Just Try to Stop Me

by Gregg Olsen

  “Baby,” he said, “let’s not think about her.”

  “It hurts me so bad,” she said, grinding her pelvis against him. “I don’t understand why some women have a problem with me. I’ve been misjudged my entire life. I’m only trying to be nice. ”

  “I know, baby,” Sherman said, his eyes and hands going back to her nipples. He couldn’t stop himself from touching her. It was like he was seventeen again. His erections were large, hard, ready. It was embarrassing at first, but it also made him feel a little proud; like he was something again; like the best years of his life hadn’t been stolen from him by his ex-wife Susan.

  “You won’t be like the others,” she said, her voice soft. “Will you?”

  Sherman loved her more than ever at that moment. He also knew what she was getting at.

  “No,” he said into her ear. “Never, Brenda. Never.”

  Brenda writhed and moaned.

  “Oh God,” she said. “I love you so much. Finally a real man to save me and help me. Finally someone to love.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Violet watched Sherman and Vanessa as they made their nightly trip into the big old barn. Vanessa leaned in to kiss him, and he returned her gesture with a playful swat on her bottom. They were an unsettling image of two opposites in love. He was quiet, cerebral. She was charismatic, no doubt, but not in the way that invited awe and interest. Just eyes on her. All the time. They never went without toting something over there, though Violet couldn’t make out what they carried. The excursions had been going on for several nights. Days too.

  Violet knew they’d be gone for a couple of hours. The instant they vanished into the barn’s huge doors and shuttered them, she dialed her daughter’s number from the wall phone in the kitchen. Her fingertip trembled as she pushed the large numerals on the phone that thoughtful—but absent—Denise had given her for Mother’s Day. Her call went to the answering system.

  “Denise, it’s me. Where are you? I know you are very, very busy. I’m proud of all of your success, really I am. I just wanted to talk. I guess I need to talk to someone. I can’t talk to Sherman. It’s about him. Not him so much him as that woman Vanessa that he’s with now. They say they are in love. Oh, I’m sorry. I must sound like a crazy, meddlesome old woman. I don’t mean to be. I just don’t like her. Something isn’t right about her. I can’t figure out what it is. I mean, she’s weird. Scary weird. Don’t worry. I shouldn’t have called.”

  Violet hung up, heart pounding. She felt hot and a little faint. Making that call hadn’t been easy. She sat in her chair and folded her hands, noticing how her knuckles had knotted more than the last time since she studied them. She remembered that Denise was away at a dental conference in Cincinnati. She’d left a message on her home phone, not her cell.

  She knew her daughter wasn’t going to get back to her anytime soon. Denise was notorious for using conferences as an excuse to take extended vacations. Violet hadn’t been to Cincinnati, and wondered if there was really that much to do there. Maybe Denise would come home.

  The barn door was open a crack. Violet wondered about that as she waited for her heart to slow from its terrified drumbeat.

  Wait. The door had been shut before she made the call.

  * * *

  The next morning Vanessa was in the kitchen arranging a bouquet of dahlias.

  “You have an amazing garden, Mom.” She looked over at Violet and smiled. Her teeth were too white. Her eyes were piercing. Everything about Vanessa was too much. Sometimes, Violet thought, looking at her was like looking at the sun. You had to squint; she was that strong a force.

  Violet wanted to hold her tongue, but she couldn’t.

  “I’m not comfortable with you calling me that, Vanessa. Do you mind?”

  Vanessa shortened the longest stems with a pruning shear.

  “Oh, you mean ‘Mom’?” she asked. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend.”

  Violet winced. “No offense. Just a lot to take in right now.”

  “Understood.” Vanessa finished the bouquet. She’d arranged the flowers, pom-pom-shaped blooms in dark red and white, in a large crystal vase that had been a wedding present to the bride from the groom. It had been stashed away in the back of the dining room hutch. Somehow Vanessa found it. “The shears were a dream,” she went on. “Sherman sharpened them for me. They cut even the toughest stems like a hot knife through butter.”

  Violet didn’t like the idea that Vanessa had helped herself to the vase, but leaving pretty things unused for sentimental reasons was a favor to no one.

  “Where would you like these?” Vanessa asked, holding up the vase.

  “The dining room is fine,” Violet said.

  “That’s what I thought too.” Vanessa disappeared into the dining room. “I’m heading over to the barn to help Sherman with some things,” she called out. The screen door slammed behind her.

  Violet got up and with the help of her walker and went over to the wall phone.

  She dialed Denise’s number and waited for it to ring, but the line was silent.

  “What?” she thought. They’d lost phone service plenty of times over the years, but mostly because of a major storm. The last night had been quiet. Outside of the nightly occurrence of the banging headboard, Violet had noticed nothing.

  She dialed again. Once more, silence filled her ears.

  Something isn’t right. Her heart raced again.

  Violet slid the receiver into its cradle. Her eyes traveled down the phone line. On the floor was a red dahlia petal. It looked almost like a drop of blood. If the phone line had been a living thing, it most certainly was dead.

  It had been cut with a very sharp knife. No. Not a knife. As the telltale petal on the floor indicated, garden pruning shears had likely been the instrument used to sever Violet from the outside world.

  What in the world had Sherman gotten himself into? Vanessa was no ordinary woman. Not by a country mile.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  While the woman of his dreams looked on, Sherman dumped out the phones. They scattered over the kitchen table. He knew that they’d be a source the investigators could use for tracking the whereabouts of the missing girls. Although there was no cell service for miles, he didn’t want to take any chances.

  Neither did Vanessa.

  She looked down at the collection—two iPhones, a gargantuan Samsung, and the smallest of the four, an interloper, a compact.

  “What’s this?” she asked, picking up the compact. “I’ve been in prison awhile and might have missed something, but this isn’t a phone, is it?”

  “One of those little bitches,” he said. “Not to worry,” he added when it was clear Brenda was completely pissed off. “She can’t use her phone here, but she can try to play hero.”

  “Dismantle those phones,” she said, “and get your ass to the barn and get the other one.”

  Without a word, Sherman snapped off the backs and pulled the SIM cards and batteries. He was fast and efficient as could be, though his fingers felt fat with Brenda’s eyes on them.

  “I’ll visit with your mom,” she said, her tone cool.

  He entered the barn and threw the door open.

  “Which one of you little bitches wants to die first?” he yelled.

  The girls, huddled in separate locked stalls, were paralyzed by their fear. Each had a reference point for a place like the one in which they were now held captive. An uncle’s farm. A petting zoo field trip. Hay. Manure. The warm, heavy smells of country life had never seemed terrifying before.

  “Please,” Kelly said, scanning the dark space and twisting in the ropes that held her ankles and wrists, “don’t hurt us.”

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” Sherman said, feeling the power of their fear surge in his bloodstream. God, it feels good. His whole life he’d been in the background clacking away on a keyboard, ignored. Unnoticed. Not anymore. The girls he’d imprisoned in the horse stalls were terrified of him. Thei
r tears and screams lifted him in a way that felt so empowering. So high.

  “If you don’t tell me which phone is yours,” he said, frustrated that each phone had been password protected. “I’ll kill you. I swear I will. Now, who has the Hello Kitty phone?”

  “I do! That’s mine!” the voice came from Monty’s old stall. That’s where he and Brenda locked up Kelly.

  “Name?”

  “Kelly Sullivan. That’s me.”

  He looked at the next phone.

  “Who had the Galaxy with the yin and yang cover?”

  “Me. That’s mine. I’m Amber Turner.”

  “Good girl,” he said.

  “iPhone with a purple cover?”

  “Me! That belongs to me.”

  “Blake,” Amber said. “Say your name!”

  “Blake Scott,” she called out. “The purple phone is mine.”

  Sherman walked over to the stall that held Chloe MacDonald. This was the part that he expected would be the ultimate in power, making the girl beg for her life. He wondered how far he should go with her, if deviating from the plan would put Brenda and their life together at risk.

  * * *

  Chloe stopped crying. She no longer screamed. There seemed to be no point in doing so. She sat in the corner of the stall thinking that her attempt at leaving some kind of a bread crumb for the police had been among the dumbest things she’d ever done in her life.

  She had gone with her gut, her instincts. She wanted to make sure that the sick piece of garbage that had killed Patty and that guy who stopped was found. She hadn’t considered that it would lead to any rescue for herself or the other girls. He’d killed Patty and the guy in the VW like they were nothing. After he raped her and the others, she fully expected they would all die.

  The door swung open. A flood of light washed over the inside of the stall, giving Chloe her first glimpse of where she was being held captive. Her eyes squinted in the brightness.

  “Where’s your goddamn phone?” Sherman asked, lunging for her.

  “I don’t have it,” she said, feeling his hot breath.

  “You do! I want it! Give it to me or I’ll slit you like a pig,” he said, feeling the wonderful surge of power that came with the promise to kill the girl.

  “I lost it,” she said, trying to come up with a plausible excuse. “You scared the crap out of me when you shot Patty! Why did you have to shoot her? She didn’t do anything to you, did she? That kid didn’t do anything to you, either! Kill me! Go ahead, cut my throat or whatever you are going to do. I don’t have my phone!”

  The rush was thrilling. God, how he’d lived the life of a loser up to now. Is this what everyone else felt like? He gulped air. He was on top of her. Her body was tiny, but she was wiry. He could feel every tendon in her body stiffen. If he’d wanted to, he could apply just a little more pressure and snap her into a zillion pieces.

  “Rape me!” Chloe said. “Get it over with!”

  Intoxicating. Exhilarating. Electrifying. He could think of no word to describe how he felt.

  Chloe braced herself as his hands went over her body, lingering in places that only her boyfriend or her doctor had touched.

  “I told you to take her phone,” came a voice from the doorway. “Not her virginity.”

  Chloe strained to see the woman, but Sherman’s head was in the way.

  “She doesn’t have her phone,” he said, rolling off her. “She says she lost it.”

  “Looks like you searched her pretty good,” Brenda said, her words meant to stab at him a little, suggesting that he was disloyal.

  “I got carried away,” he said, getting up.

  “I don’t care what you do to me,” Chloe said, “you’ll get caught. I hope someone finds my phone.”

  The stall door shut and the darkness returned.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  The blade of the butcher knife was dull. As Violet Wilder attempted to slice through the mahogany red of the venison that she’d planned to stew for dinner, she watched her son as he continued to work on repairing the barn. There was no end to his work ethic. It reminded her of her husband and how his work hours were dictated by the season. He’d work until ten at night in the summer because the sun stayed so late in the sky. She looked forward to wintertime because he’d stop early, close to six-thirty or seven, and they’d have more time together.

  “Need me to sharpen that blade, Mom?” Sherman asked.

  “I didn’t hear you come in, honey,” she said, turning to greet him.

  “Quiet as a mouse,” he said. “That’s me.”

  She gave him the knife. “This old thing does need some sharpening. Stone’s in the drawer. I can’t manage as well as I used to.”

  Sherman patted her shoulder. “That’s okay. It happens. I’m here.”

  She took her walker and slid it to the kitchen table and watched while Sherman cleaned the blade, oiled the whetstone, and started to pull the blade over its dull gray surface.

  “I’ve been watching you work,” she said.

  He cocked an eye. “You have, have you?”

  She smiled. “Reminds me of your father. You just keep going and going and going. I don’t know where you get the energy.”

  “Comes from somewhere, Mom. Maybe you and Dad passed it along to me.”

  The blade glinted as he pulled it over the oiled stone.

  “What are you doing out there in the barn, anyway? I see a lot of comings and goings, supplies going in. The barn must have been a wreck if you had to make so many repairs.”

  She turned and looked out the window, falling silent.

  “What is it, Mom?” he asked. “You all right?”

  She shook herself.

  “I guess I’m just feeling a little sorry for myself right now.”

  He rinsed the knife and dried it. He set it on the cutting board next to the bloody venison steak.

  “Oh, Mom,” he said, “don’t feel sad.”

  She moved a bony finger in his direction, indicating not to worry. She’d be fine. She was always fine.

  “I guess my eyes are too old to cry,” she said. “Because that’s what I want to do right now. Just have a good cry.”

  Sherman put his arms around her.

  “It’s okay, Mom. Things are going to get better. We’re going to get through this transition, and then we’ll start over.”

  “Right,” Violet said, sliding back over to the cutting board. “I know that. Big changes are hard.” She sliced through the meat and looked over at her son.

  “Better?” he asked.

  “Much,” she said.

  “All right, then,” he said, “I’m going to do some more work in the barn. That venison stew is going to be on my mind all day.”

  She watched as he went out the kitchen door to the barn. She wished she could go help. The stew would sit there in a pot all day. She’d sit at the kitchen table. Just waiting. Like the stew.

  * * *

  Mushrooms. That’s just what the venison stew needed. Violet sipped her tea, did a crossword puzzle, and thought about mushrooms. They’d make that dish just perfect.

  She looked at the kitchen clock and wondered when Sherman would get home from wherever he’d gone to. She hated the idea of being dependent on him or anyone. She was no longer all that she used to be. She couldn’t even get to some chanterelles that she was all but certain had erupted through the rich, loamy soil on the back side of the barn after that heavy rain.

  She looked over at her cane, propped in a corner next to the refrigerator. It was one of those four-pronged affairs that she’d managed to put to good use before the walker. She wondered if she’d given up. Let herself go. Become so mired in the sadness of being old that she stopped trying.

  “I’m not going to give up,” she said to herself. “I’m going to get those mushrooms right now.”

  She slid the walker to the counter, picked up a small paring knife and a bread bag from the drawer. Steadying herself, she reached for the
cane. It felt good in her grip. She could do this. She could feel it in her bones.

  Her bones. The reason the doctors insisted she use a walker. They were so brittle that if she fell she’d all but certainly end up with fractures. Broken bones would transition her from walker-mobility to bedridden.

  She didn’t care. What kind of life was worth living if she wasn’t able to do anything?

  The cane was familiar. She leaned on it only a little. She was sure that with careful steps she’d be able to get over to those mushrooms.

  I’m not over, she thought. Not yet!

  One step, then another, and Violet was out the kitchen door. The aroma of the farm filled her senses. Memories came to her. Her husband. Her children. Her beloved horse, Monty. The breeze was on the cool side and she should have put on a jacket, but there was no turning back.

  She looked around. It had been two weeks since her last doctor’s appointment. The yard next to the house looked unkempt. Sherman had been busy. She knew that. But he’d let it go a little long. She remembered how she used to mow that lawn with a push mower while the kids ate Popsicles and swung on the tire hanging from a tree limb. Not at the same time. That wouldn’t be safe. Violet was always careful with her children.

  Safety first.

  Soaking up the familiar, she pressed onward. She was tempted to go inside the barn to see what Sherman had been doing, but first things first. After rounding the back side of the barn to that spot where the chanterelles could be found after a rain, she saw them. A mass of golden trumpets poked upward from the black, shaded soil. Violet stood there, satisfied that she’d made it that far, but also wondering how she was going to get down to the ground to pick the mushrooms.

  I can do this, she thought. I know it.

  Holding the cane like a lever, she lowered herself to one knee.

  I did it! Sherman will be so pleased.

  It was too awkward to use the paring knife, and the chanterelles really didn’t require it. She opened the plastic bag. Next, she pulled up the mushrooms one by one, shaking off the soil and depositing them in the bag. The stew she was making was about to be transformed from delicious to out of this world. The barn funneled the breeze at her, and she shook with the chill. As she stood up, she heard animal sounds.