Fearless

by Mike Dellosso

  Their house was only fifteen minutes from the store on a good day. But now fifteen minutes seemed like ten hours, and he didn’t have that kind of time. As he pressed the accelerator between traffic lights, the engine whined and the speedometer needle climbed.

  And as each minute passed the sense of fear in him, the warning light, the blinking, blinking, intensified. He couldn’t go fast enough, couldn’t get home quick enough. They could be there right now, knocking on the door, kicking it in, busting the windows.

  Drawing in a deep breath, Jim told himself to settle down; he was overreacting. No one would be stupid enough to be so bold in broad daylight. But people did crazy things when they had no sane alternatives left, and desperation had made a fool—and a violent fool—out of more than one man.

  Finally he turned onto his street. The accelerator went to the floor, and half a mile later he was hitting the brakes and turning into his driveway. There were no other cars there. The windows were all intact and closed. The front door was in one piece and also closed.

  Jim shut off the engine and exited the car, leaving the groceries for later. He looked around, wiped sweat from his brow and chin. They lived on a semi-remote road where the homes were spaced far apart. Behind and to the left of their home was farmland, ripe with soy beans, and to the right was the home of the Murrays, a retired couple who mostly kept to themselves. But the Murrays’ home was a good hundred yards away and blocked from view by a row of tall spirea.

  He scanned the area again, checking the shrubs around the house, the trees, the roofline. Above the roof the sky was darkening. He didn’t think they were calling for rain today. But the area was clear, not a soul around. And that’s what bothered him.

  At the door Jim checked the knob and found it unlocked. The tingling was there again, covering his arms and neck and upper chest like sand being poured over his skin. He turned the knob and pushed open the door, listening for the unfamiliar sound of scurrying feet or the click of a handgun’s hammer. But he was met with silence, as still as any cave buried deep beneath a mountain.

  Entering the house, Jim left the front door cracked. He and his family might need to make a quick escape out of it, and he wanted to be prepared. In the living room he looked around for anything that might appear out of place, but there was nothing. All was as it should be in the Spencer home. The kitchen was no different. The back door was also unlocked. It led to a brick patio that overlooked the yard, which led to a harvested field and abutted the woods.

  Jim thought of the murders that had been reported. Six so far. He checked the first-floor bathroom and found it also empty and undisturbed. At the bottom of the staircase he stopped and rested his hand on the railing. He really should take a weapon with him. What if the murderer was here in his house? What if the murders were somehow tied to the sudden arrival of Louisa and the two parallel strands finally merged? Back in the kitchen he grabbed a wood-handled chef ’s knife.

  Jim took the steps to the second floor one at a time, careful to avoid the loose boards and invoke a squeak that would alert any intruder to his presence. In the hallway he stood still and listened.

  First he checked the bathroom, then the nursery. The bathroom was undisturbed, but the nursery had been messed with. Two boxes sat open on the floor. The walls had been stripped of all pictures, and near the crib lay a framed photo of a pregnant Amy, the glass broken out of it and lying in pieces across the carpeted floor.

  Jim’s heart began to race faster, beating so forcefully that he feared it would be heard from another room. He left the nursery and turned to his office. The desk hadn’t been moved; the bookshelves appeared untouched. Everything was as it should be.

  Lastly the bedroom. The door was closed, and Jim had to force himself to open it. Holding the knife high, pushing images of a bloodied bed from his mind, Jim leaned his shoulder against the door as he pushed it open. It swung on silent hinges. His heart was in his mouth, and his palms sweated. At any moment he expected to be charged by a crouching invader. But the room was quiet, the shades turned down, the bed covers intact and unmarred.

  They were gone. Abducted? Murdered? Jim’s mind raced for an explanation, one that didn’t include death. Even as tears pooled in his eyes and his hands began to shake, he scolded himself for jumping to conclusions. Just because they weren’t home didn’t mean they’d been forced to leave, or worse.

  He stepped out of the bedroom and said, “Amy?” His voice seemed to echo throughout the house and bounce off the walls as it would in a great subterranean cavern.

  No answer came. Again, “Amy.” This time louder. “Louisa.”

  It was clear the house was empty, the doors unlocked, the nursery left a mess. Something was wrong. Descending the stairs in a hurry, digging in his pocket for his cell phone, he was startled by the front door opening.

  Amy and Louisa entered, smiling. But their smiles disappeared when they saw him.

  “What’s the matter?” Amy said. His fear and concern must have been obvious. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”

  “Where’ve you been?” He put his phone back in his pocket.

  “We went for a walk. What is it? What happened?”

  “Nothing. I came home and you weren’t here. The doors were unlocked. I thought . . . what happened in the nursery?”

  “Oh, that. The picture.” Amy glanced at Louisa and smiled. “Louisa and I were doing some packing and that picture fell, hit the crib, and shattered. We both needed some fresh air, so I thought we’d go for a walk then clean it up when we got back. You didn’t cut yourself, did you?”

  “No, nothing like that.” Jim went to them and wrapped his arms around both of them. “I’m just glad you’re both okay.”

  “Why wouldn’t we be, Mr. Jim?” Louisa said.

  “Oh, I don’t know. No reason.” And while his heart had settled, Jim still felt a vague and weighty foreboding. It was as if a storm were coming, a great tempest with churning black clouds and rumbles of thunder, and he needed to do something to prepare but lacked the knowledge to complete the task.

  Jim kissed Louisa on the head and Amy on the lips. “I’m just glad you’re both home and okay, that’s all.”

  Chapter 45

  THE BASEMENT SEEMED cooler than usual, damper too. With the approaching storm inching closer, bringing an armada of dark, chiseled clouds, the air outside had grown damp and thick with the smell of ozone. Mitch stood at the top of the stairs, holding another frozen pizza he’d tossed in the oven, and shivered. He didn’t want to face the Appletons, didn’t want to talk to them. Their encounter yesterday had left him shaken and irritable. He didn’t like talking about his past and stirring up all those memories and feelings he’d so carefully and diligently packed away.

  And then there was the issue with the Harmans. Mitch wasn’t expecting Frederick to be there. Taking a family like that had left him feeling uneasy. It was too personal, too intimate. The look on Betsy’s face when the knife found her husband’s abdomen would stay with Mitch for a very long time, maybe forever. But she had respected him, hadn’t she? My, how she’d respected him. At the moment he stuck her and she squealed so softly he felt like God. He held her life in his hands, and she knew it. That was a feeling he could get used to. It was respect he deserved.

  Descending the steps slowly, balancing the pizza in one hand, a pitcher of water in the other, Mitch held his breath and counted off the steps. Fifteen in all. The steps creaked beneath his weight. At the bottom of the staircase a musty odor met him, and he almost turned and went back upstairs.

  Clare was first to speak as Mitch approached the room.

  “Hello, Mitch,” she said. She looked worn and older than she had yesterday. Her hair was uncombed and her clothes wrinkled and stained. Had they looked like that all along? He couldn’t remember. If they did, he hadn’t noticed, or maybe he hadn’t wanted to notice.

  Mitch opened the door and handed Clare the pizza, Bob the pitcher of water.

  “Are
you okay?” Clare tilted her head to the side.

  Mitch said nothing. He turned to retreat, leaving the door open, but stopped when she spoke again. “What did your father do?”

  With his back to the Appletons, Mitch closed his eyes as the memory burst in like a backdraft. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and he bit his lower lip.

  “Mitch? Turn around.” Clare was using her motherly tone with him.

  He didn’t, but neither did he move for the steps. He was stuck to the floor, unable to advance, to get away from the memory, from Clare’s voice, from his story that needed—begged—to be told. He’d been such a wounded child, scarred in so many ways.

  “Mitch.” Clare again. “Please, turn around.”

  For some reason he was unaware of, he felt compelled to turn, to face her and her lovely eyes and warm smile. She was not your average farmer’s wife. Slowly he turned, still biting his lip, almost drawing blood from it.

  “Tell us, Mitch.” Her voice was soft and comforting, a mother’s voice caressing the wounded spirit of her child. Mitch never heard that voice in his own mother. From her there was never anything but sarcasm and cynicism and scorn. Dummy. Never any love, never any kindness or encouragement. Dummy. She was not like Clare Appleton at all. DUMMY!

  “He set me on fire.” He’d put the match to Mitch’s pant leg and waited for his son to scream before extinguishing it. Then he moved to the other pant leg. Over and over he repeated the act, and over and over fear so clutched Mitch that he nearly passed out. All the while his father laughed and taunted him while waving the box of matches in the air. “But that wasn’t the only thing he did, and it certainly wasn’t the worst.” Mitch drilled Clare with an icy stare, daring her to react or cower away in disgust.

  Instead a tear formed in Clare’s eye and spilled down her cheek. “You poor boy.” To her left Bob bowed his head.

  “Don’t feel sorry for me. It only made me stronger, more determined.” And it had. He’d risen above his disadvantaged circumstances, clawed his way out of the hell he’d been born into, and actually made something of himself. Which is why he deserved the respect he’d not been freely given until now.

  “But the wounds, the weight you carry.” She dashed the tears from her cheek.

  “It’s made me stronger,” he repeated.

  Bob looked up. “But at what cost?”

  Mitch said nothing. The cost had been great, he knew that, and the price continued to rise. But to him it was a price worth paying.

  “Look what you’ve become,” Bob said. “Look what your hatred has done to you.”

  Mitch clenched his jaw. He didn’t like Bob the farmer judging him, casting a condescending look down his nose. He stepped forward. “My hatred has fueled my drive, made me who I am today. You don’t know how hard I fought to put that behind me.”

  Clare took a step out of the room. Bob placed a hand on her arm, but she cast him a look that said everything was okay, she knew what she was doing. “But it’s not behind you, is it?”

  It wasn’t. She was right, and Mitch hated that fact. The memories haunted him almost constantly. Hatred and anger still boiled inside him. His rage was sometimes uncontrollable.

  “Is it?” She was pushing him now, challenging him, and it made Mitch angry.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  Clare took another step forward, her hands clasped at her chest. Tears leaked from her eyes now, and she sniffed rhythmically. “Your heart is so hard, so full of need and vengeance. You’re miserable, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t need this,” Mitch said.

  Bob put a hand on the doorjamb. “Clare—”

  But she ignored him. “You need to forgive your father. You need to let this go and move on.”

  “Forgive him?” Mitch’s anger was now in its full, thorny bloom. He stepped closer to Clare, tightening his fists. His muscles were taut, bringing out more of a sweat on his forehead and neck. The musty odor of the basement mingled with the smell of the pizza and turned his stomach. His eye twitched uncontrollably. “You think I just need to forgive that monster and get over it? Like it’s that easy?”

  Clare stood her ground. If she feared him, she did not show it. For her part, though, she showed him no disrespect. “Forgiveness is never easy. But it’s necessary.”

  Mitch huffed. “Necessary. There’s only one thing that’s necessary for me now.” Getting the respect he so well deserved.

  She eyed him without blinking. “Forgiveness is the only way to find freedom, Mitch.”

  “Oh, I can think of a hundred ways to find freedom.”

  “And every one of them will be wrong.”

  Before he realized what he’d done, Mitch’s hand had left his side and contacted Clare’s face along her cheekbone and temple area. She let out a weak grunt and tipped to the side, stumbling into the furnace first then the wall. Bob rushed to her side and steadied her.

  Mitch pointed at the open door to the room. “Get back in there, both of you.”

  Bob helped Clare into the room. She held the side of her face and winced. At the door she turned and faced Mitch. He didn’t want her to; he couldn’t look her in the eyes. His temper had flashed in a burst of flames. The violence had come on so suddenly he hadn’t time to extinguish it.

  “Get in,” he said, his voice quivering with the aftershocks of his outburst.

  “Mitch . . . ” She reached out her hand for his.

  He pulled away.

  “I forgive you.”

  “Get in.” He didn’t want to hear that, didn’t want to hear anything she had to say. Forgiveness was an escape for the weak, for those too timid to face their demons and take them head-on.

  Bob and Clare finally obeyed, and Mitch closed and locked the door behind them. He’d return later, after he calmed himself, to give them their visit to the bathroom.

  Still shaking, Mitch headed upstairs, where he proceeded to take out the remaining portion of his anger on the furniture in the study. His rage was so hot, so fueled by frustration and disgust and hatred, that he scarcely knew what he was doing. Glass shattered, wood splintered, books soared through the air and collided with lamps and wall hangings. His vision blurred, and sweat poured down his back and chest.

  Finally, exhausted and spent, Mitch collapsed in the middle of the floor and turned his mind loose. He’d known joy once. When he was sixteen, his father kicked him out of the house, told him to pack his duffel bag and get out of his sight. Mitch went to live with his grandparents on their farm. There, for the first time in his life, he experienced love. They were good people, kind, giving, compassionate. His grandfather taught him how to find his way through a toolbox, how to work with pride, how to be a man. His grandmother was the only real mother he ever knew. But it had only lasted a year. Right after Mitch turned seventeen, they were both killed in a car accident and he became a ward of the state and placed in a foster home where he was once again neglected and ignored.

  Mitch slumped and rested his wrists on his knees. His heart still pumped out a rapid rhythm. Around him lay almost the entire library, books splayed with pages torn like so many broken-winged birds, grounded and dead. The coffee table lay on its side, two legs busted clean off. A wingback chair was pushed over, its feet in the air like sun-swollen roadkill. One picture remained on the walls, a painting of Secretariat, and it hung precariously from one corner. Below him, in the basement, he could hear Clare crying.

  At that moment Mitch Albright hated himself.

  Chapter 46

  SUNSET CAME EARLY, quickened by the rutted ceiling of swollen thunderheads that had moved in and hovered over the town of Virginia Mills like an alien craft waiting for the opportune time to set lasers to annihilate. Jim stood on his front porch, arms crossed, and looked up at the clouds. Lightning flashed horizontally through them, illuminating the angles of their underbelly, but did not break from their atmospheric home and descend to earth. Thunder rumbled like the growl of mighty tu
rbines. Soon enough the clouds would open, and the world around this small, unassuming town would be drenched by an autumn deluge.

  Inside, Amy and Louisa played a game of Uno at the kitchen table. All three of them felt the impending storm, and it was so much more than the clouds above them. Earlier in the afternoon Louisa had asked him if he was afraid.

  “Of what?” he said.

  “Of them,” she replied. “People will do crazy things when they think they deserve something.”

  She was right. Trouble was coming, and people would no doubt do some pretty crazy things. Jim could only hope the promise of rain and lots of it would ward off any troublemakers. Doug Miller told him not to hesitate to call for help if he even felt like trouble was brewing. “Better to call and be safe than not to and be sorry,” he’d said.

  At exactly nine o’clock the first wave of cars arrived and parked along the road at the edge of Jim’s property. The Buchers, Bakers, and Teals were there, along with a couple other families Jim didn’t recognize. Jim rose from his chair as if to greet guests he’d been waiting on and positioned himself at the top of the porch’s stairs.

  The small crowd crossed his yard and huddled near the sidewalk. Charlie Bucher and Reed Teal broke away and approached the porch.

  “Charlie,” Jim said, “what are you all doing here?”

  “You know why we’re here,” Charlie said. He walked up to the steps as if he were going to shake Jim’s hand but crossed his arms instead. “There’s more comin’, you know. We all got somethin’ wrong with us, somethin’ that needs a-healin’.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t do this.”

  “They’re comin’,” Charlie said. “Ain’t nothin’ gonna stop ’em now, ’cept that girl in there.” He pointed toward the open door.

  Jim crossed the porch, opened the storm door, and pulled closed the heavy front door. His action would be interpreted as an act of defiance, and that was exactly what he wanted. These people needed to know he stood between them and his wife and Louisa.