She looked around the bright living area. Before she had moved in, she had remodeled; throughout the house she’d stripped away the wall-to-wall carpet to reveal the antique maple hardwoods. She’d had the floors refinished; some people would have placed area rugs, but she figured she was more likely to hear the click of a boot heel on a hard surface.
A large-screen TV occupied the sidewall, well-placed lamps illuminated every corner of the living room, and her slate-blue leather sofa and easy chair were deeply padded and comfortable for those moments when she worked away from her desk.
In the kitchen, she’d replaced the old appliances and invested in undercabinet lighting and elegant copper lamps over the scarred wooden table. The furniture saleslady had called it distressed, but Maddie knew scarred when she encountered it, in her furniture and in her mind.
The former residents had remodeled the bathroom and the bedroom in a half-assed way, and Maddie had done more, taking special care to create a secure environment.
The branches scraped at the window again.
She ignored them, leaning over her work, studying each detail to see if she had exactly re-created him. She needed to concentrate, but … man, what a crappy day yesterday had been.
Usually in the afternoon, if it wasn’t raining—it did that a lot on the coast—she headed outside, dragging her chaise into the sun, and grabbed a few hours of sleep. Not yesterday, though, because she had fallen asleep at the wheel and broken open the front of Jacob Denisov’s home and revealed a hermit, filthy, gaunt, and hostile.
Not that she blamed him about the hostile part. She would never forget waking up behind the wheel, her vehicle out of control, climbing the stairs, ripping through the wall—and seeing that face, brown and bleak; the eyes, blinking against the light; that filthy matted hair; the bony body; the grubby shorts. He looked like some Asian yogi who lived high in the Himalayas on roots and berries and whatever gifts his disciples brought him.
She had thought she was going to run over him.
She had thought he would try to move.
She hadn’t.
And he hadn’t.
The car had dropped into a hole, slammed to a stop. The air bag inflated, then deflated. She and Jacob Denisov had stared at each other through her windshield like two opponents sizing up the competition.
The only competition they could be in was who was more damaged by life.
She thought he would win. At least she wasn’t starving herself to death.
Jacob Denisov had been caustic in his comments about her driving.
But nothing like her brother. And nothing like Mr. Wodzicki, who’d proved once again he was a misogynistic jerk. She would have taken her business elsewhere, except Andrew handled this stuff for her. She didn’t want to take the time to do it herself … and Andrew got so cranky when she suggested a better method of doing … anything.
If Andrew had a fault, it was that his way was always best. And she depended on him—like most writers, she wasn’t making enough to support herself, and he kindly supplemented her income. She needed Andrew, she had been an awful disruption in his life, and most of the time he was a good, thoughtful brother. But not when she insinuated he was wrong.
No one had known why, after the investigation of Easton’s death, she’d fled to Virtue Falls. As Andrew said, it was a Podunk town on the edge of nowhere, famous for one thing—the massive earthquake and tsunami that had been meticulously documented by the on-site Banner Geological Study.
That was what had appealed to Maddie. She had been captivated by the tsunami video, had dreamed of visiting such a spot so remote that, in this day and age, it could be cut off by a natural catastrophe. When her own unnatural catastrophe destroyed her life—again—she had fled urban Colorado and bought a tiny house on a tidy street. She had hoped to be anonymous.
Of course, that hadn’t happened. To be anonymous, she probably would have had to change her name and have a plastic surgeon alter her face. Frankly, any kind of surgery freaked her out. The idea of someone leaning over her unconscious body, holding a knife …
Something scraped at the window. Softly, gently. With intent.
Her head fell to her chest.
I am a warrior of the night. I hunt them all. I move through the tendrils of bleak fear, tearing them asunder, seeking the monsters who disguise themselves as plumbers or delivery men or cruel nurses—oh, my God, what looms at the edge of my consciousness?
Maddie jerked awake. She rubbed her forehead, then looked at her hands and hoped she hadn’t smeared ink on her face. Not that it mattered; nobody saw her. But she had already discovered pigment ink was a bitch to clean off.
During her time at the mental institution, she had suffered nightmares about her friends’ massacres and her own mutilation. She had been cowering, afraid, and with the help of a few good therapists, she had discovered it was up to her to move away from her fear and live again.
After her year in the asylum, her nightmares changed, became long green corridors stretching forever and going nowhere, drugs that affected her too much, kind caregivers who changed into cruel predators who mocked her grief, intensified her fear, administered painful injections that plunged her into a whirlpool of guilt and fear.
Taking a deep breath, she put down her pen.
Barbara Magnusson and Gary Alexander, nursing assistants in the mental institution … those two had despised and tormented their patients. Eventually they had been caught and dismissed, but until that moment, they had exercised and abused their powers.
Maddie had learned one thing during those years of murder and her resulting breakdown: monsters walked this earth in human form.
She stood, stretched with her arms behind her and overhead, then with her feet planted hip-width apart, she rotated from the waist. A little exercise helped keep her limber and awake. Caffeine would help, too, but she hesitated to drink caffeine now, and take the chance it would keep her awake in the daylight.
Besides—she shuffled through the sheets of paper—she had made good progress tonight. No drawing could ever convey the horror of the monster, but these were close. Close enough to make her skin crawl.
She seated herself and picked up the leaky pen.
The branch scratched at the window again. “Oh, shut up,” she muttered, and started another panel, placing a wide-brimmed hat on the monster’s head.
Lack of sleep+stress=a solid case of the crazies.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Jacob came out of his doze and lay rigid on the floor, listening desperately for the sound of a soft silk slipper against the concrete floor, the signal that he was back and the torment would begin again.
Jacob heard nothing. Nothing. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t standing over the top of Jacob, waiting with sadistic pleasure for Jacob’s cramped muscles to twitch …
On the street, a car cruised slowly by, taking its time …
A car.
Jacob opened his eyes. He was in his house. In Virtue Falls. In Washington. He rested on a hard floor, yes. But thin carpet over warm wood, not cold concrete. There were no footsteps. He was by himself in the place where he endured, marking time until the end.
He pushed himself onto his hands and knees, groaning as the stiff joints protested being motionless for so many hours.
He remembered the earlier fracas, the crumpling front wall … Was he alone? They couldn’t still be out there, could they? The curious crowd, the obsequious insurance man, the girl with the nice ass?
What time was it? In here he had no clock. Normally he didn’t care. He moved from bedroom to bathroom to living room on some irregular cycle.
Uncle Decker, his gung ho let’s-go-to-war uncle who had never served in the military, called him self-indulgent.
Jacob thought a better word would be “cowardly.”
But today—or tonight—he had to worry about the time, because earlier, Madeline Hewitson had knocked the front wall out of his house, and when he walked out there, he would
be revealed to the world.
Crawling over, he pushed the chest aside, then peered through the crack under the door. No light.
He turned the knob and peered out at the weird scene: the wreck of his house with its dangling trusses, catawampus studs, and exposed electric cables, and beyond that, the blessedly empty night dimly lit by the yellow streetlight at the corner.
Maddie Hewitson’s vehicle had been removed.
Cautiously, he shuffled out, half-expecting some stranger to pop out and try to snap a photo. But it was really quiet. He didn’t know what that meant; he didn’t know the rhythm of this neighborhood, when people rose, when people slept, who came and went. He didn’t want to know, but right now, knowledge would be convenient.
He peered at the clock on the stove. It was blank.
Then he remembered—the firefighters had turned off the electricity.
He groped around, found the battery-operated alarm clock on the kitchen shelf, peered at its glowing hands. Three thirty-two in the morning. He had a few hours before sunrise, before the curious came back to gawk at his house and, if they could, at him.
He hadn’t realized anyone knew who he was. He had thought he’d left that hero crap behind. But no. Someone had recognized his face or his name—the lady at the title company, the kid who delivered his groceries—and word had spread. Probably not to everyone, but to the nosy people and the people who wanted to use him to make themselves look good. Like Wodzicki the insurance creep.
Going to the sink, Jacob got a drink of water, then looked in the refrigerator. The lemon sitting on the shelf had been here since he moved in, and it was as wrinkled as Uncle Decker’s face. He opened the freezer to find a package of thawing peas.
He hated peas. He took them out, tore the end off the box, and shook a handful into his palm. One by one he flung the shriveled green knobs down his throat. When he couldn’t gag down any more, he tossed the package at the garbage and walked toward the exposed front of his house.
Someone had put a piece of plywood over the hole in the floor and tried to wipe up the oil. Half of his porch roof had been splattered across his yard, leaving the other side hanging at a jaunty half wink. His front door had somehow come to rest on the hydrangea. His mother would cry at the damage to the bush.
His street, Dogwood Blossom Street, was nothing but a stub; ten houses on one side, nine on the other, starting on the intersection of Elm Street and ending in a battered guardrail that protected cars from an accidental plunge off the cliff and into the ocean. A wooden sign in the corner yard proclaimed this was the Dogwood Blossom Historical Neighborhood. When Jacob had first come to look at this house, he had thought that the sign was vain and stupid. But he thought pretty much everything was stupid, so no surprise there.
At the house across the street, every window was covered by pale yellow blinds, yet even so late at night, light glowed, defying the night.
Maddie Hewitson’s house. He’d hate to pay her electric bill.
He inched forward, staring, tripped on a chunk of broken ceiling plaster, and barely caught himself before he went headlong across his threshold and into the broken pit of his porch.
He ought to keep going. He ought to make his way through the scattered boards, walk down to the end of the street, over the cliff, and into oblivion.
He ought to. But like he said—a coward.
He turned back to his living room, to the upright wooden chair where he sat and suffered and waited for courage.
But his chair was smashed to splinters, crushed beneath an ancient steamer trunk that had fallen through the crumpled ceiling. When the hell had that happened?… Sometime after he left the scene, he would guess.
If he had stayed, that trunk would have killed him for sure.
“Son of a bitch!” Death kept missing him by minutes and inches. He had the worst luck of any man he’d ever known.
Well. Some of his kids would disagree with him. The ones who were dead. The ones who lived with pain and mutilation …
He squatted, bent his head, held his belly, writhed as he rode out the memories.
A car drove by on Elm Street. A car. People might see him.
He lifted his head. He crawled to the recliner, knocked the worst of the rubble off the seat, and dragged his butt onto the sagging cushion. The whole thing smelled like dust and funky old lady; the former owner must have slept in it, too, and maybe died in it. He looked at the ceiling and wondered if the old lady had stored any more heavy trunks up there that would blast through the weakened rafters to crush him. But no—the plaster was gone overhead and he could see all the way through to the cracks in the damaged roof.
Madeline Hewitson had even screwed up his roof. He’d bet Wodzicki’s wallet would shriek when it heard about that.
The old Jacob would have felt guilty for making Maddie handle Wodzicki alone. But she’d brought it on herself, and besides, he didn’t have room for one more scrap of guilt. His soul was already booked up. When he thought of what had been done to him, and what he had done …
The pain came, blasting him with agony, taking him to the edge of self-loathing and …
A car turned onto Dogwood Blossom Street. Headlights flashed into his living room. The driver slammed on the brakes; Jacob couldn’t see who was inside, but he knew whoever it was, was staring at the open-face house and probably at him.
The car parked along the curb. A man about Jacob’s age got out and walked determinedly across the yard.
Yay. Jacob was about to meet another new friend.
The guy stopped by the concrete steps that now went to a porch that didn’t exist. “I’m your next-door neighbor, Dayton Floren.” He paused and waited for Jacob to introduce himself.
Jacob didn’t tell him to fuck off.
“You must be Jacob Denisov.” Floren’s voice carried in the quiet of the night. “What happened to your house?”
“Your neighbor invited herself in. With her car.”
Dayton Floren turned and looked right at Madeline Hewitson’s house. So he knew who Jacob was talking about. “That woman is a walking wrecking ball. Ever since she moved in we’ve had double police presence, county and city. That’s good, I guess.” He paused, waiting for Jacob to respond. When Jacob didn’t, Dayton asked, “How long before insurance moves in to fix it?”
Jacob shrugged.
“Exactly. With insurance companies, who can say? Home ownership is a pain. You should do what I do: rent. Then you don’t have to worry about the ugly details.”
Jacob dredged up some vestige of grim humor. “Who’s going to buy this place?”
“Very true. Very true.” Dayton nodded, then brightened. “I would! I could add your lot to mine and have a nice yard.”
“I thought you rented.”
“If I could buy them both, it might be worth it. If I did that, you wouldn’t have to bother with rebuilding.” Dayton kicked at a pile of lumber. “It’s going to be a painful process. You’ll have to move out.”
Like hell. “No.”
“But—” An ungodly shriek of terror cut him off. He whirled to face Maddie’s house.
There, silhouetted against the white accordion shade, Maddie stood swinging a baseball bat at nothing and screaming, a high, shrill, primal sound that recalled torture and terror and death. Her shadow whirled and swung, caught the blind, and ripped it halfway off the window. Then they could see her, dodging, dancing, her face a contorted parody of fright. She stumbled, swung, blasted her desk lamp across the room.
Glass shattered.
The screaming stopped.
She stood, holding the bat, chest heaving, her head turning from side to side as she sought her invisible attacker.
“Wow,” Dayton said in awe. “Just wow. She’s really nuts.”
As opposed to Jacob, who sat here in the same wrinkled pants and grubby shirt he’d worn earlier, his hair and beard a hive for any vermin that chose to nest there. Apparently being quietly nuts was more respectable than being o
utgoingly nuts. Or maybe it was just the difference between being a nutty male or a nutty female. As his sisters always informed him, gender bias was a bitch.
“At least this time she’s not shooting at anything. Hey, if you sell me your house, you won’t have to worry about her anymore.”
“I don’t worry about her now.”
Hostility might have leaked through Jacob’s tone, for Dayton backed up. “If you change your mind about the sale, let me know.”
Jacob stared at him. Just stared.
Dayton lifted a hand. “Good to meet you!” He headed toward his car, drove forward a few feet to park in front of his house, and headed inside.
Maddie’s frenzy had made a few lights switch on in the neighborhood, but nobody came out to see what was wrong.
Not real caring folks here. Or they’d been suckered by her a little too often.
Or maybe they really did believe she was a killer, and they were afraid.
She’s afraid of her own shadow now. You should have seen her fighting w/ nothing. LMAO
CHAPTER EIGHT
Jacob sat in the recliner until the sun came up.
He observed Maddie drag her sleeping bag and baseball bat out of the house and scurry toward the overgrown rose garden in the corner by her front fence. There she got on her hands and knees, shoved the sleeping bag and the bat between the bushes, and, after a few muttered exclamations—mostly ouch!—she settled down out of sight.
Not long before dawn, the elderly lady next door to Maddie let her dog out. It was one of those fat, nasty, miniature dogs that snarled at the molecules in the air. When the old lady shut the door on it, the little beast stalked stiff-legged across her lawn, fought its way through the picket fence to the well-manicured yard on the corner, and did its business. Then it wiggled back through the pickets and stood sniffing the air. Its head turned; the dog focused its beady eyes on Maddie’s refuge. It prowled toward her fence, pushed through, and went right for the rosebushes.
Jacob braced for another round of screaming.
He got a series of sharp, hostile barks that died away under a barrage of conciliatory murmurs.
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