It was much more gratifying to see all that blood gushing over Imogene Peters’s white bathrobe with its fancy hotel emblem. Even so, Carrie slipped out of her apartment late Saturday night still feeling vaguely dissatisfied.
Too many years have passed since she’s allowed herself to vent her pent-up frustration. She doesn’t regret for one second having taken out some of it on Imogene Peters. But it hadn’t been nearly enough.
She has to stay strong. She’s come too far to lose control now and throw it all away.
Oh, really? Then what about Nebraska? And Allison? If you’re not going there to stir things up, then what are you planning to do? Give her a hug and wish her well?
The disapproving voice in her head sounds very much like Daddy’s, and Carrie instinctively walks more quickly through the prairie grass, wanting to outrun it.
The sun is high overhead, its scorching heat penetrating her scalp.
She wishes it were raining, as it had been yesterday, throughout the entire midsection of the country.
When she was growing up here, she’d watch the western horizon for funnel clouds, the way Daddy had taught her. She never spotted one, but Arthur, the kindly farmhand, did on occasion. Then he’d hustle Carrie and her mother to the storm cellar.
The summer after Arthur died, the summer she was sixteen, she stopped watching the sky. She didn’t care if a tornado came along. In fact, she wished it would happen—wished a big black funnel cloud would sweep across the prairie and kill her, along with the child she was carrying.
It belonged to the man her father hired to keep an eye on things after Arthur was gone. He had greasy graying hair and a pock-marked face and he smelled like sweat.
He didn’t stick around for very long—just a few weeks. But that was long enough for him to rape Carrie.
Telling her mother was out of the question. They didn’t really talk much. Carrie had always been a daddy’s girl—even though Daddy was hardly ever around anymore.
If he had been, Carrie thought, the hired man would never have raped her.
Summer turned to fall, and Carrie waited for her father to come home. Her waistline grew thicker and she knew why, but it was too horrific to admit, even to herself. When her father came home, she’d tell him, and he’d help her get rid of it.
October turned to November and he didn’t come home; he didn’t even call. He was on the road, same as always, her mother said.
“Are you getting a divorce?” Carrie asked her, and her mother denied it.
It was just the two of them, day after day, all alone. The sky was always bleak and the wind blew rain and snow. Carrie was convinced that her father was staying away because he didn’t want to see her mother, and Carrie hated her for it.
If he didn’t come soon, it was going to be too late to get rid of the pregnancy. She was growing bigger every day, so big that one day, her mother noticed.
“You’re pregnant!” she shrieked. “You’re pregnant and it’s his. Oh my God, I should have known. I should have known . . .”
Carrie didn’t understand, at first, what she was saying; what she was thinking. Then it hit her: her mother thought Daddy—her own father—had gotten her pregnant.
White-hot anger swept over her. How could anyone believe that her father was capable of such an ugly thing? How could her mother accuse him—accuse her—
Even now, rage slips in when she remembers what happened that day. She wipes sweat from her forehead and tells herself that her mother had deserved what had happened to her.
Carrie walks on, wishing she’d thought to wear a hat and sunglasses. If only there was a shady spot somewhere in the six hundred and forty acres she has to comb until she finds the well. Squinting into the harsh glare, she searches the empty landscape for some kind of landmark; something that might help her identify the spot.
There is none. The vortex that roared through the property on that Tuesday morning almost a decade ago destroyed everything in its path, just the way she’d imagined, just the way she’d longed for, when she was sixteen. It’s all gone now: the house, the shed, the century-old stand of cottonwood trees . . .
Even the long road that led from the highway to the house, which had never been more than parallel dirt ruts, has vanished, overgrown and filled in. This landscape she once knew so well, having spent the first eighteen years of her life here, has been reduced to nothing but swaying grasses in shades of green and gold, dotted with purple and yellow wildflowers, stretching clear out to the blue horizon in every direction.
It was so different on that frigid afternoon when she last visited here, in the final days of the last millennium, and her old life.
There were landmarks then—the road, the trees. Even the house was still standing, albeit long abandoned, much too far off the beaten path for anyone to care or notice.
She had come on impulse that December day, needing one last look before she left the heartland forever—or so she had promised herself. She hadn’t been back since she was just sixteen, having fled to Minnesota and then Chicago, losing herself in the bustle of big cities where anonymity wrapped around her like a warm blanket.
She had tried for almost fourteen years to forget what had happened. When she finally realized that she never would, she looked for Allison and managed to trace her as far as New York City.
And so it began: the homework. Planning and preparation. She liked that. She still does.
When she was finally ready to move east, she rented a car and drove hundreds of miles west across the frozen prairie.
Alone in a blizzard on this desolate rural landscape, well aware that her life was hanging in the balance, she had searched for hours.
What would you have done that day if you’d found what you were looking for? Fallen to your knees and kissed the snowy ground? Left something behind to mark the spot?
Ultimately, she gave up, though not because she was afraid, or discouraged. Not, either, because she was cold and hungry. It was because a fresh start lay before her, full of promise. On the cusp of a new millennium, the whole world seemed to be tying up loose ends, looking ahead not just with trepidation but with anticipation, ready to begin anew.
What had happened years earlier on this barren spot might eventually come to matter even less, Carrie hoped, when she found her way to New York . . .
To Allison.
Even then, she didn’t know what she would do when she found her. If she found her. She only knew that she had to try. On that stormy day, the prospect of her upcoming mission snuffed out her desire to see this one through.
Now New York lies behind her—for the second time in thirteen years. Now she knows exactly where to find Allison—when she’s ready.
This time, when we come face-to-face, she’s going to know exactly who I am. At the very least, she’s going to apologize for taking what should have been mine. At the very, very least.
Chances are, though, that it will go much further. Chances are that Carrie will have the pleasure of hearing Allison begging for her life.
But I won’t listen to her. Why should I? She wouldn’t listen to me when I tried to tell her—
Whoa—is that it?
Carrie halts and stares. Right there, just a few feet away from her left shoe, is a slightly sunken, sparse patch of grass. She steps closer, pushes the grass aside, and sees a sliver of the weathered wooden plank lid of the old well.
She smiles.
So. It’s still covered, after all these years; after countless storms, including the tornado that had torn apart the buildings and trees surrounding it.
She backtracks patiently to the rental car to get the shovel she bought—using cash, of course—at a big chain hardware store somewhere between Mankato and the South Dakota state line. Her other purchases—rope, duct tape, and a small wheelbarrow—are in the trunk. For now. The shovel wouldn’t fit, so she laid it across the backseat.
Back at the well site, the sun beats down on her as she digs away chunks of grass and s
od. Finally, the entire square of wood is exposed. She pokes at the edge, wedging the tip of the shovel farther and farther beneath the rim until it lifts from the crumbly earth. Pushing the wooden handle like a lever, she pries the lid off at last, flipping it over onto the grass beside the gaping hole.
The first time she’d lifted the cover on her own, without Daddy, she’d braced herself for the black widow spiders who lived beneath it to come crawling out. She’d quickly dumped her cargo, hearing it land with a thud in the soil eight feet below, remembering what her father had told her about filling it in. There was a law now about old wells in South Dakota—they had to be properly sealed.
The next—and last—time she’d lifted the lid was just a few days after the first; on that occasion, she encountered not the dreaded spiders, but the horrible stench of rotting flesh. When she closed the lid again that day, she never expected to come back here and open it again.
But this has to be done. Only then will it be over at last. Only then will she be free.
This time, as she leans over the hole, Carrie smells nothing but damp dirt, sees nothing but shadows. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t there—nocturnal creatures, down in that dank hole, lurking, waiting . . .
Waiting.
“Don’t worry . . .” Her whisper is all but lost on the hot prairie breeze rustling the tall grass around her. “I’ll be back tonight—and she’ll be with me.”
Chapter Fourteen
“Mommy, are we in Nebraska yet?” Madison asks—yet again—from the backseat of the SUV.
She’s been repeating that question for hours, ever since they stopped for lunch just over the Iowa border. Allison gives her the same answer every time.
“Almost, sweetie.”
This time, though, she actually means it. According to the dashboard GPS, Iowa is about to fall behind them, and Nebraska lies just a few miles ahead.
“How many more hours, Mommy?”
“Not hours now. Just minutes. About ten. Maybe fifteen with this traffic.”
“But when we cross into Nebraska, we’ll still have almost four hundred miles to go,” Hudson pipes up. “Right, Mommy?”
“Noooo!” Madison wails.
Allison sighs. She’ll just have to remind her middle child, once again, that they’re having fun. Maybe if she says it often enough, she’ll believe it, too.
It hasn’t really been a horrible drive today, though. Not like yesterday, with all that rain. Today was just long, and the scenery has been a monotonous stretch of farmland, with very few landmarks and not even a cloud in the blue sky to conjure those old memories that had livened up yesterday’s trip.
“Noooo! Mommy!”
Allison realizes, when she turns to reprimand Maddy for whining, that J.J. has a fistful of her long hair.
“He’s hurting me!”
“It’s your own fault.” Hudson doesn’t even look up from her Atlas. “You should keep your head out of reach, like I do.”
“I can’t keep it out of reach. My neck is too short and his arms are too long!”
Under other circumstances, that remark might have struck Mack, at least, as amusing. But he’s been grumpy behind the wheel the last few hours, and barks, “Guys, please be quiet! This is a car, not a carnival!”
“But he’s hurting me! J.J.! Ouch! No!”
“Noooooo!” J.J. shouts gleefully, and holds tighter.
Mack clenches the wheel. “Shh! I’m trying to drive, here.”
“J.J., stop that!” Allison hisses, trying to reach his little fists.
Mack darts a glance into the rearview mirror, then the driver’s-side mirror, and the rearview again. “Allie, can I get over? I need to get over.”
She turns her head and sees a tractor-trailer alongside them. “No!”
“No!” J.J. echoes again. “No, no, no, nooooo!”
Mack swerves back into the right lane. “Dammit!”
“Mack! Watch the language! All we need is a cursing baby.”
“All we need is to miss the turn,” he shoots back, “and end up in South Dakota. I need to merge into that lane. Why the heck is there so much traffic?”
“It’s rush hour!”
“It’s Council Bluffs!”
“Rush hour happens everywhere,” Hudson comments, adjusting her map. “Um, you’re supposed to be way over there, Daddy!”
“I know that!”
“He knows that!”
“That’s where the Missouri River is. We can’t cross it if we don’t go that way. Do you think someday we can cross all the rivers in America?”
Neither Mack nor Allison answers her.
“There are a quarter of a million rivers,” she goes on, courtesy of the fact Mack finally looked up for her this morning. “How long would it take to cross them all?”
Stifling a sigh, Allison consults the GPS, checking to see where they’ll end up if Mack misses the exit. Not in South Dakota. Not yet, anyway—it’s almost a hundred miles from here.
“Mommy! Help!” Madison whimpers, and J.J. tightens his grip on her hair, babbling happily.
“Hold still, Maddy, you’re making it worse by trying to pull away.” Keeping an eye on the traffic, Allison reaches back again to disentangle her son’s sticky fingers from her daughter’s hair.
This time, she frees the strands. “Okay, sweetie, go ahead, move over.”
“What? Now?” Mack starts to pull into the left lane.
A horn blasts and he swerves again with a curse, narrowly missing a passing car.
“What are you doing?” Allison asks, shaken.
“You told me to move!”
“I told Maddy to move.”
“I thought you were talking to me.”
“I said sweetie!”
“You call me sweetie sometimes!”
“Since when?”
Not since this morning, that’s for sure. She’s been too preoccupied, most of the day, to do much talking at all.
Mack asked her, after they stopped for breakfast, why she’d been so quiet. “Are you still mad because I had to call the office?”
“What? No. I’m just . . . tired.”
He bought that. Who wasn’t tired at this point?
But the truth was, she was wondering whether Tamara Connolly Pratt had yet seen the e-mail she spontaneously sent this morning before they left the hotel.
She kept it straightforward.
I’m looking for an old friend, Tammy Connolly, who lived in Centerfield, Nebraska, in the 1980s. If you’re her, I’ll be staying at the Cornhusker in Lincoln tonight, and I know it’s short notice, but I’d love to catch up.
She provided her cell phone number and signed it simply Allison Taylor MacKenna. She was about to reread it, thinking she might want to edit it—or delete it—when Mack came back into the room, putting his BlackBerry back into his pocket.
“I’m glad that’s over. Ready to go?”
“Yes.” The e-mail zinged into cyberspace.
Her first thought after she impulsively hit send was that she might regret it. But so far, she hasn’t. In fact, she’s been hoping for a response. So far, there’s been nothing. Her iPhone is set to vibrate whenever an e-mail comes in, but maybe she missed something. The signal has been fading in and out as they made their way across Iowa, and she hasn’t looked in a while. Now that they’re in a city, she should—
“Daddy, you have to move over now! This is your last chance!” Hudson shouts from the backseat, checking the signage and her map.
With a curse, Mack looks into the rearview mirror and turns his head briefly to check behind them. He jerks the wheel, pulling into the left lane and cutting off a pickup truck whose driver honks loudly.
“Great job, Daddy!” Hudson shouts.
“Yeah, great job, Daddy.” Shaking her head, Allison presses her hand against her pounding heart. “I think it’s my turn to drive again.”
“You did enough driving today. Just relax.”
“I’ll try.” She pull
s her iPhone out of her pocket and presses the button to light up the screen. Sure enough, there’s a new e-mail waiting for her. It must have come in while they were between cell tower coverage in rural Iowa.
“Look! Look at the sign!” Hudson bounces excitedly.
Allison glances up to see a smattering of tall buildings just ahead. Omaha.
“I didn’t know Nebraska was the home of Arbor Day!” Hudson exclaims, reading the big green welcome sign that begins: “NEBRASKA . . . THE GOOD LIFE.” “I didn’t even know there were any trees here. Mommy said there weren’t any.”
“I said there weren’t many,” Allison corrects her.
“I see some right there. And over there, too. How many trees do you think there are? Can you look it up, Mommy?”
“Sure . . . in a minute.” Allison opens her mailbox.
Hi, Allison! Yep, it’s me, Tammy Connolly. I can’t believe you found me after all these years! I would love to catch up when you get to Lincoln, just the two of us. My cell phone number is 605–555–3424. Text me when you get to town and I’ll give you directions to my house. I work until 9 so I hope that’s not too late.
Allison bites her lip nervously, then gives a decisive nod.
It’s not too late at all, she types, and means it with all her heart.
At ten minutes to six, LaJuanda makes her way along a rutted, overgrown lane adjacent to the pier. A patch of white sand and turquoise sea lies at the far end, the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, marking the spot where she’ll meet Jonas at the Clucking Parrot.
An afternoon spent trying to find someone who might have either known Jane Deere or seen Molly Temple had yielded nothing at all. The locals were far too busy tending to the crowds of cruise passengers to bother with her. LaJuanda finally gave up and spent some time back in her room, futilely checking the Internet for a glimmer or glance of the elusive female bartender.
Now, as the lush greenery falls away, she steps into a beachfront clearing marked by a crudely painted plywood sign that reads “Clucking Parrot.”
Shadowkiller Page 27