Closing Costs

by Bracken MacLeod

  Why had they moved so far away? Why had they picked a house on the outskirts of town? If they were in the city, she could stand in the road and scream for help, and a hundred people passing by would all hear her. If she screamed, “Fire,” they might even come to her aid. Their first few nights in the house, they’d slept poorly because there were no sirens in the distance like there were in the city. Now, in Juanita’s back yard, she realized that those sirens were the sound of people rushing to someone’s rescue. Fire engines responding to put out a blaze. Ambulances speeding to get someone to the hospital and lifesaving care.

  The police coming to stop a man with a gun.

  A light breeze rustled the trees behind her. She looked at the reservation land and couldn’t help feeling like a character in a fairy tale. Not a modern bowdlerized one—an ancient version, where the red-hooded girl dies in the woods as a cautionary fable to teach children to listen to their parents, not to stray from the path. She was Red Hood in this tale. And the wolf was coming. But what else was there to do? Where else to run?

  The Scout lodge at the trailhead. It’ll have a landline. With all those kids there in the summer, they have to have a reliable way to call for help if one of them gets hurt. The path leads there. Disappearing in the trees seemed better also than trying to hide in a house she couldn’t lock behind her once she broke in. It’d be better to disappear fast. The trees, though still bare, offered cover. She could hide. She could find a branch or a stone to swing. She could creep and eventually sneak until she found another back yard and someone at home to beg for help. Or the welcome center.

  Nelle rose up and abandoned the house for the woods.

  At the back of the Darnielles’ yard was a low New England rock wall separating their property from the Cabot Woods behind it. She climbed over and headed for the less passable bramble of bushes and deadfall branches beyond, piled there to discourage wanderers on the path from straying into private yards. As she scrambled over, the pile shifted and fell out from under her. She tumbled down. Noise surrounded her, and she let out a racking sob of frustration. Everything she tried was a failure. She wanted to quit. Let the clown-faced piece of shit find her. A numbness settled over her. Every time she thought she’d experienced the worst, there was something even more terrible waiting right behind it. There was pain she hadn’t yet even begun to fathom, the little nagging voice in the back of her mind insisted.

  Run, a different voice told her.

  She pushed on over the rough barrier into the woods beyond. The low brush resisted her passage, catching and pulling at her hair and clothes. She kept going. Every movement seemed to make noise; leaves and twigs underfoot rustled and snapped like Lunar New Year crackers in her ears. She heard a truck pass by on the highway and regretted the decision to run for the trees instead of the road. But what if and if only were as distant as Jupiter and Saturn. This was the way she’d chosen. The only direction to go was forward. She pushed ahead harder, ignoring the noises she made and trying to put distance between herself and the man in her house.

  A few yards farther, she caught sight of movement and stopped, ducking behind a thick tree trunk to hide. Roarke emerged from the bulkhead opening. He climbed the steps deliberately, carefully, like a man unconcerned that he needed to defend himself.

  Nelle’s knees felt weak, so she dug her fingers into the bark of the tree to hold on. From the distance, she could see his red face, bloodied and torn, and felt a small swell of satisfaction at someone having hurt him, even if it wasn’t her. He wasn’t an immortal from a slasher movie that couldn’t be stopped. He was a man.

  She could kill a man.

  She wanted to kill a man.

  She wanted to kill him.

  Nelle stayed still and shrank further behind the tree as he scanned the far end of the yard. Her breath stilled as he seemed to look right at her. Then his gaze tracked on past. She didn’t let the breath out, but held it, afraid that the sound of her exhalation would draw his attention again. She knew, as had been true all along, he held all the power she lacked.

  Who am I fooling? I’m not killing anybody.

  Roarke looked to his left at the Darnielles’ house. He moved so suddenly Nelle’s heart skipped. He staggered around the side of the house toward the neighbors’. He had to have heard her trying to break the window. He was following her there, not into the woods. She watched him move quickly toward the end of the hedgerow. If he wasn’t going to get on his belly and crawl under like she had, he had to turn his back on her and go the long way around. All of a sudden, she had time. He was going the other way.

  The breath held in her lungs hurt, and she wanted to let it out—sigh with relief. As soon as she did, though, she’d take a great, noisy gasp in, and that would be the same as calling out to him.

  She mentally urged him on. Go. Go! Chase me that way. GO! He stopped and looked over his shoulder at the forest edge again, and Nelle pressed against the tree and tried to stay still. She trembled, and it felt like being naked. The tree trunk could only hide so much. But he didn’t come closer. He resumed his walk toward the driveway.

  Nelle held her breath and slipped away. This was her head start—the only one she’d get. She took it.

  54

  Mack felt dizzy and half blind, having emerged from the cellar into the daylight. His head felt tight, and the pressure seemed to grow once confronted by the sun, disconcerting him even more. He tried to focus, clear his mind, and center his thoughts, but it took effort. The pain and whatever else was happening in his head addled his brain. He reached up and felt at his cheek where his wounds began. The small hole under the eye that wasn’t focusing. His fingers were cold, and a light touch felt good. But when he pressed down a little harder, his head swam and the world turned gray, an instant fog falling over him. He moved his hand around to his cheek, or what remained of it. An image of someone standing next to a blackened, burnt tree with a scorched hat and a gormless smile on his face popped into his head. I was struck by lightning and lived to tell the tale. A tornado threw me a mile away, and I’m here to talk about it. It exploded, and I was the sole survivor. He took a deep breath and felt the air rush over the aching broken stubs of what used to be his molars and out through his ruined cheek. I got shot in the fucking face. But I survived. It didn’t feel like a victory. What hadn’t killed him hadn’t exactly made him stronger.

  He hadn’t counted on anyone else showing up with their own score to settle. He remembered wondering where a couple like this got the money to put down the deposit they had, but he’d figured they had to be spoiled shits like Sam. Rich brats with a trust fund from Mommy and Daddy that meant they could look like rejects from The Addams Family and not have to worry how they were going to be able to make a living. But now he knew. They weren’t like her. They’d stolen the money from bad men who’d come howling. Those men tried to kill him, even though he hadn’t done a thing to them. Still, they were dead now, and he was the one still breathing. And that was something. Those Russian thugs couldn’t stop him, and neither could Sam or the Pereiras or fucking anybody. Nothing would stop him.

  A throb of pain made his stomach lurch, and the fog descended again. Why was he standing out in the sun when he had things to finish inside? The bitch. What was her name again? Evelyn or something. No. Eleonora. She got out. She was out and on the run. Where?

  He remembered hearing the sound of the window cracking next door. She was at the neighbors’. He hadn’t planned on her getting loose. But it didn’t matter. Those two gutless shits next door wouldn’t have a thing she could use to hurt him. He talked to Colin once, and the guy was a snowflake. Had one of those HATE HAS NO HOME HERE signs in his yard like he wanted to prove to the neighborhood how special and tolerant he was. What’d they call it? Virtue signing or something. She might as well come at him armed with dessert forks or some pine cones in a decorative bowl; there wasn’t anything she could find out in plain sight that could hurt him. Kitchen knives or fireplace tools at bes
t. Like that would touch him; he’d been shot in the fucking face and was still on his feet. He’d take her out. He’d take down as many of the bitches as he could on his way out. Sam, the one from the courthouse, Siobhan. She thought he was stupid too, but she learned different. Women were like that. Faithless. That was the word Sam used. Like she was any better. Like she hadn’t had her new guy lined up ready to go. They both thought he was stupid, but Siobhan found out how smart he was. It was a kick to see when it dawned on her face that she’d had him figured all wrong. By then it was too late to make amends. He made her pay for fucking up what was his and telling his wife what she’d done.

  They’d all pay.

  He walked around the hedgerow toward the neighbors’ house. His heart beat hard, and he wanted to rush in after Eleonora, knock her down, and bash her face in with his boot heel like he had her cuck husband. But not so bad she couldn’t open her eyes and see him before he snuffed her. He wasn’t sure he wouldn’t let his enthusiasm get the better of him, but the pain in his head made him move quietly, carefully. He controlled himself and listened, trying to hear if she was still in the yard or had made it inside. Nothing. He’d show everyone what he thought of them. And even though he couldn’t finish things the way he wanted, when Sam turned on the news tonight, she’d see what he’d done. She’d know, deep down, it was her fault. She’d set this all in motion. She was responsible for all of it.

  He’d show them all.

  First, this one.

  XII

  ◆

  The Woods

  55

  Each painful step reminded Nelle of the gash in her heel. Her wound was poorly dressed, and the improvised bandage was coming looser with each stride. She couldn’t think about it, though. She had to move. Trying to take it easy on her right foot, she lurched unevenly along the path. Her left shoulder ached badly also, so she cradled her elbow in her other hand, trying to take some of the stress off of it as well. The contorted stagger that accommodated her wounds made her hip and back sore, but she loped along as best she could, fighting against the growing assembly of pains within her.

  The forest debris underfoot was mostly smooth, but being barefoot made the going slower. The last thing she needed was to step badly on a jagged rock or a broken branch. She couldn’t afford to twist her ankle slipping off of a slick stone or to break something splaying out on the path like she had in the yard. She took each step as quickly as she dared, careful not to fall. After a few yards, she seemed to find, if not a stride, then an uneven gait that was fast enough. And like that, she ran.

  Other times she’d hiked the path, she’d looked for houses visible through the trees. But theirs was the last house a mile or more in this direction until the parking lot and trailhead for the reservation and the big welcome center building. Summer camp season hadn’t started, and the buildings had been closed up. Everything would be locked. But it was all rustic construction, no tempered or even diamond-wired glass. She remembered all the windows in the main building being clear panes. She hadn’t inspected anything closely on her casual hikes, but figured a big rock would get her in almost any building she wanted.

  Across the highway and maybe a half mile farther up the road from the reservation parking lot was the Ripton Animal Hospital. It was a local clinic, nothing as big as Angell Memorial in Boston, but small as it was, it was still a place where people worked. They have to be open—sick pets don’t take Saturdays off. Someone there can help. Even farther beyond that was town and open-all-year civilization like shops and package stores and restaurants. If she had to make that run, maybe someone driving by would see a bleeding, half-dressed woman in her pajamas running along the side of the road and would stop. I’d be the sort of thing that would make a person pull over and at least ask if everything was all right, wouldn’t I? First, before she made a mad dash along the highway toward town, she decided to try the welcome center. If that wasn’t fruitful, then the vet hospital.

  She pushed away the thoughts of what would happen when she called for help and they found a pair of dead mobsters in her house. That didn’t matter. She’d take all the heat that came with calling the police as long as it meant getting Evan help. Getting him to a hospital. She’d happily go to prison to save his life.

  The woodland path that had once seemed so pretty and peaceful on a quiet day took on a new quality now—darker, colder, more confining, growing ever more haunted with each step, like a fairy-tale wood after the children have run out of bread crumbs, or those places where people are drawn to kill themselves like in Japan or Brattle, Washington. It had never seemed like that before. She’d loved this place. She loved running here so much more than in the city, with its bus exhaust and catcalls. But now she was hungry and dehydrated, disoriented, exhausted, and despairing.

  Her pace slowed. Her breath was becoming harder to catch, and a fresh stitch in her side grew. Her step faltered. She stumbled. I can rest for a minute. Just a minute, and then back up again. She thought about Evan lying on the cellar floor. Badly wounded—but only wounded—waiting for help to come. He was waiting for her to save him, and every second delayed was more blood lost, a breath closer to his last. If he’s still breathing, that negative voice nagged. It taunted her, telling her that she was a widow at thirty-four—a tragedy in motion, running toward dinners alone in an empty house with a single glass of wine and a phone that wouldn’t ring because no one would know how to talk to her anymore.

  She slowed more until she was walking. Her first steps in the world truly alone were these.

  And she wept.

  56

  Mack walked through the front door he’d jimmied open the night before like he had a key. The house was quiet as he stalked through looking for a sign where the bitch was hiding. Nothing gave her up. Not a bloody footprint or a single thing out of place. It made him feel nervous. He’d heard her smash the window; she had to be there. He wandered into the dining room, waiting for her to leap out at him with a butcher knife. But she didn’t. All the knives in the kitchen were where they’d been the night before when he made himself dinner.

  One of the glass doors in the dining room was badly cracked, but not shattered. It stood like a mosaic of clear tiles. He stepped over to the door. The latch was locked and the dowel blocking the door from sliding in the floor track was still in place. Outside, the brick she’d thrown against the door lay abandoned the grass. He smiled at the realization that she couldn’t break a glass door with a square foot of patio masonry. Weak bitch.

  If she wasn’t in the house, where had she gone? He hadn’t seen any trace of her out front. He looked around the patio at the mess of stains she’d left behind, blood browning in the sun. Her tracks led to the patio ledge and the gap from where she’d plucked the brick out. They led back to the doors and then away again, into the grass, where they disappeared. Because he hadn’t seen her footprints in the driveway heading toward the road, he’d assumed she’d gotten in, called the cops, and shortened the time he had left. Except she hadn’t gotten in. She’d run away. Toward the forest, it looked like.

  He smiled again. She was trying to escape through the woods barefoot and bleeding. Even sticking to the hiking trails, it was going to be slow going, and she wasn’t running toward anywhere someone could come find her before he could catch up. Stupid cow.

  He was a hunter; she was as good as dead.

  Mack walked back into the Darnielles’ bedroom, pulled out the duffel bag he’d stuffed under their bed, and dropped it on the mattress. He unzipped it and laid out the AR-15 and the extended magazines he’d bought up in New Hampshire. He set aside the improvised explosives he’d intended to plant on the sides of the Pereiras’ driveway. Those were a special thing for the cops. He reached in and removed the KA-BAR knife he’d split Siobhan open with and had intended to use on Sam. It felt good in his hand. With this weapon, he could make this bitch look at him with terror. No disgust. No disappointment. Just pure terror. That was what made him feel best of all. Al
ive. Powerful. Real.

  With trembling hands, he clipped the knife sheath onto his belt at his side and walked out of the bedroom. On the way, he stopped in the bathroom and took a look in the mirror. His face was a ruin. He looked like a monster. Something out of a zombie movie. The scratches Eleonora had given him under his eye were barely noticeable compared to what the bullet had done to his cheek, but they were there. He could see them. He tried to calm his breath, let his heartbeat slow, but it seemed like every second that passed, he just got a little more excited. His needle was in the red. He was angry and anxious and even a little giddy at the thought of feeling the KA-BAR sliding inside another woman.

  He was thirsty. He poured himself a glass of water and tried to drink. The pain of cold water hitting his raw broken teeth and ripped cheek was enough to send him out of the world. He barely heard the clatter of the plastic cup in the sink as he staggered back and hit the bathroom door. He slid down to the floor and disappeared into the dark for a moment. He had no idea for how long. He wasn’t clear about much of anything except his pain. That and the need to get after the girl before she got away.

  He stood and waited for his head to clear. The room spun once and he thought he might fall again. Then it settled and he kept his feet under him. He left the bathroom, walked through the kitchen, unlocked the back door and threw the dowel away. The door slid open easy, like a dream.

  They were hard to see, but once he found the first of her bloody footprints in the grass, it wasn’t too hard to find the next. And the next. Her blood was drying and turning brown, and that meant he’d lose her trail eventually in the dirt along the trail, but as long as he got off in the right direction, Mack felt confident he could catch up with her. Sure, she had a head start. Time was hers, but he had all the other advantages. He felt at his side for the KA-BAR knife. It was where it belonged. He pressed on.