Jennifer’s head was spinning again. The crystal calm that she had been trying to force herself to effect was now in tatters. There was no way that these people would get away with what they were planning to do. Their crime was hopeless—bungling, really.
But how could she explain that to them? If it were only she and David down here, she might have a chance. Deborah and Marcia, though, had absolutely no mixed feelings about what was about to take place.
“I’m sorry, Jennifer,” David said. “But you’re going to have to stand up now.” He gestured to the fireplace poker, which had remained undisturbed to this point, leaning against the wall. “Marcia, it’s time for you to pick that up. ‘Do what needs to be done’, as Mother says.”
Marcia stood, sighing. She had been sitting cross-legged on the dirt floor, watching her brother dig.
“So it’s up to me again? Is that it, brother?”
“I’m not getting my hands dirty with this,” David replied. “And I think we both agree that we can’t ask this of Mother.”
“Do it!” Deborah Vennekamp said. “Just do it and get it done. Twenty years ago, Marcia, you didn't need to do what you did to that Taylor girl. But this one—this one you have to do. For all our sakes.”
65
Clint brought the minivan to a clattering halt in the gravel driveway of the farmhouse. He pulled in directly behind the white van that bore the lettering, “Vennekamp’s Handyman Service” in stylized cursive characters.
Practically leaping out of the minivan, he bolted toward the front door.
Along the way, he stumbled over something, nearly losing his balance: it was a woman’s shoe.
The shoe was a dark pink penny loafer, and it looked instantly familiar. Sure, there were thousands, maybe even millions of these shoes in circulation. But it could not be a coincidence.
The shoe was Jennifer’s.
Clint dashed over the floorboards of the front porch, with no concern for stealth. He flung the screen door open. He tried the front door knob, but it was locked.
Clint pounded twice on the door. Then he decided on another course.
He leaned back, and flung the full weight of his body against the front door. He heard wood splinter in the doorjamb and frame. The door had been made to bar the entry of casual intruders; it hadn’t been constructed with a concerted, sustained attack in mind.
Marcia was just about to pick up the fireplace poker when the pounding from upstairs began. Jennifer still refused to get up, despite David’s many attempts to coax her.
“Don’t worry, David,” Marcia had said. “She actually makes an easier target sitting down.”
But now Marcia hesitated. The sounds coming from upstairs were not being made by an ordinary visitor or a door-to-door salesperson. The farmhouse was under frontal attack.
“Now what?” Marcia asked, turning to her brother.
“I don’t know,” David said. “This wasn't part of the plan. I don’t have any idea who that could be up there.”
Deborah said, “For goodness sake, David. You’ve got to go up there. Take care of it. And take the gun.” Motioning to Jennifer: “She’s not going anywhere. But someone is trying to break into this house. Put a stop to it!”
She sounded more indignant than frightened. Deborah had committed a home invasion of her own this afternoon. She had been part of a kidnapping. She was now calmly prepared to watch her daughter commit murder for the second time in twenty years. Nevertheless, Deborah could find it within herself to feel affronted by the intrusion upstairs.
That intrusion was Jennifer’s first positive sign since Deborah Vennekamp had spoken to her from the darkness of the basement at 1120 Dunham Drive. The pounding upstairs had to be related to her unwilling presence here—it simply had to be.
“Wait here,” David said. But it was obvious that he intended to dither, as he had dithered his entire life. As he reluctantly headed for the staircase, they all heard the unmistakable splintering sound of the front door bursting from its hinges.
Once inside the house, Clint walked quickly through the first floor. He passed through the cluttered living room, then through the equally cluttered kitchen. He vaguely noticed a pile of dirty dishes sitting in the kitchen sink, giving off a putrid odor.
Then he saw the open basement door.
In a few steps he was before the door, and facing a man at the bottom of the stairs. Clint had never met David Vennekamp, had never even seen a recent picture of him; but he somehow knew that the pudgy, meek-looking man who stared back at him was Deborah Vennekamp’s son. This was his house, after all.
And now Deborah Vennekamp’s son extended his arm, showing the pistol in his hand. The hand was shaking, but that did not necessarily mean that Clint had any advantage. A nervous man was an impulsive man—and David might pull the trigger with very little provocation.
“Stand right there,” David said. “I think I already know who you are.”
Deborah Vennekamp moved into view. “That’s her husband. I know him.”
“Do you have my wife down there?” Clint challenged. “Because if you do, I’m telling you right now: You need to let her go. This has gone far enough.”
“I don’t think you're in a position to be dictating terms, Mr. Huber,” David said. “Now, I want you to raise your hands and walk slowly down these stairs. Remember: I said slowly.”
“Is my wife down there with you?”
Vennekamp gripped the pistol with both hands and took aim. But he was still shaking and unsteady. “No more questions, Mr. Huber. Come down here. Slowly, I said.”
By this point Clint had already raised his hands. There was no choice, for the moment, but to do as this man ordered. Holding his hands carefully aloft to provide balance, Clint mounted the first stair down to the basement, and then the next.
When he was halfway down he saw Jennifer, her hands bound behind her back. She was missing one shoe.
A frumpily dressed woman in her late thirties was standing a few feet away from Jennifer. She had to be Marcia Vennekamp. Who else?
When Clint reached the bottom of the stairs, Marcia picked up a thin cylindrical object that was leaning against the far wall. It was a fireplace poker, black and probably made of solid iron.
Marcia’s eyes darted to Jennifer, then to Clint.
Marcia came at Clint with the fireplace poker, cocking it over her shoulder to add momentum to her swing.
Clint moved out of the way at the last second, oblivious to David Vennekamp’s pistol in order to avoid the more imminent threat. The weighted tip of the fireplace poker missed Clint’s forehead by mere inches. Marcia followed through with the arc of her blow, and one of the fireplace poker’s barbs became embedded in the age-softened wood of a stair tread.
Using his foot, Clint pushed Marcia Vennekamp away. She stumbled and fell backward onto the dirt floor of the basement.
“I’ll kill you!” she cried out in rage from the floor. “Both of you!”
Marcia was about to lunge for the embedded fireplace poker. Clint was trying to decide how to best push her away again without provoking David Vennekamp, who seemed equally nonplussed by his sister’s outburst.
“Marcia, control yourself!” Deborah Vennekamp shouted. “We’ve got both of them now, and we need to take a moment to think about this.”
“I guess I could dig another hole,” David Vennekamp said, although he didn't seem very enthusiastic about the idea. “I don’t see another way. Mother, do you?”
“Idiots!” Marcia screamed at her brother and mother. “You’re both idiots! We’ve got to—”
“Marcia?”
The voice came from behind Clint, at the top of the staircase.
Clint turned around to see Chris Whitaker standing above and behind him, in the kitchen of the farmhouse.
David said, “What are you doing here, Whitaker?”
Clint could detect more than a little panic in David’s question. The three Vennekamps had planned Jennifer’s a
bduction and murder with the idea that the numerical advantage would be irrevocably on their side. Now they were evenly matched: three against three. Clint would have felt better, though, if Roy Dennison or Officer Marx had been there. David Vennekamp, after all, still held a gun.
Then Clint noticed another detail: He had come to this confrontation with his wife’s abductors unarmed, but Chris Whitaker had not. A small, snub-nosed pistol was imperfectly concealed in the guitarist’s right hand. Clint had not noticed the gun at first; he wondered if David could see it.
Even more, he wondered if Whitaker was prepared to use it.
Whitaker did not respond directly to David’s challenge. Instead he repeated the name of his old lover—the woman who had reportedly scared him away so many years ago.
“Marcia? Are you down there? It’s Chris.”
“Marcia doesn't want anything to do with you!” Deborah shouted. “I thought we’d settled that twenty years ago!”
But Marcia—and everyone else—ignored Deborah. Marcia looked around Clint, who partially blocked the sightline between her and Whitaker.
In that instant, she seemed to forget about the melee in the basement, the Hubers, and the disaster of the attempted abduction/murder. Her face lit up like a schoolgirl’s—like the schoolgirl that she no doubt had been, a long time ago.
“Chris? You’ve come back!”
“That’s right, Marcia. I have come back. But there are all these other people around here, see; and I was hoping that the two of us could talk. Just you and me.”
Whitaker took a tentative step down the staircase, his hand still concealing most of the gun. Clint turned back and tried to make some cautionary signal—to warn Whitaker to beware of David Vennekamp. But that was not as easy as Clint had hoped. Whitaker’s eyes briefly met his; then he looked back down into the basement.
“Marcia,” Chris beckoned. “Come on up and talk to me. You don’t want any part of this.”
“Don’t go, Marcia!” David cried out. “It’s a trap!”
Suddenly, David Vennekamp achieved a full understanding of the situation. He must have seen the gun that Chris Whitaker was concealing. And Vennekamp was right about one thing: From his perspective, at least, Whitaker’s maneuver was a trap.
In the next few seconds, Clint’s life was saved by pure instinct. He knew, instantly, that it would be necessary for him to duck now. And so once again he pushed Marcia Vennekamp away. Then he fell backward onto the staircase, sitting down hard.
Clint dove down the stairs toward Jennifer. If nothing else, he would use his body to shield her. He practically leapt atop her, but he reckoned that this drastic step was necessary.
“I love you,” he said into her ear. Then the space around Clint seemed to explode.
At least two shots burst out above him, filling the air with a loud, reverberating boom and the smell of gunpowder.
When Clint looked up, he saw that Chris Whitaker had been the decisive winner of the brief gunfight. David Vennekamp was on his back, writhing in agony. But Clint had a feeling that Vennekamp’s agony would not last for long: There was a hole in his chest, and blood was spurting out in a regular rhythm, pooling on the dirt floor beside him. Whitaker must have hit an artery.
Whitaker, himself unharmed, was walking down the stairs with his gun held at shoulder level. He said to Marcia and Deborah, “You two: stand over there.” He motioned to one of the far corners of the basement.
But Marcia had other plans. Before Chris could utter another warning, she ran over to David and located his gun beside him in the dirt. She plucked the weapon from the floor.
“Marcia, stop!” Chris said shakily. Marcia looked uncertainly back at Chris. Clint thought: She knows now that Chris betrayed her, and she’s going to try to shoot him.
Instead Marcia turned the gun on her mother. “Your fault!” she screamed. “Your fault from the very beginning! Why couldn't you have left well enough alone?”
Marcia fired the pistol. Deborah was driven backward against the wall. Clint recoiled at the sight of the hole that blossomed in the center of her upper body, where her sternum would be. Deborah Vennekamp was not a large woman, and the rupture seemed to split half of her chest.
Marcia allowed herself a few seconds to watch her mother fall to the floor. Deborah rolled over once in the dust, driven by gravity and momentum rather than by any final act of will. She had likely been killed instantly by the single shot.
Marcia nodded in what could only be interpreted as satisfaction. To Clint’s horror, she briefly smiled.
Clint fleetingly thought of a single word: sociopath. Whatever—whoever—Marcia Vennekamp was—she didn't perceive right and wrong, mercy and pity, as other people did. She obviously possessed some range of human emotions, but there was a hollow space inside her.
And Marcia Vennekamp was not yet finished. She turned the gun on Clint now, who was still sheltering Jennifer from harm. “And your fault!” she shouted. “Both of you!”
This is it, Clint thought. I’m going to die. But maybe I can save Jennifer. Maybe Connor will still have a mother.
The next shot that rang out tore a hole in Marcia’s neck near the base of one shoulder. The impact caused her to spin around and drop the gun.
Then Marcia went down onto the dirt floor, bleeding like her brother—and her mother. (David and Deborah were each lying in the middle of an unsightly expanse of glistening crimson. Neither of them stirred.)
Chris ran the rest of the way down the stairs. He knelt beside Marcia, who seemed to be choking. Blood was running from a wound in her ruptured neck; it was pooling in her mouth.
So much blood, Clint thought, feeling vaguely stupid at his amazement over the obvious. And on the heels of that: I’m still alive. Jennifer is still alive.
But their would-be killer was not so fortunate.
“Marcia,” Whitaker whispered. There were tears in his eyes. Whitaker shook his head at the sight of her, as if he could will away everything that had just occurred. “Why did you force me to do that?”
Marcia made a half-hearted attempt to reach for Chris’s face—whether in love or in rage, Clint could not have said.
And then she died. (Clint would later conclude that blood had simply stopped flowing to Marcia’s brain, though he would also figure that the precise medical explanation must be a bit more complicated than that.) Marcia’s hands fell down to her sides, and her shallow breathing abruptly stopped.
One moment she was there—and the next, she was not.
“What have I done?” Chris asked. He dropped his pistol onto the floor—it had no further purpose. He stared down at the woman-girl who had alternately loved him, hated him, and frightened him. “I never wanted it to come to this!” Then to Jennifer and Clint. “I just wanted her—all of them—to go away—to let me live in peace.”
“That’s all we wanted, too,” Jennifer said. Clint was untying her binds. When she was free, Jennifer stood shakily. She walked over to Chris and placed a hand on the sobbing man’s shoulder. “This wasn't your fault, you know. In fact, Clint and I owe you. If not for you, we’d both be inside a hole about now.”
“That’s true,” Clint said. He leaned forward from the ground and placed a hand on the guitarist’s other shoulder. “I don’t know why you decided to help, after all, but I’m sure glad you did. I owe you one, dude. And I always will.”
66
The police were called, and the three survivors waited for them to arrive. This time Chief Dennison came immediately to the Hubers’ aid, with lights and sirens. The police dispatcher reported that there were three shooting victims—and yes, all of them appeared to be dead.
The farmhouse at 2334 Stony Creek Road was designated a crime scene. The police first removed the three bodies of the Vennekamps.
Later, they started digging.
The twenty year-old corpse of Josie Taylor was found in a shallow grave. The hole was a little less than two feet over from the one that David Vennekamp had ha
stily dug for Jennifer. As it turned out, Vennekamp’s instincts were correct when he moved the shovel before digging a new hole.
The girl’s body was well preserved, for a body that had been in the ground for twenty years. The lack of moisture in the basement contributed to that, the coroner said later. Her skin was brown, desiccated, and at places it had decayed away to the bone. Her hands and fingers were completely skeletal. The skin on her face was dry, also brown, and drawn back from her teeth. Clumps of black hair still clung to her scalp.
They found her buried on her side, her knees partially bent. Her clothes were rotted, but they were still discernable: blue jeans, a black leather jacket, and a tee shirt.
No jewelry. Her amethyst ring had been found in David Vennekamp’s pocket.
The Hubers and Chris Whitaker were all exonerated, especially after the fate of Josephine Taylor, a missing person from twenty years ago, came to light.
Epilogue
Six months later
It was early spring, the time of year when the weather in southern Ohio is chilled, grey, and sodden. The Hubers were staying in on this Friday night. Clint and Jennifer sat on the living room sofa, the fingers of their hands interlaced. Connor lay on the floor in his pajamas.
They were watching the latest Disney DVD. Clint had tried to follow it, but his mind inevitably drifted. Although both his marriage and his career were better than had been the case a year ago, he still sometimes found himself distracted.
Some nights he awoke in a cold sweat, having dreamed himself back to the basement of the farmhouse on Stony Creek Road. Only this time Chris Whitaker had never shown up. On these nights Clint’s dream-self watched, helpless, as Marcia Vennekamp split his wife’s head open with a blow from a fireplace poker. Then David Vennekamp, half apologetically, turned the gun on Clint and fired.
“Dad! Did you see that?” Connor rolled over on his back to exclaim to his father. Something had just happened onscreen. Something exciting and unbelievable, apparently.
1120 Dunham Drive: A Clint & Jennifer Huber Mystery Page 37