Fear tugs at her, making her cautious. It was only four or five nights ago that Jenny died, presumably while she was taking Mr. Tuttle out to pee. Recklessness—except when it came to her job—was Kimber’s usual modus operandi. But now she hesitates. Kevin is real.
Could he be waiting for her outside in the dark, expecting her to come out alone? Maybe she’s just being paranoid. At the last moment, she takes the revolver from the nightstand drawer and puts it in the pocket of her robe.
Before starting down the stairs, she picks up Mr. Tuttle so he doesn’t wake Gabriel. As she passes the tree window on the landing, she touches it lightly, as one might a talisman. The faint light shining through from the outside makes a muddy gold puddle on the stair.
Tiptoeing into the front hall, she stops to listen. No sound from the living room. Relieved (mostly), she takes the key from the table and unlocks the front door.
Mr. Tuttle struggles in her arms to get down the second they are off the porch.
“Hurry up.” He launches forward so quickly that one of his nails catches on her palm. “Ouch, you little shit.” She rubs at the scratch she can’t see, wondering if it’s bleeding.
He heads for a thick clump of pampas grass standing alone near the driveway. It’s at least four or five times his height, but he raises his leg to claim it anyway. She can’t help but smile. He really does seem to think he’s the size of a German shepherd.
A pall of humidity hangs over the street, dimming the single streetlamp half a block away. She hears in the distance a siren flick quickly on and off, a warning to a driver or someone lurking where they shouldn’t be. When the wind blows, she looks up to see the stars animated by fast-moving clouds. It’s a big, dramatic sky, and it makes her feel small and utterly alone.
In fact, she is alone. When she looks for Mr. Tuttle, he is gone.
Dammit, dog. She’ll need to keep a better eye on him, especially at night. Her mind bristles at the responsibility. It’s not even that Mr. Tuttle does anything wrong. Looking after other creatures—human or four-legged—isn’t one of her stronger skills. Something she’s chafed at her whole life. It already takes so much energy to keep track of her own thoughts and troubling feelings.
“Tuttle!” Her voice sounds flat and loud to her in the heavy night air. It’s not that she doesn’t know where he’s got to—it’s that she does. Jenny’s house sits, squat and dark and, yes, frightening, on the other side of the driveway.
She looks around. No lights are on in the houses around her. Why does she have a small hope that someone is watching her, that someone knows she’s out here alone?
Jenny’s backyard is full of overgrown bushes and empty bird feeders on poles. A sagging clothesline bears a forgotten blouse or pajama top that waves mournfully in the quickening wind. It wasn’t like Jenny to leave clothes on her line overnight. Did she think about bringing it in the night she died? It was probably dirty again, hanging there for so many days. It’s small enough to fit a child. Sadness clutches at Kimber’s chest. Damn it.
Mr. Tuttle busily claws at the back door of his former home as though he could scratch it down. His pitiful whines are loud for such a tiny animal. Screw people who say dogs don’t have feelings.
“Come on, boy. Let’s go. We can walk over here tomorrow. I promise.”
It’s only when she picks him up, holding his taut and struggling body against her chest, that she hears the voices.
“Shhhhh,” she whispers into his ear.
Remarkably, he calms.
The voices are coming from inside Jenny’s house. She slips her fingers into her bathrobe pocket to touch the revolver for reassurance. Instinct tells her she should go get Gabriel or even call the police. But she doesn’t have her phone, and she’s right outside Jenny’s door.
Tucking Mr. Tuttle under one arm, she lifts the geranium pots with her free hand, searching for Jenny’s hidden key. “Just in case,” Jenny had told her. “My daughter doesn’t think it’s a good idea, but what if something happens to me and nobody can get in? The Harkers, who used to live in your house, knew about it, and now you do too.” When Kimber finds the key, she looks to the sky and mouths a silent Thank you to Jenny.
Should she take Mr. Tuttle inside with her? The dog looks up, his black eyes bright in the darkness. Together they decide the answer is yes. Strangely, she feels braver with the dog along, though he’d be no protection at all.
She puts him down, and he waits beside her as she unlocks and quietly opens the door into Jenny’s mudroom. Then he rushes past her, straight to the kitchen. Leaving the door open behind her, she finds him standing where his food and water bowls used to sit. He looks up at her imploringly. She shakes her head and whispers, “Not now.”
The voices are clearer, more regular. There’s music too. Mr. Tuttle sticks close as she walks cautiously through the house. She’s never been in Jenny’s house at night, but she’s been there often enough in the daytime that she knows the layout, at least downstairs. When she reaches the main hallway, she sees a flickering glow in the den. “The first Mr. Tuttle’s room,” as Jenny called it. The door is open only a few inches, but she can hear the television is on, playing a nineties cop show she never liked very much. But how long will it be before such things make her feel nostalgic? She’s watching twentieth-century musicals and carrying around a tiny dog. Has she become an old lady in a thirty-something body?
She lets out a long, relieved breath but is freaked out enough that she doesn’t want to go all the way in to turn the television off. Has it been on for the past several days? How strange that none of the cops who went through the house turned it off.
“Let’s go, Tuttle.” She bends to pick him up, but he escapes her, dodging into the den, barking furiously into the semidarkness. Why didn’t she think to turn on a light? “Tuttle, come on!” Her voice is stressed, angry. What the hell is she doing here? Get a grip, she tells herself.
She pushes hesitantly on the door, but it’s suddenly jerked open from behind and she trips into the room, nearly losing her balance. A familiar voice yells her name. “Kimber, run! Run now!”
Too fast, a fist collides with her stomach, knocking the wind out of her.
Chapter Fifty-One
Kevin’s breath is foul with beer and garlic. His face is so close she can barely understand his words. But she feels the rage in them. His pulse beats through the hands squeezing her shoulders, and his breath slips into her nose and mouth, filling her with a reciprocal hate. He’s no longer wearing his thick-framed glasses, and now that she’s so painfully close, she can see her father’s face in his. But where there was playfulness and cleverness in her father’s eyes, Kevin’s hold only feral animosity.
Sharp pain spreads through her back and into her gut as he presses her against some protruding decorative thing hung on Jenny’s wall. In the back of her mind there’s an image from an old film—a prisoner impaled on something sticking out of a wall in a Turkish prison. But then the image is gone, and she knows only her own pain.
Mr. Tuttle’s quiet now. She hopes he’s run off to some corner to hide. There’s one other person in the room. The person who had screamed for her to run: Gabriel.
“Sister, sister, sister. Pretty, nasty, bitchy little sister.” Kevin gives her one more solid shove against the wall and lets her fall. The pain of the blow to her stomach is finally fading, replaced by the stinging in her back. “Why the fuck won’t you leave me alone? I’m here, minding my own business.” He jerks a thumb at Gabriel, over his shoulder. “Him I can deal with. But you! You have no patience at all. I would’ve gone away and left you alone, but you just couldn’t wait until I got what I wanted. You had to get in my business and get the fucking Florida people involved. All I needed was another couple of days. But no. You have no fucking patience. Just like your sister. Or should I say our sister.” He pauses and gives her a lascivious grin. “She was a nice piece of ass, our sister.”
Kimber’s face twists with disgust in spite of h
er pain. That this animal would even think about touching Michelle makes her want to scratch his eyes out.
“You’re vile.”
“Heh. Vile. Don’t worry. I didn’t fuck our pretty sister, though it crossed my mind. You didn’t give me much of a chance.”
“Leave her alone, Kevin.” Gabriel’s voice is threatening, but he doesn’t make any sort of move toward them. The familiar way he addresses Kevin confuses her.
“Leave her alone? I thought I was here to not leave her alone. Isn’t that what we agreed?” He nudges Kimber with his foot. “You didn’t even suspect that, did you, Sunshine? Your boyfriend here set you up. Set you up just to see you and your precious happy life go up in flames. We did a good fucking job of it too. You even look like shit.”
“Gabriel?” Kimber’s head is a riot of thoughts. What could Gabriel have done to her? He won’t look at her but turns his eyes to the window with its closed blinds and blackout curtains. The television throws light and shadows on their faces. Of course Kevin wouldn’t want the people in the house next door to know he’s inside.
“Boyfriend doesn’t want to talk about it. Guess we’re not surprised, though, are we, sis? He’s not big in the balls department. He likes other people to do his dirty work for him.”
“Gabriel brought you here? How? Why?”
“No, he didn’t bring me here. I found him when I was looking for our old man after I got out. Gabe’s name, and yours, were all over the transfer records for the house. It was stupid of the old man to call himself Ike Hannon again. But I guess he knew he’d be dead by the time I got out—and he was right. Cancer is nasty shit.”
“Don’t listen to him, Kimber.”
“Don’t listen to him, Kimber,” Kevin mimics. “You should have heard the rude names he called you once we got to be friends. Had me over to his apartment and everything. I saw the bed where he fucked you. The room where you told him you were done with him. He was pissed. Ohhhh, he hates you, sister. Any man who’s so fucked up he tries to off himself over a piece of ass has some serious issues.”
“Who told you that?” Gabriel sounds genuinely surprised.
“Who do you think told me that? It’s true, isn’t it?” He moves across the room to where he can keep an eye on both Kimber and Gabriel. Now he turns his attention to Kimber. “Everything you had. From your house to your job to your precious friendship with that prissy Diana bitch. All I had to do was move in. He helped with that too. Who do you think gave me the key to the house?”
Gabriel. How is this possible? But even as she whispers his name, tries to process the idea through her broken, fuzzy brain, she understands how it’s possible. Probable. Really happening. Payback’s a bitch. Kyle’s phrase, but a universal truth. All along it’s felt so brutally personal. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean someone isn’t out to get you. But she wasn’t even paranoid. Not really. Still…still. This doesn’t feel like the Gabriel she knows.
Murdering whore.
Kevin knew she killed Michelle, but how else could he have known about her affair so long after the fact? Her attachment to Kyle and Diana? Kevin, for all his deviousness, doesn’t seem all that bright.
But Gabriel. Gabriel knew because she’d trusted him. Told him because she was showing off, wanting to shock him a little. Solid, moral Gabriel. She had to be the cool girl, to show him how resilient and tough she was. I don’t need you or anyone. I can do, have, be what I want. Even mess with a family.
He never liked it that she was friends with Diana. He thought she was being cruel.
But I’m tough. I can have what I want.
If she’s so tough, why is she on the floor, her cretin half brother standing over her like he owns her? As a fugitive, he’s just as vulnerable as she is. Except. He has a gun trained on her now, and her revolver is still in her robe pocket. She’ll have to be patient. Kevin doesn’t know how patient she can be.
If Gabriel hates her so much, why did he tell her to run?
“What do you want?” She looks up at Kevin.
“I want the rest of the cash the old man stole from me. I know it’s somewhere in the house. It’s the only place it could be. I know what he sold the house in Florida for. He didn’t need my money to move up here.”
“Where else is there to look? You ripped up the house, put holes in every wall. It’s going to cost me a fortune to fix.”
“Why in hell should I believe you?” Kevin asks. “How do I know you didn’t find it already?”
“What about the money in the box? The twenty thousand?”
“I stashed it and told Dad to hide the rest somewhere else. Then the asshole sends me the album and the bible and disappears. Like he was ripping me off and doing me a favor at the same time. Fucker.”
Kimber can’t resist. “Maybe he didn’t love you very much after all.”
The gun comes down hard on the side of her face, and pain radiates with the sound of bone crunching beneath her skin. When she sees his arm rise again, she braces herself for a second blow—but it doesn’t come because Gabriel tackles him. She closes her eyes and presses against the wall, afraid they’ll land on her.
They roll on the floor, grunting, until one of them gives a great cry. Kevin lets loose a string of wet, throaty profanities, and then he’s on top of Gabriel, punching him repeatedly, in the face, the neck, the stomach, until Gabriel’s punctuated groans get weaker and weaker. Kimber thinks about Gabriel’s damaged arm, how hard it must be for him to defend himself. She’s never been so close to so much violence, and the room seems very small, as though she’s locked in a cage with two animals. Something damp and warm lands on her throbbing face.
“Pansy-ass bitch. Stay down!” Kevin pulls back his fist and lets it hang in the air. Gabriel moans, and slowly his head turns from side to side, finally coming to rest, looking away from her. He’s still. So still. “Good. I’m tired of you fucking with me.” Kevin puts a hand against his ear, and in the glow from the television, Kimber sees something dark leaking from between his fingers.
“Get me a towel or something.”
It’s hard to push the words from her aching mouth, but Kimber manages. “Fuck you.”
His laughter holds no pleasure. “Want me to hit him again? He might not be dead yet.”
Why should she care what he does to Gabriel? Everything that’s happened has happened because of him. They’re in this room because of him. He’s probably dying right now because he sicced this greedy animal on her. How didn’t I know?
Sliding one hand up the wall for support, Kimber brings herself onto her knees. Beneath her, the floor spins, and she closes her eyes. In a weird moment of respite, Kevin ignores her as her vertigo subsides. It feels like a deep red eternity, an eternity that may not even exist outside her head. Eventually she opens her eyes and sits back on her heels.
Gabriel still hasn’t moved. Kevin hums and rocks slowly back and forth, holding the side of his head. Has Gabriel stabbed or bitten him? She can’t tell. Kevin’s gun rests a dozen inches from his foot.
“Towel!” he demands again when he notices her staring.
Kimber gets to her feet but has to stop another few seconds for the vertigo. An episode of Seinfeld is playing on the television. Elaine is complaining about salad. Steadier, Kimber hesitantly puts one foot in front of the other. Mr. Tuttle appears out of nowhere, walking close to her feet as though trying to help her, but they’re both in danger of her falling on him.
Taking a deep breath that almost drops her where she stands because of the pain it brings, she pulls the revolver out of her pocket and turns back to the den doorway. Her eyes tell her there are two bulky Kevins backlit by the television. She closes one eye and raises the gun with one hand wrapped over the other as Don taught her. The trigger’s harder to pull than she remembers from the other day, and a split second after the bullet explodes out of the gun, the world goes silent. Kevin’s scream is like a distant whine, and she sees him fall sideways. Dropping the gun in her pan
ic, she grabs Mr. Tuttle from the floor and runs, weaving like a drunk for the back door.
Terrified, the dog trembles in her arms. It’s okay, it’s okay, you’ll be okay. Has she even spoken aloud? She can’t hear herself.
The storm clouds have broken, and tepid moonlight guides her to the open back door. But there’s a woman’s silhouette in the doorway, someone blocking her way outside.
Chapter Fifty-Two
Kimber stops running, knowing it’s a mistake. She should barrel through the doorway, knock the woman down. But this has to play out. This is no cop or worried neighbor. The locksmith had said there was a woman at her house. She’d guessed it might have been Leeza or even Diana. A vengeful Diana, beating Kimber at the ugly game she’d been playing since they became friends.
“Where’s Gabriel?” The voice is familiar, but she can’t trust her hearing or see the woman’s face. “He’s not at your house.”
Pounding footsteps tell her Kevin has followed her into the kitchen. Now she’s trapped between them. Mr. Tuttle’s barks have turned shrill and strained. Putting him down as quickly as she can, she yells for him to go outside. But he goes no farther than the woman at the door, growling low in his throat.
“Don’t let her get out. The bitch tried to shoot me.”
Instinct makes Kimber hunch forward. When Kevin hits her again with his gun, he misses her head and cracks her shoulder. She falls against a chair, her shoulder burning with pain. Her eyes squeezed closed, she fights to keep from passing out, certain that Kevin will eventually kill her. He and the woman are talking. Arguing, she thinks. She lies, unmoving, on the hard vinyl floor until fear forces her to open her eyes as much as the pain will allow. From the angle of her head, Kimber can see only the dark shapes of the woman’s legs as she opens the basement door and scoots Mr. Tuttle inside with her foot. She does it so quickly that he doesn’t have time to run. The door slams shut.
The Stranger Inside Page 27
