Drawn Into Darkness

by Nancy Springer

  His grip shifted; his head reared in wrath. “Shut up or—”

  Before he could complete the threat, I slammed my head back as hard as I could into the injured side of his face.

  I’d never been snakebitten, but I figured this would have to hurt enough to give me a chance, and it did. Stoat yelped like a kicked dog, all his limbs flew out in a spasm, and he dropped the knife. I heard it hit the kitchen floor as I was already sprinting toward the front door.

  Speed boosted by adrenaline, I flipped the lock and the dead bolt, turned the knob—but it wouldn’t open. Damn Stoat! However he had rigged the back door, he had done the same to the front. More in frustration than in any hope that I might be heard, I pounded my fists against the inside of the door, then regained some wit and scrambled to flip back the drapes and look out the front window. There sat that same stupid car that had been parked in front of Stoat’s blue house. If—

  If nothing. Nothing but blackness, because Stoat hit me very hard on the back of my head.

  TWENTY-TWO

  In the rental car, Forrest shoved Quinn’s hand off the steering wheel, noticed tears in his brother’s eyes, and started to sob even though there was no damn time for crying; tears made him angry at himself and at Quinn, who was being a pain, trying to take control as usual, reaching for the keys in the ignition. Forrest whacked his hand away but somehow in the process ended up bawling in his brother’s arms, making too damn much undignified noise. But Quinn was weeping too, the Aveo’s engine still chugging away, and the car’s air conditioner droning. A blast of cool air from the dashboard helped Forrest to gear down from sobs to sniffles, pull away from Quinn, and find a paper napkin amid the fast-food debris that littered the car. He wiped his face, blew his nose, and said, “Shit.”

  “Shit and a half,” Quinn agreed huskily. “Did you just hear some kind of a pounding noise?”

  “No.”

  “Must have been in my head.”

  “Mine feels like it’s about to explode.”

  “Yeah. And we need to go to the cops.”

  Dully Forrest studied the rental car’s controls. Somehow the gearshift had ended up in park. He reached for it.

  Quinn’s hand stopped his. “You’re in no condition to drive.”

  “Neither are you.” Forrest didn’t need to look at his brother to know this, or to know that if their eyes met, both of them would break down again. He stared up through the windshield at pink and green mimosa.

  Quinn said, “We’ll just have to call the cops, then.”

  Forrest nodded.

  “You want to go inside?”

  “Here?” The pink shack. Mom’s house. And Forrest’s gut quivered at the thought of Mom. “I—I don’t know.”

  “Not as bad as the other place.” Quinn still sounded shaky.

  “Yeah, but—where’s the note, man?”

  “Huh?”

  “The—” Forrest just barely managed to say it. “The letter Mom wrote us.” They would need to show it to the police. “Where is it?”

  “Oh, shit.” Quinn took an audibly unsteady breath. “I left it—”

  “Okay, okay. We gotta go back for it. I can drive that far.” He reached for the gearshift again.

  Quinn said, “Be careful, little brother.”

  Forrest was careful. As he drove the short distance, he heard his brother on the phone to the Sheriff’s Office. “I’m sorry, I can’t remember the name of the deputy assigned to our case.” He didn’t sound sorry, just thoroughly upset. “Listen, just put me through to a detective, okay?”

  During the pause that followed, Forrest pulled up in front of the blue shack, where he idled the car for the sake of its air-conditioning.

  “. . . possible homicide,” Quinn was saying. “We found a note from our mother.” He summarized what it had said. “Yes, I’m sure it was written by our mother. I recognized her handwriting.” His voice quivered. “No, I can’t bring it in. You need to send somebody out here. You expect us to drive when we can’t see straight? Anyway, there are things here you ought to see. State police? Fine. We’ll wait here.” He clicked the phone closed.

  Forrest looked over at him, then wished he hadn’t; Quinn had turned away, but he saw his shoulders shaking. Reaching out, Forrest took hold of his brother’s arm below the shoulder and squeezed hard. “Suit.” The affectionate insult might help. “It’s not over yet.”

  “Fuck all, Forrie,” Quinn managed to say, choking, “those phone calls of Mom’s that we never returned—”

  “I know.”

  “—what if she was trying to call us about something important?”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Maybe if we’d called back . . .”

  “Quinn, a guilt trip is not going to help. Stop it.”

  “But I feel so goddamn bad!”

  “I know. Me too. But we gotta man up now.”

  • • •

  Having very limited experience in being knocked unconscious, I could not at first figure out what was happening when I woke up sputtering. Horrified, I felt as if I were being drowned by what looked like a pooka, a shape-shifting water demon, to my blurred vision. Or some kind of evil monster bending over me and dumping cold water on my head. And cursing out of his grotesquely unbalanced half-purple face. Expletive, expletive, expletive, then “Lazy bitch, get the fuck up and make me some dinner!”

  Oh. Stoat.

  “Something hot, goddammit! I’m hungry.”

  Huh. Evidently the car in the front yard was no longer an issue. I wanted to ask who it was and whether they had gone away, but of course I could not. Without speaking, I began to struggle to sit up.

  “I want me a real cooked meal now.”

  Huh. That was one of the more unlikely things for anyone to expect from me, but Stoat didn’t know my track record. And if he still wanted me to cook for him, that meant I would live a few hours longer.

  Wobbling to my feet, I weaved toward the kitchen. Stoat followed me with the shotgun in hand.

  I had no problem considering my options, because there was only one substantial meal I really knew how to cook. Blinking, trying to focus on things that kept sliding apart into duplication, I rummaged in the freezer compartment of the fridge.

  “Gimme some ice for my face,” Stoat ordered.

  Oh, poor baby, I’d hurt his ugly snakebit face. What about my aching, bleeding head? I said none of this, of course, just took him a plastic bag of frozen mixed vegetables.

  “You call that ice?”

  With an effort I moved my mouth and formed words. “Better than ice cubes.”

  But he pulled back and would not accept what I was offering in my outstretched hand. It would seem his obsessive sense of order was offended by the idea of applying chopped broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots to his face. “You damn well get me ice.”

  I draped the sack of veggies over my own head injury and got him ice. It took all my compromised strength to flex the plastic ice cube trays. Taking him the ice in a ziplock bag, I felt shaky all over.

  To my surprise he was showing all his rotting, crooked teeth in a grin, and I heard him chuckling. Okay, so maybe I did look a bit goofy walking around with a pack of frozen veggies on my head.

  My shakes went away when I realized Stoat was no longer immediately dangerous. I set out the pound of frozen ground turkey I had located. I looked in cupboards and found a jar of tomato sauce and a box of linguine. Close enough. I moved my unwilling mouth again. “I could make spaghetti.”

  “Then do it!”

  I found that when I filled a large pot with water, I had no strength to lift it. Surely the gentleman of the house should have taken care of that task for me. But I did not ask. Instead, I slopped out most of the water, put the pot on the stove, turned the burner on, then added more water by trudging back and forth to the sink with a margarine tub like a one-woman bucket brigade, with California Blend on my head yet. Stoat gave occasional staccato bursts of laughter. Betweentimes I could feel
him watching me, but I did not waste the energy to turn my head and look at him sitting there at my kitchen table with his shotgun and his ice pack. I salted the water, left it to boil, stuck the meat in the nuker to thaw, and found another big pot to make the sauce in. Normally I would have chopped an onion. In no way, shape, or form could anything about this occasion be considered normal. Forget the onion. I scraped and crumbled thawed meat into the second pot and started it browning. Put the meat’s frozen core back in the nuker to thaw some more. Then I tried to open the jar of sauce.

  Crap. I couldn’t.

  I simply did not have enough strength to twist that lid off. Too punch-drunk. I tried again, my improvised ice pack slid off my head to splat on the floor, and the jar slid on the countertop but did not submit to me. Next I would knock it onto the floor, break it, and then where would I be? I had only the one jar of sauce. I knew I should ask Stoat to open it. And I knew damn well I couldn’t. No way.

  He knew it too. He knew exactly the predicament I was in, and it tickled his—his grits, I suppose. Through the ringing in my ears I heard him laughing, laughing while cheering as if the spaghetti sauce and I were meeting in the octagon, the “cage.” “C’mon, Lee Anna! You act like you can do anything. Super cow! No, make that sow! Hey, c’mon, super sow!” His laughter grew darker. “Open that damn jar or I will shove this shotgun right up your fat ass so it don’t need no silencer.”

  As if my own weakness did not frighten me enough already?

  Carefully fumbling, I managed to lift the damnable jar in both unsteady hands and take it to the sink, where I blasted its lid with hot water while I regarded it with malice. My back to Stoat, I gave it the evil eye I did not dare show him. I had been knocked out and was staggering around without even a big mouth to save me; if things got much worse, I’d be dying on the floor; and at this moment a pernicious inanimate object had turned stubborn on me? I hated it. I hated that spaghetti sauce jar with an irrational passion, transferring to it all my repressed feelings about Stoat. It was that contemptible jar taunting me, that nasty jar sniggering in triumph over me. Screw the thing! In a paroxysm of fury I seized it and wrung its neck.

  The lid popped off.

  Stoat crowed with laughter. “Attagirl, Lee Anna! You show it who’s boss! Jesus, if you could see your own face!”

  If I were not suddenly so weak again, I would have thrown it at him as I had once seen my mother throw a can of sliced beets at my father in a moment when he had pushed her too far. Aiming it like a football, she’d gotten a nice spiral on it so that clots of bloody red splashed the wall, the ceiling, the other wall, the floor—

  “Well, get a move on!” Stoat interrupted my reverie.

  The microwave dinged, cuing me to get out the rest of the meat and crumble it into the pan to brown. Hazily I became aware that the pot of water was boiling, and I put the spaghetti in there. When the meat was browned, I dumped the sauce on top of it and stirred. I made my spaghetti sauce in a deep pot so it wouldn’t splatter the whole stove. This was my sole claim to culinary genius. I turned to the cupboards—

  Stoat barked, “What now?”

  Cupboard alert, sir. I made an effort to remember the names of the items I needed and enunciate them clearly. “Colander, plate, fork.”

  “Sir!”

  Terror energized me. “Sir, I need to get out a colander, a plate, and a fork for you to eat with, sir.”

  “What the hell is a colander?”

  “Spaghetti drainer, sir.”

  “Well, why the hell didn’t you say that?”

  “Chronic undifferentiated vocabulary overuse, sir. Do you prefer your spaghetti al dente, sir?”

  “Who the hell is Al Dante?”

  Luckily I had no sense of humor left at all. Goddess only knows what would have happened if I had laughed at him. Flat-faced, I spooned out a strand of the spaghetti, which was actually linguine, and tasted it. Unfortunately it required several more minutes of cooking. “It’s going to be a while,” I remarked, adding, “sir.”

  Stoat menaced with the shotgun. “Hurry it up.”

  But there is no way to hurry linguine. I couldn’t warp the space-time/pasta continuum just to placate Stoat. And I was wondering how to break this to him when I heard a distant, unexpected noise.

  A siren.

  Sounding progressively louder. Heading toward us.

  Ambulance, fire truck, police car? There was no way to tell, and no particular reason to pay attention, yet I listened intently. So did Stoat. I suppose I should have been relieved that something had distracted him from fussing about his dinner for the moment, but I felt only apprehension.

  More so when the siren bleeped to a halt just short of passing my house.

  Stoat threw down his ice pack, jumped up, reached me in two strides, and put the gun to my head.

  TWENTY-THREE

  By the time the first police car arrived, Quinn had led the way into the blue house, where he and Forrest had put their mother’s purse and her letter back in their original positions. Quinn felt as taut as the wires on a snare drum, but he had himself under steely control now. And as far as he could see, so did his brother.

  He glanced outside as the siren bleeped to a stop and the officer, a state trooper, got out of his cruiser. “It’s Willet,” he reported.

  Sitting on the sofa, stony calm and quiet, Forrest nodded. Quinn stood in the shadows near the front window and watched as Willet swaggered over to the shack’s crude wooden steps. Muscular, with no paunch, but a bit short for a cop, Willet showed every indication of having a Napoleon complex, from his extremely erect posture to his scowling face to his shining boots. He did not merely open the front door; he subjugated it, whamming into the shack without knocking. Nor did he bother with a greeting. “I ordered you people to clear these premises.”

  As calmly as possible Quinn said, “If we’d left, you wouldn’t be here to look at evidence now.”

  “Which said same evidence is no damn good since you two done tampered with it.”

  “We haven’t touched the bed with what may be our mother’s blood on it.” He tilted his head toward the room. “Go see.”

  “You don’t tell me how to do my job!”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it,” said Quinn, utterly toneless.

  Willet glared at him. Quinn stared back with his heartbeat drumming in his ears but, he hoped, with no expression on his face. He didn’t hear the second cruiser pull in, but Forrest got up and walked to the front window to see. “Somebody from the Sheriff’s Office is here.”

  Immediately, Willet barged into the room with the bare bed and shackles. Wanting to get ahead of the other cop, probably.

  Quinn wished the sheriff’s deputy might be Bernie Morales. But in a moment he could see it wasn’t; that would have been entirely too helpful, Quinn thought bitterly. The law officer who came in was the detective they’d met earlier, Deputy Kehm, a tall, rawboned, sad-eyed man with a bald head but a robust white walrus mustache that made his leathery face look very tan. “Quinn, Forrest,” he greeted them, shaking hands. Quinn fretted over his use of their first names; was the cop being condescending or just friendly? “What’s this about?”

  Quinn led him to Mom’s note, pulled it out, and watched him read it. Forrest put a tape into the VCR and turned it on. As it started to play, Quinn noticed it was not the same one as before, but contained much the same content, except that this one added bondage.

  Kehm’s head jerked up. “Jeez!” he exclaimed, staring. “Are all them tapes like that?”

  “This is only the second one we’ve watched,” said Forrest.

  Quinn asked, “Is that old goat Stoat?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The answer is yes,” said a ponderous voice; Trooper Willet had reentered the room to watch the video from behind them. “Yes, I recognize that man as Steven Stoat, which means we can issue a warrant for his arrest for sexual misconduct with a minor.”

  Quinn heard this and turned sharpl
y. “To hell with his sex kinks!” The minor would be Stoat’s so-called nephew Bernie had mentioned, and if he had lasted this long, he could wait. “What about issuing a warrant for the bastard on suspicion of kidnapping my mother?”

  Trooper Willet faced him belligerently. “So you found her purse, so she was here in this house, that don’t prove—”

  “You need to see this,” Kehm interrupted smoothly, handing him the letter.

  After reading the sheet of tablet paper, Trooper Willet demanded of Quinn, “Where’d you find this?”

  “On top of her purse.”

  “How do I know you didn’t write it yourself and plant it?”

  For the first time in his life Quinn actually saw red. A haze of that color obscured his vision as sheer rage suffused his body. As he tensed to attack Willet, he felt hands grabbing his arms hard enough to hold him back: Forrest and Deputy Kehm.

  He heard Forrest tell Willet, not too steadily, “That’s my mother’s handwriting.”

  Kehm said pleasantly enough, “Willet, looks to me like we got a crime scene here. It’s all yours. You take the videotapes and pursue the sex crimes charges. I’ll follow up on this other angle.”

  Willet rumbled, “I told these two boys this morning to clear out of here. Now all the evidence is tainted.”

  “Not the tapes. No way they altered them.”

  “Okay, but I still ought to cuff them for trespassing, obstruction, and acting just plain stupid.”

  “No need. You want them out of here, I’ll take them with me.”

  Quinn’s vision started to clear, and he regained just enough sense to keep his mouth shut. Rather than yelp, “Boys?” at Willet, he stepped back. Forrest and Deputy Kehm let go of him.

  Forrest told Trooper Willet with strained courtesy, “We’d like to have Mom’s note after you’re done with it.”

  Willet glowered at him and offered the note to Kehm, who held an evidence bag open to receive it. After closing and labeling this, he pocketed it, turned around, and winked one of his sad, hound-dog eyes at Forrest. His white walrus mustache made it impossible to tell whether he was smiling as he did so. He thrust his chin toward the front door, and without a word Quinn led the way out. Going down the three unpainted wooden steps was like a descent into hell, if only because of the heat and fiery light. Kehm opened the back doors of his cruiser for him and Forrest.