Nelle reached up between his arms to claw at him again, but she was so weak. Her fingers traced down his intact cheek almost tenderly. She croaked out as much of his name as she could. “Mac . . .”
Confusion clouded his face. His clear eye focused and then rolled again. She felt his fingers loosen for a second. She took a gasp of air and said, “Please.” They tightened again. But it was enough. She’d gotten a breath. The cool air filling her throat and lungs brought the moment into clarity and a flood of things ran through her head as she tried to find the words that would buy her more life. A second. Half a minute. Anything, but not to die. She wanted to beg, but couldn’t think of one thing to say that would make him want to stop killing her. She wondered how many women he’d murdered. She thought about the one in his trunk. That was how they did it, wasn’t it? They started with their mothers and then girlfriends, wives, and finally strangers.
Which dead woman was she?
Not the last. Not while his wife was still alive.
He blinked rapidly as if he was trying to clear his vision. Clear his mind. His face shifted from disconcerted to sad to panicked, like a mask made of swiftly flowing water until it settled on hate again. The moment had passed. So had his confusion. He knew who she was. And he’d come to kill her.
She raked his good eye with the hand that had caressed his cheek a moment before and shoved with her nails. He shrieked and leaned away from her. She tried to claw at him again, but he knocked her arm away. She bucked up with her hips and he lost balance, pitching forward. He braced himself against the ground with an arm. She thrust her hand down between his legs. His jeans were stretched tight and she couldn’t get a good hold. But the grip she did get was enough. She squeezed his balls and he pitched over onto his side, moaning. She scrambled away from him. Her hand banged against something solid. She looked. It was a knife. Like something from a movie. Big and terrifying. Something that wasn’t made for cutting twine or opening packages from Amazon. This was a tool made to open people. A knife made for war.
She grabbed it and scrambled on her knees toward Roarke. He’d gotten to his knees and held out a hand as if he was trying to feel for where she’d gone. She reared up and plunged the knife into him as deep as she could, hitting him between the shoulder blades. It stuck in, but not as far as she imagined it would when she swung it. Again, the force vibrated painfully up into her arms like it had before with the tire iron. He howled and fell back onto his side.
This time she held on.
She pulled the blade out and stabbed him again in the thigh. His screams echoed through the trees. She crawled closer, climbing over his legs and shoving him onto his back, straddling him like a lover. She held the knife in both hands, raised it high above her head, and drove it down.
This time, it went in deep.
The sensation felt unreal. She wrenched it out of his body and thrust again, stabbing into his chest and neck and face. He felt less real with each blow that wasn’t answered with a scream, or a shout, or even a sigh. His last breath was a wet burble bubbling up through his ruined mouth.
After that, he wasn’t real anymore.
And she penetrated him again and again until she was too fatigued to pull the knife out from where it stuck a last time. Where he’d once had a mouth.
And then Nelle finally found her voice.
She screamed for the rest of his life.
61
Nelle stared at the body lying in the dirt as the sun dipped down behind the trees, the knife sticking out of its face like a trail marker.
SPECTRE PATH
⇩
Unlike the woman in the trunk of his car, the sight of Mack’s corpse didn’t make her want to look away. There was comfort in seeing it, knowing he wasn’t lurking in a shadow or a corner of her house, waiting. He was right here and hadn’t moved in maybe forty minutes or more. No longer a person, he was a thing. An it. A body and nothing more.
She’d made him that.
If she turned away, though, things seemed as if they might be less certain. She felt afraid not to stare at his corpse for fear it’d begin crawling after her, hungry and insatiable.
She didn’t know how long it had been since she’d stopped killing him. Long enough it was getting dark. And while he was undeniably dead, she wanted to be far away from him when the sun finally set. Before the deep darkness of wooded places embraced her and her imagination brought him back to life.
She tried to stand, but her ankle and heel wouldn’t bear her weight. She would have to crawl out of the woods. That was fine. Crawling was better than being carried out. She pushed up onto her hands and knees and began to make her way down the hill, trying to ignore the pain of rocks and roots pressing into her knees and cut palms. Mud and forest debris stuck to her bloody hands. When she got around to the side of the cabin, she stopped and looked back over her shoulder, certain that Malcolm Roarke would be standing there, looming over her with that big knife, his face restored to maniac fluid unpredictability. He wasn’t following. He was dead—still, she looked back to be certain. Something felt unfinished. She crawled back over to him and dug into his pants pockets, finding his keys and cell phone. Her phone was still in the cellar.
The cellar. Evan is in the cellar.
Fresh tears swelled in her eyes. She wiped them away angrily and pushed back at the impulse to cry. I won’t cry until I know. And I won’t do it next to you, motherfucker. She spit in what had been the dead man’s face and woke his phone to call for help. The signal bar was low, but she was not entirely out of range. She dialed and waited. After a moment, a woman answered. Her voice crackled and broke up, and Nelle only understood what she said because she knew what she’d been expecting the dispatcher to say. “Nine one one, what’s your emergency?” She tried to speak, but her throat was dry, and her voice failed. She coughed and tried again. The woman on the other end asked something, but Nelle couldn’t understand. The sound was too broken up. Then there was silence. She looked at the phone. The call had dropped. She dialed again and a different person—a man this time—answered. But the conversation was the same. She tried to speak, telling the dispatcher that she needed an ambulance to go to her house because her husband was hurt badly. When she finished begging for help, the silence told her, again, the call had dropped. She gritted her teeth and clenched her fists in frustration.
It’s just a call! One goddamn call! I just need this. One. Fucking. Thing.
She looked at the phone as if it was a collaborator with its owner. Frustrating her on purpose so she couldn’t bring help. That was ridiculous, but Nelle couldn’t help feeling like she wanted to smash the thing against a rock for its bond to a corpse when it should be helping her.
There’ll be a signal in the parking lot. There’s definitely a signal at home.
She stuffed Roarke’s phone and his keys into her waistband and crawled away.
Partway down the hillside, she found a broken branch on the side of the path that was both sturdy-looking and long enough to use as a makeshift crutch. Her hands and knees were aching and raw from moving over the rough terrain. She pulled the branch out of the brush, stuck the narrow end in the dirt and with a little struggle, got up onto her good foot. She’d been running on adrenaline and fear for an entire day, and now that the danger had passed, exhaustion was catching up to her. She couldn’t rest yet. Danger hadn’t passed. Though the active threat was gone (He is gone, right? she thought as she looked over her shoulder again), Evan needed help. She put her weight on the stick and tried a step. The jagged end was painful under her arm, but it was better than crawling. She could manage this. She was walking out of the woods, alive. She was walking home.
To Evan.
How long ago had she left him in the cellar? Minutes? Hours? She felt like she existed outside of time, as if it had stopped and she was living in the space of a single second that dragged out for eternity. No time. There was no time to lose. She tried to move faster, but had to be careful not to fall
and hurt herself worse than she already was. It would be no good to try to walk out of the woods and break her leg. So, it was slow going. Slow and steady might not win the race, but it was the only way to finish.
The sun continued to sink as she too went down. The shadows grew longer until they were swallowed by the monolithic darkness cast by the hillside. It grew darker, and colder, and the path became harder to see. And then she emerged from the trees at the trailhead behind the welcome center. Her first instinct was to return to it and try to make the call to the authorities she’d wanted to make there first of all. Instead, she turned toward the red car parked in the lot. Home was a mile away, and it would take her too long to get there on the path, especially in the state she was in.
Throwing her support branch in the back seat, she opened the car door and brushed as much of the shattered glass out into the gravel as she could before climbing in. She shut the door and pulled the keys out of her pants. She stared at the fob for a bit, wondering what to do with it. There was no key prong; it was just a remote. Near her thumb, the word PANIC, in red capital letters stared up at her like a command. Yes. Panic was what she felt she was about to do.
Not yet. Get home first.
The car had a keyless ignition. She searched for the start button on the dash. The button that opened the trunk reminded her of what was less than six feet behind her. Sticky red and still and soft like a lover. She found the ignition and pushed it. The engine rumbled to life. The way the whole thing vibrated around her, made her feel powerful in a way she wasn’t outside of it. It was a beast she controlled. It had to do what she said, take her anywhere she wanted to go, and, if she desired it, run down whatever stood in her way. Sitting in it, she felt protected and safe for the first time since early that morning.
It wasn’t her power, though. It was borrowed—stolen—and she couldn’t keep it.
She put the car in gear and pulled out of the lot toward home. It was hard to work the brake with her hurt foot, but she managed because she had to. It didn’t require as much from her as standing did. But, boy, did it hurt. She pushed through the pain and pulled onto the highway. The car roared and complained as she struggled to shift from first to second, and then to third. She hadn’t driven a stick shift in years, but it came back to her.
* * *
Before she realized it, she was slowing to turn into her driveway. Time had collapsed in the other direction—no longer an eternal single pinpoint second, but slipping away in leaps of minutes that passed like breaths. She pulled around to the side of the house beside the black Range Rover parked in front of their cars. Her guts cramped as she remembered the other men who’d come to kill her and her husband.
Nelle got out and hobbled on her crutch for the front door. She paused, her hand floating by the door handle.
Had either one of them survived? Were they waiting?
She pulled Roarke’s phone out of her pocket and looked at the bright display: four bars. As good a signal as they ever got in their house. She thought about hitting redial. Speaking to the 911 dispatcher again, telling whoever answered that her husband needed an ambulance. They both needed help. She hesitated.
She limped around the side of the house toward the back. When she rounded the corner, she saw the red bulkhead door sticking up, dark as dried blood, a faint light spilling out from inside. The thought of going down into the cellar was paralytic. Roarke wasn’t down there, she reminded herself. She’d left him in the woods.
But the other two.
Dead. She’d killed one of them. Watched him die. And heard the other one get shot.
I heard Roarke get shot too. Saw his face.
Her panic told her to leave, call the police and let them deal with it.
Evan was in the cellar. He needed help. He needed her.
Dead. Those men are dead. And Evan is alive, and he needs help.
She had to go down into the dark and be with her husband. She had to find him and hold him while help came. She had to be strong, because he needed her and she needed him every bit as much, and this was what they did. They leaned on each other in difficult times because there wasn’t anyone else in their lives who held them as well.
She stumbled around the steel doors to the lip of the concrete steps and sat on the top one, descending into the dark hole on her behind, like a child, repeating to herself, “Please be alive. Please, please be alive.” Trying to become strong, but feeling as fragile as glass right before it breaks.
XIII
◆
The Cellar
No
Nonononononononono
Oh please please please no, she whispered
but no one answered
XIV
◆
Costs
63
FIFTEEN WEEKS AFTER CLOSING
Tony gave Nelle a slight nod, and she pushed the button that sent the casket gliding slowly into the crematory retort. She watched a flame ignite underneath as the bottom of the box met the heat inside, and then a brighter flash when the lacquer caught. The feeling of heat on her face made her want to blink and look away, but she kept her eyes open and trained on the flames. She watched the casket slide the rest of the way in and the steel door come sliding down slowly behind it, cutting her off from the heat and her husband’s remains. Evan would have scoffed at the extravagance of the casket she’d picked out. He’d have said, “Why pay for something like that? I’ll never know I’m in it.” But she knew. She wanted him to have something nice. An extravagance that in their past lives they never would’ve been able to afford. Like a nice car. Or a house. Tony had tried to tell her she didn’t have to pay for it, but she didn’t want to take advantage of him after he’d been so good to her the last few weeks. And she wanted to do this thing. She needed to buy this thing. In the end, Tony agreed to charge her his wholesale cost, but no more. She paid him and was pretty sure he just turned around and sent the money to some charity. That was Tony Tremblay. He was a good man.
Evan had been a good man. He was kind and funny and a good lover. And if she’d ever felt a feeling, he knew what it was just by looking at her. He got her in a way no one else she’d ever met had. She’d wanted to have children with him, and he was excited to be a father someday. But they hadn’t worked that out yet. There was always time, they’d said. But there wasn’t always time. There was only the time you had and not a second longer, no matter how much you wanted there to be more.
“Let me take care of the rest,” Tony said. He put a light hand on her arm. It was meant to be reassuring. She let him touch her, though the feeling of another person’s hand on her made her stomach tense and her breath quicken just a little. A little dose of adrenaline coursed through her, and she wanted to jerk her arm away and take a step—or a hundred—back. She stood there and tried not to show how terrified just a little innocent touch made her feel.
She thought about her friends waiting in the lobby. Their friends. They’d wanted to come into the crematory “witnessing room” with her, offering their strength to buttress her own, but Nelle asked them to wait outside. Part of it was that she felt that this moment was hers; she wanted it for herself. A quiet moment to say goodbye to her husband. Part of it was guilt. Guilt over his death. Guilt over everything.
If she and Evan hadn’t moved out to the suburbs. If she’d never met him in the first place. If she’d moved out of state after high school and traveled like she’d dreamt of doing, how differently would things have turned out for everyone? Evan would be alive; that much was certain.
If she and Evan hadn’t bought the house, someone else would’ve, and they’d be burning their dead. Perhaps there would be even more funerals to attend than only one. Of course, there were more than one. The woman from the courthouse and her daughter. Samantha’s parents, the woman in the trunk, Siobhan. They were dead too. But they weren’t her dead. She hadn’t killed them. Still, there was a guilty voice in her heart that told her all the choices she’d made in her life had
brought her to this moment, and all those people who’d gotten hurt had been pulled along in her wake.
Whether or not it was rational, it was in her. In those boxes of philosophy notes in the cellar—in her essays on Simone de Beauvoir. “I am the very face of that misery . . .” She was responsible. For everything. Even if she wasn’t.
Evan too, though he was gone.
If they hadn’t stolen the money . . .
She thought about the men she’d fed into this very crematory oven. She felt less guilt for what she’d done to them. They got what they deserved.
She’d dragged their bodies out to the shed and locked them in. It had been so hard; they were so heavy and she’d been hurt and tired, but she’d done it. She cleaned up the mess where the one had been shot upstairs. Wiped Roarke’s blood off the leather sofa and the hardwood floors. Picking up after the one in the cellar had been easier. She’d given him a heart attack. No blood. She found their guns and stuck them in the back of the Range Rover and then parked that in the neighborhood across the highway before ambling home to call for help.
The dispatcher on the phone had exuded a practiced composure as he spoke that upset her. She was afraid and panicked because the world had split apart and she was barely hanging on, dangling over an abyss, and she wanted him to be upset along with her too. But the man on the telephone was calm. He told her in his neutral voice, help was on the way. He told her to stay strong. Stay. A barking laugh had escaped her mouth at that, like a soul departing. How do you remain something that you never were to begin with?
Closing Costs Page 27