Praying for Sleep

by Deaver, Jeffrey

  Another line from Shakespeare slipped into her thoughts. “No beast so fierce but knows pity.”

  “Oh, my God!” Lis whispered. “My God . . .”

  She dropped to her knees and began to sob.

  Ten minutes later Lis was wiping Trenton Heck’s sweaty forehead. He seemed to be hallucinating and she had no idea if bathing his face helped at all. She squeezed a sponge over his skin and wiped away the effluence in a delicate and superstitious way. She was standing up to get more water when she heard a sound at the door. She walked into the kitchen, wondering why she hadn’t heard the sheriff ’s cars arrive or seen their lights. But it wasn’t the police. Lis cried out and ran to the door to let Owen inside. Gaunt and muddy, he stumbled into the kitchen, his arm bound to his side with his belt.

  “You’re hurt!” she cried.

  They embraced briefly then he turned, gasping, and gazed outside, surveying the yard like a soldier. Pulling his pistol from his pocket he said, “I’m all right. It’s just my shoulder. But, Christ, Lis—the deputy! Outside. He’s dead!”

  “I know. I know. . . . It was horrible! Michael shot him.”

  Leaning against the doorjamb he gazed into the night. “I had to run all the way from North Street. He snuck past me.”

  “He’s upstairs.”

  “We’ve got to get away from the windows. . . . What?”

  “He’s upstairs,” she repeated, stroking her husband’s muddy cheek.

  Owen stared at his wife. “Hrubek?”

  She held up Michael’s filthy gun and handed it to him. Owen shifted his gaze from Lis’s haggard face to the pistol.

  “This is his ? . . . What’s going on?” He laughed shortly, then his smile faded as she told him the story.

  “He wasn’t going to kill you? But why did he come here?”

  As she fell against Owen’s chest once more, mindful of his shoulder, she said, “His brain’s gone completely. He wanted to sacrifice himself for me, I think. I don’t really know. I don’t think he does either.”

  “Where’s Portia?”

  “She’s gone for help. She should’ve been here by now so I guess the car got stuck.”

  “The roads are mostly out in the north part of town. She’ll probably have to walk.”

  Lis told him about Trenton Heck.

  “That’s his truck outside, sure. Last I heard he was going to Boyleston.”

  “Bad luck for him he didn’t,” she said. “I don’t know if he’s going to make it. Could you look at him?”

  Owen did, examining the unconscious man with expert hands. He knew a lot about wounds from his military service. “He’s in shock. He needs plasma or blood. There’s nothing I can do for him.” He looked around. “Where is he? Hrubek?”

  “I locked him in the small bedroom upstairs, the storeroom.”

  “And he just walked up there?”

  “Like a puppy . . . Oh!” Her hand flew to her mouth. Lis went to the closet and set free Trenton Heck’s dog. He was not pleased at the confinement but strode out unhurt.

  She hugged Owen again then walked into the greenhouse, picking up the newspaper clipping. She read, The BETRAYER hIdeS as the crusher of heADs. i AM to be sacrificed to save POOR EVE

  She exhaled in repulsion at the madman’s macabre words. “Owen, you should see this.” Lis glanced up and saw her husband studying Michael’s pistol. He flipped the cylinder open and was counting how many bullets were inside. Then he did something whose purpose she couldn’t understand. He pulled on his leather shooting gloves and wiped the gun with the soft cloth.

  “Owen, what are you doing? . . . Honey?”

  He didn’t respond but continued this task methodically.

  It was then that Lis realized he still intended to kill Michael Hrubek.

  “No, you can’t! Oh, no . . .”

  Owen didn’t look up from the gun. He spun the cylinder slowly so that, she supposed, a bullet was aligned under the hammer. With a loud click the gun snapped shut.

  Lis pled, “He wasn’t going to hurt me. He came here to protect me. His mind’s gone, Owen. It’s gone. You can’t kill him!”

  Owen stood very still for a moment, lost in thought.

  “Don’t do it! I won’t let you. Owen? . . . Oh, God!”

  A ragged white flash of light enveloped his hand and all the panes of the greenhouse rattled at once. Lis threw her palm toward her face in a mad effort to deflect the bullet, which narrowly missed her cheekbone and snipped a lock of her tangled hair as it streaked no more than an inch from her left ear.

  32

  She fell to the floor, toppling a small yellow rose shrub, and lay on the teal slate, her ear ringing, smelling her own burnt hair.

  “Are you mad?” she shouted. “Owen, it’s me! It’s me!”

  As he lifted the gun once more, there was a blur of motion, a brown streak. The dog’s teeth struck Owen’s injured arm just as they had Michael’s. But her husband, not numb to the pain, cried out. The pistol flew from his hand and clattered behind him.

  Then he was frantically kicking the dog, hammering on its solid shoulder with his good fist. The hound yelped in pain and fled out the lath-house door, which Owen slammed shut.

  Lis leapt for the pistol but Owen intercepted her, grabbing her wrist and throwing her to the rocky floor. She rolled, opening patches of skin on her elbow and cheek. She lay for a moment, gasping, too shocked to cry or say a word. As she climbed to her feet, her husband walked slowly toward the pistol.

  My husband, she thought.

  My own husband! The man I’ve lain with the majority of nights for the past six years, the man by whom I would’ve borne children had circumstances been different, the man with whom I’ve shared so many secrets.

  Many secrets, yes.

  But not all.

  As she ran into the living room, then down the basement stairs, she caught a glimpse of him standing, gun in hand, looking toward her—his quarry—with a piercing, assured stare.

  His gaze was cold and for her money the madness in Michael Hrubek’s eyes was twice as human as this predatory gaze.

  Poor Eve.

  No light. None. The cracks in the wall are large enough to admit air. They’re large enough to bleed brown rain, which here falls not from the sky but from the saturated earth and stone of the house’s foundation. If the time were two hours later, perhaps the uneven wall would admit the diffuse light of dawn. But now there’s nothing but darkness.

  The scuffling sounds outside the door.

  He’s coming. Lis lowers her head to her drawn-up knees. The wound on her cheek stings. Her torn elbows too. She makes herself impossibly small, condensing her body, and in doing so exposing wounds she didn’t know she had. Her thigh, the ball of her ankle.

  A huge kick against the wooden door.

  She sobs silently at the jolt, which is like a blow to her chest. It seems to send her flying into the stone wall behind her and her mind reels from the crash. In the hallway outside Owen says nothing. Was the blow one of frustration or was it an attempt to reach her? The door is locked, true, but perhaps he doesn’t know it can be locked from the inside. Perhaps he believes the room is empty, perhaps he’ll leave. He’ll flee in his black Jeep, he’ll escape through the night to Canada or Mexico. . . .

  But, no, he doesn’t—though he seems satisfied that she’s not inside this tiny storeroom and moves on elsewhere in the rambling basement to check other rooms and the root cellar. His footsteps fade.

  For ten minutes she has huddled here, furious with herself for choosing to hide rather than flee from the house. Halfway to the outside basement door—the one Michael had kicked open—she’d paused, thinking, No, he’ll be waiting in the yard. He can outrun me. He’ll shoot me in the back. . . . Lis then turned and ran to this old room in the depths of the basement, easing the door shut behind her, locking it with a key only she knows about. A key she hasn’t touched for twenty-five years.

  Why, Owen? Why are you doing this? It’s a
s if he’s somehow caught a virus from Michael and is raging in a fever of madness.

  Another crash, on the wall opposite, as he kicks in another door.

  She hears his feet again.

  The room’s dimensions are no more than six by four and the ceiling is only chest high. It reminds her of the cavern at Indian Leap, the black one, where Michael had whispered that he could smell her. Lis thinks too of the times as a girl when she huddled in this same space; then filled with coal, while Andrew L’Auberget was in the backyard stripping a willow branch. Then she’d hear his footsteps too as he came for his daughter. Lis read Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl a dozen times when she was young and although she understands the futility of concealment she always hid.

  But Father found her.

  Father hurt her doubly when she’d tried to escape from him.

  Still, she made this castle keep as defensible as she might—stockpiling crackers and water and a knife and flinging all but one of the green brass keys to the ancient lock into the lake, hiding the remaining one on a nail inside, above the door.

  But the mice got the crackers, the water evaporated, a cousin’s child found the knife and took it home with him.

  And the key proved irrelevant for when Father said open the door she opened it.

  Metal sounds on concrete and rings as it falls. Owen grunts as he retrieves the crowbar. Lis cries silently, and lowers her head. She finds in her hand the clipping—Michael’s macabre gift, spookier to her than the skull. As the blows begin, she clutches the newsprint desperately. She hears a grunt of effort, silence for the length of time it takes the metal to traverse the passageway outside then a resounding crash. The oak begins to shatter. Yet her room, so far, is inviolable. It’s the old boiler room next door that Owen is assaulting. Of course . . . That room has a head-high window. He’d be thinking that she would logically pick the room that offers an exit. But no—smart Lis, Lis the teacher, Lis the scholar after her father’s own heart, has cleverly chosen the room without an escape route.

  Another crash, and another. A dozen more. The wood shrieks as nails are extracted. A huge crack. His footsteps recede. He’s looked inside and seen that she isn’t there and that the window is still covered with dusty plywood.

  She hears nothing. Lis realizes that she can see again. A tiny shaft of light bleeds into the room around her through a crack in the thin wall shared with the boiler room. Her eyes grow accustomed to the illumination and she peers out, seeing nothing. She cannot hear her husband and she is left alone in this cell with the spirit of her father, a dozen pounds of ancient anthracite, and the clipping, which she now understand holds the explanation as to why she is about to die.

  The BETRAYER hIdeS as the crusher of heADs. i AM to be sacrificed to save POOR EVE

  The paper is smeared and disintegrating. But she’s able to read most of Michael’s handwriting.

  . . . heADs. i AM . . .

  AD . . . AM

  ADAM

  These sentences, circled, are connected by lines resembling blood veins to the photo accompanying the article. The person they point to, however, is not Lis. They extend to the left of the photograph and converge upon the man who holds open the car door for her.

  The BETRAYER hIdeS as the crusher of heADs. i AM to be sacrificed . . .

  Michael’s inked lines encircle Owen.

  The BETRAYER IS ADAM.

  Is this the purpose of Michael’s journey tonight? Has he come here as an angel of warning, not of revenge? She opens the clipping fully. It is stamped, Library Marsden State Mental Health Facility.

  Think now. . . .

  Michael saw the article in the hospital, perhaps long after the trial. Perhaps in September—just before he sent his note to her. She tried to recall his words. . . . Eve of betrayal. Perhaps his message was not that she was the betrayer but rather the betrayed.

  Perhaps . . .

  Yes, yes! Michael’s role at Indian Leap was that of witness, not murderer.

  “Lis,” Owen says calmly. “I know you’re down here somewhere. It’s useless, you know.”

  She folds the clipping and sets it on the floor. Perhaps the police will find it in the investigation that will follow. Perhaps the owner of this house fifty years from now will notice the clipping and wonder about its meaning and the people depicted in the photo before tossing it out or giving it to his daughter for a scrapbook. More likely, Owen will comb the house and tidily dispose of it, like every other clue.

  He is, after all, meticulous in his work.

  No more prayers for dawn. The storm rages and the sky outside is as dark as the hole in which she hides. There are no whipsawing lines of colored lights filling the night. Owen’s grisly task will take only seconds: a bullet into her with Michael’s gun then one for the madman with his own. . . . Owen would be found sobbing on the floor, clutching Lis’s body, raging at the same police who’d ignored him when he begged for protection of his wife.

  She hears his footsteps on the gritty corridor outside.

  And then, the same as with her father, Lisbonne rises to her feet and, dutifully and with a minimum of fuss, unlocks the door then pulls it gratingly aside.

  “Here I am,” she says, just as she used to.

  Ten feet away Owen holds the crowbar. He’s somewhat surprised to see her appear from this direction and he seems, if anything, disappointed that he was careless enough to let his enemy get behind him. She says to him softly, “Whatever you want, Owen. But not here. In the greenhouse.” And before he can speak, she has turned her back to him and started up the stairs.

  33

  He whispers, “You thought I’d never find out.”

  Lis backs into a rosebush and senses a thorn easing into her thigh. She feels little pain, she hardly hears the rain pummeling the glass roof above them.

  “How pathetic of you, Lis. How pathetic. Sneaking into hotels. Strolling on the beach . . .” He shook his head. “Don’t look so shocked. Of course I knew. Almost from the beginning.”

  Her throat clogs with fear and her eyes dip momentarily shut. “And that’s why you’re doing this? Because I had an affair? My God, you—”

  “Whore!” He lunges forward and strikes her in the face. She falls to the ground. “My wife. My wife!”

  “But you were seeing someone!”

  “That gives you license to cheat? That’s not the law in any jurisdiction that I know of.”

  Lightning flashes though it’s now in the east. The heart of the storm has passed over them.

  “I fell in love with him,” she cries. “I didn’t plan on it. Why, you and I spent months talking about divorce.”

  “Oh, of course,” he says in a snide voice, “that excuses you.”

  “Robert loved me. You didn’t.”

  “Robert was interested in anything in a skirt.”

  “No!”

  “He fucked half of the women in Ridgeton. A few of the men too probably—”

  “That’s a lie! I loved him. I won’t have you . . .”

  But through these protests another thought rises into her mind. She considers months and dates. She considers their reconciliation after Owen’s affair—just around the time Mrs. L’Auberget was diagnosed as terminally ill. She considers his resistance to buying the nursery. Her tears slow and she looks at him coldly. “It’s something else, isn’t it? It’s not just that I was seeing Robert.”

  The estate. Of course. Her millions.

  “You and Robert talked about getting married,” Owen says, “you talked about divorcing me, cutting me out of everything.”

  “You talk like it’s money you earned. It was my father’s. And I’ve always been more than generous. I . . . Wait. How did you know Robert and I talked about getting married?”

  “We knew.”

  Stunned by a blow sharper than his palm a moment before, Lis understands. We knew. “Dorothy?”

  Owen wasn’t seeing a lawyer at all. Dorothy was his lover. Was and still is. Obedient Dorothy
. They planned Lis’s death all along. For Owen’s insane pride and for the money. Charming, careless Robert had perhaps left some evidence of the affair around the Gillespie household, or perhaps had simply not stopped talking when he should have.

  “Who do you think called the day of the picnic to get me into work? That wasn’t my secretary. Oh, Lis, you were so blind.”

  “You were at the park after all. I thought I saw you.”

  “I stopped at the office and had my calls forwarded from there to the phone in the Acura. I was at the park fifteen minutes before you. I followed you to the beach.”

  And he waited.

  Dorothy forgot Lis’s copy of Hamlet intentionally, thinking that she’d go back to the truck alone for it. Owen would be waiting for her.

  But it was Robert, not Lis, who went after the book, hoping to meet Portia. Robert must have wandered past Owen, who attacked him at the mouth of the cave. Bleeding badly, Robert had run inside and Owen had pursued him. Claire must have heard Robert’s calls for help and followed.

  And it would have been Owen who found the knife Lis had dropped near Robert’s body.

  “The mutilation! Why, you bastard!”

  “Let the punishment fit the crime.”

  “Michael never hurt Robert?”

  “Hurt him? The son of a bitch tried to save him! He was crying, he was saying, ‘I’ll get that blood off your head, don’t worry, don’t worry.’ Some crap like that.”

  “And you’ve been waiting for something like this. . . .” She laughs, looking around her at the night. “You didn’t go out there to kill him at all. You went to bring him here! You were going to let him . . . let him finish the job tonight!”

  “At first I thought that was why he escaped—to come after you. Then I tracked him to Cloverton. He—”

  “That woman . . . Oh, Owen . . .”

  “No, he didn’t hurt her. He just tied her up so she couldn’t reach the phone. I found her in the kitchen. He’d been muttering to her that he was on his way to Ridgeton to save someone named Lisbonne from her Adam.”