It was the most piercing, ringing scream of her life, one that seemed to carry for leagues into the empty forest in all directions. He was upon her again, and was reaching out to rip at her hair. All at once, she gathered herself and leapt sideways into the water, and he just missed grabbing her. The frigid water zapped all her senses as she submerged completely. From beneath the water she could hear a much louder splash as he followed in after her.
Teddy clawed twice at her ankles beneath the water, and on the second try he locked his fingers around her foot. He dragged her toward him with a violent yank.
Mallory thrashed and scratched at him, but soon his hands were all over her. He pushed down on the crown of her head, forcing her further under, and she panicked. He grabbed onto her hair and ripped it back. She screamed in muffled gurgles and then was suddenly lifted out of the water, gasping, choking and crying.
Teddy dragged her over to the edge of the pool where he was only waist deep. She screamed again and he slammed her head under the water, forcing water up her nose and into her sinuses, filling her face with an awful burning sensation. He lifted her again above the water and she spit up water in wrenching coughs.
Her eyesight cleared just in time to see his fist. The impact made her vision explode with white bursts of stars. Pain radiated away from her nose into her cheeks and then she was almost instantly underwater again. His big hands, with dark hair mossy across the top and over the knuckles, slid around her neck.
Mallory’s windpipe sealed and she gagged. She could see his blurred face up through the water, he was yelling something. He held her horizontal so she couldn’t get her footing. She dug her nails into his hands with all the strength she still had in her fingers.
He held on.
She threw her arms at him in wild smacks, lunging for his face, but he simply looked away and kept his power over her, holding her under.
Gobs of blood leaked out of her nose and diffused into the water in pluming clouds of red. She screamed and lunged and kicked. She scratched down his arms, peeling up gouges of flesh. The last thing she saw was Teddy’s blurred face looking down at her through the bloody water. Her mouth came open, and freezing water rushed down her throat.
Patrick
PATRICK SPOTTED THE ADDRESS SCRAWLED on the mailbox in yellow paint, and turned his van slowly up Mallory’s dirt driveway. The rutted out road jostled him in his seat and pebbles crunched under the tires. The scent of fresh forest trees filled up the cab on the drive up the mountain.
Mallory’s house came into view and Patrick stomped on the brake a little harder than he should have. The van skidded a yard and stirred up a tumbler of dust. He lurched forward in his seat and stared hard out the windshield at Teddy’s truck parked in front of the house. For a moment a fear rushed through his body that Mallory had set him up. He was holding onto the wheel so tightly that his hands began to numb.
In the months working with him, Patrick had never once heard of Teddy driving all the way home for lunch. He grabbed his phone off the passenger seat and brought up her contact. His thumbs wavered. What if he wasn’t being set up? Was it actually worse to text her if Teddy was inside the house, sitting next to her, talking to her? Patrick set the phone down on his thigh and killed the engine.
He waited on the incline, listening and looking for any indication of what to do. It was silent except for the sound of distant birdsong in the trees. Once again, he checked his phone. He could come back in twenty minutes to see if the truck was still there.
Suddenly there was a loud pop and Patrick flinched. It had come from the house, and instantly his blood cooled and the hairs on his arms stood up like cactus needles.
“Fuck it.” He quickly called Mallory on his phone. He listened to it ring over and over, all the while only hearing that pop sound repeating in his head. His eyes stayed glued to the house while the phone was pressed to his ear. Voicemail. He texted: are u okay? He waited what seemed like forever for a reply. He considered calling the cops. But what if it was something else? What if he ruined everything by having the police show up?
Patrick fired up the engine again and rolled forward, up the hill at a creeping pace. He parked next to Teddy’s truck and left the keys in the ignition just in case. He stepped out and stood there at the driver’s side door, listening and scanning the exterior of the house. The windows were too washed out with the bright sun bearing down.
He pressed up the porch cautiously, the wooden steps creaking on his way. Then Patrick was at the door, the handle calling out to him to take it. He glanced once more at Teddy’s truck before giving the door a gentle rap with his knuckles.
His whole body felt wired with adrenaline. He waited almost a full minute before knocking again. He was trying to think up possible reasons for being at Teddy’s doorstep, and settled on the lie of being here to apologize personally to Teddy for what had happened at the office yesterday.
He knocked a third time and still no one answered, so he tried the handle and it twisted freely. It was unlocked. The door gave a whine as it swung about three inches inward, enough for Patrick to peer inside.
“Hello?” he called. His voice passed through the big house, echoing off its high walls. The silence was eerie. He recounted the sound of that pop. It was clear he hadn’t imagined it, yet there seemed to be no one home.
With a nudge, he swung the door open completely and glanced around. The living room and kitchen were empty. His eyes noticed a peculiarity when they moved to the kitchen. There was a pot in the middle of the hardwood floor, turned over and leaking some sort of brown sauce, and one of the stove’s burners was still alight with blue flame.
Something had gone wrong. He sensed it, felt the chill of it in his bones.
As he took his initial steps into the house, he imagined Teddy jumping out from behind a corner crack him over the head with something. Between the kitchen and living room, Patrick called out again, louder now.
There was definitely no one inside. His muscles relaxed a bit, and he walked more freely and quickly about the house. He even went over and turned off the burner. Whatever the sauce was, it was splattered everywhere, on the countertops, the floor, even a little on the wall next to the window.
Patrick ventured deeper into the house, checking a bathroom, an office, and what appeared to be a guest bedroom. All empty. Then he took a deep breath, mustered his courage and took to ascending the stairs. At the top, he went right and came to a door. He glanced inside. It was a bathroom. He kept going until he reached a large open loft area that had a TV and a sectional couch. Back he went in the opposite direction, past the stairs. There were two more doors.
The first was again some sort of guest room. At the third, Patrick stopped when he noticed something odd coating the brass handle. Moisture. The handle was wet. Patrick drew back, and again that uneasy feeling rumbled inside him. “Anyone in there?”
He gave it a push. The door swung in silently. Beyond the bed, against the far wall, was a black leather chair in which Teddy sat, motionless. A dark shotgun with a dull luster was lying haphazardly across his lap. The crown of Teddy’s head was gone, had plastered itself on the wall behind him and on the ceiling above him.
Patrick rolled back and if not for the railing would’ve cascaded off the overhang and down onto the stairs below. He bent over and gagged violently, trying not to look at the atrocity but yet not able to pull his eyes away from it either.
After several minutes crouched and clutching the railing, he crept around the large king sized bed that was still perfectly made without a drop of blood on it. He sighed relief at seeing there was no one else in the room. Mallory wasn’t there. He then felt the same nervous knot of tension as he checked the bathroom that was adjoined to the room to the right. She wasn’t there either.
Patrick thought again through all the rooms he’d looked into, wondering if maybe she was hiding. He called out loudly to her. “It’s me, Mallory. Come out if you’re there.”
Patrick
hurried down the stairs and looked all around one last time, trying to decipher what might have taken place. His could feel his pulse pumping blood down his arms and legs. At last he walked outside and shut the door behind him, but did not walk down the porch steps without wondering if he shouldn’t have touched the doorknob, wondering if he shouldn’t be here at all.
Teddy’s truck. His stomach sank as he considered the possibility.
He walked up next to the big black thing, and peered into the bed and then tried the passenger side handle, which was unlocked. It was a king cab and he checked both front and back seats, but it was spic and span, and empty.
Time to call the police. He withdrew his phone from his pocket with a subtly shaking hand and was ready to dial when something shined in his peripheral vision, off to his left, about twenty paces into the trees up the slope of the property.
Patrick kept the phone out but didn’t dial just yet. He paced over to it, pinched it out of the needles and dried leaves, and lifted it up to eye level. An apron. There was no blood on it, but there was brown sauce, the same as that on the kitchen floor. Patrick immediately felt the intuition that she’d run off.
“Mallory!” he called out at the top of his lungs this time, and his voice echoed back to him in waves bouncing off the trees and surrounding hills. There was no answer.
With a hinge of his wrist he let the apron fall back where it had been, thinking it might be important to leave it as he found it. On the ground all around where he stood, there were small skids of exposed earth where leaves and needles were cleared away and either dirt was showing or grass was sprouting up. His eyes moved up the slope, into the scattered trees. Teddy had gone that way. Had he gone after her?
Before his mind could process it all, he started up the hill, weaving through trees and generally going straight up, directly into the slope. Every twenty-five yards he would stop and listen, and all the while his eyes were scanning around for anything peculiar. There was the sound of his heartbeat thrumming in his ears, but nothing else.
He kept walking, even to the point where he couldn’t see the house down the slope. A small draw of sweat had started on his brow. What was he doing not calling the police? He pulled out his phone, and saw that his service was nonexistent up on this incline. He was ready to head back down when his ears perked up, focus drawn to something—the sound of water. The sound of a stream.
It was off somewhere to his right. He circled around a grouping of thick pines and found the rushing stream.
Something made him go further, a feeling deep inside. He felt there was something he was missing, something he couldn’t see but was obvious. He called for her as he walked but there was only the absent sound of the forest.
The hill steepened and Patrick looked up ahead to an overhang, where the water was spilling over and then being funneled into the stream. He climbed the hill without hesitation, shoes muddy now, feeling this was what he’d been searching for. He couldn’t explain the feeling. Then he heard the unmistakable washed-out sound of a small waterfall. He hurried even faster up the incline, lurched forward with arms hanging down to keep his balance.
Like a bowl had been cut out of the land, there it was. His eyes first went to the waterfall, six or eight feet high at most. The sun left a gold-flecked shimmer on the pool’s surface. He peered around the edge until he set eyes on something white in the water. It was submerged two or three feet deep, but it was clear now as he scuttled around the pool’s edge.
His legs moved involuntarily and he bounded into the water. The icy rush ran up his frame, ripping the breath out of him. He waded toward her in a rush and found that she was face down and the black dress she had on was drifting and swirling in the water. He turned her over toward him, lifted her face above the water, and patted her face frantically.
Mallory’s eyelids were half-opened and her bright green eyes were slightly faded, a duller olive green. Her lips were pallid, almost light blue. He cradled her at first, feeling his arms shake as he held up the weight of her body. Then he shook her, softly at first and then violently, trying to wake her up. He pushed her red hair back so that he could see her entire face, that pure creamy skin, and begged her to wake up.
***
Patrick had carried her until he was too exhausted to go any further. He was forced to drag her. Overwhelming shock, that’s what kept him going. At one point on the descent down the slope, he let go of her wrists and dropped down to his knees and started sobbing.
Her skin was completely pale now, covered in dirt, and her wet hair had collected small dead leaves in it.
He slid his forearm across the bridge of his nose, wiping the tears away, and pulled out his phone. He shook it out. Water flung out of the headphone jack on the top and dripped out of the tiny speakers on the bottom. It was completely slogged and wouldn’t even turn on. Exasperatedly, he threw it onto the ground and punched down on the screen, blasting the glass face into a spider web of cracks.
There was no telling how far he was from the house, he’d been so focused on finding her that he hadn’t kept track of how far he’d gone. But he pushed on, feeling absolutely sick, and his legs were on fire by the time the house came into view. He marched, panting, and again fell to his knees at finally reaching the driveway where Teddy’s truck and his van were both parked. With total care, he set her down, and then laid her out neatly. He pushed her eyes closed, brushed the leaves and dirt from her hair and arranged it, and flattened out her skirt so that it hung like it should on her.
Patrick fell back in the dirt a few feet from the van, his whole body aching and frigid from the water. Each time he looked at her, the way she was lying there white as paper and motionless, his stomach wrenched and he cried harder.
Then his phone dinged with a text message. It snapped him out of his misery. He scrambled to fish it out of his pocket. It wasn’t there. Confused, he patted down both pockets, but he couldn’t find it. He remembered he’d punched it and left it on the hill.
There was a set of crunching footsteps behind him and he twisted around, startled.
Josh stepped out from behind the van.
Patrick scrambled to his feet, initially terrified by being watched and not knowing he’d been there. “What the hell are you doing?”
Josh lifted his hands. “Sorry.” His eyes went to the girl lying there. There were a hundred things that could’ve come out of his mouth, but the only thing that did was a question: “Is she—”
Patrick nodded. “We need to call the cops.”
Josh nodded back, but face had become flat.
Patrick looked down at Mallory, calming slightly, and then back at Josh. “What are you doing here?”
“You told me on the phone you were coming up here.”
Patrick remembered. “But why are you here? And how did you even know where she lived?”
A look of slight shame came over Josh’s face. “I called your work and pretended I was from the corporate office. They gave me Teddy’s address.”
Patrick’s eyes moved over his friend, observing his demeanor. There was something off. Something strange. Patrick suddenly took a precautionary step backward. “So what are you doing here?”
Josh was standing there, not moving at all, his green eyes locked on Patrick. “I needed to find you.”
Patrick pointed at his pocket. “Just call the cops, okay?”
Josh nodded, but otherwise didn’t move.
“I said fucking call them, Josh! What’s the matter with you? Can’t you see what’s happening?”
Josh didn’t say anything, just stared at him. It was then Patrick felt the impulse to run. Like he was being hunted. But he wasn’t going to run. Not from Josh. “You want to fight me, is that it? You finally a man now? Fine. That’s fine.”
Patrick curled the tips of his fingers up into his palms. A chilling sense of rage had snuck up on him in a matter of seconds, yet he didn’t want to strike Josh, he wasn’t even sure he could lift his own arms.
> But Josh came toward him in measured paces, and once they were at arm’s length Josh curled his arm behind his back to reach for something.
All the muscles in Patrick’s body were fully wound tight, but when Josh’s arm snapped forward in a blur, by some miracle Patrick’s fingers narrowly slid past the blade and caught hold of Josh’s wrist. Patrick forced the wrist down and rolled into Josh’s arm so that his back was at Josh’s chest.
“What the fuck are you doing?!” Patrick shouted, eyes processing what was happening with a simple focus on keeping Josh’s arm stretched out long.
Josh didn’t give an answer, he only made a muffled grunt as he clenched his teeth. He was pulling the knife back with all the strength he had trying to wrench it into Patrick’s stomach.
Patrick recognized it, had seen it a few times over the years on rare occasions where he rode in the back seat of Josh’s car and the hunting knife, which was usually buckled in a nylon sheath, came out from under the seat with the momentum of the car, sliding into his shoes, at which he usually kicked it back under. Josh always kept it in his car, and had only brought it out on a few camping trips.
The blade was vibrating now, each of them struggling with all the blood and adrenaline and force they could channel into their arms and hands.
“Drop it!” Patrick shouted. With both hands clamped on Josh’s wrist, he had the leverage for the moment, but the long black paint coated blade quivered dangerously close to his abdomen.
Suddenly he threw back his weight, peddling his feet against the dirt and Josh almost tripped backward, but he caught himself. Patrick twisted Josh’s wrist away awkwardly, but the sweat from panic was greasing his palms and he was losing a grip.
In a quick jerk, he threw his head back and his skull cracked into Josh’s teeth. Josh cried out, it was almost a scream. Patrick felt warm blood immediately seep into his hair, Josh’s or his he wasn’t sure.
Josh’s other hand which had been pulling on Patrick’s shoulder came free as he instinctively reached for his bloody mouth. Patrick rolled again with his body, this time away from Josh’s body and toward the blade, forcing Josh’s arm into a straight line, rocking him off balance.
EDGES Page 32