He hadn’t thought this out. That gave me a chance.
“Have fun with that,” I said. “Papa’s heavy.” My father’s eyes met mine, flashing understanding.
Will stood up. “Yeah. You’re right. We’re going on a field trip. I’m going to murder your dear Papa in his bed while you two watch, then I’ll herd you both back up here and finish the job. That will make things easier.”
He leaned forward, brandishing the knife. “I’m going to cut your ankle cuffs,” he told his captors. “Don’t try anything funny.”
I saw my chance. I sidled behind him, towards the night stand, stepping sideways. I would have made it, had Maggie’s eyes not flitted to me, causing Will to turn around.
“Ha!” he said, catching sight of the phone. “Naughty, naughty. Give it to me.” He held out his hand.
I snatched it off the charger and dialed 911, quick as a flash.
“911, what is your emergency?” the phone blared.
“Fucking bitch!” Will exploded. He swung the knife, slashing the phone out of my hands. The blade sliced the side of my arm, which began gushing blood. I felt no pain. There was too much adrenaline pumping through my veins.
Maggie screamed, a high, reedy sound.
“They’re coming,” I told him smugly. “They’ll be here in minutes. It’s over.”
Will’s eyes bulged. “Yeah, it’s over,” he jeered, “So I got nothing to lose. I’m gonna kill you, bitch.”
“No!” Helmut rasped. “No, leave my daughter alone!”
Will had already sliced the zip ties tethering my father’s ankles together. Papa clumsily rolled onto his knees, his two bound wrists a weapon. He batted at Will’s head. “I won’t let you hurt my daughter!”
Will slashed at him with the knife, but my father was unstoppable. He threw himself onto Will, beating at him with his bound hands, using his body as a battering ram. “You may take me, but you will never take my daughter!”
Somewhere in the distance, a siren blared. Still too far away. The wound on my arm was bleeding copiously, and I felt dizzy. I wasn’t sure if it was the loss of blood, or the sight of it, but I felt my consciousness slipping away.
Will rolled out from beneath my father’s body weight, but Papa still hovered over him. The younger man raised the knife.
I screamed with all my might, “No!” but it came out faint, a mere token protest.
I was dying.
I watched as he struck the killing blow, stabbing my Papa right in the heart. My father’s eyes widened. He turned to make his final appeal. “All I ever wanted was for you to be safe,” he said, before he collapsed.
Will turned to me, blood splattered across his face like war paint. His eyes were glittering. It was like he’d been possessed. He’d opened his heart to evil, and within him it found a home.
He lifted the knife.
Maggie’s screams reverberated in my head as the world went black.
Chapter twenty-eight
Maggie
I could smell blood.
I didn’t plan to go to the Reiter home. I was furious with Ursula, and I thought the silent treatment was in order, Jana’s favorite method of punishment. But as the day wore on, I realized that wasn’t going to work for me. I needed to talk about it. I wanted to reach some resolution with Ursula, even if that meant deciding to go our separate ways. I couldn’t just stop speaking and let a gulf spring up between us, an ocean of words left unsaid.
I went to the house as an excuse to speak to her.
Helmut was unusually sluggish. “Maybe you caught Ursula’s virus,” I told him, feeling his forehead. He lay sprawled on the couch in the heat, sweat beading his forehead, staring listlessly at the television.
“They’re coming for me again,” he announced. His eyes were tired.
Normally I was patient and understanding with the old man, but today I was irritable.
“They’re coming,” he repeated, having failed to elicit a reaction from me.
“Then go hide,” I snapped.
He stared at me. “No,” he said. “I’m an old man, and I’m through hiding.”
It was almost six o’clock when the bell rang.
I was annoyed. Ordinarily, I would have left around five, but I was waiting for Ursula. She was extraordinarily late, which wasn’t unusual, but today it seemed inappropriate. With everything going on, did she really think drowning herself in her work was the right thing to do? She should be trying to patch things up with me. No doubt she was watching the footage of her blasted experiment over and over again, masturbating to it, orgasming from the wealth of footage she’d accumulated. Damn.
There was something wrong with Ursula Reiter. She had a stone where everyone else had heart. Maybe it was the way she’d been raised, perhaps it was living beneath the cloud of her father’s horrific experiences, but I no longer cared why she behaved the way she did. It wasn’t human. I deserved better.
I was initially not alarmed to find Will standing on the Reiter doorstep. I know that’s hard to understand, but one must consider my mindset. Once again, Ursula had failed to make me a priority.
I was foolish enough to believe Will was there to smooth things over, that I meant something to him after all.
I just wanted to mean something to somebody.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. “I figured you’d be miles away by now.”
He glared at me like a petulant child. “I will be soon,” he said. “Guess you’re happy about that, huh? You don’t have to worry about seeing me this fall, either. I won’t be back.”
I sighed with relief. His eyes narrowed. My heart spasmed with sympathy. He wasn’t to blame. He merely played out his role. It was Ursula who invited evil into our lives, who seduced us into peering into the abyss. She’d proved her point. Under a specific set of circumstances, human beings turned into monsters. So? Did we really need to hurt people to figure that out? Wasn’t that something we’d known all along? History told us that. Why did we need to have experiments to prove something we already knew?
“I’m sorry things turned out the way they did,” I told him, leaning against the door frame. “We had fun, in the beginning.”
He stared behind me, into the empty foyer. “This is her fault,” he seethed. “Is she here?”
I shrugged. I wasn’t going to argue the point about it being her fault. It was. But he did bear some responsibility. Just because someone told you it was okay to hurt someone didn’t mean you had to do it. There was choice involved in that. “Just her father,” I said. “She’s still at work.”
“I guess you’ll be scrubbing muffs tonight,” he remarked, curling his lip in disgust.
“Doubtful,” I responded. “We’re not exactly getting along these days, if it makes you feel any better.”
“It doesn’t,” he said.
“Well, she’s not here,” I said, suddenly feeling very weary. “If you want to leave her a note or something, I’ll take it. Otherwise, I guess this is good-bye.”
“I’d like to leave a note,” he said. “I’ll need a pen and a piece of paper.”
I turned my back on him. That was my fatal mistake. One second, I was heading back down the hallway in search of paper, the next Will was on me like a ton of bricks, knocking me to the floor, his hands around my neck. I couldn’t breathe. I dug my nails into his fingers.
Was this the end?
He loosened his hold, but his body was still on top of mine, a parody of the sex act. He was breathing heavily. I could smell his sweat.
“I’m going to take my hands away from your neck but if you scream, or try to get up, I’ll choke you again,” he said. “Understand?”
I nodded.
He slowly withdrew his hands. His weight made it unable to breathe deeply, but it was still a relief.
“Now I am going to let you up,” he said. He rolled off me and jerked me to my knees.
“Hold your hands out, like this.” He demonstrated, putting his wrists t
ogether.
Don’t obey, a voice in my head warned. But what was I going to do? Part of me thought that if I went along with him, Will would come to his senses. We could laugh this off as a joke. The situation could be salvaged.
Every minute brought us further away from that, but I still refused to believe we were past the point of no return. After all, this was Will. I kissed him under the stars only a few days ago. How did we get from there to here? This couldn’t be happening.
I held out my wrists as he withdrew a pair of zip ties from the pocket of his shorts. My mind raced. How did he have those handy? Those were the types of things serial killers carried around, not college grad students. For the first time, I realized I didn’t know who Will was. Not really.
He herded me into the sitting room. Helmut was lying on the couch, but he slowly sat up when we entered. “What is this?” he asked.
“Vhut is this,” Will mimicked. “This is your executioner, old man. You can thank your bitch of a daughter for this. I’m going to finish the job for Hitler.”
Helmut’s eyes went immediately to me. “Don’t hurt Maggie,” he said, my name alien in his mouth. He never called me by my real name. “I am an old man. If you need someone to kill, fine, take me. But don’t hurt her.”
“Too late, motherfucker,” Will mocked.
He’d only been armed with a pocketknife when he entered, but once he had us both bound and sitting together on the couch, he went in search of a better weapon. He didn’t have to look very far. Ursula had what she affectionately referred to as a “pigsticker,” an enormous knife she used to slice up big cuts of meat.
Will didn’t really have a plan in place. At first, he wanted me to call Ursula and have her come home. Then he realized that allowing me my cell phone, even under supervision, wasn’t the best idea. Helmut and I sat frozen as statues as he paced back and forth, thinking out loud.
“I want her to watch me kill you both,” he said, waving the knife. “Destroy everything she loves.”
“You are an evil, evil man,” Helmut said, “I knew you’d be back. I knew I could not hide from you, that in the end you’ll find me.”
Will looked confused. “What’s that?” he asked me.
“He thinks you’re one of the Nazis, come back to get him after all these years,” I said, wishing I could somehow phrase that so I wasn’t insulting the old man.
Will looked flattered. “For real? Oh, this is better than I imagined.”
I don’t know how much time had passed when Will decided to move us from the living room. “It would be great for her to find us upstairs, in the room where she made love to you,” he said, his eyes shining. “I think you should die there, in her bed, with her watching.”
“You’ll never get away with this!” Helmut raged.
Will raised the knife. I screamed. He got control of himself at the last moment, so instead of stabbing Helmut, hit him across the face with the flat side of the blade. It swelled instantly. A trickle of blood dripped down his cheek from where the skin had split.
Will pointed at me with the knife. “You scream again, and I’ll cut your vocal chords.”
The unreality of the situation washed over me. This couldn’t be the end. My life couldn’t be over. There had to be some reprieve.
Ursula. She would get us out of this.
Chapter twenty-nine
Ursula
It was a beautiful, sunny day. I was with Papa in a meadow filled with pink and purple wildflowers. I could smell them. It was summer. Were we picnicking? The very notion was ridiculous. Papa on a picnic? He never left the house.
“Where are we?” I asked him, turning around in a circle to take in the view.
“A place my parents used to take me to when I was a little boy,” he said. “It was a nice spot, on a river.” He smiled, but his eyes were sad. “I never really remembered them, just the river and the meadow and being happy. But, look. They’re here.”
He pointed. Far off, across the field, I could see the river, dark water moving rapidly, and a slender woman wearing a white dress and a hat. She waved. There was a dark- haired man with her, also wearing white, and he smiled in our direction.
A young girl wearing a gingham dress was looking out across the water from the riverbank. “Angela,” Papa said.
Someone stepped out from behind a tree, and my breath caught. It was Mama, but she looked impossibly young, her hair a curly cloud loose on her shoulders.
“That’s how she looked when we first met,” Papa confided.
I started to go to them, but he laid a restraining hand on my arm. “You can’t be with them, Ursula,” he said sadly.
I wrung my hands in distress. “Why? I want to see Mama.”
“They’re here for me, not you,” he explained. “I’m grateful to have a little time to say good-bye.”
“I don’t want to say good-bye,” I said.
“You can’t stay with us. We’re dead, and you’re still alive.”
My memories flooded back, of the slashing knife, and Maggie’s screams. Watching Papa die. Feeling nothing but coldness as the blade plunged into me. Knowing it was over, and feeling nothing but relief.
Then this lovely field, and my lost family, waving. A picnic laid out on the riverbank.
“I’m dead, too,” I said. I’ve always been dead.
“No, you’re alive. You still have things left to accomplish on earth. Me, my time is done. Our people are waiting. I’m going to be happy now. I’ve gone to a better place. The reason I brought you here, to explain this to you, is because I don’t want the horrors that happened to me to haunt you anymore. It is over. Remember, behind all the hopelessness and darkness that you see in the world, is this. This is always here, waiting for you.”
“Papa, I don’t want to leave you,” I said. “I’ll be all alone.”
“No,” he said, “never alone. We’ll always be with you. Just because you don’t see us, doesn’t mean we’re not there. We’ll be waiting for you by the river. Don’t forget.” His voice was tapering off, the whole scene fading, and spots appeared in front of my eyes.
I sat up. My forehead was dripping with sweat. Somewhere behind me, a machine was buzzing. The room was dark, but I knew I was in a hospital from the smell of disinfectant and urine. I lay back down, trying to decide whether I should ring the call button. My mouth felt dry. I hadn’t made a decision when I opened my eyes to find the room flooded with sunlight.
“You’re awake,” the nurse said, when she came to check on me. “The doctor will be in to see you soon. You’ve been out a few days. You were in critical condition. It was touch and go awhile there, but you look much better now.”
I had my first visitors before I even finished breakfast, a soft boiled egg mashed up and some Jello. They weren’t sure I could digest food yet. I was starving
They were detectives, wanting to hear my story. From then, I found out the police had broken into the house before Will started on Maggie. He’d stabbed me in a frenzy. There was blood everywhere, but he’d missed all my major arteries. Still, I’d lost a lot of blood. The police thought I was dead at first, and the EMS workers had put my chances at slightly above zero.
I could barely remember what happened in the house. It was a blur. I couldn’t even picture Will’s face. The vision of the meadow kept interfering. I wanted to go there. I didn’t want to be here.
We’ll wait for you, Papa promised in my head.
The program was shut down, declared a complete failure. The candidates were issued green cards and transported back to New York City in the same rickety white bus that had brought them to Baylor a week earlier. They’d survived seven days in hell. Did being able to go home five weeks early make it worth it? I could only hope.
All the remaining counselors, including Moose’s two friends that never had to do a day’s work, received their full wages for the summer. The government demanded discretion in return.
In the space of a few weeks, my entire lif
e had been destroyed. But sometimes destruction can be good. It gives you the opportunity to rebuild something better.
I was putting the house on the market and returning to the City. After that, who knew. I no longer had Papa to hold me back. For the first time in my life, the world was a shining place filled with possibility. I had savings and money from the sale of the house. I could literally go anywhere. I was leaning towards Amsterdam.
I knew wherever I went, I would take the meadow with me.
Maggie came to me as summer waned into fall. She never visited me in the hospital. Her absence stung. Then Dr. Heinrich told me she’d taken her wages and gone away. He didn’t know where, just that she hadn’t gone home.
The police brought me a new cell phone. My old one was evidence. I could have been in contact with Maggie in seconds, but I didn’t even try.
The time had come to set her free.
I was emptying the house the day she finally came. I was giving most of our stuff to Goodwill. Some student returning to campus would no doubt celebrate about the almost new furniture being offered at a steep discount.
I refused to mourn the loss of the house and its sparse furnishings. I was anxious to rid myself of this haunted town.
But I felt a pang walking through the empty rooms of the mansion. I loved this house. I hoped the new owners would keep it intact, but I doubted it. It would probably fall victim to the same fate that had befallen the rest of the mansions on Professor’s Row. It would either be sold to a sorority or fraternity, torn down, or chopped up into apartments. A shame.
I turned when I heard footsteps behind me, expecting to see the movers. I’d hired Moose and a few of his friends. My heart spasmed when I beheld Maggie, looking radiant. The sunlight falling through one of the front windows set her hair on fire.
Hiding Places Page 23