скачать книгу бесплатно
When asked how an alligator gar might “rise up out of the river,” he laughs. “Chalk it up to a child’s vivid imagination. That’s the only possible explanation.”
From the Arcadia Argus, July 16, 1980:
Monster Sighting A Clever Hoax?
Well, it looks like we’ve all been had, but it was a fun ride while it lasted. Sheriff McCaid now believes Shelby Westmoreland’s claim that she saw the Pearl River Monster a month ago was, in fact, a hoax perpetrated by the girl’s uncle, James Westmoreland, to capitalize on the influx of sightseers to the area.
According to the sheriff, business at the Pearl Cove probably increased by as much as tenfold during the weeks following little Shelby’s claim. Anxious for a souvenir, visitors to the jewelry store were willing to plunk down hundreds of dollars for freshwater pearls from the river, guaranteed to protect the wearer from the monster.
With her uncle’s confession, Shelby’s fifteen minutes of fame have officially come to an end. Following recent developments, her second scheduled appearance on the “Tonight” show has been canceled, and the tabloid reporters have all gone home. Evidently, their feelings now are that the girl’s story just isn’t very credible.
Let’s hope little Shelby doesn’t go crying wolf in the near future because it’s doubtful anyone would be willing to listen….
Chapter One
Twenty-one years later…
Nathan Dallas swatted a mosquito on the back of his neck as he guided the Buford boys’ aluminum fishing skiff across the dusky water. The two brothers sat in the prow, drinking and muttering to one another until Nathan couldn’t help but wonder what they might be up to. He’d been gone from Arcadia for a lot of years, but he still remembered the rumors that had always swirled around the Bufords.
He remembered a lot of other things, too. The river stirred powerful memories for him. His father, strong and agile, diving into those murky depths for pearls. His mother, gentle and pensive, calling Nathan in to supper.
And Shelby, suntanned and sweet, waiting for him on the bank.
Cutting the outboard motor, he let the boat drift. In the ensuing silence, the twilight came strangely alive. A few feet from the skiff, a water moccasin glided like a ribbon of silk toward the bank. Somewhere nearby a turtle plopped into the water, and a whippoorwill called from the branches of a sweet gum.
The melancholy sound brought back even more memories. The nights Nathan had camped out alone by the river because he couldn’t stand seeing the grief in his father’s face, the defeat that had stooped Caleb Dallas’s shoulders and dulled his eyes before he’d reached fifty.
Back then Nathan had sworn he would never be caught in the same trap that had drained the youth from his father. He’d get away from this river if it was the last thing he did. He’d make something of his life, be somebody. And no one—especially not a woman—would ever take it away from him.
Well, at least that part had come true. His downfall hadn’t been caused by a woman. It had been his own hubris that had wiped out his career and his good name. And now here he was, back where he’d started. Back on the river, but this time, he wasn’t diving for mussel shells with his father. Caleb Dallas was dead, and Nathan now hunted something far more precious than pearls. A story that could launch his comeback. An exposé that could not only restore his reputation, but the self-respect he’d so carelessly tossed away in Washington.
He let his gaze travel downstream to where spotlights illuminated Takamura Industries. Yoshi Takamura had made millions selling freshwater mollusk shells to the Japanese cultured-pearl industry, but now that the mussel beds in the Pearl River were badly depleted, he’d turned his attention elsewhere.
He’d built a laboratory along the water, but to what end no one in town seemed to know. Or care, for that matter. Takamura was too important to the local economy for anyone to get overly concerned about their activities. But the secretive nature of the lab had triggered Nathan’s natural curiosity.
He’d cultivated a deep throat on the inside, a man named Danny Weathers who was an old school buddy of Nathan’s and who now worked as a diver for Takamura. So far, Danny hadn’t been able to shed much light on the activities inside the lab, but Nathan wasn’t about to give up. Not when he smelled a story.
At the other end of the boat, Ray Buford slapped at his bare leg. “Hellfire, Bobby Joe. Why’d you go and forget the bug spray? Skeeters gonna eat us alive out here.”
“Not if you get enough alcohol in your bloodstream. This is better’n any old bug spray.” Bobby Joe drained the last of his beer, smashed the empty can against his forehead, then slung the can overboard with a bloodcurdling yell.
Frowning, Nathan watched the container sink. Obviously, the Bufords didn’t put much stock in river conservation. No wonder the Pearl River suffered from such dangerous levels of pollution. Nathan was sorely tempted to give them both a stern lecture, but he doubted it would do any good, and besides, he didn’t want to risk alienating them. They both worked part-time for Takamura, and Nathan figured if the brothers got drunk enough, they might be willing to talk to him—which was precisely the reason he’d convinced them to let him help run their fishing lines tonight.
“Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if we saw that ol’ monster out here tonight?” Bobby Joe drawled.
“Yeah,” Ray replied dryly. “That’d be real hilarious, Bobby Joe.”
The younger Buford laughed, belched then pulled a wicked-looking knife from his belt and trailed it in the water. “Here monster, monster, monster. Where are you, boy? Come show that ugly face of yours. Make us famous.”
“What’re you, stupid or something?” Ray grumbled. “Shut the hell up.”
“Chill, man.” Bobby Joe made a chopping motion in the water with the switchblade. “That monster comes up here, I’ll show him, like I did ol’ Shorty Barnes that time.”
Shorty Barnes was the reason Bobby Joe had spent three years in Cummins Prison Farm, but Nathan wasn’t about to remind him of that fact.
“You’d show him all right,” Ray scoffed. “Hell, boy. He’d chomp your arm off in one bite, knife and all.”
“Sounds like you boys believe all those stories about the Pearl River Monster,” Nathan said.
“Oh, Ray believes all right. He saw that thing himself, didn’t you, bro?” There was a goading quality in Bobby Joe’s thick voice. “Go ahead, tell ’im.”
Ray didn’t say anything, but in the fading light, Nathan saw something that might have been fear flicker across his homely features.
Unlike Bobby Joe, Nathan wasn’t about to ridicule Ray Buford for his fears. Nathan used to dive in this river, in water so murky he sometimes couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. There’d been times when he’d become so disoriented, he couldn’t tell up from down, and in a cold, black panic, he’d sensed things he’d never told anyone about.
Twenty-one years ago, he’d never been as certain as everyone else in this town that Shelby Westmoreland had been lying.
An uneasiness settled over the boat. They were in the middle of the river now, over the deepest part. The water was more than fifty feet in places. Nathan had often wondered what kind of creatures could survive on that cold, muddy bottom. Man-sized catfish, if legend could be believed.
But it was the giant river loggerheads that had always given Nathan a healthy dose of caution. Diving in water populated by those creatures wasn’t for the faint of heart. Also known as alligator snapping turtles, they sometimes grew to over two hundred pounds, and Nathan had once seen a smaller one snap a broom handle in two with its powerful jaws. He hated to think what one of the larger specimens could do to a man’s hand.
The boat drifted toward the first marker, and Ray reached over the side of the boat to grab the white bleach jug fastened to the end of the trotline. He gave it a yank. “Damn. The line’s tangled.”
“Looks like one of us’ll have to go down and get it freed up.” Bobby Joe fingered his knife. They both looked at Nathan.
He reached over the side of the boat and grabbed the line. “Let’s try working it loose first.”
They tugged and pulled for several minutes before the line finally snapped free. Bobby Joe grunted as they hauled it up. “Musta hooked us a big sucker.”
When the line popped to the surface, Ray leaned over the side to get a look. “What the hell is that?”
The realization hit all three of them at once, and Ray yelped, jerking back so violently the boat threatened to tip. Nathan clung to the sides as he stared at the mass of flesh and bone tangled in the line.
“Man, oh, man,” Bobby Joe said almost reverently. “Would you look at that? Something’s done ripped that poor bastard all to hell.”
Ray didn’t say anything. He stared at the corpse with a look of sheer terror, flinching almost pitifully when the beam of Nathan’s flashlight accidentally caught him in the face.
Nathan leaned over the edge of the boat, playing the light over the body, what was left of it. The black neoprene wet suit was in shreds, but the mask was still in place. Sightless eyes stared up through the lens, and an icy chill sliced through Nathan.
The dead man was Danny Weathers.
Chapter Two
Exhaustion tightened the muscles in Shelby August’s neck and shoulders, and she lifted her hand from the steering wheel to massage the soreness. Not so much exhaustion as tension, she realized, feeling the knots. Ever since she’d left the hospital in Little Rock where her grandmother had been admitted two days ago, Shelby had been experiencing a strange sense of disquiet, an uneasiness that had strengthened the farther north she drove on the interstate.
An hour out of Little Rock, she took the Arcadia exit, bypassing downtown to head east on a paved road that would take her to the river. A few miles in the opposite direction would have put her in the foothills of the majestic Ozarks, but Shelby came from the river bottoms—acres and aces of flat, swampy farmland steeped in superstition and mosquitoes.
Trees rose on either side of the road, obliterating the sky in places and turning the countryside almost pitch-black. The farther from town she drove, the more primal her surroundings. If she rolled down her window, she would be able to smell the river. But Shelby kept her windows up and her doors locked.
“Coward,” she muttered. She was thirty years old, no longer the same little girl who had cried “monster” more than two decades ago. But if the passing years had dimmed her memory of that night, time had done nothing to convince her that monsters didn’t exist. She knew all too well that they did.
But real monsters didn’t creep up from the river in the dead of night, as she’d once believed. They walked into offices in broad daylight and killed for the contents of a safe.
He can’t hurt you now, Shelby. You know that, don’t you?
She could picture Dr. Minger sitting behind his desk, his kind eyes soft and a bit blurred by the thick lenses in his glasses. Albert Lunt is in prison, serving a life sentence. No chance for parole. It’s over.
But it wasn’t over, Shelby thought, fingering the silk scarf she wore at her throat. It never would be.
Months of therapy had helped. The nightmares were fewer and farther between now, but they still came. Albert Lunt still terrorized Shelby’s sleep just as surely as he’d done the day he’d murdered her husband. Or the night he’d broken into her home and tried to kill her. As long as he was alive, he would always have this terrible hold on her.
I’ll find a way to get you, he’d promised as the police had dragged him from her home that night.
And a part of Shelby still believed—would always believe—that he would.
She shivered, even though the evening was warm and humid and the air conditioner in her rental car was turned low. She reached over and shut off the fan, wishing she could turn off her memories as easily. But they were there, niggling at the fringes of her mind as they had been ever since she’d left L.A. Distance wouldn’t quiet them, nor time. Nothing would.
Outside, the night deepened. Through the patches of trees, she had an occasional glimpse of moonlight on water. A silvery ribbon that wound for miles and miles through the very heart of Arkansas, the Pearl River had once held a fascination for Shelby, and then terror, after that summer. Now she realized that she had been hoping it might hold the key to her salvation.
Sixteen months, she thought numbly, as her headlights picked out the last curve in the road before she reached her grandmother’s house. Michael had been gone for over a year. Sometimes it seemed like only a heartbeat ago that the two of them had been planning their future together. Sometimes it seemed like a lifetime. Those times were the hardest, when Shelby would lie awake at night, unable to remember what he’d looked like. Oh, she could recall his beautiful grey eyes, the sound of his voice, the way he smiled. But she had trouble putting all those features together, making him seem real again.
It’s time to let go, Shelby.
I can’t. It’s my fault he’s dead. If I hadn’t been late—
Lunt would have killed you, too. You know that.
Getting out of L.A. was a good idea, Dr. Minger had said. There were too many memories that bound her to the tragedy. She’d been trapped in a terrible limbo since Michael’s death, not seeing friends, not going to work. Their savings and the proceeds from the sale of Michael’s business had enabled her to let her career as an accountant slide into obscurity because she hadn’t wanted to cope with the day-to-day pressures of getting on with her life.
If it hadn’t been for her grandmother’s call for help, Shelby wasn’t certain she would have yet had the courage to break free.
Around the curve, the silhouette of her grandmother’s house, perched on wooden stilts, came into view, but the sight of flashing lights down by the river almost stopped Shelby’s heart. For one terrible moment, she thought she was back in L.A., back in her husband’s office, bending over his lifeless body while the sirens wailed outside.
Then she thought of her grandmother, but Shelby quickly reminded herself that she’d left Annabel little more than an hour ago. Her grandmother was safe in the hospital and slowly on the mend. This had nothing to do with her.
Her uncle James? No. James didn’t like the river. He had a place in town now. This was nothing to do with him, either.
But the reassurances didn’t stop Shelby’s hands from trembling as she pulled into her grandmother’s drive, parked the car and got out. The lawn ran to the edge of an incline that dropped gently to the river. Several police cars and a hearse were parked along the road, and she could hear voices down by the water. With increasing trepidation, she walked across the yard and stood at the top of the bank, gazing down. A flashlight caught her in its beam, and someone shouted up to her. After a moment, a policeman scurried up the slope toward her.
“Get back in your car, Miss, and move along. This is police business.”
“But I live here.” She waved her hand toward the house.
“Annabel Westmoreland owns this place, ma’am. I happen to know she’s in the hospital.”
“I’m her granddaughter,” Shelby said a bit defensively. “I’m going to be staying here for a while.”
The deputy cocked his head. “Shelby?” He shone the flashlight in her face, and she flinched. “Sorry.” He doused the light. “You are Shelby, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” She still didn’t know who he was.
He chuckled ruefully. “Guess you don’t recognize me in the uniform. No one ever expected a Millsap to be on this side of the law.”
“Millsap?” she said incredulously. “Dewayne?”
He nodded and grinned. “Been with the county sheriff’s department almost ten years now.”
The Millsaps, along with their cousins, the Bufords, had once terrorized all of Cross County and half of Graves County. No one had ever expected any of them to amount to a hill of beans, as her grandmother would say.
“What happened, Dewayne?” Shelby asked uneasily. “Why are the police here?”
His expression sobered. “My cousins found a body tangled in one of their trot lines.”
Shelby caught her breath. “Oh, no. Who was it?”
He hesitated, then shrugged. “Guess it won’t matter if I tell you, seeing as how we’ve already notified his next of kin. His name was Danny Weathers. He was a local diver.”
“How did he…die?”
“Looks like a boating accident. The coroner’s down there now.” Dewayne nodded toward her grandmother’s house. “Look, maybe you best go on inside. This isn’t something you want to see.”
“But—”
“Hey, Dewayne!”
He turned at the sound of his name, then muttered a curse as a tall figure topped the bank and headed across the yard toward them. “Pardon my French, but I sure as hell don’t need this tonight,” he muttered to Shelby. He called to the newcomer, “Look, you got questions, you need to talk to the sheriff, Nathan.”
Shelby’s mouth fell open in astonishment. Nathan? Nathan Dallas? The boy who had once gotten her into so much trouble? Was it possible?
She’d heard Nathan had left this part of the country years ago. Like her, he’d migrated to a big city. Her grandmother had told her once that he was some hotshot reporter in Washington, just as he’d always said he would be. What in the world was he doing back in Arcadia?
“McCaid won’t talk to me, you know that. Come on, Dewayne, cut me some slack here, okay?” Nathan strode over to the deputy, his back to Shelby. “I want to know what the coroner found when he examined the body.”
Dewayne sighed. “And have my words splashed across the Argus? No thanks. Been there, done that.”
“You got burned once by my uncle,” Nathan said. “But you’re dealing with me now. If you say something is off the record, it’s off the record.”
“Yeah, right.”
Nathan ignored the sarcasm. “You don’t really think this was a boating accident, do you? Come on.”
“What else would cut a man up like that?” Dewayne said grimly. “He got caught in a boat propeller.”
…cut a man up?
Shelby shivered uncontrollably. She’d forgotten how dangerous the river could be, how unpredictable. She’d come here seeking solace from the violence of her past only to find more death, more horror. But surely this was an accident. A terrible, tragic mishap.
“It’s how he got caught in a prop that makes me curious,” Nathan persisted. “Why was he out there diving alone?”
