by Craig Smith
They go thirty paces due south of the barn. Will finds his spot and breaks the sod eagerly. Two feet under the soggy ground is a black plastic garbage bag. He punctures the plastic with his screwdriver. He probes about until he finds the Bernardelli. A seven shot, small enough to fit in his hand. He loads it and takes the extra ammunition. Before he can look at the rest of his treasure, he hears a car coming down the gravel road. He dives into the girl and takes her into the weeds. She yaps wildly in fear, but he crawls up and takes her mouth with his hand.
He is close to her now. They lie together like lovers in the wet grass. They listen as the car roars by. When it is gone, he studies Tamara’s eyes. ‘I need your help, Tammy.’ Tamara doesn’t answer, but she is listening. ‘What we’re going to do, we’re going to get me another car. That’s all I want. A car people won’t know I’m driving. Can you help me do that?’
Her eyes wide and frightened, Tamara nods her head.
Chapter 36
Wednesday 5:08 p.m., March 24.
THE SHADOW OF A WOMAN moves in the picture window as Will brings Tamara’s Chrysler Le Baron to a stop in front of the garage door of Ben Lyons’s grand house in the suburbs. Will waves at the woman inside. Smiles. He tells Tamara, ‘Get out and go to the front door. I’m right behind you, Tammy. Don’t disappoint me.’
She hesitates. ‘Do it!’ he tells her, and Tamara opens the door. She could take off. She could run for the neighbours, but she doesn’t know the neighbours. She knows Mrs Lyons. She is in front of the Le Baron when Tamara breaks into a run suddenly. Heading right for Mrs Lyons. Mrs Lyons hurries to open the door for her. Will shifts the roll of tape from his right hand to his left and reaches into his jacket pocket for his Bernardelli. He still grins at Mrs Lyons, who stares back at him in perfect wonder.
Tamara starts talking the moment she gets to the door. She pushes into the house and screams, ‘HE’S GOT A GUN!’
Will steps toward them still smiling. Mrs Lyons holds the door, looking at the girl, then at Will. Her mouth is open when he sets the gun to it. Will fires two shots. Her head kicks back. She falls inside the entryway. Will bends and scoops her legs out of the way as he closes the door. He takes Tamara by the hair and pulls her to the floor beside the dead woman. He pulls her hands together, tapes them with a strip that he peels off his jeans. Now her mouth and finally her ankles. Seconds pass. Tamara has no fight in her. Will walks back into the huge house and sees Penny Lyons coming out of her bedroom. Penny screams when she sees he has a gun, but Will has her down on the floor instantly. He holds the gun against her face so she can see it. ‘Don’t make me kill you, Penny. I don’t want to do that. Do you understand?’
< th t}div height="1em">Her eyes fill with horror, but slowly she nods. ‘Is there anyone in the house besides you?’
A hoarse, terrified whisper, ‘My mother.’
‘Anyone else?’
‘No.’
Will binds her wrists and ankles. When he finishes trussing her, he gags her and pulls her back to her bedroom, careful to close her blinds. He leaves her on the floor staring up at him with her wide dark eyes. He tells her he has to do this. He apologises. Then he returns to the front room, pulls the curtain shut and surveys his workmanship. Tamara stares dully at the floor directly before the fallen Mrs Lyons. The girl looks to be in shock, her eyes wide, dilated, glassy. At least she is not fighting.
Will walks through the house to make sure of his surroundings. He sees a dog in the backyard: a German shepherd. He’s jumping and barking. Knows something is wrong. Will feels a moment of panic but lets it pass without giving into it. He finds the garage, then the switch which operates the door. He opens the big door and walks casually toward the Le Baron.
The keys are still in it. He starts the engine and drives it in next to a fat sleek van. He shuts the door with the automatic switch. He gets the tarp out. He can cover the windows of the garage door or the car itself. He decides the car is better and tosses it over the Le Baron. Next he drives his screwdriver into the garage door track, testing the door to make sure it holds.
Chapter 37
Wednesday 5:15 p.m., March 24.
THE MICE IN THE MOTOR SCREECHED as they always did when Rachel Merriweather’s New Yorker rumbled to life. Connie just loved his Chryslers! Of course he was always saying the older ones were better. Classic! Not to mention cheaper. He never mentioned that! God bless him. She smiled even as she steered the big boat out of its tight quarters. Rachel checked her watch. A quarter past five. She had called just before she left work. Five o’clock, and the girls not home yet. Rachel shook her head. They were at that age. Lord saves us from teenagers! Such sweet kids though. And good girls still, but it was that time in their lives when everything was a fight. Everything so hard to do, so impossible to understand. And boys...
She would sooner juggle hand grenades than let one of them near her babies, but what was she going to do? Tammy had put up this poster of some new teen throb. Jeans slung down over his hips, rippling muscles over his belly, eyes staring out dreamily, hair in wet curls, and that lump in his pants! Rachel sighed. Her little girl all grown up. Or wanting to be. And Tabit.
Quiet as a midnight kiss. What you didn’t see in that one was what you worried about! Her posters were so philosophical it was scary. Rachel was sure they were only months away from opening their front door and finding a hippie-Goth-beatnik, or whatever they called themselves these days, asking for Tabit.
And Connie bringing Will into the house! At least that was almost over! This thing with the attack on Will and Tammy almost getting in the middle of it, she had told Connie, ‘End of the week. Get him anywhere, but get him out!’ And Connie had agreed. Definitely, certainly, positively. Working on it. She just needed to make sure he followed through. Tonight, they were okay because he was still fro ely. g iat the hospital. Which meant Thursday and Friday nights and maybe Saturday night. She could put up with anything for three or four nights. But that was it.
By Sunday if they had to put Will in the Holiday Inn, they were going to do it!
Rachel hadn’t really minded Will. Sweet boy, actually, and such a nice voice, too. She could see why Connie felt the way he did. Solemn and... what was it? That kind of mock-cultured effect that self-educated people get. Everything done a little too carefully. Precision always double-checked, the nervous grammar. Those ain’t s that slipped through sometimes.
And Connie was right. Never a Christian more faithful. The way he read scripture every spare moment he had! She had known ministers who did not work half so hard on their studies. You would think he found Jesus yesterday, God bless him. But of course there was that prison. Ten years without the touch or smell of woman and then Connie bringing him into our home...
‘A godly man, Rachel.’
‘Abraham was a godly man, and look what he spawned!’
Rachel shook her head fondly. Connie loved his God so much he sometimes did not pay attention to what the other side was up to!
THE WAY HOME CAME with thoughts about the countryside that was about to bloom and a worry or two for the weather. Clouds, a bit of drizzle, an endless field of gray that had gone on for weeks.
Hope Palm Sunday turns it around. Easter for sure. A blue sky for Easter. ‘That would be wonderful, Lord.’ Rachel thought about Easter a while, then slipped back, as she always did, to her private worries, her prayers, her anger and her thanksgiving. All trouble and joy coming from one source. Not God, not directly anyway, but the man she had met oh, it was too many years ago to count. Tall and trim in those days. Not that extra load around his waist back then!
A load of books under his arm, every philosopher under the sun, just so he wasn’t a Christian, and the look... well back then they didn’t have the lumps in their pants, thank you. Cut the cloth differently. But the look was pretty much all this girl could notice from one day to the next!
Such a handsome man, that Connie Merriweather! And the big lug looking when she wasn’t, at least when
he thought she wasn’t. Finally, some talk. It was so hard back then. Maybe it was always hard and just didn’t seem so after you had been through it. What’s your name? I’ve seen you around. All the nonsense you had to go through just to find out if it was more than spring fever in September. A cup of coffee at the Student Union. Oh, my, he was a handsome young man, though! And good as a gold watch. But on the issue of God...
‘Well, I have to be honest. I’ve looked at this every way a man can look at something, and there’s nothing to it. There is just no God.’
‘Thank you for the coffee. I have to be going.’
‘What’s the matter? What did I say?’
She could still laugh at what she had told him then. Oh, boy! ‘I thought you werespecial, Connie Merriweather. I guess I was wrong.’
And that was it. Connie Merriweather was out of her life. For about six weeks. Then he&nbod.spsaw her one day, and he had said to her...
Rachel turned into the driveway and felt a twinge of uncertainty. The garage door was open. Connie’s car was not inside. Tammy’s Le Baron was not in the driveway. Open for anyone to walk in and take whatever! Rachel pulled up short of the garage, a few feet in front of where Tammy would park when she got home. She got out of her car cautiously. She was not sure it was safe! She walked across the soggy front lawn and then up the step to the front door.
Locked. She opened it with a key. She saw the spilled mail on the floor. The mirror inside the entryway was broken. There was blood on it...
Instinct told her to retreat, but the blood pulled her inside. The girls. Were they home?
She shouted each girl’s name out once and found herself walking toward two pieces of cloth on the floor in the TV room. Oh God! Tabit’s jacket and what looked like a piece of her blouse.
Ripped. She picked up the jacket. Yes. Tabit’s. But that didn’t mean...
Rachel’s mind reeled back toward morning. What had Tabit worn? She went back to the front hall, the stairway. She called both girls’ names again. She started up the stairs but stopped at once. She was shaking. She tried to breathe, tried to calm herself. Nothing wrong, she whispered. Just go up and check to be sure, then call Connie. A perfectly simple explanation.
He had said to her, ‘You know I used to believe all of it. I went to church and I prayed and I loved God, but then I realized it was just an old myth!’
And she had told him...
Oh, God! In Tammy’s room she saw tape and rope. She felt the room swirling. Only the jolt of terror for her children kept her standing. She tried to breathe but nothing happened. Is this how you feel when you die? She whispered a prayer. She covered her face with the palms of her hands; she took a long, shaky breath and summoned her common sense.
There was rope on the floor. A piece of tape. It meant nothing. A school project. The jacket and blouse, the broken mirror… that could have just been some rough-housing. They were kids! Just kids playing, and then walking away thoughtlessly. She stood, staggering toward the door and hallway. Check Tabit’s room. Everything would make sense. It had to.
And she said to him... she told the strange boy whom even then she knew she would marry, ‘I could never marry a man...’
Nothing out of place, nothing at all wrong with Tabit’s room. She walked across the hall.
Will’s room. All of it quite neat, of course. She stopped as she was closing the door and peeked back in. She walked into the room now and looked at everything carefully.
‘...never marry a man who didn’t love Jesus.’ And then of course she had realised she’d said marry, and he had heard it too.
A pair of jeans missing…
She had bought them for Will herself. Now why would someone come into the house and steal a pair of jeans? And leave a bathrobe that I had taken to the hospital yesterday? And slippers that… that Will had with him at the... Rachel blinked. Had Will come back to the house? But that wasn’tm">xd possible. He wasn’t going to be released until...
It wasn’t possible! He was...
No! Oh, dear Jesus, no! ‘No!’ Her voice echoed through the empty house. And then again, her face melting to agony, ‘NO! NO! NO! NO!’
Part V Treasures of Darkness
I will go before thee, and make the crooked places straight: I will break in pieces the gates of brass and cut in sunder the bars of iron:
And I will give thee the treasures of darkness. .
--Isaiah 45: 2-3.
Chapter 38
Wednesday 6:15 p.m., March 24.
AT PRECISELY 6:15 BEN LYONS pulled into King’s Court and drove along a curving road until he came to Wolverine Lane. Turning into his driveway, Ben hit his garage door opener.
Nothing happened. A frown of irritation settled over his dark features. He tapped the button again. Ben shut the Bronco off and went up to try the door by hand.
It wasn’t moving. He peeked in through one of the three small windows. What he saw did not make sense. There was a car parked in his slot with some kind of a tarp tossed over it.
Ben turned and looked at the neighbours’ houses. Across the way Lou Stillman’s car was parked in his drive. Next door the Eilers were still gone. On the other side, it looked like the Frosts were home. He could see through a window that their television was on as usual, hear the low indistinct rumble of a game show leaking out through their porch, both of them deaf as a couple of posts. Everything was as it always was. Except Ben’s garage door was not opening, and it looked like there was a strange car in his garage!
The curtains were all closed. The lights were off. That was odd, too. Judy and Penny were supposed to be home. He checked his watch. It was almost dinnertime. He pulled his key out but the door was unlocked. Ben leaned into the house cautiously. He called to his wife.
When there was no answer, he called again. ‘Judy? Penny? Anybody here?’ Something wasn’t right. But what? Still in the doorway, Ben took a quick glance across the room. Nothing he could see, just a feeling. Something out of place. An odour, maybe.
Yes! There was something in the air he didn’t like. Ben took another step and heard Penny sobbing. He went as far as the hallway and saw William Booker standing behind his daughter, a pistol pushed into her ear. For just an instant, Ben felt nothing. In that first split second even the terror wasn’t quite real. Then of course he understood.
Ben Lyons had just stepped off the edge of the world.
Chapter 39
Wednesday 6:52 p.m., March 24.
BENNY’S DAD’S CAR WAS in front of the garage when Benny pulled into the driveway. The house was dark. Taking his gym bag and trotting to the front door, Benny felt a moment of uneasiness. Why was his dad’s Bronco parked outside? What was going /p> @ton? His dad should have been watching the evening news while his mother cooked dinner, and they weren’t even here! The door was locked. Benny opened it and called out. There was a light on in the hallway, but no one answered him. Had something happened?
He stepped into the room further and called out again. ‘Hey! Anyone home?’
‘They’re downstairs, Benny.’
Will Booker was standing in the hallway by Penny’s bedroom. He was holding Benny’s dad’s pump shotgun. Its hollow bore pointed at Benny. Benny felt a jolt of adrenalin surge through him. He dropped his gym bag without intending to do it. He heard it hit the floor with a thump. The sound seemed to come after an interminable delay. He was shaking in surprise. He thought to run, but suddenly his legs were too heavy to move. ‘I don’t want to hurt you, Benny, but I will if I have to. Do you understand me?’ Benny stared for a long moment at Will Booker, then nodded. ‘Now what do you say we go down to the basement?’
The seventeen-year-old hesitated as he studied the situation. Will Booker seemed to know what he was thinking, seemed almost to be laughing at him because he could not fight.
Not here, not now. He had no choice but to do what he was told. On the stairs, Benny thought about turning back. If he could get his hands up fast enough it might work. He was c
lose enough for just a second, and he was strong enough. He knew that. This guy was small! He looked back with a quick glance, measuring the odds a second time, but it was already too late.