by Ninie Hammon
Daniel had told people “Cincinnati and northern Kentucky” but she supposed “northern Kentucky” could be interpreted in pretty broad terms. And besides his twenty-five-thousand-member congregation, untold thousands of people all over everywhere watched Daniel’s sermons on television every Sunday morning—and read the church’s Facebook page.
“Thanks for doing this,” he said, and she hated the disappointment she heard in his voice.
“It’s gone happen, sugar,” she told him. “You’’ll see. The Lord’s gone lead us to wherever it is Billy Ray’s got that little girl hid out.” She sighed. “Wherever Becca is, I’m glad she don’t know her monster father snatched Andi to get her back.”
Theresa thought she heard a sound behind her, but with the brace on, it was hard to turn around. It was only the old house creaking.
She punched the off button, wiggled in the chair trying to get comfortable, and the phone rang again immediately.
******
1985
Maybe I’ll die today.
Oliver Marshal had started every morning for the past twenty years with that thought and so far it had proved an empty promise.
The old man sat in his wheelchair inside the front doors of the Twin Oaks Nursing Home, had been parked there by that juiced-up crackhead of an orderly. Oliver had that guy’s number alright, could tell he was a druggie by the way his eyes were always dilated and how he was as antsy sometimes as a little kid who needed to go to the bathroom. But do you think anybody would pay attention to Ollie if he ratted the guy out? He made a humph sound in his throat. Not likely! They’d all sworn allegiance to the Great Sovereign Gospel of Nursinghomedom: anybody over the age of sixty-five is either senile or an idiot, and either way you’re free to ignore them.
“Thank you for telling us, Mr. Marshal,” they’d say soothingly, giving each other the look right there in front of him like he was blind instead of only a little hard of hearing. “We’ll check into it right away.”
“Check into it” meaning pretend the old coot hadn’t said a word and “right away” meaning never.
It wasn’t Oliver’s fault he’d lived so long! He hadn’t wanted to, hadn’t asked to. Who wants to be eighty-nine years old and can’t get around anymore? Shoot, he hadn’t stood up on his own like a man since they kicked Nixon out of the White House. Millions of people, young people, dying every day, and his heart kept ticking like a Timex watch.
Since everybody believed he was senile, Ollie played along and let them think so, sat with his chin on his chest and his eyes blank. It took too much energy to get the attention of people who looked right through you as if you weren’t there. He’d stay here where they’d parked him with a blanket over his lap—why’d they always truss him up like a Christmas turkey? He’d never said he was cold. It was summertime, for crying out loud!—and watch what little life there was in this place go on around him. Eventually, they’d come and get him and park him somewhere else.
He saw a group of boys on bicycles cruise by the nursing home on the road out front as he heard Mrs. Booth’s high heels click, click, clicking on the shiny ceramic tile floor behind him—her on-a-mission gait.
“Robert,” she called out to the crackhead orderly who was probably on his way to snort some coke, “is the phone in the TV lounge working?””
“Don’t know, ma’am, haven’t tried to use it today.””
“Well, try,” Mrs. Booth said. “I think all the phones on the first floor are dead. I’m on my way to see about the ones on two and three.”
She went clicking off to the sweeping stairway on Ollie’s right, one of two that swooped down in an elegant curve from the second to the first floor of the old building, with an elevator tucked unobtrusively between them. On the second floor, the elevator and staircases opened onto an internal balcony with a wrought iron railing that ran the width of the west wing where second and third floor residents could sit in rockers or wheelchairs and stare off into the elegance of the atrium—those who could see that far, that is.
The beauty and grace of the original Twin Oaks mansion had been preserved when the structure was converted into a hotel in the 1930s, and miraculously most of it survived the renovation into a nursing home in 1978, retaining sufficient style and architectural niceties to keep the building on the National Registry of Historic Places.
The structure was U-shaped, nestled in the woods on the north and south, with the west wing of the building backed up against the Big Puddle River. There were no resident rooms on the first floor, leaving all the original grandeur intact, the whole sweep of it an open atrium with ceramic tile flooring in an intricate mosaic design, marble pillars, columns and glass-top tables that held huge vases filled with a jungle of tropical silk flowers. Ollie couldn’t decide which he thought was the more ostentatious—the historic chandelier or the fountain. The antique wooden chandelier hung above the front doors, suspended by four chains from the third floor ceiling, a fifteen-foot-wide, detailed scale model of Twin Oaks with lights shining out its windows and from a later-added lattice attached to the bottom. The fountain sat in the middle of the atrium, pristine white marble with a six-foot-tall porpoise standing on its tail in the center with water squirting out its mouth.
The kitchen was located in the south corner of the ground floor, the administration offices the north corner. Facing a parking lot in the center of the U, a wide plank porch stretched the length of the building, enclosed not by white balusters but by a black wrought iron railing. The wrought iron was mirrored in the decorative window grates on the second- and third-floor rooms. Frosted glass in the double entrance doors featured the entwined oak trees logo.
So prestigious was the facility, its waiting list ensured that within forty-eight hours after a resident “passed,” another showed up to take his place. Right now, the sixty-four rooms housed one hundred and fifteen residents—which meant they’d be bringing somebody in to take the place of Ollie’s former roommate any day now. He’d already outlived half a dozen or so; he’d lost count.
The six boys on bicycles cruised by on the road out front again, going the opposite direction, not cutting up like boys out for a ride but serious as soldiers on a mission, playing some game, probably. One of them had a Mohawk haircut. Looked like a punk. One day he'd wish he could grow back some of that hair he'd shaved off. Three cars pulled out of the parking lot, and the boys on bikes stopped on the side of the road directly across from where Ollie sat and watched as the cars drove away, leaving only a handful of vehicles—staff and maybe a visitor—in the lot. Once the cars were out of sight, one of the boys got off his bike and ran off into the woods across the road from the nursing home. He returned a moment later hauling some kind of sign, a big one mounted on what looked like a sawhorse but couldn’t have been because he carried it in one hand. He placed the sign across the driveway that led from the road to the parking lot and started back to his bike. One of the other boys called out something to him, and he turned back to the sign and used his shirttail to wipe the sign where he’d been holding it. Then he got on his bike again, and all the boys raced away west down the road and disappeared from view beyond the sunroom.
The sign was blocking the entrance! Whatever was written on it was facing the other direction, and Ollie couldn’t read it. Probably said, “Screw you!” The boys’ prank wasn’t going to seem at all humorous to the first person who tried to pull into the parking lot and had to get out of the car and move the sign to get past.
A couple of cars drove by, but none tried to turn in. A few minutes later, Ollie saw a lone boy—a black kid carrying something—walking down the roadside in front of the building, coming from town, opposite the direction the other boys had ridden away. He crossed the road, walked past the sign set only a few minutes before in the driveway, then crossed the parking lot and loped up the steps to the porch and in the front doors of Twin Oaks. He was wearing a Bradford’s Ridge Rangers All-Star team baseball shirt and looked hot, tired and winded. Ha
d he walked all the way from town?
“Excuse me, sir, is there a pay phone in the building?” he asked Ollie.
Ollie said nothing, pretended he didn’t hear.
The boy figured out Ollie wasn’t going to answer and looked around, apparently saw the sign pointing to the administrative wing and headed off in that direction. When the boy turned his back, Ollie read the name printed on his jersey in big block letters: Carpenter.
The boy hadn’t been gone out of the atrium for ten minutes when Ollie saw the six boys who’d twice cruised by on the road out front come around the edge of the sunroom on foot. As they jogged toward the parking lot, he saw the big gym bags they carried, bags that they had not had on their bicycles. When they got to the parking lot, they divided up. The north and south wings had double doors that opened onto the porch and steps that extended to sidewalks leading to the parking lot. Three boys headed up the sidewalk to the north wing and three headed up the sidewalk to the south wing. None of the boys entered the building through the double doors in front of Ollie.
He saw one of the boys, his hair all fluffed out like a sissy girl, cross to where Gladys Overstreet was sitting on the porch in a rocker. He grabbed the back of the rocker and dragged it backward, with Gladys aboard, across the porch and into the building and closed the double doors behind him.
Ollie felt a chill. He hadn’t felt cold like that since the day he’d watched the Krauts toss mustard gas canisters into a school and then shoot the kids when they came running out, him sitting helpless in the trees, unable to do a thing to stop it.
The six boys came straight down the hallways into the atrium. A blond kid with a rat-tail that must have been a foot long hanging down his back set his duffle bag on the floor and took a length of chain out of it. He went to the double doors on the front of the building, closed them and then wrapped the chain around the handles, fastening them together. He took a padlock out of the sack, hooked it through the chain links, snapped it closed and dropped the key into his shirt pocket.
Ollie’s heart began to hammer in his chest, but he sat with his chin down, slack-jawed, and the boys blew by him like he wasn’t there. Harold Castleback wasn’t pretending senility, though. When he saw the boy begin to chain the door shut, the seventy-five-year-old former high school principal stood up from where he’d been reading a newspaper in one of the chairs by the window and hurried in his shuffling gait across the atrium.
“Hey, there,” Harold said. He had reached the boy who had dropped the padlock key into his pocket. “What do you think you’re doing?”
The boy turned to Harold. He had a plump bottom lip that made him look like he was pouting, but he didn’t behave like a petulant child.
“Keeping the world out and you in,” he said. Then he grabbed Harold by the neck with one hand. Ollie couldn’t see what he did exactly without turning his head, and he didn’t intend to move! Whatever it was, all Ollie heard was a kind of strangling sound, a grunt, and when the boy released his hold on Harold, the old man collapsed on the floor like a marionette with broken strings.
“The floor plan shows six entrances,” said a redheaded kid who appeared to be the leader. “These three on the front of the building, a big service entrance next to the kitchen”—he pointed toward it —“and two back doors on the river.” He indicated the hallway leading to the back of the building. “And you saw the two fire escapes on the way in. Seal everything, chain the doors and nail the windows shut. Nobody gets in or out. Kill anyone who tries to stop you.”
One of the boys had been carrying one of those big stereo things, a boombox, and he set it on the floor and punched a button and sound blasted out of it in the most awful racket Ollie'd ever heard. Wouldn't call it music. The pulsating rhythm attacked his whole body, the screeching and shrieking sounded like somebody was feeding cats into a meat grinder.
The redheaded boy turned to the remaining boys and indicated the “administration” sign with his chin.
“Come on,” he said, and the parody of a smile curled his lips. “This is going to be payback for all the times we were ‘careful not to hurt anybody.’”
CHAPTER 35
2011
Senator LaHayne’s office sent a car to pick Daniel up at his hotel. He stepped out into sunshine so bright it made the world look overexposed. He patted the cellphone in his pocket, willing his fingers to leave it alone. And he slammed shut for the one millionth time the door leading down into the dark dungeon of monsters in his mind. Where the Wild Things Are. He’d read that book to Andi when she was little. Only the wild things behind the door in his mind were real, they walked around in the world, and his daughter could see them. One of them had kidnapped her and was threatening to kill her.
No, that wasn’t right. Theresa’d said Billy Ray wasn’t possessed by a demon. He was just an evil man all on his own. She said there were a whole lot more bad people like him out there than people possessed.
Daniel literally shook his head to fling thoughts of Andi out of his mind, then got into the back of the sleek limousine. The sights along Pennsylvania Avenue blew by the window in a blur. Daniel wouldn’t let himself think about the time he and Emily had brought Andi to Washington. She’d wanted to climb up into Abraham Lincoln’s lap.
When the car bearing Daniel to his meeting with Senator LaHayne and the demon-possessed Chapman Whitworth turned left off Constitution Avenue onto First Street, Daniel glanced right. Half a block down the street on the left stood the grand edifice of the United States Supreme Court building.
The senator’s office was on the fifth floor of the seven-story Dirksen Senate Office Building, across the street from the Russell Senate Office Building and diagonally across the grounds from the senate wing of the Capitol.
The clicking of his heels echoed ominously as he walked down the long, brightly lit hallway, past the doors of other senators—each with flagpoles on both sides. On the left was the American flag, on the right the flag of the state the senator represented. He spotted the Ohio state flag with its distinctive triangle of stars and swallowtail design beside a door about halfway down on the right.
He was ushered immediately into the senator’s inner office. Surrounding a sitting area and a huge cherry desk, the walls were painted a dignified forest green and inset shelves were jammed with a somehow uncluttered array of family photos and books. Daniel wondered if he’d actually read all of the books and decided he probably had.
The senator looked up from his work, rose from his chair behind the desk and indicated for Daniel to take a seat in one of a pair of stately wingback chairs across a glass coffee table from a sofa covered in incongruously bright-yellow fabric. Arranged on the table was a tea service set for three—white china with a simple gold rim and the seal of the senate on each cup, and a small plate of cookies. The senator was famous for his proud devotion to tea over coffee. LaHayne seated himself in the other wingback and indicated a manila folder on the table beside the teapot.
Daniel picked it up but didn’t look inside. He knew what the folder contained.
“My grandmother would have said you look like death on a cracker,” the senator told him. “Did you even go to bed last night?”
He hadn’t.
“Of course I did. I just didn’t rest well,” Daniel said. “Guess it shows, huh.”
“The steamer trunks under your eyes are big enough to pack up a fashionista for a month-long tour of Europe. Things aren’t any better back home, are they?”
“No, they’re not.”
“I’m looking forward to hearing the whole story of what’s going on with you and your police officer friend.”
“Don’t. It’s not a story you want to hear.”
The senator reached out and patted Daniel’s knee. “We’re writing the most important chapter in it today, son. You ready for this?”
The senator had an uncanny way of making a question sound casual, when it was anything but. The calm and peace around the man was no facade. It went
all the way to his core. He was not tense about what was to come—not because he foresaw the outcome but because he was totally prepared to deal with what happened, however it turned out.
Daniel tried to let the senator’s presence calm him.
The senator laid out the plan again for Daniel, such as it was. He’d described it yesterday, and it hadn’t altered since then. Daniel represented the chips the senator intended to stack up in the middle of the table, his whole bankroll bet on one hand. On a cell phone the senator had provided that was now in Daniel’s coat pocket, he had a copy of the surveillance video linking Whitworth to a man named Edgar Wallace Boskowitz and the murdered “rape victim.” It was his job to display that “evidence,” along with the contents of the manila folder, to make it appear the senator was holding four aces—instead of a couple of twos, a three, a seven and the joker.
******
2011
Becca moved as silently as a cat in house shoes. It was a skill she’d learned during years on the run. Don’t wake up the other derelicts—they could be like junkyard dogs, vicious if roused. Don’t disturb the cattle when you sneak into the barn to sleep in the hay. Don’t let the security guard hear you slide in behind the boxes to keep warm or the produce trucker hear you fill your duffle with carrots.
Theresa kept her car keys in her purse. She kept her purse upstairs on the dresser beside her bed. As Becca eased up the stairs, she listened to the rise and fall of the old woman’s voice on the phone. The second step from the top squeaked so she stepped over it.
With the keys snug in her jeans pocket, Becca went back down the stairs as quietly as she had gone up them. Theresa was still talking as she had been when Becca came in earlier—when Becca heard her say that “Billy Ray’s got Andi hid out.”