Fennel and the bitches bounded back toward the road.
“Come, Emil,” Heck called. The hound hesitated just a moment longer and slowly followed his master, clearly reluctant to forsake the grassy fields, damp and cold though they were, for the slippery plastic bench seat of an old, smelly Chevrolet.
When she heard the deliberate footfalls coming up from the basement stairs, the heavy steps, the dull clink of metal, Lis Atcheson understood immediately, and the mood of the night at once turned icy.
Owen walked into the doorway of the greenhouse and looked at his wife, who was pulling more burlap bags from the stack near the lath house.
“Oh, no!” Lis whispered. She shook her head and then sat on a bench made of hard cherry wood. Owen paused then sat beside her, smoothing her hair over her ear the way he did when he explained things to her—business things, estate things, legal things. But no explanation was necessary tonight. For Owen was no longer in his work clothes. He wore a dark-green shirt and matching baggy pants—the outfit he wore under a bright-orange slicker when he went hunting. On his feet were his expensive waterproof boots.
And in his hands, a deer rifle and a pistol.
“You can’t do it, Owen.”
He set the guns aside. “I just talked to the sheriff again. They’ve got four men out after him. Only four goddamn men! And he’s already in Watertown.”
“But that’s east of here. He’s going away from us.”
“That doesn’t matter, Lis. Look how far he’s traveled. That’s seven or eight miles from where he escaped. On foot. He’s not wandering around in a daze at all. He’s up to something.”
“I don’t want you to do this.”
“I’m just going to see exactly what they’re doing to catch him.” He spoke in an austere, assured voice. It was her father’s voice. It was a voice that could hypnotize her.
Still, she said, “Don’t lie to me, Owen.”
And like Andrew L’Auberget, Owen’s eyes contracted, hard as a tick’s back. He had a faint smile on his face but she didn’t believe it for a second. She might very well have been speaking to one of the marble-eyed trophies Owen had nailed up on his den wall, for all the effect her words had on him. She touched his arm and let her fingers linger on the thick cloth. He pressed his hand over hers.
“Don’t go,” she said. She pulled him to her. She felt a surge of unfocused ardor. It was more than the memory of their liaison earlier. His strength, his gravity, the hunger in his face—they were all immensely seductive. She kissed him hard, open-mouthed. She wondered if the arousal she felt was truly lust, or was rather an attempt to keep him encircled in her arms all this long night until the danger was past.
Whatever her motives might have been, though, the embrace had no effect. He held her for a moment then stepped to the window. She rose and stood behind him. “Why don’t you say it? You’re going to hunt him down.”
She studied her husband’s back and the reflection of a face that should, she supposed, be vastly troubled. Yet he seemed very much at peace with himself. “I’m not going to do anything illegal.”
“Oh? What do you call murder?”
“Murder?” he whispered harshly, spinning around, and nodding toward the upstairs of the house. “Don’t you ever think about what you’re saying? What if she heard you?”
“Portia isn’t going to turn you in. That’s not the point. The point is you can’t just track somebody down and—”
“You forget what happened at Indian Leap,” he snapped. “I sometimes think I was more upset by it than you were.”
She turned away as if slapped.
“Lis . . .” He calmed quickly, wincing at his own outburst. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. . . . Look, he’s not a human being. He’s an animal. You know what he’s capable of. You more than anybody.”
He continued his argument smoothly: “He escaped this time, he could escape again. He got away long enough to mail that letter to you when he was in Gloucester. Next time he’s there maybe he’ll wander off. And head this way.”
“They’ll catch him tonight. They’ll put him in jail this time.”
“If he’s still mentally incompetent he goes right back into the hospital. That’s the law. Lis, look at the news-casts, they’re emptying the hospitals. You hear about it every day. Maybe next year, the year after, they’ll just turn him out on the street. And we’d never know when he might show up here. In the yard. In the bedroom.”
Then the first tears started and she knew that she’d lost the argument. She had probably known it when she first heard his steps on the basement stairs. Owen was not always right, she reflected, but he was perpetually confident. It seemed wholly natural for him to load up the 4x4 with guns and cruise off into the middle of a stormy night to hunt down a psychopath.
“I want you and Portia to go to the Inn. We’ve done enough sandbagging.”
She was shaking her head.
“I’m insisting.”
“No! Owen, the water’s already up two feet and it hasn’t even started to rain here. The part by the dock? Where the creek flows in? We need another foot or two there.”
“I finished that part. I added plenty of bags. It’s three feet high. If the crest’s higher than that, there’s nothing we could do anyway.”
She spoke coldly. “Fine. Go if you want. Go play soldier. But I’m staying. I still have to tape the greenhouse.”
“Forget the greenhouse. We’re insured against wind damage.”
“I don’t care about the money. For heaven’s sake, those roses are my life. I’d never forgive myself if anything happened to them.” She sat again on the bench. Lis had noticed that she commanded less authority standing beside her husband, with him a foot taller. Seated, though much lower, she paradoxically felt more his equal.
“Nothing’s going to happen. A few broken windows.”
“You heard the report. Eighty-mile-an-hour winds.”
Owen sat beside her and gripped her thigh, pressing hard. His elbow was against her breast. Instead of comfort she felt vulnerability, her defenses breached by his proximity.
“I’m not going to argue this,” he said evenly. “I don’t want to have to worry about you. I want you to go to the Inn. Once they get him—”
“Once you get him, you mean.”
“Once they get him I’ll call you. You two come back to the house and we’ll finish the work together.”
“Owen, he’s going the other way.”
His eyes flashed. “Are you trying to deny it? Lis, he’s run seven miles in forty-five minutes. He’s up to something. Think about it. Why’re you being so damn stubborn? There’s a killer out there. A psychotic killer! He knows your name and address.”
Lis said nothing. She breathed shallowly.
Owen pressed his face against her hair. He whispered, “Don’t you remember him? Don’t you remember the trial?”
Lis happened to glance up and see on the wall a stone bust of a leering gargoyle. She heard in her memory Hrubek chanting, “Lis-bone, Lis-bone, my Eve of betrayal. My pretty Lis-bone.”
A cheerful voice filled the room. “Little late for fishing, isn’t it, Owen?” Portia stood in the doorway, eyeing his outfit. “The party breaking up?”
Owen stepped away from his wife but he kept his eyes on her.
“I’ll pack a few things,” Lis said.
“Going somewhere?” her sister asked.
“The Inn,” Owen said.
“So soon? I thought that was later on the program. When the crazy man showed up to boogie. Oops, sorry. Was that in bad taste?”
“He’s traveled farther than they thought. I’m going to talk to the sheriff about what they’re doing to find him. Lis and you’re going to a bed-and-breakfast up the road.”
“God, he’s not coming this way?” Portia asked.
“No, he’s going east.” Lis looked at her sister. “It’ll just be better to spend the night at the Inn.”
“Okay by me.”
Portia shrugged and went to collect her backpack.
Lis rose. Owen squeezed her leg. What, she wondered, does that mean? Thanks? I won? I love you? Hand me my guns, woman?
“I won’t be long. A few hours, tops. Come lock the door after me.”
They walked into the kitchen and he kissed her for a long moment but she could see that his mind was already in the fields and on the roads where his prey wandered. He pocketed the pistol and slung his deer rifle over his shoulder. He then walked outside.
Lis double-locked the door behind him, watching him climb into the truck. She stepped to the window and looked down at the garage. The black Cherokee backed out and paused for a moment. The interior of the truck was dark and she wondered if he was waving to her. She lifted her own hand.
He pulled into the driveway. Of course Owen was right. He knew more about Hrubek than all of the pros did—the troopers, the sheriffs, the doctors. And, what’s more, Lis knew too. She knew Hrubek wasn’t harmless, that he wasn’t wandering around like a dim animal, that he had something on his mind, damaged though it was. She knew these things not as facts but as messages from her heart.
Her cheek pressed against the window for a moment. She backed away and gazed at the uneven, bubble-flecked glass, realizing something she’d never thought of—that these panes had been made two and a half centuries ago. How, Lis wondered, had the fragile glass survived intact all those turbulent years? When she focused again on the yard, the truck’s taillights were gone. Yet she continued for a long time to gaze at the shadowy driveway down which the truck had vanished.
Here I am, she thought in disbelief, a pioneer wife, staring into the wilderness after my husband, who’s traveling through the night, on his way to kill the man who would kill me.
The lingering dust raised by the vehicles settled and their taillights vanished behind a hill far to the east. The night was still again. Overhead the clouds that swept in from the west obscured a sallow moon, which sat over a rock outcropping above the deserted highway.
There was as yet no hint of storm. No breeze at all. And for a moment this portion of highway was absolutely silent.
Then Michael Hrubek, pulling his precious Irish cap down over his head, pushed aside the grass and walked directly into the middle of Route 236. He replaced his pistol in the backpack.
GET TO
These words swam into his mind and floated there for a moment, doing slow loop-the-loops. He knew they were vitally important but their meaning kept evading him. They vanished and he was left with a prickling reminder of their absence.
What do they mean? he wondered. What was he supposed to do with them?
He stood on the asphalt and walked in a circle, searching through his confused mind for the answer. What did GET TO mean? Filled with a churning dread, he knew that they were jamming his thoughts. They: the soldiers who’d just been pursuing him.
Let’s think about this.
GET TO
What could it possibly mean?
Hrubek again looked east down the highway, the direction in which the soldiers had disappeared. Conspirators! With their dogs on ropes, sniffing and growling. Fuckers! One man in gray, one man in blue. One Confederate soldier. And one Union, the man with the limp. He was the one Hrubek hated the most.
That man was a con-spirat-or, a fucking Union soldier.
GET TO
GETTO
Slowly the hatred began to fade as he thought about how he’d fooled them. He’d been only thirty feet away from the soldiers, holding his cocked gun, crouching down in a bowl of dirt high on a ledge of rock above them. They’d eased into the grass and found the bag he’d carefully placed there. Shivering with fear he’d heard their alien voices, heard the wet snorting of the dogs, the rustle of grass.
Hrubek saw the letters again, GETO. They floated past, then vanished.
Hrubek recalled the colored lights on the police car starting to spin. A moment later the soldiers returned to the cars and the one who hated him most, the lean fucker in blue, the one with the limp, got into the truck with his dog. They sped off east.
Hrubek crouched down and put his cheek against the damp road. Then he stood up.
“Good night, ladies . . .”
It was coming back to him. GETO. He squinted down the highway, westward. He was seeing not the black strip of asphalt but rather the letters, which slowly stopped swirling and began to line up for him. Like good little soldier boys.
GETO 4
Hrubek’s mind was filling with thoughts, complicated thoughts, wonderful thoughts. He started walking. “I’m gonna see you cry. . . .”
GETON 4
There!
There it was! He began trotting toward it. The letters were all falling into place.
GETON 47 M
The dogs were gone, the conspirators too. The fucker with the limp, Dr. Richard, the hospital, the orderlies . . . all of his enemies were behind him. He’d fooled them all!
Michael Hrubek searched his soul and found that his fear was under control and that his mission was as lucid as a perfect diamond. He paused and set one of the tiny animal skulls in a nest of grass at the base of the post, muttering a short prayer. He then walked past the green sign that said RIDGETON 47 MILES, turned off the road into the cover of brush and began to hurry due west.
2/
Indian Leap
9
On her parted lips he rubs the petal of a yellow rose.
His eyes are fixed on hers, two feet away, close enough for him to penetrate the orbit of her perfume, not so close each feels the heat radiating from the other’s body in this chill room. She reaches out for him but he motions curtly for her to stop. Her hands acquiesce but then rebelliously reach slowly to her own shoulders and dislodge the satin straps of her nightgown. They fall away and the cream-colored garment drops to her waist. His eyes stray to her breasts but he does not touch her and, as he again commands, she lowers her hands to her sides.
From the green-and-russet tangle of a rosebush, the reigning plant in the darkened greenhouse, he lifts away two more petals. These, pink. He holds them in his large, confident fingers, and lifts them to her eyes, which she closes slowly. She feels the petal skin brush over her lids and continue down her cheek. Again he makes a circuit of her mouth, both petals coursing slowly over her half-open lips.
She wets these lips and tells him playfully that he’s destroying one of her prize flowers. But he again shakes his head, insisting on silence. She leans toward him and nearly succeeds in planting a contracted nipple against his forearm but he sways back and their bodies don’t touch. A petal caresses her chin then slips from his fingers, spiraling to the slate greenhouse path on which they stand. He snatches another from the shivering bush. Still, her eyes are closed, her hands are at her sides. As he has insisted.
Now, he brushes her earlobes so gently she doesn’t at first feel the touch of the flower’s skin. He presses the valleys behind her ears and caresses the soft wisps of white-gold hair.
Now, her shoulders, muscled from carrying tubs of earth like that out of which these rosebushes grow.
Now, her throat. Her head tilts back and if she opened her eyes, she’d see a cluster of pale stars awash in the speckled glass. Now, he weakens and kisses her quickly, the petals disappearing from his spreading fingers, which grip her neck and pull her to him. Her breath, matching her desire, rushes inside her, pulling with it his own. She moves her head in a slow circle to increase the pressure of his touch. But he’s too fast for her and he dodges away. He stands back again, dropping the crushed petals and tugging more from the thorny stem beside them.
Her eyes still are closed and the anticipation grows unbearable as she awaits the next touch, which occurs on the lower part of her modest breasts, and she sets her teeth as her lips spread in what could be taken for a snarl but is rather evidence of will. The roses move slowly along the arcs of her breasts and she feels too the drag of several of his fingers, a much rougher feel yet equally provo
cative. . . . Soft and rough. Fingernails, petal flesh. The heat of his touch, the cold of the greenhouse floor on her bare feet.
She feels pressure as slight as a breath. She’s astonished that such a large man is capable of such subtle motion. He kisses her again and the sensations from his lips and fingers fire through her.
But he won’t hurry. The pressure fades and vanishes and she opens her eyes with a plea for him not to stop. He again closes her eyes and she obeys, listening to a curious ripping sound. Then silence, as her neck and breasts are covered by two huge handsful of petals, which fall away from his hands and trickle to their feet.
He kisses each of her eyes and she takes this as the sign that he wants her to open them. They gaze at each other for a moment and she sees that, no, not all the petals have fallen. One remains. He holds it between them, a bright-red oval from a John Armstrong plant. He opens his mouth and places it on his tongue, like a priest dispensing host. She desperately works the nightgown over her hips and reaches for him, enveloping him in her arms, sliding her hands into the small of his back. He leans forward. Their tongues connect and as she pulls him down on top of her, they transfer the red petal back and forth until it disintegrates and they swallow the fragments as they swallow each other.
Lis Atcheson remained lost for a moment in this memory then opened her eyes and gazed out over the flowers in the greenhouse, listening to the pleasant hiss of spray from the watering system.
“Oh, Owen,” she whispered. “Owen . . .”
She set down her packed suitcase and strolled through the damp, fragrant room, then out the lath-house door to the flagstone patio. She looked out over the lake.
The black water lapped persistently.
Troubled, she noticed that the level of the lake had risen another several inches in the last twenty minutes. She glanced to her left, toward a low-lying portion of the property—the dip in the yard behind the garage, where Owen had stacked the extra bags. A creek trickled into the lake there and the marshy shoreline was obscured with rushes. She couldn’t see how well the barrier was holding but she didn’t particularly want to walk down the narrow, slippery path to find out. Owen was a meticulous—often fanatic—worker and she guessed that he’d built a solid levee. Her own engineering efforts, in the center of the yard, looked shoddy. The water was almost up to the level of the bags she’d dozed upon after she and Owen had made love; it was only eighteen inches beneath the top row.
Praying for Sleep Page 10