The Bone House

by Brian Freeman

  Hilary peeled the girl's arms firmly away. 'I know, kiddo, but keep quiet, he's downstairs. We have to hurry. Help's on the way.'

  Hilary grabbed her car keys out of her pocket and sawed at the tape on Amy's left leg with the jagged edge of one key. The threads split apart, and she tore it away, making the girl's skin bleed. Amy winced and bent her leg at the knee to jump-start her circulation.

  Hilary quickly freed her other leg.

  'Let's go,' she whispered. 'Let's get the hell out of here.'

  Amy swung her legs off the bed, but her knees gave way as she stood up, and she collapsed heavily into Hilary's arms.

  'I'm dizzy,' Amy said.

  'I know. Try again.'

  Hilary slid an arm around the girl's waist, and Amy draped her left arm around Hilary's shoulder. Amy swayed as the two of them took a step together, but she didn't fall.

  'Stay quiet,' Hilary whispered. 'The front door is at the bottom of the stairs. We'll go straight down and out, OK?'

  'Hell yeah.'

  With each step, the girl grew stronger. Her young body shrugged off the after-effects of the drug and the long stretch spent prone on the bed. She let go of Hilary, balancing one hand on the wall of the hallway. They reached the stairs leading back to the ground floor, and Hilary went first, with Amy at her heels. Freedom felt close; she could almost smell the rain and pine outside. The staircase wound like a corkscrew, and as they followed the iron railing round the curve, the front door beckoned to them from across the marble tile of the foyer.

  She wanted to run. In ten seconds, they could be through the door and safe. She reached behind and took hold of Amy's hand.

  Hilary glanced back at the girl. Their eyes met. She gave Amy an encouraging smile, and the girl's face glowed with confidence as she smiled back. Then, as Hilary watched, the smile vanished, and Amy's expression bled into terror. Hilary looked downstairs and understood why.

  Gary Jensen stood at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for them. Hilary's eyes followed the length of his right arm and saw that he was holding a gun.

  Amy screamed in panic, yanking Hilary's hand and dragging both of them back up the twisting staircase. The girl's speed took Jensen by surprise, but they were only a handful of steps ahead of him as he charged in pursuit. At the top of the stairs, Amy sped left through the open door to the master bedroom. Hilary cleared the doorway behind her, slammed the door shut, and pushed the surface bolt into place just as Jensen's shoulder collided with the heavy door.

  Hilary longed for the sound of sirens, but she heard nothing outside. She dug out her phone and punched in 911 on the keypad. On the other side of the door, Jensen hammered and kicked. The lock shivered under the impact, the screws loosening. She heard the phone ring once, twice, then three times, with excruciating slowness.

  Jensen kicked again.

  'Nine one one emergency,' the operator finally answered.

  'Get the police here, we've got a man trying to kill us.'

  Her panic didn't rattle the operator. 'Ma'am, this is a mobile phone. I'm showing this phone registered to an address in Washington Island, Wisconsin. What is your current location?'

  Jensen kicked again, and this time the lock exploded off the door, and the door itself spun on its hinges and banged into the wall. He surged through the doorway with his gun extended and his finger on the trigger. He pointed the barrel at Hilary's head.

  'Ma'am, what is your location?' the operator repeated.

  'Hang up!' Jensen whispered.

  Hilary hesitated. The operator spoke urgently into her ear. 'Ma'am? Are you OK? Are you still there? Ma'am, what is your location?'

  Jensen shifted and pointed the gun at Amy's head, not even two feet away. 'Hang up!'

  Hilary clapped the phone shut. She let it fall from her hand to the ground.

  'Don't be stupid,' she told Jensen. 'The police are already coming. You may as well let us go.'

  She watched his face. His eyes darted between them, and his hand squirmed on the gun, which slipped in his sweaty fingers. She realized he was paralyzed. He didn't know what to do.

  'Give it up,' she urged him. if you harm us, you only make it worse.'

  At Hilary's feet, her cell phone began ringing.

  'See?' she said. 'They know we're here. They're already tracking the pings on the phone. It won't take long.'

  Jensen squatted and took the phone in his hand. He flipped it open, not taking his eyes off the two of them, and switched the phone off.

  'Get on your knees,' he said. 'Both of you.'

  Amy glanced at Hilary, who nodded. They slid down to their knees on the bedroom floor, next to each other. Jensen towered over them, shifting the gun back and forth between their faces.

  'You killed Glory, didn't you?' Hilary asked, stalling for time, praying for the police to hurry. 'That's what this is all about.'

  Jensen laughed, but it was manic and strangled, like a man who laughs at things he can't see in the darkness. Things that scare him. He pointed the gun at Hilary's head.

  'Please don't do this,' she said.

  The gun trembled in his hand. His finger moved on to the trigger, and she knew she had to jump for the gun. If she jumped, if she got in his face, then she gave Amy a chance to survive.

  Hilary thought about Mark. She saw his face and felt his touch, as real as if he were here with her. She thought about the faces of the children they would never have. She thought about how you can go from life to death in an instant.

  She readied herself to leap, but before she did, she spotted movement in the hallway behind Gary Jensen. She didn't dare look away from Jensen's eyes, but in the dim light beyond the doorway, she realized that someone was creeping down the hallway toward them. A teenage girl stalked Jensen's back with a finger pressed over her lips for silence.

  It was Katie.

  * * *

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  The shot went wild, careening into the treetops.

  Troy cursed silently to himself. He'd heard Bradley's voice in the woods above the beach, but he was aiming like a blind man. His nerves made him careless. Now, with a foolish shot, he'd warned Bradley away.

  He hiked up the dirt road away from the beach. He hoped the patter of the rain covered the slow crunch of his footfalls. He had the uncomfortable feeling that he was being watched, but he couldn't see anything in the darkness, and he was confident that no one could see him. Even so, he didn't feel alone. The woods seemed alive. He told himself that it was his imagination creating monsters in his head, but every scrape of tree branches as the wind blew made him twitch with fear.

  He wanted to quit. He wanted to hike to the main road and call his buddy Keith, who would pick him up and smuggle him on to the ferry in the morning. They could spend the night in Keith's basement, drinking beer and playing pool and surfing porn. Forget about Mark Bradley. Forget about the gun in his hand.

  He thought: Glory's laughing at me.

  Maybe she was the one watching him; she was the spirit he felt. Her ghost. If he listened, he could hear her voice. You can't do anything right.

  He was angry at Glory. Angry at himself. All of that anger still had a focus that made him stay where he was, rooted to the ground. Mark Bradley. He wasn't going to give up while Bradley was alive.

  'Where are you, you bastard?' he murmured aloud.

  Like the answer to a prayer, Bradley revealed his location. No more than two hundred yards away, Troy saw a stream of light splash through the woods. It was deep in the trees in the campground between the beach and the cemetery. He stayed on the road and hustled, eating up the space between them. Based on the direction of the light, Bradley was heading toward the graveyard, and Troy realized he could get there ahead of him and be waiting for him when he emerged into the open ground.

  Troy splashed through huge puddles in the road, sprinting south. A quarter-mile further, he broke from the trees and found himself in the sprawling grass of the cemetery. He had enough light under the open sky
to see rows of stones poking out of the earth. He bent low, moving from tomb to tomb, eyeing the woods. The telltale light came and went, flashing on and off, and Troy was directly in its path. Mark Bradley was heading straight for him.

  He stopped behind a grave marked with black marble only fifteen yards from the brush where the forest ended. It was slick with rain, and the grass was sodden as he crouched near the tomb. He clutched his gun, smelling burnt powder on his hands. He watched the trees, hunting for the shadow of a man arriving at the long carpet of headstones. His heart thumped so fast he thought he would die before he sprang up and pulled the trigger.

  Troy took a deep breath. He lifted the gun.

  Mark couldn't find Tresa. She'd been swallowed up by the night. After the boom of the gunshot rose above the rain, he knew that Troy was out there, firing blindly at anything that moved. The boy was a menace, and if he wasn't stopped, someone was going to get killed. Mark picked his way through the forest, breaking branches, not caring about the noise he made. If Troy was here, he wanted the boy to hear him and follow him. He wanted to draw him away from Tresa.

  His ankle was swollen where he had twisted it. Each time his heel landed on the uneven ground, he grimaced. He headed south, but it was nearly impossible to keep a sense of direction inside the trees. He wished he had a flashlight to guide his path. Where the forest ended, he planned to cut across the cemetery ground to the main road. He had little hope of flagging down a car on a deserted night, but he could follow the road toward the center of town until he reached the house of one of the year-round residents, and then he could finally use a phone.

  Call the police. Call Hilary.

  To his left, he spied a beam of light in the maze of trees. It came and went, on and off, as someone maneuvered through the forest. It had to be Troy. They were on parallel paths, both heading toward the cemetery.

  Mark pushed past the trees at the border of the graveyard, and a moment later, he was free of the dense, grasping grip of the woods. The sky opened up over his head. Rain swooped down in sheets, and he wiped his eyes with his sleeve so that he could see. Triangle-shaped pines and skeletal oaks dotted the land. He looked for the warning glow of the light he'd seen before, but the forest was dark. He eyed the trees and graves for a moving silhouette, but as far as he could tell, he was alone.

  'Troy!' he shouted.

  His voice fought with the storm.

  'Troy, it's Mark Bradley. I know you're here. I want to talk to you.'

  He wandered deeper into the cemetery land. He looked down, but he couldn't see the names on the stones.

  'Troy, listen to me. Tresa's here too. Neither one of us wants her to get hurt.'

  Forty yards away, not far from the woods, Mark saw a headstone grow into a large shadow, as if a ghost were rising from the earth. The silhouette detached itself from the grave and walked toward him. Mark recognized the bulky outline of Troy Geier, and he saw that the boy had a gun in his outstretched hand. Troy marched closer until he was no more than ten feet away. The gun was pointed at Mark's heart.

  'I'm here,' Troy said.

  'So am I,' Mark replied.

  'Where's Tresa?'

  'I don't know. She ran. I didn't want you shooting her accidentally.'

  'I wouldn't hurt her. This is between you and me.'

  'I understand.'

  Troy was silent. Mark could see his gun arm shivering.

  'Listen, Troy,' he went on, 'Tresa knows you're here. If you kill me, you'll go to jail. You'll be throwing away your life.'

  'I don't care.'

  'I know you think you're doing this for Glory.'

  'That's right. I'm doing it for her and for Mrs Fischer and for Peter

  Hoffman and for Tresa, too. You're going to pay the price. I'm not letting you get away with everything you did.'

  'What did I do?' Mark asked.

  'You killed Glory.'

  'No.'

  'You killed Peter Hoffman.'

  'No.'

  'You think I believe you?' Troy demanded loudly. 'You're a liar trying to save his skin.'

  'Troy, listen to me. I didn't do those things.'

  'Bullshit. Everybody knows you did.'

  Mark spread his arms wide. If Troy wanted to be a man, then Mark would treat him like one. 'OK, you better shoot me. If I really killed them, I'm a monster, and I have to be stopped.'

  Troy hesitated. 'You don't think I can do it, do you?' he asked, his voice puffed up with nervous bravado.

  'I know you can,' Mark told him. 'If you really believe that I could do those things - that I could strangle your girlfriend on a beach in Florida, that I could take a shotgun and blow off an old man's head - then you need to shoot me now.'

  Mark could barely see the boy's face in the darkness. He couldn't see if he was reaching him. He watched the gun, which was still aimed at his chest at point-blank range. One pulse, one twitch of Troy's finger, and the bullet would sear through Mark's body.

  'I - I don't know,' Troy murmured.

  'This is what men do, Troy. We do what's right. We take responsibility. You need to look into my eyes and tell me you know that I'm guilty. After that, it's easy. After that, you won't have any doubts.'

  'Mrs Fischer, she said—'

  'I don't want to know what Delia thinks,' Mark told him firmly. 'This is between you and me. What do you think?'

  'It had to be you. It had to be.'

  'If that's true, then pull the trigger.'

  Troy's arm fluttered as if he couldn't hold it steady in the wind. He took a step toward Mark. 'I'm going to do this.'

  'I know.'

  Mark couldn't take his eyes off the barrel of the gun. He wondered if he would see the flame or if he would hear the explosion, or if it would all happen in silence and darkness before his brain could process the shot. He would simply be standing here in one instant and lying on his back in the next instant, unable to draw a breath, feeling the warmth of blood on his chest.

  Troy was crying. Mark could see the boy's chest heave.

  'I have to do this,' Troy said.

  'I'm not going to stop you.'

  There were no easy choices. If Mark moved, he died. If he stayed where he was, he died. Troy tightened his grip on the slippery butt of the gun. As he hesitated, poised to fire, a bright beam of light speared through the night and caught the two of them in its glare like deer on the highway. Mark instinctively shielded his eyes with his palm. Troy spun in shock, taking the gun with him.

  'Troy, put that gun down right now,' a man barked.

  Like a child, Troy complied. His arm sagged; the gun pointed at the ground.

  Mark recognized the voice and saw the man's squared shoulders and squat legs in the light that bounced off the dirt.

  Sheriff Reich marched toward them from the edge of the forest.

  Tresa huddled in the trees above Schoolhouse Beach. She shivered, her arms wrapped around her knees. Her red hair was plastered to her face. She could barely feel her fingers and toes. She felt paralyzed by what was happening. By the gunshot. By everything that Mark had told her. By her fears of what was about to happen.

  By the past.

  She'd kept the secret for too many years. She'd willed it out of her mind as if it had never happened. She'd told herself that she was wrong, but now Glory was dead, and Mark and Hilary were both in danger, and it was all because she'd pretended she didn't know anything at all. She'd allowed everyone around her to believe a lie.

  She should have known what had really happened in Florida. She should have suspected the truth.

  Tresa stared at the water, which was a black sheet merging into white rocks. Part of her wanted to walk down into the lake's cold embrace and keep walking until the waves closed over her head and she was numb. Her guilt overwhelmed her, and she wanted to drown in it. Her eyes got lost in the dimpled surface of the bay. The raindrops hypnotized her. Only the silhouette of the man hiking on the beach awakened her from her trance. He came from the east near Mark's
house. He hugged the woods, twenty feet from where Tresa was hiding. At first, she saw only that he was absurdly tall and lean, but then, as he drew near, she recognized Cab Bolton.

  Gathering her courage, Tresa bolted from her hiding place. 'Detective!'

  He didn't look surprised to see her. 'Tresa, are you OK?'

  'Yes.' She saw ribbons of blood on the detective's neck. 'You're hurt.'

  'I'm fine,' he said, but his face was ashen. 'Where's Mark Bradley?'

  'He's in the campground. We were hiding from Troy.'

  'What the hell is Troy doing here?'

  Tresa hesitated, but she was done hiding and pretending. 'He came here to kill Mark. I tried to stop it, but I've made a mess of everything. I don't know what to do.'

  Cab put an arm around her shoulder. 'Come on, stay with me. We have to find them. Troy isn't our only problem right now.'

  He pulled her along the fringe of the beach, but Tresa stopped and held Cab's arm. 'Wait.'

  'What is it?'

  She tried to breathe. She tried to get the words out.

  'I know who killed Glory,' Tresa told him.

  * * *

  'Troy, you stupid ass,' Reich snapped. 'What the hell do you think you're doing?'

  Troy shrank like a wilted flower in front of the sheriff. The boy opened his hand, and the gun dropped to the wet ground of the cemetery. It may as well have been on fire. 'I just - I mean, I thought I could make things right for Glory, you know?'

  'You?'

  'Yeah. I thought if no one else could stop him, then I could.'

  The sheriff marched so close to the boy that he was practically in his face. 'Then do it already,' Reich told him.

  Troy cocked his head in confusion. 'What?'

  'Shoot the fucker.'

  Mark wasn't sure he'd heard the words come out of Reich's mouth. Reich wasn't joking. He was dead serious. When Troy stood frozen in disbelief, Reich squatted and retrieved the gun and stuffed it back into the boy's hand. Like a robot following orders, Troy turned back toward Mark, but he could barely hold the butt of the gun steady. Panic and fear made his entire body quake.