Head in a Haymow

by Chris Seaton

  “Bernice,” Margie chuckled in self deprecation, “I'm sorry, but I honestly don't know who you're talking about.”

  Bernice ignored the denial. “I mean, you still had three young kids at home.” Bernice looked at her then with genuine sympathy. “Did she threaten you or the kids? Is that why you kept Herb in that garage all these years?” Bernice slid her hand toward Margie on the table's surface. “Margie, I understand if you're scared. Let me help you. Tell me where she's hiding.”

  Bernice had stopped watching Margie's hand on the full can of pop. It was her second mistake. The first was that she didn't call Agent Wyatt. That mistake flashed through her mind at the speed of sound, just slightly faster than the speed of the can that Margie hurled with an anguished growl at Bernice's head.

  “What the fuck!” That curse was all Bernice managed to shriek before Margie shoved Bernice's chair backwards. Her knees bashed painfully into the tabletop. Gravity and inertia took over sending her and the chair onto the worn carpet. Bernice scrambled as quickly as she could out of that vulnerable position but failed to deflect the well placed kick into her ribs. She gasped, rolling.

  “You stupid Bitch!” Margie yelled back. Her shout hurt Bernice's ears with its screechy pitch. Margie stomped onto Bernice's back with the heel of her tennis shoe. “You think you're so smart!” Bernice rolled away but not before getting a glancing blow on her upper arm. “You don't think I had you checked out after your little comforting visit? Ha? You ever heard of Google?!”

  Bernice was up on all fours then, watching Margie. “You and Jessica were in this together! Which one of you strangled Herb?” She stood up very slowly and worked her way around the table.

  Margie picked up one of the displaced chairs, carrying it like a weapon. “Jessica, Jessica, Jessica!” She mocked Bernice with a falsetto rant. “Where is Mean Old Jessica?” She took a swing, missing Bernice. She cleared off the buffet, taking out the carefully placed pictures of her carefully maintained life and scattering them across the room like shrapnel from a land mine.

  “God, I can't stand that fucking name one moment longer!” She threw the chair at Bernice. Bernice blocked her face and turned just enough. The chair struck her already beaten up back. Tears spurted involuntarily from her eyes with the wincing pain.

  “Tell me where she is!” Bernice screamed at her, grabbing the dining room table and whipping it up. She ran as it moved but she wasn't fast enough.

  “Rurahghghgh!” Margie screeched like a banshee, rounding the table and throwing herself at Bernice's front, knocking them both to the floor. She brought her knee hard into Bernice's pelvis and hurled her little fists at Bernice's face like sharp rocks. “She's dead! You bitch! The cunt is dead! Dead!”

  Bernice could barely register what she was hearing. She was too busy tossing her hands out at Margie, trying to deflect some of the blows that were coming too fast at her head. Her nose smarted. Her lip felt split open. Her head throbbed. She could barely open her eyes.

  Margie was not some tragic widow anymore. She was a killer and she was pissed off.

  Bernice had no clue what weapon finally knocked her unconscious.

  She wasn't out for long. The excruciating pain of getting kicked down the stairs woke her up. Her head smacked with a pop against the concrete floor. Bernice gasped, her eyes ripping themselves open to witness her fresh hell.

  She was in the dark. She heard the door above her slam shut. With her nostrils flared, she caught the familiar smell of musky damp. She was in a basement and she was still alive, painfully alive.

  When Bernice was just a kid, she took Darlene up on a dare and tried riding one of the dairy cows home. The cow was so startled at the foreign object on her back that she began to gallop, mooing loudly in panic. Bernice flopped off, hitting the packed cow path with a loud thud.

  That didn't save her from getting trampled by another cow running directly behind her. The bruises on her thighs took weeks to go away. Her collarbone and two ribs knitted back together eventually. It took six whole months to convince her parents to let her go to the farm again.

  That was a picnic compared to what she was feeling now. Everything hurt but not enough to keep her brain from running like a freight train.

  “Why am I still alive?” it was asking. “Why didn't she finish me off? Why am I down here?” As Bernice started to think clearly again, she noticed something. Her arms were twisted behind her back and she couldn't move them. Her feet were stuck together too. She pulled reluctantly because they hurt like hell, but the action caused her to be able to determine that she was tied up.

  “Why?” It didn't make sense. As grateful as she was that she was not dead, it didn't keep the cold dread of fear from creeping in like a toxic fog. Margie cut up her own husband. She was capable of anything.

  Bernice's senses were all scrambled up with overstimulation. She could taste blood and dirt in her mouth. She could feel the cold sweaty floor against her bare, scraped up arms and ankles. She could hear splashing.

  “Splashing?” It came from upstairs, sloshing onto the floor under the door, and dripping down into the basement. Then she could smell it, that distinct metallic sulfur smell that exudes from the pump of every gas station in existence.

  Her whole body froze when she heard the knob on the door turning. Her bound form was flooded with light then quickly shadowed by Margie's standing body.

  “I'm just gonna borrow your truck, Bernice. Hope you don't mind.” Her voice was flat and unfeeling like a switch had turned off in her head. The anger was gone. It was replaced with apathy.

  “Margie, don't do this!” Bernice yelled back. “Don't leave me down here!”

  Instead of acknowledging her plea, Margie picked up the gas can and emptied it out over the steps. Bernice knew instinctively that she had to move...somewhere. She flipped with a whimper onto her side. This brought her nose almost level with the floor. The smell of the gas was invading her mouth.

  “God, please!” Bernice begged, her voice breaking into a shrill cry of desperation as she twisted her head to face Margie in her last hope of mercy.

  “I'm gonna go now.” Margie sounded annoyed and impatient like she was trying to reason with a spoiled child. “I started the curtains on fire in Mark's room. I don't know how much time you got.”

  Bernice just stared. There was nothing left for her to say.

  “I did my damnedest not to kill you, you know.” Margie shut the door. Bernice heard her footsteps quite clearly through the floor. They walked evenly through the kitchen, through the dining room and then stopped when she heard the front door shut. There was silence until the engine of Bernice's truck kicked in outside of the house.

  Bernice didn't know if she was hallucinating from the gas fumes, but she swore that she could already hear the slow smoldering of Mark's room going up in flames.

  “Dammit!” she screamed. Tears streamed down her face. Her body went limp in defeat, her nose pressing against the floor. She twisted it the wrong way and pain shot up through it.

  It was a reminder. She wasn't dead yet.

  “I did my damnedest not to kill you, you know.”

  If Margie wanted her dead, she would have done it by now. She could have stabbed her, bashed her head in, strangled her, but she didn't.

  Bernice's thoughts were interrupted by a fit of coughing. “Think, damn you!” Margie didn't want to kill her. She took her truck. This was just another distraction. She wanted Bernice alive. She wanted Bernice to understand. That meant there was a way out.

  The crackling upstairs was not her imagination. She could see smoke fogging over the sliver of light under the door. There wasn't much time.

  Bernice painfully rolled over onto her arms, crushing them and landed with a hard grunt on her other side. She twisted her head in every direction possible, looking for a door, window, wood shoot, anything that would give her a way to keep going.

  It wasn't looking good.

  A flair caught her eye. She wormed
around on her side and craned her neck.

  The old wooden stairs were nice and seasoned. With the coating of gasoline, they flamed up without any problem.

  The pretense of a stealth apprehension of the suspect was quickly disregarded when they saw the smoke. After that all bets were off. Down the hilly country road the black ugly plumes could be seen for miles.

  Agent Wyatt barked commands at Lyle's cell phone while grabbing at the dash. Traversing the peaks and valleys of the road, Lyle was using the off road package in the SUV like he was baha-ing over sand dunes. Agent Wyatt was feeling a tiny bit queasy.

  “Every road out of the county, I want a least one squad stopping every car. Call in all the villages. I got state troopers fanning out as we speak.” The APB had already been put out on Margie's description and Jessica's too for good measure. It took some intense arm twisting with the county DA and the Sheriff to throw so much manpower at one little woman. However, two confirmed deaths made for good incentive.

  She was running now. Five years ago Margaret Abernathy strangled her husband and had the gall to put his body in her anniversary present. And he stayed there, locked away in the unused garage until a garden variety thunderstorm did its worst, and the shit hit the fan. What he couldn't piece together was how Jessica Breck fit into the picture, if she did at all.

  They were within a few miles of the house now. The local township volunteer fire departments would be on scene shortly. Lyle took a turn that was recommended to be maneuvered at 25 miles an hour according to the yellow sign and gunned it to 45. The SUV leaned uncomfortably. Agent Wyatt's eyes went wide but he kept his mouth shut and his machismo intact.

  Then Lyle's phone rang. “Wyatt,” he chirped crisply.

  “Uh, yah, this is Deputy Veuson. Um, is this Agent Wyatt?

  “Yes, Deputy, I'm using Investigator Brigand's phone. What do you need?” He couldn't help the impatience creeping into his voice.

  “Well, I was just wondering.... do you happen to know a woman named Bernice, Sir?”

  The little hairs on the back of his neck stood in acute warning. “Is she okay?” Agent Wyatt asked carefully.

  He received a chuckle from the deputy. “Oh yah, she's just fine. I only bring it up 'cause I stopped her here at the river, and she seemed to know all about the investigation. She just wanted me to tell you, 'hi'.”

  “Good to know,” he replied relieved. “I'll let you get back to work then.”

  “Sure thing,” the deputy finished and hung up.

  But the neck hair was still obstinately standing. Agent Wyatt's hardened features began to pucker with worry.

  “That about the lady from the car the other night?” Lyle asked before mounting another hill.

  “Yep,” was his pert reply.

  “Huh,” Lyle remarked. “She didn't seem very friendly, you ask me.”

  “I didn't,” Agent Wyatt corrected then added, “Sorry, she's just not too keen on cops.” At that point, the irony hit him. He quickly redialed.

  “Yello,” came the happy reply.

  “Deputy Veuson, this is Agent Wyatt again. Can you describe Bernice for me please?”

  “From what I can remember,” he started, “Blonde, medium build-”

  “Yeah, I get that,” he interrupted testily. “What was she wearing?”

  “Oh.” Deputy Veuson answered like he was on the spot, “Um, let's see... I think it was some kind of polo shirt. Yah, a little pink polo shirt, kind of cute, matched her fingernails.”

  Agent Wyatt stopped listening at “little pink”. Bernice didn't wear pink. None of her shirts were little and she did not chitchat with cops.

  Her name echoed in his brain with the reverberation of the huge explosion taking place a half a mile in front of them.

  She felt it as much as heard it. As the ground shook, the shelves on the wall opposite to her tumbled to the earthen floor, breaking the ancient canning jars and allowing decades old vegetables to escape.

  Bernice hunched up into the fetal position as best she could away from the falling debris, but could only manage to guard her torso and head. Her feet and calves were covered in broken glass and unidentified food goo.

  But fortunately, the room remained intact. For that she was grateful. She still had a chance.

  Earlier, when the stairwell went up in flames, it illuminated the dark basement like a roman candle. Bernice was able to make out every corner. That's how she found the wooden door.

  Many of the houses from the 1950's and 60's in that area were built over the foundations of old houses from before the Second World War. Most of them only had partial basements and a few of them had root cellars. Bernice was lucky that it was still there. She was unlucky that it was a good twenty feet across the room.

  The slow torturous task of squirming and rolling her beaten and bound body across the unforgiving concrete was one of the hardest things she had ever done in her whole life. She began to lose feeling to her limbs, the shock of her trauma releasing anesthetizing chemicals into her body.

  Bernice was ten feet away when the stairwell finally collapsed. The sheer terror of the noise and smoke was what she needed to galvanize her to move that final distance.

  Shoving herself onto her back with an agonizing cry, Bernice kicked at the stubborn door repeatedly, swearing loudly and gritting her teeth. It gave, opening about halfway before getting stuck on the dirt inside.

  That was all the room she needed. The cool earth felt like a relief on her torn skin. It would itch soon. She would probably get an infection...if she lived that long.

  Almost immediately after the shelving collapsed, Bernice was rocked again when half of the house caved into the basement.

  “We beat it the hell out of there when we saw the LP tank,” the fireman was saying. “You never know with those fuckin' things layin' around.” He stood there with his helmet under his arm, sweating profusely in all the heavy gear.

  “Good call,” Lyle complimented him. “Anyone inside that you could tell?”

  “Nah, and with the smoke and fumes, they wouldn't have lasted long anyway.”

  “So no body count then?”

  Agent Wyatt didn't have to look up to see the shake of the fireman's head.

  The blast from the tank left a large shallow hole in the ground. It was situated near the laundry room and had apparently destroyed whatever structural integrity was left of the house, which was slowly collapsing into a big smoldering heap.

  The attached garage was still standing and on fire. Another department was at work wetting down the hot asphalt shingles to keep the minivan inside from igniting.

  He had six different counties hunting Bernice's truck down. If Margie was caught, she'd never see the outside of a prison again, but that wouldn't change anything. If Margie had Bernice's truck then Bernice was dead, and Margie went out of her way to make sure he knew it. The only thing keeping his grief at bay was his anger. It boiled his blood and fed his resolve.

  “Lyle, I'm taking your truck.” Agent Wyatt abruptly turned to leave. He stopped in his tracks as he watched Cameron's car approach the driveway. “Shit,” he cursed. With a heavy head and heart he slowly marched across the lawn to greet them.

  Darlene didn't wait for introductions. She was already trotting toward him. “Where's Bernice?” Her face was flushed with worry.

  Cameron came up behind her. He held her shoulders and gauged Agent Wyatt's face, tactfully saying nothing.

  “Um, I'm sorry, um, Darlene.” Agent Wyatt was having trouble articulating with the huge stone forming in his throat. He looked back at the carnage and tried to gather some composure.

  He'd had told people before that their loved ones had died. It was a necessary evil of the job. Sometimes he'd get hit or cursed at for it. A grief-stricken father spit in his face once. Knowing that his news would potentially ruin people's lives was a huge responsibility and had to be handled with decorum.

  But this was hell. He didn't want to be comforting. He didn't want t
o be nice. He wanted to track down that evil bitch Margie and wring her neck. “She's gone,” he blurted out with a gravelly voice. “I need to get who did this.”

  “Are you trying to tell me that Bernice is dead?” Darlene's voice jumped an octave. “Is that what you're trying to say?”

  “Yes!” It came out harder than Agent Wyatt wanted, but his emotions were taking over. He beat them back down. “Yes. Bernice came here to confront Margie and she was killed for it. Margie took Bernice's truck. I need to go get her.” He enunciated harshly, spitting his acid at the ground, not daring to look up.

  He expected Darlene to break down. He was waiting for the weeping and screaming to begin. He was mistaken.

  “I want to see her.” Darlene's voice was low. “Show me her body.”

  Agent Wyatt looked up, the impatience taking over. “I don't have time for this.”

  “I don't care!” Darlene spat back, stepping forward. “I need to see her!”

  He shook his head, trying to clear it as much as trying to reason with Darlene. “They didn't find her body. She's gone.”

  “Then how do you know she's dead?” Cameron reasoned, finally speaking up.

  Agent Wyatt looked at the SUV waiting for him. He looked back at the house. It was a pile of misshapen studs and empty walls. One end of the house had caved in completely. The logical side of his brain, detached from the raging emotions, reasoned that the basement must be on that side of the house. Without preamble he marched off. “Hey!” he yelled at the fireman who was talking to Investigator Brigand. “Comere!”

  The fireman snuffed out his cigarette, looking over Agent Wyatt with distrust. He sauntered over. “Yah?”

  “You guys check the basement?”

  The fireman was startled at the question and looked behind him at the convex pile of smoking rubble. “What?” he asked dumbfounded.