Drawn Into Darkness

by Nancy Springer

  “You are not under arrest,” he told them as they got in.

  Quinn still didn’t trust himself to say anything.

  Forrest asked, “Then where are you taking us?”

  “My office, so we can talk about your mother. You hungry? I’m hungry. Let’s stop for something to eat. You like pulled pork barbecue? Chili dog?”

  Friendly, Quinn decided. But what the hell was the use of “friendly” under the circumstances? Pulled pork barbecue, hell. They needed to find Mom.

  “We need to eat,” Forrest said as if hearing Quinn’s thoughts, “so we can think halfway straight and stay on our feet. Thank you, Officer Kehm.”

  “Chicken soup? I know a place that’s got good chicken soup.”

  This was not a melodramatic movie; this was real life and didn’t deserve to be saddled with such a cliché. Quinn had to close his eyes and clench his teeth against his own frustration.

  Forrest told Officer Kehm, “Whatever you want is fine with us.”

  • • •

  Within a few minutes after the twins came home from school, Ned felt confirmed in his good impression of Amy. Saying hello to Kyle and Kayla, he saw ten-year-olds who still looked somewhat like children, not fashion models, and thereby he saw a sensible mother. Talking with his grandchildren, he encountered kids who were mannerly yet full of life, and he gave credit to good parenting.

  While pleased to meet him, the twins seemed not overly impressed that he was their newfound grandfather. “Now, if Justin came back,” Kayla told him, “that would be something.”

  “Yes, it would.”

  “Justin is our brother. You know what happened to him?”

  “Yes, I heard.”

  “He’s probably dead,” Kayla said, but not quite as if this were her personal conviction. More as if she wanted to see whether her new grandfather would respond with horror.

  Ned said, “That’s sensible to think under the circumstances. But I still hope he’s alive and he’ll come home.”

  “Okay.”

  Kyle took over the interrogation. “Listen, we heard you’re a drunk. Are you a drunk? No offense.”

  “None taken. I used to be a drunk, but now I am a recovering alcoholic. Do you think your father would bring a drunk into the house?”

  “No.”

  Kayla asked, “How did you stop drinking? Did you get religion?”

  “Yes, kind of, in a nondenominational sort of way.”

  “Non what?”

  “Nondenominational. Not Baptist or anything. More Zen, actually.”

  Kayla blinked and did not ask what Zen meant. Instead she asked, “Can me and Kyle play with Oliver?”

  “Kyle and I,” Amy corrected from the sofa.

  Ned said, “Oliver would love that if it’s okay with your mom.”

  It was okay. Oliver happily romped off into the backyard with the Bradley twins. Once they were out of the room, Ned told Amy and Chad, “They’re a credit to you.” Good kids, in Ned’s experience, hardly ever came from bad families, although the opposite could be true, as he had proved by example. He’d had good parents. He’d had a good wife. The fact that Chad had turned out so well was a testament to the job his wonderful wife had done raising the boy after he, Ned, had turned into a drunken butthead.

  Of the twins, Amy said, “They can be a bit outspoken, but I don’t want to squelch their honesty away. You handled them well.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t shush them.”

  “Sometimes I have to.”

  “Not for me.”

  “No, not for you.” She smiled, and Ned had to restrain himself from hugging her. Tacitly, he and she had just settled something between them. Without minding in the least, he had felt her watching him and judging him, assessing whether he could be trusted with the kids. He had also sensed that it was not in her nature to pass judgment and that she was now relieved to be done with it. She probably had no idea how greatly her acceptance warmed his heart.

  • • •

  Still holding the gun to my head, Stoat swore in a way that made cursing not just a vent for frustration but also a reinforcement of a threat, finishing off with, “You lard-ass uppity shit-tail damn stupid cow, how the hell did you call the cops on me?”

  “I didn’t!” Instead of speaking as calmly and firmly as I wanted to, I squeaked, “How could I?”

  “You think I’m stupid? Who else—”

  I managed to interrupt with articulate sincerity. “Mr. Stoat, sir, if I had called the cops, they would be here instead of—where are they? Your place?”

  “I’m fixing to see. Move.” His freak-show face as grim as his tone, he marched me the few steps to where he kept his duct tape. Ripping some off with his snaggleteeth, he stuck it none too gently over my mouth. “Sit.” He prodded me into one of my kitchen chairs and duct-taped my hands behind me. Setting down his shotgun so he could immobilize me more quickly, he swaddled tape around my ankles and the legs of the chair. “Don’t make a sound and don’t move,” he said harshly and, in my opinion, quite unnecessarily. I nodded meekly.

  Satisfied that he had me under control, Stoat took his gun and strode into the living room. Nothing prevented me from turning my head to watch him. Crouching beside my picture window, he peeped behind the closed drapes at a sideward angle, hardly moving them at all. Then he started to curse again, rapid-fire, like an automatic weapon. I didn’t think he was speaking to me. I suspected he generally swore aloud when life didn’t suit him. “That fucking half-assed car is back down there,” he complained between bursts of stronger language. “What the fuck’s that all about?”

  I wished I knew! Who in the world had driven into my front yard, and why? I wondered whether Stoat had seen anyone after conking me on the head. But even if my mouth had not been silenced by duct tape, I could not have asked him.

  Peering out the window, Stoat swore some more. “Dickhead state trooper parked in front of my house. What the fuck the goddamn cops think they’re doing? Jesus shit, here comes another one. Looks to be from the sheriff.”

  Deep in my aching guts I felt a sluggish stirring of the feathered thing with wings called hope. Dare I hope this sudden influx of law enforcement might have something to do with me?

  “This is bizarre,” said Stoat. “What the fuck do they want?”

  Bizarre was the word, all right. Everything seemed so surreal that my faint fluttering of hope went still almost immediately, and the only thing I could think was that someone had found Justin’s body.

  Stoat craned his neck in an effort to see better—

  And lost his balance, falling over and whacking his head on the corner of the windowsill. Just a few feet away from where Schweitzer had once lain, Stoat flopped to the carpeted floor and lay still. Knocked out.

  I felt my mouth attempt to open beneath the duct tape, felt the skin stretch around my wide-open staring eyes; I was so astonished. Due to Stoat’s bluster or his bravado or both, I had not realized Stoat was still feeling pretty damn weak from the snakebite.

  Could he be—dead?

  No, dammit, the bastard was not dead. He lay faceup, and I could see his greasy gray nose hair moving as he breathed. But he seemed to be out cold.

  For all the good that did me when I sat firmly adhered to a kitchen chair. And when, of all the frustrating things, I knew there were police right down the road!

  Immediately I tried to get free. I struggled to slip my hands out of their sticky binding, but I soon found that the duct tape was way stronger than I was. I tried to kick my legs free. Same problem. I tried to stand and walk while still taped to the chair, only to put myself in great danger of falling. Panting with effort, I sat still again, trying to think.

  As my breathing eased, I could hear Stoat snoring. Snoring! The loathsome man lay sleeping like a baby on my living room floor.

  I wanted to scream. I thought I would lose my scant remaining mind to sheer outrage.

  Then another seething, bubbling sort of snoring sound
turned my attention away from Stoat and toward the stove, where I saw a large pot boiling over.

  The spaghetti! Or linguine, whatever. I had forgotten all about it. Not only would it overcook, but the sauce needed to be stirred or it would burn. In fact, I already smelled it scorching.

  I felt a moment’s concern, then rebelled against it. There went Stoat’s dinner. Nyah, nyah. Served him right. Lying there taking a snooze.

  A sensible woman would have felt relief that he was not threatening her for a few moments, but I had deteriorated way beyond being sensible. I hated him. I wanted to lie down and sleep too. Slumping in the chair as far as I could, I rested my chin on my collarbone and closed my eyes. Almost instantly I dozed off, for what might have been ten or fifteen minutes but seemed like a few seconds.

  Then an intensely irritating shrill peeping sound awoke me. At first I could not think what it was other than just egregiously the last straw, the icing on my crappy cake, the cherry on top of my wretched captivity. Then, wincing at the clamor it made, I realized it was the smoke detector.

  I looked. Smoke was starting to rise from something on the stove.

  I looked at Stoat lying on the living room floor. He showed no signs of hearing the smoke detector. Maybe he was conked out or in a coma. Maybe he was deaf. Maybe he was dead after all.

  Which would have been delightful under other circumstances. But right now, if the stove went on burning Stoat’s dinner long enough, the house would catch on fire. With me in it. Unable to escape.

  It was a definite “Oh, shit!” moment.

  Despite the obvious fact that I could not move, somehow I had to get to that stove. My feet touched the floor in close proximity to the chair legs. I pressed my toes into the linoleum and shoved, but nothing much happened. I attempted a sort of seated hop. Nothing. Wisps of smoke wafted over my head now. If I could have opened my mouth, I would have screamed. I panicked, and somehow my panic enabled me to fling my entire body into levitation mode. Lo and behold, the chair and I moved a few inches, although not exactly in the direction I wanted.

  I tried again, of course. And again, and again, I have no idea how many times, with varying degrees of success, although I could not correct or predict my heading. The chair and I scratched a wavering path across the linoleum in the general direction of the stove as the smoke in the kitchen fast-forwarded from wisps into clouds into a billowing overcast that hung only inches above my head. The panic that energized me now was fear of suffocation, asphyxiation, dying of smoke inhalation even before my house burst into flames. Damn Stoat and his damn spaghetti and his damn duct tape.

  By the time I finally flumped my way to the stove, smoke settled like a kind of attack fog around my head, stinging my eyes, depriving me of proper breath, making me cough through the tape covering my mouth. And what the hell did I expect to do about it anyway, stuck in a chair with my hands behind me? I couldn’t even see, let alone think. More frantic than ever, I ducked my head in an attempt to find better air, and in so doing I banged my nose against the stove knobs that turned the burners on and off, which gave me a thought.

  I nudged one of the knobs with no effect, and the heat from the stove top singed my hair and nearly blistered my face, meaning it was probably way too late for my pitiful heroics to make any difference. By being a good Stoic I could have sacrificed myself and let an appropriately hellish inferno take Stoat along with me. But the survival instinct trumped philosophy. Slewing my head at an improbable, muscle-straining angle, I positioned my duct-taped mouth on the handle of one of the knobs, pressed against it until my teeth hurt, and attempted to turn it to the “off” position.

  Attempted more than once. Heads are not trained in fine motor skills, let alone working through duct tape, so it was not easy. But I finally, clumsily, very nearly toppling into the stove, got one burner turned off. I leaned sideways and stretched my neck to reach the other, applied my muffled mouth again and turned it—not quite off, but it would have to do. With no strength left, unable to breathe properly or open my mouth to pant, feeling weak and queasy, I let fear advise me once more and did something desperate and counterintuitive. I deliberately tipped myself over onto the kitchen floor.

  Ow. I banged my already-banged-up head pretty good.

  But there was still some air down there. I could breathe again.

  And I could let myself sag onto the linoleum. I could rest.

  So that’s what I did. With no idea whether I would ever get up again, I lay on the floor, let my legs hang from their bindings, closed my eyes, and relaxed. Despite the yammering of the smoke detector, I actually dozed, dreaming I was back in the swamp with Justin, walking through drippy Spanish moss that groped us and Spanish daggers that tried to neuter us and a variety of other insults. Justin struggled with tangled vines and I scratched mosquito bites and we had a great conversation about what we would eat when we got out of there. He wanted to gorge on Snickers bars. I just wanted to bury my head in a five-gallon tub of chocolate-chip cookie dough ice cream.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Again Bernie drew missionary duty, driving the Leppo brothers back to Stoat’s house, where they had left their car. He was hungry, and he should have been on his way home, but he did not mind, for the slanting late daylight gave him a mellow mood in harmony with the yellow halos it limned on the rows of soybeans in the fields, the tousle-headed pine trees, the cows strolling home—Bernie had always liked cows. He liked simple, humble things. He noticed that someone had erected a pole with crossbars from which hung white gourds, now rimmed in saffron by sundown light, for birds to nest in. Bernie decided he wanted to do the same in his backyard.

  Forrest and Quinn saw none of this, he could tell, for they looked only at their own hands. Heads bowed as if grieving a death, they did not speak. Bernie knew some Americans preferred to keep their silences, but he could not stand it. “You hear bad news from Deputy Kehm?”

  The older, taller one, Quinn, shifted his bleak gaze to Bernie for an ominous moment before he spoke. “Not from Kehm. Our mother left us a note that said she, um—”

  “I hear about the note,” said Bernie to spare Quinn, who seemed to be having difficulty going on. “But what Kehm say?”

  “Nothing.”

  This sounded like Deputy Kehm. Everyone on the force knew his good ol’ boy act was just that: an act. Really, Kehm cared about his food and his mustache but not much else.

  “Nothing,” Forrest echoed, “and that’s what he expects us to do.”

  “Go back to the hotel, watch TV, and go to sleep?” Quinn sounded incredulous. “As if we could sleep? Isn’t there any local TV or radio or someplace with computers—”

  “We need to get the word out,” Forrest explained.

  “—or photocopiers where we can put together a poster—”

  Bernie said, “Down in Panama City, maybe.” Fifty miles away.

  Neither of them seemed to hear him. “Not just posters. Organize a search.” With every word Forrest sounded more fervid and more desperate. “With tracking dogs, helicopters—”

  Quinn interrupted. “Bernie, is anybody staking out Stoat’s house?”

  “I don’t know. But Kehm will check with the Stoat family to see if they know where he is.”

  “Do you think they will?”

  “No,” Bernie admitted.

  “He’s probably in California by now,” said Forrest morosely.

  Quinn muttered, “They still should stake out his house.”

  Bernie saw Stoat’s skink-tail blue shack ahead, with the Leppo brothers’ rental car parked in front. He offered his last, best advice. “For the posters, try the churches. They have offices.”

  “Open after business hours?” Quinn asked.

  “No. But look in the phone book, call the preachers at home. Someone will help.”

  Almost in a whisper Forrest said, “It’s no use, is it, Bernie?”

  In all probability, Bernie knew, he was right, but no one with a heart would say so. “More
use than to lie in bed looking at the ceiling.” Bernie turned left, bumped over a culvert, and stopped in front of the bright blue shack, now embellished by even brighter CRIME SCENE DO NOT PASS tape. A large yellow X of the stuff sealed the front door.

  “Thank you, Bernie. You’re a friend.” Quinn reached toward Bernie and shook his hand with sudden fervor before getting out of the cruiser.

  Forrest said thank you and shook his hand too. Both gave him wan smiles as they waved and headed toward their rental car.

  Bernie felt as if he should not leave them. But what could he do? He had no copy machine to make the posters, no tracking dog, no helicopter, only Tammy Lou, who was waiting for him at their casa feliz, their happy home. Bernie left.

  • • •

  A disturbing sensation of Stoatness awoke me, and I twisted around to look up from where I lay on the kitchen floor. Sure enough, looming over me, Stoat stood at the stove ravenously eating spaghetti sauce out of the pot with the big wooden spoon I had been using to stir it, which left smears of blood red on his face. When he sensed me staring up at him, he gave me a look of pure malice. “What the hell you think you’re doing?”

  The duct tape still sealing my mouth prevented me from voicing any of the several trenchant replies that came to mind.

  “Goddamn spaghetti looks like Elmer’s glue,” Stoat said. “My dinner is ruined.” He kicked at me as if ruining his supper had been my intention. But the effort made him almost lose his balance, and his pointed cowboy-boot toe harmlessly hit the kitchen chair. “Now there ain’t no damn time to cook none. Git up.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him, trying to telegraph to him that he’d overlooked one important detail.

  He railed, “I said git up! What the hell’s the matter with you—oh.” Belated realization did not make him any less pissed off. He swore luridly as he got out his knife, and I could not help cringing at the sight of the long blade shining in the dim kitchen—why so dim? The answer took a moment to float into the mist of my mind: Stoat and I had slept for hours. Day was fading. An unmistakably evening breeze reached me on the floor, and belatedly I realized the smoke had cleared; Stoat must have opened some windows. Come to think of it, the noise from the smoke detector had stopped.