Bill Pronzini - Hellbox

Some walk. But how far could she have gone? Quite a ways if she’d taken the secondary road below; it meandered along the hillside for a considerable distance in both directions before dropping down to the main valley road. But she’d said something this morning about a walk in the woods. Which woods? There was timber all around the property, all along Ridge Hill Road.

Possible she’d gotten herself lost, but that wasn’t likely. There were other houses tucked in among most of the nearby forestland, except for the section that ran along the ridge above and down the other side, and she wouldn’t have gone up that far. Kerry was not a risk-taker for one thing, and for another, she had a built-in compass that operated even in unfamiliar surroundings.

Some kind of accident? Tripped, fell, hurt herself badly enough so that she couldn’t make it back? That possibility was what worried me the most. Accidents could happen to anybody at any time, no matter how careful you were.

I let another fifteen minutes go by, my nerves jumping, the fear of some sort of accident jabbing at my mind. And when she still didn’t show, I went looking for her.

The woods at the rear first. There was a gate in the fence back there… through it seemed the most likely way for her to have gone. On the other side was what looked like a deer trail, and I followed that to where it split in two. Damn! I went a little ways along each fork, looking for some sign of recent passage and not finding any. She could have gone in either direction-the timber ran all along the rear of the property and down on both sides. If she’d come in here at all.

I took the left fork first, followed it until it petered out against a deadfall. You could get around it, but not without making a detour through fern groves on either side. None of the ferns appeared to have been trampled.

Back to the other fork and along its winding course. Broken twigs, scuffed-through needles… somebody had been this way recently. Kerry? It could also have been a deer; in one place, I came on a little pile of black pellet droppings. I was not enough of a woodsman to make the distinction.

The trail led me out of the trees, across a shallow streambed and a rock-strewn brown meadow. No sign of Kerry. No sign that she’d ever been here. What was discernible of the path ended at the far end of the clearing, beyond which was a moderately steep incline through trees and underbrush. I thought about climbing up there, but I didn’t do it. The muscles in my legs were already tight-drawn from the exertion.

I couldn’t keep searching blind like this. The dusky light was deepening, which made the footing even more uncertain; in my tired and edgy state, I was liable to be the one to suffer a harmful fall. My watch told me I’d been chasing around in these woods for nearly an hour. Kerry might have returned to the cabin by now, be there waiting and wondering where I’d gone. If she had, I’d feel like a fool for all this frantic activity-a relieved fool.

I made my way back through the trees, and even with my eyes cast downward, I stumbled a couple of times over hidden obstacles. Once I thought I’d managed to get myself lost, then located the trail again and finally emerged at the gate in the boundary fence. I half ran around to the front of the cabin.

The door was still locked.

Kerry wasn’t there.

Now I really was scared. I hurried down to the graveled parking area, drove to Ridge Hill Road. The shortest route to the main valley road was to the north; I turned in that direction. No Kerry. There was a good-sized public park on the west side of the valley road intersection, a campground a short distance away on the east side; I made looping passes through both. No Kerry. Back along Ridge Hill in the opposite direction. No Kerry. Another secondary road branched upward to the left; the signpost there gave its name as Skyview Drive and warned that there was No Outlet. I swung up there. No Kerry.

Ahead was another intersection, this one on the left. When I neared it, I saw that the branch was unpaved and heavily rutted-an old logging road probably, that angled up through the woods. I sleeved sweat off my face as I slowed to make the turn. Follow the logging road as far as it goes, I thought, and if I still didn’t find her, go back to Ridge Hill and start knocking on doors in the vicinity and asking if anyone had seen her.

The explosion happened just as I swung onto the logging road.

Booming concussion, somewhere nearby. A fireball inside a cloud of oily black smoke boiled up above the timber to my right-very close. My frayed nerve endings sparked like live wires; reflexively, I jammed on the brakes. The flames were no longer visible, but the smoke kept pumping upward in great gouts, putting a black filter across the fading blue of the sky.

I don’t believe in the kind of ambulance chasing mindset that draws people to accident scenes, but with Kerry missing and the nearness of the blast, I wasn’t about to ignore it. Christ knew what had happened over there. I slammed the gear shift into reverse, backed out in a sideways slide onto Skyview Drive pointing south. The blacktop climbed up over a rise, and when it dropped down out of the pines into several hundred yards of rolling open space, I had a clear view of the source and aftermath of the explosion.

There was a house in a pocket backed by a humpbacked hill… what had been a house. Now it was a pulsing, squared-off sheet of flame, the oily smoke still pouring out of it and blackening the sky above. A car in the yard had been blown onto its side by the force of the blast, its blue paint scorched and blistered. Which meant at least one person had been inside the house when the place went up. Dead… no way anybody could have survived that kind of fiery eruption.

Not Kerry. Of course, not Kerry. Not Kerry!

I was the first person on the scene: no other cars on the road or on the drive leading up to the burning house. I accelerated to the bottom of the rise, pulled up in a shallow ditch on the far side of the driveway. There was no good reason for me to run up into the yard but I did it anyway, propelled by my half-panicked fear for Kerry. No sign of anybody inside or out, alive or dead. I couldn’t get any closer to the conflagration than fifty yards. The radiating waves of heat were intense, the smoke thick enough to affect my breathing, start me choking and hacking.

Neither of the two outbuildings, a barn and a smaller structure, had caught fire yet, but falling embers had already ignited patches of grass in the yard and on the lower edges of the hill. The pine woods along the hilltop and on the near perimeter were untouched so far. If a fire got started in any part of them, as dry as some of the underbrush was, it would move fast enough to destroy acres of timberland and threaten any number of other homes.

Other vehicles were arriving now-a couple of private cars, a deputy sheriff’s cruiser. In the distance, I heard the first wail of sirens. I was back on the access drive by then, away from the pulsing heat and roiling smoke, trying to suck in enough fresh air to clear my lungs.

A fresh-faced young deputy came running up. “What the hell happened here?”

“I don’t know,” I said between coughs. “Sudden explosion, that’s all I know. Only been here a couple of minutes.”

“Either of the Verrikers inside?”

Verriker. The name was vaguely familiar, but I didn’t try to place it. “Car there says somebody was.”

“Christ. Oh, Christ.”

I had nothing to say to that. The roof of the barn was burning now, in crawling flames like napalm. Out on the road, the oncoming noise of sirens and rumbling engines overrode the thrum and crackle of the blaze.

The deputy said to me, “Go back to the road, stay out of the way,” and hurried off without waiting for an answer.