Maybe he’s bringing her home to tell me he’s leaving me for her.
Her anxiety grew as they turned off Jackson Road onto Maple drive, the street where they lived. Sarah slowed her car as they reached their house, then drove past it and into the Manning’s driveway. Charlie drove past at a crawl, just in time to see the Manning’s garage door roll up and swallow up the red Focus.
Danny’s house? They had the gall, the unmitigated nerve to carry on their tryst in the house next to where she and Paul lived? She pulled the SUV into her own driveway and sat watching the house next door. Paul and Sarah were careful; they didn’t turn on any of the room lights, but she saw a pale moving beam of light—a flashlight, she supposed. It flickered a few times in the downstairs rooms, then everything went dark for a few moments while she waited, her heart in her throat. Finally she saw a flicker of light in one of the upstairs rooms.
She waited, watching the windows, unsure of what she was going to do. They certainly weren’t up to anything innocent like planning the discussion group series for spring or wrapping Christmas presents.
Her hurt and anger grew. How dare he? And Sarah—trying to make her suspicious of Heather, when all along, she was the one after Charlie’s husband. She got out of the car, being careful to close the door soundlessly, and headed around the hedge between the two houses to the Manning’s backyard. A multi-windowed porch jutted off the back of the house, overlooking the back yard where Katie had grown flowers and Danny had tried gardening with a few basic vegetables, beans, carrots, and tomatoes. She tiptoed up the steps and tried the porch door. It opened easily, and she went on into the enclosed porch. The door to the kitchen was also unlocked, and Charlie walked in, nearly bumping into the kitchen table. She slipped off her shoes and, feeling her way, padded into the next room, which turned out to be a dining room. The stairway, revealed in the moonlight reflecting on the snow outside, lay to the right. Above, she heard Sarah’s throaty laugh and Paul’s deep voice. Well, no reason to be quiet, was there? Nobody knew they were in here, and they certainly couldn’t be heard from outside.
She made her way to the stairway, found a light switch on the wall and flicked it on. There was sudden silence from the bedroom at the top of the stairs. Charlie walked upstairs with a deliberate step, no longer caring if they heard. There was a switch outside the bedroom, too. She turned it on and walked into the bedroom
Paul and Sarah lay in Danny and Katie’s bed, frozen in surprise and guilt as they stared up at her in the doorway. Both were naked; Paul’s hand lay on Sarah’s breast, and their legs were entwined.
Charlie intentionally looked Sarah up and down, taking in each curve of her faultless figure, glad to observe that when she looked at her face again it was bright red. Sarah looked as humiliated as she had ever seen anyone look. Charlie shifted her gaze to Paul, and as she did, Sarah untangled her legs from his, pulled the sheet up over both of them, and turned onto her side, hiding her face in the pillow.
Paul had his arm over his eyes, as if too embarrassed to look at her. It had never been Charlie’s way to scream and yell and call people names. Her fury was cold and contained. She had, after all, followed them all evening, confirming all her previous suspicions, so the sight of them in bed was hardly a surprise.
Charlie looked around the room and saw a straight-backed chair in front of a desk, a tasteful antique thing, small, elegant, with long curved legs. She picked up the chair and brought it to the side of the bed where Sarah lay, now sobbing quietly, and sat down on it, facing the two of them. For a long moment no one spoke, but the total silence in the room spoke louder than words.
Finally Paul removed his arm and looked at her. “I must say, Charlie, this is a really unethical thing for you to do, following us and breaking into the house like this—”
His ridiculous assertion that she was the one indulging in unethical behavior set her off. She laughed so hard that even Sarah dared a miserable peek at her.
Paul had the grace to realize what he had said and didn’t make another attempt.
“I’m not proud of doing this,” Charlie said, “but I had to.”
“Why did you have to?” Paul said. “Our life is ruined now. I’m probably going to get fired tomorrow night, and now I suppose you want a divorce.”
“You’re killing me, Paul—not physically, but emotionally. I’m hurting so much I can hardly swallow. I walk around feeling like a shadow with no substance except pain.”
“I’m sorry, Charlie,” he said. “This was the last time for Sarah and me. I wasn’t going to see her again, I swear.”
She regarded him in silence.
“It’s over,” he continued. “I know I need to change, Charlie. I know you may never trust me again. I just have to beg you for a second chance. We’ll move. We’ll start all over in a new place.”
“I understand that men stray, that men can’t resist temptation when it’s thrown in their face,” Charlie said, noting that Sarah scrunched herself up smaller, as if hoping to disappear, “but I can’t understand how you could do this to Courtney, who idolizes you.”
More silence, ticking away like a time bomb.
“And you, Sarah,” Charlie said turning her wrath on her one-time friend. “You sat in my home, watched Death Island with me, ate my food and drank my wine. We had lunch together, went shopping together, and all the time you were screwing my husband and trying to make me think Heather was the one I should be worried about.”
Sarah sat up suddenly, wrapping the sheet around herself. “Because I love him, Charlie,” she cried. “I’ve loved him since the day he preached his candidating sermon. I didn’t touch him for years. I wanted him so much I finally couldn’t stand it anymore. Then, when Matt and I had a terrible argument one day, I went to see Paul—”
Her eyes were letting loose torrents of tears. “It just happened, Charlie.”
“It just happened,” Charlie repeated in a dry tone of voice. “What I don’t get, Sarah, is how, as a supposedly-Christian person, you can just help yourself to another woman’s husband. He wasn’t yours to take! I just don’t understand that.”
“You’re such a goody-goody!” Sarah yelled at her. “Always trying to help somebody else, like Danny Manning—a hopeless case if there ever was one. Haven’t you ever wondered what it would be like with another man? Haven’t you ever been tempted?”
“Of course I have,” Charlie said.
Paul stared at Charlie. “Have you had the opportunity, Charlie? Has anyone from the congregation come on to you?”
She looked at him. “I suppose it never occurred to you that other men might find me attractive,” she said. “But yes, Paul, I’ve had my chances, and I chose not to act on them.”
“Who?” he demanded, sitting up straighter. “Who dared to proposition you?”
She looked at him, not believing his self-righteous anger, flaring up again. But before she could answer, they were all riveted in place by the sound of the back door slamming shut. Footfalls thumped across the downstairs floor, hesitated, then, step by step, slowly, with a heavy and deliberate tread, someone began to climb the stairs.
* * * *
He knew where they held their trysts, in Danny Manning’s vacated home. He had followed them several times. They were very careful, no lights, no noise, the car secreted away in the garage. He couldn’t imagine how Paul or Sarah could have the key to Danny’s house—but who knew? Maybe Danny was screwing Sarah as well.
And now Charlie was in there with them, although as he approached the back porch, he didn’t hear any screaming or crying coming from upstairs.
He carried the axe lightly, as if it weighed hardly anything. It was a pity that he would have to kill Paul, too, but this nest of vipers could not be allowed to exist any longer. He was God’s instrument, and all the women he had killed had deserved it, because of their moral laxity. Now he would eliminate two more from the face of the earth, the bitch and the whore. He no longer cared if they heard him as he beg
an to climb the stairs.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Danny hobbled toward the gate, forcing his legs to move under him, ignoring the pain that shot through him with every step. His only thought was Talon, the boy he now thought of as a son. He had to rescue him, even if it cost him his life. He heard the voices calling after him, Jake and Evan, and some of the others who were working in the yard or who had come out of their cabins to watch.
“Danny! You’re in no shape for this. Rest up a few days.”
“You’ll never make it in your condition. Don’t be a fool.”
And finally, as he reached the gate, “Oh, let him go. He’ll go in the middle of the night unless we tie him down.”
And, Evan protesting, “Well, we will tie him down then. He’ll die out there.”
Martin said, “Let him go. I’ll follow him. If he collapses I’ll send a smoke signal. You can come with the stretcher and we’ll bring him back.”
Danny heard them, but it didn’t all register. He was going to get Talon, and that was it. He reached the gate, unlocked the two lower bars, then had to climb up the notches in the side of the wall to get the other two. Nobody came to help, but he felt them watching him.
He pushed the gate open, not bothering to close it, and plunged into the jungle. He knew the Tribe lived at the south end of the island, ten, fifteen miles away, maybe, in the thickest part of the forest. He’d have to stop overnight somewhere, but that was no longer the threat it had seemed a year ago, when he was first dropped on the island. He could survive out there. Martin had taught him well.
Determination kept him going, plowing through the jungle, taking a trail or path when one was available, always heading west. Birds flew down from the trees to inspect the strange, two-legged invader, and a monkey threw a partially-eaten fruit at him. He wiped his cheek and kept going. He saw a large spotted cat sprawled under a tree, chewing on a bloody bone. It snarled at him, but he trudged on past it without thinking of giving it a wider berth. He was fairly sure it wouldn’t attack him; it already had its meal, and prey was plentiful in the forest.
He didn’t see or sense any people. Wherever the members of the Tribe were, they weren’t out after him. His gut crunched. Martin had said they ‘amused’ themselves with their captives. He didn’t want to think about what that meant.
When it began to get darker, and branches he didn’t see scratched his face and arms, he knew he had to find something to eat and bed down for the night. Martin had shown him how to find the nests of the wild turkeys. Searching carefully through the long grass around the base of the trees, he found a shallow depression in the dirt, cleverly covered over with vines and grass. He uncovered the nest with care, and saw that there were indeed eggs, twelve of them. That was good. Mother Turkey would never miss two of her eggs.
“Sorry about this,” he mumbled, hoping that the egg had been recently fertilized and wouldn’t contain a partially formed chick, or even worse, one just about to hatch. He remembered, with a touch of dark humor, how Tom had gagged and then vomited the first time Martin had cracked and eaten an egg with a half-formed chick in it.
“Protein is protein,” is all he had said.
“Protein is protein,” Danny repeated. He stuck his finger in the end of the egg, breaking the shell, and then, without looking to see what it contained, sucked out the contents and swallowed them. He waited a moment to see if his stomach would accept this unusual meal, then repeated the procedure with the second one.
“Katie, it will never compete with your cheese omelet with herbs,” he said. He sighed at the memory of cheese. In spite of all their domestic talents, the Villagers had not mastered the art of making cheese, and it was one of the foods he missed the most.
Well, what would it take, he wondered, as he scouted around, looking for a suitable site to settle down for the night. You had to have an animal that would let you milk it. He guessed that a deer would be the closest thing to that kind of animal on the island, but could you domesticate deer to the point of milking them? Well, reindeer could be milked, he knew that. Then, how did you make the milk into cheese? He had no idea. He remembered Katie’s friend Diana from the hospital telling them that if they knew how cheese was made, they’d probably never eat it. Something to do with a substance called rennet, which came from the stomach of calves. So—could fawns produce rennet for the cheese? It would be a shame to kill one of those shy, beautiful creatures for that. But he did miss cheese.
A large slab of rock set among a small circle of trees looked suspiciously as if it had been planted so that someone could settle down there for a night. Who was he at this point to quarrel with that? Besides, if ‘they’ had planned a convenient bed site here, there would also be cameras, and he could make another plea. He began to scoop up handfuls of pine needles and palm leaves and throw them onto the flat rock. There were bushes with berries, and he helped himself to those as, groaning, he lowered his aching limbs onto his bed.
He wondered where the camera might be. Martin was so good at picking them out—a mushroom, a loose piece of bark on a tree, a peculiar looking rock. It was getting too dark to see. Then, on the limb of a tree, whose branches spread out over him like a canopy, he saw the faintest speck of red, blinking on, blinking off.
“Hot damn!” he said.
“Charlie? Are you there? Are you watching right now?” He listened, as if he could hear her answer. He looked at the tiny blur of red above him. “I’ve been here almost a year now,” he said. “Well, that’s what Jake and Evan tell me. I have no idea how long it’s been, since I’ve been unconscious and recovering from my ill-fated attempts at escape.”
He paused for a moment. “I guess you’ve all forgotten about me by now,” he continued. “Maybe there are more interesting men here now for you to watch.” He stopped to think. What did he want the audience, and Charlie in particular, to know, just in case they were still watching? “Maybe some of you have come to the conclusion that I was not guilty of those murders,” he said. “Maybe there have been more murders by the same person who killed my Katie and those other women. If so, then you should have figured out by now that it wasn’t me. And maybe someone has started the wheels turning to get me freed. All I can do is appeal to you—whoever is out there watching. I never killed those women, and I sure as hell didn’t kill Katie!”
He turned his head away because, against his will, all the emotions of the past year overwhelmed him, and he began to cry. Then, he thought, what the hell? If they see me cry, so what? I have nothing more to lose.
Since he could no longer see the light, he assumed it had been turned off. He let himself cry for awhile. It felt good, a relief, and there was no reason not to. Eventually, the sounds of the forest settled down, and he grew sleepy. He ached all over, but that wouldn’t keep him awake; his aches and pains had become more or less a fact of life.
An owl hooted somewhere, and that was somehow comforting, a familiar sound that he could have heard at home, from the woods in back of his house. He wondered what had happened to his house. Probably the town had claimed it and turned it into municipal offices—after all, it was right next door to the church—or maybe it had been raffled off, the proceeds given to charity.
He wondered how Charlie was. Even though they weren’t church people, he thought that he and Katie might have enjoyed getting to know the Adjavons. All of a sudden, he jerked awake, remembering his premonition that Charlie was in danger. When had that occurred—how many days or weeks ago?
Had anything happened to her, or was she okay? Like a blanket, the feeling covered him again, and the knowledge came, with absolute certainty that something terrible—something powerful and evil, was coming for Charlie.
Chapter Thirty
Danny awoke at first light, the chirping of the birds providing his alarm clock. He sat up and groaned, as every bone and muscle in his body protested.
Sleeping on a rock had certainly not done anything for his sore body, but he was almost used to it
now. He reflected that he might not even be able to sleep in a regular bed—with a mattress, clean linens, and so forth. He struggled to his feet, grabbing for support onto the tree that had sheltered him while he slept.
He was thirsty, but he hadn’t come across a stream or pond, so he had no choice but to go on, hoping to find water on the way. And sure enough, the forest fell off a bit, opening onto a field of long grass and spiky purple flowers. In the center of the meadow, half a dozen deer, drinking from a small pond, watched him approach. He trudged on, the deer scattering back to the cover of the trees as he drew near. He bent down, scaring a turtle, who slid off a log and back into the water with a plop. The water was cool, and he washed the sweat and grime from his face and arms, noting the raw scratches that decorated his skin like random tattoos. On an impulse, he waded into the pond, sank down and submerged his body. Why should he take his clothes off, anyway? They would just dry on his body in the heat of the day, and he and they would benefit from the soaking.
After his impromptu bath, he resumed his walk. Fruit from the trees and berries from the bushes provided his breakfast. He was damned if he knew what kind any of it was. He had always been an orange and grapefruit kind of guy anyway, never much for mangoes and kiwis and other not-so-familiar fruit. The tree fruit was juicy, the berries sweet.
As the sun climbed higher, he observed that the ragged red cliffs where he had begun his life on the island looked much closer. By noon, when the sun was directly overhead, he was dripping with sweat and exhausted. He decided to rest for just a few minutes, so he sat down at the base of a tree and leaned his head against the trunk. He closed his eyes, never intending to sleep—for he knew he still had miles to go—but he was just so tired and everything hurt so much, and he couldn’t seem to control his thoughts. Where was he? In the woods … where? And why? Where was Katie? Who was that other woman who kept emerging from the mist to fill his mind? And why was the mist red, and why did he have this awful premonition of danger, and this looming sense of violence hovering over him?
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