by Candice Fox
‘I could go first, then we put her in the shower.’ Homer gestured towards the back of the house, the bedrooms beyond, as cool and calm as a man talking about arrangements to borrow a car. ‘Then you go.’
‘I like to go first.’
‘So do I, and I caught her.’
‘Yeah, but you wouldn’t have caught her without me. Your ass would probably still be wandering around the desert if I hadn’t led you out of there. This is my payback,’ Kradle said.
Homer licked his lips. Kradle forced a pleasant smile.
‘Okay.’ Homer shrugged. ‘Whatever you want, buddy. Just don’t tire her out.’
‘You might think about taking that shower,’ Kradle ventured. ‘You smell like a dead dog. It would be nicer on her.’
‘Watch it.’ Homer elbowed him, hard, in the ribs. Kradle’s legs were numb as he walked into the kitchen and picked up Shondra from the tiles. The woman wriggled and screamed in his arms as he carried her to a bedroom and dropped her on the bed, slamming the door closed behind them.
CHAPTER 14
Keeps watched the desert roll by, one wrist on the top of the steering wheel, fingers resting on the dashboard. He slouched in the seat, eyelids low. Celine was gripping her jeans, sitting bolt upright, watching the mountains in the distance, which didn’t seem to be getting any closer.
‘Is this as fast as you can go?’
‘This is as fast as I wanna go.’ Keeps glanced at her. ‘I ain’t enthused about going any faster. I hate Mesquite. My ex-girlfriend is from Mesquite. She stole my CD player. The deal was I’d be chillin’ in your hot tub, drinking your beer, while you stayed out searching for these losers, not driving you around. Do I look like Morgan Freeman to you?’
‘I haven’t slept in twenty-four hours. It’s not safe for me to drive. And I don’t have a hot tub.’
‘I’m pretty sure one was mentioned.’
‘Nope.’
‘Fuck my life.’ Keeps sighed, shook his head. ‘So, tell me again about this guy? He blew his wife away?’
‘The wife was some kind of eccentric,’ Celine said. ‘Christine Hammond. They met while she was in Louisiana, hunting ghosts. She was a paranormal investigator, I suppose you’d say.’
‘You’re shittin’ me.’
‘No shit. If you heard bumps in the night, she would roll in with her bag of tricks and work out what kind of bogeyman you were hosting. Splash some snake oil around, try to kick it out of your house.’
‘People can make a living doing that?’ Keeps asked, smiling.
‘I think it was Kradle who kept them afloat. He was a handy man. Builder. Plumber. Mechanic. Jack of all trades. Her family was wealthy but I don’t think they supported her. Ghost hunting wasn’t really in the family line,’ Celine said.
‘You know all this how?’
‘I looked real close at the case when we took him in five years ago.’
‘You do that with all the row guys?’
‘Only the true assholes.’
‘So why’d he blast her?’ Keeps asked. ‘The wife. Money troubles?’
‘I think he just snapped,’ Celine said. ‘That’s what they do, these family annihilators.’
‘Oh jeez, they have a term for it.’ Keeps laughed to himself.
‘There’s a pattern,’ Celine said. ‘The pressure builds and builds and builds, and they just snap and kill everyone. Financial pressure will do it. Maybe a sickness in the family or a recent loss. I think they were hard-up for cash, but I also I think his relationship with her family wasn’t great. And she had taken off from their marriage and gone missing for fifteen years.’
‘Fifteen years?’
‘She walked out the day the baby was born.’ Celine said. ‘Left the hospital. Went into hiding. You’re trying to tell me she felt safe with him?’
‘Maybe she just didn’t want to be a mom.’ Keeps shrugged. ‘Maybe it wasn’t him.’
‘It was him, trust me.’
‘So why’d she come back, if she felt so unsafe?’
‘I don’t know. But she was back for less than three months before he killed her, and her sister, and the kid.’
Keeps’s mouth twisted, and stayed twisted. Celine sat watching it, waiting for it to untwist. It didn’t.
‘What?’
‘I don’t know.’ Keeps shrugged one shoulder again, the way he’d been doing for the whole conversation. Celine’s blood was heating up, just watching that shoulder lift up and flop down, as if what they were talking about was no big deal. ‘Something ain’t right.’
‘What ain’t right?’
‘The guy sounds like a pretty straight-up dude,’ Keeps said. ‘He builds things. Fixes things. Makes the money while she flutters around doing her ghosty-ghosty shit. Then she drops a baby on him and bounces out of town for fifteen years? Who raised the baby?’
‘He did.’
‘Yeah, see?’ Keeps clicked his tongue. ‘He didn’t kill her. Kind of guy who would take a bitch back after all that wouldn’t turn around three months later and kill her.’
‘Why don’t you just trust me on this, okay?’ Celine patted his shoulder. ‘I looked at the case. They found him standing on the lawn, soaked in the blood of all three victims, covered in gunshot residue and gasoline, watching the house burn to the ground.’ She straightened in her seat, but for some reason couldn’t find the same level of comfort she’d had only minutes earlier. ‘I know John Kradle. He’s not a nice guy.’
Kradle tried to pin her down. It didn’t work. He shoved the wriggling, screaming, kicking Shondra off the bed and onto the carpet, on her stomach, held her head down, and put his lips to her ear.
‘Stop!’ he rasped. ‘Stop, stop, stop! Listen to me! You’ve gotta listen!’
She stopped fighting and broke into furious sobs.
‘I’m going to let you go,’ he said. He ripped off her shirt. The cheap restaurant uniform shirt gave way easily, the buttons popping, seams cracking as the stitches burst. It became a rag in his hands with one hard yank. ‘You have to do exactly as I say. Understand?’
Shondra’s sobs ebbed slightly. They both listened, panting, as, at the front of the house, the pipes squeaked and water hit tiles.
‘You’re going to get up,’ Kradle said, ripping the tape from her wrists and ankles. ‘And you’re going to hit me.’
He climbed off her. Shondra scrambled backwards into the side of the bed, reached for the tape around her mouth, found it hopelessly wound around her skull three or four times. Her cheeks bulged as she watched Kradle tug the clock radio from its socket in the wall behind the nightstand.
‘Hit me with this.’ He handed it to her. ‘Then climb out the window and run for your fucking life.’
He stood. Shondra got awkwardly to her feet. Her trousers were soaked in urine. Kradle could smell it. Her left breast had snuck sideways from her bra, the strap broken and the underwire cutting into the flesh of her ribs. He tried to take a step towards her but she backed away, almost fell on the bed.
‘Hit me!’ He gestured to his face. ‘Come on. Come on! We don’t have time. You’ve got to do this. I can’t do it myself!’
Shondra gathered up the cord of the clock radio, wouldn’t meet his eyes with her own. Her whole body was shaking, a hard, bent, uncontrollable quivering.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ Kradle snarled. ‘Hit—’
The movement was too fast for him to follow. There was no build-up, no swing. She lashed out with the device from her centre like a basketballer making a chest pass, the clock radio crunching into his temple as he tried to twist away. His knees hit the carpet, the room tilting.
‘Okay.’ He gripped his face. ‘That was—’
She was on him. Beating down savagely with the device, knocking the radio on his forearms and elbows as he raised them to defend himself; her face turned away, swift, blind, brutal downward force. A second passed in which Kradle might have blacked out. He held on to the carpet as the room spun and dipped around him, an
d the woman named Shondra climbed through the bedroom window and disappeared.
Homer was there suddenly. Damp but dressed, lifting Kradle up by his arms and shaking him.
‘What the fuck? What the fuck, man?’
‘Oh! Whoa!’ Kradle was suddenly awake, snapped back into self-preservation mode. ‘She got me. She got me!’
‘Get up.’ Homer wrenched him to his feet, pushed him towards the door. ‘Get packing.’
1999
‘Suit yourself.’
Celine tried to grip on to those words as she hugged the cold, dry hardwood pillar in the crawlspace under the porch. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to visualise her arms, hands, fingers folding around the two words, pulling the letters into her chest, clinging on. Suit yourself. Suit yourself. Because the teenager knew that if she didn’t hang onto those words as if they were a rope dangling above a cavern, she would fall. The other words, the other sounds, would creep back to her. Sounds from an hour earlier, when her grandfather turned away from her and walked up the porch steps and into the house, brought his rifle down from his shoulder and aimed it.
‘Jesus, Nick, what are you—’
Cha-chick. Boom.
‘Oh my. Oh my. Oh my god. Oh oh oh—’
Cha-chick. Boom.
‘Dad! Dad, stop! Dad!’
Cha-chick. Boom.
Cha-chick. Boom.
Celine gripped the pillar, hugged it with her knees, opened her eyes and looked across the dark space beneath the porch where she had hidden when the firing started. The dirt was lined with thin, gold pinstripes from the midday sun. She could see legs out there. Every time she opened her eyes there were more of them. Men going to the barn. Men assembling at the driveway fence. Men walking up the steps into the house.
She had seen two faces in all the time she crouched there, holding on to the porch pillar. The face of a police officer who bent and vomited into her grandmother’s garden of purple petunias after returning from the barn. And the face of a paramedic who lay on his belly now, ten yards from her, his hand outstretched towards her.
‘Celine,’ he’d been saying gently, over and over, ‘it’s safe now. He’s gone. We’ve got him. Okay? He’s locked up. He can’t hurt you. Celine, come towards me. Let me help you out of there.’
Celine knew it wasn’t safe. Her splintered, ticking, writhing mind knew that much. Her grandparents’ neighbours were at the edge of the driveway, their dog going nuts, Michael staring at the dirt, Paula weeping madly, wringing her hair, recounting how she’d heard the shots and thought it was the boys fooling around. How she’d seen Nick’s truck speeding away, the eerie feeling that gave her. How she’d gone over and seen Celine’s father crawl out onto the porch and die on the steps. Celine listened as the shooting unfolded again over the telephone; a set of boots on the opposite side of the porch to the paramedic, walking back and forth, dropping a cigarette every now and then.
‘He just walked into the station,’ the cop said, ‘and put the rifle on the counter in front of the sergeant and said what he’d done, plain as that. That’s what they’re telling me. No, sir, I’m at the house. Oh, bad. Yeah. Yeah, bad. Seven, maybe eight. And five kids. He just went through and . . . one at a time. Everybody. Fucking everybody. Just . . . There’s one left. A girl. Seventeen. She’s under the porch. No. Nope. No. They’re gonna give her a minute or two and then go in and pull her out, I think.’
‘Celine,’ the paramedic said. Celine squeezed her eyes shut and gripped the pillar tighter. She heard him shuffling forwards on his belly in the dirt, coming into a crouch, crawling towards her. He was going to pull her out, like the cop on the phone said, and a piece of her mind was screaming with fury at that. At being pulled into the reality of it all before she was ready. Because, under the porch, it wasn’t real. Above her head, above the creaking wooden boards, out there in the sunlight of the Georgia day, her little cousins were still playing in the barn, and her grandfather was rattling around the house somewhere, growling at people, and her mom and nanna and aunty were making salad. It was still just a day. Christmas Day.
CHAPTER 15
Old Axe had seen The Wizard of Oz plenty of times during his four decades staring at tiny, convex TV screens in prison cells at night. In his experience, most correctional facilities in Nevada had pretty shitty movie collections, county jails being the worst. Any violence had to be chopped out, so anything half-decent, like murder mysteries, could lose twenty minutes or more. No boobs, no butts, no kids in swimsuits, either. You didn’t have to chop anything out of The Wizard of Oz or The Sound of Music or Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Some of the kid-heavy films tended to rattle the fiddlers, but theirs was a quiet, harmless kind of unrest. Oz was a safe, universal prison classic.
Axe had been thinking about Dorothy stepping out of her black-and-white world and into that magical, shiny new place as he trundled through the desert sand towards the Joshua tree. The tree itself was taller than he’d anticipated, weird bristled fingers gripping a handful of blue sky. Worth the walk. He’d decided to keep wandering north, and stopped a few times to look at almost mystically beautiful rocks, cacti, scrubby plants. He halted at the sight of a spotted lizard, and put his hands in his pockets and watched it watching him for a while. Axe the alien on a new and pristine planet. He came across a Coke can shining like a diamond, its light drawing him from about half a mile away. The air tasted different and the world seemed unfathomably big.
One of those flying drone machines did buzz over his head just before nightfall, but it didn’t descend to check him out or give him any orders. He let the breeze direct him, having no real intentions, feeling jubilant for the first time in a long time. He slept under the stars, woke under them, too. His ears kept presenting him with phantom sounds, the way that solid ground must lie to sailors for a week or so after a long stint at sea, he guessed. He heard someone call out his name and turned to find only emptiness behind him. He heard the peal of the chow bell and the clatter of feet on the steel steps outside his cell.
After a while, he hit an unlined road. He saw an animal, so pancaked and sunbaked he couldn’t tell which was the head or tail, or what it had once been. He turned to his left, because the wind was going that way, and kept on.
When he heard the sound of a vehicle behind him, he figured it would be a prison van or sheriff or someone coming to take him back. He stopped, and the car pulled over, too far behind him to make any sense. Axe turned to look.
An RV was sitting on the shoulder, two women in the front seats, leaning together, talking. There were more people in the back. Axe waited. Nothing happened. The RV’s engine hummed. The desert gaped. In the distance, he could see something tracking across the sky – either a drone close by or a helicopter far away. Axe waited another moment or two, then turned and continued trundling. The RV came up and slowed alongside him.
He saw that the two young people in the front weren’t women but long-haired men. Axe hadn’t seen this kind of honey-brown suntanned faces, bleached eyelashes and flowing, golden hair on men since the 1960s. He noticed surfboards on top of the RV and clumps of sea grass in the wheel wells.
The vehicle stopped, and still nothing happened. He realised the kid closest to him, with his elbow hanging out the window, was listening to an argument in the cabin.
‘Might be a crazy-ass serial killer or something!’
‘Come on. Come on, Manny! Where’s your sense of fuckin’ adventure?’
‘He’s an old man. What’s he gonna do?’
‘If we leave him out here he’ll probably die.’
‘There’s only one of him and five of us.’
‘Dude.’ The sun-speckled kid in the window grinned at Axe. ‘Dude, hey. All this shit on the radio about a breakout. Is it true?’
Axe brushed dust off the chest of his prison denims, examined them.
‘Seems like it,’ he said. They were the first words he’d uttered to someone outside a prison since before the man he was t
alking to was born.
‘You, like’—the man paused to laugh at his own daring, or maybe at the absurdity of it all—‘you want a ride with us?’
Axe thought about it. Sucked air down the sides of his teeth and examined the horizon. When he turned back, the window was crowded with young, apprehensive faces – curious, scared, excited, he didn’t know.
‘Guess so.’ Axe shrugged.
The young people looked at each other.
‘Are you dangerous?’ a girl asked from the back of the huddle.
Again, Axe thought about it. About the truth and how well it had served him in his life.
‘Nope,’ he said.
The back door of the RV popped open. Axe went to it, climbed aboard with some difficulty. The air conditioning enveloped him, as did the scent of weed. He was standing in a cluttered kitchenette. Dirty plates. Wooden knife block on the counter, full of shiny blade handles. One of those flat-panel computers he’d seen on TV was lying on an armchair, its cover flipped open and screen blank.
‘I can’t believe we’re doing this,’ someone giggled. Axe moved the computer carefully and sat down in the armchair. All the young people were grinning. The RV started up and rumbled back onto the road.
‘You want a drink, old man?’ a girl asked.
‘Sure,’ Axe said.
When in Oz, he thought.
1999
He didn’t believe in all the ghost stuff. But he showed up anyway. He figured that was what you did when you loved someone. You nodded and laughed and chipped in with a ‘She’s right, you know. I’ve seen it!’ occasionally. You held the camera steady and let her do her thing, and it wasn’t as though she didn’t do the same for him now and then, though it was usually a ladder she was holding, and his thing mostly ended up getting her crazy mad and covered in leaves or dirt. He sold the houseboat and made enough cash to buy a decent car, and they took her show on the road, answering emails that came through a webpage she’d been clever enough to cook up.