by Skylar Finn
“Aren’t you supposed to be dead?”
“The key words are ‘supposed to be.’ ‘Supposed to’ and ‘actually’ are two very different things.”
“Why are you doing this?”
Cynthia stared at him as if he was naïve, stupid, or both. “What do you mean, why? Why does anyone do anything? Why did you pack up your miserable little life and move to the middle of nowhere, only to have your life threatened on a daily basis by me? For the money, of course.” She ground out her cigarette on the hearth and tossed it into the fireplace.
“Please don’t hurt Emily,” Jesse said. Ordinarily, his pride would forbid him from pleading with such a person, but the idea of this woman getting anywhere near Emily was more than he could stand.
“That’s very chivalrous of you, Jesse, but I’ve never actually seen your wife,” said Cynthia, before amending, “Well, I’ve seen her, but I haven’t met her. And I don’t plan to. The less our paths intersect, the better, as far as I’m concerned. I have other people to deal with that. I don’t like to get my hands dirty.”
“What about when you killed Matilda?” asked Jesse. “What about then? All those kids, you don’t call that getting your hands dirty?”
“Little old me?” Cynthia pretended to look shocked. “I would never kill anybody. Not out of ethics, of course. If they’re in the way, and that’s the surest way to get them out of it.” She shrugged. “Well, in that case, good riddance. But that’s precisely why I don’t plan to kill you. You’re in my way, but killing you is actually not the surest way to get rid of you. If anything, you’d create more problems for me dead than alive. Anyway, actually killing somebody, or felony murder, involves doing time I have no intention of ever doing. Having someone else do it means I can set up a plea deal if everything really goes to the dogs. You know?” Cynthia cocked her head at him as if this was a normal thing to ask.
Jesse felt sick. He wanted her to go away so he could lie down, but he was afraid if he went to sleep, he’d never wake up. And even listening to the horrible things she said seemed preferable to not knowing. Maybe if he accumulated enough information, he’d learn enough to get out of the situation. Or he’d learn something that might save Emily later. Ideally both of them, but even in the worst-case scenario, he could at least save Emily.
“Who are you working with?” asked Jesse. “Was it Richard? What about the lawyer? Was it him, too?”
Cynthia eyed him pityingly. “I think you know the answer to that already, don’t you, Jesse?” She lit another cigarette and looked into the empty fireplace. “It’s a funny thing about family, isn’t it? Can’t live with them, can’t live without them, am I right? I love my brother and sister, but they’re like two brainless pawns I have to move around in order to get everything done. Can’t I at least have a rook? A bishop? A knight? Do I really have to make every single vital move on the board for us to succeed? But that’s family for you. You don’t choose your family. You can, however, choose to get away from them, which is hopefully where all this is leading to.”
Cynthia got up and went over to the couch, extracting a roll of duct tape from the large pocket of her black parka. “Not that I don’t enjoy talking to you, Jesse, but if you don’t mind, I just need to make a quick phone call.” She taped Jesse’s mouth shut. Then she reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out his phone. She shook her head at him.
“You didn’t even look, did you?” she said mockingly. He glared at her. She chuckled. She scrolled casually through his phone, as if she had all the time in the world. She tapped on the screen.
Jesse could hear ringing, and he knew that Cynthia had put the phone on speaker just to torment him. She made Richard seem passive as a kitten. His heart contracted when Emily answered the phone.
“Jesse?” she said. “Are you okay?”
Jesse tried to make a noise, but all that occurred were a series of helpless, muffled groans. Cynthia snickered at him.
“I’m afraid Jesse can’t come to the phone,” she said. “He’s feeling a little…indisposed.”
“Who is this?” Jesse could hear the fear in Emily’s voice, now frantic.
Cynthia explained and told her the terms of the arrangement. When she demanded to speak with Jesse and Cynthia lied, telling her he was unconscious, he tried to kick over the coffee table so that she could hear him.
For the first time, Cynthia’s cold mask of phony jocundity dropped. She marched over to the couch and slapped Jesse right across his bruised and tender face. He sank into the cushions in agony.
“I’m afraid you’ll just have to take my word for it,” she said into the phone before she hung up. “Nice try, Romeo. Pull something like that again and I’ll shove this poker through your eyeball.” Cynthia picked up the iron poker next to the fireplace and tapped it menacingly on the hearth.
Jesse mumbled something through his duct tape gag. Cynthia studied him, as if debating whether or not it was worth it. Finally, she peeled back a corner of the tape over his mouth.
“What was that?” she said.
“I thought you didn’t like to get your hands dirty,” Jesse said.
Cynthia smiled. Even her smile was little more than a sadistic little smirk.
“Just because I don’t like to,” she said as she tapped the poker against the hearth, “doesn’t mean I won’t.”
Jesse didn’t know how long it was before Emily came. It felt like days, though he assumed it was only hours. He nodded off for a while, and when he came to, there was a different Cynthia sitting on the hearth. She looked similar to the Cynthia of before and for a moment, Jesse wondered how hard they’d hit him on the head. Was it the same person?
The woman glanced over at him and he saw it was Theresa Plumber, Cynthia’s neighbor. Or the woman he thought was Cynthia’s neighbor. They were clearly related. Sisters, even.
“Oh, hello,” she said. “You’re awake. Can I get you a sandwich?”
Jesse’s head swam. He felt a wave of nausea wash over him at the very thought of a sandwich. He shook his head, but just barely.
“You probably need water,” she said, nodding. “I’ll get you that.”
Jesse marveled at the difference between this person and Cynthia. It was as though someone added a generous helping of empathy, put Cynthia back in the oven, then set the timer for twice as long. Maybe he could use it to his advantage. Jesse made a noise, hoping she would take the gag off.
The woman giggled. “Oh yeah, I see what you mean. Can’t really drink anything with that over your mouth, can you?” He thought she would take it off, but she had apparently merely made the logical connection required not to get him water, and she went back to staring into the fireplace. Jesse stared at her incredulously.
“It won’t be much longer now,” she said comfortingly, almost as much to herself as to him. “She’ll show up and I’ll get the deed and give her the money and then you guys can go. This will all seem like a bad dream.”
Jesse saw then that Theresa wasn’t kind, just delusional. She probably believed whatever Cynthia and Richard told her and followed them blindly.
Theresa’s phone chirped and she pulled it out to look at it. “Oh, it looks like your favorite person is here!” She got up and reached into her pocket for what Jesse felt certain was a gun. He hated the feeling of knowing Emily was in danger and he couldn’t do anything to stop it.
“I’m just going to tuck you out of sight for a few minutes, for safekeeping,” Theresa said. She got up and came over to the couch, grabbing Jesse by the collar. She was shockingly strong. Where Cynthia was frail and waif-like, Theresa was built like a linebacker. She dragged Jesse out of the room only slightly less easily than Richard had dragged him into it. He watched the floor of the hallway scrape by under his heels before she dropped him into a bedroom and shut the door.
Jesse looked for something he could cut his bonds with, but the room was pitch black and he couldn’t see a foot in front of his face. He wasn’t sure how much
time went by before he heard voices in the living room. Emily.
He had to warn her. Jesse thrashed his way across the floor, startled when a beam of light fell across his face.
“Oh, look,” said Theresa. “You were already on your way out to join us.”
She grabbed him again, proceeding to drag him back the way they’d come earlier. At this point, Jesse didn’t know which one he feared and disliked worse: Cynthia or Theresa. Cynthia was pure evil, but he felt certain he could take her in a fight. Theresa, he wasn’t so sure about.
Relief washed over him in waves when he saw Emily, unharmed, in the living room. He thought that everything would be okay if they could only make it through this together.
As Jesse finished his story, he rolled the window up. The stinging cold air was too much for the pain on his face. It was beginning to snow. Emily reached over for his hand and squeezed it tightly in hers. He squeezed back.
“We’ll make it out of this together,” she said. “I’m sure of it.”
Emily slowed as she reached their street, in case Cynthia and Theresa had gotten there first. Theresa had left the cabin before their showdown with Richard, but Emily had no way of knowing if she was meeting Cynthia at the house, or if the two were off plotting somewhere, or meeting Watkins before they came by to loot everything Matilda had owned. Emily felt a fresh wave of anger at the thought of them not only taking Matilda’s life, but everything in the house. Inwardly, she vowed that she wouldn’t let them get away with it. Not for a second time.
There was no sign of a vehicle in front of the house and no lights on inside the house, either. Emily turned off the headlights on the truck and crept cautiously around the side of the house to the back, where there was no sign of Cynthia or Theresa, either.
She pulled into the shed out back. “Even if they do see the truck here, they’ll just think it’s Richard,” she said.
“Good point,” said Jesse. “But how are we going to take them out? You know they’re both armed. And we’re not. I don’t think Matilda owned a gun. If she did, I’ve never come across it. And we have no ammo in the one we got off Richard.”
“They’re going to have to split up at some point,” said Emily. “They won’t think anything of it because they’ll think it’s just them in the house. As far as they know, we’re still duct taped to a couch in the mountains. They’re armed, but I don’t think they’ll have their guns out. They won’t have any reason to. We’ll just have to sneak up on them. Do you still have that baseball bat you used to chase Richard the night he broke in during the storm?”
“It’s in the basement,” said Jesse.
“Okay, here’s what I think we should do: we go in the house through the tunnels and get Widget. We bring her out here to the truck. We get the baseball bat and whatever else we can find to use as a weapon: maybe the poker from the fireplace. We wait for them to get here. We follow them through the walls and when they split up, we can take them out, one by one. It worked on Richard, and he was a lot bigger than us and he had a gun. But between the two of us, we were able to outsmart him.”
Jesse nodded, and Emily could tell by the set of his jaw that he was determined to overpower the people who had overpowered him. “I think we should sneak in low-key, in case they’re already in there with the lights out. We’ll grab Widget and get her out here in the truck where she’ll be safe. Then, we go back in and wait for them.”
He opened the trapdoor in the corner of the shed that led to the hidden passage through the house. He went down the ladder first, so he’d be beneath Emily if she fell. She lowered herself after him and pulled the door closed over their heads, surrounding them in darkness.
34
Emily pulled out her phone and opened her flashlight app. She shined it into the tunnel to illuminate their way. They ascended the gently sloping rise that led past the kitchen and stopped at the small door that opened to the inside of the pantry. She pushed it open and crawled through, nudging open the pantry door as quietly as possible. The house was dark and silent. Emily reached into her pocket and pulled out her keys. On it was Widget’s dog whistle. She put it to her lips and blew.
Relief washed over her as she heard the familiar clicking of Widget’s black toenails on the linoleum floor. She trotted across the kitchen and into the pantry, her tags jingling. Emily picked her up and buried her face in Widget’s thick fur. She turned and handed her to Jesse. Then she pulled the door shut as quietly and carefully as possible.
“I’ll take her to the truck and meet you back in here,” said Jesse. “Where do you think they’ll come in?”
“Probably the back door,” said Emily. “They’ll want to hide the car from the street, so they’ll probably park behind the house. I’ll get the poker from the fireplace and find the bat.
Do you remember where it’s at in the basement?”
Jesse shook his head. “It’s all kind of a blur, to be honest. It’s probably pretty close to the opening, because that’s where I was when Richard got away.”
“I’ll find it,” she said. “You’ll need a light for when we split up.” She quickly crawled back through the door and into the pantry. She ran across the kitchen to the drawer next to the sink, where they kept a spare flashlight, and brought it back to the passage, where she handed it to Jesse. She pulled the doors to the pantry closed and then shut the doors to the passage.
“I’ll be in the passage by the living room when you get back,” she said.
Jesse squeezed her hand. Then he turned on the flashlight with his free hand. They made their way back down the passage. Emily turned right toward the basement and Jesse turned left toward the shed.
She opened the passage door that led into the basement. It was pitch black and Emily held the light of her phone high to see. She tried to visualize the basement. The last time she’d been down here, the ghosts had protected her from Richard. Jesse had chased him from the basement into the secret passage just as the police arrived. What had he done with the bat?
A thin beam of light illuminated the corner closest to the secret passage. Emily stared at it. As she watched, it seemed to glow brighter and brighter.
“Matilda?” she whispered.
Soon the corner was as bright as if the overhead light was on. Emily could clearly see the outline of a bat. She went over and grabbed it.
“Thank you,” she said softly as the light dimmed and faded out.
Jesse held Widget tightly as he ran down the passage toward the toolshed. Widget wagged her tail excitedly. She seemed to think they were playing a game. When he got to the end of the tunnel, he climbed the ladder built into the wall with Widget tucked carefully under one arm.
Once he emerged into the shed, he opened the door to the truck and placed Widget gently in the cab. She cocked her head and looked at him.
“Stay here,” he cautioned her. It was then that he heard it: the sound of a car.
Jesse cracked the door of the shed and peered through the narrow opening. The first thing he saw was snow. In the brief time since they’d hidden the truck and gone in the house to get Widget, it covered the ground. Fat flakes fell from the sky with no sign of stopping.
The second thing he saw was the black Town Car. The sight of it immediately brought back the memory of being hit in the head and thrown in the backseat. Jesse narrowed his eyes as he watched the car glide into the backyard and park flush with the steps that led to the back door.
Cynthia got out and popped the trunk. She opened both the doors to the backseat, then pulled on her ski mask. Theresa got out of the passenger side, already wearing hers. The sisters trudged up the back steps and into the house.
Jesse shut the door and went over to the trap door. He opened it and lowered himself down into the tunnel, pulling the door closed over his head. He swiftly scaled the ladder down and dropped to the hard, packed dirt floor. He ran swiftly down the tunnel toward the house to find Emily.
Emily headed up the passage back toward the living room.
The hidden door that opened to the room was concealed behind the couch. Emily slipped through it and darted across the room to the hearth, clutching the bat from the basement. She tested the weight of the fire poker, giving it an experimental swing.
It was then that she heard the car engine out back. Emily froze at the sound of car doors opening and closing. Then she ran back into the passage carrying the poker and closed the door firmly behind her.
Emily was focused so intently on the sound of Cynthia and Theresa entering the house that she didn’t hear Jesse come up behind her until he was practically on top of her, his breath in her ear. Emily bit back a scream as she backed into something warm and solid before realizing it was Jesse. He put a finger to her lips. She handed him the bat.
The back door opened. It was followed by the sound of urgent voices. The voices were muffled in the kitchen, but grew louder as they walked down the hallway and toward the living room.
“What do you want in here?” came Theresa’s curious voice from the hall.
“I want that hideous painting over the fireplace so I can throw it on a bonfire and dance around it while it burns,” said Cynthia. Her voice grew louder as they entered the living room. “Other than that, just the Ming vase on the end table and the Waterford crystal from the mantel.”
Emily and Jesse huddled together in the passage. They were barely breathing, not daring to make the slightest sound.
“What if they go back on the whole deal? They could be talking to the cops right now.”
“They’re not talking to the cops,” said Cynthia impatiently. “I’m telling you, I know these people, and they’re predictable. All good people are. If they decide not to take the money, she’ll take him to the hospital, putting his well-being above everything else, including her own. Then she’ll come back for the dog. And if she does that, it’s time for Plan B.”