Penumbra

by Carolyn Haines

  “More to the left,” the boy said, urgency in his voice.

  She adjusted their course so that they were only fifteen feet from the overhanging limbs of the bank. A strong wind had picked up, a wind from the south, blowing against them, slowing their progress to a lazy crawl. The clouds slipped away from the moon, and suddenly the river shimmered in the lunar glow. She looked down at the child in the bottom of the boat. Suzanna Bramlett rested beside the boy’s mother. The crazy woman had taken the curtain that was her only protection and draped it over the child’s body.

  Dotty burst into tears. Her wail of despair echoed off the river-banks and the wooden pier that rose out of the shadows of the bank like a whisper of hope.

  Jade timed her jump, and when Junior walked close to the sideboard, she leapt upon his back with an inhuman shriek. She held the knife aloft and drove it with all her force into his neck. The blade struck his collarbone and glanced off with a jolt that numbed her arm to her elbow.

  Junior gave a roar of pain and rage and began to whirl. He bumped into the table and ricocheted to the sideboard, where his weight caught Jade’s lower leg and ankle with such a burst of pain that she almost loosened her grip around his throat. He shook like a bull, and it took all of her strength to hold on to him, her arm around his throat and her knees gripping his hips. She raised the knife again, just as he lurched into the wall. The blade sliced his cheek, opening a gash from the corner of his eye to his lip.

  “I’m gonna kill you,” he raged, and ran full tilt across the room, aiming to smash her into the fireplace.

  Jade stabbed again, this time hitting his right eye. She felt him stagger. He took two more steps and dropped to his knees. She brought the knife down into his back as she slipped off him. He fell to the floor and began to crawl.

  Panting, Jade started to retch. She heard someone calling her name and she staggered away from Junior. She couldn’t kill him. She couldn’t. Now that he no longer threatened her or Marlena, she could not finish him off, though it shamed her to realize it.

  “Jade!” Frank burst into the dining room from the kitchen. The storm had ceased and moonlight flitted through the window, illuminating her as she stood, hunkered over and gasping, the taste of vomit bitter in her mouth.

  “Jade!” Frank was beside her, pulling her against him as she sobbed.

  On the floor, Junior moaned.

  “He’s still alive,” Jade said. “He’s still alive.” She started to cry. “I can’t kill him.”

  Frank helped her into the kitchen. He pulled out a chair and eased her into it. His hands on her shoulders were strong and warm. Kneeling beside her, he stroked her back and murmured in a tone that comforted her.

  In the dining room, Junior thrashed into a chair. It fell to the hardwood floor, the sound echoing in the still night. “Help me,” Junior cried in a voice that shook.

  Jade could no longer check her sobs. Frank’s arms circled her and shifted her so that she leaned against his chest.

  “Go on and cry,” he said softly. “That’s the best thing now. Just cry it out.”

  While Junior struggled in the dining room, knocking furniture over, Frank stroked her back and hair as she cried. His strong hands softened the horror of the past hour. Junior Clements had meant to kill her and Marlena. She’d stabbed him several times. Even now, he writhed across the floor of the Kimble house, slowly dying. Jade clung to Frank as she sobbed.

  When the worst of it was over, Frank touched her face. “Is Marlena okay?”

  “She’s in the pantry,” Jade said.

  Frank rose and walked across the room. Jade watched as he opened the pantry door and saw what looked like a sheet-covered chair. He uncovered Marlena’s sleeping face, touched her cheek to discern if she was still alive. He tried to wake her, but without success. He returned to Jade. “You have to get Marlena to the hospital,” he said.

  “You take us.” Jade knew she sounded weak and frightened, “Junior’s still alive. I can hear him whimpering.”

  “You have to take Marlena. Now.” He grasped her shoulders and forced her to look at him. “I have something to do.”

  Something glass crashed to the floor in the dining room. Junior was moving again.

  “What are you going to do?” Jade asked.

  Frank touched her cheek. “You don’t need to worry. Not ever again. Now let’s get Marlena in the car and you go. When you get to the hospital, call Sheriff Huey. Find him wherever he is and get him over there.” He kissed her cheek. “And find your daddy. He’s worried sick.”

  Dotty felt hands lifting her from the boat, and she had no energy left to fight against them. Her foot bumped the pier, and she cried out.

  “Holy shit,” a man’s voice said.

  “Get the other woman. Is she alive?”

  “I can’t tell. The girl is dead. Been dead a while.”

  Dotty let the man carry her across the creaking boards of the pier. The sound of his footsteps stopped in the sand, and she leaned her head against his chest and let go of the last tenuous threads of consciousness.

  She came to again in the backseat of a car, the driver a silhouette in the front seat. Beside him and looking back at her was a woman.

  “She’s awake,” the woman said, punching the man on the shoulder.

  “Who are you?” Dotty asked.

  “I’m Bill Fairly,” the man said, slowing so he could glance back at her. “This is my wife, Emmy. We’re taking you to the hospital in Drexel.”

  “Where’s the boy and the woman?” Dotty tried to sit up, but the woman in the front seat put a hand on her chest and pushed her back down.

  “Stay still ‘til we get you to the hospital,” she said.

  “Where are they?” Dotty felt a surge of panic.

  “They’re right behind us,” the woman said. “They’re in another car.” She turned so that Dotty could see her profile, the sharp nose and the makeup-free face that was brown and wrinkled from the sun. “Who’s the dead girl?” the woman asked.

  “Suzanna Bramlett,” Dotty said. “Lucas Bramlett’s daughter. We found her floating in the river.”

  “That’s the little girl’s been missing.” She stated a fact. “I knew she was dead.”

  “Who’s the woman and boy?” the man asked, his voice less sympathetic.

  “I don’t know their names,” Dotty said. “They helped me escape.”

  “Escape?” the woman asked, casting a glance at her husband that clearly questioned Dotty’s sanity. “Somebody been holding you prisoner?”

  Dotty leaned back against the seat, the motion of the car lulling, even though she didn’t want to give in to it. She didn’t know these people, couldn’t be sure if she could trust them or not. But she was too tired to fight any longer. Too tired to protect herself or the boy. She closed her eyes and slept.

  The way Jonah figured it, he had two advantages. He knew the house from attic to crawlspace, and he wanted to live. The rain had stopped, and the silence that settled over the house seemed magnified. As soon as he turned off the flashlight, he moved to the right, easing into the front bedroom that Jade had converted into a sewing room. He hugged the walls, knowing that the boards in the center of the room would creak with his weight.

  “Dupree,” Pet said, “you might as well come on out. I ain’t leavin’ until I find out where that gal has gone. You can tell me and make it easy, or it can go hard. Either way, I got to know where she is.”

  Jonah didn’t utter a sound. He shifted down the wall, moving around the sewing machine and then the chifforobe.

  “I ain’t got all night,” Pet said. “Somebody’s waitin’ on me.”

  That would be Junior, Jonah thought. Pet didn’t have the initiative to do anything on his own. He was working at Junior’s behest.

  “The storm’s gone by and they’ll have the power on soon enough,” Pet said. There was a whine in his voice. “Just tell me where Jade went and I’ll be gone.”

  Jonah gripped the flashl
ight. He’d made it through the front bedroom and was halfway through Jade’s. The house was built in a circle, with one room leading into the next. He slipped into the bathroom, and then the kitchen.

  “Listen here, nigger. You best tell me what I want to know or you’ll be more than sorry.”

  Jonah prayed that he would keep talking. In the darkness, that was the only way he could locate Pet. He hadn’t moved. He was still in the front room, probably still in the rocking chair. Pet was not a ball of fire at any job, not even intimidation.

  Jonah stepped wide over an old plank in the kitchen that moaned and complained whenever anyone trod on it. He’d avoided it most of his life, especially when he was trying to slip home after a late evening. He eased through the dining room and stood in the doorway to the parlor. Since the storm had stopped, the night was so quiet he could hear the frogs down at the pond, which was over a mile away. He listened for the creak of the rocker. He heard one soft movement of the chair.

  He didn’t hesitate. He lifted the flashlight as he ran into the room. He brought it down in a vicious swing that connected with flesh and bone. Something wet and solid hit the floor. Pet Wilkinson made a sound like a sigh, a soft exhalation, and then he fell to the floor. Jonah stood in the darkness, his breath ragged and his heart hammering. When he could finally move, he bent to the body. There was no pulse, no sign of life. He felt along the body until he came to the head, which was split open and sticky with blood. He’d caught Pet right at the temple. He couldn’t have hit him more perfectly had he aimed.

  Jonah stood up, wiped his hand on his pants, and hurried out the door. Jade might be at the hospital, and Junior Clements was looking for her.

  As he drove to town, he thought about Lucille’s car. Well now, if she wanted to have him arrested, they could add a charge of murder to his sins. He hadn’t intended to kill Pet, but he had. He had no regrets. Pet had come to hurt Jade, had probably hurt Marlena. Now he would never hurt anyone again.

  33

  Frank watched Jade’s headlights bounce down the puddled driveway. She was alive, but he knew she wasn’t undamaged. Fear changed a person. The things that had happened were forever in her mind, darkling images cast by a shadowed moon. Jade would have visits in the night from Junior Clements and Suzanna. She would suffer, and she had done no wrong.

  When her taillights disappeared from view, Frank walked into the dining room where Junior Clements was bleeding out. A blood trail covered half the room, soaking into the wood floor, mingling with the blood of the past. Frank straddled him, listening to the bubbling sound of air mingling with the blood in his throat.

  “Where’s Suzanna Bramlett?” he asked.

  “Fuck you.” Junior could barely manage the words.

  Frank picked up the knife Jade had dropped on the floor. He pressed the point under Junior’s chin, inserting the blade a quarter of an inch into the tender flesh.

  “I’m going to split your tongue from under your chin,” he said. “Where is Suzanna?”

  Junior made a soft gurgling sound, and Frank pressed the blade slightly deeper.

  “She’s dead,” Junior gasped.

  Frank removed the blade. “How long has she been dead?” “From the first. She kicked my balls. I didn’t mean to, but I broke her neck.”

  Marlena had been right. Suzanna had been dead from the first few minutes of the attack. Frank lowered his face closer to Junior’s. “Who told you to attack Marlena?”

  The rate of Junior’s bubbling increased. He tried to look away but had lost control of his head.

  Frank removed his gun from his holster. He shifted down Junior’s body so that he was standing on either side of Junior’s knees. He pointed the gun at Junior’s testicles. “Suzanna kicked ‘em, and I’m going to blow them off if you don’t tell me who paid you to hurt Marlena.”

  He gave Junior a moment to reflect. “I know it was either Lucas or Lucille. Which one?”

  Junior tried to lift a hand, but the effort was too much for him. He rattled and moaned.

  Frank waited another thirty seconds and then cocked the gun. “Junior, you’re going to die. I’m telling you right out. It’s justice for what you’ve done. Suzanna didn’t have a choice. Neither did Marlena. It would have been kinder if you’d killed her. The promise I make you, is that I can make it quick, or I can make the last half hour agonizing.”

  “It was Ms. Longier. She wanted us … to scare Marlena. She was fucking that route man.”

  Frank understood, even though it sickened him. He saw the whole picture, and in the center of the web was the queen spider, willing to eat her young to preserve her kingdom.

  “She sent you there to frighten Marlena. John Hubbard set it up. He had Marlena there so you and Pet could frighten her. And then it got out of hand. You killed Suzanna so you decided to have your fun with Marlena.”

  He gave Junior a chance to deny it, but Junior had nothing else to say.

  “Then you had a taste for it,” Frank supplied. “You pulled your car across the highway and tricked Sam Levert into stopping and you beat him to death for his money.”

  “Call an ambulance,” Junior begged. “I don’t want … to die.”

  Frank knelt to examine his wounds. Two were superficial, but two were serious. The eye wound posed a real potential for infection, but it was the cut to the kidney and gut that would eventually kill Junior. Eventually. Gut wounds were always the worst.

  Frank read the story of the wounds. He saw how Jade had jumped on Junior’s back and fought for her own life and her sister’s. Junior’s breath was fading. Soon he would be dead. Not even the miracles of modern medicine could save him. Frank sighed. “You brutalized Marlena, and you killed that man on the highway because you liked the way it felt. But you didn’t count on Jade, did you?”

  “Help me,” Junior whispered.

  Frank sensed someone else was in the room. When he looked up, his grandfather stood at the edge of the table. Blood leaked slowly from Gustave’s temple where the bullet hole was ringed in powder. He held the gun in his right hand, and he nodded at Frank.

  Frank rose slowly to his feet. He stared at Gustave, finally understanding what must have happened on that night so long ago when Anna and Alfred were killed and when Gustave took his own life. Gustave had not killed his sister-in-law. He had not fired that first shot, or the second. Greta had. She’d killed her sister-in-law, and then her brother-in-law. Gustave had not acted in madness when he put the gun to his own head, but had merely put an end to things that could not continue. He’d taken the blame and left his wife free to raise their baby.

  Moonlight broke through the clouds, flooding the room with light. The gun glinted in Gustave’s hand. He nodded once more.

  Frank grasped his pistol as he stood over the dying man on the floor. Junior looked up at him with a plea in his one remaining eye. Frank aimed at Junior’s heart, cocked the .357, and fired. The badge Frank wore would protect him from murder charges, if anyone was foolish enough to care that Junior was dead. Frank knew his action would protect Jade from the stain of Junior’s death, from the dreams that sometimes came when the night was deep and quiet.

  He walked out into the yard where moonlight swished in the leaves of the trees and darkened the dense green of the camellia leaves. A sweet breeze with the promise of fall tickled the trees into a whispery sigh.

  Jonah sat in one of the two chairs in the waiting room, his head in his hands and his body still shaking. He wanted to vomit, but there was nothing to come up. He needed to call Ruth, but he couldn’t trust his voice to hold firm and not frighten her. In his mind was a single image that looped and relooped. Two sounds, that of his flashlight smacking into flesh and bone and the soft plop of brain onto the floor, echoed in his heart. After that, his hearing had stopped. Even now, sitting in the hospital with nurses and Dr. McMillan running back and forth, he heard nothing.

  Jade was safe. She was in an exam room with a nurse cleaning blood from her. She wasn’t hurt
. Not physically, anyway. Her could see in her face that she was frightened and upset, in shock. The doctor had given her a sedative to calm her. Marlena was in the second exam room, and from the faces of the nurses, he could see that things weren’t good for her. Lucas paced the hallway, his expression blank. Jonah was unable to read any intention in his face.

  The emergency room doors burst open. Jonah didn’t recognize the man who stepped through the door with a blond in his arms. It took him a moment to realize the blond was Dotty Strickland. She looked like she’d been run over with a truck and then skinned.

  “What in the hell is going on?” Dr. McMillan yelled as he came out of the room with Marlena to find another crisis in his hallway. “Take her in here.” He pointed to the doorway to surgery and disappeared behind the man carrying Dotty.

  The double outside doors opened again and Jonah stood up. He fought the muscles of his face to keep them from showing emotion at the young boy who walked in, his face so badly scarred he looked inhuman. Another man entered carrying a woman who weighed no more than seventy pounds and looked like she’d been beaten all over. She was wrapped in some type of cloth, and he saw the wound on her ankle that looked as if she’d been chained.

  He was about to sit back down when a third man entered, carrying the body of a child. Her brown hair, dry now, fluttered silkily around the man’s knees. For a moment Jonah thought her alive, but then he saw her face where death rested in the blue-tinted skin and the sightless eyes.

  “Suzanna!” He cried the name and stepped forward before he could stop himself. The man froze. Jonah felt himself pushed aside, and he turned to see Lucas striding past him, his gaze on his daughter’s body. Lucas said nothing. He stared at his dead child, turned, and walked away, his footsteps tapping on the hard tile of the hospital floor until they faded into nothing.

  34

  The August sun seemed to drink the life out of the landscape as Frank parked his car in front of the house on the hill with the wraparound porch and cool shade. It was midmorning on a Monday. A flock of chickens scattered around his feet as he walked to the steps. Lucille was home. He knew it. She had no way of leaving because he’d told Jonah not to return the car.