“Kind of. I knew yet I kind of didn’t know. Am I crazy?”
“Nope. You were just in denial. I’ve been there myself.” I thought of the five wasted years before the divorce. Georg running around, chasing skirts, looking for his missing e. I had thought it was just his midlife crisis. Crapola. I should have dumped him before he dumped me. Way before.
In a very low voice Justin said, “I could have got away once he let me start going to school. Just a phone call. Now I feel like a total coward.”
“Hell, no. It was incredibly brave, what you did, whacking him with that baseball bat to save me. To save us.”
“But what if you hadn’t come along? What am I supposed to tell people when they ask me why I didn’t try to escape?”
“Tell them they should just try it once. Try being kidnapped by a psycho. Try being immobilized by a stun gun and raped and beaten and starved and chained to a bed and afraid of dying any minute.”
Silence again. I kept my lips pressed shut to keep from saying any more. Thousands of his self-esteems could have danced on the head of a pin. The decision to contact his parents was one he had to make himself, if at all possible.
Bleakly Justin said, “Nobody’s ever going to understand.”
“I understand.”
“And that’s why I want to stay with you, Lee. Can’t I just stay with you? I don’t want to go home yet!”
“Stay with me? I don’t know where I’m staying myself!”
“Here! What’s wrong with right here?”
“How long?”
“Long enough for my hair to grow out.” The flashlight beam was too dim to show me, but I bet he blushed. “The hair on my head, I mean.”
“Justin, we can’t risk it. What if Stoat finds us?”
“I just need a few days—”
“Justin, I can’t handle a few days.” It was no use; I had to take charge. “We have to get you to the cops. Tomorrow.”
He blurted, “But they’re gonna think I’m a faggot.”
“No, they won’t think any such thing. They’ll understand.”
“Lee, there’s no way in hell anybody will ever understand what it’s been like for me.”
“Nobody ever understands anybody completely. But your parents love you.” I pressed more than I should have. “You can’t possibly understand what they’ve been going through, missing you, searching for you. They love you so much. That’s all that matters. Don’t you love them, Justin?”
Too late I remembered I was talking to a kid who, in addition to being terribly damaged, was a teenager. But he didn’t roll his eyes, just narrowed them, wincing. “Look, can’t we just go to sleep now?”
“Oh. Um.” I realized I’d gone too far. “Sure, excellent idea.” Maybe in the morning he’d be more able to deal with his situation.
The dying flashlight helped us grab blankets out of the Rubbermaid containers. We took turns using the very primitive outhouse. Then Justin kicked off his pink socks and headed for the top bunk. “Good night,” I told him.
He didn’t answer. Typical kid. I took the flashlight with me to the bottom bunk, turned it off, lay on my side almost in the fetal position, nestled under my blanket, and tried to relax. I was so physically exhausted, this wasn’t as impossible as it should have been. Within minutes, Justin and I were both asleep—or so I thought.
• • •
“Now, tickle my grits—just look at this.”
The loud and unpleasantly familiar voice plus the glare of a Maglite in my eyes startled me from a deep sleep into—I wished it were just a nightmare.
Lying flat on my back in the flashlight’s glare amid utter nighttime darkness, I could see only that the man steadied a long gun with his other hand, a double-barreled shotgun pointed at me. His head appeared only as a bobbing shadow, but by his gloating voice I knew well enough who he was: the bogeyman in person. Stoat. Come to get me. Us. Justin in the bunk above me—
At the thought of Justin, adrenaline bolted through me so that I reacted like lightning. Feeling Hypatia’s weight coiled atop the warmth of my midsection, I grabbed the snake and flung her into Stoat’s face.
He screeched and staggered back, arms flailing so that his Maglite showed me only mad flashes of shotgun out of control and snake convulsing as it fell. On my feet, I yelled, “Justin. Justin!” and grabbed at the top bunk where he should have been as the shotgun went off with a blast that traumatized my ears and my heart; what could Stoat be shooting if not the boy? “Justin!” My arms searching the top bunk found it flat and empty. Where was Justin? In a panic to find him and run from Stoat, I slewed around to look, then stood paralyzed by what I saw.
The Maglite lay on the floor, showing me Stoat with a contorted face and his shotgun shaking in his hands. He aimed the shotgun toward a biggish snake writhing at his feet, but it was not Hypatia. Its crisp markings, diamonds running down its spine, identified it unmistakably as a rattler. So did the raised, quivering tip of its tail, although I could barely hear it buzz through the clamor in my ears.
“The fucker bit me!” Stoat yelped, sounding incredulous just before his shotgun roared again, the second barrel blowing the rattlesnake into bits. Then, visibly shaken, he raised his unlovely face to glare at me. For the gray man that he was, he looked unusually white, and I didn’t think it was the spotlight effect in the darkness. On his hollow cheek above his goatee, paired puncture wounds and trickles of blood showed garishly red against his pallor. He clenched his long yellow teeth as he said, “You threw a rattlesnake at me and it bit me.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize!” I responded with spontaneous, genuine contrition. “You’d better sit down.”
“The hell I will. Where’s Justin?”
“I wish I knew!” Then, top volume, I called to the night, “Justin!” before I realized how stupid I was being, summoning him to where Stoat would kill him.
Or maybe not. Staggering to the back door, Stoat doubled over, vomiting.
I grabbed the Maglite and darted out the front door, running for my life yet yelling, “Justin? Justin!” because I didn’t want to leave him behind. I tried to scan with the Maglite as I ran. The beam jumped like a demented flea but did show me something big and white: Stoat’s van, left where he had stopped it in the middle of the tall grass. I surmised that he had rolled it down the hill with the engine and headlights off. Please, I mentally begged some unknown deity. Please, if only he had left the keys in it. I sprinted over to it and yanked at the driver’s side door handle.
It didn’t open.
With desperate, illogical persistence I shone the Maglite inside, pressing my face against the window to see the ignition. Like it would do me any good if Stoat had locked his keys in the van? Anyway, he hadn’t. They were probably in his pocket, damn him. But if the rattlesnake venom killed him—
“Miss Lee Anna.” I gasped at the sound of his voice, mean and mocking and not nearly far enough away. “I can see you and I got my gun reloaded and I will kill you if you don’t git over here right now. MOVE.”
I moved, but only to duck behind the van. He couldn’t shoot me through it. Damn him, why wasn’t he inside the cabin, lying on the floor, dying? Probably rattlesnakes died from biting him. But he had to be feeling weak, I thought as I fumbled madly at the Maglite, trying to get it turned off so maybe, just maybe, I could get away from Stoat in the darkness.
The Maglite shone on relentlessly, its dazzling bright bulb illuminating everything except its own handle, where I could not seem to find the on/off switch.
“Bitch, I told you git over here!”
Time was running out. Unable to turn off the damn Maglite, I swung it at the end of my arm and flung it—not nearly far enough away from me, damn everything. Nevertheless, still crouching behind the van, I scuttled toward that bulky vehicle’s hind end.
“Goddamn you, Lee Anna. . . .” Stoat said several obscene things about me.
Damn absolutely everything. Now that I had thrown the Magli
te away, I could see that darkness had turned disloyal to me. A sickly pallor of dawn had sneaked into the sky. It was Thursday fricking morning. I would be a clear target the minute I stood up.
But if I stayed behind the van, maybe Stoat wasn’t strong enough to come after me.
“Bitch,” he roared in what sounded like total exasperation, “git your fat ass over here and fetch me some water!”
Huh. He needed me to do things for him?
“On the count of three, I’m coming after you! One . . .”
Maybe if he wanted a nurse, he wouldn’t kill me.
“Two . . .”
“All right,” I called, standing up. “Don’t shoot.”
I walked toward him none too steadily. He cursed me every step of the way. And even in the persnickety dawn light I could see why. Half of his face had swollen hugely and turned a lurid purple. He could glare at me out of only one eye. His voice had gone hoarse. “Git me water right now!”
He looked tottery. Yet he managed to follow my every move with the shotgun as I walked into the fishing shack and out the back door to the pump, where I plied the handle long and hard before a gush of water saw fit to emerge.
He emptied the mug of water I gave him with one gulp while I stepped out of range in case he wanted to clout me. But hurting me seemed not to be foremost in his mind. As if he’d been through a fight, he panted with his mouth open, his breath rasping in his throat. “More water!” he ordered me, his voice a croak, and he menaced with the shotgun as if he would be watching me.
By the time I got back with his second mug of water, he had sat down at the picnic table and laid his shotgun on it kind of as if he had put it on a stand. He kept hold of it, swiveling it, finger on the trigger. But by now enough morning light had infiltrated the place so that I could see how ghastly Stoat looked, his forehead sweaty, his skin as gray as the shack’s splintery unpainted walls. That place was so small I could take in everything with a single glance. Stoat swilling his water. Dead rattlesnake splattered on the floor. Stoat swiveling his shotgun toward me as if he could make me any more terrified than I was already. And under its double barrel, something on the plank surface of the table. Black block letters drawn in marker on the raw wood.
SORRY LEE
DON’T WORRY
I HAVE A PLAN
FOURTEEN
I stood owlishly blinking at those three lines like haiku, cryptic and profound, compressing worlds of hope and fear into a few syllables.
SORRY LEE
DON’T WORRY
I HAVE A PLAN
That note hadn’t been there the night before. It could have been written—in the dark, in careful printing like that of a blind man—by only one person. Justin. He had been alive a short time ago.
“Justin,” I blurted, staring at the message. “He ran away.”
Stoat put down his mug, swiveled his head in his lizardlike way, and peered at me with the one flinty eye that wasn’t swollen shut. “What you mean, Justin ran away?”
I felt like crying because Justin had sneaked away like the coward I knew he wasn’t. I felt like laughing because Stoat wouldn’t get to kill him today. I had to keep my voice very neutral so that Stoat would not take offense and kill me instead. “Justin wrote that.” I pointed. “He must have left right after I went to sleep.”
“Gee, ain’t that too bad.” The water seemed to have lubricated Stoat’s wheezing somewhat. “And you lying in wait for me with a rattlesnake in your hand. Fixing to kill me.”
He gave me way too much credit. Me, some sort of superwoman wielding a rattlesnake instead of a zap gun? My mouth hung open but words failed me.
“Stupid bitch.” Creepily calm, Stoat began to feel surreal to me, a horror-movie monster whose ballooning purple face might explode at any moment. “You think I’m going to die, don’t you?” He pointed his shotgun at me. “Say it.”
I stood there unable to say a thing.
Stoat said, “It so happens I got double vision right now, but if I shoot one of you, I guarantee I’ll get you both.” The shotgun’s double barrel wavered, showing how weak he felt, and how dangerous. “Go ahead—say you mean for me to die.”
Just in time I got my big mouth back. “I certainly hope so,” I told him brightly.
“Huh.” He put the shotgun down on the table as if it were too heavy for him. “Well, I ain’t gonna oblige you,” he lectured me. “See, I’m the kind of person that if you mess with me, you die, not me.”
He paused to breathe heavily. Some sort of comment seemed expected. “I believe you,” I said politely.
“I need you for a couple days, but soon as I can, I will kill you, tricky bitch. I—what the hell?”
His voice shot up and his single viable eye widened, staring past me. I turned to see what had spooked him.
“Hypatia!” I greeted the oak snake emerging from under my bunk with the absurd joy of seeing a friend during a difficult time. So graceful, the way she poured herself like a meandering stream—
BAM. Shotgun, so close, so loud, I jumped and screamed. Hypatia disintegrated. I stood gulping and quaking. Stoat was a good shot.
“Git me some more water,” he ordered, “then clean up them dead snakes.”
• • •
Thomas Hart Benton murals distinguished the ballroom-sized lobby of the skyscraper where Quinn Leppo worked. Podunk people touring the Big Apple stood gawking, but Quinn strode through without hesitation, tall, reasonably handsome in a three-piece suit custom-tailored to give his long legs and narrow shoulders the most flattering fit, all banker. Or so he might appear, Quinn thought as the elevator lifted him to his office on the twenty-second floor. Hardly anyone ever looked closely at his tie or his socks. He wore plain socks today, but his tie featured a tiny print of Munch’s The Scream. Tomorrow, Friday, he would wear his TGIF socks.
In his office—as midlevel management, Quinn had scored an office with a window—he immediately set down his Starbucks coffee and checked his e-mail. He could have done it on his iPhone during his subway ride, but he hated working before he got to work. He rolled his eyes when he saw, again, the e-mail from his mother that had been there since yesterday afternoon. Guiltily aware that he hadn’t phoned her, sure it would be mama drama, he had left it unopened at the time, and again last night, and in the bright light of morning he felt inclined to leave it unopened yet once more. But if he did, he’d have to begin actual work. With a sigh, he clicked.
What the ruck?
Hello family of Liana Clymer, aka Liana Leppo. This is Deputy Bernardo Morales of the Maypop County (Florida) Sheriff’s Office contacting you.
Quinn read on with rapidly increasing consternation. Schweitzer, dead? Shot? Mom had to be heartbroken, especially at this bad time when she was still getting over Dad’s defection. But Quinn had learned to distance himself from his mother’s feelings, so this concerned him more: Mom would never willingly have gone away and left Schweitzer’s dead body on the floor.
And who could have shot Schweitzer? Unbelievable.
Was this e-mail maybe a hoax? Mom was capable of doing outrageous things, such as the time she painted her car with quotes from her favorite philosophers interspersed with daisies, or another time when she had accumulated a variety of concrete animals on the front yard and dressed them up in fancy finds from Goodwill. Could she maybe have sent this e-mail herself as a weird kind of comeuppance to him for not answering her calls?
The reaction she desired from him being, of course, a phone call.
Damn. Trapped. He brought up his mother’s name on his cell phone and, feeling doomed, he thumbed the green button with every expectation of hearing her answer ever so innocently, “Oh, hello, sweetie!”
But he didn’t even get a ringtone. Just a recorded voice nasally informing him that the subscriber was unavailable.
Huh. Not good. Quinn pondered a moment, drumming his fingertips on his desktop, then swung into serious action. Stepping up to the plate was what had gotten him
early promotion to the position he held. He looked at the e-mail’s addressees and decided to call his brother first. Grandma and Grandpa might not have seen the e-mail yet; they didn’t check every day. Uncle Hi (Hiram, the Hi Clymer) and Uncle Rocky (Rockwell, the Rock Clymer) were not likely to give a shit. For that matter, Grandma and Grandpa would dismiss the situation as “one of Liana’s shenanigans” when they heard. Quinn called his brother, who lived on the fringes of the megalopolis in New Jersey.
Forrest answered his cell phone on the first ring. “What’s up, Suit? Wait, I bet I can guess. You just got around to reading that weird e-mail from Mom. Or about Mom. Whichever.”
“Yeah, well, when did you read it?”
“This morning. I put it off. Like you.”
“Well, what do you think?”
“At first I figured maybe it was her trying to do a number on us.”
“Same here. So I tried to call her—”
“And her phone seems to be shut off,” Forrest finished for him. “Which would never happen. Unless maybe she let her battery funk out—”
“As has been known to happen.”
“True.”
“So what do we do about it?” Quinn asked with more than the usual New York City edge. He had always been quick, and his younger brother had always been—not slow, exactly, but in no damn hurry, and it had always annoyed him that Forrie seemed to do just fine in his lackadaisical way.
“I been thinking about that,” Forrie drawled, and Quinn could have sworn his kid brother was intentionally trying to irritate him. “So I called the Sheriff’s Office down there in Maypop.”
“Did you?” For Forrest, this was an impressive show of initiative. “What did they say?”
“They say yeah, Mom seems to be missing, but they haven’t done anything because they need a family member to request an investigation.”
“I’m going down there,” Quinn said. “Where are you now?” An oblique way of asking whether Forrest could go along, or even wanted to.
Drawn Into Darkness Page 13