She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be

by J. D. Barker

  I shouted for Preacher.

  I pulled the gag from my father’s mouth, a dirty rag smelling of oil.

  Nearly unconscious, he didn’t realize I was standing there. When he did see me, he might have thought I was some kind of hallucination, because he just coughed, his one good eye closed, and he started to drift off.

  A second later, that good eye snapped open, glared at me. “Jack?”

  “You’re going to be okay.”

  I stuck my head out the open door. “Preacher! Cammie! In here!”

  That’s when the phone in the corner of the shed began to ring.

  12

  Detective Joy Fogel had seen a lot during her time with Pittsburgh PD, but she had never seen someone take their own life.

  At some point, she gripped the edge of her chair and her fingers held onto the metal frame like vice grips, her muscles tense and squeezing with all the force they could muster. She wanted to scream, but the only sound to leave her lips was a single gasp.

  Robert Trudeau’s blank stare remained on her.

  Fogel didn’t move.

  Time passed. If someone were to ask her, she wouldn’t be able to tell them if ten seconds had gone by or ten minutes.

  Fogel didn’t move.

  When she finally did move, it was because of one of the last things Trudeau said, a sentence that caused her heart to thud when she heard him utter the words.

  We have confirmation. Both the boy and the Nettleton girl are on Whidbey, the remaining adults, too.

  Fogel rose from her chair and rounded the desk.

  The Nokia sat beside Trudeau’s lifeless hand.

  Fogel picked up the cell phone, scrolled to the last incoming number, and called it back.

  Someone picked up on the third ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Who is this?” Fogel asked.

  “Who is this?”

  “Detective Fogel, with Pittsburgh PD Homicide. Identify yourself.”

  A male voice. A familiar voice. “Fogel? How…how did you get this number?”

  “Who is this?”

  Then she knew.

  She recognized the voice. “Jack?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I…I don’t either.”

  “Where are you? How did you find me?”

  “Charter Pharmaceuticals. I hit redial on his phone, and it called you. Holy shit, he’s dead.”

  “Slow down, Detective. Who’s dead?”

  “The man in the white suit.”

  Jack went silent for a second. “Detective, are you okay? You sound like you’re in shock.”

  “He killed himself.”

  “Who?”

  “I…I don’t know where you are, Jack. But you need to leave. He said they’re coming for you. You and the Nettleton girl, and the adults. Holy Christ, he killed himself. Somebody there, where you are, called here, called this Charter place. He said they’re coming for you. Where…where are…”

  Fogel wasn’t one to cry. She couldn’t remember the last time she shed a tear, but the flood works opened up then, and her vision went cloudy with it. Sobs poured from her throat. The emotional buildup of what just happened erupted from her in an explosion.

  The Nokia beeped.

  Low battery alert.

  The call dropped.

  13

  Preacher came through the door as I hung up the receiver. His face turned red. “Who’d you call?”

  “I didn’t call anyone, did you?”

  He crossed the shed, went to the phone, and tore it off the wall. “Who were you talking to?”

  I shook my head and knelt back down to my father. “We don’t have time for this. They’re coming. Help me untie him.”

  He wanted to argue with me, I could see it in his eyes, but he didn’t. Instead, we worked the knots. Preacher’s gun dangled from a shoulder holster. I had no way to protect myself if he decided to draw it.

  I gently gripped the sides of my father’s face and turned his head toward me. “Can you stand?”

  My father nodded weakly, a firmer grip on consciousness now. We helped him to his feet.

  He cleared his throat and spit blood into the corner of the shed.

  I put his arm over my shoulder and helped him to his feet. “Let’s get you back to the house.”

  Inside, we found Cammie rifling through kitchen cabinets. Half the drawers were open, too. Her daughter (Darby, I learned) sat on a stool in front of the kitchen island, watching her mother.

  Cammie looked up from under the sink when we came through the door. “Holy shit, he’s still alive?”

  She rushed over to us. “My God, Eddie. What did they do to you? Sit him down. I found a first-aid kit.”

  We helped my father to the living room and sat him down in one of the leather chairs.

  The dead man was gone.

  So was Stella.

  “Where is Stella?”

  Cammie knelt at the chair, opened the plastic box, found some cotton balls and antiseptic, and went to work on my father’s face. “I helped her to one of the bedrooms.”

  I frowned. “You didn’t—”

  “Touch her? No. I wore a pair of those.” She pointed to our box of latex gloves on the counter. “I found them in your car.”

  “You went through our stuff?”

  “You stole them from my house,” she countered. “Stella told me to wear them, told me where they were.”

  My father sucked a breath in between pursed lips. He pressed a hand against his abdomen. “I think he broke a few of my ribs.”

  Cammie shook her head. “Christ, we need to take his shirt off. That fucking bastard did a number on him.”

  Preacher hovered over us. “I caught him on the phone, Cammie.”

  “You didn’t catch me doing anything.”

  “I heard it ring,” Cammie said. She turned and glared at me. “You answered? Are you fucking crazy?”

  “You heard the phone ring all the way in here? I was out in the woodshed.”

  She went back to my father’s face. He winced as she dabbed at a cut above his left eye. “There are extensions all over the house, every room. They all rang. Was it him? That kid, David?”

  “No.”

  Preacher clucked his tongue. “We need to tie him up, like Hobson. If it was Pickford, he wouldn’t tell us. He may not even remember. This is a shit show.”

  I stood and got in his face. “You’re not tying anyone up.”

  Preacher laughed. “You’re stopping me? Now I’m gonna do it just to see what kind of moves you’ve got.”

  “Both of you, put the testosterone away,” Cammie said, working the last button on my father’s shirt. She peeled the material back. His entire midsection was black and blue. Higher up on the left, the skin was red and angry. “Oh, man. Definitely a few broken ribs.” She snapped her fingers toward the first-aid kit. “Somebody hand me that roll of gauze.”

  I handed it to her, and she looked back at my father. “Eddie, I’m gonna wrap your ribs, but I’m going to keep it loose. I don’t want to restrict your breathing. If I go too tight, it might feel better, but that increases the chances of one of those bone fragments puncturing one of your lungs.” She gently pressed on his midsection, her fingers walking over the dark skin, making note of my father’s reactions. “Looks like we’ve got two broken on the upper left and one down low on the right. I need you to lean forward a bit.”

  My father did, and his one good eye pinched shut with the movement.

  To me, Cammie said, “Who was on the phone?”

  I thought about what Fogel said.

  Somebody in this house called that place first. That someone told them where we were. I had been alone with my father. I had no idea where Preacher had been when the call went out. Cammie was here in the house. Stella was in the house. Hobson was in the house. I glanced over at him. He was on the floor in the foyer, still tied up. Awake, but making no attempt to escape his bindings.

  “It wa
s a police detective back in Pittsburgh.”

  Cammie stopped wrapping. “What?”

  “She’s at that Charter place, I have no idea how she got there. She said a call came in from this number. The person who called told the person on her end where we were. She said they’re coming.”

  “Somebody called from here? Who?”

  I glared at her. “You tell me?”

  “It wasn’t me,” Cammie said. “I’ve been in here.”

  “You said there are phone extensions everywhere.”

  Preacher paced the floor. “Does it even matter? The guy who did this to Eddie was already here. They found him before any phone call.”

  “I handled him,” my father said softly, each word painful.

  “Yeah,” Preacher said. “You handled him. Had things totally under control.”

  “He’s just some kind of scout,” my father said. “He found me digging in the garden, caught me by surprise, sucker-punched me, then he kept going—hitting, kicking, I didn’t get a shot in. Tied me up in the woodshed. Then Jack got here. He didn’t have a chance to call anyone.”

  “He had enough time to hide his Suburban in the garage,” I pointed out.

  “Maybe I passed out for a minute, I don’t know.”

  Cammie finished wrapping his chest and helped him back into a fresh shirt I’d found in the laundry room off the kitchen. “Whoever called. Doesn’t matter. They know we’re here now. We need to go. Now. Even if they have people in the area, it will take them a little while to scramble and get someone out here.”

  That’s when the phone rang again.

  “Nobody touch that,” Preacher said.

  The shrill ring of half a dozen phones filled the house. One ring. Two rings. Three rings.

  “We need to answer,” my father said. “I’ve got people watching both ends of the island. It might be one of them.”

  “Or it might be the Pickford kid,” Cammie countered.

  “It could be Detective Fogel calling back,” I said. “Maybe she can help us. She might know something else.”

  Four rings.

  Five.

  Preacher rubbed at the bristle on his chin, then nodded at my father. “Whoever it is, they’ll expect you. You answer.” His hand dropped to the butt of his gun. “If it’s the Pickford kid…”

  My father understood. If it was David Pickford, if Pickford instructed him to do something, to somehow harm the rest of us, Preacher would put an end to it using whatever force was necessary.

  Seven rings.

  I helped my father stand, and he hobbled over to the telephone extension in the kitchen. When he lifted the receiver off the wall, he held it a few inches from his ear, as if that little distance would protect him from Pickford’s words. “BH Bed and Breakfast, how can I help you?”

  The voice on the other end was male and loud enough for all of us to hear through the tiny speaker. “I just took reservations for twelve here on the north end. They’re driving down from the Pass in four…scratch that, six vans. ETA approximately one hour.”

  A click then, as he hung up.

  My father replaced the handset. “That was Lloyd. He’s got a little place just this side of Deception Pass. He would have spotted them crossing the bridge. Barring some kind of delay or road hazard, the pass is fifty-eight minutes away.”

  Preacher wasn’t about to wait. He scooped Darby up off the floor and grabbed Cammie by the hand and headed for the door. “We’re taking the ferry out. We can be there in half the time. You’re welcome to follow, if you want. We can regroup on the mainland. We get separated, meet in one week at the Crater Lake welcome center in Oregon.”

  “That’s a bad idea,” my father said. “The next ferry is at noon. I’d be willing to bet they’re on it. If they’re not on that ferry, you can be sure they’ll be on the mainland waiting to board the next one. Probably watching every car leaving Whidbey. You don’t exactly blend in with that Pontiac.”

  “We get to the mainland, we’ve got a shot at outrunning them,” Cammie said. “Or we can take one of the other cars and try and slip past them. We can’t wait for them to get here.”

  “Why not? This place is defendable. Why do you think I’m here?” He motioned out toward the water. “We’ve got a sheer cliff behind us, with only one set of stairs to get up and down, and nearly four acres of open space in the front between the main house and the only road in or out. They can’t get close to us. We won’t let them.” My father crossed over to the kitchen and opened three of the upper cabinet doors. Rather than plates, glasses, pots, or pans, we found ourselves staring at an arsenal. Dozens of weapons, freshly oiled, gleaming. Handguns, rifles, shotguns—several appeared to be military grade. M-16s or AK-47s, I had no idea. “I stopped running twenty years ago. I’m not starting again today. We need to end this.”

  Cammie looked defeated. “They want us all dead, Eddie.”

  “They may want us out of the way, but we’ve got three of the children here with us. They won’t do anything to risk their lives. They want them alive.”

  “Why?” I broke in.

  The room went silent. They all turned to me. “Why do they want you dead but not us? Why are they chasing us in the first place?”

  My father appeared puzzled by this, as if he expected me to already know. He glanced at Preacher and Cammie, but neither said anything. He turned back to me, truly surprised. “You don’t know? Your aunt didn’t tell you? The guidance counselor, Elfrieda Leech—she didn’t give you my letters? I’ve been writing you for years.”

  “I’ve never gotten a letter from you. All she gave me was this.” I took out the letter Stella’s father had written and handed it to him. He looked over it, then handed it to Cammie. “Your aunt must have told her not to say anything. Fucking Jo. Always insisting you live out a normal life. She never grasped…” His voice trailed off as he thought about this. He went over to the dining room table and started sifting through the various documents and folders.

  “We don’t have time for this,” Preacher said.

  “We’re making time,” my father told him. He found what he was looking for and handed it to me. An old flyer, the kind with tearaway phone numbers printed at the bottom. About half were missing. The headline read:

  EARN $1000!

  CHARTER PHARMACEUTICALS NEEDS VOLUNTEERS FOR THE FINAL STAGE (STAGE FOUR) OF TESTING FOR THEIR NEW VACCINATION PROTOCOL. ONE SHOT TO YOU MEANS YOUR FUTURE CHILDREN WILL NOT NEED TO RECEIVE ANY VACCINATIONS!

  CALL FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION.

  “They told all of us that as long as both parents received the shot, you’d be protected from dozens of ailments. Everything from polio to diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus—even chicken pox, small pox, and measles. Your mother and I were already dating. We had talked about kids, and frankly, we needed the money. We went. We all went. Back then, students were making money hand over fist participating in trials like this. Some were scary—LSD and hallucinogenics. This was the seventies. We were all doing that stuff anyway. Why not get paid?”

  “The government always had the best LSD,” Cammie muttered. “I should have stuck with that instead of getting wrapped up in this bullshit. $1000 was nearly twice what the other studies paid, and who wants their future kid to be subjected to dozens of vaccinations? Seemed like a no-brainer at the time.”

  My father said, “After the shot, we had to report back for regular blood tests and monitoring. The eighth of every month. Nothing crazy, and they paid us for that, too. There were no side effects, not for any of us. Not at first, anyway. But then, your mother got pregnant. Don’t get me wrong—like I said, we talked about having kids, but the plan was to finish college, get married, get jobs, establish ourselves, then have children when we were ready. Your mother and I were careful, but somehow she got pregnant anyway. Same with Richard Nettleton and Emma, Keith Pickford and Jaquelyn Breece. All of us got pregnant around the same time. We halfheartedly joked the shot boosted our hormones. Richard and Emma dropped ou
t of school and broke ties with Charter. The rest of us continued to go into our scheduled appointments. When you and David were born, they paid us all even more to monitor you—routine blood work, vitals, the same they were doing for us. Everything seemed okay, seemed normal. Then I started to hear from the Nettletons. What happened every time their daughter, Stella, touched something that was alive. They didn’t know what to do. They went into hiding, off the grid. Keep in mind, this was the late seventies, early eighties. Much easier back then than it is today. Richard was convinced whatever was happening to his daughter was related to that shot, whatever Charter had given us. I thought he was crazy, we all did. But your mother and I watched you close anyway. I kept in touch with Keith and Jackie. They watched David, too. You both seemed okay. Richard got paranoid, said people were chasing him, these people dressed in white, just like the people from Charter. I began to wonder if maybe the shot had just triggered some kind of mental breakdown in him, like an allergic reaction. That kind of thing happened, too. Safety protocols were so lax.” He paused for a second, dusting off the information in his head. “Keith Pickford and Jackie stopped showing up at their appointments in mid ’78. Your mom and I didn’t really get all the facts until about a year later, but it was bad. Keith lost it. He threw a pot of boiling oil at his little boy’s face, burned him horribly, then he stabbed Jackie to death before turning the knife on himself. Neighbors found David on the kitchen floor, screaming at the top of his lungs, in terrible pain, both parents dead, blood everywhere. David was talking back then, but not much. Only two years old. He couldn’t really tell anyone what happened, and they didn’t press him. I thought about the shot. If that shot somehow drove Rich Nettleton crazy, maybe it had done the same with Keith. I heard David went to live with relatives. That’s what the staff at Charter told us, and we had no reason to question them, not at that point. Rich and Emma Nettleton, Stella’s parents, that’s about the time they came back to Pittsburgh. They were both dead less than a week later. Murdered in some kind of home invasion. Stella was gone. I heard about the bodies they found there, grown men who looked like they’d been burnt, and I realized that Stella might have actually done it. What Richard had been raving about, what she could do, might actually be true.