by BJ Hoff
Robuck thought her voice peculiar, as if she had a sore throat or was perhaps hoarse from a cold.
She couldn’t see the little one from the doorway, of course. And the mischievous tyke stood unmoving, her shoulders hunched, one hand over her mouth as if she were enjoying her fun altogether.
Robuck looked from the wee girl to the woman, who now stepped outside the door and once again called to the child. She waited only a moment before ducking back inside, then returning with a lantern in hand.
In the lantern’s faint glow, Robuck could see that she had a full mane of dark hair and, though slender, was a fine, well set-up woman. Something stirred inside him as he watched her look about the front yard, then start toward the side of the house.
“What’s this?” Biller rasped behind him. “Kane made no mention of anyone besides the child!”
“This,” Robuck whispered, taking a step forward and gesturing that Biller should follow, “is clearly more than we bargained for. Indeed, I’m thinking this job comes with a bit of a bonus.”
“Wait! We’re not to move until Kane is in place. That was the plan.”
But Robuck was already moving. Gun still in hand, he went at a crouch, as quickly and quietly as a mountain cat.
“Kane be skunked. I have my own plans,” he said under his breath, heading for the house.
Brady went at a run, his heart banging against his chest wall. He stumbled once on a loose cobble, righted himself, and hurried on. He’d meant to be in place well before now, to make certain that Gabriel had indeed left the house and that the two thugs had actually showed up. At the last minute, however, he’d delayed just long enough for a quick drink, to fortify himself.
He should have left earlier…shouldn’t have stopped…
He tried to reassure himself as he rounded the corner. He still had time, after all. In fact, he was exactly on time.
The wind had blown up again after a brief break, stinging his face as he ran. But he picked up his pace still more as he spotted the old oak tree directly across the road from Gabriel’s cottage. He’d chosen the tree as his “station”; from there he could see both the front and the side of the house, as well as Robuck and Biller when they made their move.
His chest was burning, and the pounding in his head matched the slamming of his heart as he reached the oak tree. He stopped, gasping for breath, looking around.
He saw Roweena first, holding a lantern, then Evie, hunched down at the side of the house. He snapped his gaze right and spotted both Robuck and Biller.
Everything seemed to happen at once. Without warning, his carefully scripted plans spun out of control, and he was left reeling.
He had never considered the possibility that Roweena might come outside, too. Not once in all the times he had watched the house to study their routine had she ventured outdoors with Evie.
Until tonight.
Suddenly, Robuck and Biller started to move, going at a crouch but going fast. Brady knew he had to think, had to do something.
Instead he froze. His mind was as leaden as his feet. Even as he watched the two take off—Roweena turning and starting for the side of the house, calling Evie as she went—he realized that Evie was oblivious to it all, at least in that moment. He watched the men split, with the bullish Robuck heading for Roweena while the smaller Biller lunged at Evie. Even knowing what was about to happen, Brady couldn’t move, couldn’t stop his mind from spinning.
He didn’t dare break in on them yet—he would ruin everything. He would have to explain himself to Roweena, and then she’d know that he was behind it all. Everything would be spoiled.
But what if things got out of hand and Roweena got hurt? Could he trust Robuck not to get rough?
Trust him? Of course, he couldn’t trust him! He hadn’t trusted him from the beginning. The perpetual sneer on his face, the hooded, calculating set of his eyes, his obvious contempt, had set Brady on edge the moment they met.
But that was to be expected. He was just another roughneck. That didn’t mean the two wouldn’t carry off the job as planned. Roweena complicated things by showing up as she had, but Robuck could keep her at arm’s length long enough for Brady to make his stand.
He wouldn’t dare hurt her. To him and Biller, this was nothing but another job. A work for hire. The only thing they’d even questioned him about was the money, and he’d agreed to their price. They wouldn’t do anything to risk the rest of their payment.
And he wouldn’t delay his part. No, he’d actually move it up a little. He’d wait only a few minutes, just long enough for his “rescue” to have the desired effect.
For an instant, the irrational desire for some sort of weapon seized Brady. Maybe he should have brought something along, just in case. A gun.
But he’d never used a gun in his life. Besides, he didn’t need a weapon. Robuck and Biller wouldn’t have weapons. He’d been dead clear about that.
He reminded himself that the two toughs he’d hired were just that—common thugs. Not killers.
Everything had been orchestrated, right down to the last detail. They would do their part as planned, and he would do his.
Brady’s hands were shaking, his entire body trembling so violently that pain shot through him like a volley of grapeshot. He steeled himself, trying to stay calm. But the throbbing in his skull sent a surge of nausea exploding up in him, and try as he would, he could not rid himself of the panic that jolted through him at the sight of the two men—men he had hired—heading directly for Roweena and Evie.
28
A DARKNESS IN HEAVEN
What that fate may be hereafter
Is to us a thing unknown.
“A SOUTHERN” FROM THE SAMUEL B. OLDHAM COLLECTION
At the corner of the house, Roweena stood for a moment, looking about. It was a dark night entirely, with no lights of heaven overhead. The wind that had died earlier had renewed itself over the past few minutes, and she pulled her thin shawl more closely about her shoulders.
She lifted the lantern a little higher as she started around the side of the house, stopping the instant she saw Evie, hunched down, laughing as if her sides would split.
The child did test her patience at times. “What…are you doing? Don’t you know…you frightened me?” she scolded.
Evie straightened, her smile still in place but somewhat more tentative now, as if she saw that Roweena was in no mood for her foolishness.
“I was only having fun with you,” she said, speaking slowly so that Roweena could make out her words in the dim light from the lantern. “I was playing hidey-seek.”
“There is no fun…in being thoughtless!” Roweena snapped. She knew she was being shrewish—perhaps she was making too much of little—but in truth she had been frightened. There were no stars for the child to “follow” this night, and with Gabriel away she didn’t like her roaming about in the darkness for any length of time.
Evie’s puckish features pulled into a fierce pout, and she stood scuffing the toe of her shoe without looking at Roweena.
The child invariably melted most of her attempts at sternness, but Roweena tried to keep a firm tone. “Inside with you now, do you hear? Gabriel will not be pleased to learn of your little joke.”
Evie finally looked up and started toward her, and Roweena lifted the lantern to illumine her steps. When the child suddenly stopped in midstride, Roweena renewed her warning. “Eveleen, if you don’t come with me right now, you will not play outside again for another week!”
Evie’s gaze lighted on Roweena for only an instant before deflecting to something behind her. Suddenly, the child’s eyes grew wide, and her mouth pursed in a circle of surprise.
“Evie?”
Without warning, a look of fear spread over the girl’s features, sending a crawling sensation along Roweena’s spine.
She felt the blood drain from her head. A gust of wind lashed at her face, whipping her hair over her eyes, nearly obscuring her vision. Her pulse racing, sh
e started to turn to see what had spooked Evie so. But at the same moment, the dark form of a man leaped out of the shadows and grabbed Evie.
Roweena cried out and lunged forward, but before she could reach Evie, a heavy arm came around her own neck, another around her waist, trapping her.
Panic and the foul scent of body odor and stale tobacco induced a surge of nausea that lodged in her throat and threatened to strangle her. She gagged for breath and tried to scream, but the thick arm pressing against her windpipe choked off her air and smothered her voice.
Stunned, Roweena felt herself hauled back against a large, solid body. She stumbled, trying to twist free, only to be seized in an even more vicious, bruising grip.
In a blinding blaze of horror, she saw Evie struggling to break free of a small, wiry man with a kerchief over the bottom half of his face. Even though her ears were deaf, Roweena could hear in her mind the child’s terrified screams.
At the sight of Evie in such a state, her own fear gave way to a fury so intense that something inside Roweena snapped. She flailed her arms like a wild thing, striking out, meeting nothing but air, trying to wrench herself free as her futile attempt to scream was once again choked off and the arm about her waist tightened to the point that she thought she would be sick.
Then the night itself exploded into madness.
Brady stood, frozen in rising panic and confusion. It was happening too fast. Everything was going wrong. Evie screaming, then silenced by Biller’s hand over her mouth. Roweena struggling, thrashing and pounding her feet like a wild woman in an insane dance of terror.
And Robuck—holding her, shouting and swearing at her, spewing vile obscenities that seemed to contaminate the very air around her, even though Roweena wouldn’t be able to hear a word he was saying.
Brady’s own insides were screaming, and for an instant he thought he had cried aloud, then realized his protests were only in his head.
His ears thundered as his pulse sped out of control. His mind began to spin, groping for reason, scrambling to think of what to do.
The scene erupted before him like a nightmare exploding into reality. A raging wave of guilt and self-revulsion crashed over him as he stood watching the horror he had unleashed.
He was trapped between desperation and indecision, shocked into near paralysis by the catastrophe he himself had set in motion.
Gabriel made his way through the narrow lanes of the Claddagh with a blind eye to almost everything around him.
The wind that had seemed so ineffectual only minutes ago now carried a slicing edge that slashed his face and an angry roar that filled his head.
The vague sense of apprehension that had been rising in him all evening was now a shaking, hammering dread, driving him home in a fever, pressing him on despite the feeling that he was dragging a ball and chain around his ankles.
Ulick’s words virtually shrieked inside his skull with every step he took, and he could not take the darkened streets quickly enough. In the moments since he had left Ulick, his earlier uneasiness about leaving Roweena and Evie alone had spiraled into a taut coil of tension.
Perhaps he was merely being foolish or reacting to the wildness of the night; Ulick’s startling revelation had left him badly shaken, after all. But whatever the reason, whatever the anxiety squeezing at him, he had to get home, and as quickly as he possibly could.
He was almost running now, the blood thundering in his head, his heart pounding from the exertion.
The only thought his mind would hold was what he had learned from Ulick this night. Of everything he might have expected to hear, never in a lifetime would he have expected what he did hear.
But thank the gracious Lord that he had heard it, before disaster could strike.
Unbelievable—incredible—that something which had happened so long ago, so far away in the past, could still reach out across the years and touch today, that one night of savagery could possibly alter the lives and even the destinies of two or more generations.
They had to be told, but how he dreaded the telling. Yet it would be a dangerous folly entirely to keep such a secret from the two of them.
But was it a secret? Roweena, of course, knew that she was the result of a brutal attack on her mother. Gabriel had told her what he knew, once she was old enough to understand. Then, too, she actually remembered bits and pieces of the past: the convent where she and her mother—badly deranged by then—had lived when she was only a wee girl. The fire that had destroyed the convent and killed her mother. The years she had lived with Gabriel’s parents, then later his uncle—until finally Gabriel himself had assumed her guardianship.
But what about Brady Kane? Was it possible he had never been told? Or, if he knew, did he simply not grasp the significance, not realize what it might mean to him? And to Roweena?
An unbidden thought of the portraits Kane had painted struck Gabriel, and he stopped for an instant where he was. He remembered how the likeness of Roweena had disturbed him, the sense of something…sick, even obsessive, behind the artistry. Had he really seen what he thought he had, or had the wrongness of the portrait merely been a kind of warning?
Sick at heart, anguished in spirit, but more anxious than ever to reach home, Gabriel finally broke into a full run, his heavy boots slapping and pounding the cobbled streets that only minutes before had been silent.
29
ENCOUNTER WITH EVIL
Men of the same soil placed in hostile array,
Prepared to encounter in deadly affray.
ROBERT YOUNG
Roweena fought against the man’s effort to turn her about, to make her face him. Perhaps a part of her thought, irrationally, that to see him face-to-face would only make him more real—more dreadful. But her strength was as nothing compared to his.
He turned her easily, roughly. He was a big man—not tall, but thickset with massive shoulders and a barrel chest. His hair was a dull shade of red, worn long and heavy. Like the other, he wore a kerchief covering his mouth, but even as she watched, he lifted a hand to tug it down, letting it fall around his neck, as if he wanted her to see his face.
His eyes were the worst: close set and hooded, they held the flint of a mean spirit and the coldness of one who would inflict pain without so much as a second thought.
Only a deliberate act of will empowered her not to scream in his face as he lifted his free hand and passed it back and forth in front of Roweena, bringing it so close he almost touched her.
He had a gun.
Unwilling to let him see her fear, Roweena tried to avert her gaze. But he pressed the cold barrel of the gun under her chin to tilt her face, forcing her to look directly at him.
He was speaking to her. Roweena had all she could do to concentrate on the cruel line of his mouth, to try and read what he was saying. For some reason, she did not want him to know about her deafness, for fear he would somehow use it as an advantage. His words came too fast, though, and she managed to make out only fragments of his speech.
“…careful…you do. Me and you…inside…have ourselves…fun…Behave yourself…neither you nor her…get hurt…”
No…oh, dear Lord, no…not that…not the evil thing that had been done to her mother…please…blessed Savior…not that…
He looked past her, to the other man holding Evie. Again Roweena tried to read his lips.
“…shut that brat up! And keep…out here until…won’t take long…”
Roweena managed to half turn to see Evie draw her leg back and kick her captor on the shin, hard. In retaliation, the man hauled her up against him, holding her like a rag doll. Flailing her arms, twisting and kicking, she intensified her fierce, but futile, attempt to escape his clutches.
Roweena saw that she was calling out for Gabriel almost with every breath until the man slapped a hand over her mouth. Wide eyed, she held out her arms to Roweena in supplication.
Roweena could bear no more. She squeezed her eyes shut, only to be yanked roughly about to fa
ce the redheaded man again. This time he pressed the gun up against the side of her head. His eyes held fire, his mouth twisted into an ugly scowl as he harangued her with obscenities, then, “…I’ll blow…brains out and hers as well if you don’t do as…”
No, not Evie…she could not let them hurt Eveleen…
“Please—make him let her go!” she begged him. “She’s…little more than a babe! Please!”
She had no way of knowing if he answered, for he merely pushed her around and began shoving her toward the house. Roweena’s legs threatened to give way beneath her, but she forced herself to go on, hoping that by doing what he wanted she might be able to protect Evie. And yet she knew that her sanity—perhaps her life and Evie’s life as well—depended on her not going inside the house. At least out here there was a chance that someone would hear…someone would see…
Even with the thought, she knew her hopes were in vain. Everyone was inside on a night like this, and the wind would no doubt swallow all their pleas for help.
She choked down her panic, digging deep inside herself for some semblance of calm. She sensed that her captor was an angry, impatient man. If she fell to pieces entirely, there was no telling what he might do.
Gabriel…where was Gabriel? Shouldn’t he be back by now?
Her mind began a desperate litany as she stumbled and her captor shoved her on, the gun prodding her in the back. Oh, God, have mercy on us…Christ, have mercy on us…Mercy, please, Lord, have mercy…
Reason deserted Brady when he saw Robuck put a gun to Roweena’s head, then begin to push her toward the house.
But there wasn’t supposed to be a gun! They had agreed—there would be no weapons! And he couldn’t let him take her inside the house! She’d be trapped there with Robuck!
His stomach wrenched.