by Anna Bailey
But as he goes, he does not hear the sound of leather on skin. Instead he hears his sister cry out suddenly, and an odd, pained sound from his father. It isn’t until that day in the woods, months later, when he watches Noah take off his belt with that same fluid motion, that he realizes what it was he really witnessed.
NOW
Emma loses sight of Samuel’s pickup on the way back to Whistling Ridge. Perhaps he takes some back road to avoid the traffic, or maybe he really is driving that fast, but by the time the familiar church spire comes into view between the trees, there is no knowing where he might be.
She tries Hunter’s phone again but there’s still no answer. When she pulls up at the Maddox house, only his car is parked outside, there is no sign of his parents, and yet the front door is wide open.
She approaches slowly, clearing her throat. “Hello?”
There is a red handprint on the doorframe. Emma feels the hairs on her arms standing up as if they were hundreds of little hooks in her skin trying to pull it right off her bones. Her instinct is to run back to her car, but she takes a deep breath, and then a voice from inside, faint but familiar, calls: “Hello… is someone there? Please—”
“Hunter?”
She finds him in the hallway, lying on his back, the blood on his hands and clothes slowly seeping into the carpet around him. His shirt has been torn open. The wound in his gut looks like a second mouth, and when he tries to move it opens up, spilling more blood onto Emma’s hands as she tries to touch him.
“Oh God, oh Jesus, Hunter! What happened?”
His head lolls to one side. “He stabbed me… I went to the door and he just stabbed me.”
“Who? Who stabbed you?”
“After what he did to her… what he did to Abi, I had to help her…” Hunter’s eyelids flutter as if he can’t keep them open.
“Oh, no, no, please just look at me.” Emma takes hold of his face, shaking him as much as she dares. “Hunter, come on, just keep looking at me, keep looking.”
Something to stem the blood flow, that’s what she needs. That’s what they always do on TV.
“Just hold on, I’ll be right back.”
“No, don’t leave me…”
“You’re going to be okay, you’re going to be just fine. You know what they say, it takes ages to die from a stomach wound.” She laughs, only because she needs some way to let the pressure out, and it’s either that or bursting into tears.
In the kitchen there is a hand towel with little woodpeckers on it, so she takes it back to the hall and presses it against the wound, trying to apply as much pressure as she can, although she’s worried she’s hurting him even more.
“Hey, Hunter, do you have those photographs? That one of me and Abi at the Tall Bones?”
He blinks heavily, rolling his head to the side again.
“I know, Hunter, but this is really important, it’s important for Abi.”
“Upstairs… the drawer…”
“I’m going to go get it, okay? But I need you to… Here.” She takes his hands and puts them on top of the towel. “Jesus… You need to keep holding this as hard as you can, okay? I’ll be right back.”
Emma has never had to dial 911 before and it takes her several tries because her fingers are so bloody. It is such a surreal experience, and there’s a little part of her that is almost excited as she dials the number while taking the stairs two at a time to Hunter’s room, her cell phone tucked between her shoulder and chin.
The man at the other end sounds too calm, Emma thinks. He takes her address and tells her to sit tight. They’ll send someone as fast as they can, he says, but it’s a difficult drive from Estes to that part of town: those mountain roads are pretty tough for an ambulance.
“What about the police?” she says, kneeling down at Hunter’s bedside table and wrenching out the drawer. “My friend was stabbed. Shouldn’t they be here too?”
“Ma’am, do you believe the assailant is still on the premises?”
“No, but I—” She looks down at the Polaroid in her hand, at her and Abi’s faces now covered with the bloody whorls of her fingerprints. Abigail’s arm is around her shoulders, her hand dangling right at the edge of the frame—and there on her wrist is that same bracelet made of old bullets.
“I know who he is.”
He knows these woods better than anyone. He could have taken some secret back way from the hospital and she would never have seen him.
“Please, you need to contact Sheriff Gains at the Whistling Ridge Sheriff’s Department. Tell him… tell him we know what happened to Abigail Blake.”
Just like TV, she keeps telling herself, and perhaps it is the adrenaline that makes her so certain of what she must do next.
Downstairs, she presses the towel firmly against Hunter’s stomach, trying to ignore the warmth of the blood between her fingers, the taste of it in the air, like she’s been holding a coin in her mouth.
“I’ll wait until the ambulance comes.”
“Emma, don’t leave…”
“I’m staying right here until it comes, I promise. Just hold on, okay? But then I have to warn Abi’s family. I can’t let him do this to them too.”
47
THEN
It is a small-town sort of night—the last that Whistling Ridge will see for many years to come, although nobody knows this yet.
Noah Blake tries not to look at the mud-stains on his jeans as he peels out from the dirt road near the Winslow place. His face feels hot as he watches Rat, high cheekbones illuminated by the spark from his cigarette lighter, retreating in his wing-mirror.
Dolly sits at the bottom of the stairs, staring at the cross on the wall, wondering if this is the night. Maybe tonight her son simply won’t come home, and what will she say then?
In their big wooden house, Jerry Maddox exchanges an anxious glance with his wife as he tapes up twenty grams of cocaine in an old Safeway carrier bag.
On the edge of the woods, Emma Alvarez shrugs and says, “See you tomorrow, I guess,” and picks her way back through the shadows of the Tall Bones. Abigail watches her friend until she is out of sight, and her heart hurts as though somebody is sitting on her chest. The bonfire crackles and the trailer-park kids holler at the moon. Across the field, Rat emerges, dragging on his cigarette, in time to see Abigail turn into the trees.
* * *
“Are you sure?”
Hunter lowers his flashlight so that it isn’t shining directly in Abigail’s face, but he can still make out the way her eyebrows furrow when she says, “Last week he tore the pages out of my diary—I know it was him. He didn’t say anything, but he put the book back like he wanted me to find it. He knows everything, Hunter. And he knows I was supposed to meet you tonight. We’re out of time, we have to go now.”
“But what about the money? My parents found the coke.”
“Look, you don’t have to come if you don’t want to, but I’m not going back.”
The forest creaks around them, brittle pines bending in the wind. Hunter reaches for her in the dark, feels the veins raised on the back of her hand. She does not meet his eyes, but eventually she grips back.
“Come on,” she says. “If we go against the river, we’ll know we’re going the right way.”
“What about Emma? Did you say goodbye?”
“I told you, Emma has enough to deal with.” Abigail leads the way, tugging him behind her. The branches paw at them as though trying to hold them back. “It’s better like this.”
Hunter can’t see her face, but he can hear it in her voice: she does not believe that.
“If we stay on course, we can be in Estes before sunrise and catch the first bus to Denver. No car, no trace, no nothing.” She adds, “Did you bring the gun, at least? The one you took from Rat’s place?”
He tries to ignore the little sting of at least, and tells her, yes, of course he did. “I don’t know about it, though. I’ve never shot a pistol before. I don’t see why we cou
ldn’t just take one of my dad’s hunting rifles.”
“He’d notice it was missing.”
“I guess.”
“You’d better let me have it. You’re a lousy shot.”
“You don’t really think we’re going to need it, though, do you?”
In the beam of the flashlight, he catches the look on her face as he hands her the gun.
“Hunter, we’re in the wild now.”
* * *
Samuel parks the truck among the trees, shutting off the lights and laying fallen branches over the windshield to prevent any reflective glare from the bonfire across the field. Kids are dancing among the stones that reach up out of the earth, like the devil’s fingers. He sees Abigail, her red hair brilliant in the firelight as she melts into the forest, and then, keeping to the trees, he slips around the Tall Bones to follow. The ground is still damp from the evening’s rain, and he presses his fingers into the instep of one of Abigail’s footprints. It isn’t the first time Samuel has had to track without being seen, and it’s easy enough to fall back into the old rhythm.
They come to a halt where trees give way to rocks at the edge of a steep drop, ten feet or so, where the river has worn away the earth. Even without the Maddox boy’s flashlight, Samuel can tell there are rapids below, the thundering rush filling up the gorge and pouring out into the woods. He watches from among the pines as the two kids lean up against a large boulder, stopping to catch their breath. The boy just seems tired, but Samuel recognizes in Abigail the kind of weariness that comes with hypervigilance. She twitches at every sound the forest makes. A bird taking off from a nearby tree makes her jump, and Hunter puts his arm around her. She is stiff for a moment, but eventually she relaxes against him.
“You’re not saving me, you know that, right?” she says. “You’re not saving me, you’re helping. There’s a difference.”
Samuel emerges then, while her defenses are down, striding into the clearing with his teeth bared. Abigail falters, her face white as the moon, grappling for something in her purse. The Maddox boy stands in front of her, arms raised, but there’s no conviction in his fists: he misses the first punch he tries to throw, and then Samuel grabs him by the shirtfront and thrusts him aside, kicking the boy’s ankles so that he falls on his face.
“Abigail!”
She has pulled out a gun, but Samuel grips her by the wrist and wrenches it from her, tearing off her shell-casing bracelet as he does so.
“Stop this, Abi, you hear me? Come on now, come home.”
She squirms in his grip, and then she tosses her head back and spits in his face. He lets go, only for a second, to wipe his eyes, but Abigail takes off toward the rocks.
“Don’t you run from me, girl! Don’t you dare turn your back on me!”
And in that moment he is no longer in the Colorado woods, but back in that clearing in So’n Tnh, rifle in hand, the laughter from the bar filtering into the night. He can see the whites of Hoa’s eyes as she pulls away from him and runs, bare feet crushing dead leaves. “Hey,” he yells, “don’t you run from me!” In that last second before he pulls the trigger, she looks over her shoulder and the fear he sees there is so certain he swears he can actually taste it: bitter, tangy on the back of the tongue, like licking a lemon with a cut in your mouth. The way she falls, the way she lies in the dust, he can still see those eyes. In support groups down the years, he will hear men say that they could not bear the eyes: the eyes always seemed to say something to them afterward. Samuel had no such epiphany—there was nothing in Hoa’s still, silent gaze: no anger, no blame, no forgiveness. But God forgave him, didn’t He? God understood. Samuel had to get rid of the evidence, he had to—what would his mother have said…?
When he looks again, the Vietnamese woman is gone, but Abigail is clutching her shoulder, a dark stain spreading under her hand.
Samuel makes a sound as though someone has punctured his lungs. Abigail looks from him to the Maddox boy, her eyes frighteningly wide, but in that last moment, when she turns back to him again, Samuel thinks he catches the hint of a smile pulling at the corner of her mouth. Maybe it is just a trick of the moonlight. A second later she is gone, over the edge of the rocks, lost to the thrashing water below.
* * *
He doesn’t know how long he crouches there on those rocks, the cold air from the river down below hitting his face as he calls her name to the water. It feels like a long time. His knees seem to think so, the way they click as he stands up at last. When he turns around, the Maddox boy is still there, sitting with his back against the foot of a pine tree, his legs drawn up to his chest, staring at the spot where Abigail had been, either too shaken or too stupid to move.
Samuel takes a slow breath, weighing up his options. He could shoot the boy as well. He could certainly do that. But that would also make Samuel the only real suspect the police could place here. That’s assuming they even get that far—bunch of inbred mountain folk in the Sheriff’s Department—but still. It never hurts to have a fallback plan, and this kid, he’s an easy read for Samuel.
He empties the remaining bullets into the river, wipes the empty gun down with his sleeve, and tosses it into Hunter’s lap on his way past. “There. Now you shot her.”
Hunter sits bolt upright as if Samuel has just handed him a live grenade, gripping the pistol and staring at him openmouthed. “But I didn’t shoot her; I would never…”
“I’m the only other person who knows that.”
The kid just gapes at him again, and Samuel thinks if this weren’t his boss’s son, he would have slammed that square jaw shut by now, knocked all of those too-straight teeth out.
“You want to get out of this town, don’t you, boy? You want to go to college? Can’t do that if you’re stuck in a cell somewhere, and I know what happens to boys like you in prison. Believe me, no amount of Daddy’s money’s going to help you in there.”
Hunter scrapes his hair back flat against his scalp. “Oh God… Oh, shit.”
“You breathe a word of this to anyone, and you’ll be learning how to make shivs out of your own toothbrushes for the next sixteen years.”
“But what about this? What do I do?” Hunter holds the gun up, fingers curled around the trigger, like he still almost thinks he could shoot it. He seems, to Samuel, like a man holding his own flaccid dick.
“You brought it. Not my problem.”
“No, you have to—”
“I don’t have to do anything, boy. But if you do as I say and keep your mouth shut, then maybe I’ll keep mine shut too.”
48
NOW
Dolly almost shoots Noah as he comes through the front door.
“Mom, Jesus Christ!”
She lowers the rifle, her whole body sagging with relief. She had been so certain when she heard the truck in the driveway that it was Samuel arriving home.
“What are you doing here? I tried your cell, but I thought you were at the hospital.”
“I was.” Noah is still eyeing the gun. “Then Emma told me about some weird phone call she got from Jude, and I started thinking… Hey, where is Jude? Is he okay?”
It’s been a long time since Noah got that kind of worry in his voice about his brother. Dolly might even be glad, if these were any other circumstances.
“He’s in the living room. Your dad broke his stick.”
“Where’s Dad now?”
She clutches the rifle to her chest, like some treasured keepsake. “I expect he’ll be here soon.”
In the living room Jude, sitting awkwardly on the couch, says, “You’re not really going to shoot him, are you?”
Dolly thinks about what he’d told her, about the things that happened in her own toolshed, in her own backyard. About what Abigail wrote on those torn-out pages.
“Mom, we should call the police.”
“With what evidence? A few scraps of a diary? What you thought you saw when it was dark?”
“I did see it.”
“Th
at won’t matter much to them, not without…” Without her body. Abigail’s poor body. It won’t be enough that she wrote it all out by hand (her dear little hands!), they won’t be satisfied unless they have a body to slice open and prod around inside.
“I don’t think the cops round here give a damn,” says Noah, and when Dolly looks at him, there is a real coldness about him that shouldn’t startle her, not after what he’s been through, but it does all the same. She has always said that, when he gets that hard look in his eye, he resembles his father.
Dolly clenches her jaw. Oh, my children, what have I made of you? But this is no time for self-pity. For now, she must steady herself with the cold-steel clarity that fury brings.
* * *
Samuel arrives not long after. They wait for him in the living room, and he walks in holding his buck knife and wearing the blood on his hands like a pair of red gloves.
“Well now, feels like I’ve been running around this whole mountain range looking for you, and here you all are.”
“Put down the knife,” Dolly says, gesturing with the rifle muzzle.
Noah is staring at his father’s hands. “Whose blood is that?”
Samuel looks down as if only just noticing it, but then he turns to Dolly instead, and she tightens her grip on the rifle.
“You haven’t earned the right to carry that,” he says. “Put it down before you break something.”
“You don’t get to speak to me like that, not anymore.”
“You’re angry, Dolly, I can see that.”
“I’m past angry. Now put the knife down, Samuel.”
He gets a strange look on his face, almost as if he’s smiling at her, and in an exaggerated gesture, he places the knife at his feet and holds his hands up.
Take him outside. That is what she has decided. Take him outside so the boys don’t have to see. They have been witness to enough.