Colleen opened the book. A hand written note was scrawled beneath Lolita in blunt, graceless letters:
Beautiful Sally-
A little too young for my tastes, but here she is, my bride. I hope you enjoy it again. Maybe you can read your favorite passage to me one day. You will come to love me as I love you.
Huff
“He was a sick bastard,” Sally said.
“Yeah,” Colleen said.
“How are you?”
“I’ll live,” Colleen said, looking down. She could still feel the knife in her hand.
“You did good.”
Colleen’s voice dropped. “I don’t think I’ll ever get over it.”
She frowned, fell silent.
Sally looked down at the book in her hands.
“Kimberly hated it.”
“What?” Sally asked, and then a look of realization flashed across her face. “Oh, this. Yeah.” She nodded, and the look in her eyes went a little distant. Colleen could tell that she was thinking about the book, not about everything else.
“Yeah. Some people do, but I think there’s something beautiful about it. And the language. You’ve never heard a blow job described like that.”
Colleen smiled. “My high school lit teacher said that the main guy—”
“Humbert Humbert. Crazy name.”
“Yeah—she said that Humbert was Europe, and that Lolita was America, that the whole thing was a metaphor.”
“For old Europe fucking young America?”
“I don’t know,” Colleen said, and it was true. She wasn’t sure what her teacher had meant, based on her limited knowledge of the novel.
“It makes sense, I guess,” Sally said, looking genuinely surprised. “Never thought of that.”
“How are you feeling?”
Sally shrugged. “I feel fine, I guess.” The look on her face changed. Before, there’d been a touch of hope, perhaps something like good cheer, but now there was nothing. “I’m a little worried.”
“About?”
“Everything. He was pretty messed up, wasn’t he?”
“Who?”
“Samson.”
“Oh,” Colleen said. “Yeah.”
“Huff put a hurting on him?”
“He did. A serious hurting.”
“Maybe he won’t be back,” Sally said, her eyes downcast. She picked at the spine of her book for a second, looked up, and attempted a smile.
“Maybe,” Colleen said, but like the smile on Sally’s face, Colleen held little hope.
“Ooo,” Sally said, letting go of the book and gripping her stomach.
“Should I get her?” Colleen asked, meaning Mathilda.
“It’ll pass,” Sally said, her face scrunched into a pained knot. As Colleen watched, Sally relaxed, smiled. “See?”
“I’m still worried.”
“I’ve done this before,” Sally said. “Now get out and let me read a bit. America and Europe, huh?”
“Tell me if you need anything.”
“Huh.”
“I mean it.” Colleen left. She locked herself in the bathroom for a little while. She cried, pressing her face into a towel to muffle the sound of her weeping.
The kids were happy to see her. Little Huff stomped over to where she stood, demanded to be held, his small hands opening and closing at the ends of his outstretched arms. She scooped him up, and he rested his head upon her shoulder and sighed.
“Hey, Mama Colleen.” Lissa said, flashing an awkward but endearing smile—a mix of baby teeth, grownup teeth, and missing teeth.
“Hello.”
One of the twins—Colleen could not tell Jack from David—sat quietly pushing wooden blocks back and forth upon the rug while the other tossed an orange foam basketball to Lissa. Laughing, she encouraged the boy, told him how much of a good job he’d done.
The little blond laughed. Lissa rolled the ball toward him, and after much fumbling he seized it and threw it at his brother. It struck the other child’s face and bounced to the floor, vanishing beneath the bed. Both boys laughed, and the one who’d thrown the ball ran to the bed and tossed himself to the floor, wriggled the upper half of his body beneath the bed in search of his lost ball.
“I’m scared,” Lissa said.
“I know. I am too.”
“Mama Thilda said something bad happened.”
“Yes,” Colleen said. “A lot of bad things have happened.”
“What?”
Damn this kid. The look in her eyes, the tone of her voice—there was nothing childish about either. She was a child, but speaking to her now was like speaking to a woman, someone who knew and understood the gravity of adult life. For a second, Colleen considered telling the girl just what was what, but then she remembered Daniel when he was nine or ten. A natural mimic, like all kids, he could do a fairly mean grownup imitation, despite the fact that he was a child who cried when he skinned his knee and sometimes wet the bed.
“It’s nothing for you to worry about,” Colleen said, and the girl stared at her, blinking, her face now entirely unreadable.
“You promise?”
Colleen tried not to miss a beat: “You betcha.”
“Okay,” Lissa said, and she was just a little girl again, no imitative mask of maturity, just a small girl of seven who still believed what the grownups in her life told her.
Little Huff gurgled nonsense into Colleen’s ear, writhing to be set free. She eased him to the floor, and he wobbled away, dropping to all fours and vanishing beneath the crib in which the nameless boy slept. She was happy to be rid of him—an irrational feeling, she knew, but no less real. They were all Huff’s children, as far as she knew or could tell, but he was the only one to bear the man’s name.
The twin who’d taken the ball to the face had gone back to playing with blocks, and his far more adventurous brother scooted out from under the bed with smears of dust on his shirt and the ball in his hand.
“Got it!” He yelled, looking up at Colleen and flashing a lunatic grin.
“Hey,” she said, “look at that,” and clapped.
The boy chortled and once more tossed the ball at his brother. It bounced off his forehead, and this time the other boy bunched his face into a red knot and screamed.
Colleen helped to calm the child, and when he returned to his blocks Colleen excused herself, said that she had to check in on Mama Sally.
“Will you be back?” Lissa asked, and Colleen realized that she didn’t really like the girl. There was nothing specific, and Lissa certainly seemed sincere, but there was something else, a know-it-all-quality that Colleen associated with kids from her childhood, kids she hadn’t liked, for whatever reasons children have for not liking other children.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll come back.”
“Good,” Lissa said, proceeding to make Colleen feel like shit: “I love you so much, Mama Colleen. I’m glad you came.”
Mama Sally was fine, drifting off to sleep with a pained look on her face. Her contractions were roughly thirty minutes apart now, and the window was easing shut.
Outside, the sky opened up, and rain pelted the window. Colleen parted the curtains and stared into the downpour, wondered where Samson was, if he’d survived the beating he’d received.
Please, God, she thought, unmindful of whether or not she still believed in God. Let him be dead.
“You should close the curtains,” Mathilda said. Colleen looked at the older woman, imagined bullets smashing through the glass. She closed the curtains.
Mathilda prepared lunch for the kids just before two, and brought it in to them. Colleen sat and stared at a book she’d taken from the large bookcase, a nonsense horror story from the thirties with writing so dense that she’d taken ten minutes to work through the first three pages before giving up.
She looked up from the cover of the book to see Embeth lying there upon the floor, eyes open, staring at her.
“Oh,” Colleen said, tossing aside the b
ook and leaning forward. “Are you…” Her words trailed into nothing, and she struggled for something, anything, that would make some kind of sense. Finding no such thing, she closed her mouth. Embeth looked around, back to Colleen.
“You tied me up.”
“We did,” Colleen said, sliding from the couch and to her knees. She reached toward Embeth, froze, drew back her hand, as if the bound woman were dangerously hot to the touch. “You were upset.” She said this a little louder than she needed to, in the hope that Mathilda would hear her.
“Huff,” said the woman, her bloodshot eyes spilling tears. Her bottom lip quivered. “He’s really dead.”
It wasn’t a question, but Colleen answered her anyway. “Yes.” She steadied herself. “Samson killed him.”
“Oh, God,” Embeth said, and just when she seemed poised to collapse into hysterics, she composed herself, took a deep, snot-choked breath. “Samson...”
“Yes. He killed Evie and Max, too.”
“Where is he?”
“Who?”
“Samson.”
“We don’t know,” Colleen said, glancing at Mathilda, who’d just entered the room and stood with her arms crossed. “We’re hoping…”
“Hoping what?” Embeth said.
“Hoping he’s dead,” Mathilda said. “Huff hurt him.”
“He did?” The nerves in her face did a little dance, and for a second she looked immensely proud.
“Yes. How do you feel?” Mathilda asked, walking toward them, looking down at Embeth.
“Dizzy and hungry.” She licked her lips. “Thirsty. Why should I be tied up? Untie me.”
Mathilda walked to the kitchen, returned with a glass of water. With Colleen’s help, the bound woman sat up. Mathilda pressed the glass to Embeth’s mouth.
“Stop that.” She jerked away. “What are you doing? Untie me!”
Mathilda drew a long breath. “You need water, come on.” Embeth still resisted, and she sighed. “We can’t have you freaking out again. We need you to keep your head together, if we’re all going to get out of this.” She paused, and Colleen wasn’t sure if she meant what she said next, or if she were just trying to calm Embeth: “Huff would want it that way.”
“I’m okay. I just want to see my babies,” Embeth said, and Colleen realized for the first time that she had no idea who’d given birth to each of the children, with the exception the unnamed boy, who was Mathilda’s.
“Sally is in labor.”
“Now?” Embeth asked, eyes wide, and Colleen feared that something was wrong. The woman was off-kilter. By now, they were all a little off-kilter, but Embeth was the only one who’d sat clutching the severed head of her kidnapper, her husband of nearly two decades, the man she loved—or had been brainwashed into loving—cradling it to her chest.
We shouldn’t, Colleen thought, wanted to say, but she couldn’t, because maybe she was just being paranoid. And maybe they’d need help soon, and they were short on hands. Besides, it just wasn’t right, keeping her tied up like that. How long could they keep it up?
“I’ll need your help,” Mathilda said. “Colleen and I can’t do this alone. She hasn’t delivered a child.” She looked up at Colleen. “Have you?”
“No. Puppies.”
“You have,” Mathilda told Embeth. Her face hardened. “Where are his guns?”
“Whose guns?”
“Huff’s.” She looked away.
“I don’t,” Embeth began, frowning, considering what she could and couldn’t say, should or shouldn’t. “I don’t know—”
“You do,” Mathilda said, leaning in close, a crease forming between her eyebrows. “I’m not untying you unless you tell me.”
“But this—”
“We’re in trouble, Beth,” Mathilda said. In the back room, Sally yelled something about pain, dammit—it was really starting to hurt. Mathilda looked over her shoulder, toward the back, and yelled, “Be there in a minute.” She looked back at Embeth. “Even if Samson is dead, we’re going to need those guns eventually. With all that’s happening out there.”
“Okay,” Embeth said, swallowing. She licked her lips again and looked around. “You’re right. They’re in the house. He keeps them locked up.”
As far as Colleen knew, there was only one house on the property—the deserted ranch-style house they’d gone into shortly after arriving. She remembered the locked door at the end of the hall.
“Okay,” Mathilda said. “The keys?”
Embeth looked toward the bedroom in which Huff’s body and head lay, and once more Colleen was certain the woman was about to crack. She said, “He has them,” and that was all.
They untied her, and Embeth moved from the floor to the couch, and let herself break down. She wept, her shoulders hitching, tears streaming down her face. Mathilda wiped tears from her own eyes, sat beside Embeth and held her and stroked her hair.
Colleen left them, drifted past the door to the room containing the bodies. The keys—she had to search Huff’s body for a key-ring, but she wasn’t ready.
“What’s going on?” Sally asked as Colleen entered the room in which she lay waiting to give birth.
“We untied Embeth. Can I get you anything?”
“How is she?”
“They’re both crying,” Colleen said, shrugging.
“They loved him,” Sally said. “They’ve been here so long.”
“It kind of worries me. I don’t know what we should do.”
“Do?”
“What if they, I don’t know—freak out?” Colleen said.
“We keep an eye on them. We do what we have to do,” Sally said, and Colleen didn’t like the look on her face. “We take care of them if we have to.”
Colleen’s shoulders fell a half inch and she nodded.
“Do you think you’ll be able to, if it comes to that?”
“Yes,” Colleen said, and the word was out before the realization had an opportunity to make itself at home. She may die soon, and in some horrible way, but she would no longer be a victim of Huffington Niebolt’s insanity. “I’ll do what I have to do. You know I will.”
Sally assessed her, and Colleen wondered just how long the woman had been this way. Had her time here hardened her, or did it go back to her life before? “We need Mathilda. I won’t get through this without her.”
“She’s taking it okay. Embeth?” Colleen shook her head. “I’m not so sure about her.”
“We’ll take it as it, oh—” Mathilda scrunched up her face, eyes squeezed shut, fists clutching the thin blanket draped over her stomach. When the contraction passed, she looked Colleen in the eyes. “Getting shorter. What? What’s that look on your face?”
“I don’t think Samson is dead.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I’ve been thinking. The dead ones I saw in town, at the little store, they’d come from the other town.”
“Beistle?”
“Yeah, they came from Beistle but they were from right there in Harlow.”
“They came home.”
“Seems like it.”
“If he were dead, you think he’d have come right back here?”
“Maybe,” Colleen said. “I don’t know.”
“You might be right,” Sally said. “But this isn’t his home. It’s ours. He’s rarely here.”
“He’s got his own apartment, right?”
“Yes,” Sally said. Colleen thought of the three small apartments they’d encountered following the exhausting uphill walk with Samson, the trap he’d led them to, the attack that followed.
“Then he’s probably there,” Colleen said. “We need to get to the guns before he does. I need to find him. I need to kill him.”
“You’re right,” Mathilda said, appearing beside her. She no longer cried, but her moist eyes were red, the skin around them puffy. “But this comes first.” She looked at Sally. “How are you?”
“About twenty minutes apart.”
“G
ood,” Mathilda said, looking back and forth between the two of them. “The sooner we get this one out of there the better.”
“How is she doing?” Colleen asked.
“She’s having a drink,” Mathilda said, “She can’t believe he’s dead,” and now her eyes were on Colleen, pinning her in place. Mathilda looked old and tired. “I can’t either.”
The seconds ticked by without response, and Colleen suspected that Sally’s reasons for silence were much the same as her own—so as to not say anything that had the potential to set off Mathilda.
“He was insane,” Mathilda said. “I know that. You know that, Colleen—you just got here. Sally, too. But me and Beth and Evie, we’ve been here so long. Evie suspected it was all a farce, but Embeth? She fell for it a long time ago. She was his, pure and simple. She was his.”
“And you?” Colleen said.
“Sometimes it made it easier to believe. I loved him, yeah, as sick as that is, and as much as it hurts me to admit it, but I did,” Mathilda said, and then she laughed without humor. “I loved the son of a bitch. He was good to me. And some part of me, the part that remembers when he took me—that part of me wishes I’d been there to see him die.
“So,” she looked at Sally. “You popping soon?”
“Soon enough.”
“Okay,” Mathilda said, placing a hand on Colleen’s shoulder, squeezing once. “I’m gonna check on her.”
Sally waited until Mathilda was gone to speak in hushed tones: “She can’t know what we did. Not ever.”
“She doesn’t have to.”
They talked nonsense for a little while, mostly about the book that Sally was reading, and whether or not it was genuinely sexy, whether or not it was right to find it sexy. Mathilda held up her right forefinger in a just-you-wait gesture, and fanned through the pages. Finding what she was looking for, she read aloud. A few words into the passage, somebody screamed.
The scream went on, like a siren, and Colleen bolted from the room, down the hall, and into the living room, where she spun in place, tried to get a fix on the sound of the scream. Looking at the nursery door, she realized with complete clarity and utter lucidity that the sound was not one scream but several, overlapping and weaving into one another.
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