The Stonefly Series, Book 1 Read online

  The Stonefly

  Scott J Holliday

  Copyright © 2013 by Scott J. Holliday.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Severn River Publishing

  www.SevernRiverPublishing.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-951249-19-9 (Paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-64875-064-9 (eBook)

  Contents

  Also By Scott J. Holliday

  Special Audible Deal

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Epilogue

  Never Miss a New Release!

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  Thanks for Reading

  Next in Series

  UNGRANTED: Prologue

  UNGRANTED: Chapter 1

  UNGRANTED: Chapter 2

  UNGRANTED: Chapter 3

  UNGRANTED: Chapter 4

  Read Ungranted

  About the Author

  Also By Scott J. Holliday

  The Stonefly Series

  The Stonefly

  Ungranted

  Recall Bound

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  Other Books

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  This book is dedicated to my little girls, Heather and Samantha. They can't even read this yet, but one day they will, and they will be spectacular people when they do.

  Be careful what you wish for...

  —Anonymous

  Prologue

  Jana Davidovich opened her eyes to a clicking sound.

  It was her husband, Dimitri, turning off the lamp on the nightstand.

  "You fell asleep," he said, smiling. His face was close to hers as he leaned over the bed where Jana had spent the last two weeks after a month-long stint in the hospital. His skin glowed in the darkness of the room, lit by the faint light from the television on the dresser, the sound muted. The daytime nurse left an hour ago after Dimitri came home from work, leaving the couple to brave the evening together in their small brick-and-vinyl ranch.

  Dimitri gestured toward the television. "Turn it off?"

  Jana nodded.

  The movement was a mistake. Bolts of blue pain shot down Jana's neck and through her chest, through her bones, over her skin. She clenched her teeth. Tears ran from her eyes.

  Dimitri set down the TV remote and dabbed his wife's face dry with a terry cloth rag. He was a shadow above her, his face no longer glowing as the television had gone dark. "Use your words, honey. Try not to move." The American term of endearment, honey, sounded strange with his foreign tongue.

  "Okay," Jana said. Her voice was not only weak, but muffled; her jaw was wired shut.

  The news had described Jana's accident as 'horrific.' The word seemed too small to her now, too few letters to describe what she'd been through. Her Accord had been t-boned by a drunk in an SUV who'd run a red light. Jana was thrown from the vehicle with broken bones and a shattered pelvis before her body was hit by another car swerving to avoid the first collision.

  It was the second impact that tore away Jana's skin, leaving her face a grafted, shapeless plane, her left eye pale as a stone, her scalp a flap to be stitched back down. Even smiling was painful now. The doctors promised recovery but they also promised pain.

  Their second promise came true once the morphine drip was removed.

  "Want the window open?" Dimitri said.

  "Yes."

  He went to the window, unlatched it, and pulled it up. A cool breeze pushed into the room past a set of velvet drapes. The drapes had been a gift from her mother along with the nightstand back when she and Dimitri were still newlyweds. They'd spent their last penny on the down payment for the mortgage and needed help making the house a home. They still had the futon that had been the only thing to sit or sleep on for the first three years. It was stored in the basement now, along with a tiny television with rabbit ears and a VCR on the side. Life was simpler then. They ate Funyuns and watched dollar VHS rentals from Movieland just down the street. The video store was a dry cleaner now.

  "Need a scratch?" Dimitri said. He held up a long metal shoe horn—the best tool for getting at the itchy spots beneath the casts on her legs and arms.

  "No, but thank you."

  "I'll be a half hour, tops," Dimitri said, propping the shoe horn against the bed where she could reach it with her good arm. He placed a hand on her chest and kissed her forehead. "Get some rest."

  "Okay."

  Dimitri closed the bedroom door behind him. She heard his footfalls as he padded across the house, out the front door, and down the steps of the porch. Keys jangled. The car started. A brand new Ford to replace the totaled Accord. She heard him pull out and accelerate down the road, off to Kroger for a few groceries.

  He wasn't supposed to leave her on her own, but they both agreed he could run out for a few things now and then without real risk—things he could blend into a shake she could consume through her unmovable teeth. They'd tried blending a Big Mac on her first day home but it hadn't gone well. Bananas were the base of everything now, usually with strawberries, spinach, and chocolate syrup. High energy food. Recovery food.

  Good lord, just to be able to chew again.

  A noise by the window. A thumping sound. Jana jerked involuntarily, hissed in pain, turned her eyes. She had no depth perception now that it was just the right eye doing all the work. Hard to focus on distant things.

  A hand appeared in the open window, gripping the sill. With help from the light of the moon she could see it was coated in a latex glove. The gloved hand grew into an arm. A second gloved hand appeared, followed by a ski-masked head. A man pulled his upper body into the opening and threw a leg over the sill.

/>   Jana's body went cold with fear.

  The man stared at her while he brought his other leg over the sill to the carpeted floor. He steadied himself and stood to his considerable height. His hands were big, as was his chest. His legs were thick down past the calves to his feet.

  Jana cried for help through her wired jaw.

  The masked man shook his head. He placed a latexed finger to his lips. "Shhh."

  The drapes fell still as he closed the window. He picked up the wooden kitchen chair Dimitri had pushed against the wall, the same chair he sat in while they caught up on back episodes of Broadchurch with the British dialog close-captioned. Jana imagined the chair was still warm from Dimitri's body heat.

  The man placed the chair beside the bed and sat down. He clicked on the lamp and leaned in close to her face. He had dark, empty eyes and smelled of hydrating ointment which reminded her of her stay at the hospital. They'd spread it on her healing wounds day and night. The scent was gag-inducing to her now.

  "Who are you?" Jana said through her closed teeth.

  The man showed her his big hands inside the translucent latex gloves. She could see there was something wrong with the skin beneath. Gripping the glove at his wrist, he pulled the latex tight against his left hand, bringing wavy burn scars into focus.

  A trickle of knowledge came to her then. Something about this man ran familiar. A distant and terrifying awareness.

  "Please," Jana said. "Don't hurt me."

  The man sat back in the chair. He pulled off his ski mask to reveal the face of a manchild. He turned his head to show her his melted ears, the burn scars on the back of his head, the sparse hair patterns, the scaly skin. He said, "Do you see?" The tenor of his voice was deep and alien, like that of a silhouetted informant in a true crime exposé.

  Jana found she couldn't respond. The knowledge of who this man was—this killer in her house, in her bedroom—descended upon her like a foot stomping her chest and staying there, crushing out her wind.

  "You were pretty," the man said. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a folded piece of newsprint. He unfolded it and showed her the article concerning her accident. She was pictured in the upper right corner in black and white. The drunk who destroyed her body was pictured opposite. He was dead now. Didn't survive the crash.

  And yes, she had been pretty. Beautiful, even.

  New tears formed. They rolled down Jana's cheeks in painful, tickling streams, rolled across skin no one would call beautiful again.

  "Why do you do this?" Jana said. Her tongue had grown thick with emotion. It was trapped behind her teeth, threatening to choke her. Her nose felt hollow. She swallowed with difficulty, knowing this man—Ghost Mother, the newscasts called him—had never left a victim alive.

  The man folded the newspaper article back into a small square. The ink smeared on his gloves. He pocketed the paper and put his ski mask back on. "You don't deserve this fate," he said, gesturing to her broken body.

  "I'm going to recover," Jana said. "I'm going to live."

  The man's sad smile was framed by the red-stitched mouth-hole of the ski mask. He shook his head, no. His eyes traveled up and down her body. "I'll tuck you in now." He arranged and fluffed her pillows just so, pulled the covers up under her chin, tucking her neatly into bed.

  Seemingly satisfied with his work, the man reached down to the shoehorn Dimitri had left propped against the bed. He brought it up with two hands, the curved, blunt blade pointing down in the fashion of sacrificial execution.

  Jana's scream was deflated when the shoehorn cracked through her ribs and punctured one of her lungs. The sound from her chest was like a whistling tea kettle removed from the flame. Blood bubbled up around the metal shaft rising from within her. It spread across her sheets, darkening the fiber.

  The man looked into Jana's eyes.

  She saw that he was crying now, too. His tears glistened from down within the shadows the ski-mask created on his face. His lower lip quivered when he said, "Tell me I'm a good boy."

  Jana died before she could reply.

  1

  Day One

  Jacob Duke fly-fished the Tobacco River in silence. Steam rose from the water on a hot September evening as he unsuccessfully worked an eddy with some store-bought caddisflies. The fish weren't taking the bait. Jake was almost ready to pack it in when a clump of cattail spores floated past.

  The image rushed Jake back to childhood memories. Summer afternoons at the pond behind his mother's Birmingham estate, popping cattail heads with a Cooper Worth, Kirk Gibson model baseball bat. Now, holding the fly rod, his hands recalled the feel of the wooden bat handle in his grip, the violent swinging, the release of a bastard's frustration on the innocent bystanders of boyhood.

  Those first spores passed and more were coming downstream.

  Jake broke down his rod and started upriver, wading over the bed of stones, rotting branches, and boot-removing suck-mucks through the trail of white clumps that spun around his legs and tumbled in between.

  He spotted a boy around the next bend.

  The boy sat at the end of a crooked dock with his head hung low, his hands tucked beneath his thighs, and his bare feet dangling over the edge. One toe occasionally tapped the river's surface and sent out rings. He was shirtless and sporting a pair of hacked-off Salvation Army cords. His arms were dirty and his haircut looked like he'd been pinned down for the job. The cattails along the swampy bank cast him in shadow, many of them headless or their stalks broken. Floating on either side of the dock were the puffy white remains of their thrashing. There was a stick stabbed into the mud at the boy's side, the dry end worn of bark and smoothed by a youthful hand. Not quite a Kirk Gibson model, but equally as effective for cattail destruction.

  "Hey there," Jake said as he approached. He believed his speech sounded normal, but being deaf since he was seventeen it was impossible for him to know. He could use sign language, but preferred to read lips, particularly since most people couldn't sign back.

  The boy replied, "Hey."

  The word was silent to Jake's ears, but read off the kid's scowl. He tapped the empty wicker creel on his side. "I'm getting skunked. Know of any good holes around here?"

  The boy shrugged.

  The river's sulfuric stink rose from the muck where Jake had disturbed it during his approach. His blood-blistered fingertips stung from a day's worth of slipped hooks. "Everything okay?"

  The boy nodded, yes. It was the kind of nod that generally means no and is often followed by a tearful jag.

  Jake looked down the length of the slowly flowing water. There was a willow at the next bend. Its limp, leafy branches swayed in a breeze full of airborne spores spiraling like Hollywood snowflakes. A sparrow swooped out from the trees, dove toward the water, pulled up just in time, and darted back into the canopy. Beyond the willow, beyond the river's bend, and beyond the distant fields were the brick walls and razor-wire fences of Jake's old home—the Dover Psychiatric Hospital for the Criminally Insane. There wasn't much to the building from the outside. Most would say it looked nothing like a psych ward and more like an elementary school, but the razor-wires were a dead giveaway.

  Jake rubbed the back of his neck. He turned to the boy, who was now eyeing the hook patch on Jake's vest. There were a group of green caddisflies and tan colored nymphs hooked on, ready for what was supposed to have been an eventful afternoon of brown trout and brookies.

  "You need stoneflies," the boy said. "Them caddis won't do nothin'."

  "Is that right?" Jake had sifted the riverbed for aquatic insects when he arrived that morning, but he'd found no stoneflies. He figured they weren't right for this river.

  The boy looked off. The crying jag was visibly on him now. A trembling of the bones, a pinching of the face. Jake noted a welt on the boy's neck—a fresh red imprint of a man-sized thumb, just below the kid's emerging Adam's Apple. The choking mark filled out to a full hand and ran behind his neck. Soon it would be a purple and y
ellowing bruise.

  "You sure you're okay?" Jake said. He glanced downriver to check his horizon. The hazy red line hovered at the base of the dusky sky, comfortably far away and plenty expanded.

  The boy looked up with blue eyes rimmed in red. His lips quivered. His ears appeared hot.

  Jake squinted, unsure if he wanted to read what the boy would say next. He could just move on and keep fishing. He could pretend he never met this kid. He could get the hell away from Dover and just go back to Detroit, find a different wish to grant, maybe tomorrow, maybe next week.

  No. Jake knew he would be bound this boy's wish the second he laid eyes on him, knew there was a wish in store when those first cattail spores floated past. He'd followed their trail like a hound on blood.

  "It's my dad," the boy said. "I wish someone would kill him."

  Dread spread over Jake like ink on paper. He never should have come here, never should had approached this kid.