by Adam Cesare
They were quiet, listening to tires on gravel.
“That was beautiful, Cole. Thank you. I should add that to your suicide note,” Dunne said, leaning over, opening the glove box. Dunne held up an envelope marked “Dad.” The handwriting was so close to Cole’s own, Cole had to blink, try to remember if he actually had written the word. “It comes with a full confession. Not the particulars of the spree killings, but enough. Should be pretty ironclad. One of us in the Improvement Society is a lawyer—he looked it over, made sure that your father wouldn’t be legally culpable for any of your actions, might even get another insurance payout. Drop in the bucket, for a man of his means, but every little bit will help.”
Money, of course. The false hope that the one rich guy in town could pull everyone out of their shitty lives. If he would only reinvest in the town. Cole had heard it all before.
“My dad may be an asshole, but I doubt he’ll buy what you’re selling.”
“People can surprise you,” Dunne said, oddly cheery.
Cole looked out the window, the silhouette of the shuttered refinery blocking out the stars.
It figured that this would be where it ended.
“If it makes you feel any better, think of yourself as a phoenix. Your death becomes a rebirth. Baypen reopened. Kettle Springs saved.”
“Frendo wins,” Cole said softly.
“Frendo wins. And a little drop of Baypen makes everything better.” Sheriff Dunne nodded, lapsing into silence, his master plan explained. He reached out and depressed a button, a garage door opener strapped to his dashboard radio.
Somewhere in front of them there was a whirr of metal and machinery. Gears worked against rust and heat-warped parts, the shutter of the loading dock miraculously still operational, after the fire.
Cole looked up to see the charred face of Frendo the Clown, a giant mural painted over a double-wide bay door, the steel rising up, becoming the clown’s open mouth.
Dunne pulled the cruiser onto the factory floor and shut the engine, cutting the lights.
There were a few fluorescent lights somewhere to the right, forming a circle of light that ended around the stairs leading up to the foreman’s office, but the rest of the factory floor was dark.
There was a knock on the driver’s side window that caused Cole to flinch.
Frendo the Clown had appeared out of the gloom and motioned for Dunne to roll down his window.
Frendo lifted his mask and it took Cole a moment to place the bald man. Tall, but still toady, with bland features, and still somehow married to Miss Kettle Springs. It was Janet’s stepdad. God. How could he? Did Janet’s mom know? Where was she tonight? Without her husband and daughter, that was certain.
“Oh, you got him,” Mr. Murray said. “That’s good. At least something tonight can go right.”
“Nothing has gone wrong,” Dunne said, sounding angry. “They all knew the risks.”
“Sure. Sure they did.”
“Did he say if he was coming down or not?” Dunne asked. “If he wants to see it? To say goodbye to the boy, at least.” Dunne smiled, glanced back to Cole.
“Yes. He said wait for him. He needs a minute.”
“Okay, then,” Dunne said, looking over toward the lights. The new fluorescent bulbs had to have been recently installed. There was no way they’d survived the fire. The lights were throwing hard shadows across pipes, mixing tanks, and suspended walkways. There was very little debris on the factory floor; the firefighters had cleaned most of it away with their hoses. The refinery was structurally unsound, the building condemned, but there was plenty of infrastructure that hadn’t burned.
Mr. Murray apparently couldn’t take the silence, so he spoke again. “He could be praying, don’t you think?”
“I don’t presume to guess,” Dunne said, a chastisement. “If he said wait, we’ll wait.”
Cole felt nauseous.
He could now see the noose dangling from one of the burned-out catwalks. The walkway that led up to the foreman’s office.
Suddenly Cole knew who they were waiting for and his heart broke.
People can surprise you.
Twenty-Six
Quinn’s calves ached, but she knew that as long as she kept running perpendicular to the rows, she would stay in the right direction.
Would you believe Trent’s the best tight end the team’s had in a decade?
Cole’s words from the parade came back to her as she ran.
There were no footfalls behind her, but she knew that Ronnie and Matt were in pursuit. They had to be. They wouldn’t let her go. Couldn’t.
She hoped the rifle shot had done enough damage to slow them down. That the bleeding hadn’t stopped. Matt would be inducted into some kind of hall of fame, if he could still be the best tight end with a hole in his hand and one of his ears blown off.
Quinn felt her strength return, like when she was in training, at camp. She’d run until she felt ready to collapse, and then something would click and she’d find a second full gas tank she didn’t know she had. Quinn huffed along, trying to maintain her pace, ten rows, then twenty. It was possible she was still miles away from the Tillerson farmhouse. Possible she’d somehow drifted off course and missed it. But that would be okay, too: she’d keep running until the sun came up, until she ran into someone who could help, even if that someone was in Ontario.
After a few more minutes, another half mile maybe, Quinn reached a simple dirt road. This had to be it, the driveway. She looked both ways, then continued in the direction of the farmhouse.
At the end of the drive, she spotted a pickup truck, the tires looking a little flat and the hood dusty, but otherwise intact.
The truck was red, brick-colored, and had a cream stripe across the side. Quinn tried pulling on the driver’s side door as she passed. It opened, but she’d need the keys. She wasn’t lucky enough to find them waiting in the ignition, or under the window shades, or in the glove box where she took a moment to check. She’d have to go inside to look for them.
Quinn walked up the front steps and in through their screened-in porch. To the side of the front door was a broken swing, one chain dragging on the ground. A pile of weathered Fisher-Price toys lay stacked in one corner of the porch. Quinn couldn’t decide if the smiling, oversize, mildewed plastic caterpillars and dogs were more of a sad detail or a creepy one.
She approached the front door, held her breath, reached a hand out, then stopped. The knob was streaked with dirt and soot, big dusty fingerprints on the white of the doorframe. There was no telling if the prints were fresh or not.
She’d made it this far. She couldn’t start acting stupid now. It didn’t seem possible that Ronnie and Matt could have beaten her to the house—she would have seen them and she knew she was fast . . .
But she wasn’t about to walk into a trap.
Quinn left the porch and walked around the back of the house, peering in windows, stopping and listening twice, seeing if she could hear anything if she stayed still, ear flat to the siding.
Nothing. The house seemed empty.
And the back door didn’t have any smudges.
She said a half-second prayer and turned the knob: the back door was unlocked.
Back in Philly, leaving town on vacation with a door unlocked was like asking to be robbed, but out here, the closest neighbors were miles away. If she’d grown up here, she wouldn’t have bothered, either.
She pulled open the door, a metallic creak she couldn’t stop.
She listened. Nothing.
The door opened onto a coatroom that saw regular use. The small room smelled like sweat and feet. Beside the rubber doormat, there were stacks of work boots, heavy-duty gloves, and a thick layer of dirt and grass clods, presumably scraped from the sole of the boots with the flathead screwdriver that’d been tucked into the molding.
Quinn shivered. Inside the house was as cool as outside. The Tillersons must have turned off the heat when they left town. Reaching up, Qui
nn grabbed a jacket. Slipping it on over her bloody clothes, she immediately felt safer and warmer. She wondered if this was Mr. or Mrs. Tillerson’s coat. It smelled faintly of burned leaves and perfume. Or maybe that was fertilizer.
Quinn moved from the mudroom into the kitchen, with black-and-white linoleum tiles and pastel cabinets. The fixtures could have been green, could have been blue, it was hard to tell in the darkness. She looked to the countertops, her blood chilling at a utensil drawer left open. But, no, Ronnie had the gun. Even if Ronnie and Matt had somehow been able to beat her here, why would they bother ransacking the place for knives?
Quinn’s eyes scanned the dish rack: mismatched cutlery, mugs, plastic plates with cartoon characters, and a large, chipped cleaver. If they’d been in here looking for weapons, they would have taken that.
Quinn pulled the cleaver out from between a mug and a plate, trying her best not to clatter. The blade was top-heavy, but like wearing the jacket, having it made her feel more comfortable.
She turned from the sink and saw the phone on the wall, spiral cord dangling from the handset.
If only she could think of the right person to call.
A 911 call would reroute to local police. Wouldn’t it? She could call her dad. She had to call her dad.
But when Quinn held the headset to her ear: busy signal.
Quinn wasn’t surprised. This was the way it was. Whether the line was dead from a deliberately cut phone line or an unpaid bill, it didn’t matter.
She’d find the keys to the truck and be out before . . .
She sniffed the collar of the jacket, then the kitchen air. There was a scent wafting in through the doorway, coming from down the hall.
She moved to investigate.
The smell . . . It was burned meat and chemicals. A turkey that an absentminded grandmother put in the oven still wrapped in plastic.
Following her nose, Quinn reached a double-wide entryway and stopped. She remembered the smudges on the door handle and held the cleaver up, ready to defend herself.
She peeked in.
Shit.
She stifled a gasp. Frendo was sitting on the Tillersons’ living room couch.
She pulled her head back, flattening herself against the wall. When would it end? When would it fucking end?
When she made it end, she thought.
Quinn swung around the corner, cleaver high, ready to do what had to be done.
“Hah!” she yelled, a karate movie entrance.
But Frendo didn’t move.
He didn’t even flinch.
He was . . . dead? She watched the clown for a moment, then stepped out onto the carpet, the material thinner in this room than in the hallway. She had her cleaver held high, but didn’t need the weapon.
She came around the front of the couch and realized that he must’ve been one of the clowns caught in the silo explosion. He’d somehow made it to the farmhouse, despite the burns over most of his body, then had sat down to die.
His eyes were milky and lidless.
Frendo’s mask had been melted to his face by the heat. Blisters had sprouted on the clown’s exposed flesh, pale white fissures glowing in the moonlight from where the skin met the edge of the plastic.
Quinn took a few steps and poked him with the flat end of the cleaver. He didn’t move, didn’t blink.
This clown didn’t matter.
He was dead.
Good. She sighed and remembered that she needed to find those keys. Ronnie and Matt had to be on their way here, and who knew what kind of backup they’d bring.
Quinn looked around the room, playing a game of “I Spy”—crocheted doilies, a video game controller, a pair of slippers . . .
There. On the coffee table. Between a stack of magazines and a small bowl of individually wrapped caramels: the metal glint of keys.
Quinn crouched, began to creep toward the key ring, her hands out.
Beside her, outside the front door, the porch groaned. A small sound, but enough to startle her.
Quinn looked over to keep an eye on the clown:
He was still dead.
She looked to the door, still for a moment. She heard no footsteps, no other squeaks or groans.
There was nothing out there. It was just the kind of sound old houses made.
She dipped her hand down, snatching up the key ring, then crossed to the front door, holding her cleaver out in front of her.
Was this the right way to do it? Would she be better served by exiting the house the way she came in? Head to the truck the long way, around the back of the house?
No. She was alone out here. No more jumping at shadows.
She pulled open the door and peered out onto the Tillersons’ depressing porch.
Four feet away, the screen door had been soundlessly propped open.
Ronnie stood in the threshold, frozen there, like she knew Quinn had heard her try the first time and had not wanted to chance another step onto the porch.
“Hello,” Ronnie said, then charged at Quinn, shoulder slung low, rifle butt out like a battering ram.
“Youuuuuu die,” Ronnie screamed, a battle cry as she took two running steps and closed the distance into the living room.
Hand still on the knob, Quinn tried to swing the front door into the girl’s face, but the door only bounced off the side of Ronnie’s body as the girl gave a grunt, barreling through into the living room. Her golden ponytail bobbed as she tried to use the end of the rifle like a club, lashing out and narrowly missing the end of Quinn’s nose.
Quinn backed up, knees taken out by the arm of the couch, spilling backward into the roasted clown’s lap, charred flesh flakes raining down on her.
Ronnie stopped at the arm of the couch and brought the gun around and pointed the barrel at Quinn.
“Don’t move,” Ronnie said.
But moving was the only choice, hedging her bets because Ronnie hadn’t chosen to shoot at her yet.
Quinn crab-walked off the back of the couch, the edge of the cleaver cutting the dead clown as she went. The smell of cooked blood filled the room, nauseating.
“Fuck, that’s gross,” Ronnie muttered, gagging.
Quinn heard the rifle clatter as Ronnie struggled to aim.
Over the far cushion of the couch, Quinn kept moving down the hall. She found her feet, then juked toward the direction she’d come, the kitchen and the back door, but then remembered that there were possibly two of them.
Matt might’ve taken up position at the back of the house.
She needed to go deeper into the house, kick out a window in one of the bedrooms if she had to and—
BAM! Plaster and drywall exploded inches from Quinn’s face. Ronnie had fired at her.
“Stop,” Ronnie yelled from the living room, but Quinn didn’t stop. She was going to get away or die trying. Quinn dove farther down the hallway and pushed into the first door she came to before Ronnie could fire again.
She shut the door behind her, but there was no lock.
Who didn’t have a lock on the fucking bathroom door!?
The window! Quinn jumped into the tub, pulling the shower curtain closed behind her, as if the vinyl could deflect a bullet.
“Shit,” Quinn said, tugging at the base of the small window, age or a lock holding it shut. She banged on the glass with her palm, textured and opaque for privacy, desperate to get it to move.
Behind her, the door creaked open.
Quinn whirled.
Ronnie stood on the other side of the shower curtain, a shadow, a grim reaper in cheap nail polish ready to take Quinn away.
“Did you know more Americans die in the bathroom than any other room in the house?” Ronnie said, a sick, tremoring laughter in her voice.
No. Not like this; not killed by her.
Frantic, Quinn jumped out of the tub at Ronnie, not peeling back the curtain but instead jumping through it.
Plastic rings snapped above them, some giving way, some tearing at the vinyl,
the shower curtain collapsing on top of them like a parachute.
Ronnie bounced back into the bathroom door, slamming it shut, barely space for the two of them to stand in the space next to the sink. Quinn’s hip collided with porcelain as Ronnie bucked forward, her head thudding against the corner of a towel rack.
Under the curtain, Quinn managed to get Ronnie’s gun pointed away from her, but couldn’t see exactly what Ronnie was doing, if she were ready to attack from another angle.
But Quinn could discern where Ronnie’s head was.
Quinn brought the cleaver down, making a sharp, soft sound she wasn’t expecting.
Swit.
There was no bone crunching, not even a scream, as the cleaver dug into shower curtain, separating the section of Ronnie’s skull with the ponytail from the part with her exquisite bangs. Ronnie instantly slackened against Quinn’s body, the small whimpering groan she gave too much, too pitiful in the close quarters of the bathroom.
Quinn let go of the cleaver, leaving it there, handle pointed out, as if keeping Ronnie’s brains intact on either side of the blade somehow made Quinn a kinder person, less savage.
Even as Ronnie’s body wilted, Quinn stepped on the barrel of the rifle, just to be sure. Then she peeled back the vinyl to reveal Ronnie’s face.
“Ronnie,” Quinn said, trying to meet the girl’s blank, dreamy stare in the low light. “Ronnie? Where did they take Cole?”
Ronnie wasn’t dead. But it didn’t look like she’d be able to answer.
“Ronnie?” Quinn said. “Please.”
Please, before you go, you terrible piece of shit, do something for me, make amends for the pain you helped cause.
Before Ronnie Queen died, she didn’t speak.
But she did sing.
“Ehhhhh,” Ronnie began, a childish smile at her lips, one of her eyes starting to drift inward. “Lit-tel drop of Behhhhhhh . . .”
She didn’t get the rest out. But Quinn knew what she was trying to say. She could remember the view from her bedroom window.
“Makes everything better,” Quinn finished, gathering up the rifle.
Quinn stumbled on preschool toys on her way out the porch’s screen door.
