by Lois Duncan
“Lie down,” she begged, “here. Please!” She pressed him back upon the pillow, and he drew a long, choking breath and closed his eyes.
“Okay,” he said weakly.
“I’ll be gentle. I’ll try not to hurt you.”
“It’s not that.”
This time when she reached for his jacket he did not stop her. He merely lay there resignedly as she undid the buttons and turned obediently on his side while she gently worked the sleeve of first the jacket and then the flannel shirt down from the injured shoulder.
It took a moment for understanding to reach her.
“There,” Dexter said softly. “There, now you see. Aren’t you glad we don’t have to be seen on the beach together?”
Jesse sat in silence, gazing down at the boy before her, at the sturdy man’s body with the wasted, underdeveloped arm and shoulder no bigger than a child’s.
So this is the reason, she thought. This is the reason for all the anger, the defensiveness, the bitterness. This is the reason for Dexter Barton.
“All right,” Dexter muttered coldly, “you’ve looked long enough now. The second show doesn’t start until noon.” He paused, and when she did not answer, a tremor came into his voice. “Well, why don’t you say something?”
“There is nothing to say,” Jesse told him, and she leaned over and kissed him. It was the first time she had done such a thing in her life.
Chapter Eleven
BRUCE HEARD THE PISTOL shot when he had almost reached the trees. The sound lent wings to his feet, and with a final spurt of speed he cleared the last space of moonlight and plunged into the welcoming shadows of the thicket.
Another figure crashed in beside him, and for a moment the two of them clawed their way through the bushes, gasping and struggling, shoving aside branches and fending off the brambles that whipped across their faces, until at last they were clear on the far side with the dirt road curving ahead.
“Shit!” Bruce heard his brother’s voice mutter. “This would have to happen just when we had the engine going and everything set. If Dex hadn’t been so stubborn about sending you back to get the girls …”
“Dexter!” Bruce grasped at the name, his breath coming in short gasps. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know. He started out right behind me.”
“The pistol shot! You don’t think—”
“Of course not. Buck fired that shot to scare us. He couldn’t have taken good aim from the doorway.” Glenn had steadied his breathing now and seemed calmer. “Come on, kid, we had better get going.”
“Where?” Bruce regarded him blankly. “Where can we go? It’s twenty miles to the village.”
“We’ve got to try it. We can’t stay here and let Buck catch up with us.”
“We’ve got to wait for Dexter.”
“That’s crazy.” Glenn had already started along the roadway, moving at a dogtrot so that the younger boy was obliged to jog in order to keep up with him. “Dex could never hike this. He’s got something wrong with his leg. You know how it buckled just on the ride up here.”
“But we can’t leave him!” Bruce insisted. “If his leg is bad, he’ll need us to help him.”
“We can’t wait for him.”
“But why can’t we? If we stand in the shadows, we can see Buck coming …”
“Bruce, look.” Glenn drew a long breath. “Dex isn’t coming. There isn’t any sense in waiting for him. He—he went back to the cabin.”
“He couldn’t have. What reason would he have for doing a fool thing like that?” Bruce fought against the question; then full realization struck him. “He was hit, wasn’t he? You told me that he wasn’t?”
“I didn’t want to have to tell you. Yes, he was hit. I heard him fall.”
“Do you think … was he …”
“I don’t know. How can I know? It’s just damned sure that we can’t go back there. Marianne and Jesse will take care of him. If there is anything to be done, you know that they’ll do it. The thing for us to do is to keep on going.” He paused and then said, “You know that’s right, don’t you? We have got to keep going.”
Reluctantly Bruce nodded. “Will Buck be following us, do you think?”
“If he does, we’ll hear the engine of the van in time to get off the road. I shouldn’t think he would try following us on foot. Not in this cold, without his jacket.”
Bruce crammed his hands into the leather pockets of Buck’s jacket, conscious suddenly of the warmth of the wool lining against his body. He thought of Jesse’s bringing it to him and was filled with a surge of gratitude. At the time there had been no way for any of them to know how important the gesture would turn out to be.
The night was cold, but it was a still, windless cold. Bruce could feel it like a dull pressure upon his shoulders and a stinging sensation on his lips and ears. The moonlight, falling in an eerie silver glaze upon the ice-encrusted road, gave the moment a feeling of unreality.
It is as though, Bruce thought, this is something I have dreamed a million times before. Any moment now I may open my eyes and find that I am in my bed at home, dreaming it again.
If it had not been for the circumstances behind the situation, it might have been almost pleasant for him, trotting alongside Glenn, the two of them drawn together by their very existence, as lone human beings, in a world of stillness and snow.
He was not afraid. It was impossible to be afraid with Glenn beside him. There had been times when as a child he had imagined such a moment, the peak of a challenging adventure with Glenn to share it. In these childhood fantasies there had sometimes been tornadoes, sometimes earthquakes, or invading armies from other planets. It had not mattered what the danger was. The important thing had been that it was he and Glenn, banded together, who were combating it.
But never in his wildest imaginings had he envisioned a kidnapping, a blazing pistol, a mountain hideaway. It was as though a dream had suddenly gone out of control and become life-size.
He glanced sideways at his brother, suppressing an urge to reach out and touch him.
And then he heard it: the sound on the road above them. It took them both a second to register what it was.
“That’s the engine,” Glenn exclaimed. “It’s the van! Buck is trying to follow us!”
“We’ve got to get off the road!”
Bruce glanced around quickly. There was only one direction in which it was possible to turn, for to the left the road fell off in a steep drop-off to the woods below. To the right there rose an embankment and above that the protective shelter of heavy underbrush.
It was toward this that Glenn was already beginning to run.
“Hurry,” he shouted, and Bruce, turning to follow, felt his feet slip from under him on the icy smoothness of the road. He struggled to regain his balance, knowing even as he did so that it would not be possible.
He caught himself as he fell, taking the brunt of the impact on his arms and knees. For a moment he scrambled on ice, trying to get his feet beneath him, wishing frantically that he were wearing boots instead of his school shoes. Then he was standing, but the wasted moment was one which should not have been lost.
In that instant the van rounded the curve behind him, and the road was flooded with the glare of headlights.
For one frozen second, Bruce stood petrified. Then he began to run.
To run—but where? There was no place to go. There was no time now to follow Glenn up the steep embankment, no time to search for a pathway down the cliff to the left. There was only the road ahead down which to run, a perfect target centered in the glare of the headlights. Like Dexter, Bruce thought, he shot Dexter while he was running, and now he will shoot again, and he cannot miss, not possibly!
But Glenn was safe! That thought sustained him. For some strange reason he thought of Jesse. There was no reason for her to come into his mind then, but she did, flashing briefly across his vision—and then his parents, with their open, loving faces.
The sound of the engine rose to a roar as Buck mashed down upon the accelerator.
Bruce’s breath was coming in ragged gasps, and in his ears he could hear his blood pounding in a harsh, wild rhythm. His legs were moving with a speed of which he had not known he was capable.
I will not die, he told himself with vehemence, no matter how often he shoots me. No matter where the bullet hits me, I will not die! I will keep running and running. I cannot die, not yet, not now! There are too many things I have never done!
And strangely it was this last thought, beyond any feeling of fear, which drove him in a final, superhuman burst of effort to round the next curve and stagger into the shadows which lay beyond.
For an instant he was engulfed in darkness, and then the headlights were again upon him, but something was different. They had changed direction! He was no longer centered in the flood of brightness but was on its edge, poised at the intersection of light and darkness. Again he was falling, but this time it was not he who had lost balance but the road itself that was rising in a drunken lurch to meet him.
With a last motion of exhaustion Bruce twisted backward, just in time to see the bulk of the van on the road behind him, moving sideways in a slow arc toward the left side of the road. Shadows leaped wildly as the light slid past him. The wheels of the car were spinning; the engine was roaring.
From his sprawled position, Bruce watched, hypnotized, as the car drifted onward. So slowly it moved that it did not seem possible. It was as though an invisible hand had reached for it and were drawing the vehicle gently, deliberately across the ice to the cliff’s edge.
And then—in one incredible instant—beyond it.
There was a ripping sound, a series of thudding crashes as the car struck trees, passed them, struck others below. And then there was silence.
Silence. So total that Bruce, lying quietly in the empty road, could hear the far, faint whisper of pine needles as they bent together under their crusting of snow. He could hear his heart beating and the rasping, labored noise of his own breathing.
For a long time he lay there, unmoving. Then he became conscious of approaching footsteps and of his brother’s voice.
“Bruce? Bruce, are you all right?”
Bruce nodded slowly in the darkness.
“Bruce, where are you? Bruce?”
“Yes. Yes. I’m okay.” He formed the words carefully, hearing his voice, cracked and distant, as though it were that of a stranger. “I’m here. I’m okay.”
“Why didn’t you answer when you heard me calling? I thought he’d got you!”
Glenn had reached him now; Bruce could feel him beside him.
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“He didn’t shoot at me.”
“Of course, he didn’t. He was going to run you down instead! When he slammed on the car brakes …”
Bruce nodded weakly. “The car …”
“It was coming too fast for this road. It hit that ice and went into a skid.”
“He went over … the cliff. …” Dizziness swept over him; he struggled against it. The world was tilting precariously about him.
“Bruce, what’s the matter?” Glenn’s voice was very close. “I thought you said you were okay!”
“I am. I just …” Nausea struck him in a wave, doubling him over. “The car … went over …”
The sickness came upon him, tide upon tide of it. Against the black screen of his eyelids the car came skidding, turning, sliding, the headlights sweeping in a long, slow arc. He could see the driver’s face. Buck’s face, staring through the windshield, the eyes wide with terror, the mouth open in a silent scream at the knowledge of what was happening and could not be controlled. In actuality he had not been able to see into the car, had not seen the driver, but now in this second vision he could see and did see, and the sickness came again and again as the car slid nearer and nearer to the edge, like a child’s toy on a tilted tabletop—and then went over.
“Bruce, stop it, do you hear me! Get hold of yourself!” Glenn’s voice cut into his consciousness. “Come on, we’ve got to get moving. You can’t keep sitting there in the snow. You’ll freeze!”
Slowly the sickness subsided. Bruce opened his eyes. The world looked soft and blurred in the moonlight.
“Get up,” Glenn told him, and he did so, finding to his surprise that his legs could hold him. He was no longer shaking.
He felt very calm.
“I guess,” he said, “we had better start looking for a way down the cliff to the car.”
There was a moment’s silence. Then Glenn asked, “Why?”
“To see what we can do to help. He might still be alive in there. There is always a chance. We can’t know. …”
“You must be crazy,” Glenn said incredulously. “It’s Buck who was in that car. He was trying to run you down.”
“Yes, but—”
“What do you want to go down to him for? What if through some miracle he is alive? What do you think you’re going to do about it?”
“It would depend on how badly hurt he was,” Bruce said reasonably. “We can’t tell until we reach him. If he is alive, surely we can do something.”
“Bruce, that man was trying to kill you. That’s why he went over the cliff. He was trying to kill you! It’s just by luck that you’re alive, and standing here now. Don’t you understand, you don’t owe him one blasted thing!”
“You mean …” Bruce stared at his brother, not certain he was hearing him correctly. “You think we should leave him there?”
“You’re damned right I do. We’ve got ourselves to think about. We’ve got a long trek in front of us if we’re ever going to make that village. We’d better be getting on with it.”
“You do mean it, don’t you?” Now it was Bruce’s turn to be incredulous. “You really mean it.”
“Of course.” Glenn’s handsome face was planes and shadows in the moonlight. “What is Buck to me? What is he to you?”
“He is a human being.”
The wall was there between them, thin and invisible, but there, solid, like a sheet of cold glass. It was, Bruce thought miserably, the way it had so often been in their childhood. He was with Glenn, close, an arm’s length away, yet somehow he could not touch him. Raising his face, he tried to see into his brother’s eyes, but he could not do so. In the dim light they were dark pockets hidden in shadow.
“He is human.” Bruce struggled to find the words. “He is down there, and maybe—maybe … he is alive. If we don’t get to him, we’ll never know. We’ll never be sure. We’ll go the rest of our lives not knowing but that we might have been able to save him. I couldn’t live with that, Glenn, could you?”
He paused. His brother did not answer.
“Could you?” Bruce persisted. “Could you live with that and not feel guilty about it every day of your life?”
“Yes,” said Glenn.
For a long moment neither of them spoke. The silence hung between them, part of the wall, but now, at last, the wall was defined.
Slowly Bruce reached out and touched his brother’s arm. “The other night,” he said, “that car accident. It didn’t really happen the way you said it did, did it? Another car didn’t hit you. That scrape and dent—they weren’t really made by a car at all.”
“Of course, they were,” Glenn said carefully.
“You didn’t really let your insurance lapse. That isn’t the reason you didn’t want Dad to know about it. You got the car fixed so fast. The whole thing repainted.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“It was Monday that Joan Miller’s brother was hit by that hit-and-run driver. It happened less than a mile from our house on Monday night, right there at the entrance to Valley Gardens.”
Glenn regarded him blankly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, Glenn.” Bruce spoke the name softly. “Glenn.”
It was the name he had spoken so often in the past, with pride,
almost with reverence, the strong, shining name which was his brother’s.
“Glenn,” he said now, and pain tore through him.
Say that I’m wrong, he begged silently. Oh, Glenn, please, please tell me that I’m wrong!
“It was late,” Glenn said. “I was tired. I didn’t expect a scooter to be zipping around at that time of night. It was his fault as much as mine. He came shooting out of a side street.”
“But you didn’t stop,” Bruce said shakily.
“There was nothing I could have done, Bruce. Lights were going on in all the houses. I knew that people had heard the sound of the accident and would be taking care of things. It wasn’t as though I were leaving him on a side road someplace without calling for help. What would it have accomplished if I had stopped and got out and everything? There would have been a big furor. The folks would have been pulled into it. My license might have been revoked.” Bruce’s hand was still on his arm. He covered it now with his own. “You can see that, can’t you, Brucie?”
His voice was warm and persuasive.
Bruce slid his hand out from under his brother’s. He thrust both hands deep into the pockets of Buck’s jacket.
“No,” he said.
“Oh, now look, kid.” Glenn moved as though to put an arm around his shoulders, thought better of it, hesitated. “You’re not going to make a big thing out of this, are you, Brucie?”
“A big thing?”
“When we get back, I mean. You could get me in a lot of trouble. Besides, I’d deny it. You don’t have proof of anything.”
“No.”
“The car is fixed up by now. They can’t compare marks or anything. I told the guy at the garage that I scraped it on a fence post. He believed me. Other people will believe me, too. It will be my word against yours. I can even show them the fence post. It’s way out on South Ten.”
“Don’t,” Bruce said chokingly. “Don’t, Glenn.”
“People believe me. You know that. You’ll just look like a jealous kid brother, trying to get into the limelight. And if you did convince anybody, what would you be achieving? It wouldn’t help the Miller kid any. He’ll either get well or he won’t, regardless. Our parents would go to pieces. Mother might even have a nervous breakdown.”