by Greg Enslen
Tony nodded, staring at the body on the floor. To Vincent, he looked a little sick to his stomach.
“Yeah, we are. When is the buy?”
“Tomorrow night.”
“Can you get this cleaned up quickly?”
Vincent nodded. “Yeah. I’ve got it covered. It’s a clear shot out through the hallway out to the van, and I know a place for him,” he said, nodding at the body.
“Cleaning the carpet will be the hardest part,” Tony said.
Vincent handed Tony a card, which read A-1 Carpets and Floors. “They’re coming tonight to rip up the carpet and replace it with a darker color. I told them we had a party and some grape juice got spilled. We only have to make the stains a little less obvious—one of my guys will do that,” he said, nodding toward the other room.
Tony smiled and Vincent knew what he was thinking—Tony had always been the thinker of the family, and Vincent had been the doer. It was nice to see that they could work together so well after so much animosity, after so much time apart.
And as Vincent looked at the body on the carpet, he saw the clear evidence. They were on their way.
Chapter 9
She was sitting on the porch when the song came on once more, mocking her. She’d been crying, hoping they would play “Georgia” like they had a few nights before, hoping it would remind her of Chris and their good times. Instead, they played the song that made her think of crazy things, of freedom, of revenge.
It was “Independence Day” by Martina McBride, a song about an abused woman who kills her husband by burning down their home around them. It was a sad song, told from the point of view of their young daughter as she watches the home burn, but it was also joyful—the woman was free, finally, from the man who was slowly killing her. And the mother had saved her daughter from a similar fate.
The song had been on the radio a lot lately, and every time it came on, it made Judy feel strangely empowered. Maybe she didn’t have the courage to do what the woman in the song did, but maybe she could escape, at least. Could she be clever enough to get away forever? There had to be a way out of this endless cycle of hell in which she found herself trapped.
He was upstairs, in their bed. She couldn’t be near him right now—she wanted to be as far away from him as possible.
Trying to do anything to him was pointless—his family was too powerful. Maybe a year ago, but now he and his brother were getting along, working together, and if something happened to Vincent, Tony would surely be able to find her no matter how far she ran.
No, if she were going to get out of this, she’d have to do it on her own. She would have to get away from him once and for all. That meant that she had to make him think that she was dead.
She could lose herself in her paintings, but that only worked for as long as he wasn’t around—she shuddered at the thought of Vincent finding out.
But if things kept going the way they were, she wouldn’t have to pretend.
Tonight, he’d cut her hair off.
There had been no warning about what was coming. He’d come into the house in a huff, the alcohol so evident on his breath that it was like a hazy cloud around his face. His dinner was warm and ready. The house was clean, and she had a cold beer sitting out waiting for him, but none of that mattered.
He had come straight at her, angry about something out in the yard that she couldn’t even understand, muttering about the plants looking dead and screaming at her for not keeping up a nice yard so that when people drove by they didn’t laugh at him. She had no idea what he was talking about—he was the one who usually took care of the yard—and was about to say so when he punched her hard in the face.
Usually his beatings started with slaps or squeezed arms or pulled hair—the punching and kicking came later, if at all. Sometimes he just got tired and went away. A fight that started with a full-on punch told her that he was really spun up about something, and as the punch leveled her, she made an instantaneous decision as she crumbled to the floor. She fell and lay perfectly still.
He’d bent over her in the kitchen, yelling, but without someone fighting back or fending him off, he quickly lost interest. She could feel his eyes on her. Judy just lay there, perfectly still, and then out of the corner of her eye she saw blood on the floor under her head.
When he stood again and kicked her in the ribs, she really did pass out.
There was no way to know how much time had passed before she woke up, but the lights in the kitchen had been flicked off. She could hear the sound of the TV coming from the living room, and as she sat up, she noticed that some of the food was missing from the kitchen table.
She put her hands on the floor to push herself up, and that was when she noticed the hair on the kitchen floor. It was all around her, patches and clumps and straggly pieces, and some of it was on her clothes.
Her hands drifted up to her head.
He hadn’t shaved her clean, but the hair had been roughly cut, sharply angled. It had been one of the few things of hers left, one of the small things she could be proud of. Now it was scattered around her. She hadn’t been to a beauty salon in a long time, but this is what the floors of those places looked like—covered with hunks of hair. Her hands told her that her hair was now short as a boy’s on all sides.
She’d looked at her reflection in the toaster and saw that she looked like a doll some mean little girl had tortured.
Judy didn’t know anything else to do but cry.
After a while, her tears faded, and she got up and cleaned up his mess. She could hear him upstairs snoring, so she busied herself in the kitchen, cleaning up the dishes and the floor. The hair was hard to throw away, but she scooped it all up onto a folded newspaper and carried it carefully to the trashcan. It wasn’t until the third trip to the trash that Judy actually looked at the paper she was carrying.
Man Dies in Car Accident, the headline read.
She didn’t notice the clumps of hair that slid off the paper and fell to the floor around her feet.
The story was about a man from a town one county over who had been driving through O’Fallon. He’d cracked up his car on Blackwood Lane, crashing against a tree on a lonely stretch of the road that ran north of the town. The man had evidently been drinking and speeding—not the greatest combination.
And Blackwood Lane was a bad place to try your luck—the long winding road had few lights but plenty of notoriously sharp turns, blind corners, and narrow shoulders. Wrecks happened every year, and so many people had died in accidents on the road over the years that a mystique had built up around the area.
Blackwood Lane was supposedly haunted.
The author of the newspaper article had pointed out ominously that there had been twelve fatalities on a short stretch of Blackwood over the past twenty years, including an accident involving a carload of teenagers that killed two teens and left two others paralyzed. One of the teens killed in the wreck was a young woman, and in subsequent years, it was said that her spirit haunted that stretch of road, causing even more accidents. The guy writing the newspaper article sounded like he was swaying in the direction of believing the tale.
Judy couldn’t tear herself away from the description of the car wreck. She’d dreamed a thousand times that Vincent would have an accident on the way home, and here was the story of some other poor sap who’d done that very thing.
Why couldn’t it have been Vincent?
Vincent had come home drunk tonight, driving his Mustang with gusto and gunning the engine as he’d come up the long dirt driveway.
Why couldn’t it have been him?
Suddenly, she knew she couldn’t wait anymore for something to happen to him. If she were going to escape, she’d have to do it herself.
She had to run away—or disappear in a way that made Vincent think she was dead.
I have to drown, or do something else where there would be no body for them to find, she thought to herself.
Lake O’Fallon was just two miles from the house. Sh
e could walk there, leave her clothes and shoes on the shore, and swim to freedom. Or at least to somewhere she could climb out without leaving any footprints.
It would be hard to leave her paintings, hard to leave the few mementos she had collected over the years. But she could do it.
This latest incident, his cutting off her hair, had pushed her over some mental line she had long ago drawn for herself. Judy felt like she had just spent the past four years floundering on the “good” side of that line.
Now she was over it, and there was no looking back.
She sat on the porch and wondered, and for the first time in more years than she could remember, she didn’t feel afraid.
But she knew the feeling would last only until her next beating. If she were to ever be free, she would have to start planning—planning for real. No cathartic dreams of freedom, no hopeful and helpless fantasies of a real life.
No. It had to be real for it to matter at all.
Chapter 10
He couldn’t sleep. Gary got up and headed to the kitchen, looking for a drink. He got the glass of Pepsi poured and was looking for the bottle of Jack before he realized what he was doing. All the alcohol was long gone from his apartment, but the habit was hard to break. He could taste the bitterness of the whisky as it mixed with the sweetness of the cola.
He downed the cola, then drank two more. He didn’t care about the caffeine at three in the morning—he wasn’t planning on sleeping anytime soon. It was already Thursday, and he had to be at work in four hours. Gary grabbed the two-liter bottle and sat down in front of the TV, flipping it on and mindlessly surfing the channels. He grabbed his cigarettes and smoked two in a row, enjoying the scent of the smoke. For some reason, the smell of cigarette smoke always calmed him down, more so than the cigarettes themselves.
It didn’t make any sense. He’d felt better, finally understanding that the dream wasn’t about him—it was about some woman. And the crazy guy in the dream seemed familiar, but he’d not yet figured out who it was. He’d hoped the dream would go away, but it still came, night after night, over and over. And every time it was just as scary and ended just the same, with the name shouted in his mind and the intense headache upon waking.
He poured another drink and downed it, finding an old movie on the TV. It was some B movie, people running around being chased by dinosaurs. That wasn’t the way it was in real life—when people were chasing you, bad things tended to happen. And you almost never escaped.
When his mother had died, it had only been dumb luck that he had survived. They’d been leaving to go somewhere unimportant. He’d dropped his baseball cap and gone back for it, and his mother had climbed into the car across the street and turned the ignition. Gary had picked up his hat and was hurrying toward the car. She was looking at him, smiling at him when she turned the key and the engine exploded and the car was engulfed in a fireball that knocked him off his feet, roiling over him like an angry animal made of fire and shrapnel.
Gary didn’t remember much about the rest of that day. The federal agents had whisked him and his father away from the “safe house” where they had been hidden, moving them to a hotel for their safety. He remembered looking out the back window of the van as the agents drove them away—his mom’s car still smoldering, the street full of firemen and policemen blocking off the area.
There had been an ambulance too, but Gary could see that the lights were off and he’d seen the two EMTs leaning casually against the vehicle. At that moment it had hit him—his mother was dead.
The movie on TV was boring—dinosaurs loose in some town, killing everything, and the Army trying to figure out how to stop them. Gary lit another cigarette, drawing deeply. He thought of stripes, white against dark, and smoke drifting through them. His mind drifted like the smoke around his head.
After a moment he shook his head, returning to reality. He grabbed the remote, flipping again through the channels, looking for anything to watch. Anything to get his mind off the dream.
Chapter 11
Without much in the way of advance planning, Judy decided to move forward with her plan. She was being stupid, she knew it. Stupid and impulsive.
But at least running away would give her a fighting chance.
So on Saturday morning, just after the sounds of his new car faded into the distance, she found herself climbing up off the couch and going upstairs to pack.
Judy carefully picked through her small closet, getting out a set of clothes to wear—they had to be clothes he would not notice were missing. She dressed in a pair of jeans and a shirt she hadn’t worn in years. She gathered a few things together in a roomy backpack from the attic: some makeup, some pictures, and all the money she had. Last, she picked out a skirt and top he would remember and put them in the backpack, too.
The top drawer of her dresser always stuck. She pulled on it and finally wiggled it free, setting it on top of the dresser and reaching around the back.
Taped to the wood was a resealable plastic bag containing the two things in life that she cherished the most: the letter from San Antonio and the engagement ring from Chris. She stuffed it into her pack.
On top of the dresser, she left the note in a place where he was sure to find it.
She’d worked on it all day yesterday and hidden it—her brain couldn’t fathom what he would do if he’d found it before she left.
Judy looked around their bedroom and saw nothing else she cared about. It was sad how little of her there really was in this house. Even when she and Vincent had been getting along better, this place had never really felt like a home.
Judy set her bag at the top of the stairs, then reached up and pulled down the attic stairs, climbing back up into the stuffy attic.
The low ceiling of the room was studded with nails, poking in from the roof. The small room was filled with boxes, a few pieces of old furniture, Christmas decorations, and a tree leaning up against one wall. She wiggled around behind several large cardboard boxes and pulled out her paintings—she wanted to look at them one more time. There were quite a few—she had been painting off and on for years. They were all here: her friends, her sanity. She knew it was a stupid thing, but the paintings had brought her so much joy, especially in the past few months.
It would have been great to be free to display them—sometimes she dreamed of having her own place, with every wall decorated with her paintings. But she knew that would never happen here with Vincent, and there was no way she could take them with her.
Every painting was of the sea. Several were of waves crashing into rocky coastlines, throwing up a foam of white and blue. Some were of boats at sea, lashed by heaving waves as they tried to right their keels and save themselves. Others were of whales or seagulls or empty beaches, lonely and quiet.
Her favorite painting was in the back—she pulled it out slowly, dusting it off, admiring it. The painting was of a lighthouse perched on a tall cliff at night, the huge yellow beacon of light piercing the dark clouds, reflecting off the peaks of the waves as they came in from sea. Near the base of the lighthouse was a small parking lot with several cars, and nearby was a high cliff. Below, breakers crashed into a rocky shore. It was a detailed piece, with every element seeming to leap from the canvas. It was a beautiful work, and the one that Judy most wished she could take with her.
But where she was going, she didn’t need these paintings. She would be free to buy all the canvas and acrylic she wanted and paint however often she wished. She wouldn’t have to race to hide her things in the attic when she heard him roar up the driveway.
Judy Luciano climbed downstairs and left the house, locking the door behind her. She sighed, looking at the front of his house, then turned and left. Judy had with her everything she would ever need.
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They were having dinner soon, and she had the kids ready for their father. He’d be home any moment from work—he worked for one of the most prestigious architecture firms in Sacramento. He was successf
ul, and Judy was happier than she had ever believed she could be.
Chris came in, looking great, as always. Taller than when they had dated in high school, and happier. He only had time to throw his keys onto the little table by the front door before the kids rushed him, smothering him with hugs. Judy stood to the side and watched—this was her favorite part of the day, when Chris came home.
Her husband spent a minute with Tina and her younger brother Joshua, asking them about their day and smiling at their stories—he was a good father to their children. He was always patient and never raised a hand to either of them.
Chris was a good man.
When he was finished, Chris gave each child a good-natured swat on the fanny and told them to get ready for dinner. They scooted off, giggling, as he walked over to her and put his arms around her.
Perfect.
Judy stumbled on a rough patch of the field she was crossing, falling out of her daydream. She looked down at the ring she was wearing—she almost never wore his engagement ring, but walking to the lake, it had seemed perfect.
The trail led from the field through a small stand of trees, and she could see the lake just past them, heat shimmering off the surface and distorting the far shore. Someday she’d find him—she’d find him and they’d make a life together. Or she would die trying. She was tired of prison.
This edge of the lake was deserted—she’d planned on coming out here, on the opposite side from the boat docks and the merry-go-round, the quiet side of the lake. It was Saturday, and already there were several boaters on the other side of the lake.
Setting down the backpack, she opened it up. Inside the backpack was everything she was taking with her—two changes of clothes, her money, a couple of trinkets Vincent would never miss, and the letter from San Antonio; she slipped off the ring and put it into the envelope with the letter.
Judy would go there first and see if she could get her inheritance from her parents’ estate. She hoped that the intervening years would not have had any effect on her ability to claim the money.