by Dan Padavona
I almost tried to break the door down again, figuring I’d have a better chance fighting Jenkins and his crooked family cop in court, but I thought better of it. Barton Falls was a cold, lonely area, a place where someone could disappear. I might end up at the bottom of a deep hole on the outskirts of town. The officer glared at me with hard, black eyes that made me wonder if he’d read my thoughts.
“So what’s it going to be?” my landlord asked. “Do you want your belongings?”
I nodded. My stuff didn’t add up to much, but it was worth more than a hundred dollars. I opened my wallet.
Riley let me throw two bags into his trunk for safe keeping. The remainder of my possessions—a few changes of clothes, a toothbrush, and an empty wallet—were stuffed into a knapsack.
“I can’t believe he’d go this far,” Riley said, pulling his coat together to fend off the cold whipping across in the parking lot. “You have to take him to court.”
“Why bother? He has a police officer in his back pocket, and you know what the officer will say when he’s called to testify. It’s my word against theirs.”
“The other tenants have to know what he did to you.”
Riley cut off, seeing Jenkins storm across the lot with a bag of rock salt.
“You’d better go inside before he sees us talking,” I said.
The sleet abated, leaving behind a treacherous glaze of ice.
“Where will you go, man? You’re welcome to stay with me for as long as you need. You know I have room.”
“Not a good idea, Riley. Not unless you want to be in his crosshairs next. Don’t worry about me. I’ll land on my feet.”
As I threw the knapsack onto my shoulders and climbed onto my bike, realization dawned on Riley’s face.
“No way, Steve. No freaking way. I know what you’re up to. If you think you have trouble with the Barton Falls Police Department now, wait until they catch you breaking into houses. This Becca girl is nothing but trouble.”
A switch flipped inside of me. What did Steve know about Becca? All the frustration I’d stored away—Riley convincing me to move to Barton Falls, the computer manufacturer abandoning us, wrecking my car, settling for a dead-end supermarket job, Jenkins ripping me off—came rushing forth in a dam break of released fury.
“I don’t have a fucking choice, Riley. Look at me. This bag represents all I have to my name. And don’t tell me what you would do in my position, because from where I stand, you’re in a better fucking position than I am. Why in the hell did I listen to you? Come to Barton Falls, they’re on the verge of something big here. Thanks a helluva lot for the advice.”
“Steve…I…”
I saw the hurt in his eyes, the look of a scolded dog. All I wanted to do was kick that dog in the ribs.
“And another thing: don’t talk about Becca. You don’t know her, don’t know what she’s been through. You don’t have the right to speak her name.”
I kicked down on the pedals and rolled out of the parking lot. I felt him watching me, fighting to swallow the lump in his throat as his best friend of the last two decades left him alone in the cold. I knew I was a complete heel, that I’d taken my frustrations out on my friend.
I never swallowed my pride and accepted Riley’s help.
And that’s how the trouble started.
Becca looked surprised and a little concerned when I arrived at the Lin family doorstep. Her eyes flicked over my shoulder, a quick and subtle movement borne of years of suspicion, as though worried I’d brought the authorities back with me. Then she saw my raw, red fingers and ears and pulled me in from the cold.
As the light faded from the stormy October sky we sat a few feet apart on the basement couch, a blanket thrown over our legs and an old James Cagney gangster movie on the television. We sipped from mugs of hot cocoa while the wind tried petulantly to pry into the house.
She barely watched the movie, dividing her attention between television gunfights and a slip of paper in her lap. From the corner of my eye, I could see she held a list of potential residences. None of them were within a hundred miles of Barton Falls, and one was as far away as northern Florida. With a pang of regret, I already knew how much I’d miss her after she left.
Though I didn’t know her story, it was obvious she’d been dealt a tough hand.
Yet here she was, a survivor, possessing a freedom most of us couldn’t comprehend.
I’d begun to feel as though she was my doorway, my egress to something better. Hers was somehow a roadmap to a better life, evidence that the walls we perceive around us are figments of imagination.
Why play by the rules when the game is rigged?
That got me wondering if she’d let me travel with her.
I wanted to put Barton Falls behind me forever, get as far away as possible. At wages barely above the legal minimum, the supermarket position wasn’t worth me sticking around. Moving back home with Mom and Dad wasn’t palatable, not for a twenty-four-year-old who’d disappointed his parents enough already. I had to leave. Still, I would have loved to get my hands on Jenkins just once.
Becca caught me reading her list. She folded the paper and tucked it away in the pocket of her jeans. On the television, a soaking rain fell as James Cagney stumbled down the street, his body riddled with bullets.
Even tough guys met their makers.
The computer screen was locked on an ominous news story. Another body had been discovered, sans head, in a town called Vestal about two hours south of Barton Falls. A group of Binghamton University students found the body, a freshman male on the lacrosse team, butchered inside a thicket on campus. The Midnight Killer was back, and he was getting closer.
I glanced at the blanket-covered windows and pictured the frigid dark outside. If the downward trend in the weather continued, snow would arrive by Halloween. My bike, secluded amid the backyard trees, would be rendered useless once snow and ice covered the roads.
Becca sighed and flicked off the television. I could feel her studying me as I fidgeted on the couch.
“You want to leave with me,” she said.
Her knack for reading my mind was uncanny.
“First you tell me I’m crazy to take these risks.” She rolled her eyes. “And now you want to join me.”
I didn’t know what I wanted. I knew I wasn’t ready to lose Becca. If being together meant giving up the perceived safety of a mundane life for the danger of the road, I would.
“Okay,” she said.
Just one word, two syllables.
Suddenly it felt as if all those imaginary walls disintegrated. A sense of freedom I hadn’t felt since I was a kid fell over me.
“But only if you follow my lead and my rules.”
Since I had no experience scoping out houses, I agreed.
“For instance?”
“Remember I told you I have principles, and I always leave a house better than I found it,” she said. “I’m eating their food, using their energy, sleeping under their roof. The least I can do is clean up after myself. I’ve been known to remove mildew that was there before I arrived. I’ve repaired jammed windowpanes and tightened my share of loose screws. I guess it’s my way of saying, thanks for letting me stay here.”
“The locations on your list are a long way from Barton Falls. How do you move from town-to-town?”
“During spring and summer, walking or biking is the best option. A small tent and a backpack are all I need to camp my way across a state.”
But it wasn’t summer, and spring was half-a-year away.
“And now?”
“Hitchhiking, unless the idea of train hopping appeals to you.”
I didn’t like the idea of hitchhiking, especially with The Midnight Killer somewhere in New York. That’s when I remembered the foreclosed property outside of town. If the cold spell broke in the next few days, we could bike to Myers Road.
The prospect of the country house came up between us, then it hung in the background like a pale fo
g at the window while she schooled me on locating vacated residences. I could tell she wanted to get south before winter caught up and trapped her until spring, yet the Myers Road house seemed a perfect fit. Neither of us saw a need to rush a decision. The Lin house was warm and safe, as ideal a temporary residence as I could imagine.
I was wrong.
I awoke with a start sometime after midnight. I’d dreamed someone was in the house. Darkness swallowed the basement except for a tiny pool of red and green on the carpet below the computer lights. I heard the gentle rise and fall of Becca’s breathing, like low tide rinsing over sandy shells.
I threw off the blanket and quietly climbed the stairs. A clock ticked inside the living room. The refrigerator was a low rumble of white noise. All else was silent and shadowed as I slipped from room to room, looking for an intruder I knew wasn’t inside.
The carpet was soft under my feet as I climbed the stairs to the upper level. I opened the door to the master bedroom and found an empty water bed flanked by his and hers nightstands. An antique wooden dresser topped by picture frames and a jewelry box ran along the near wall. I didn’t like the way the darkness poured down from the ceiling and waited in the corners. It was easy to envision someone hiding back there, waiting for me to step close enough to grab. I guess that’s why I decided not to check the closets or open the doors to the kids’ rooms.
I relieved a full bladder in the bathroom and flushed, feeling stupid for overreacting to a nightmare. I was a trespasser in a strange house. A bad dream or two seemed inevitable. But as I washed my hands, a cold dread that I was being watched worked up my legs.
The cloudy night lent dingy, gray light through the hallway windows, just enough to make the floorboards visible. I waited for a board to groan and something to rush out of the shadows.
There was nothing.
Just the October wind keening outside the window.
It took me a long time to convince myself nobody was in the hallway. Still, the sensation of being watched persisted.
I walked the long and narrow corridor back from the bathroom. At the top of the stairs, I peered out through the wall-length window and stood back from the glass, hoping the darkness would hide me. The window looked over the front yard; dead leaves rained down from a grove of trees separating the house from its Park Place neighbors. A greater chunk of sidewalk and street became visible between increasingly barren limbs. The Lin house wasn’t as concealed as it had been before the cold struck and the trees were fully leaved.
The clear expanse of glass made me feel like I was standing in the crow’s nest of a tall ship, the shifting shadows of the trees on the ground ocean waves. It was enough to evoke vertigo. I imagined Ji Lin spent considerable time staring out this window. It was a crime if he didn’t.
“Look at that,” I whispered. Something about the dark inside the vast house made me want to whisper, as though raising my voice might make the imagined ghosts real. The heavy quiet of the house smothered me, an unceasing warning that I tread on dangerous ground.
I started to turn away from the window and felt as though a live wire touched my heart. A figure stood watching the house from behind the trees. I stepped back into the darkness. What if I’d already been seen?
The watcher stood tall, wrapped in an overcoat and somehow vaguely familiar. Long hair whipped in the breeze.
Donna?
A sick feeling that she’d found me again worked through my stomach. But it couldn’t have been Donna. Nobody knew I was here.
Unless she’d followed me.
When I looked again the sidewalk was empty.
CHAPTER FOUR
In Over My Head
I jumped out of my skin when Becca shook me awake in the wee hours of the morning.
“Easy. It’s just me.”
In a moment of panic, I worried the Lin family had unexpectedly returned. They hadn’t.
“We’re almost out of food,” she said. “Let’s go.”
I didn’t know what to expect as Becca quickly dressed. She threw dark sweatpants and a hooded sweatshirt over her clothes and recommended I do the same. My knapsack held my black sweat pants, but we needed to rummage through Ji Lin’s dresser to find a darker sweatshirt.
She pulled me out into the cold a little after four in the morning. It was still dark. I couldn’t stop shivering.
The storm had moved on, and the clouds parted for the moon. Except for one shining light from an upstairs window as some poor soul readied for an early workday, all of Park Place was dark and sleeping.
I had to quicken my pace to keep up as we turned onto Old State Road. Her long legs glided silently up the sidewalk. She breathed easily without a hint of strain. Our breaths puffed little clouds into the cold, still morning.
I kept throwing quick glances over my shoulder to make sure nobody was back there.
“Problem?” she asked.
I shook my head, not wanting to alarm her over the crazy junkie and figuring it was way too early for him to be out.
Sunrise was still two hours away when we turned into the same shopping plaza I’d hidden behind. The storefronts were dark except for a 24-hour Walmart anchoring the far end of the strip mall.
Until now I hadn’t asked her where she was taking me or what she meant by gathering food.
“I have about twenty dollars left,” I said, touching my near-empty wallet through two layers of pants.
“Save it for a real emergency.”
“Okay,” I said apprehensively. “I thought you said you wanted food.”
The dichotomy between her energy and a morning that couldn’t have felt more harshly silent wasn’t lost on me. She was a torch moving with purpose through the darkest of dungeons as we circled around the backs of the buildings. I half-expected to turn the corner into Isengard and see goblins scaling the walls. A month ago we would have heard peepers singing out of the marshes. Now it was still and dead, as though everything fled the coming winter.
For several minutes we knelt behind a recycling dumpster reeking of wet cardboard.
“What now?”
She placed a finger to her lips and shushed me.
As though on cue, the rumble of a large truck approached from the front of the plaza. Its headlights grew against the rusty fence separating the lot from the dark countryside.
“Here we go,” she said.
Before I could ask Becca what she intended, she pulled me out of hiding. We ran hunched over to a line of detached truck trailers and knelt down. The truck was closer now, the headlight beams blasting a sheet of white across the blacktop. The motor’s rumble ascended from the ground and rode through my legs.
As the truck taxied alongside the unlighted back wall of the store, Becca reached into her coat and removed two sacks. Now I understood. She intended to steal supplies as the truck was unloaded. Anger burned through me. She could have told me her plan. I felt as though she’d thrown me into the fire.
There was no time to protest. She darted out of hiding and rushed to the next set of trailers with me struggling to keep pace.
A door opened and slammed shut, then I heard the driver circling behind the truck. The trailer door opened with a screech as a light flicked on behind the building. I felt ice move through my veins when the light pooled around my sneakers. Our shadows were sharp against the blacktop, easy to recognize.
A metallic overhead door rolled noisily up along the back wall of the store. I heard voices and hoped nobody would notice our shadows. I peeked around the corner and watched one of the store’s night crew hand the truck driver a clipboard. Then the driver returned to his trailer and emerged with a dolly of cardboard boxes.
The instant the driver disappeared into the store, Becca said, “Go,” and ran for the open trailer. I almost lost her in the dark before I saw her silhouette leap through the open door. By the time I climbed in behind her she’d already loaded her sack half full of food boxes, bread, sports bars, anything she could grab. The trailer’s inside
was frigid and claustrophobic, the walls of boxes pressing in on me as clouds of refrigerated air rolled down from the ceiling. My hands trembled. I reached for a box of pudding and thought better of it, opting instead for yogurt.
I’d only filled half of my sack when she tugged my shirtsleeve.
“You’re too slow,” she said, throwing a full sack over her shoulder. “He’ll be back at any second. Move it.”
She leaped off the back of the trailer and disappeared around the corner. When I jumped out after her, I tripped upon landing and felt the macadam scrape anguish across my knees.
I looked up and saw only darkness. Becca was somewhere amid the rows of trailers. I was too panicked and turned the wrong way. Someone shouted for me to stop as I wheeled around.
“He’s stealing from the truck!”
The trucker’s voice awakened a clamor of activity inside the storeroom.
I limped through blinding slashes of light, angling toward the trailers as footsteps raced from behind. Too injured to run, I knew I’d never outrun the truck driver.
As I fled across the parking lot, I saw Becca’s shadow between two long trailers, motioning me to run toward her.
Trust her.
I cut hard to my left and felt the driver’s fingers brush the back of my shirt. He cursed and stumbled as I ran for the trailers.
Becca was gone.
Good, I thought. Please, just let her escape.
The driver was on his feet and closing on me. He yelled for me to stop, close enough for me to feel his breath on my neck.
As I started down the tunnel between the trailers, I knew I wouldn’t make it to the end.
He grabbed the food sack.
I spun around and heard him grunt as the breath rushed out of him. He lay clutching his stomach. It was too dark to see what happened as Becca jumped out of the shadows and pulled me after her.
I thought of her switchblade.
No, she wouldn’t kill someone over a bag of food. Would she?
The blacktop behind us was empty. Surely someone had phoned the police.
We ran along the fence bordering the parking lot. While my lungs screamed, she seemed tireless. A siren rose up from inside the township and headed in our direction as we emerged onto Old State Road.