Part 24 (2/2)

”Was he a ?” I let the sentence trail off. The last time I saw Sam, my mother and I had called the fire department as soon as we had left his land. But by the time the firefighters arrived, it was too late. The fire had moved extremely quickly, and the entire Jumel grounds were burned to a crisp-the woods, the winery, the McMansion, everything. Strangely, the inferno hadn't spread beyond the bounds of the Jumel property. It had taken them nearly a week to sort through the rubble.

Mike's dad nodded. ”We found the skeletons of his workers down there, too. Looks like he might have been respon sible. He must have realized we were putting two and two together with the disappearances and leaped to his death.”

”He had been acting really weird lately.” Understatement of the year.

Sergeant Ring leaned in closer. Human lie detector. He stared at me for a long, long moment before drawing back. ”And that well-it wasn't like a regular well. It had a tunnel in it. Very odd.”

I shrugged. ”I don't know. Sam never told me anything. He didn't like me much.”

Sergeant Ring just nodded. He ran a hand through his hair. ”Hey, that wine from your stepfather's office-it was bad or something,” he said. ”Tasted like c.r.a.p. Made me sicker than a d.a.m.ned dog. I swore off drinking after that.”

”Really?”

”Yeah. I had some last night, and I tell you, I don't know why people said that vineyard was so good, because that stuff was awful.” He closed the gap between us, back in menacing-cop mode. ”You are going to keep that between us, though, right?”

”Yeah, sure.” Mike's dad had drunk the wine last night. After all of this had ended. Maybe everything had been true, and once the Jumel legacy was over, the wine spoiled, too. If it sobered up Mike's dad, hey, maybe there was one bright side to this whole thing. I toyed with the dictionary on the shelf. Tried to act cool. ”Did you, ah, find anything else down there?”

”No. Just your stepfather and the skeletons of the dead babies he'd 'lost' and the six missing workers. Nothing else. I'm sorry about your stepfather.” Mike's dad went on about contacting my mom for funeral arrangements or something, but I wasn't listening.

There'd been no other skeletons, no other bodies.

Meaning they hadn't found the creature.

Had he disappeared, like the vine man I'd obliterated on the stairs, when he died?

Or had he survived?

My gaze went to the window. The warm day suddenly felt cold. No one could have survived that fall, the stabbing by Sam, the fire a Could he have?

But he had lasted two hundred years, when any ordinary thing would have died a No, he was dead, I decided and started to turn away.

My new cell phone rang, and I dug it out of my pocket. Who could have the phone number already? Even I didn't know the number. I flipped the top and put it to my ear. ”h.e.l.lo?”

Silence.

”h.e.l.lo?”

And then a sound started. At first I thought it was the chatter of static, the hum of a bad connection. But the noise intensified and began to grow in volume, and a chill ran down my spine.

There was only one sound like that in the world. The quiet, evil undertow of- Laughter.

A. J. WHITTEN is a pseudonym for New York Times bestselling author s.h.i.+rley Jump writing with her teenage daughter, Amanda. A shared love of horror movies and a desire to spice up the Shakespeare stories that are required reading in high school led to their collaboration on The Well. Learn more at .

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