by G. M. Ford
The well-tended shrubs and bushes of Emerson Park stood tentative and unsure of themselves, like half-finished sketches, as Corso and Dougherty moved slowly down the park’s long central path, their heads swiveling, their eyes searching for patterns among surrounding greenery.
“Feels like one of those English horror flicks,” Dougherty whispered.
“Yeah…except I’m way more scared than that,” Corso said.
She jerked hard on his elbow. “Don’t say that, Corso. I start hearing a guy with a death wish saying he’s scared, it makes me nervous.”
He stopped. Looked hard into her eyes. “I’ll walk you back to the room.”
She shook her head. “Anyplace you’re going, I’m going.”
He knew better than to argue. Instead he took her by the hand and pulled her off the path, angling away from the lights out into the semidarkness of the lawn, and then finally into the deep gloom among the shrubs that separated the family picnic area from the river. They duckwalked their way among the twisted roots until they had a clear view of the path, then squatted in the darkness, surveying the concrete walkway running along the edge of the water.
Their hideaway was at the high point of the path. To the right, they could see for forty yards. The path was deserted. To the left, for twice that distance, nobody was in sight. “We wait,” Corso whispered. Dougherty pulled her cape beneath her and sat down on it.
Tommie de Groot lowered the binoculars. Two hundred yards across the foggy park, the pair of outlines beneath the bushes sat invisible to the naked eye. If he hadn’t watched them creep into place, even with his deer-hunting binoculars he might never have found them in the gloom. He closed one eye, as if aiming. “I had my rifle, I’d put one right through her into him.”
“We need ’em alive, remember?” Teresa whispered. “Else we’ll never know what’s behind us.” She leaned in and whispered in his ear. “You don’t know what’s coming for you, you don’t know what to do next. How deep to dig in. How far to run.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “I been running all my life,” she whispered. “Running away from people and the things they done to me. Running away from the things they made me do. It’s all the same. You just take out the garbage and move on.”
When Corso reached out and squeezed her arm, Dougherty moved nothing but her eyes. To the south, a solitary figure emerged from the haze, walking fast like she was out for some exercise. As she passed under the wooden stanchion that marked the park’s boundary, she slowed her pace, as if impeded by the slight incline.
Corso bent until his chest was scraping the damp ground, peering out from under the branches at the approaching woman, whose loose-fitting jacket and raised hood made it difficult to see her features.
As she moved along, she gazed out at the river, leaving Corso to peer at the side of her hood as she walked closer and closer to their hiding place. Twenty feet from where they crouched, she turned and began to walk back the other way. Kept going until she disappeared into the fog again. They waited in the darkness. The river gurgled twice, the blatt of a truck rolled in from the road, and then all was silent.
Corso started to rise. Her hand on his arm held him down. The stroller was back. Her dark silhouette displaced the silvery air. She came their way again, still gazing at the ruffled black water as she ambled back up the incline. She stopped and leaned out over the rail. Checked her watch and looked upriver. Corso checked his. Five after ten.
The sound of voices split the air. Something about a doctor’s appointment on Tuesday. When the woman turned toward the sound, Corso got a brief glance at the side of her head. Whatever color her hair was, it wasn’t white. Either the caller had been mistaken, or this wasn’t her. A cold wave of disappointment rushed through his body.
An elderly couple gradually emerged from the fog, chatting as they walked along at a brisk pace. The woman at the rail turned her back on them as they passed.
“Evening,” said the older woman as she walked by. No answer. They walked a dozen paces before she leaned close and whispered something in the man’s ear. As they disappeared around the bend, the man looked questioningly back over his shoulder at the solitary figure standing at the river’s edge.
The odors of stale sweat and nicotine came to Corso’s nostrils in the moment before he heard Dougherty whimper and felt her shift her weight on the ground. He saw the gun first, pressed against her temple, and the hand across her mouth, the long fingers seeming to wind completely around her head. The face took him a minute. Wasn’t until he heard “Don’t you fucking move” that he recognized the shaven and shorn version of Tommie de Groot. “Get out,” de Groot told him. “Get out from under here right now.”
When Corso didn’t move, de Groot cocked the hammer. Dougherty’s eyes got to be the size of saucers. “I’m going,” Corso said.
He crawled out onto the strip of grass separating the path from the shrubbery. She had her hood down now. Her hair wasn’t blond. Wasn’t spiked. But it was her all right. Her small exotic features had aged gracefully. Mrs. Ethnic Housewife, Anyplace, USA. Only the shark in her eyes and the gun in her hand said otherwise.
“Over there,” she said. “Lean against the rail.”
“Move it,” Tommie growled from behind.
Corso felt the icy touch of fear running up and down his spine like steel ball bearings. He had no doubts. The only way they were coming out of this was dead. They had nothing to lose.
He put his hands on the icy rail, just as Dougherty was slammed in next to him. Her mouth hung open. Her eyes were beginning to fill. Corso heard a ripping sound and looked back over his shoulder. Tommie de Groot stood a pace back, his revolver aimed at Corso’s head. Teresa Fulbrook had her hands around a roll of duct tape and was about to tear a five-foot section with her teeth.
Corso looked over at Dougherty. She read the terror and desperation in his eyes.
“No,” Corso said. “We can’t let them take us.”
Before she could process the information, Corso had thrust himself off the rail and was rushing toward the barrel of the unwavering gun.
“No,” Teresa Fulbrook screamed, dropping the tape and reaching for her gun. She’d only moved a few feet when Tommie shot Corso about a foot above the left knee. The sound of the report was swallowed whole by the fog. Corso went down in a pile of arms and legs. When Teresa snapped her head around, all she saw was the back of a cape fluttering in the breeze as Meg Dougherty vaulted the rail and splashed into the dark river below.
And then it was silent. Nothing but the cold and the darkness and the pressure in her ears as the current bumped her along the bottom, where her hands could find no purchase among the slimy rocks, where she struggled to get her feet beneath her, to push, to kick, anything to get her head above the rushing water, out of the cold blackness and into the light, to stop the scream that was building in her ears and the red-hot coals that filled her lungs as she rolled along the river bottom, banging a knee and then her head as she somersaulted through the inky water, out of control…out of air…. In her final throes, she began to flail…felt a hand break water and splash…felt the cold night air on her wet skin…felt…
She used her teeth to rip off another yard of duct tape. Used it to bring Corso’s elbows together behind his back, then rolled him over and checked the tape covering his eyes and mouth again. Didn’t want him to bleed to death, so she wound two more strips tight around the hole in his leg. The sounds of boots brought her eyes up.
Tommie was out of breath. He rested his hands on his knees and worked some oxygen through his lungs before he spoke. “She never come up. I followed her all the way till I heard people. Never seen a sign of her at all.”
“Just another tourist fell in the river and drowned. Happens all the time,” she said, getting to her feet. She kicked the unconscious Corso in the ribs. “Tape or no tape, this one’s gonna be trouble once he wakes up.” She looked around. “We’ll drag him in the bushes. You stay with him. I’ll get the car.”
…a hand on her wrist, pulling, slipping off, losing its grip, then another set of fingers entwined in her hair, breaking her momentum, spinning her in the water until her knees scraped across the top of a rock and she could use the last of her strength to lever herself upward, gasping, spitting water, her breath coming in convulsions as the hands dragged her from the current until only her feet remained in the water and she began to gag and choke on the night air as the voices swirled about her.
“You go call for an ambulance,” a woman’s voice said. “I’ll stay with her until you get back.” She listened to the sound of shoes crunching across the gravel riverbank and felt the steadying hand on her back. “Help is on the way, honey,” the voice said. “You just relax and we’ll get you to the hospital. Everything’s going to be just fine.”
Corso lay facedown on the floor of the car. Back-seat, with the transmission hump squeezing the air from his lungs with every bump. Tommie de Groot had his feet resting in the middle of Corso’s back. “This is done,” he asked, “where we gonna go?”
“One step at a time,” she said from behind the wheel. “Don’t want to get ahead of yourself here. Don’t want to be thinking too far down the line. Just take things one step at a time. First thing we do is we find out from Mr. Nosey Parker here who he is and what it is he knows about us.”
“You think he’ll tell us?”
She laughed a laugh he’d only heard once before. Back when he was little. Back when she’d described how she’d gotten the nun to tell her where the money was hidden. The sound sent a shiver running down Tommie’s spine.
“Oh, he’ll tell us all right,” she chuckled. “He most surely will.”
Dougherty ran her tongue across her teeth and then spit on the ground beside her face. After a moment, she pulled one knee under herself and then the other. The woman’s hand on her back pressed harder now. “You just stay still till the ambulance gets here, honey,” the woman cooed. “Everything’s gonna be all right.”
Dougherty lurched to her feet, reeling and nearly going down on the rough stones. She swayed as she looked around. The woman was a blur—sixty-some-thing, short and solid, wearing something bright blue. Some kind of hat on her head. “Oh, honey,” she pleaded as Dougherty used the metal handrail to pull herself up the four steps to the walkway. “Come on now, honey. Jack’s at the phone by now….”
Dougherty lost whatever the woman said next in the rasping and rattling of her own breath as she staggered north along the river. She tried to pick it up, to move from a walk to a jog to a run, but instead tripped herself and fell hard on the asphalt.
Four minutes and two falls later, she was back at the apex of the trail. Knees bleeding, breathing like a locomotive, she looked over into the gloom beneath the oversized bushes and then walked over to the spot where she’d gone over the rail. Nothing. Not a sound. She checked the river. The path. All the way till it disappeared into the fog. No blood, no nothing. Not a sign of Corso.
Trotting now, she skirted the bushes to the left and, once in the open, began to run across the grass toward the lights on Main Street. The picture brought her heart to her throat. Spinning tires had clawed a pair of seeping ruts into the grass. Her eyes followed the tracks across the ravaged lawn, out through the gate, to the street beyond. “She’s got him,” she said out loud, and then began to sprint. “Oh, Jesus, she’s got him.”
36
Dougherty burst through the motel room door, slamming it into the wall so hard the knob punched a hole in the plasterboard. The mirror at the far end of the room showed what a pitiful sight she was. Blotches of brown mud all over her body, one shoe gone, her hair caked with mud and hanging in her face, a pair of bloody knees visible through the holes in her jeans.
She kicked off the remaining shoe and ran to the nightstand, where the blinking red light on the cell phone was telling her they had messages. She snatched the phone from the charger. Held it to the side of her head before she realized she didn’t know the number. Took her a full minute to figure it out; then she brought the receiver down and pushed Redial. Seven rings. A sleepy voice. “Molina.”
“We found her,” she yelled.
“Found—?”
“The de Groot woman. We found her.” The connection was so good she could hear the rustling of linens as he sat up in bed.
“Are you sure—” he began.
“It’s her,” she shouted into the mouthpiece. “She’s got Corso.”
“Slow down,” Molina said. “What’s the—”
“We found her. She calls herself Teresa Fulbrook. She lives somewhere east of Midland, Michigan, on Route 10. Please…you gotta—”
“Call nine-one-one.”
“No time,” she panted. “Tommie de Groot’s here. He shot Corso. Took him off someplace. Please…please…you gotta send help.”
“Okay…okay…okay,” he chanted. “I’ll—”
She didn’t wait for the rest of it. Instead broke the connection and threw the phone onto the bed. She stood for a moment, staring stupidly at the walls, before crossing the room to the desk and pulling the phone book from the drawer. Her hands shook as she leafed through the white pages. Skipped from D to H. Went back, found G, and moved backward to F from there. Fu. One l or two? Then she found it. One l. Two listings. M. L. Fulbrook 27654 RFD 10. G. F. Ful-brook 24788 RFD 10.
She tore the page from the book, grabbed the car keys from the desk, and started for the door. Stopped and turned around. Grabbed the phone from the bed. Back to the phone book. Leafed through the front of the book until she found the local map. Tore that out too and ran out of the room.
“Papa’s home,” Sarah said. Emily rushed to her sister’s side at the windowsill. Three-quarters of a mile away across the winter fields, the lights of their house were visible from Mama May’s upstairs window, as was the white pickup truck parked by the kitchen door. “Let’s go see Papa,” Emily cried.
“Mama don’t like surprises.”
Emily’s lower lip trembled. “I want to see Papa,” she whined.
“Tomorrow,” Sarah said.
“He said he’d bring us ice-cream cake.”
“We leave here, she’ll skin us.”
“Not if Papa’s there,” the little girl said. “Papa won’t let her.”
“Papa goes to work,” Sarah cautioned, but Emily wasn’t listening. Instead she skipped across the room to the closet. Pulled her red jacket from the hanger and put it on. “I’m going to see my papa,” she announced.
“Mama gonna make you wish you didn’t,” her big sister said, but the little girl was undeterred. She hurried back to the window, pushed the bottom sash as far up as it would go, and climbed out onto the back-porch roof.
Sarah stood in the bedroom they shared and watched as her younger sister climbed down the latticework to the ground below, just like Sarah had taught her to do last summer. Sarah looked out over the fields at the glowing spark in the distance. At the white pickup in the yard. Thought about ice-cream cake and could feel the cool creaminess in her mouth, just as Emily came into view, riding her new bike away from Mama May’s house, the white beam of the headlight bouncing crazily along in front of her as she pedaled down the tractor path that wound across the fields.
Sarah smiled. Smiled for the beating Emily was sure to get the first time she was alone with the witch. Smiled as she reached for the phone and dialed. Something she was never allowed to do in her own house. At least not when the witch was home. Billy’s father answered. “Yeah,” the gruff voice said.
“Could I talk to Billy, please?”
“Just a sec.”
She watched Emily’s little red taillight bounce into the distance and smiled again.
A woman’s voice crackled in her ear. “This Sarah?” it wanted to know.
“Yes, ma’am,” she said.
“Listen,” Billy’s mother said. A short silence ensued before the woman went on. “I’m sure you’re a very nice girl and all, Sarah, but our Bill
y isn’t ready for…” She stopped again. “What with your mother and all…” the woman began again. “Please don’t call here anymore,” the voice finally said, before hanging up.
Tommie de Groot took one last hit on the hand-rolled cigarette before grinding it out on Corso’s bare shoulder. Naked to the waist and taped to the kitchen chair, Corso could do little more than squirm in the seat and groan behind the duct tape covering his mouth. Despite several layers of tightly wrapped tape, the wound in his right leg had begun to seep, dripping a pool of blood on the floor around his foot.
Teresa Fulbrook tore off the strip of silver tape covering Corso’s mouth. Left the end hanging down over the series of burn marks covering Corso’s shoulders and chest.
“Tell me again,” she said to Corso. “Just you and the drowned girl. That’s it. Right? That what you been telling me? You found us all on your own.”
Tommie slapped Corso’s face, the impact painting the images of his long fingers on Corso’s cheek. “You answer her, god damn you,” he said.
Corso kept his mouth shut and his head bowed. Tommie grabbed him by the back of the hair, tilting Corso’s face toward the ceiling. “You hear me?” He put his face right in Corso’s. “I’m talking to you, boy!” he screamed. “You hear me?”
“He hears,” she said. “This…”She reached over on the table where the contents of Corso’s wallet were spread out over the surface. Picked up his driver’s license. “This Frank Corso character here fancies himself a hard case.”