by Abby Knox
It was like she had vanished right into the slab foundation.
Except, as Misty got right up against the bricks, she saw where the cat had gone. Of course Xena had not disappeared into the bricks. At the top of the cinder blocks was not a slab, but a very narrow gap. Not large enough for her to climb into, thank god. But small enough for a cat.
Xena was pawing at the ground and her meowing was not letting up. Misty shone her flashlight into the gap where the cat had gone.
She could see an earthen floor and it looked like it had been freshly dug. Across the small, narrow space she could see something else. A hole, leading to the exterior of the house.
She did not like this. She did not like this one bit.
But there was no way for her to access that area without climbing up on top of the wall and sliding flat on her back. And even if she did that, what would be the point?
“Come on, Xena, let’s go get Ryan.”
But the cat wouldn’t budge. It was meowing and pawing at the dirt. And then, Xena was batting something around.
“Come on, girl, there’s nothing down here, I don’t have time to pick up your mice treasures.”
The cat had dislodged something from the dirt and was batting it around.
Misty swallowed. “I really do not want to know what it is you’ve got there, Xena.”
Xena gave the object a few more bats, and then the thing came tumbling over the wall and onto the floor.
Misty felt the lava in her chest and throat when the object hit the concrete floor.
It was not a mouse. It clattered loudly. It was a headlamp on a fabric strap. And it was not an old one.
Just then, she heard the doorbell ring. The trick or treaters were arriving, and she jumped out of her skin for the second time that afternoon.
She calmed herself down and beckoned the cat to come out.
“Good girl, come on now,” she said. But the cat would not move.
“Dammit.” Misty decided finally that the cat had clearly survived this long going in and out of this little gap in the wall—hardly big enough to even be called a crawlspace—and she could find her own way out again.
Misty ran up the stairs with the panicked, sickening feeling in her stomach, the kind of psychological terror that a person inflicts on herself when imagining someone is chasing her up the basement stairs.
When she reached the top, she shut the basement door and locked it.
She took a deep breath and went to the front door to hand out some candy.
It was a cute little girl in a pink tutu, with a nice-looking dad and, a little farther back, what looked like the girl’s kindly grandfather shielded in shadows, who appeared to be dressed like a half-assed hobo, hanging back on the walkway. She could not see the shadowy face but she smiled at the little girl.
“Wow, are you a ballerina? I’ve always wanted to be a ballerina.”
The girl giggled and thanked her as Misty loaded her up with candy.
She closed the door but left it unlocked as there would definitely be more little trick or treaters any minute. Misty walked back to her bedroom to fetch her phone.
She called Ryan. It went to voicemail. He must be driving back already, she thought.
“Hey, I found a clue. I’m freaking out a little bit, can you please get over here?”
She stuffed her phone down into her pocket and made her way back to the front door as the bell rang again.
She opened it to a whole group of kids: a zombie, a ghost, a witch, Elsa, Spiderman, a cowboy and three or four more whose characters she could not identify. It took a while for them all to explain to her who they were. Misty discovered she was about four or five Disney movies behind in her pop culture knowledge and decided that a movie marathon on the couch with Ryan would be just the thing she needed to catch up with the rest of society.
When that group left, she took the candy bowl and her phone and waited on the front porch for the next wave of kids.
Just then, Xena appeared from the driveway, crossed over the lawn and parked herself on the walkway in front of the porch. The cat meowed.
“What is up with you?” Misty asked.
She started getting anxious for Ryan to get there already. Something wasn’t right. She had all the bad feelings.
Time to go inside and get her handgun, just in case.
She set the candy bowl down and went inside, letting the screen door slam shut and locking the front door as a precaution.
She went to her bedroom to fetch the Glock. Opening the side table drawer, the only thing she saw inside it was her picture of her mom and Aunt Eliza. Or, rather, the woman who raised her and, she supposed, her biological mother.
Her breath caught in her throat. She turned and lifted up her pillows, running her hands under the comforter of the bed.
“Shit, where is it?”
This was so not good.
She got on her knees and searched under the bed. Perhaps the gun had slipped from under her pillow and fallen to the floor through the gap between the mattress and the headboard as she’d slept last night? But she knew that wasn’t the case. Ryan had slept here beside her last night and she clearly remembered putting the gun in the side table drawer.
“Looking for this?”
For the rest of her life, Misty would remember exactly what she was looking at when those cold words rattled ever nerve ending in her body. The moment she came to terms with the fact that she was about to die.
The patterns in that braided rug on the floor next to her bed, the mixture of reds and oranges and purples, would be forever burned into her brain. She swallowed and thought about what to do next.
27
Ryan
“I need to answer that.”
Ryan’s truck was pulled over by the side of the highway on the way into town.
The sheriff’s deputies had pulled him over almost the minute he had sped out of the dollar store parking lot with a boat load of Reese’s for his girl. He had managed to get up to 75 on the highway before the light-bar appeared in his back window.
And now his phone was ringing. He had his hands on the wheel and glanced over to where his phone lay on the seat. It was Misty.
“Not until we’re done here,” snapped the deputy.
“And how long will that be?” Ryan asked.
“When I say we’re done. Did you know you had a taillight out?”
Ryan sighed. He knew he did not have a light out. “The light’s working.”
The deputy looked over his shoulder and shouted, “Hey, Murphy, you see a taillight out back there?”
The deputy at the back of the truck replied, “Let me check. This could take a while.”
Ryan sighed.
The first deputy asked, “What you in such a hurry for?”
“My girlfriend’s calling. She never calls, she only texts. Something has to be really wrong. I’m going to take my hands off the wheel and listen to her voicemail.”
“The hell you will,” the deputy replied.
“Come on, man, have a heart.”
“Oh, you mean the one that Remy took with her when you stole her from me and then kicked her to the curb? That heart?”
Ryan smirked. “Come on, Taylor. You know it’s not like that. But if you want another shot at Remy, go ahead and give it a try.”
“Come on, man, her new fella coaches your boy’s baseball team. Everyone knows you three got a thing going on. You let me in on some of that menage action and maybe I’ll let you off with a warning.”
Ryan was getting mad now.
“Or should I say, foursome. That’s right. Your new girlfriend is that creepy chick who bought the suicide house. Now that is one hot ass. I bet she’s really into some freaky shit.”
“Shut the fuck up, Taylor, before I file a complaint against you.”
“Good luck getting your hands on those dispatch logs, you file a complaint against me.”
Ryan slowly took his left hand off the wheel and lean
ed out the driver side window to look Taylor directly in the eye.
“You trying to get yourself punched in the face?”
Taylor crossed his beefy arms and said, “I’d love nothing more than to charge you with assaulting an officer of the law. And I’ve got news for you. The reason I pulled you over is because I got those call logs you asked for. Judge called dispatch and ordered it. You must be some kind of important person to earn favors from the judge. But since you’ve been giving me attitude, I don't think I’m gonna give ’em to you. If the judge asks me why not, I’ll let her know you punched me.”
Ryan cracked his knuckles and smiled, still leaning out the window. His other hand was on the gearshift and his right foot was getting ready to hit the gas.
“Great. Sounds perfect. Just one thing,” he asked, arching an eyebrow at the deputy.
“What’s that, asshole?”
“You’ll have to catch me first, dipshit.” Ryan shifted the truck in gear and peeled away down the highway.
Just as he thought would happen, the deputies hopped into their patrol vehicles and they were in hot pursuit.
A few seconds later, Ryan was on the phone with dispatch.
“I’m being chased by your guys down Highway 5, you better send backup to 666 Main Street.”
28
Misty
She paused to gather her thoughts as the killer spoke.
“Hands in the air, please.”
“Well, at least you have manners,” she muttered, raising her hands in the air. “Daddy.”
“I ain’t your daddy. Birth certificate doesn’t mean anything.”
She said, “You got that right. Seeing as I never saw a penny of child support.”
“Is that what you’re doing here? Trying to squeeze me for money?”
Just then, the doorbell rang.
“Trick or treaters,” she said. “I should answer that.”
“Keep your hands up,” he barked.
She sighed and tried to sound calm. “I don’t want your money. Besides, I’m sure there’s not much to be had with all the people you had to pay off to protect your failed political career.”
“You think you’re pretty smart.”
Misty shook her head, “That was just a guess. I don’t have the slightest idea how to start following the missing money from the art club, but since all the shady shit in this town seems to have the Phillips name all over it, I’m guessing it wouldn’t be that hard to do. I’m gonna turn around now.”
He cocked the gun. “Ma’am, I will shoot you.”
The bell rang again.
“But, see, Daddy, I don’t think you will.”
“I told you, you ain’t mine.”
She smiled as she slowly turned around. “Look me in the eyes and tell me I’m not yours. We have the same nose. The same jawline. You and I have the same face shape.”
Her biological father could no longer deny what was right in front of him. And as she studied him, she realized he was the half-assed hobo who had been standing in the shadows on her front walk moments ago.
The brazenness of this guy nearly made her shiver and she had to use all her strength not to show it.
He waved the gun at her. “You were supposed to go to the Phillipses!”
Misty was confused. “What?”
Roy’s voice was cracking. “When Eliza told me she was pregnant, I told her there was no way she could keep that baby. It would be the end of me and my family. I had convinced her to give you up, and you were supposed to go to Edna Phillips.”
“The old art teacher? The one in the nursing home?”
Roy nodded his head. “They only had the one son. They wanted a girl, and I was going to arrange that for them. Eliza would not agree to it, and she threatened to go to the newspaper with her story. Well, when Eliza’s sister took you away, Edna was so angry she threatened to tell everyone I was in the business of selling babies.”
“So you killed my mother and you paid off Edna,” Misty said.
“I raised a hell of a lot of campaign money, but when I didn’t appear to be spending any of it, the state board of elections started nosing around. I had to drop out of the race.”
Sarcastically, Misty replied, “So sorry that didn’t work out for you.”
“I would have won! I’d have been governor by now!”
“I’m sure it would have been worth committing murder too. What I can’t figure out is, why’d you build that addition to the house, right after killing her?”
“You can’t prove I killed her!”
Roy had started out calculating, and now he was becoming unhinged.
“OK, Daddy. I’m sorry. Can we go into the kitchen and make some coffee and talk about it?” She gestured to the kitchen.
“Shut up and put your hands in the air.”
“Well, which is it? Do you want me to lie down on the floor or put my hands in the air?” She hoped the nonsense would confuse him just enough.
It did.
“What?” he asked.
With her hands in the air, she ran at him like a linebacker.
Roy was caught off guard just enough that he stumbled backward, but not before the gun went off.
First, Misty felt a heat in her lower left abdomen, then burning. Then a really bad cramp.
He had shot her in the gut.
The two of them were on the floor, struggling. Misty summoned her strength and jabbed her fingers into his eye sockets. He screamed. She grabbed for the gun. He was still too strong. She let loose all her strength and shoved the lower half of her palm upward at his nose.
She heard the crunch of cartilage and he rolled sideways, holding his eyes and his nose. She had weakened him just enough to wrench the gun out of his hand.
Just then, she thought she heard a battering ram at the front door. In the next moment, Ryan was busting through. He didn’t have a battering ram. He had a shotgun and had blown the lock to pieces.
29
Ryan
“I told you we should have handed out candy at my house.”
Ryan was trying to keep Misty’s spirits up, but underneath he was seething.
“Baby,” Misty replied as EMTs fussed over her as she lay on her sofa. “You live in the middle of the country, on top of a hill. No kids were ever going to go trick or treating there.”
“But I’d buy the full-size chocolate bars! Hell, I’ll put a sign on the road!”
“Babe, it’s not the same. You’re just mad you didn’t get the chance to beat up old Roy. The deputies were on top of him as soon as you blew the door off the hinges,” she said, putting her hand on his leg as he sat on the edge of the sofa near her head.
Ryan scoffed. “Oh, no worries. The boys in khaki let me have a crack at him while they looked away for a minute.”
“And where’d you get the shotgun, anyway?” she asked.
A man in the doorway cleared his throat. “That would be me,” said Jackson Clay, now surrounded by his gaggle of children. Like some kind of track star, Maggie Clay hurdled over her many children and parked herself next to Misty on the sofa. She felt her forehead and her pulse.
“Oh my god. Are you OK?” Maggie asked.
“Just a graze. Ryan’s been making me wear a bullet-proof vest anytime we’re not together. Silly boy.”
Maggie laughed. “Turns out not so silly after all! When the kids came running up telling us your door was closed and the candy bowl was left outside, we knew something was wrong right away. Jackson called the cops, and he went right to his truck and got his rifle.”
“All y’all are crazy,” Misty said, laughing and crying at the same time.
Ryan stroked her hair. “A lot of people have been worried about you. You’re just gonna have to get used to that.”
30
Misty
Misty was shaking and crying.
“Hey,” Ryan said, grabbing her hand.
One of the EMTs asked her if something hurt. She shook her head, but the tear
s kept falling.
Maggie put a blanket over her. “Do you want us to go so you and Ryan can have some quiet time to process all of this?”
The EMTs were leaving, having been satisfied with all her vitals and having applied an antibiotic ointment and a bandage to the flesh wound on her abdomen.
Misty shook her head, but she could barely get the words out. “I want you all to stay,” she squeaked.
Ryan handed her a clean handkerchief from his back pocket.
“I told you how I feel about hankies,” she joked between sobs.
“What the hell is going on?” Now, it was Remy’s voice filling the room. She, Troy, Elly and Hawk were now all filing into her living room, as if appearing out of nowhere. Misty started sobbing even more.
Remy and Elly ran up and hugged her while Ryan filled everyone in on what had happened.
After Ryan finished telling everyone the events of the evening, Maggie brightened up.
“I have an idea!” she said, standing up.
“Oh lord, here we go,” Jackson said, rounding up a herd of kids and toddlers dressed like farm animals.
Maggie clapped her hands together. “We should have a big sleepover, tonight. Right now. Here, at Misty’s house.”
Misty’s response was only laughing and sobbing and dabbing her nose.
Ryan tried to start saying that was probably not the best idea, but Misty finally pulled herself together. “No, let’s do it. I want y’all to stay. I want as many people around me as possible right now.”
Jackson said, “We have like a dozen kids, I think. I’m not sure, I lost count. We can’t all sleep here.”
Misty insisted they could make it work. Maggie and Remy set about gathering blankets and pillows from Remy and Troy’s house, which was the closest. Jackson and Hawk left to raid the inventory from the diner.
Less than 30 minutes later, Misty’s family room was wall-to-wall air mattresses, cushions and sleeping bags, and her kitchen was laid out with fried chicken, biscuits, every kind of pie imaginable.