Behind the Bonehouse

by Sally Wright

  Stoker was ninety-three, and he owned close to two thousand acres there on McCowans Ferry. His fine old farmhouse was three houses north of hers, but he owned the back strip of woods and fields behind the houses between them where he’d always let her ride.

  He still farmed, driving his ancient tractor. Mending fence, usually without help, though he was stooped now and almost skeletal, and he moved so slowly and tentatively Jo often marveled that she’d never seen him fall. He was tall and sinewy and had the sun-toughened tan of a hardworking farmer. He was notoriously tough in every kind of transaction, and a determined lifelong bachelor. An introvert who liked being solitary. Who spoke gently and quietly. A man who’d shown her mother great kindness, and Jo as well, once her mother and brother had died.

  Jo took him pies sometimes, and bread, when she baked it. And they talked horses, and breeding, and the price of hay. And when Jo heard how weak he sounded, her blood started pounding in her ears.

  “I’m real sick, Jo. Pneumonia. Fell a good long while ago … just now crawled to the phone.”

  “I’ll be right there. Stay right where you are!”

  She was in her truck in less than a minute, with Ross sleeping in a basket carrier beside her on the bench seat. The rain was so heavy she could hardly see the road, but she’d still parked by Stoker’s front door within a couple of minutes.

  It was locked. And she didn’t want to knock and make him try to get to her. So she ran around through pounding rain to the porch door in back.

  She rushed through into the kitchen—and saw a very surprised Stoker Randolph eating vegetable soup at a round pine table in the center of an old brick floor.

  “Josie!” Stoker looked astonished. His wrinkled mouth had dropped open, and he was staring at her with his spoon in midair, his sunken old cheeks peppered with stubble, his faded blue eyes on hers.

  “You didn’t call me?”

  “No, ma’am. Not that I’m not pleased to see y’all.” He looked a little embarrassed then, and ate the soup off his spoon.

  She told him about the call. And they both pondered who could’ve done it and why. They chatted then for a minute about Alan’s release, and the way Stoker’s wheat was shaping up.

  Jo left, pulling the hood of her raincoat over her head, an unsettling flash of fear twisting her insides as she slammed the truck door behind her.

  She couldn’t stop thinking about the call Carl had placed to Alan to get him out where he wanted him, and then she thought about Butch, as she started the pickup and pulled back out onto McCowan’s Ferry Road.

  The rain was blinding and her windshield wipers weren’t keeping up, and yet she could see that headlights had come up close behind her once she was on the road.

  Too close. Way too close on her tail. And she began to wonder what that could mean, as she put on her turn signal and slowed to turn right into her own drive.

  Then the car was there beside her, pulling straight in front of her, forcing her off the road on the right.

  She kept from hitting the big stone pillar at the opening of the drive, but she scraped the right fender of the other car as it pulled in front of her, and she hit her head against something hard.

  Ross’s basket had slid across the seat into the passenger door, and Ross was screaming, and she was trying to scoot over and pick Ross up—when her door was wrenched open.

  Butch Morgan was filling the doorway, holding a gun at her head.

  “Out. Get the kid.”

  “Butch—”

  “OUT! NOW!”

  Jo grabbed the basket and the diaper bag, and Butch backed away from the driver’s door enough for her to climb out.

  “Put the kid in the backseat of my car.”

  “He’s scared, and he’s gonna cry if—”

  “NOW!”

  Jo did, trying to think. Too stunned to see what else she could do.

  “You’re gonna drive. If you don’t do EXACTLY as I tell you, I’ll kill you and the kid. The kid first. So you can watch.”

  “Butch—”

  “Shutup!” Butch was on the passenger’s side of the bench seat in his old sedan. And he smelled of cold sweat and old booze and he looked half out of his mind.

  Jo put it in gear, feet on the clutch and the brake, blood trickling down her forehead from a cut up close to her hairline, as he told her to drive north to Versailles, then take 33 south.

  Ross cried all the way into town. Butch told her to shut him up, and she tried just by talking, and though he quieted down for a minute or two, he started crying again. When they got to Rose Hill and turned south onto Main, right where Main became Rt. 33, Ross sobbed even louder and pushed himself up in his bassinette. It fell on the floor against the front seat and he screamed till he sounded like he’d choke, and Butch told her to pull off. He grabbed the bassinette and got it back on the seat, and shook Ross by the shoulders, the pistol still in his hand.

  Jo said, “That’ll make him cry more. Let me calm him down!”

  “Shutup and do what I tell you, if you want him to live.”

  The rain was still torrential, and Jo could hardly see the twists in the old pot-holed road, though Ross eventually began to calm down, and seemed finally to doze as they climbed one low hill after another, and rolled through the valleys in between.

  Fifteen minutes turned to thirty, and they still weren’t where they were going. And then, when 33 dead-ended into 68, Butch told her to turn right, still heading south on the road that led to Shaker Town.

  Jo could hear Butch breathing, in the quiet times when he wasn’t blaming Alan for what was wrong with his life. Jo learned the hard way not to argue with him. To listen, and drive, and try to figure out how Butch saw what had happened.

  She struggled to see through the fogged-up windshield, with blowing rain beyond, and tried not to do or say anything at all that would set Butch off, praying she’d have some idea sometime of how to cope with whatever it was Butch was planning to do.

  His silence carried as much weight as the hate. And driving took real concentration. Jo didn’t even recognize the house she was restoring as they passed below it, with the quiet then, and her own fear, stretching on ahead.

  By the time they’d been on 68 for twenty minutes, they crossed the Kentucky River on an old stone bridge, where the river was bound on both sides by high rock cliffs. A jagged wall of rock rose straight in front of them as soon as they’d crossed, turning Rt. 68 to the left.

  The rain was beginning to slacken, and Butch told her to slow down and look for an abandoned roadhouse down the incline on their left where the ground fell to the river.

  Jo saw what looked like an abandoned boat house, covered with vines, the roof line sagging, then nothing else for a quarter of a mile.

  The remains of an old painted sign, dangling lopsidedly between two posts up close to the road, was suddenly caught in their headlights, maybe fifty feet up ahead. Then she saw the outline of a building behind it down the slope, a long collapsing rectangle, the dark rotting wooden frame listing off to the left.

  “Stop!” Butch had his window open and he was peering out ahead, when he took a bottle out of his pocket and shoved a pill in his mouth. “Couple a feet more, and you angle down a drive just past the roadhouse. It’s real steep and muddy, and there’s a pull off to the right. Pull in there and turn around and park behind the building.”

  It was hard to see what she was doing, but Jo eased the car past the crumbling roadhouse and parked in what had been a gravel patch behind its right end.

  Butch grabbed the key out of the ignition, and walked around the car heading toward Jo, who was trying to reach over the seat and get Ross and his bassinette.

  “Out.” Butch had pulled the driver’s door open and was holding the revolver up against her head.

  “I’m getting out as fast as I can.” Jo eased out from behind the wheel, then opened the back door with her back to Butch.

  Ross had fallen asleep from exhaustion, but when Jo pulled
the bassinette toward her, he woke up and cried. It was misting by then, not pouring, and Jo picked Ross up and held him under her raincoat, then put the diaper bag in the soft sided bassinette, and turned and faced Butch.

  “Up the hill. Toward the road. Into the trees with your back to the bridge. Get movin’ now!” He was standing behind her, off to one side, with the gun aimed at her back, motioning toward a tangle of underbrush and close-grown trees.

  “I don’t see any path.”

  “There. Between the bushes.” He shoved her into a thicket of shrubs.

  And she asked him where they were going.

  “If you want the kid to get there, keep your mouth shut!”

  It was hard going, carrying Ross and the basket, shoving her way through the brambles and branches on that stretch of incline—the hill climbing hard on her right, the river down below her on the left—and she fell hard on her knees once, but she didn’t drop Ross, or say the words she wanted to shout at Butch.

  She listened to him right behind her, breathing hard, smelling of whiskey and hatred. Her head had stopped bleeding, and that helped, and she pulled herself up and moved on, trying to protect her face with the arm holding the basket.

  “There’re stairs comin’ up. Take ’em down to the river.”

  Just when she thought she couldn’t go any farther, her boots thick with mud, heavy and hard to stay up on, she saw a thinner patch of undergrowth up head. And when she got there, she could see stairs that headed left toward the river, and climbed up on the right too, through thick grass and brush that hid the road completely.

  Then she heard the first car they’d met in almost an hour, and saw lights in the darkening dusk stabbing through the line of trees up above by the road.

  “In here. Fast.” Butch tapped her on the shoulder with the barrel of his revolver, and it startled her so she almost fell, which made Ross start wailing. Butch grabbed her arm and pulled her back into the underbrush, while he hissed at her to shut him up.

  “Shh, Ross. It’ll be okay. I’ll give you a bottle in a minute.”

  When the car was past, Butch listened for half a minute, then shoved her on toward the stairs and told her again to head toward the river and keep the kid quiet.

  The river was very low, and the shallow stairs, overgrown with grass and weeds and shrubs starting up, ended in a strip of sand wide and deep enough to be a kind of beach. It wasn’t more than a temporary beach, because when the river was running high all this land below the road would be flooded. With the cliffs and the flooding, this whole strip was nothing now but unused land cluttered with the bones of a few old fishing shacks and the prohibition roadhouse, long abandoned and left untouched by everyday human life.

  But there, where the broken stairs met the strip of flat ground, the broad bow of a dilapidated houseboat was pulled up on the sand, the disintegrating wooden stern listing in shallow water.

  There were two padded benches abandoned on the sand that must’ve been in the houseboat to begin with, but now lay covered in mold, the plastic upholstery ripped into strips exposing filthy stuffing.

  Jo stood and stared at the cracked wooden siding, and the broken glass in the top of the door, as Butch stepped up on the warped wooden bow—a wide flat square-cornered bow designed like a deck on a house, where one aluminum-framed folding chair leaned against the door.

  Butch threw it out of the way and wrenched the door open, the screech of swollen wood cutting across the quiet of the river bank like a knife in Jo’s chest, and motioned her up onto the deck with his .38.

  She stepped up on the sodden wood, the smell of rot and mold overwhelming, the rain dripping through the overhanging porch as though the roof weren’t there.

  Butch shoved her inside the cabin and pulled the door closed behind them—and Jo stood and stared at the wreck, at the water covering the rusting floor, deeper ahead of her toward the stern, shallower by the bow.

  Black mold grew around the window frames, and lichen stuck to the walls. A metal sink had been half ripped out of its cabinet on the right side close to the door. A built-in table was centered on the left, shooting out from the wall between windows, a wooden chair in front and behind it, the bottoms of their cracked legs standing in dirty water. It dripped in places from the ceiling too, and gathered in beads on the outside walls. Maps curled and hung in strips where they’d once been smoothed between the two windows on the long right-hand wall.

  Someone had been there recently. A sheet of plastic covered the table. A bucket sat on it close to the windows to catch a drip from the roof. A loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter sat in the middle by a jar of instant coffee and an unopened fifth of bourbon. There were two metal cups and a gallon jug of drinking water. And opposite the table, along the right wall, was a raised wooden bench-like bed with a blanket and pillow in a clear plastic bag sitting in the middle.

  A cast-iron Franklin stove stood in the back right corner, to the right of the solid rear door, its doors standing open, kindling, newspaper and several small logs waiting, ready to be lit.

  Butch had waded over to the table, while Jo looked at the cabin, and he said, “Put the kid in the basket on the table,” as he laid the handgun on the plastic with the barrel pointed at Jo.

  Jo did, after feeling to be sure the plastic was dry. And then took a bottle out of the diaper bag with a can of formula and a bottle opener.

  Butch shoved her down in the wooden chair with its back to the front door, her feet in more than an inch of water, and tied her ankles to the legs of the chair. Then he stood and grabbed her arms and started to tie them behind her.

  “Don’t. Please. I’ve gotta hold him and feed him a bottle, and be able to change his diapers. You know. You’ve got kids, you—”

  “Shutup!” He stood and stared at her for half a minute. Then tied her elbows to the corners of the chair back, leaving her hands free enough that she could hold Ross, who was whimpering already, getting ready to cry.

  “He’s hungry. I need to give him a bottle. That’ll help settle him down.”

  Butch dropped into the chair on the other side, watching her the whole time, as she sat Ross in her lap and poured formula in a bottle. She laid him down in the crook of her left arm, but he wanted to sit up and lean against her, and she held the bottle in his mouth as best she could, while he held on to it too.

  “Why have you done this?”

  “Why! I’ve lost my wife. I’ve lost my kids. Even my last job. Alan Munro needs to know what it’s like to have what you love ripped away!” Butch unscrewed the top on the bottle of bourbon and poured what sounded like a sizeable slug into a metal cup.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Alan left Equine earlier than normal, not much after 5:30. He’d gotten to a spot in a methods report where it made sense to stop work—and he was restless, which wasn’t much like him, and he wanted to get out of there and get himself home.

  He’d been more tired than usual the last week too, and he’d begun to think that the anxiety and the stress and the interrupted sleep that had driven him for weeks had left him feeling limp and slow once the pressure released.

  But it’d been a good day at Equine. He’d interviewed a very promising lab director candidate. And the new production manager had made some progress with the viscosity control in the de-wormer paste, making it more likely that they could move to the new Sigma blender sometime soon. Which meant that as Alan drove home he was thinking about what he’d tell Jo about work, and what he should make for dinner. He liked to cook when he had time, and Jo could use a night off.

  The rain was horrific by the time he got halfway to Versailles. He actually had to pull off and wait once on the Lexington Road. But there were hardly any cars on McCowans Ferry, and the windshield wipers were slapping against the glass in a rhythm that made him hum something that sounded to him like an old English ballad, and he was smiling to himself at how badly he hummed as he slowed down the last long hill that took him on toward home.

&nb
sp; Then, in the fraction of a second when the wiper cleared the glass, he saw Jo’s truck pulled off on an angle on the right side of the road by the pillar at the end of their lane.

  He pulled over behind it, and ran to the driver’s door, and saw then that the left front bumper had been grazed by another car. The damage didn’t look serious. Not enough for Jo to abandon it. And then, when he pulled her door open, he saw the key was in the ignition and her purse lay open on the floor.

  She never would’ve left her purse, or her keys, or walked home with Ross in the rain. And adrenaline hit Alan like lightning in the blood, firing every nerve, whipping him back into combat, his whole body coiled and tense, as he started the engine, and put it in reverse, and found that it drove just fine.

  There’re tire tracks in the mud by the pillar.

  There’s red paint on the fender.

  Someone ran her off the road, and it’s got to be Butch.

  “You bastard!” If you hurt either one of them you’ll wish you’d never been born!

  He pocketed her keys and grabbed her purse and drove his own car up to the house to phone Butch at home.

  It wasn’t that he expected Butch to be there, or answer even if he were. He had to start somewhere, and eliminate what he could, and make some sort of move fast for the sake of his own sanity.

  No one answered, which was no surprise. It made more sense that Butch would call him, and make some threat or demand.

  Toss was gone, so he couldn’t have seen anything. He’d fed the horses and turned them out, and gone off to play cards with his hunting buddies and wouldn’t be back till eleven.

  Alan called Spencer, who picked up the phone in his barn. He didn’t live all that far from Butch, and he said he’d check out Butch’s house, then come on to Alan’s.

  Alan stood by the phone in the farm office, his fists planted on Jo’s desk, staring through the archway into the dining room without seeing a thing.

  He limped up the two broad stairs, and on through the dining room, across the front hall, and the living room beyond, then down two steps to their bedroom.