Sick Puppy (Maggie #2)

by Pamela Fagan Hutchins

  “Michele? Rashidi?” she calls. They aren’t due home until after midnight. Michele had offered to come home during their call earlier, but the search would have been over before she made it back. It was pointless. Maggie had thanked her and declined. She looks at the time on her phone. Ten thirty.

  No answer. Her skin prickles. She’s being paranoid, though. The dogs would be barking if someone is in the house. Snap out of it, Maggie.

  She gets up. In the bathroom, she splashes cold water on her face. She isn’t drunk anymore, although she wishes she was still under the influence of something to take the edge off. Anything to escape this feeling that she’s trapped in a garbage barge, lost at sea. It’s been years since she’s craved coke, but if there were lines in front of her now, she’d snort them and damn the consequences. She stares into the mirror. The chance for a relationship with Hank is ruined. Gary is dead. Her store is burned to ashes. Law enforcement is harassing her for it. What does she have to stay clean for anymore?

  She walks back to bed in the dark and huddles under the covers, replaying the last few minutes. All those things that are wrong—she’s convinced they aren’t what woke her up. She thinks harder. Before the search team came, she was researching Leslie. She hadn’t found much. But it’s Leslie, she realizes. Leslie is what woke her. She missed something. She has to go back over her search results. Her subconscious is screaming that there’s an answer in there that she skipped over the first time.

  She doesn’t bother turning on the bedroom light, just flops on her tummy and gropes for her laptop. When she doesn’t find the hard plastic rectangle amidst the bedding, she remembers Boland took it.

  “Shit!”

  She furrows her face, concentrating. What is it about Leslie that woke her up? She hadn’t thought she’d found anything earlier. Now she’s convinced she did, if only she could put her finger on it.

  Louise barks at her.

  “Keep your pants on.”

  Maggie opens the door and Louise follows her out, the dog circling Maggie’s legs all the way to the living room. “Need to go out, girl?”

  Gertrude pads up, dreadlocks swinging.

  “Girls, plural. Sorry, Gertrude.” She lets them out the back door, gets herself a glass of water and a handful of grapes, then returns to the door. She opens it to let the dogs back in, but they’re not there. “Louise. Gertrude. Come.”

  She waits on them a moment, remembering the woman she’d seen in the backyard that weekend. Her mind plays a funny slideshow of images. The woman in the backyard. The woman across the road from Flown the Coop the night of the fire. The pale braided woman with the dark eyes she’d seen in the rocking chair.

  “Son of a bitch.”

  The woman she’s picturing in her mind is the spitting image of the pictures she’d found when she ran a search using Leslie’s PayPal email account. Enough to be her sister. Goose bumps rise on her skin. It makes no sense. But one thing is clear. Maggie can’t wait for morning to look for answers. She needs to know Leslie is out of her house, right now.

  And if she’s not, she has a whole lot of explaining to do, starting with the identity of the pale, braided woman.

  Thirty-Four

  On her way out the door, Maggie grabs the shotgun Michele keeps there on two wooden pegs. It’s for scaring off whatever needs scaring. Coyotes, bobcats, prowlers. The gun is only a 20-gauge, but it makes a powerful noise. If Leslie’s still at Maggie’s house, Maggie can blast a few shots outside the bedroom window. Maybe it will scare Leslie off like it does the varmints.

  Shotgun under one arm and keys in the other hand, Maggie runs to the truck. She opens the truck door, and Louise jumps in first, without permission. She hadn’t even known the dog followed her out the door. Putting her back in the house will take too long, so she lets it slide. She’ll make her stay in the truck when she gets to her house. Maggie lays the long gun on the floorboard, business end pointing toward the passenger-side door. Louise settles on the seat above it.

  Maggie peels out of the driveway and onto the road, taking the turns like Bess is on rails. The shotgun slides and bangs into the passenger door. To have lived in Texas all her life, nearly, and not have a gun rack behind her seat—it feels unpatriotic. And dangerous. She wishes she had one now.

  She drives by an oil derrick lit up like a Christmas tree. A flare burns pressure off an oil well across the road. She hits a patch of old pavement on the mostly gone-back-to-dirt road as she takes another curve. The tires squeal. She slows down. All she needs now is a wreck and the delay and publicity of a DWI. But she’s too jacked to drive the speed limit. There’s no calming her down, even with the cooling night air blowing in the open windows, not after the night she’s had. The day. The week. The month. The life.

  Maggie reaches her house in record time, ten minutes door to door from Michele’s. Leslie’s car is still there, parked partially out of sight from the road behind a copse of trees, but in front of the house. Light spills out two of the windows.

  “Leaving tonight, huh? Doesn’t look like it.”

  Louise bobs her head, almost like she’s nodding.

  The Coop rubble is no longer lit up for crime scene technicians, but Maggie’s headlights illuminate the yellow tape barricade as she pulls into the parking area. She skirts it and drives over the lawn, like Leslie must have. When she’s close, she angles Bess toward the house, pointing the high beams through the front door and down the central hall.

  “Take that, squatter.”

  Now that she knows Leslie hasn’t left town yet, all thoughts of the pale, braided woman she’s seen in real life, dreams, and online fly out the window. Maggie rolls the window down halfway, tucks the shotgun under her arm, and holds Louise at bay while she shuts the truck door. Marching toward the front of the house, she calls, “Stay,” over her shoulder.

  Louise howls in her best sad-coyote imitation, but Maggie ignores her.

  She bangs on the front door of her house. She’s not surprised when there’s no answer, but Leslie has to be there. Not just because of her car, but because the chances of her still being at Charlotte’s at eleven o’clock on a Monday night are nil.

  Maggie isn’t leaving without satisfaction.

  She walks around the house. At the master bedroom window, she shouts, “I know you can hear me, Leslie. I’ve spent the evening getting to know you online.”

  Maggie pauses, listening. She hears a moan. A sex moan. Who would have sex with Leslie? She’s attractive, but such a robot. And a bona fide head case.

  Maggie yells again. “You hide online behind pictures of someone who isn’t even you.”

  This time she hears a muffled yell, then an impact and a grunt. It gets her attention. If that’s sex, it’s not the good kind.

  “Leslie? Are you okay in there?”

  She presses her face to the window, her chin above the ledge. There’s a little sliver not covered by the curtains, big enough to see into her bedroom. It’s a small room. All the rooms in her old farm cottage are little. Her queen-size four-poster bed takes up most of the space, leaving just enough room for a rustic bedside table, a tall antique dresser, and a matching dressing table with a gilded mirror. Her favorite Gidget painting, Front Porch Pickin’, hangs over the head of the bed. A large urn on the dresser usually holds fresh flowers. Now, dead sunflower heads loll over its side. She’d left them for Leslie before her drive to Wyoming. Her white duvet is in a heap on the floor. The overhead fixture is out, but a lamp she’d made from an old milk jug sheds light on two people on the bed. She almost pulls back, the thought of Leslie mid-coitus giving her a wave of nausea. But she can’t force herself to look away.

  Feeling like a voyeur, she realizes what she sees. Someone is tied to the four posts, spread-eagle, naked. Not Leslie. A man. Leslie crawls over to him and throws a leg astride his hips. She has a cigarette in her mouth, the end a glowing red.

  What the hell?

  Maggie shouts, “Fine. Don’t answer. I’ll see you
tomorrow morning, Leslie, with the deputy here to arrest you. Goodnight, bitch.”

  She stomps her feet on the ground, hard, then softer, then softer still, but doesn’t leave. She keeps her eyes on Leslie through the slit in the curtains. Let the woman think she’s given up. She isn’t going anywhere.

  Leslie takes a drag on the cigarette then stubs it out on the man’s chest. He barely reacts save for a light moan into a gag in his mouth. Leslie tosses the butt away, stands up, and pours the contents of a bottle of Balcones all over him. Maggie’s skin crawls. Leslie sets the bottle upright on the bedside table. Then she walks out, leaving the man tied there, alone.

  Bess’s headlights are still pointing into the house. Maggie can’t get away much longer with the charade that she’s given up and left. She hoists herself onto the window sill, struggling to get a better look at the guy, wondering if she should call 911. Then she sees his face.

  Horror washes over her.

  It’s Hank. Her Hank, and he’s tied up in her bed, covered in Balcones, and this isn’t sex, good or bad. It’s some awful other thing that she doesn’t have time to understand.

  She bashes one of the window panes out with the butt of the shotgun. As fast as she can, she batters the wood frame to bits and the other panes with it. She lowers the gun inside the window, drops it to the floor, then pulls herself in after it. Her landing is rough, the glass digging sharply in her palms. She rolls onto her knees beside the shotgun and looks up. The first thing she sees is Leslie, back in the room on the other side of the bed from her, setting down a gas can and lighter.

  The second thing she sees is Hank, and once she does, he is all she sees. Up close, his predicament is even worse than she’d thought from outside. His mouth is gagged with a blue-and-white scarf. Each wrist and ankle is held fast in a noose that holds him fully extended. The material doesn’t look like rope. More like a plastic-encased steel cable. He’s naked, like she thought. His hair is matted and dark with sweat.

  As her inspection crosses his face, he opens his eyes. I’ll get you out of here. Hang on, Hank. She imagines the two of them under a big Wyoming sky, riding side by side on a mountainside, and tries to send the image to him, but his eyes flutter closed again.

  Leslie’s voice brings her back. “This will be perfect. Murder-suicide. The finale to the drama. Your Wyoming lover dumped you, he shows up in Texas to tell you once and for all to stay out of his life, you drug him like you did Gary, tie him to your bed, and set the house on fire for revenge, then, overcome by grief, you shoot yourself as you’re going up in flames with him.”

  Maggie looks up at Leslie and into the short, lethal barrel of a steel gray handgun. She feels a flash of recognition. Why does she always feel like she knows this crazy woman, not like knows her from the present, but from sometime before?

  Her voice sounds less like C-3PO now. “Throw the gun out the window. NOW.”

  “What did you give him?”

  “A roofie. I’m glad I had one left, since it was a lucky surprise he showed up here asking for you. I offered him a beer while he waited on my dear, sweet friend Maggie to get home. Easy as pie to crush a roofie up and watch him guzzle it down with Shiner Bock.”

  Maggie puts her hands on the shotgun.

  “Good girl. Out the window.”

  Leslie’s chilling voice rings in her ears, but Maggie doesn’t move. She’s been in this moment before. In Wyoming. Hank shot. Bleeding on the ground. No one else around. The moment when she realized she had to run for help.

  “Don’t do anything stupid, Maggie.”

  She’d abandoned the gun then, and she’d figured out how to save him. There’s no alternative now, just like there hadn’t been one then. She’ll come up with something to get them out of this mess. She has to. Her refusal to take shit or ever give up are all she has.

  She climbs to her feet, glass digging into her knees, fingers tight around the shotgun. She grimaces. Her left palm stings like a scorpion bite, a memory from a childhood playing in the woods in these parts.

  “Easy,” Leslie warns her.

  Moving slow and calm, Maggie tosses the shotgun through the busted-out window. It thuds on dry grass and dirt below. Blood trickles down her wrists. She rotates toward Leslie, holding her hands shoulder high. “Okay?”

  With her head level and still, Maggie shifts her weight through her hip and drags the other foot forward without lifting it.

  “Keep your hands up.”

  Maggie doesn’t drop them. “So, who are you, anyway?” She repeats the process with the other hip and foot, gaining a few precious inches toward Leslie.

  “Fuck off.”

  Other hip. Other foot. “Who are you?”

  “The woman who has Hank’s life in her hands.”

  Hip. Foot. “You’re not Leslie DeWitt.”

  “Yeah. And I guess you’re not as much smarter than the rest of the world as you always thought you were, because I told you that earlier.”

  Maggie searches the room for a weapon. Something to stab with? A screwdriver. A knife. A pen. Something to use as a club—flashlight, wrench, glass bottle. All are normal items in her life, but tonight, she has none of them in her room. Then, like a gift from above, she realizes the sting in her palm is a piece of embedded glass. A long one. She folds her fingers over and tries to grasp it. The glass is too short to lodge between her fingers or to curl her fingers around.

  “You don’t look like your picture online.” She brings her hands together, slowly. “Ouch,” she says.

  “I said keep your hands up.”

  “Glass. Give me a second.” She digs the glass out and acts like she’s discarding it, but keeps the shard between the fingers of her right hand. She raises her hands again. “You’re younger. You have lighter eyes.” Maggie sneaks a look at Hank. His eyes open, then roll back in his head again. She repeats her hip-foot sequence.

  “Stop,” Leslie barks. “No closer.”

  “I’m stopped.”

  Suddenly Leslie bends at the waist, clutching at her gut. Her back heaves. Maggie thinks she’s having some kind of medical episode, until Leslie straightens. Tears are running down her cheeks. She’s laughing.

  “If you haven’t figured out who I am, you deserve this even more than I thought.”

  “Figured what out?”

  “You hurt everyone in your life, you know it? You never give a shit what happens to the little people. And we’re all little people to you.”

  “I knew you? Before this week?”

  “Duh.”

  “Your eyes are familiar.”

  Leslie grins. It’s pure mockery. She pretends to play keyboard, then brings the barrel of the gun to her mouth like a microphone. She breaks into Martina McBride’s “Independence Day” in perfect pitch. She stops suddenly. “We shared a room for two months on the road. You’d think you’d at least remember that.”

  The blood runs from Maggie’s face, and it’s like her life draining out of her. She remembers the night in Cheyenne like it was yesterday. Getting into an argument with her guitarist, Davo. Refusing to go back onstage. Standing outside the bar, talking to Hank. Hearing Davo introduce the next song, “Independence Day.” And the woman who sang it. Maggie’s backup singer. Why hadn’t she seen it sooner? The scars, sure, the scars, the age and weight, different hair, but she should have recognized Celinda Simone, even if she last saw her fifteen years before in a van in Wheatland, Wyoming, before her band drove away to an accident that killed all of them, except one. “Celinda.”

  Celinda slow claps.

  “You’re so different. Not just how you look.”

  “I am different. I’m not a doormat anymore.”

  Maggie bites the inside of her lip. Celinda had been a doormat. She let Davo force her to the mic in Maggie’s place, when Celinda wasn’t ready to front the band. She slept with Chris, their drummer, who turned around and took up with Hank’s ex right in front of her, and Celinda didn’t do a thing about it.

&nb
sp; But through all of that, Maggie had never once asked Celinda if she was okay. Maggie had just latched onto Hank and rode off into the sunset, however brief the ride was.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “The old me died in the crash, along with my face. This?” She vogues like Madonna around her face. “This is a lot of plastic surgery later. You didn’t make it to any of the funerals. Flowers and cards don’t get you off the hook with me, not when you shot to the top by climbing on our backs.”

  “I, uh, I’m—”

  “How many people like me are there, Maggie, hmm? In your life? How many people did you use up and throw out?”

  Maggie stares at her. Names rush through her mind. Not just Celinda, Chris, Davo, and Brent. Her manager, Randy. Her mom, whose heart she’d broken. Rudy, a fan she’d blown off, who’d come back to haunt her in Wyoming because of how she’d treated him. Her dad. Yes, even her dad. Her mouth moves, but she doesn’t say anything.

  Hank’s voice croaks, and both women whip their heads toward him. His scarf gag is chewed partly in half and hanging below his mouth on one side. His voice slurs, the words coming between long pauses. “It’s my fault. I pushed her away from you guys. Then I dumped her. She was depressed.”

  Maggie can’t make sense of what he’s saying. That’s not how she remembers it. She’d thought he had loved her. Then, very slowly, very deliberately, Hank closes one eye, the one closest to Maggie, and she realizes he’s winking. She’s not going to let him take the blame. Celinda is crazy, and Hank is defenseless.

  “No. It’s my fault.” Her voice is firm.

  “There’s plenty of blame to go around. Maggie, you took my career. Hank, your slutty ex–buckle bunny took Chris away from me. I actually loved him—can you believe it? And then he died in the crash, before I could get him back.” Celinda flicks her lighter. “How does it feel, Maggie, to lose stuff?”

  “Bad.”

  “Not bad enough.”