One Last Scream

by Kevin O'Brien

  Ina didn’t say anything to him, but she nodded.

  “I’m going upstairs to say goodnight to Jenna. Then I’ll come back down here to keep watch. You should head up and try to get some sleep.” He poured some more Jack Daniel’s into her Flintstones glass. “Here. Have another blast of this. It’ll help you doze off.”

  “Thanks,” Ina said, taking the glass, and moving toward the sink. She still wasn’t looking at him. But she could see his reflection in the darkened window as he stepped out of the kitchen.

  Ina took a gulp of the bourbon. It was warming and took a bit of the edge off.

  She listened to the staircase floorboards creaking. She just assumed it was Mark on his way up to the second floor.

  Ina didn’t consider the possibility that the sound might be coming from the cellar steps.

  The toilet flushing woke her.

  Ina had nodded off for only a few minutes. She’d come up to bed about an hour ago, leaving Mark down in the living room with his hunting rifle. As Ina had reached the top of the stairs, she’d heard Jenna calling to her. She’d poked her head into the master bedroom.

  Her sister was lying in bed with the light on. “Listen, I’m sorry I’ve been such an unbearable shrew today,” Jenna said, not lifting her head from the pillow. “You must want to clobber me.”

  “Oh, don’t be silly,” Ina said. “Go to sleep.”

  Jenna gazed up at the ceiling. Ina noticed, in this light, her sister was looking old and a bit careworn, and it made her sad. Neither one of them was young anymore.

  “I think Mark has been with someone,” Jenna said.

  Ina let out a skittish laugh. “What are you talking about?”

  “He’s having an affair, or at least, he’s had one. I can tell. By any chance, did he say something to George? He’s close with George.”

  Ina shook her head.

  “You’d tell me if you knew, wouldn’t you? If George said something to you about it?”

  “Of course, I’d tell you,” Ina said. She sat down on the edge of the bed, on Mark’s side. “Jenna, Mark loves you. He’s not seeing anyone else. That’s just nonsense. You’re worrying about nothing.”

  “Maybe,” Jenna allowed, sighing. “Jesus, I’m so messed up. Nothing’s been right since Collin died. I feel like a zombie half the time. It’s as if I were walking around with a piece of my insides cut out. It hurts, Ina. It’s not just emotional either. It’s a-a true physical pain.”

  “Oh Jen, I’m so sorry,” Ina whispered. “There now…there now…” She couldn’t think of anything else to say. She hugged her sister.

  Jenna rested her head on her shoulder and wept. Ina felt her sister’s tears through the silk burgundy robe.

  After a while, they’d said goodnight, and Ina had slinked off to her room. Crawling into the creaky twin-size bed, she felt awful. Instead of supporting her sister during this terrible time, she’d slept with Mark. How could she do that to Jenna? And how could she do that to George?

  She would be a better sister, a better wife, better mother, better person…

  Ina had been telling herself that when she’d dozed off.

  Now, she was awake again, listening to the toilet tank refilling. The master bedroom door let out a yawn as Mark closed it. He would be asleep soon, and she’d be the only one awake in the house-this creepy little house in the middle of nowhere.

  Ina heard a rustling noise outside, and told herself to ignore it. They were practically surrounded by a forest, and it was full of creatures making noises. Or was it that thing Mark had chased halfway up the trail? Maybe it had come back. Maybe it had been watching the house, waiting for him to go to bed.

  Ina, quit doing this to yourself.

  There it was again, the rustling sound.

  Ina tossed back the covers and climbed out of bed. Padding over to the dormer window, she peered outside. She didn’t see anything. But she heard those strange rustling sounds again. Was it coming from inside the house? Downstairs?

  Standing very still, Ina listened. Floorboards creaked, more rustling. It wasn’t Mark; she would have heard the master bedroom door squeak open again. Way down the hall and farther from the stairs than her, Mark couldn’t hear what she was hearing, not even if he was still awake. She was the only one who heard it, the only one who knew something was terribly wrong.

  You’re blowing this out of proportion. You got spooked earlier by that bear or whatever it was, and now you’re imagining the worst.

  That much was true. She was thinking about the type of killer who might lurk within these woods, someone resourceful and clever, and yet savagely brutal. Someone deranged.

  Stop it! She’d grown up listening to too many urban legends: the killer with the hook for a hand; the babysitter menaced by a maniac in an upstairs bedroom; and now, her own wild imaginings about this woodland killer.

  She heard the noise again, and realized how silly she was. It was just the sound of logs in the fireplace popping and settling. That was all.

  Ina crawled back into bed, and pulled the covers up to her neck. As much as she tried to convince herself everything was fine, she lay there tense and rigid, listening for the next sound.

  She didn’t have to wait long. It came from downstairs again, in the living room, and she could tell exactly what it was: the legs of a chair scraping across the floor. Someone must have bumped into it.

  The noise was loud enough that Mark must have heard it, too, because the master bedroom door creaked open again. Then there were footsteps in the upstairs hallway.

  Ina climbed out of bed and started toward the door. Her heart was racing. At least she wasn’t the only one hearing the noises. And Mark was investigating it. She could hear him on the stairs. “Oh, thank God it’s you,” he murmured. “Jesus, what are you doing here? You scared the hell out of me….”

  A hand on the doorknob, Ina pressed her ear to the door. She could hear undecipherable whispering. But one thing she could make out was Mark saying. “Okay, okay, I’m sitting down….” Obviously, he knew the person who was downstairs. There was more murmuring, and then Mark raised his voice. “Hey, no! Wait a minute, no-”

  A loud gunshot went off.

  Ina reeled back from the door.

  She heard her sister’s footsteps along the hallway. Someone else was charging up the stairs. “Oh, God, no, no!” Jenna screamed.

  Ina’s stomach lurched at the sound of a second blast. She heard someone collapse right outside her bedroom door.

  God, please. This isn’t happening, this isn’t happening.

  Ducking into her closet, she closed the door and curled up on the floor. She was shaking uncontrollably. She heard footsteps. She couldn’t tell if they were coming toward her bedroom or moving away from it. She felt dizzy, and couldn’t breathe. The dark closet seemed to be shrinking in around her. Ina’s whole body started to shut down.

  She wasn’t sure what had happened, if she’d fainted or gone into a kind of shock, but Ina suddenly realized some time had elapsed. The house was still, and a very faint light sliced through the crack under the closet door. Dawn was breaking.

  Was it all a nightmare? As she tried to move, every joint inside her ached. She felt as if she’d been beaten up. Her body was reacting to the trauma. This was no nightmare. It was real.

  Ina managed to get to her feet and open the closet door. But she was shaking. The bedroom was still dark with only a murky, early dawn light seeping through the dormer windows. Nothing had been disturbed in the room. The door was still closed.

  Ina swallowed hard, and then reached for the doorknob. As she opened the door, she saw the blood and bits of brain on the hallway wall. Only a few feet in front of her, Jenna lay dead on the floor facing that blood-splattered wall.

  Ina let out a gasp. Tears stung her eyes, but she didn’t stare at her dead sister for too long. She staggered back toward the stairs. She shook so violently she could barely make it down the steps. She clutched the banister to keep from fal
ling-or fainting.

  In the dim light she could see only certain areas of the living room. Other spots were still shrouded in darkness. She glimpsed Mark in his robe, sitting in the rocker by the fireplace. But his face was swallowed up in the shadows, and he wasn’t moving at all. As Ina warily approached him, she saw that his wavy brown hair was matted down with blood on one side. He stared back at her with open dead eyes and a bewildered expression. The top left side of his head had been blown off.

  “Oh, no,” Ina whispered, a hand over her mouth. “No, no, no…”

  Someone emerged from the darkness beyond the kitchen door.

  Ina gasped again. She saw Mark’s hunting rifle-aimed at her.

  Tears streamed down Ina’s face as she gazed at the person who was about to kill her. “Oh, my God, honey,” she whispered, shaking her head. “What have you done?”

  The shotgun went off.

  Chapter Three

  Her aunt was staring at her, and asking, “What have you done?” And that was when Amelia shot her in the chest.

  All at once, she bolted up and accidentally banged her knee against the steering wheel of Shane’s Volkswagen Golf. Amelia barely noticed the pain. She was just glad to be awake-and out of that nightmare. It seemed so horribly real. She’d even felt the blood splattering on her face as she’d shot her parents and Aunt Ina at close range.

  Now Amelia anxiously checked her reflection in the rearview mirror. She touched her hair. Not a drop of blood anywhere. If she’d washed it off, she certainly would remember. It was a dream-vivid and frightening, but still just a dream.

  Shivering from the cold, Amelia looked around. It took her a moment to realize she’d fallen asleep in the front seat of the VW. She’d parked in the small, desolate lot of a boarded-up hot dog stand. The unlit, cracked sign had a cartoon of a smiling dachshund. It read: WIENER WORLD! HOT DOG EMPORIUM-WIENERS, FRIES, and COLD DRINKS!

  Amelia wasn’t sure where she was, but she could hear cars zooming along on the other side of some evergreen trees across the street from Wiener World. She had to be somewhere close to a highway. She squinted at her wristwatch: 11:15 A.M.

  Her head was throbbing and she felt so thirsty she could hardly swallow. She hadn’t had a hangover in several weeks, and this was a painful reminder of what it had been like during her drinking days. Now Amelia remembered the party last night, and how she’d treated Shane so shabbily. She remembered grabbing that bottle of tequila and driving off toward Wenatchee. She’d had this sudden urge to get to the family cabin, and make certain her parents and her Aunt Ina were all right. She’d been convinced some harm would come to them.

  Amelia felt around under the car seat for that bottle of tequila. There was still some left, and she took a swig from the bottle. But even the jolt of alcohol didn’t erase the violent images lingering from that nightmare. Something had happened at the Lake Wenatchee house; she was sure of it.

  Amelia wished she could remember, but everything was a blank from the time she’d sped away from that party on fraternity row to when she’d woken up here just moments ago. She suffered from occasional blackouts-lost time. It usually happened when she was drinking, but she’d experienced these memory lapses other times, too. On several occasions, people claimed they’d seen her here or there, and Amelia didn’t remember it at all. It was almost as if she were sleepwalking some of the time.

  Had she killed her parents and her aunt during one of these sleepwalking episodes? Was it possible?

  Amelia put down the tequila bottle, then dug her cell phone from her purse. Squinting at it, she dialed her mother’s cell number. But if they were still at the cabin, the call wouldn’t get through. Sure enough, just as she thought, no luck. Biting her lip, Amelia dialed her Aunt Ina and Uncle George’s house in Seattle. Her Uncle George had stayed home with her cousins this weekend. If something had really happened, he might know about it.

  “Could you please make that announcement again?” George McMillan asked the woman at the concierge desk in the Pacific Place Shopping Center.

  Nodding, the pretty concierge with curly auburn hair and cocoa-colored skin gave him a pained, sympathetic smile. She picked up her phone and pushed a couple of numbers.

  “Stephanie McMillan, attention, Stephanie McMillan.” Her voice interrupted the music on the public address system. “Please meet your father by the first-floor escalators.” She repeated the announcement.

  “Thank you,” George said, nervously tapping his fingers on the edge of the desk. He gazed up at the people passing by the railings on all four shopping levels of the vast skylit atrium. No sign of Steffie. He scanned the faces of the shoppers lined up on the escalators. He still didn’t see her. His stomach felt as tight as a fist.

  His daughter had wandered off about fifteen minutes ago. Already, George had sweated through his shirt. He imagined every horrifying scenario of what might have happened to her. He saw Stephanie’s face on milk cartons. He thought about the call from the police, asking him to come identify the corpse of a pretty, freckled-faced, auburn-haired five-year-old. He imagined looking for the little strawberry mark on her arm-just to make sure it wasn’t Stephanie’s double. As if there was another like her.

  His son, Jody, eleven, was supposed to have been keeping an eye on her. George had taken the kids to Old Navy in downtown Seattle this morning. His wife, Ina, had made out a shopping list that included the kids’ clothes and some other things she wanted him to get. After Old Navy, he’d stopped by Pottery Barn in the Pacific Place Shopping Center to pick up candles-specifically, “eight-inch pillars in fig.” George had had a big bag from Old Navy weighing down one arm and Steffie hanging on the other. He wasn’t sure if fig was tan, brown, or green. Or maybe it was purple-no, that was plum. He had unloaded Stephanie on her brother, then went in search of a saleslady.

  At the time, he kept wondering why the hell Ina needed these stupid candles now. She wasn’t entertaining any time soon. Why didn’t she just buy them herself when she got back from Lake Wenatchee? Considering the company and their situation, George hadn’t been up for the trip this weekend. Besides, someone had to look after the kids. Jenna and Mark had volunteered Amelia’s services as a babysitter, but George didn’t have much confidence his niece could handle the task, at least not for the entire weekend.

  The last few months had been pretty rough for everyone. The drowning of his nephew, Collin, had hit George awfully hard. Collin had had a special bond with his Uncle George, and he’d been like a big brother to Jody. His death had devastated two families, not just one. George walked around in a dark stupor for weeks afterward. Maybe that explained why he couldn’t see what was happening between Ina and his brother-in-law.

  Once George discovered the letter Ina had started to Mark, he realized his wife must have wanted him to see what was happening.

  In fact, it had already happened-in the Hotel Alexis. “Dear Mark,” she’d scribbled on the hotel’s stationery.

  As I write this, you’re in the shower. I still feel you all over me, and inside me. I know what we did was wrong. I’m not arguing with you about that. But we’re two good people, who are hurting. We’ve found something with each other, something that made our pain and loneliness go away. I’m not sure if it’s love. But I do know I’ve always felt a connection with you. You haven’t-

  That was as far as she’d gotten before she’d half crumpled up the note and thrown it away-in their master bathroom, for God’s sake. It lingered there at the top of the trash in the silver wastebasket from Restoration Hardware. George noticed the note while sitting on the toilet. She’d obviously wanted him to see it. Otherwise, she would have tossed the letter away in the hotel room, or torn it up and flushed it down the toilet, or at the very least, buried the damn thing under some used Kleenex in the trash.

  Ina didn’t deny her indiscretion.

  “You left that love letter in plain sight,” George pointed out. “God, what were you thinking? What if Jody had found it? Hell, I know
what you were thinking….” He kept his voice low. They were in their bedroom, and he didn’t want Jody and Stephanie, downstairs, to hear. “It’s pretty obvious you wanted me to find out about you and Mark.”

  “Now, why in the world would I want that?” she asked, shaking her head.

  “I don’t know. Why did you want it, Ina?”

  George wondered if she’d been dropping any more clues about her infidelity. The note-with its cringe-worthy prose-mentioned Mark was taking a shower. Had she bothered to bathe at the Alexis that evening, or did she want her addlebrained husband to detect the scent of another man on her?

  “I can’t understand how this happened,” he said finally. “You don’t love him. Did you think screwing Mark and letting me find out about it would make me want a divorce? Is this your way of trying to end it for us? You haven’t said you’re sorry.”

  Flicking back her long, curly auburn hair, she turned and headed for the door. “I have to get dinner started,” she murmured.

  “Do you love him?” George asked pointedly. The question made Ina stop in her tracks. “Or did you just use him to sabotage us? For chrissakes, he’s your sister’s husband, Ina. Tell me the truth, do you love him?”

  Facing the door, she shrugged awkwardly. “I don’t really know,” she whispered. She started to cry, but kept her back to him. “I’m so sorry, honey. Do you hear that? I’m apologizing. I’ve screwed everything up but good. Maybe I did want you to know. You’re probably right about that. God, I feel so shitty about this. You’re a good man, George, and a good husband. You deserve better…”

  He stared at her back, and wondered if this was a variation of the It’s Not You, It’s Me speech. “I’ll be honest. Right now, I’m so furious at you, and so hurt, I’m not sure I have it in me to be forgiving. I need to know if it’s worth a try. Do you want to stay in this marriage?”

  “I–I can’t say for sure,” she whispered. “I’m not certain about anything right now.”