She flew by me like she was on roller skates and lit into her brother like a Thai boxer, with fists and feet, pounding him, pummeling him, kicking him on his arms and chest and legs while he tried futilely to avoid the blows. Her screams were incoherent, incomprehensible. And loud: The hair on my arms quivered to attention; the spaniel tried to make himself very small in the far corner of the room.
I forced myself out of my paralysis of shock and grabbed Amy by her upper arms, peeling her off Vince. That was harder than it sounds: Though the girl was nothing but skin and bones, she was fighting like one possessed and I—foolishly—was worried about hurting her. Both of the kids were yelling now. I may have shouted a thing or two as well; it would have fit the mood. Finally I got her off him but she wanted more, and kicked and elbowed at me to try and get it. I crossed my arms above her small breasts and pulled her back against my chest, hard, giving her no room for leverage. “Stop it!” I yelled into her ear. “Stop it!”
Those well-chosen words calmed her, marginally. Her chest heaved and she still strained against me, but she was no longer the hellion. However, I didn’t release her yet.
Vince was putting himself back together, touching scratches on his face and neck and examining his blood-dotted fingertips. “Goddamn,” he breathed incredulously. “You drew blood, you little—”
He pulled back his arm and I pirouetted, dragging Amy, to put myself between them. “Enough of that,” I said loudly, but Amy drowned me out:
“I don’t care,” she yelled. “You shouldn’t have said that. Don’t ever say that. Kate isn’t dead. She isn’t. And she didn’t hurt Daddy. She loved him. She loved him better than any of us—” And with that the screams dissolved into sobs, loud, racking sobs that shook her slim, reedy body, and mine too.
I let her go.
Vince reached past me to touch her shoulder. “Jesus, Amy,” he began slowly, but she pulled away violently before he could speak further and ran through the dining room into the living room. The boy and I exchanged looks. I had no pearls of wisdom, and not enough breath to dispense them if I had.
“Shit.” Vince snapped off a paper towel to dab at his face. The bloodshed was nothing—a paper cut produces more—but the welts on his face and throat were red and raw-looking. “I better go talk to her …”
I stopped him with a gesture. “Maybe you’d better not,” I countered breathlessly. “I skipped my vitamins this morning and I’m not up for another workout like this.” I gulped more air. “Why don’t you go clean up a little. I’ll talk to her.”
He hesitated. “Well …” he said with a glance in the direction of the living room. “I should be getting down to school. I was sort of waiting for the doctor to show …”
“That’s fine; I’ll baby-sit till then. Go ahead.”
He vacillated another instant or two, then went, through the kitchen and up the stairs. A moment later I heard water running through pipes in the ceiling. Only then did I follow Amy.
She was in the living room, in the oversized chair she had retreated to after finding her murdered father. Today, however, instead of staring mutely into the cold fireplace, she was crying softly, face hidden, forehead against her knees, hands wrapped around her long, long legs—she was nothing but legs, it seemed, and yet somehow she managed to fold them and fit them into the big chair with her.
I hesitated in the doorway, wondering if this picture was better or worse than the other day’s. Better, I decided provisionally. But I was still uncertain how to proceed, how to keep from inadvertently doing her further injury. Just be around, Koosje had said. I shrugged mentally. That much I could manage, I figured.
So I came slowly into the warm, countrified room, and seated myself on a low bench near the hearth, facing Amy. She didn’t seem to notice me but went on with her crying, her face still hidden. The scene called for me to offer her my handkerchief, but I didn’t have one—not a clean one, at any rate. So I did nothing, said nothing, for a long while. Finally, however, I had to act: I reached across and covered the long, thin hands that were linked around her shins. The hands were freezing. I gripped them gently. “Amy …”
Her head came up. The sad eyes were infinitely more sorrowful now, red and streaming. “He shouldn’t have said those things,” she said, and sniffled.
“I know. So does Vince. He was just upset, you know, he didn’t mean it. Everyone’s real upset …” Brilliant, I thought, absolutely stellar.
“Kate isn’t dead.” She said it with conviction, gulping spasmodically for wind, wiping at her nose with a sleeve of her pink sweatshirt. “I know she isn’t. And”—a snuffle and a wet hiccup—“she didn’t have anything to do with the guy who killed my-my-my dad, either.” She dragged the sleeve across her wet eyes and hiccupped several more times. “She wouldn’t, ever—she wouldn’t. Kate loved Daddy. She loved him a lot. More than I ever did …” She squeezed her eyes shut but the tears leaked out anyway and flowed down her long, smooth face. Her mouth twisted in a silent cry that again racked her body almost convulsively.
I got up off the stool and leaned over her, put my arms around her. Amy’s slender arms wrapped around my back and held me tight, so tight I almost lost my balance. Her breath was hot against the side of my neck, her tears even more. “Come on, Amy, honey,” I murmured into her dark hair, largely because I didn’t know what else to say. How come when it really counts the mots justes vanish, the silver tongue tarnishes, the quick wit’s shoelaces are tied together? “I know that Kate’s just fine, and I know you loved your dad a whole lot. I can tell by the way you’re acting n—”
“Not e-enough,” she sobbed. “Not like K-Kate did. I tried, I really tried, but I just c-c-couldn’t—”
The blood was thundering in my brain now, making it difficult to hear or understand Amy even though she was speaking into my ear. A crazy sort of panic grabbed me by the nape of the neck, shook me a little, and rolled sweat down my back. I wished, hoped, prayed to hear the back door open and Koosje walk in right now—
She didn’t. I heard nothing but the roaring in my ears and the sound of Amy’s agony, seemingly miles and miles distant.
Gently, uncertainly, I pulled back enough to look into Amy’s face. She wouldn’t meet my eyes. I put a fist under her chin and raised her head, forced her to look at me. “Amy.” I stopped, listened to the voices screaming in my brain, tried to shut them out. I swallowed and licked my lips, fearing—knowing, with gut-wrenching certainty—that anything I did at this point would be the wrong thing, one more wrong thing, one more miscalculation in a hideous morass of miscalculations, mistakes, misjudgments—
Koosje—damn it—get here—
“Amy,” I repeated, my voice sounding curiously muffled and quiet compared to the shrillness of the internal voices. “Honey.” I smoothed her long hair, still somewhat cool and damp from her morning shower. “This is really important. Okay? What do you mean when you say you tried? What do you mean when you say Kate loved your father better than you could? …”
The girl looked at me with a strange, eerie calm, and I was afraid that she was retreating, pulling back from me the way she pulled away from Koosje. Worse, I feared that I had forced a backlash, a regression, a flight to that other world Koosje worried about losing her to. But apparently not. She sniffled and wiped her eyes again and spoke, very quietly, and I knew what she was going to say before she so much as opened her mouth:
“Kate used to sleep with him.” She said it softly, slowly—as if she was trying to break it to me gently.
A missing piece clicked into place.
I could hardly hear Amy now over the pounding in my ears and the babble of voices in my brain. I suppose I didn’t really need to hear any more, any of the slow, halting confession, of how, late at night, Amy would sometimes hear her father slip into Kate’s room. How, even when Amy was much, much younger, she somehow knew what they were doing, knew that it wasn’t right—but couldn’t understand how it could be wrong if it was all right with her
daddy. How she knew and feared that her turn would come someday. How it did, when she was eleven and the house was empty. How she tried to love him the way Kate did but couldn’t, just couldn’t. How her crying frightened him, drove him from the room. How he never loved her again after that, just Kate …
After a while I became aware that she had quit talking. I was looking straight at her but I hadn’t seen her; now I came back to that room, and it was like coming out of a deep, drugged sleep. Amy was staring blankly into the fireplace again, and a shudder went through me. But I spoke her name and she looked at me with heavy-lidded eyes. “I should have tried harder,” she said regretfully.
My throat was dry and constricted. I cleared it. “You didn’t do anything wrong, honey. Do you understand me? You did nothing wrong.” She smiled with ancient, infinite sadness, as if to say, Poor man, you simply don’t understand and you never will.
I held one of her small hands between my own. “Are you okay?”
She nodded.
“All right. I have to go upstairs for a minute, okay? But I’ll be here until Ko—until Dr. Van der Beek comes. All right?” Again she nodded sleepily.
I left her then, forced myself to walk slowly from the living room, then dashed up the carpeted stairs. They ended in a wide hallway whose walls were covered with framed photographs. One man’s family, I thought bleakly as I flung open doors. Even in the best of homes …
The upper floor was vacant, no sign of Vince. As distracted as I was, I could hardly believe that he could have come downstairs and left without my hearing him.
The answer came in the master bedroom. Narrow French doors opened onto a small terrace on the south side of the house. From the terrace a long open-plank staircase, snow-covered, led to the ground. The snow had been disturbed.
“Goddamn!”
I tore out of the room and headed down the carpeted stairs to the dining room, jumping the last five or six in one of those foolhardy moves you wouldn’t even think about if your brain were hitting on all the cylinders. I threw a glance into the living room: Amy seemed to be dozing in her wing-backed chair.
The dog thought this was the greatest thing since kibble. He was at my heels, he was in front of me, flopping around in the spaniel’s loose-limbed way, whining with excitement as I tried to get my goddamn boots on. I wound the long ends of the laces around my ankles and tied them in front. It would do.
I stood to reach for my coat and, through the window over the kitchen sink, saw a heavy-coated figure moving across the yard, toward the large barn that stood in the distance, carrying a knapsack in his left hand.
I swore again and banged out the back door. The dog followed but I managed to trap him in the porch. He didn’t like it much.
“Vince!” I yelled, starting toward him in an easy trot, already wishing I’d’ve spent the two seconds it would have taken to grab my parka. The snow fell freely now, and it was hard to see where the sky met the field farther on.
The walker paused, turned.
It was then I saw the long barrel of the rifle he toted in the crook of his right arm.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I dived from the porch stairs, hit the ground, grateful for the cushion of the soft new snow, and rolled behind my Chevy, mainly for cover but also with a mind toward claiming the .38 in the glove box. For all I knew, Vince was merely taking the rifle to a gunsmith for repairs—but we nervous types tend to jump to conclusions, usually the unpleasantest one first.
I reached up for the door handle on the passenger side. Locked. Hell. I poked my head up just enough to peek through the window at the driver’s-side door. Same deal. One of my few good habits was hitting the lock button with my elbow whenever I left the car. My insurance man had convinced me it was a good idea. I made a mental note to cancel with that agency if I ever got the chance. Of course, it wasn’t his fault that my keys were in the pocket of my parka, in the house.
Crouching at the front tire, I tried to think. I could run back to the house and grab my keys. But I figured Vince was heading for the barn because he had a car or a truck there, and I didn’t want to risk losing him. I had already blundered enough for one week.
So I stuck my head up over the fender and yelled again. The boy was almost to the barn—he had double-timed it after my appearance, but the snow made it tough going. Now he stopped, dropped the backpack, and raised the gun. The swirling snow all but obscured the picture, but I could see that rifle clearly enough.
I fell back behind the car and waited for the report that didn’t come.
The snow was too deep for a peek under the car, so I edged forward, my hands burning from the cold, and looked around the front bumper.
Vince was ducking through a side door of the barn.
I scrambled to my feet and toward the garage that stood to the south, ten or fifteen feet off the back of the house. Flattened against the rear wall. Waited a beat. Crouched near the foundation. Looked around the corner.
Nothing. Silence, except for my ragged, shivery breathing.
The back door of the garage was unlocked. I went in. It was warm here; an automatic gas heater mounted overhead purred softly. I hit the switch inside the door and two bare bulbs in the ceiling threw weak light on two cars, a small silver-gray Mercedes and a copper-and-tan New Yorker. The third stall, I guessed, was for the maroon Cutlass that the cops had impounded.
Besides the cars, the garage held bikes and toys, tires, tools, hoses, empty flower pots, a wheelbarrow, cardboard boxes, boards—the usual garagey junk. I was looking for some kind of weapon, a BB gun, a slingshot, but all I came up with was an old and heavy ax, suspended alongside other tools on nails driven into the wall studs.
Young Dan’l Boone, I thought, ripping the oiled-leather hood from the ax head.
After checking the cars—they were both unlocked, but the drivers had thoughtlessly neglected to leave the firing pins in place—I decided there was nothing to do but get on with it. I looked out through the grimy windows of one of the overhead doors and, seeing no activity in the direction of the barn, hoisted the door up.
The sound of the door’s rollers in their metal tracks was echoed by a similar but louder noise from the barn. Its huge overhead door—the barn doors you’ve heard so much about apparently being a thing of the past—was slowly rolling up, mechanically.
I quit the garage and ran diagonally across the yard, half crouched and well aware of how ridiculous that position was: The area between the garage and the barn offered not so much as a tree stump for cover, and if Vince stepped out now and took aim, that was it. Unless I was quick enough to swat the bullet out of the air, like Wonder Woman, with the flat of the ax blade.
I hit the broad side of the barn, between the front corner of the building and the side door that Vince had entered through. The door-opener inside was still groaning and clattering; I thought and hoped it would be enough to cover the noise I made getting over here and the sound of the breathing I was now trying to get under control. When the most exercise you get is twelve-ounce curls …
The side door was ajar five or six inches. I bent low again and peeked in.
The barn was huge—what else would you expect of a barn?—dark, cold, and musty-smelling. It was also comparatively empty; Castelar hadn’t farmed, he rented his land to others, and so he hadn’t owned the massive combines, tractors, and what-not that such colossal buildings ordinarily house. The structure contained mainly—stuff. Odds and ends littered the far wall. High overhead, boards that had been placed across rafters supported cardboard boxes and wooden crates. On the dirt floor, at the far end of the barn, a thirties-era Buick rested on concrete blocks, half-covered by a dusty tarp.
Toward the front sat a Deere tractor, a smallish one, probably used for odd jobs and hauling. A riding mower, currently equipped for snow removal, was parked in front of it. Next to them stood a big rust-pitted blue-and-white Blazer.
The overhead door was literally overhead now; the rackety opener quit automat
ically. The Blazer’s motor jumped in to fill the gap.
I was four feet from the passenger side. I bumped open the barn door, crossed the frozen dirt in two steps, and yanked open the car door with my left hand.
The rifle was propped against the seat. I reached for it, but Vince was quicker. He grabbed it and, immediately realizing he didn’t have room to maneuver for a shot, swung it around and stabbed at me with the butt.
He caught me on the left side of my head, a glancing blow, but at the moment it felt like my ear had been torn off. My grip on the door frame dissolved, I lost my balance and slipped off the running board, collapsing into some litter piled against the wall of the barn.
Vince hit the gas and the Blazer roared out of the building.
I rolled against the wall in an effort to keep legs and other vital parts out of the way of the car’s huge tires. Then I came up on one knee and gently probed the side of my head. My hand came away bloody and dirty. I figured I was lucky that my ears were cold-numbed, otherwise the pain might have been paralyzing. As it was, I merely felt like I could chew right through the barn wall.
I forced myself up and out the side door.
Vince was rounding the corner of the barn in a wide, half-skidding arc. He was giving it too much gas; all four wheels were spinning like mad, too fast for them to gain proper traction in the snow. The myth that you can’t spinout with four-wheel drive is just that: a myth.
I lurched forward, toward the machine. Vince saw me. It was reflected in his eyes. He grabbed for the rifle and I saw the barrel briefly above the dashboard, but what was he going to do with it, shoot out his own windshield? He must have asked himself the same question in the same instant, for the gun disappeared and he tramped on the accelerator again.
The big car—or truck, or whatever you want to call it—swung toward me. I half-jumped, half-slipped backward and fell flat into the thick, fluffy ground cover. No time to make snow angels, I thought wildly, fighting to my feet as the Blazer fishtailed past.
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