Central Park by Guillaume Musso (ebook reader macos .TXT) 📕

“Ugh…red, I think. No, more like pink.” And he hung up.

Alice and Gabriel looked at each other, petrified.

The nightmare was continuing.

20Inside the House

A NEARLY FULL MOON hung heavy in the sky, defying the clouds.

It was icy cold.

The Mustang Shelby’s heater blew only lukewarm air. Alice rubbed her hands to warm them up and covered them with the sleeves of her sweater. She had turned on the dome light and was looking at the road map folded out on her lap. Gabriel drove, leaning forward, face somber, his hands tightly gripping the wheel. They had driven about three hours since the phone call with Seymour, still heading north. After such a long trip, they were becoming painfully aware of how uncomfortable the Shelby was: very low seats, prehistoric suspension, faulty heating…

Focused on the road, Gabriel rounded a hairpin bend and accelerated. The road wound between the gorges of the White Mountains. They had not seen another car for miles. The whole area seemed deserted.

All around them was unfettered nature. The forest was dark and menacing. The palette of fall colors had given way to a single shade of black—the black of shadows, the black of the bottom of the ocean.

As the car meandered around the road’s curves, they sometimes glimpsed the valley, veiled in fog, or a tiered waterfall, the rock silver beneath the rushing foam.

Her eyes ringed with fatigue and sleeplessness, Alice went over what Seymour had told them: Not only was Vaughn not dead, but he was still killing. Ten days earlier, he had murdered a nurse here in New England, and soon afterward he had returned to France, killed again, and left the body in the old sugar factory.

Vaughn was not acting alone, Alice was sure of that. It wasn’t by chance that she and Gabriel had been brought together. Vaughn had engineered this in order to provoke them, to defy them. But this macabre setup could not possibly be the work of one person. Materially, logistically, there was no way a single individual could have orchestrated such a gigantic puzzle.

Alice rubbed her eyes. Her thoughts were growing murky, her brain slowing down.

But one question wouldn’t stop torturing her: Why had her father lied to her about Vaughn’s death?

She rubbed her shoulders and wiped the condensation from the windshield. The gloomy landscape was affecting her mood. She felt fear in her gut, and only Gabriel’s presence prevented her from yielding to panic.

They drove another ten miles before reaching the opening to a forest path framed by wooden logs.

“That’s it!” Alice said, looking up from the map.

The car veered to the left and entered a path through the woods bordered by pine trees. After a hundred yards or so, the passage narrowed, as if the trees were uniting to repel the intruders. They kept going, pine needles scraping against the Mustang’s bodywork, branches hitting the windows and doors, the ground becoming ever more unstable. Almost imperceptibly, the conifers were closing in around them.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a dark mass burst out in front of the car. Alice screamed; Gabriel slammed on the brakes and jerked the steering wheel to the side to avoid the obstacle. The Shelby skidded into the trunk of a pine tree, breaking off the side mirror, smashing one of the windows, and short-circuiting the interior light by which Alice had been reading the map.

Gabriel turned off the engine. Silence. Fear. And then a long bellowing noise.

A moose, Alice thought, watching the silhouette of a large animal with fan-shaped antlers running away.

“Nothing broken?” Gabriel asked.

“No, I’m okay,” Alice said. “How about you?”

“I’ll survive,” he assured her, then started the car again.

They drove five hundred yards and came to a clearing with a cabin at its center.

They parked the Shelby near the building and turned off the headlights. The moonlight was bright enough for them to make out the little house. It was a rectangular wood-paneled construction with a cedar-shingle roof. Two dormer windows seemed to observe them suspiciously. The shutters were open and the darkness inside was absolute.

“There’s no one here,” Gabriel said.

“Or that’s what they want us to think,” Alice replied.

She buckled the straps of her satchel and handed it to Gabriel. “Take that,” she ordered, then took her gun from the glove compartment, removed the Glock from its holster, checked the magazine, and pressed her finger to the trigger.

“You’re not planning on going in there without backup?” Gabriel asked.

“Do you have another solution?”

“We might as well just paint targets on our faces!”

“If Vaughn had wanted to kill us, we’d be dead already.”

They went out into the cold and moved toward the house. Steam escaped their mouths, forming silvery clouds that vanished in the night.

They stopped in front of a mailbox with peeling paint: CALEB DUNN.

“At least we don’t have the wrong house,” said Gabriel, opening the mailbox.

It was empty. Someone must have picked up the mail recently.

They continued until they reached the porch, where they found a newspaper.

“Today’s Concord Monitor,” Gabriel noted after ripping off the protective plastic. He dropped the newspaper onto an old rocking chair.

“So Dunn hasn’t been home today,” Alice deduced, glancing at the paper.

Gabriel stood in front of the door and seemed to hesitate.

“You know, legally, we have no right to be here. Dunn is not officially a suspect. We don’t have a warrant or—”

“So?” Alice asked impatiently.

“So maybe we should get in without breaking down the door.”

Alice holstered her gun and knelt in front of the lock. “Hand me my bag.” She rummaged inside the satchel and took out a large manila envelope containing the chest X-ray films she’d asked Mitchell to print out for her.

“Where did you get those?” Gabriel asked, seeing the images.

“I’ll explain later. What do you want to bet that there’s no dead bolt? How many burglars can there be around here?”

Alice slid the rigid plastic sheet between the door and the frame and pushed it in several times. No luck.

“Forget it, Schafer. This isn’t a movie. It’s locked.”

But Alice did not give