by P. J. Tracy
And then she closed her eyes and saw a burning barn and wanted desperately to get out of the house.Right now.
Three minutes later, they were all huddled around the front door, peering through the glass panel at the top. There was nothing out there, just a hint of light at the top of the trees that towered around the town, advertising that somewhere beyond their view, the moon had risen. Apparently, it was high enough to start painting the shadow of the cafe on the grass between it and the house.
And then part of the shadow moved.
Grace froze, afraid to look away, afraid to blink, but everything was still. Maybe her eyes were tired, playing tricks, or maybe an errant breeze in this breathless air had moved a single leaf on a bush.
But Annie and Sharon had seen it, too. They were already moving toward the basement door, down the steps without a sound. Grace followed, turning on the top step and starting to close the door. Had it squeaked when they'd opened it? She couldn't remember.
Outside the house, two shadowy figures crept up to the front door and immediately dodged to either side, flattening their backs against the siding. A shower of loose paint chips crackled softly, then fluttered down to the cement stoop.
Grace froze at the top of the basement stairway, the door an inch from closing. In this too-quiet town where the absolute silence had been ruptured only intermittently-by gunfire and jeeps and soldiers unconcerned with making noise-the faint shussing she'd just heard outside was menacing in its subtlety. Seconds passed, almost a minute, but she heard nothing more. She released her breath slowly, then took another step down and closed the door behind her. The latch engaged with a soft click.
Outside on the front stoop, one head jerked, cocked an ear toward the door. His partner looked over at him and lifted his brows in a question.Did you hear something?
They both listened, eyes narrowed on each other, palms wet on their rifle grips. After a sixty-second count, they entered the house quietly, the muzzles of their rifles swinging in a deadly double arc.
Down in the basement, Sharon and Annie waited for Grace on either side of the wooden door that led up the back concrete steps and through the storm door to the backyard. Neither of them made a move to open it. Maybe they were waiting for the last possible second before they risked making noise, or maybe they were just terrified of what might be waiting for them on the other side.
Grace reached past them for the metal knob, then froze when she heard a floorboard creak overhead.
The three women were rigidly still, their eyes rolled upward to look at the basement ceiling. Not one of them doubted the cause of
that long creak above their heads. Even though there hadn't been another sound for almost a full minute, they all knew. Somebody was upstairs.
A few seconds later, Grace felt a breath of air, the soft pulse of a baby's exhale touching her face.Air exchange! Air exchange! The thought screamed like a Klaxon in her head.
Someone had opened the door at the top of the stairwell.
The women stood motionless in the black basement while beads of silence gathered on the string of time. Grace was looking over her shoulder in the direction of the stairwell, listening, waiting. The Sig felt heavy hanging in her right hand.
They're up there. Men with guns a lot bigger than this one are standing up there at the top of the stairs, wondering if the treads will creak under their weight, listening for sounds from down here before they risk the first step. . . .
When it finally came-the barely audible tap of a rubber sole against the wood of the first riser-it was almost anticlimactic.
First step.
Grace's hand began to turn the knob . . .
Tap. Second step.
. . , farther to the right in perfect, beautiful silence . ..
The third riser creaked faintly just as the latch eased free of its housing and Grace pulled the door open slowly, not too far, just a crack, just big enough for Sharon to slip through silently, silently . . .
Grace never heard the next step, but she knew when it happened, because she felt the weight of that oh-so-silent boot coming down, as if he were treading on her chest instead of the fourth step down . . .
Sharon slipped through the doorway like a floating shadow. She rounded her back and went up the first few concrete steps bent in half, then squeezed to one side. The presence of the slanted overhead door bore down on her like a great, invisible weight. A few of her hairs brushed against its splintery underside and pulled free from her scalp.
In what had to be the most graceful movements of her life, Annie followed like water flowing uphill. She squeezed next to Sharon, every muscle in her body screaming with tension.
Grace felt the mass of their three bodies crowding the small space as she took a silent step after Annie, then turned and pulled the door closed behind her.How many steps have they come down now? Are they at the bottom, on the dirt floor? Can they see the door yet? She gritted her teeth and started to ease the knob back to its resting place, a millimeter at a time.
And then she heard them on the other side.
Sharon's hands went up instantly and pressed against the slanted door over her head. Someone on the other side of the door in the basement was talking, heedless of noise now. Apparently, they'd decided that the building was empty. She couldn't make out the words, just syncopated mumblings muted by the heavy wooden door. Stupid men. Stupid, stupid men. They hadn't checked behind door number two. Yet. She tightened her stomach muscles and pushed the overhead door up an inch, then another and another.
Annie's eyes lifted as a slice of muggy air wafted into the tiny space, then she straightened slightly and poked her head up into the night.Silly, she thought.What are you going to do if there's someone out here? Just sink back down and take odds on who'll find you first? The guys outside or the guys inside? She moved quickly then, up the rest of the steps, turning to hold the heavy door by its handle while Sharon and Grace crept up after her. The three of them shared the weight, easing it carefully back down until it stopped soundlessly in its frame. Still bent over, they froze at the unmistakable sound of the inner door opening, and then a low-pitched voice, muffled only slightly by the outer door and the three feet of space that separated it from their ears.
"Come on. Let's go out this way. . . ."
Before the man had finished his sentence, they were halfway across the yard, sprinting silently on the balls of their feet, heading for the side of the house. They'd just ducked around the corner and pressed their backs to the siding when the outer storm door began to lift from its casing.
"So now what, the gas station?" The man's murmur traveled clearly in the silence, snaked around the corner, and pinned the three women in place.
"Then the cafe . . ." Their voices receded as they turned away and started moving across the house's backyard in the opposite direction.
For a few moments, the women remained flat against the side of the house, watching, listening, waiting for their hearts to slow down.
Grace's eyes were wide open, but she couldn't see a thing. Somewhere the moon was probably washing open fields with pale yellow light, but it hadn't risen high enough to shine down into the hole in the forest that was Four Corners. For all she knew, this kind of utter darkness was common in a place so far from the reflected glow of city lights, but even she knew that this kind of utter silence wasn't common anywhere.
No sleepy bird sounds, no croaking frogs, no mosquitoes, for God's sake.
Gradually, her eyes adjusted to the black night, and shadows began to separate into distinctive shapes. Directly across from where they stood, an elderly, virtually impenetrable hedge of lilacs ran the length of the house, up to the cafe beyond, all the way to the shallow ditch bordering the road. They crept quietly across the grass into the deeper blackness of the hedge's shadow, then inch by cautious inch, they made their way to within a few yards of the highway. The three dropped simultaneously to their bellies in the dirt.
Straight ahead, a hint of starlight played off the pebb
led surface of the two-lane strip of tar. To the left, past the hulking outlines of the cafe and the gas station beyond, the black mouth of the forest swallowed the road.
To the right, the direction they had chosen, the delineation between the dark highway and the darker sky was almost indiscernible, and the road simply disappeared over a small rise. Nothing moved. Nothing made a sound.
Grace glanced at Annie on her left, saw a glitter of white where the eyes would be in a nearly invisible face, and then began to wriggle forward, past the shelter of the lilac hedge, down into the shallow, grassy ditch. There was no way they could risk getting in and out of the cafe now-only a faint hope that the purses might not be seen in the dark.
With virtually no sounds to hear other than the ones they made themselves, and no light by which to see, Grace's other senses seemed to sharpen and overlap, as if to compensate. She could smell the oil from her gun, caught a whiff of brackish water from somewhere up ahead, and breathing through her mouth, tasted something she could only describe as green.
After the first few yards, Annie decided that crawling on your belly was one of those activities you very sensibly gave up when you started to develop breasts. She felt as if she were trying to propel two ripe cantaloupes through grass so long and slick that even the insides of her feet had trouble gaining traction.
It was a relief when she sensed the floor of the ditch sloping down, even as the highway sloped up.Good, she thought, thinking that if it went deep enough, they could crawl on their hands and knees instead of trying to slither on their bellies. Snakes with legs, she decided, would be every bit as handicapped as people without them. It all depended on what you got used to.
The ground beneath the thick grass was dampening with every push forward that Grace made. When the fingers of her left hand dipped into standing water puddling around the roots, she bent her right elbow to keep her gun clear of the water. A few more yards, and she felt the giddy relief of a floating sensation as she pushed into water deep enough to displace part of her weight.
By now the ditch had widened slightly, and the walls were a good three feet above their heads. Grace stopped and waited for the others to come up next to her. Easing onto her haunches to give her back a rest, she felt the fronts of her legs sink into the compressed muck beneath the water. Her face felt heavy. When she touched her cheek, her finger skated through sweat.
She felt it in her legs long before she heard it-a low, throbbing vibration that traveled through the ground. "They're coming," she said quietly. "Get down."
The jeep seemed to thunder by above on their left, shooting grit from the road onto their backs, whipping the tall grass above them into a chaotic dance. And then the silence wrapped itself around them again.
Eventually, as soon as her heart slowed down, Grace started inching forward again, the other two following soundlessly in her grassy wake. The ditch became shallow again as they crawled up a slight incline until Grace's head topped the rise and she could see what lay ahead. She ducked down almost immediately and scrambled backward until she was with the other two.
She spoke downward, letting the ditch absorb her voice. Annie and Sharon had to tip their heads close to hear what she said. "Another roadblock. More soldiers."
Sharon whispered, "Can we get past?"
"Too far away. Can't tell." Suddenly, Grace realized that she could see Sharon's profile. Her eyes lifted and she saw the rim of a huge, rising moon topping the forest. A full, bright moon. "It's getting lighter. It's time to get away from the road. We're too exposed here."
All three of them raised their heads high enough to look over the edge of the ditch. There was a cornfield directly across from them, and beyond that, set far back from the road, the outline of a silo, its metal hood glinting in the moonlight.
And then suddenly there was a flicker of light up the road, less than twenty yards away. A suspended face appeared to be floating in the distance, and then a second one, moving close to the first. They heard the distinctive click of a lighter closing, then saw only two sparks of red in the darkness as the men drew on freshly lit cigarettes.
The three women slid silently down into the ditch to lie in the water again. Male voices, surprisingly clear, rode the thick, still air to where they lay.
"I don't like this. We should just clear the hell out."
"Won't do much good if someone got in."
"Christ, if somebody had gotten in, we would have found them by now. That car was outside the perimeter. It could have been there for a week, for all we know."
"There was luggage inside. Nobody leaves luggage for a week."
"So the car broke down, and whoever it was got a lift, and we sure as hell better be gone by the time they come back for it, or we're fucked anyhow."
"At least the farm's done."
There was a soft grunt of acknowledgment, and it frightened Grace that the sound carried so well. Then the soldiers' footsteps faded gradually as the men walked on the stony shoulder away from the women and toward the roadblock.
A minute passed, then another. There was the sound of gears grinding far up the road, and the labored growl of an engine, then nothing.
Grace closed her eyes. It was a little better than she'd thought. Yes, the soldiers had found the Range Rover, but they weren't sure they had company yet. And the farm was "done," whatever that meant. Probably that they'd just finished searching it.
By the time the three women felt secure enough to creep back up the rise and peek over it, the moon was halfway over the tallest of the forest's giants, and a diffuse white light was rolling back the night. The corn across the road was full-grown, nearly ten feet tall, thick and dark and welcoming.That way, Grace thought.
A quick glance confirmed that the blinking yellow lights of the roadblock were still in place. The lights stuttered periodically as the shadows of men passed in front of them.
Grace's eyes shifted downward to where the white line of moonlight sliced the ditch in half. If they were going to cross this road, they had to do it fast, before the moon rose any farther.
They crossed the road on their stomachs, just beneath the rise so they wouldn't be visible from the roadblock, then rose to their hands and knees and scrambled deep into the cornfield. A few more rows in, and it was thick enough to block the moonlight, tall enough to allow them to stand in perfect concealment. The women stopped crawling and rose to their feet.
Homo erectus,Sharon thought as they started walking in a cultivation furrow. She pulled the soft fragrance of living, growing corn deep into her lungs and longed for the first bite of the season's sweet corn exploding sugary juice into her mouth.Another week, she thought,maybe two. If we live that long.
The field angled to the right, leading them farther into the land, closer to the silo, and then suddenly only a single row separated them from a closely clipped lawn.
The farmhouse was a large, two-story cube sheltered by motionless umbrellas of old elms. The shadowy shapes of hollyhocks towered around the small back porch, leaning against it, making their own miniature forest. The three women stood at the edge of the cornfield, listening, watching.
The house looked solid in its darkness, as if there were no windows or doors, as if whatever lived inside could not bear the radiance of light of any kind.
Sharon caught a quick breath, suddenly understanding why she always left a lamp on all night long, in spite of burned-out lightbulbs and the battered bodies of moths that she had to sweep from the end table on summer mornings. It was for moments like this, for people like her who stood paralyzed in the night, affected beyond reason by the unshakable certainty that dark was evil and light was good.
This is a bad place.
BY NINE P.M., the lights were blazing in Halloran's office, the rich aromas of the chicken-fried steak Cheryl had brought over from the diner were already a fading memory, and wisps of Bonar's thinning hair were sticking out at all angles from his head. He slammed the phone down on the credenza and ran his hands throug
h his hair again, making a bad situation worse. "I swear to God, the collective IQ of all gas-station attendants drops about a hundred points on the weekend."
"Nobody saw our cake lady?" Halloran asked from his desk. He had the phone cradled on his shoulder, and his pen was busy on the state map that was spread out on his desk.
Bonar exhaled noisily. "Who the heck knows? Stopping at any one of those northern back-road gas stations is like jumping into a black hole. Hell, she could have stopped at every one of them, stripped naked, and danced around the pumps, and those bozos wouldn't remember."
Halloran switched the phone to his other shoulder and rubbed his neck. They'd both been working the phones for more than two hours, trying to track the missing cake lady in the northern counties between here and the wedding in Beaver Lake, and throwing out a more casual net for Grace MacBride's car in the counties along the major routes from Minnesota to Green Bay. Halloran figured his ear would fall off soon. "They'd remember Gretchen. That woman blocks out the sun."
"One would think."
"You sure you got all the stations? There's got to be a lot of them between here and there."
"Forty-two, to be precise, and we pinned down the attendants that were on this morning for every one of them, which was no mean feat, I might add. Tracked down half of them at some bar or other in the middle of their second or third or tenth Saturday-night beer, almost too stupid to live. One kid asked if I was going to arrest him, and when I reminded him I was on the phone, calling from fifty miles away, he asked me if I wanted him to wait until I got there. You know, I don't get it. We have a drink or two on occasion, and I do believe we get more brilliant with every swallow."
Halloran managed a smile. "I agree absolutely. So maybe Gretchen didn't stop for gas at all."
"No chance. Ernie said she left with under a quarter tank, and that old guzzler she drives gets about five miles a gallon max. You on hold?"
"For most of my life."
Bonar grinned and stood up, arching his back to work the kinks out. "So true, but who are you waiting on this time?"