishing, Lukas thought. Because being a widower, much less being a father, had never changed the old man’s behavior one whit. He’d always done as he damn well pleased.

Lukas followed Esme into the tiny living room where she’d set up her ironing board in front of the television. A soap opera was on, and she watched the story for a moment before she reached down and switched off the set.

“Tell me what happened last night,” he said.

“It’s like I told that lady on the phone. I saw something out my bedroom window.” Esme picked up the hot iron and plowed it into a shirt. A cloud of steam rose as the iron hissed against the freshly starched fabric.

The smell of ironed cotton brought back an unexpected memory. Lukas suddenly had a vision of his mother standing behind an ironing board pressing one of his father’s khaki uniforms as tears rolled down her cheeks. Lukas had been maybe four or five at the time.

“What’s wrong, Mama?”

“Nothing, son. I’m just tired, that’s all. You run along and play. I have to get these shirts done so I can get supper on the table by the time your daddy gets home.”

Strange to be remembering that now, Lukas thought, as he sat down in a chair near the ironing board. “What did you see, Miss Esme?”

She glanced up, her eyes flickering with something Lukas couldn’t define. “Somebody on top of Mr. James’s house, that’s what.”

He stared at her in surprise. “On top of the house? In the middle of an ice storm?”

“The sleet had stopped by then. And the moon was out. I could see him up there plain as day.”

“You could tell it was a man?”

She guided the point of the iron across the shirt collar. “Only thing I could tell for sure was that he was up to no good. Why else would somebody be up there that time of night?”

“What time was this?”

“After midnight. More like one o’clock.”

“Are you always up that late?”

“My old arthritis bothers me at night. Sometimes it helps to get up and walk around.”

“So you looked out the window and you saw someone on the roof of the DeLaune house. Why didn’t you call the station?”

“I didn’t want nobody out on those slick roads because of me. Somebody get killed driving over here, I got that on my conscience.”

“Yeah, but we might have been able to catch him last night. It was probably just someone trying to find a way in out of the cold, but if it happens again, you call us. Hear?”

She went back to her ironing. Lukas watched her for a moment, mesmerized by her strong strokes.

“Have you seen anything like that before? Anyone coming around the house acting suspicious? Any strange cars parked out on the street?”

“Not lately, I ain’t.”

“But you have seen something?”

The iron faltered and another cloud of steam rose up from the shirt. “It was a long time ago. Before they sent him to the pen.”

“Who?”

“That ol’ Fears boy.” Her tone was pure contempt.

“Are you talking about Derrick Fears?”

She nodded, her eyes gleaming with scorn. “I’d see him out on the sidewalk sometimes, watching the house. I’d try to run him off before Mr. James catch him, but he wouldn’t budge. Just stand there and mock me. Sometimes he’d cup his hands to his mouth and squeal like he was real bad hurt. You ask me, there’s something bad wrong with a body who’d do something like that after what this family went through. Something done took that boy’s soul a long time ago.”

“Did you ever call the police when you saw him out there?”

“Nothing the police could do about it. Ain’t no law against standing on the sidewalk actin’ a fool, is they?”

“Do you think it could have been Derrick Fears you saw on the roof last night?”

“They still got him locked up, last I heard.”

“No, he’s out.”

“Out?” She said the word as if she couldn’t quite comprehend its meaning.

Lukas nodded. “He paid his debt to society and they set him free.”

She slammed the iron down so hard on the board, the rickety legs threatened to fold. “Now don’t that just beat all? He slices somebody up in a knife fight and don’t get as much time as my boy Robert did for stealing some blamed old car. That don’t seem right to me.”

“It doesn’t seem right to me, either, but I’m not here to argue the shortcomings of our judicial system,” Lukas said. “I’m trying to figure out who was up on that roof last night and why.” He walked over to the window and glanced out.