by Andrew Hart
Here comes the circus, he thought now. Clowns and acrobats and wild, wild animals.
He racked the slide on the shotgun, enjoying the sharp and ominous sound of it in the still Charlotte night. Then Carl Jennings climbed the steps up to the basement door, whistling softly to himself.
Chapter Fifty-Four
ANNA
I ran from room to room checking all the phones, deliberately not turning the lights on, in case there was someone watching from outside, but they were all just as useless. I tried my cell phone but, as usual, got no signal. I turned on my laptop, but whatever was interfering with the landline was also disrupting the Wi-Fi. We were cut off.
I didn’t say so to Oaklynn—Nadine, whatever—but she didn’t need telling.
“You think it’s him,” I said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes.”
I didn’t know what to do. I looked at her, unsure whether I was feeling trust or merely desperation.
“We should get out of the house,” she said.
“And go where?”
“It doesn’t matter. Just . . . out. Away.”
She said it with such certainty, though she seemed less scared than weary, as if she had been through all this before.
“I’ll get the girls,” I said, turning and heading up the stairs.
Veronica opened the door at the sound of my voice.
“The phone wouldn’t work, Mommy,” she said. “I tried and tried.”
“I know. It’s OK, honey.”
“Is it the man?” she said.
I blinked.
“What?” I said.
“The person you were talking to,” she said. “Is it the man with the beard?”
“The man with the beard?” I echoed blankly.
“I don’t like him,” she confided, her voice very low, her eyes haunted. “Why was he in our yard?”
For a second, I didn’t understand what I was hearing and just stared at her.
“When was he in the yard, Vronny?”
It was Oaklynn, speaking urgently as she blundered up the stairs.
“Oaklynn!” exclaimed Veronica, confused. “Why are you here?” She turned quickly to me. “Is Miss Oaklynn coming back to live with us again, Mommy?”
“Answer Miss Oaklynn’s question, Vronny,” I said, all other concerns suddenly out of my head. “When did you see the man in the yard?”
“Just before,” she said, looking suddenly chastened. “I went to the bathroom. I looked out through the window, and he was there in the yard. Just standing. Looking up at me. I’m sorry, Mommy. Did I do wrong?”
“Did he have anything in his hands?” I asked.
“Something long. I couldn’t see.”
“Oh God,” said Oaklynn, her voice thin. “Oh God.”
I spun to face her. She was chewing her finger ends, her eyes brimming. Her face, which I was used to seeing as a mask of efficiency and determination in moments of crisis, was white and terrified. I stared aghast as she clamped both hands over her mouth like a child, as if trying to muffle the proof of her despair.
“It’s OK,” I said, as much to her as to the girls, gathering Grace into my arms. “We’ll get in the car. We’ll get a cell phone signal as we go up the hill to Harris. We’ll call the police.”
Nadine nodded fervently, her tears spilling down her face as she fought to bite back the sob.
“Mommy?” said Veronica. She had been brave till now, confused and wary but brave. Now she had caught Nadine’s fearful apprehension, and the line of her mouth had buckled. Her eyes were wide and wet.
I stooped to her, but whatever I was going to say died in my throat as we heard the blast of a firearm and, after the numb, hollow silence that followed, the crash of the basement door being kicked in.
Chapter Fifty-Five
It was dark in the basement, but Carl knew there was no one down there, and darkness didn’t bother him. The shattered door quivered on its hinges as he pushed through it, not breaking stride as he crossed the fancy hardwood and went into the hall. He tried a couple of white shell doors—a bathroom and a blue bedroom, unslept in—and then he was at the foot of the stairs and coming up, switching from the shotgun to the AR-15 that had been slung across his back as he walked.
The stair treads were a golden oak, matching the banister rail supported on perfect white spindles.
A nice house. Sophisticated but still cozy.
Well, thought Carl as he cocked the semiautomatic rifle, we’ll see about that.
Both women knew they couldn’t get the children and make it down the stairs without meeting the gunman in the hall, so escaping in the car was out of the question. They also knew that the puny indoor locks would give way to a rough charge of the big man’s shoulder, never mind the force of the arsenal he had surely brought with him. Veronica had picked up the flashlight and was clicking it on and off absently, her eyes on her mother. It wasn’t producing a steady glow but the same intermittent flashing it had been doing before—three long blinks, then three short ones, then three long ones, over and over, unstopping. Anna was dimly aware of it, a needling annoyance on the edge of her consciousness as she tried to decide what to do. Nadine had sunk to the floor, hands still clasped over her mouth, defeated: a sacrificial lamb waiting for the slaughterer. The crossbow lay discarded at her feet.
“Can you load that?” Anna demanded.
Nadine looked up at her, blinking vaguely, as if Anna had spoken to her in another language.
“Load it!” Anna shouted.
The urgency in her voice acted on the other woman like a slap. She started, then looked at the crossbow as if she had never seen it before.
“Quickly!” yelled Anna. “Do it.”
She could hear the man in the hallway downstairs. He was whistling. It sounded like “Born in the U.S.A.”
Nadine got awkwardly to her feet, stood the crossbow up, and slid one shoe into its stirrup, fishing the rope-cocking device from a pocket. Anna watched her lace the cord around the butt and hook it to the drawstring.
“Hurry!” she said. The Maglite in Veronica’s hands was still flashing—three long, three short, three long . . .
Morse code.
It was an SOS programmed into the flashlight! She snatched it from her daughter’s hands and rounded the bed to the window at the front of the house, propping the Maglite up against the frame as best she could. She took her hand carefully away, and it stayed, blinking their cry for help.
Not that anyone would see it. The sleepy neighborhood that had seemed so idyllic suddenly felt remote and abandoned. No one would see. No one would come.
“Loaded,” said Nadine.
She had fitted an arrow from the three-shot quiver. She looked wary, uncertain, as if the very act constituted a defiance that felt desperately bold, wrong, holding the weapon away from her body as if she was afraid of it. Anna just looked at her.
“OK,” she said.
Chapter Fifty-Six
The woman had been on Officer Paul Randall’s mind all day. He had sat in her house and listened to her talk about her psycho nanny, and he had only made notes for the look of the thing. When his sergeant had asked him if there was anything to the complaint, he had shaken his head and made some dismissive remark about Myers Park women with too much time on their hands. But then the call had come through about how the real Oaklynn Durst was out of the country, and it had all started to look very different. He had called to warn the Klein woman, but his failure to trust her instincts worried him, made him restless. He made a few more calls, and that was when things got weird.
Turns out, he wasn’t the first law enforcement officer to be asking around after Oaklynn Durst lately. He spoke to Nurture, the placement agency, again, then to the church, and finally to the neighbors. They gave him the name of the Dursts’ former housekeeper, one Nadine Clark, and of a bearded FBI agent who had shown up a few weeks ago, asking about them. Randall began hunting employment records for Nadine Clark—an ide
ntity that seemed to wink in and out of existence over the past decade as she moved from Georgia to Missouri and finally to Utah, employment records spanning day-care facilities, clinics, and hospitals, but always in short-term positions. He called their HR departments and got a checkered history of good work intersected with unreliability, absence, and the whisper of domestic abuse. When he managed to speak to people who had actually worked with her, he got more reports of the mystery FBI man who had been asking about her over the last few months, a big guy with a beard. One of them had a name and badge number.
Edward Flanders.
It was fake. The FBI had no record of such an agent or anyone in the organization past or present matching that name.
The guy had moved around hospitals, day-care facilities, nursing homes, and the like for months, never dealing with HR or anyone higher up in the organization who might run his credentials, relying on a smile and a chatty demeanor. He made everything look low-key, so almost no one followed up, and those who did, figured they’d gotten his details wrong. It was smart, but it was also indicative of someone playing a very long game, and that was worrying.
Then Randall had played a hunch. He went through Nadine Clark’s file and pulled the ex against whom she had a restraining order: one Carl Jennings, an electrician by trade with a string of arrests for possession and domestic abuse, as well as various public-disturbance charges keyed to Nazi and other white-supremacist rallies.
White supremacist?
Maybe this wasn’t what Randall had thought it was at all.
He called Mrs. Klein but got no reply and no answering service. He didn’t have enough to merit drastic action, though he forwarded Jennings’s details to the FBI, anyway. They might not think a manhunt worth the effort, but they’d want to follow up on the agent-impersonation charge. He checked his watch. Twenty minutes to one in the morning. Too late to drop by with nothing more than a warning. Still. He told Dispatch he was making a routine follow-up visit and got in his car. He was on Settle Road in twelve minutes. He’d just stop by. He wouldn’t even leave the car. Just look, then sit for a while, till he was called elsewhere. Just in case.
The street was quiet, and the few houses were dark, save for the Klein house, where a light blinked in an upper window. Some manic early Christmas decoration, he thought, though it was more annoying than it was jolly, flashing away like that in a steady, regular pattern of long beats, then short, then long again . . .
Randall snatched his radio to his mouth, gave his call sign, and requested immediate assistance, thumbing on the cruiser’s flashers as he did so. He gave the operator the address and said he would go in ahead.
“Negative,” said the dispatcher. “Wait for backup.”
“There isn’t time,” said Randall. “Get here fast.”
And then he was out of the car and running to the front door.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Carl felt like the big bad wolf from the fairy tale. He knew the little piggies were upstairs, hunkered down in the bedroom, sweating out their fear, squealing and helpless. It was almost funny.
Weird, he thought, how all the weeks of cold rage, the who-the-fuck-did-she-think-she-was rants delivered to no one as he drove halfway across America and back, could turn into this calm amusement now that push had come to hard shove. As Edward Flanders, FBI, he had gotten into the habit of being so careful, he didn’t even admit what he was doing to himself. Now that he could be Carl again, it was like taking off a mask that had been hot and hard to breathe through. Now he felt free.
Free and clear.
Yes. He knew what he had to do. He could see it all like it had already happened.
He set his foot on the first step to the upper floor, the rifle held almost casually in front of him, and he wanted it all to slow down so that it wouldn’t be over just yet. He looked around the place, knowing he would remember every detail, every picture on the walls, every arty knickknack and stick of furniture, taking step after careful step. That was why he had put the lights on. Partly, it was to make sure that those who knew the house better than he did didn’t have an advantage as they moved around it, but mostly it was so it would all be burned into his memory forever in vivid detail.
What did the old movies say? Filmed in fabulous Technicolor.
Yeah. That was what he wanted.
So he took his time, savoring each step. Listening to the sounds of their frantic feet and sobbing in the room above him. He was only halfway up the stairs when the doorbell rang.
He turned.
There was a cop out there. Carl could see him in the long window by the door. A black guy at that. And beyond him, out in the dark street, was the strobing of blue lights.
It was impossible. How the fuck could they be here already?
For a second, Carl just stared. Then all his calm burned away, and there was only the old fury, the outrage that he might not get what he wanted. What he deserved.
He aimed the rifle at the door and opened fire.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Officer Paul Randall saw the bearded man through the window a fraction of a second before the first shot shattered the wood of the door. He was there under the bright hallway lights, big as life and armed to the teeth. Randall saw the muzzle flash before the sound, before the door broke apart in a shower of fragments as the rifleman fired shot after shot through it.
Randall leaped sidewise, but there was no cover on the porch, and the front yard was small and open, all lawn, ground cover, a barren cherry tree, and a solitary dogwood. He hadn’t been hit yet, but it was only a matter of time.
He dropped back, drawing his service weapon and squeezing off two quick shots at the doorframe, his heart pounding. He was massively outgunned.
The barrel of the rifle pushed through one of the smashed door panels, and for a second, Randall saw the face of the bearded man searching for him in the dark. Randall fired again, but the shot only gave away his position. There was another explosion of sound, and Randall felt the bullet rip the pistol from his shredded hand. He only realized that two fingers had been torn off at the knuckle when he looked.
He almost dropped but had just enough presence of mind to skulk back, doubled over, clutching his bleeding hand. The darkness of the street was his only hope. The car wouldn’t protect him from a weapon like that whose rounds would go through the doors and out the other side, but if he sheltered behind the engine itself . . .
There was another burst of shots. Three, four, each less than a second apart, but unfocused, wild, like the shooter didn’t care what he hit.
Randall pushed at his collar-mounted radio with his good hand as he loped away, knowing he was losing a lot of blood, feeling the shock and adrenaline threatening to overwhelm him.
“I’m hit,” he managed. “Officer down. Repeat, officer . . .”
But then there was another burst of gunfire from the doorway, which made the windows of the police car explode, and he said no more.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
ANNA
The noise of the gun was deafening, hellish. Grace began to wail. Veronica’s weeping was quieter but somehow worse. It had no performativity, no hope for comfort or attention. It was all dread and horror and hopelessness. We all felt it. I looked out the bedroom door and down to where the gunman stood at the foot of the stairs, aiming into the night. Then I felt Oaklynn—Nadine—push past me and raise the crossbow.
One shot. We had one shot.
I realized too late that he had seen us reflected in the window by the door, realized only as he turned, dropping to one knee and firing. I saw the flash of the gun through the acrid, smoky haze, and I shrank back even as Nadine cried out. The arrow slammed into the door behind him, piercing the wood almost to the flights. Then we were falling back into the bedroom, dragging the door pointlessly closed behind us, Nadine gasping in pain.
The bullet had caught her just below the elbow of her right arm. It wasn’t a clean hole, as I would have expected, but a
mess of chewed-up tissue. There was blood everywhere, and when I leaned in to see, I caught an alarming flash of ragged whiteness that I feared was bone.
The shooting downstairs had momentarily stopped, but it was replaced by the bearded man’s voice, loud and flat.
“See what you made me do, Nadine?” he roared. “Know what I’m gonna do next?”
He paused, as if waiting for a reply, then added, quieter, “Yeah, you do. And you know what else? It’s your fault. Everything that happens here tonight is on your head. Don’t you ever forget that.”
Nadine had collapsed into a kind of crouch again, childlike, her face haunted by more than pain. She gave me an appalled look that was full of something like entreaty.
“Veronica,” I said, turning to my eldest daughter. “Take Gracie into the bathroom and get in the bath.”
It wouldn’t offer much protection as the bullets started flying around, but it might keep them alive for a moment, at least till he decided to target them directly.
Don’t think about that.
“Nadine,” I said, turning to her, “can you reload the crossbow?”
I knew the answer before she gave it. Her right arm was useless. I picked it up, anyway.
“In here,” I said, pulling her up and after the girls into the bathroom. I closed the door and, again, put on the useless lock. We moved between the toilet and the twin sinks, and then I tried to pull the drawstring of the crossbow. It wouldn’t move more than a few inches.
“Help,” I said.
She seemed to think about it, to decide, then set her teeth and stamped down on the stirrup. I laced the cocking rope through and hooked it in place, as I had seen her do, while she held her ragged, dripping right arm away from her, as if afraid to look at it.
“I’m coming in now, Nadine,” said the man at the bedroom door. He said it almost tenderly, but there was a bitterness underneath the tone that made my stomach tighten and my skin creep.