by Tabitha King
Liv looked around. “On the floor,” she said to Travis, and he obediently dropped to his belly, only inches away from Ricky’s corpse.
Liv crept along the inside wall of the porch to the big window that looked out on it from the living room. It had a storm window on the outside, the bolted Indian shutters on the inside. She looked around the porch. All the old-fashioned wicker furniture had been put away. But on the other side of Ricky’s body, tucked into the corner, there were two red clay plant pots the size of bowling balls, full of sand. They had had mixed clusters of cacti in them last summer, she remembered. Miss Alden must have transplanted the cacti and taken them back to Wellesley with her. Perhaps she had left the pots handy to sand the steps if she came in winter.
Liv limped cautiously around Ricky’s body, and picked up one of the pots. As she bent, she whispered to Travis, “Turn your face away, okay. The glass is going to fly.”
Travis nodded.
She propped herself at an angle to the window against the arching pilasters of the porch, pulled up her collar, and heaved the pot. The instant it left her hands, she covered her face and ducked. There was a satisfying explosion of glass and the thump of the pot against the wood of the shutters, followed by the shattering of the red clay on the porch floor. Liv felt shards raining on her snowsuit and the woolen cap she had pulled down over her ears.
Travis jumped and stifled a cry.
“It’s okay,” she reassured him. She brushed broken glass off herself. Travis tentatively brushed at the bits that had reached him.
Liv crunched across pot shards and glass and examined the window. There were big jagged pieces still in the frame. She wiggled them back and forth in the old putty until they came out, and then stacked them carefully in the corner of the porch. She threw her whole weight against the shutters and they bowed in, straining against the bolt, but the test discouraged her. They seemed very solid. She wondered how in the hell the Nighswanders had broken into this fortress in years past. Breaking in doors seemed to be the height of their finesse. Then she remembered Ricky Nighswander, like his brother, carried a knife—and if once it had seemed wicked, she now thought eagerly of its sharpness and strength.
She limped to Ricky’s body. Travis pulled himself up a little to watch her.
Some of the flying glass had embedded itself in Ricky’s face and hands, and lay twinkling on the snow on his chest, but had drawn no blood. Liv glanced at Travis. He had looked at Ricky and then turned his face quickly away, to stare at Gordy. It being its nature, the snow was building a dune over Gordy.
Liv gingerly patted the gory remnants of Ricky’s snowsuit until she felt the hard blade of the knife in its sheath, tucked up the left sleeve. She had to pick his arm up to draw out the knife. It was limp and heavy. She dropped it quickly. She scrambled back to the shutter, drew out the blade, which now did not seem so much barbaric as substantial. It was easy to insert it between the shutters, which had not been fitted with any concern for tightness. The blade nicked against the iron bolt. She drew it out and began to splinter the wood on each side of the shutter, digging to expose the entire bolt. Her hand rose and fell frantically. More than once she looked over her shoulder.
“I’ve got my eyes peeled,” Travis reassured her, and she forced a smile for him.
The old pin disintegrated rapidly under the tough steel. At last she broke through into the homemade mortise, a simple tunnel in the wood, revealing the bolt. Crouching as low as she could and still retain her purchase, she inserted the tip of the knife between the end of the bolt and the wall of the mortise and pushed the bolt backward, out of the hole. Ducking even lower, she pushed the left hand shutter back into the wall. Then she sat down with her back against the wall.
“Whoosh,” she said, and mopped her brow elaborately.
Travis grinned at her.
Liv propped herself up again and peered into the house, through the single layer of dusty glass of the interior windowpane. The new source of light spilled over the old familiar shapes of Miss Alden’s furniture. And winked on a web of wires that criss-crossed the room in every direction, and at heights from under two feet to five feet high. In the shadows, Liv could make out the muzzles of a dozen shotguns and the occasional gleam of a glass eye in the heads of Miss Alden’s trophies.
She sank back to the floor, breathless with shock.
Travis scuttled around Ricky’s body and cuddled next to her.
“Mom?” he said.
“It’s a trap,” she said dully.
Travis peeked over the window ledge. He sucked in his breath.
Liv hooked an arm around his waist and drew him down next to her. “Scary, huh?”
“I think Miss Alden musta been crazy,” he said.
A brief smile twitched at Liv’s lips.
They heard the distant foundering whine of a single snowmobile from the lake at the same instant. Travis tensed against Liv. She pushed herself upward, craning to see over the ledge again.
“Remember the secret passage,” she said.
Travis nodded eagerly and squeezed her hand.
“We could crawl,” she said. “Do you think we can get the secret door open without touching one of the wires?”
Travis popped up and down. “If we don’t open it all the way.”
Liv took a deep breath. “We have to try. There’s no place else to go.” She couldn’t have gotten anywhere else, but she wasn’t going to tell Travis.
She tucked the knife into her own sleeve. There was no telling when she might need it again. She decided there was no point in closing the shutter. Rand would not miss the shattered glass, not with Ricky lying there like a pincushion, nor the exposed bolt on the shutter. More important, she and Travis needed the extra light the open shutter provided if they were to have a chance of reaching the secret passage alive.
“Fill up our caps with snow,” Liv told Travis, passing him her own. “We’ll need to try and cover our tracks.”
Obediently, he scrambled to the steps and packed the caps.
She unzipped her snowsuit and tucked in the capful of snow, and Travis did the same.
When she started to pull herself toward the door, she was surprised to find Travis hard by her right side, trying to give her support. It was mysteriously cheering and made her want to laugh out loud. And then, just as unexpectedly, she was weak and dizzy, and he was there for her, like a little fireplug, panting and red-faced, but hearteningly substantial. Reassuringly dense, like his grandfather.
Over the threshold, it was suddenly quieter, as the wind was outside the thick walls. She rested against the frame of the door, on her left haunch, the knee slightly bent, and eased her right leg straight out in front of her. Travis hunkered down next to her. The wind had blown snow into the room, dusting the floor, bared of its animal skin rugs, in a great fan halfway across the room. Before her and above her, the web of wires criss-crossed like a cat’s cradle. The broken ends of two wires coiled in and out of the layer of snow on the floor, within their reach. With the light from the open shutter, here and there in the gloomy corners of the room, she could make out parts of many shotguns—a glinting long bone of a barrel, the dilated pupil of a bore, with its steely rim of an iris, the gleam of polished wood in a stock, the checkering of the small of the stock—close to a dozen of them. The trip wires must be repetitive, many of them leading to the same trigger.
The lion’s head roared silently at them out of the shadows. Its tongue lolled blood-red over its cold, white teeth.
The piano was gone. Miss Alden must have taken it away with her. Hadn’t wanted it damaged by a stray blast, Liv thought.
Across the room, a birchwood fire had been laid in the enormous hearth, presumably for Miss Alden’s next visit. A box of Blue Diamond wooden matches in a brass dispenser hung on the wall near the secret door. There seemed enough wood for bonfire, but it was a colonial fireplace that a small man or a woman could stand in and no doubt the draw of the huge chimney was wickedly ineffic
ient. It would eat a lot of wood, heating the stone of the chimney, and not much else.
The lowest wires in the trap looked to be about eighteen inches from the floor. Travis ought to be able to make it, if he didn’t panic. If no one came bursting in on them.
She hugged him. “You first. Commando style, on your belly. Keep your head down and your butt down and you’ll be fine. When you get to the other side, roll into the fireplace. You can stand up inside it. I’ll come after you. If something happens, you throw the snow in your cap over the floor so your tracks won’t be obvious and then get inside that secret passage and stay there. Don’t make a sound. Wait for Walter, okay?”
Travis sighed. Then he popped up and kissed her cheek. “Okay.” He scuttled away from her.
She took the cap of snow out of her snowsuit and put in the crook of her knee, just to have something to do with her hands, so she wouldn’t reach out after him. And all at once he was beyond her reach. As she watched him, she marveled at the ease of his passage, at how natural it all seemed. Just another game of commando.
The wind outside continued to rise and fall according to its whim, spitting snow into the room over her extended leg. In its calmer passages, she could hear the closing roar of the snowmobile. Then the wind would blot out the sound. She was increasingly afraid Rand would be upon them without warning. When she looked nervously over her shoulder, there was no one there except Ricky, whose open eyes were filling up with snow. Beyond him, at the bottom of the steps, the wind continued burying Gordy. There was no telling if he was dead yet.
Travis rolled smoothly out from under the wires over the hearth and up against the kindling and logs. He sat up and brushed his hair out of his eyes and grinned triumphantly at her. Her throat closed and she fought tears. He was safe.
“Can you reach the secret door?” she asked.
He sidled toward it, reached out, and fumbled along the molding. The panel suddenly slackened in its frame.
“Got it,” he exclaimed, and grabbed the edge.
“Careful,” she warned, leaning forward and at once regretting it. “How far can you open it?”
He pried it gently, and inserted himself in the space he had opened. It was startling how quickly he disappeared into the crack and how dark it was in there. The door cleared the nearest wires only by an inch or two. He slipped out again.
“Da da,” he sang.
She laughed, suppressing her own dismay. It was going to be tough for her to enter it without setting off one of the guns to signal their presence. But first she had to get there. Of course, if she didn’t, Travis’ capful of snow wouldn’t make any difference. There would be all the evidence Rand could want that they had entered the house.
She pulled up her right leg and got it behind her, then dropped herself gently onto her left side. She lifted the right leg and rested it on the left. Then she rolled onto her belly. She felt like a mermaid. It was uncomfortable and clumsy, but she couldn’t afford to leave an uncoverable trail of blood smears. Face to the floor, she reached out to place both hands flat on the floor, and said, “Travis, I love you.”
“I love you, too, mom,” he piped. “Don’t worry, you can make it.” But his voice was trembling. She was glad she couldn’t look up and see his face. She pushed forward from her left foot, and dragged herself forward by her hands, and was under the wires.
“Great,” he said, coaching her.
Inside her snowsuit she was a slick of sweat. It’s a game, just a game. No shotguns. Ricky’s not really dead. Gordy’s not really dying.
Suddenly, there was a break in the susurration of the wind. And now, there was no sound of a snowmobile to be heard, distant or near.
Liv hesitated. She could hardly breathe.
“Mom!” Travis whispered urgently.
She pushed on. Dragging and wriggling and twisting. She stopped and looked around as much as she dared without lifting her head, to see where she was.
“Okay, mom,” Travis said. “You’re okay.”
She dropped her head wearily again and inched onward. It seemed as if she had been doing it forever. She could not afford to feel her own panic or fear or terror, but Travis’ worry and impatience reached out to her. She imagined her love for him as a strong wire that she could draw herself along to him. Then her shoulder brushed something, and she collapsed flat on her belly, letting her right leg flop where it would. The pain nearly made her pass out.
“Mom!” Travis cried out.
“Stay,” she croaked. “Stay where you are.”
She could sense him, tensed at the edge of the hearth, ready to dive under the wires. She could hear his breathing, fast and frightened. She turned her head to try and see him. Above her the wires glinted in their deadly net. She could see the one she had touched from the corner of her eye, but she couldn’t see Travis.
The wind took a breath. Snow crunched under boots at the edge of her hearing.
“Mom!” Travis said again and there was agony in his voice. He had heard it, too. His boot heels scuttled on the hearth.
She reached out again, dragging herself forward as hard as she could. His hands touched the crown of her hair. Sobbing, she pulled herself toward them. His fingers tangled in her hair as they had casually twisted in it as an infant while he nursed. Then they were face to face, and he was dragging on her hair, as if he intended to pull her by it to safety. Together they rolled onto the hearth, and fetched up against the wood.
“Inside,” she whispered. “Give me your cap.”
He thrust it into her hands, and disappeared into the secret passage. She hauled herself up onto her one good leg against the side of the fireplace, and thence to the waiting firewood. Propping herself against it, she tossed the snow in handfuls from the caps, trying not so much to cover their passage, for there was not enough snow to do that, but to confuse it. She sprinkled the last of it on the hearth and over the wood in the fireplace, and tucked the caps inside her snowsuit. Painfully, she pulled off her right boot, then her left. Holding them under one arm, she crouched on her good knee and printed first one and then the other, this one with deliberate clumsiness, in the snow. It wasn’t until she had finished, she realized the right boot was bloody at the neck. Sudden inspiration moved her to tip the boot upside down on the logs. A few drops of blood spattered over the white birch. Then she tucked the boots under her arm again, hauled herself up, and sidled along the wall to the secret door. Travis pushed it open a little for her and reached out to take her boots. She grabbed the edge of it eagerly as another crutch, with the wall, and very carefully inserted herself through the opening. As soon as she was through, she pulled the door tightly to, and nudged Travis to go up the stone steps. She sank down on them, and lifted herself up as a child learning to go up and down the stairs does, on her bottom. They went up about mid-way and she reached out and touched Travis. He slipped down next to her and they hugged each other. She placed her fingers over his lips. He reached up and sealed her lips with his own pudgy fingers. They smelled like very old wood ash, from the hearth.
Rand put his back to the broad trunk of a hemlock and lit a cigarette with shaky fingers. From there, he could see the yard and house, but anyone inside was unlikely to be able to make him out through the veils of blowing snow and in tree shadow.
As Liv had, he noted at once the absence of vehicles and wood smoke, signs of habitation. It must be the old bitch had hiked or snowshoed in, and was sitting inside that house all bundled up, playing a waiting game. It looked that way.
He could see the shape of the body on the porch, looked long enough and hard enough to be sure it was Ricky, and that he was dead. Before he had died, he had broken in the front door, and it was still broken open, letting in the weather. One of the shutters of the window on the porch was open, most likely as a lookout. It had taken a little longer to discern Gordy, within a shroud of snow, at the bottom of the steps. That’s when he had decided there was enough snow being blown about to cover a little cigarette smoke
in the trees near the beach.
He didn’t give a goddamn about Gordy; he was no loss. Gordy had never been anything except a drooling burden since the day his father had fetched home Jeannie McKenzie Teed and Gordy in his ten-year-old Cadillac and announced Jeannie was his new wife. Arden Nighswander hadn’t mentioned Gordy, but there he was, already fat as a piglet, and twice as stupid. Gordy had never changed except to grow larger. His body was still somewhere in mid-adolescence, unfinished, sprouting sparse red hair in his pits and groin, but still with a boy’s penis, and boy’s scrotum, as his balls had not descended, even in his early twenties. Well, now they never would, and the world was less one idiot.
But he was angry over Ricky. Not because he cared much more for his younger brother than he had for Gordy; Ricky had been even more trouble. The world might have been better off if Ricky’s balls had stayed where it was safe and warm. Ricky had more bad habits than he could count, and no talent at all for getting away with any of ‘em. Rand had known that Ricky sometimes sodomized Gordy, and more often forced Gordy to fellate him, and at first been both mildly amused and mildly disgusted. Later it seemed to him that Ricky grew to like the arrangement too much. Like Ricky’s promiscuous pissing, what had once seemed mostly exuberant acting up showed signs of hardening into permanent and embarrassing tastes. Still, Ricky was his brother, for all they had fought and schemed against each other. When the old bitch murdered Ricky, she was spelling out a message for Rand, and he read it perfectly well: You next.
Rand finished his butt, feeling calmer and more purposeful. Crouching low, keeping his head down, he began to zigzag across the yard, from tree to bush wherever there was sufficient cover. A few yards from the house, he hunkered down again. He could almost reach Gordy. At this distance, he could see how the snow was disturbed along the foot of the porch. The snow had gentled it, but clearly, someone had been there. The steps had been used, and by more than one, more than just Ricky in his last moments, but he couldn’t tell now how many.
He circled around the house toward the orchard, and satisfied himself the woman and the boy had been there. The track was being buried fast, but it was there, two of them, the woman dragging. It actually cheered him to think they had reached the house and gained entrance. Now they were inside with the old bitch, and he could settle all of them at once.