A sudden rustling in one corner riveted both dogs’ attention, and Jack hopped over to check out the source of the noise. He sniffed and snuffled, while I held my breath, fervently hoping that no mice—or worse—would come running across the boards toward me. Whatever it was remained hidden, and Jack gave up the search to follow his nose across the floor to the wall.
A narrow, steep staircase went down into the gloom below. Jack walked his front feet down a couple of steps, stopped, and looked back at me. “We’ll explore another time,” I told him. “Right now it's dark down there and I don’t have a flashlight and that guy is following us. You’re the one who wanted to run away from him, remember? We need to get going.”
Emily Ann sneezed delicately from the position she’d taken beside me.
“Come on, let’s figure out how to get out of these woods,” I said.
Jack came back to stand by me. I turned toward the door. Jack pricked his ears and growled. He was looking toward the stairway that led into the lower part of the building. Before I could react, hinges creaked and more light flooded in as the lower door was opened.
Except for the intake of breath that caught in my throat, I was frozen in place. The dogs became statues. Jack gave the faintest of growls, but the pounding of my heart was as likely to be heard.
The door downstairs creaked again. I imagined the man in the sport coat and slacks holding the door and looking around. A heavy gun gleamed in his hand. Just when I thought I would scream with fear and frustration, the elderly hinges spoke once more. The light dimmed. Silence from below. He must have gone back outside.
I wanted nothing more than to dash out the door we’d come in, but we would run right into him. I looked around hastily. I could climb down the ladder and hide in the space he’d already seen, but I couldn’t leave the dogs. I flung myself behind the bales of hay that Jack had inspected earlier. Wedged my back between the bales and the wall and drew up my knees. Emily Ann pressed against my side. Jack scrambled between my knees and my chest. We’d barely squeezed into place when the door into the upper level creaked. I felt as much as heard the heavy footsteps on the wooden floorboards.
The footsteps came closer and my nose began to tickle.
It must be a nearly uncontrollable human compulsion to sneeze when you’re hiding. I've always been skeptical when someone in a book or movie just has to sneeze at the worst possible time. Now I realized it was a cliché based on true human experience. Of course, surrounding oneself with dusty hay might be a contributing factor.
I held my breath. I could hear his breathing across the few feet that separated us. I caught the mingled scent of aftershave and cigarette smoke. I wiggled my nose to distract it. Didn’t help. My right arm was around Emily Ann’s shoulders. I moved just enough to pinch my nostrils shut. That slight movement made the floorboard creak.
Absolute silence. Then one more heavy tread thudded on the old floorboards. What should I say when he found me? I hoped I could come up with something wittier than “Dr. Livingston, I presume?” Or would he just shoot me before I had time to say anything? Then on the other side of the hay bales little paws scrabbled and a tiny voice squeaked.
From a point far too close to our hiding place, the intruder sucked in his breath and jumped back, hitting the old floorboards with a resounding thud. I clenched my eyes shut, praying for him to go crashing through to the floor below. No such luck. He said loudly, “Shit! Stupid mouse.” Jack and Emily Ann and I held our breath.
And then a dog barked outside, not far away. To my ears it didn’t sound like either Jack or Emily Ann, but it diverted our follower. His footsteps hastened toward the door. Hinges creaked, and again as the door banged shut. Silence held the barn.
Gradually the pounding of my heart slowed and my breathing became that of a person sitting down instead of a marathon runner or a fleeing Victorian heroine. The sneeze must have been scared right out of me, for now my nose was fine. A new discomfort edged into my awareness—the hay bales were making me itch. A sweatshirt and jeans were scant protection from their prickliness.
It took a while to let go of the dogs. I finally loosed my arms from around Jack and Emily Ann and whispered, “Okay, guys, I think we can get up now.”
They both shook themselves hard when they got outside the confines of the bales; the whipping sound of Jack’s long ears seemed thunderous. I froze again, but the man did not reappear. My knees had locked and I had to crawl out of my cocoon and lean on a bale to hoist myself back to my feet. I dusted pieces of hay off my clothing and scratched the itches that I could reach. Finally we crept to the door.
I pushed it open a couple of inches to peek outside and listen. Other than the normal—what I assumed were normal—bird and breeze noises the morning was quiet, and neither dog seemed to hear anything untoward. I trusted their hearing far more than my own. We slipped outside.
A path beaten in the withered grass encircled the barn. I turned to the left and tramped down the hill that the structure was built into. Reaching the front corner, I took a cautious peek and saw that an old road ran past double doors in the center of the barn’s lower level and continued in the direction of Bob’s house. It was patchy with grass and weeds and couldn’t have had a tractor using it for years. Walking the road would be easier and faster than continuing haphazardly through the woods. Also, given my level of navigational skills, if I followed a road I was more likely to actually arrive somewhere.
I could only hope that the man who’d followed us had gone back toward Bob’s house. I decided if I saw him I would duck into the woods and either get away or make myself look like a tree.
Chapter Eleven
Emily Ann, Jack and I walked a few hundred yards, around a bend and out of sight of the barn. It started to rain. I paused to look at the sky. While we had been running through the woods, the sun had disappeared behind a wall of gray. Now the clouds had reached critical mass and a cold downpour drummed on our heads.
I started along the rough road again, hurrying but no longer running. Jack lifted his face appreciatively to the sky as he took a long sniff. Emily Ann shook herself. I growled.
The pause in the barn had let me catch my breath, but in no other way was I any happier. My face was chilled but I was uncomfortably hot inside my jeans and sweatshirt, and I itched in various places, including several that could not be addressed in public. Hay had worked its way inside my shirt and fallen partway down my back. The weight of my fanny pack increased half a pound with every step. My glasses were steamed up on the inside and rain spotted on the outside. I took them off and wiped them but my wet sweatshirt only made a smeary blur.
With my glasses back on, I saw that the trees ahead were thinning. We hurried forward, and I saw houses, ranch houses built in the Sixties, huddled on their grassy plots. We had come out of the woods and reached suburbia.
The old farm road petered out between two chain-link-fenced yards, ending at a curving street. The day was still early, perhaps 9:00 or a little later. Children would be in school and their parents gone to work. If anyone was around they were safe and dry inside. The street had the deserted air of a town in a science fiction film where everyone has been spirited away.
Even with no traffic, I didn’t want to leave Jack leashless on the street. He’s a bright guy but any dog can get distracted by a cat or squirrel at just the wrong moment. I took Emily Ann’s leash and threaded it through his collar and looped it around once.I had no idea of which way to turn. I could see intersections in both directions. “What do you guys think?” I asked. Emily Ann unhesitatingly turned right, and Jack and I followed her.
And followed her and followed her. Who decided back in the Fifties or Sixties that neighborhoods should consist of winding streets? Each led into another and curved around. I could hear traffic noises indicating signs of life somewhere off in the distance, but I couldn’t get there. Every street looked like the one we had just walked down. We walked and walked, getting wetter and wetter. I became con
vinced that we must be going in circles and tried to pay attention to the houses at each corner, but their identifying details ran together in my brain until every house looked alike.
A couple of times a car hurried past on its way to the outside world or to home and warmth and comfort. I thought about flagging one down to ask how to get out of this place, which set off an argument in my head about the wisdom of doing so. The shy voice said it was too embarrassing to be lost in a residential neighborhood. The alarmist added that anyone I stopped would think I was insane and probably call the cops, and with my luck it would be Chief Johnson who came to arrest me. The practical one said we’re bound to find our way out eventually, and to keep moving.
Whenever I paused to look around, the dogs would shake their accumulated rain onto me. I wished I could do the same; my wet clothes sagged more with each step. Thank heavens I'd worn jeans; pants with an elastic waist could have spelled disaster.
At last I saw a neon glow against the cloud-darkened sky, and was able to keep making turns toward it. We reached the entrance to the tract and I recognized where I was—about a mile and a half from Bob’s driveway. I turned right and stumped up a straight stretch that in a car would seem flat, but actually had a steady rise. I felt as though I'd been tramping around for years.
The neon glow grew brighter, and at last I reached a Texaco station with two covered bays for gas pumps and the usual little attendant’s booth with a cash register behind a counter and a rack of tired looking snacks. And—wonder of wonders—a pay phone at the edge of the lot.
I hauled out my wallet from the fanny pack. It held a five and six ones, and seventeen cents in change.
I walked to the counter and laid a dollar down in front of the attendant, a vacant-eyed man wearing a shirt that looked suspiciously like a pajama top. “Could I get some change for the phone please?” I asked.
He managed to focus on me, and then on the dollar bill. He shook his head. “Uh uh, I can't just give out money. You gotta buy something.”
I found it necessary to close my eyes and breathe deeply so I would not scream at him. When I opened them again, Jack was looking worriedly up at me. Suppressing a wish that my companions looked more threatening, I glanced around to see what I could buy. Mints and gum and little cellophane bags of salted nuts and odd brands of candy bars I didn’t recognize hung limply from the rack. Everything looked faded and old, and even though I was beyond hungry I saw nothing in this place I could bear to put into my mouth. I finally picked up a package of chewing gum that claimed to have eight sticks of mouth poppin’ cinnamint flavor and laid it on the counter next to the dollar.
Pajama Man rang up eighty-nine cents on his cash register. The drawer popped open and he fished for a dime and a penny.
“Wait a minute,” I said quickly, realizing he was about to close the drawer again. I could be buying stale candy all day. “I need change for the phone. Give me some quarters while you have the drawer open.” I pulled another dollar out of my billfold.
He frowned and looked at the two bills. “Um…”
I was really going to have to teach these dogs to bite people. I'd think about how later. Now I was seized with inspiration. I picked the two dollar bills up and put them back in my billfold, and handed him the five. Instantly his brow cleared. “Uh, okay,” he said.
“And be sure to give me four quarters for one of the dollars,” I reminded him. He managed to oblige. I heaved a sigh of relief and turned away from the counter with my change.
“Um, ma’am, you forgot your gum,” he called after me.
I turned and he was holding it out, smiling. “You know what?” I said. “I just needed the change. You can have the gum.”
His smile got bigger, and I realized how young he was. “Gosh, thanks,” he said.
I waved to him and decided to postpone biting lessons for the dogs. “Come on, pups,” I muttered. “Let’s call someone to give us a ride.”
They trotted obediently at my side. As we emerged from under the high canopy over the pumps, the rain renewed our general wetness. The phone’s height was awkward, the top of its stainless steel hood reaching my chin. What had happened to phone booths you could step into and sit down, those quaint, old fashioned ones with a door you could close? No doubt they had been supplanted by cell phones and the driver’s seat of a car.
I leaned against the too-short booth, realizing with a pang that Bob would be my first choice of someone to call for a ride. That obviously wasn’t an option.
I should call Kay and have her fetch me. But I didn’t know what time the furniture was being picked up—Kay had said dawn which could mean anything from five a.m. to ten or so. She would need to be at the store.
I could call the police; after all, I'd been chased by a man with a gun. At least I thought he had a gun. Chief Johnson couldn’t still be on duty, could he? Surely he didn’t work around the clock. I considered whether explaining the whole thing to someone new would be worse that talking to Chief Johnson again. But he would have told the next person on duty about the events he had handled on his shift.
The sarcastic inner voice piped up. “Can’t you just hear him? ‘It was a busy night. I did a routine traffic stop and it was Kay Chelton’s crazy cousin claiming her boyfriend had been kidnapped by a space alien posing as a blonde in a red suit. Later she called to tell me about a message the space aliens had beamed down onto the boyfriend’s phone machine.’”
“Stop it, it was Kay who added the space alien bit,” I said out loud. The dogs pricked their ears at me. I reached for the phone. “I'll just tell the police we were chased by a man with a gun.”
The police officer in my head asked, “And what kind of gun was it, Mrs. McGuire? Oh, you didn’t get close enough to see? You say it was tucked into his waistband and you saw it through a set of white organdy sheers?”
I couldn’t do it. I ran through a mental list of other people I'd gotten to know in the few months I'd been back in Willow Falls. They were acquaintances, people you said hello to when you passed them in the street. I had met several friendly people at the dog park, but I didn’t know anyone’s last name. A tattered phone book was tucked under the phone, but the phone book is not enlightened enough to list people by their dogs’ names.
I pulled out the book, looked up a number. Dialed for a cab.
The ladies’ room beckoned next; I didn’t want to look so scary the cab driver would refuse to pick me up. Both dogs shook themselves hard as soon as I closed the door behind us. Luckily they were just wet, not muddy, so a few paper towels erased the evidence of their ablutions from the walls and floor. They panted happily at me, shiny and eager for whatever would come next.
I, on the other hand, felt like a refugee from a junkyard. Only so much damage to one’s appearance can be repaired with cold water and paper towels in a Texaco restroom. In my case it made no appreciable difference. Twigs of hay stuck out of the hair plastered to my skull. Mud streaked up my cheek, partially covering a scratch on my forehead. My wet clothes clung to me in a clammy embrace. My face was flushed and my neck blotchy and overheated. Mushroom goo smeared one knee, and a liberal coating of stick-tights decorated my jeans from the hems on up. My shoes squished as I shifted my weight. I was probably lucky the cashier had waited on me at all.
“Blagh,” I scowled at my reflection. I don’t waste space in my fanny pack on cosmetics or cleaning equipment. A few wet paper towels took care of the mud, and I fluffed as much water as I could out of my hair with my fingers. I made a face at myself in the mirror, and left the restroom to wait for the cab.
It took forever to arrive. After a few minutes I sat down on the curb by the attendant’s booth. When the taxi finally pulled into the drive I hauled myself to my feet. The white station wagon, several years old, was emblazoned with the name of the cab company and its phone number painted in purple and red on the doors. I pulled open the back passenger door. Emily Ann stepped in and lay down by the far door as Jack bounced in.
“Hey, lady,” the cabbie protested as I slid my wet butt onto the seat, “I don’t take no dogs in here.” He peered at me over thick glasses perched halfway down his long nose. A stout man in his early sixties, he sported the kind of stubble on his face that always looks like a three day growth of beard, no matter when it was last shaved off. Jack put his short front legs on the back of the front seat and laid his muzzle on them, giving the driver a soulful look. His tail wagged madly. “What the hell,” the driver shrugged. “Where you goin’?”
“Two twenty three Maple,” I told him and settled back for the ride.
Chapter Twelve
Two Weeks Earlier
Cleta came out of the café with a carafe of boiling water to refresh my tea. “Kay called,” she told me. “She wants you to come by when you finish your breakfast.”
Trellis Island’s Eileen had finished her coffee and hightailed it to my cousin’s store. “Sure,” I said to Cleta. “Thanks for the message.”
“Kay is your cousin?” Bob asked, surprise coloring his voice. “How did she know where to find you?”
“Kay has her little ways,” I said.
“Do the two of you have a deep psychic connection or something?”
“No, thank heavens! You just don’t know how small Willow Falls is yet.”
He took a sip of coffee. “You said you inherited your parents’ house. Is that where you grew up?” he asked. I shook my head.
“No, my parents bought this one after I'd left for college.” When I had gone home for Christmas my freshman year I’d found that from now on I would stay in my parents’ guest room, that I no longer had a room in their house. They had seen nothing odd in the arrangement. “I haven’t decided yet if I want to keep it or buy something else.”
He nodded. “You probably keep seeing your parents in it.”
Sleeping Dogs Lie wfm-1 Page 6