The Twisted Window

by Lois Duncan

  If there was a response to Doug’s question, it was not discernible from the bedroom.

  Doug’s voice rose again in an outraged bellow.

  “Tracy Lloyd! You get yourself out here this minute!”

  The sound of her name released Tracy from immobility. Letting the overalls fall to the floor, she rushed out of the bedroom and hurried down the hall to the living room.

  The scene that confronted her there was even worse than she had anticipated. Huge and glowering, Douglas Carver was planted solidly in the center of the room in the stance of a bull preparing for a charge. His head was lowered, and his nostrils were flared and quivering, in one crazy instant of near hysteria, Tracy could almost imagine that he was going to begin to snort and paw holes in the carpet.

  Brad was standing across from him in the doorway to the kitchen, looking as startled and caught off guard as a matador who had misplaced his sword and sent his red cape to the cleaners.

  As Tracy entered the room, Doug swung around to confront her.

  “You call yourself a baby-sitter?” His voice was shaking with fury. “We haven’t been gone twenty minutes, and already you’ve let a stranger into our house! You were hired to take care of Cricket, not to entertain visitors!”

  “It isn’t the way it looks. I mean, Brad is a friend of mine.” Tracy groped frantically for words to explain the unexplainable. “I didn’t know—I mean, I thought …” Unable to come up with a way to end the sentence without revealing the true reason for Brad’s presence there, she let it trail off uncompleted.

  “I know what you thought,” Doug said grimly. “You thought we were gone for the evening and you and your boyfriend could have the run of the house. Well, it didn’t work out that way, did it? As it turned out, I forgot our theater tickets, and I left Sally at the restaurant to order while I drove home to get them. The last thing I expected to find was a strange car in our driveway.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Tracy—sorry you came back and saw Brad’s car, she finished silently.

  “Well, you’d better be sorry! This is the last time you baby-sit at this house!” Doug glared at her and then turned his attention back to Brad, who had not moved throughout the course of the diatribe. “As for you, kid, I want you out of here, and I mean now! You can count yourself lucky I’m not calling in the police.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  Then, Brad said, “Maybe you should. If you want to call the cops, I wouldn’t mind talking to them.”

  “Did I hear you right?” Doug demanded. “You want to be arrested?”

  “I wouldn’t be arrested,” Brad said. “What law have I broken? You’re the one who could be charged as an accomplice to a felony.”

  “Are you on drugs or something? You’re talking like your brain’s been fried.” Doug regarded the boy with undisguised disgust. “I’m going to repeat this one time and one time only—I want you out of my house! If you don’t walk out that door, I’m throwing you through it, and, believe me, little man, I’m the guy who can do that!”

  In the terrible silence that followed, Tracy could hear the trip-hammer pounding of her heart, so loud in the room she was sure that the others heard it also. She could feel Doug’s fury radiating out of him in waves like the energy-charged vibrations from an overheated motor.

  She would not permit herself to look at Brad.

  “Please,” she said in a shaky voice, “do as he says. He’s so much bigger than you. He could really hurt you.”

  For a moment she was afraid he was going to ignore her and continue to blurt out statements that would antagonize Doug Carver further. Then, like a windup toy activated by a switch, Brad stalked over to the door, jerked it open, and stepped out into the night.

  His footsteps clicked twice on the doorstep and then were lost in the grass of the lawn. A few moments later, Tracy heard the slam of his car door.

  Gentler sounds then suddenly rushed in to fill the void left by angry voices, filtering through the screen to invade the silent living room: the tinkle of wind chimes in a tree in the Carvers’ front yard; guitar music wafting across from a neighbor’s house; cicadas serenading spring-time from their home in the hedge that separated the Carvers’ house from the one next door.

  Apparently satisfied that Brad had been permanently disposed of, Doug addressed himself to Tracy. “Your boyfriend’s crazy. God knows what junk he’s been shooting up or smoking. I can’t believe you’d let someone like that come into this house with Cricket here.” He paused and then, with a major effort, got a grip on himself and managed to continue in a calmer voice. “Now, I want you to get on the phone and call your aunt.”

  “Call my aunt?” Tracy repeated. “Why should I do that?”

  “You’re a minor, right? And Irene Stevenson’s your guardian?”

  “Yes,” Tracy acknowledged.

  “Then she’s responsible. You’ve contracted to do a job you’re not trustworthy enough to handle, so it’s up to your aunt to take over in your place.”

  Tracy stared at him, unable to believe what she was hearing.

  “You expect Aunt Rene to come over here and babysit?”

  “Damn right I do,” Doug said tersely. “Tonight’s our anniversary. Sally and I have a celebration planned, and I’m not about to let you wreck it. I’ll be too late to get back to the restaurant in time for dinner, but at least I can join my wife and friends at the theater. You get your aunt on the phone and explain what’s happened. Tell her I’m not leaving this house until she gets here.”

  With no option but to obey, Tracy pulled her cell out of her jeans pocket and reluctantly dialed the number of the Stevenson’s home. As the phone on the other end of the line began to ring, she could visualize her aunt and uncle, comfortably planted in front of the television, squabbling good-naturedly about whose turn it was to get up and answer.

  The loser this time turned out to be her uncle. After the eighth ring it was his voice that said, “Hello?”

  Before Tracy could respond, however, Brad spoke from the doorway. “Hang up, Tracy,” he said. “You don’t have to make that call.”

  Turning to face the door, Tracy could see the outline of his figure, a blurred shape on the far side of the screen. She drew in a sudden, sharp breath and lowered the receiver.

  “Hello?” Uncle Cory’s voice crackled, tiny and thin, at the end of the wire. “Hello? Who is this? Hello? Hello?”

  Doug Carver said hoarsely, “My God, the kid has a gun!”

  Tracy turned off her cellphone.

  Chapter 11

  BRAD PULLED THE SCREEN door open and stepped into the room, keeping the hunting rifle leveled at the big man’s chest.

  “Yes, the kid’s got a gun,” he said. “Keep your hands at your sides and don’t try anything stupid.”

  “I was right! You are crazy!” Doug Carver’s normally florid face had turned the color of ivory. “Put that thing down, you idiot. It might accidentally go off.”

  “If it goes off, it won’t be an accident,” Brad said evenly. “I’ve done a lot of hunting with this gun, and I know how to use it.” The pressure of the gun butt against his shoulder was reassuringly familiar. It brought back memories of deer trails in the Pecos Wilderness; of the pungent odor of dew-drenched pine needles in the early morning; of his father, turning to smile at him over his shoulder, his breath rising from his nostrils in little puffs of steam in the cold mountain air. “Do just as I tell you. Walk backwards into the kitchen.”

  Out of the corner of his eye he could see Tracy’s ashen face as she stared at him incredulously.

  “What are you doing?” she asked in a whisper. “Where did you get that thing?”

  “Stay back out of the way,” Brad warned her. “I don’t want to run the risk of having you block my shot. If you get between us, you’re probably going to get hurt.” With the gun still trained on Doug, he began to advance slowly toward him. “Didn’t you hear what I said? Get into the kitchen. That’s the way”—as the ma
n took one cautious step backward and then another.” Keep moving back until you’re through the doorway. Now, turn to your left.”

  “If this is a robbery, you’re not going to get much,” said Doug. “We’re not rich people. There’s no money stashed around here. All you’re going to find in my wife’s jewelry box is cheap imitation stuff. The only good pieces she owns are what she’s wearing tonight.”

  “I don’t want your wife’s jewelry,” Brad said. “I only want what’s mine.”

  “If you’re looking for drugs—”

  “Stop talking and keep on walking.”

  He moved steadily forward, keeping pace as Doug backed into the adjoining room. Across from them, on the far side of the kitchen, the window he and Tracy had peered through two nights before reflected the activity in the lighted room. In its depths he could see Doug’s broad back, encased in a gray pin-striped suit jacket, and beyond that, a slender, curly-haired boy holding a deer rifle. The boy’s face looked foreign to him, steely-eyed and oddly expressionless—the face of a stranger he had never seen before. At the same time, he knew the person with the gun was himself and that the unnatural effect could be attributed to the warp in the windowpane.

  “What now?” Doug asked grimly. His voice was stiff with anger, but beneath that there ran an unmistakable undercurrent of fear.

  Brad glanced quickly about him, trying to decide on the next step. When he had confiscated the grocery sacks, he had not bothered to fully close the door to the pantry. It now stood ajar, disclosing three walls of floor-to-ceiling shelving stocked with cleaning supplies, canned goods, and boxes of baking mixes.

  “Take your cell phone out of your pocket and drop it on the floor,” he said. “Then turn around and step through that door.”

  “You want me to go into the pantry?”

  “That’s what I said, isn’t it?”

  Doug seemed unable to decide whether or not to obey.

  “Look,” he said, “there’s a little girl back in one of our bedrooms. I don’t care what you do to me or how much stuff you take, but I want you to promise you won’t do anything to her.”

  “I told you,” Brad said, “I’m only going to take what’s mine.”

  “She sleeps soundly,” Doug continued. “She’s not going to wake up. There’s no reason you’d even want to go in there. There’s nothing in that room you’d be interested in taking. It’s just little-kid stuff, like picture books and toys.”

  “Dump that phone on the floor and get into the pantry,” Brad told him, at the end of his patience. “If you push me any further, you’re going to be sorry.”

  Glowering with fury and frustration, Doug did as directed. Extracting his phone from his pocket, he let it fall and stepped through the doorway into the tiny, windowless storage room. His shoulders grazed the edges of the shelves on either side.

  “You won’t get away with this.” His voice was muffled by the closeness of the room. “Why don’t you quit while you’re ahead, kid? We’ll chalk this one up to the fact that you’re high on something and aren’t in any condition to be held responsible. I give you my word, I’m not going to call the police. You can walk out of here, and it’ll be like nothing ever happened.”

  Not deigning to dignify the statement with a verbal response, Brad thrust out his foot and kicked the door closed. The slam of it jolted the kitchen like a crack of thunder.

  Instead of the usual punch button lock, this door had a bolt lock at shoulder height. Brad reached up and slid the bolt into place.

  “Tracy?” he called. “Come out here! I need your help.”

  Tracy appeared in the doorway, visibly shaken. Her eyes were wide and frightened, and she glanced apprehensively about her as though she expected to be confronted by a scene of bloody horror.

  “That noise!” she said. “When I heard it, I thought you’d shot him!”

  “That was the sound of the pantry door,” Brad told her. “The blast of a gun is a lot louder than that.”

  “This wasn’t supposed to be part of it,” said Tracy. “If you’d told me you had a gun, I’d never have agreed to this.”

  “The gun was my dad’s,” Brad said. “I had it in the trunk of the car. The way things worked out tonight, it’s lucky I did.”

  “Put it down. It makes me nervous just seeing you hold it.” Her voice had a sharp edge to it. “You wouldn’t really have used it, would you? No matter what he did, you’d never have shot him?”

  “I don’t know,” Brad told her honestly. He thought back upon the moment when Doug Carver had hesitated at the door to the pantry. If instead of obeying his command the man had attempted to rush him, would he have had the nerve to pull the trigger?

  “I don’t know,” he said again. He set the stock of the gun on the floor and propped the tip of the muzzle against the kitchen wall. “That flimsy door won’t hold if the Hulk tries to force it. We’re going to have to pull the table over to brace it.”

  The dinette table had a butcher-block top, and there was a double-leaf insert attached beneath it, which made it a great deal heavier than it appeared on first glance. Even with Tracy’s assistance, it took more effort than he had anticipated to haul it across the room and shove it tightly against the pantry door. Then they went back for the chairs and brought them over also.

  By the time the job had been completed, the two black hands on the Garfield clock that hung over the refrigerator were indicating the time to be well past seven. Beyond the window, a thin slice of moon had ascended above the rooftop of the house next door and settled into the sky like a misplaced jewel in a witch’s hair. The lighted kitchen reflected in the glass produced the illusion of an eerie second dimension, as though two unrelated photographs had been superimposed one upon another.

  “We need to get a move on,” Brad said. “Having Carver come back for those tickets screwed up our timing. His wife is going to be calling to see what’s keeping him. When she doesn’t get any answer, she’s going to panic.”

  “I haven’t finished packing yet,” Tracy told him.

  “Don’t worry about that. Mom can buy her new stuff. The important thing now is to get Mindy out of here.”

  With Tracy at his heels, he went swiftly down the hall to Mindy’s bedroom. After the loud scene in the living room, he half expected to find his sister awake and crying. To his relief, however, she was still sleeping soundly, curled in the same position in which he had left her, thumb in mouth, stuffed toy clutched to her heart.

  When he bent to lift her from the bed, she emitted a soft kitten-mew of sleepy protest. Then, as Brad gently worked her free of the tangled bedclothes, she pulled her thumb out of her mouth with a popping sound and, with her eyes still closed, slid one arm around his neck. With her free hand, she continued to cling to the monkey.

  “Mindy,” Brad whispered, “do you know who’s got you? It’s Brad. I’ve come to take you home to Mommy.”

  She was as unexpectedly heavy as a sack of wet feathers, and she smelled of talcum powder and toothpaste and baby shampoo. The warm, limp weight of her body, the tickle of her hair against his cheek, the small sigh of her breath as she buried her face in the curve of his neck had been so long inexperienced that the new reality of them brought him close to tears.

  It was strange to recall there had once been a time when he had not wanted her, when he had tried with all his mental strength to wish her out of existence. He could remember the shock he had experienced when his mother, pale-faced and teary-eyed, had broken the news to him that she was pregnant.

  “This wasn’t my idea,” she had told him bitterly. “The last thing I ever wanted was to go through childbirth again. Gavin has this selfish need to prove his masculinity—and of course my feelings have never meant anything to anybody.”

  Throughout his mother’s pregnancy, Brad had made a concentrated effort to avoid looking at her. It had horrified him to see her slim body grow increasingly thicker as the existence of the baby within her became more and more apparent.
When Jamie had teased him about his upcoming role of “big brother,” he had put the conversation to rest with such a blistering retort that his friend had never dared mention the subject again.

  In the end, though, it had not been at all what he expected. His mother’s labor had been short and the birthing experience comparatively easy. Mindy had been a Christmas baby, born right at the peak of the holidays, and she had come home from the hospital wrapped in a bright red blanket with a Santa Claus cap the size of a mitten on her round, bald head.

  From the first moment he had laid eyes on her, garbed in her silly, festive outfit, he had blocked from his mind the thought that Gavin was her father. Instinctively, he had extended his finger to touch her, and immediately her tiny hand had closed around it. He had been amazed at the strength of the grip of her doll-size fingers, and the way she stared up at his face as if she already knew him. His heart had filled with a sudden rush of tenderness, and he had known, in that moment, he wanted to be a brother.

  “What’s the matter, Brad?” Tracy’s voice snapped him back to the present. “You’re the one who said we had to get out of here fast.”

  “We do,” Brad said. “Do you think Mindy’s going to be warm enough? Maybe we ought to take a blanket to wrap around her.”

  “I’ll get one, and a pillow so she can sleep in the car. If you can handle one of these sacks, I’ll take the other.”

  “And the gun,” Brad said, raising his left elbow so Tracy could wedge one of the bags of clothing under it. “I left it leaning against the wall in the kitchen. Turn off Carver’s cell, and on your way back through the living room, take the landline phone off the hook. That should buy us some time when Carver’s wife tries to call here.”

  Leaving Tracy to deal with the final aspects of their departure, he shoved the screen door open with his shoulder and carried Mindy out into the gentle darkness of the April evening. The night air was filled with the fragrance of hyacinths blooming in the flower beds along the walkway, and the cicadas in the hedge chattered sociably like friendly gossips.