The Woman in Our House

by Andrew Hart

  I sucked in a relieved breath, conscious that Oaklynn was not at my heels, then snatched Veronica into a hungry embrace. Her hair was tangled, flattened against her face, and she felt clammy to my touch.

  I whispered her name, squeezing her to me, and then, rubbing her eyes and still sounding dazed with sleep, she said again, “Who are you talking to?”

  “It’s OK, honey,” I said.

  She peered at me, reading my confused emotions, and her face clouded with wary seriousness.

  “Come with me, OK, honey?”

  She nodded once, her eyes on mine.

  I went to Grace’s room, picked her up, and took her to the master bedroom. I put Gracie with Veronica on the bed, my half of which was still a little warm under the duvet.

  “You know how to lock the door, Vronny?” I said. “With the little latch under the handle? Remember when we played hide-and-seek and you shut yourself in the bathroom?”

  She nodded but said, “I’m not supposed to.”

  “It’s OK tonight,” I said. “I’m going to go, and you should lock the door after me, OK? Don’t open it again for anyone but me, you hear?”

  “OK. Mommy, what’s happening?”

  “No one but me,” I said, ignoring the question. “Not even Miss Oaklynn.”

  “Miss Oaklynn isn’t here, Mommy.”

  “Well, she may visit,” I said, desperation making me stupid. “But even so. You don’t open the door to her, OK? Just me. You stay here with your sister, OK? No matter what.”

  “OK. Mommy?”

  “Yes, honey?”

  “Are you scared?”

  It was a strange question, one she had never asked me before, and I loved her for it. I also saw how absurd it would be to deny the truth.

  “A little bit,” I said. “But it will be OK. I promise. But you stay here, and keep quiet as mice, OK? Gracie, too.”

  “OK.”

  The idea that Oaklynn was outside the door, that she might have already slipped away or hidden in some other part of the house smoldered in my head. I had to know where she was, to make sure I was alert and ready, between her and my kids for all her stories of crazed ex-boyfriends. Still, I snatched up the phone, my eyes locked on the door she might use. I hadn’t even started to hit the keys when I realized that there was no dial tone.

  Damn. Stupid, useless phone.

  We should have thrown the useless thing away months ago.

  I clicked it and listened again. Still nothing. And the longer I stood here, the less I knew what Oaklynn was doing.

  I wanted to scream in fear and frustration, but I pushed those feelings down, replaced the glitchy handset, and put on a cheery face for Veronica.

  “I’m going to go now,” I said, “but just for a little while. Lock the door after me, OK? And Veronica?”

  “Yes, Mommy?”

  “When I leave, call the police. The phone isn’t working right now, but keep trying, OK?”

  I whispered it into her ear while hugging her.

  “You remember how?” I said, my voice unsteady.

  “911,” said Veronica, stunned.

  “Tell them Oaklynn is here. Do it as soon as I leave.”

  I kissed her, straightened up quickly, fearing I had already taken too long, and left, listening for the snap of the pathetically ineffectual lock as soon as I closed the door behind me.

  I turned, glancing down the hall toward the steps up to the attic, and found Oaklynn standing there, looking at me in that odd, detached way of hers, watching me absently, like a cow in a field, vacant and uninterested. She was still cradling the crossbow. I swallowed, then forced myself to take a step toward her.

  “OK,” I said. “Talk fast.”

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Carl Jennings parked the olive-green Camaro outside a half-finished house on Chilton Place that skirted the country club’s golf course and took a long duffel bag from the trunk. He was pretty sure no one saw him. The car might have stood out among the Beemers, Lexuses, and Range Rovers around Myers Park, but this was the third time he had parked here, and no one had raised the alarm. The great thing about neighborhoods with lots of construction was that the streets were always dotted with beat-up old vehicles belonging to the black and Mexican bricklayers, rough carpenters, and cement spreaders who did most of the real work. Carl had taken the precaution of scraping the Trump sticker off the rear bumper, just as he had covered the swastika tattoo on his arm when he had been posing as the FBI man, Edward Flanders, or—his favorite private joke—Martin (Luther) King, amiable neighborhood uncle, but he wasn’t worried.

  He was, in fact, exhilarated, and not just because of the 9mm in his waistband that, paired with the shotgun and the AR-15 in the duffel, were going to make for an interesting evening. The night was cold, crisp, and quiet, but he could almost smell the sense of excitement like the distant sounds of a fairground somehow growing closer. Carl grinned, feeling the weight of the duffel as he slung it over his shoulder with a muffled clink.

  A fairground, smelling of oil and funnel cake, a place of sideshows and barkers and a big old wooden roller coaster . . .

  The guns in the bag felt heavy with power and purpose. With destiny.

  Oh yeah. The fair was coming to town. Or did he mean the circus? Either way.

  He began walking down to Sharon Road, feeling the deepening chill of the creek air, lingering for a moment in the ground under a tree till he was sure there was no traffic, then crossing the road quickly where the little bridge spanned the creek. He grinned to himself at the thought of his alter ego the FBI agent called—after the weak dick neighbor on The Simpsons—Edward “Ned” Flanders.

  Okely dokely, neighborino. Welcome to hell.

  He walked down the embankment, ducking for a moment as a solitary vehicle rolled south, but its headlights never came near him. A moment later, he was in the thick, weedy scrub of the protected greenway on the north bank of Briar Creek and pushing east. To his left were woods, thick and black and still, the highest towers of the city skyline just occasionally visible in the distance. To his right was the steep bank down to the thin ribbon of water he would have to cross in a little while, then the equally steep and slippery clay bank on the other side and the backyards of Settle Road. The scattered houses were as dark and silent as the trees.

  He pushed through the stiff, dead grass and strangling vines. The scent of winter was in the air, and vegetation that had been wall-thick only a few days ago had died back noticeably.

  All the better. Nothing should delay the circus . . .

  Hell, he might even get away afterward.

  That didn’t seem to matter so much, but he had never really seen the percentage in those guys who went out and killed the wives or bosses who had been giving them shit, only to turn the guns on themselves. Seemed to him that when you finally got what you’d been dreaming about, you’d want to enjoy the victory for a while. If the cops came, they might very well take him out, though he figured he’d get a couple of them first, and that was OK. But if he could wrap things up and just walk away, why the hell wouldn’t he?

  He was confident, almost swaggering, and he knew that was because he wore a cloak of righteousness. Nadine—whom he had spotted from his car as she’d sneaked back into the house after the Kleins had thought her gone—was his to do as he demanded, and the mixed-race brats and their Jap mother would be sacrificed in the name of white purity.

  Multiple birds, one stone. He hadn’t planned it that way, but it had a kind of symmetry. It was more than just punishing Nadine now. He was part of a movement putting the world back to how it used to be. How it would be again.

  Something stirred in the bushes up ahead: a deer, maybe. Still, Carl’s hand went to the nine and pulled it out. There was no talking his way out of sneaking around out here that would mean he could come back another night and finish things the way he’d planned it. If anyone was dumb enough to be walking around here at this time, he’d drop them. Simple as that. Maybe
the sound of shots would draw attention, and maybe it wouldn’t. There were all kinds of ways a city might make noise, and this was the kind of neighborhood where if there was anyone within earshot, they probably figured it was someone else’s problem. Anyway, it’ll get plenty loud soon enough, he thought, grinning to himself again. He sure as hell wasn’t going to worry about waking the locals.

  This night had been a long time coming.

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  “My name is Nadine,” said the woman who had been calling herself Oaklynn. “I used the identity of a woman I worked for in Utah so that I could start over. For a little while. Thought I would get away from him for good this time. Stupid. He always finds me.”

  “Who is he?” said Anna.

  “My ex. Carl Jennings.”

  “Big guy? Beard?”

  Nadine’s eyes widened with shock.

  “You’ve seen him?”

  “In the store a couple of days ago,” said Anna. “Said he was looking for you. He seemed quite nice at first.”

  “Yes. He can do that. It never lasts.”

  “No,” Anna agreed. “He scared me.”

  This is surreal, she thought. She was talking to this woman whom she had hated, whom she had been terrified of only moments before, as if they were on the same side. They weren’t. Couldn’t be. She forced herself to be wary. And besides, the longer they talked, the sooner the police would be here.

  “And he hurt you?” she said.

  Nadine nodded, speechless, then sighed and said, “Over and over. For years. And I ran, and he found me and hurt me again. I ran again. And again.”

  “Why didn’t you report him?”

  “I did. I have restraining orders and warrants scattered through the Southeast,” she said. “But Carl has buddies in all kinds of places. He’s a guy’s guy, you know? Plausible. Nothing ever sticks to him. Whereas I’m just a liar, a head case . . .”

  “You were a nurse?” said Anna, a guess she had been mulling for a while.

  “For a couple of years,” said Nadine, managing a smile.

  “What happened?”

  “What always happens? Carl. Between my bruises and him threatening to give me worse if I didn’t bring him the pills he wanted . . .”

  “You got fired.”

  Nadine nodded slowly.

  “He preferred it when I didn’t work,” she said, voice and eyes both hollow.

  “Why doesn’t he leave you alone?” asked Anna. “What’s the point in insisting on being with someone who doesn’t want to be with you?”

  Nadine gave her a look. It was both disbelieving and pitying.

  “He thinks he loves me,” she said, shrugging.

  Love.

  The two women looked at each other, and that most loaded of words hung between them, stuffed full of misconceptions willful and otherwise, a word that meant everything and nothing.

  “Thinks he owns me,” she added, as if refining the previous statement.

  “And now?” said Anna.

  “He won’t leave without me, but he’ll punish me either way.”

  “By hurting me, my children?”

  “It’s hard to know how his mind works, especially when he’s mad, and he’s mad now.”

  “But you think . . . ?”

  “He has guns. He’s planning to use them.”

  “Against us?”

  “To spite me and . . .” She hesitated, as if suddenly embarrassed. Under the circumstances, it was bizarre.

  “What?”

  “He doesn’t like people who aren’t like him.”

  “People who . . . ? How do you mean?”

  “White people,” she whispered the words, ashamed of them. “He doesn’t like people who aren’t white. Or people who marry outside their race.”

  Anna just stared, but inside she curled up a little, like a beetle shrinking in on itself and turning its hard outer shell toward the world. A decade ago, even less, this would have seemed preposterous and convenient, the rampaging ex who was also a Nazi sympathizer. But now? She thought of the quiet neighborhood they had moved into, the friendly faces at the doors and windows. She had trusted them, assumed the smiles were real.

  She thought of the attic, the words scrawled all over its timbers.

  Hell is empty.

  “You’re Ben Lodging,” she said, suddenly certain.

  Nadine hesitated, recognizing the weight of the question and how she might answer it. She bit her lip, then nodded, eyes downcast.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Anna considered her as if for the first time—the book’s curious, watchful tone, and its awkward, damaged, and potentially dangerous protagonist spreading through her mind like a familiar tree caught in the strange and altering light of the eclipse.

  Of course the woman in front of her had written the strange and unsettling novel. It seemed obvious now. It should have scared her, this further evidence that the nanny she had brought into her home was so deep and consummate a liar, Anna thought. But the logic of the thing, its symmetry, made so much sense that she processed the news as if it filled a hole in the plot, made it complete. More than that, it touched her with something like pity for the woman, as if the lie had revealed a larger and more profound truth about who she was, her separateness from the world and its people, the emptiness she carried around with her day after day as she gazed hungrily at the happiness of others. It was as if Oaklynn—Nadine—had stepped out into that odd eclipse light, revealing the demons in her shadow as they clawed and tore at her from inside.

  “OK,” Anna said.

  That was all, but Nadine’s eyes came up in astonished, disbelieving hope, and met hers.

  “Let’s go downstairs.”

  Nadine hesitated, but Anna simply stood at the top, waiting, nodded again, and started down, moving quickly in case the other woman might reach out and push her head over heels.

  At the bottom, Nadine seemed to loiter, unsure what to do next, but Anna strode briskly past her and snatched up the phone from the cabinet, thumbing it on and hitting 911. The police should be here by now. Maybe Veronica had not been able to get through. Maybe she had but hadn’t been taken seriously . . .

  Anna listened for the dial tone.

  Nothing.

  Anna stared at it, feeling the orange glow of its keys against her face, then turned it off and on again. She pressed it to her ear, but there was only a distant, rattling static.

  It wasn’t just the bedroom handset. All the phones were dead.

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  The creek had been cold but barely ankle deep, and though he had stumbled and slid on the clay bank reaching the house, it had felt almost comically easy.

  These stupid fucking rich liberals and their absurd sense of security.

  Carl had inspected the house several times over the last few days. Seeing no outside lights or signs of an external siren box, he was as sure as he could be that there was no alarm system. Not that it would make that much difference. He wasn’t intending to be inside for more than a few minutes. Just enough to say his piece and make his point. Three shots would do it, though he would savor each one. If he did indeed walk away tonight, make it back to the car before the place was swarming with black-and-whites, hightail it over the border into South Carolina and down to the coast, where he could lose himself in the tangle of Lowcountry mangroves and saltwater inlets around the cabin Noah had set up for him, he would want something to think back on. Three shots would do the job, but the AR-15 gave him some rather more dramatic options, as did the shotgun, which at close range could take a head off if you aimed it just right. Tonight he was going to show Nadine the kind of horrors from which she’d never recover.

  Until a little while ago, she had been the sole target. The woman had walked out on him, lied to him once too often, and she would pay in blood. It was only when he saw the Klein family to which she was so stupidly attached that Carl had begun to wonder if the punishment might not cut that much shar
per and deeper if the blood spilled wasn’t hers. The thought had come to him like inspiration, a little flicker of black lightning that had stopped him in his tracks with its cruel brilliance like gunfire. He’d started small, terrorizing the Klein bitch and her kids and then vanishing the evidence away just to mess with their heads, but the time for little gestures was long past. The AR-15 cut a body into pieces if you hit it enough times in the right places. Think of that. Picture Nadine watching helplessly as he sliced and diced his way through the Jap bitch and her half-breed brood, then turned around to her as the blood ran and the hair stuck in red clumps to the walls, looked her in the face, and said, “Get in the car, Nadine.”

  Like a scene from a movie.

  And now it would be a bigger statement than just him teaching Nadine a lesson. It would be a blow struck for the cause, a white light against the gathering brown fog of irreligion and modern liberalism. Show the world that blood matters, skin matters, and if the world won’t listen, show them by spilling blood and flaying skin. Then maybe they’ll pay attention.

  Nazi. That’s what they’d call him when he made the news. He preferred white supremacist because Nazi sounded German. Ideology aside, Carl was no great fan of Hitler and the rest of those old Krauts. America had fought and beaten them, and as he liked to tell Noah, Carl thought of himself as absolutely and defiantly American.

  So he had crossed the creek like a knight on crusade in the land of infidels and stood in the unguarded backyard gazing up at the house, playing it all in his head like it was a tape of something that had already happened. Then the kid had appeared at the upstairs window, no more than a silhouetted head peering down over the window ledge, and that had broken the spell. He had gone to the box on the wall and snipped the phone line with the wire strippers in his back pocket, and then he had opened the duffel and chosen.