by Jude Hardin
“My father bailed on us when I was six. I barely remember him. He might still be alive, but I wouldn’t know. Anyway, I’d rather not talk about it.”
Danielle nodded. “I understand,” she said. “Where did you get the sword?”
“It belonged to my great, great, great grandfather, on my mother’s side. It’s from the Civil War. Pretty cool, huh?”
“Yeah. Very cool. It’s like a piece of history right here in your house. It must be worth a fortune.”
“It’s worth a lot to me,” Jason said. “And there’s a story that goes along with it.”
But before he could tell her the story, someone knocked on the door.
Mark
Monday night, Hallows Cove
The door opened, and there she was.
Danielle.
It had been months since Mark had seen her, but she was every bit as beautiful as he remembered. He wanted to embrace her and kiss her all over. He wanted it to be like it was before.
He glanced down and saw the ring on her finger.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey.”
She gestured toward the twelve pack of Corona hanging from Mark’s left hand.
“Why did you bring that?”
“You know me,” he said. “I never go anywhere without my beer.”
“Yeah. Come on in.”
“Thanks.”
Mark stepped into the foyer and followed Danielle into the living room. There was a man sitting on the couch.
“Mark, this is Jason, my husband. Jason, this is Mark Taylor.”
The man stood, smiled, extended his hand.
Mark didn’t shake it. “Mind if I put my beer in the fridge?” he said.
“I’ll take it,” Jason said. “Want me to open one for you?”
“Yeah. They’re a lot easier to drink that way.”
Jason took the twelve-pack and headed toward the kitchen.
“Have a seat,” Danielle said, gesturing toward the leather recliner in the corner.
Jason walked over and sat down. It was a very comfortable chair.
“So you really did it,” he said. “You really got married.”
“I wanted to tell you sooner. But like I said, I figured you might be—”
“Why him? Why him and not me?”
“You’re not going to make a scene, are you?”
Yes, Mark thought. Yes indeed. He was going to make a scene. But not now. Later, after he’d downed a few beers. He was going to wait for just the right time, and then he was going to make a scene Danielle would never forget.
He stood. “I need to use the restroom,” he said.
“Down the hall, first door on the right.”
Mark walked down the hall, and just for giggles he decided to try the second door on the right. He still wasn’t convinced that Danielle had married this Jason jerk. He wanted to see some kind of evidence that she was really living there in the house with him.
Unfortunately, the second door on the right was locked.
The hallway doglegged to the left, and there was another door at the end of that corridor. Mark thought about trying that one, but it was nowhere near the bathroom. He figured he would get caught snooping if he went that far out of the way. Best to just play it cool for now, he thought. The evening was young.
He stepped into the bathroom and closed the door. Right away he saw plenty of evidence that there was a woman living in the house. Makeup, curling iron, hairspray, all that crap. He opened the medicine cabinet and saw a bottle of Midol, some fingernail polish remover, and one of those things women use to curl their eyelashes. Damn. So maybe it was true. Maybe Danielle really had gotten married.
Not that it really mattered. Mark was going to carry through with his plan regardless.
He did his business, washed and dried his hands, opened the door and started back toward the living room.
But something stopped him.
When he’d tried the second door on the right, the one that was locked, he’d noticed a foul odor. At the time, he assumed it was coming from the bathroom. He figured Jason or Danielle had recently taken a shit. But as he walked out, he realized that the bathroom smelled fine. It was the hallway that stank.
He stepped over to the locked door again. The smell was definitely coming from that room. It was awful.
He knelt down and tried to peek through the keyhole, saw nothing but blackness. Why would someone’s spare bedroom smell like poo? It didn’t make sense.
Or maybe it did make sense.
Maybe there was a dog in there. That must be it, Mark thought. The family pet had taken a nice big dump on the carpet. It’s what dogs did. Nothing unusual about that.
He turned back toward the living room, but then he stopped again.
If Danielle or Jason had put the dog in there, why would they have locked the door? And why wasn’t the animal making any noise? Dogs hate being closed up alone. They hate it worse than almost anything.
“Mark, you okay?” It was Danielle, calling from the living room. “You didn’t fall in, did you?”
Mark didn’t say anything. He cupped his hand against the locked door and listened. Nothing.
“Mark?”
It was Danielle. She was standing at the end of the hallway.
“There’s a smell coming from this room,” Mark said. “Any idea—”
“We’ve been having problems with the septic tank,” Jason said, walking up behind Danielle. He had a glass of beer in his hand.
Danielle nodded. “Sorry. We have someone coming to look at it tomorrow.”
“Just wondering,” Mark said. “I didn’t want anyone to think that I’d left that stench in the hallway.”
“No problem,” Jason said. “I got your beer here.”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
Mark followed Danielle and Jason back to the living room.
Lisa
Lisa had held it as long as she could. Now she was lying in a pile of her own excrement. The thought of it—and the smell of it—made her want to vomit. Only she couldn’t vomit, because there was a rag stuffed in her mouth.
She was so thirsty. If she went much longer without fluids, Jason wouldn’t need to worry about how to kill her. She would die of dehydration.
There had to be a way to escape. There just had to be.
She’d heard voices in the hallway. Jason, and another man, and a woman. She’d tried to make some noise, but the best she could manage was a whimper. Nobody was going to save her. She knew that now. If she was going to survive this, she was going to have to do it on her own.
Jason had bound her hands in front with duct tape, and then he’d wrapped the tape around her upper body like a mummy. He’d bound her ankles too, but she could still wiggle her feet a little, and she could still bend her knees. If she could only get the tape off her legs, maybe she could stand and make a run for it. She hadn’t tried anything before, because all day Jason had been checking on her every fifteen minutes or so. Now that he had company, maybe she would have some time to do something. It was worth a try.
She couldn’t see anything, but she knew where the bed was. She’d heard the springs squeak when Jason sat on it. She started scooting that way, an inch at a time, acutely aware of the mess in her diaper with every painstaking movement. If she could only get away from this house, everything else in life would be gravy. Everything else would be roses and rainbows, stars and unicorns. If she could only get away.
She kept scooting. The room was warm, and she could feel the sweat trickling down the back of her neck. More fluid, she thought. Fluid that she couldn’t afford to lose. But she didn’t have a choice. This was her only chance. There would be no other. She had to go for broke.
She felt something hard against her right shoulder. A bedpost. Was she at the head of the bed, or the foot? She needed to get her bearings, because she planned to use the rail on the bed frame to slice through the tape around her ankles.
She raised her head an
d pressed the side of her face against the post, trying to get a feel for where she was. With her cheek she felt the cold hard steel of the post and something softer and warmer hanging next to it, a quilt or a comforter or something. She bent her knees, thinking she would try to move the lower part of her body closer to the bed, and when she did her right knee rammed into something hard and unforgiving.
The bed frame.
Now she knew her position. She was lying parallel to the bed, which was exactly where she wanted to be.
She spread her legs a little, scooted to where her right knee was under the bed, lifted her ankles and felt the resistance of the frame against the duct tape. She started bending and straightening her knees in a sawing motion, hoping that the friction would eventually wear the tape down and cause it to split, hoping it would happen before she passed out from exhaustion.
Or before Jason returned to check on her.
Danielle
Mark was sitting in the recliner, working on his third beer already. He was practically chugging them. Danielle hoped he wouldn’t get too drunk to drive. When she came up with this marriage scheme, she hadn’t even thought about that. What if Mark wanted to spend the night? If he did, Danielle would have to sleep with Jason, and she really hadn’t planned on carrying the charade that far. She liked Jason a lot, but she wasn’t ready to go to bed with him—especially under these circumstances.
No, Mark would have to leave. Even if he got totally wasted. Danielle or Jason could drive him to the nearest motel, and he could sleep it off there.
Jason walked in from the kitchen.
“You guys ready to eat?” he said.
“In a minute,” Mark said. “I need to talk to Danielle. There are some things I need to say to her in private.”
Jason laughed. Not out of amusement, Danielle thought, but out of arrogance. It was a side of him she hadn’t seen before.
“That’s kind of why I’ve been hanging out in the kitchen for the past twenty minutes,” he said. “I thought it would give you guys a chance to talk.”
Mark’s expression didn’t change. “I can hear you rattling silverware and dishes in there, so I know you can hear us talking.”
“So what are you saying? You want me to leave my own house so you can be alone here with my wife?”
“That’s it in a nutshell,” Mark said.
The two were glaring at each other now. Danielle decided to intercede before the situation came to a head.
She turned to Jason. “Maybe you could run up to the store and get us a bottle of wine to go with dinner,” she said. “Some wine would be nice.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Jason said. “If you want some wine, go get it yourself.”
Danielle frowned. Jason had never talked to her that way before.
“Not a problem,” Mark said. He rose from the recliner. “Come on, Dani.”
She hesitated, and then got up from the couch. “We’ll be right back,” she said to Jason.
“Take your time,” he said.
Danielle took a deep breath as she and Mark exited the house. This was turning out to be much more difficult than she anticipated.
Jason
Jason watched from the window as Danielle and Mark climbed into the BMW and backed out of the driveway. They took Mark’s car, but Danielle was driving. Jason figured they would be gone at least half an hour, plenty of time for him to do what he needed to do.
He walked to the spare bedroom, unlocked the door, stepped over the threshold, and stood there in the dark for a few seconds. The stench was overwhelming.
He switched the overhead light on.
Lisa was lying where he’d left her, beads of sweat dripping from her forehead.
“I need to change your diaper,” Mark said.
He didn’t want to. He wanted to slit her throat, pull all her teeth out, wrap her in plastic, and carry her to the trunk of his car. But there wasn’t time for that right now. Later, after Mark and Danielle departed for the night. Then he would start working on disposing of her.
He grabbed a fresh diaper and a box of baby wipes from the closet and knelt beside her. When he reached to pull the tabs on the diaper she was wearing, he noticed that the duct tape securing her ankles was frayed in the middle where her legs met.
“What the—”
Before he could say hell, Lisa Webber clobbered him in the face with her left knee. A burst of psychedelic stars exploded in Jason’s head as he toppled backwards and landed on the floor.
Jason swiped a finger across the area under his nose. It was warm and wet and sticky. Blood. Before he could react, he felt another blow to his head. And another. And another. Lisa was standing now, and she was stomping on his face with the heel of her foot.
The crazy bitch was trying to kill him.
Danielle
Danielle steered into the Publix parking lot, found a place and killed the engine. She’d noticed the shopping center on the drive up from St. Augustine. It was only a few miles from Jason’s house.
“Okay,” she said. “What was it you wanted to talk to me about? You’ve got five minutes, and then I’m turning around and—”
“I killed a man,” Mark said.
“You what?”
“The guy who was subleasing your apartment. It was an accident.”
Danielle’s heart started racing, pounding against her chest wall like a jackhammer. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
“Oh my god,” she said. “What happened?”
“I was trying to get him to tell me where you were. He wasn’t cooperating, so I pointed a gun at his head. I never meant for it to happen. I swear I didn’t.”
“Does anyone else know about this?”
“No. You’re the only one. I buried the gun in the woods. I don’t think they’ll ever be able to connect me to the crime, but I had to get it off my chest. I had to tell somebody.”
While Danielle was trying to process what she’d just heard…
Lisa
…Lisa was busy dancing on Jason’s head. She still couldn’t see anything, but every time one of her feet connected with the bones in his face, she felt the kind of elation football players must feel when they make a winning touchdown.
Score!
And to think, less than twenty-four hours ago she’d still been in love with the bastard. It was mindboggling how much had changed since then.
Take that, she thought. And that. And that.
Hyped on adrenaline, Lisa was enjoying herself, but her strength was waning. She needed to save some energy to get out of there, to run for help. Satisfied that Jason was out cold, or maybe even dead, she stumbled away from him and started trying to find the door.
She stepped forward slowly until she reached a wall, and then she started sliding along the length of it with her back against the sheetrock.
She felt a bump.
The light switch.
The door was only inches away.
She felt the trim and the jamb and had started rounding the corner when a strong and angry hand grabbed her by the throat.
Danielle
Forget the wine, Danielle thought. She just wanted to get back to Jason’s house, climb into her own car, and start driving. Fast.
Mark had actually shot a man to death.
He.
Had.
Killed a man.
Because of her.
He’d killed a man because of her, and now Jason was acting weird as well. She needed to get as far away from these nutjobs as possible, and she needed to do it quickly.
She started the BMW.
“Aren’t we going in?” Mark said.
“You know, I decided I’m not in the mood for wine after all. Maybe I’ll just have one of your beers.”
“Listen, I know you’re upset, but there’s really nothing I can do about what happened. I could turn myself in, but what would be the point? Nothing I do is going to bring the guy back.”
“Right.”
“You’re not going to say anything to anyone about this, are you babe?”
Danielle steered the car out of the parking lot, gunned it through a traffic light on its way from yellow to red.
“Me?” she said. “Of course not. I’m not going to say anything.”
“Promise?”
“Absolutely. Is this where I turn? Do you remember?”
“Yeah. This is it.”
Danielle took a right and hauled ass down the curvy two-lane blacktop that led to Jason’s street.
To Jason’s kidney-jarring dirt road, she reminded herself.
Another mile or two, she thought. She would make some kind of an excuse to leave, and then she would put some distance between herself and this insanity. Another mile or two and she would be home free.
Lisa
It was hard enough to breathe with the rag in her mouth, nearly impossible with Jason’s hand gripping her throat. Fading in and out of consciousness, resigned to her fate now, she allowed herself to go limp.
Then, seemingly from nowhere, an incredible surge of power shot through her like a bolt of lightning. It was a gift. Her body was giving her one more blast of adrenaline before giving up the ghost.
From the bleak darkness that surrounded her, a bright red neon sign rose, a sign that said LAST CHANCE.
This was it. If she didn’t get away now, she never would.
With every ounce of her remaining energy, she slammed Jason in the groin with her knee. Once, twice, and then again. She must have hit the target squarely on the third try, because Jason yelped like some sort of wild animal caught in a steel trap. His grip on her throat loosened, and she heard him slump to the floor moaning in agony.
Lisa stumbled through the doorway and took a left. She’d been to Jason’s house many times while they were dating, and she knew the layout like the back of her hand. She made it to the living room, nearly fell when she ran into the couch, and then used the piece of furniture as a landmark to guide her toward the front door. Her feet went from carpet to linoleum, and suddenly she was there. She could feel the knob with her pelvis. Freedom was only inches away, but her hands were still bound against her body. She couldn’t use them to turn the knob.