The hand-scrawled New Canaan sign loomed up like a signpost on a dream road to hell. Just past it a ghostly apparition, the American equiva-lent of Wilkie Collins' woman in white, drifted into the road.
Heath was almost relieved to see her too-real sense of unreality made manifest by the appearance of occult phenomena.
Not a ghost of course. Perhaps on England's moors ectoplasmic beings could wander with impunity for centuries. On the front range of the Rockies, the poor specters would be burnt or frozen or blown away before they could get a good haunt going.
Heath tapped the brake. She'd been going too fast. The RV was too heavy, the road surface bad. The great lumbering vehicle slid on the gravel for a stomach-churning second before lurching to a stop. Her ghost vanished in a cloud of dust then reappeared, coughing, tapping on the driver's side window.
Heath pushed the magic button and the glass hummed discreetly into the door. "Where are the others?" she asked.
"Wait." Sharon quickly ran to the bushes and returned with a gray-blue hard-sided suitcase, the kind all the girls wanted when Heath was fifteen, the kind that came with a square overnight case with a mirror in the lid.
"Where are the others?" Heath repeated and felt a stab of guilt as she realized she was thinking only of Beth, her limpet, and not of Sharon's sisters.
"We've got to go back. Patty told Mr. Sheppard we were going. About two hours ago, I guess. He's locked her in the chapel. I couldn't find Alexis or Beth. They're probably locked there too," she said as she climbed into the passenger seat.
"Buckle your seatbelt," Heath said automatically. The anxiety she'd felt earlier couldn't be said to have returned because it had never left. It did change, and not for the better. Her hands went numb on the wheel and her adrenaline-drugged mind whispered of creeping paralysis from a new complication in her spine. Though she could see, it was as if she looked through a tunnel, and Sharon's words reached her ears a fraction later than normal. Her voice sounded tinny and far away as if a tiny person whined from deep inside her skull.
"What are we supposed to do?" she asked.
"I can't run off and leave them. I can't," Sharon said unhelpfully.
"I have to go there to turn around anyway," Heath said numbly. "This thing's like driving a semi."
She shoved the gearshift into drive and the RV crept ahead. The speedometer read seven miles an hour. All of a sudden she wasn't in a hurry. During her aborted time in physical therapy the medical staff had attempted to teach her, among other things, relaxation technique. She wished she'd paid more attention. The out-of-body experience- numbness, altered vision, audio distortions-were growing worse. Heath looked at Sharon, wondering if she could tell her that her driver, her hero, was melting, dissolving, right down to her functionless feet of base clay.
Sharon, white-faced, eyes as glassy and gray as the window beyond her. was caught in the faint green glow from the dashboard lights. Written in the younger woman's profile was the alphabet of Heath's fear: jaw muscle rigid, lips pressed too tightly together, corners of the mouth pulled down. In her lap, the delicate-boned rough-skinned fingers flexed and stretched as if she readied herself to play a difficult concerto. Or strangle a man.
Heath might lose her dignity. Fall on the ground. Flop around a bit perhaps. Boys could laugh at her. Mr. Sheppard or one of his disciples could come after her with a shotgun or, worst case scenario, she might soil herself.
Sharon, carrying only one old-fashioned suitcase, was leaving behind the only life she'd known since she was a little girl. Wretched though it might be, a warm bed, three meals a day and a roof to keep off the rain were not to be taken lightly. And she had two sisters at risk, sisters she might lose forever tonight though all three went on living.
The stakes were hardly comparable. Heath felt the panic recede-not much but enough she could unclench her jaw, enough she could loose the death grip she had on the steering wheel, reach over and take Sharon's hand.
"It'll be okay," she said, and felt better for saying it. "Mr. Sheppard can't lock us all up. My aunt and that ranger, Anna Pigeon, know what we're doing. They'll come if we don't call."
"Patty and Alexis, we have to get them out," Sharon said. "I don't care about me. I'm over."
Heath gave Sharon a startled glance, not because the sentiment was unique, but because it was one she shared. To hear it from a woman twenty years younger than she, a woman with two good legs for walking through the long life that presumably lay ahead, jolted her into the real-ization that giving up was the saddest disability of them all.
"You're not over till it's over," she said harshly. The condemnation in her tone was for herself, not Sharon, but she didn't apologize.
In front of the building housing the Sheppard clan, Heath stopped the RY. Only a single light showed. No dogs barked. No one came out to greet or banish them. She put the vehicle in park, the engine idling. They might be leaving in a hurry.
"The cars are gone," Sharon said. "We have two-all of us, two cars. He's taken the girls somewhere."
"Maybe not," Heath said and was ashamed at the part of her that hoped it was true, hoped to avoid a confrontation.
"You said he locked them in the chapel?"
"Patty. Yes."
"We'd better check it out," Heath said before she could chicken out and change her mind.
"You'll come with me?"
Sharon's voice had gone thin and wispy. Being back in New Canaan robbed her of what was left of her courage. Heath knew if she didn't go, Sharon wouldn't leave the van.
"I'll come as far as I can," she promised.
The process of swiveling the driver's seat, transferring herself to her chair and engaging the hydraulic lift went without a hitch. Knowing she might be driving the getaway car, Heath had rehearsed it a dozen times during the hours she'd awaited word from New Canaan.
"Stay, Wiley. Guard the fort." The dog wasn't pleased but, being a pro-fessional, dutifully trotted to the driver's seat, leaped up and settled in to keep watch. Or nap.
Pressed as close to the side of the RV as she could get without actu-ally melding with the metal and fiberglass, Sharon waited as the lift descended.
"The kitchen door has no steps. Do you need me to push you?"
Heath started to snarl no, as had become her habit when being offered help, but she didn't. Sharon needed something to do, something to think about besides her own fear. If Heath's infirmity could give her a fleeting sense of strength and control, a little humility was a small price to pay.
"I'd appreciate it," she said with a graciousness she'd not known she still possessed.
So quiet was the compound, Heath's wheels on the rocky soil seemed excessively loud. In her mind, if not in actuality, the noise echoed like the approach of a tank battalion. She wished she felt as formidable.
Sharon came around the chair and opened the door on the side of the building. Heath wheeled herself through, the wide tread of her rubber tires moving easily over the doorsill. The kitchen, of industrial size as it would have to be for a family with at least three wives and heaven knew how many children, was dark and deserted. Dinner hour had come and gone, yet a kitchen, the heart of a house, should still be bustling.
"Where is everyone?" Heath whispered.
"Lockdown," Sharon whispered back. "Mr. Sheppard must have ordered it after I got away."
Not left; got away.
"When things are some way he doesn't like, everybody is confined to quarters until he says they can come out again. I was ordered to my room after he locked Patty in the chapel. I don't think he believed I would leave vithout my sisters. I went out the window and waited for you. He must have figured I'd gone."
'And gone out looking for you," Heath said, thinking of the missing cars. "I didn't pass anybody on the road."
"There's lots of dirt roads. Old ranch roads. He might have thought I'd gone out one and hid."
During this whispered exchange, Sharon had again taken the driver's position and pushed Heath t
hrough the oversized kitchen and into a long hallway that ran from the kitchen at one end to the chapel at the other. Closed doors lined either side like a dormitory after lights out.
"We have to hurry." Sharon leaned down so close Heath felt the warm breath stir her hair. "Mr. Sheppard won't have gone far." Urgency could not counteract the fear that had entered her bones; she continued to push Heath at a lame snail's pace.
Fear had settled in Heath's bones as well, though of precisely what, she wasn't sure. Not death. Fear of something worse than life-worse than life in a wheelchair. Though she couldn't think what that might be at this moment, over the last week she'd come to know it existed. Grabbing the wheels, she rolled herself forward. The handles of her chair slipped from Sharon's grasp, the tires squealed on the linoleum. Moving fast, Heath could hear Sharon's Keds snuffling on the hard floor in her wake. Ahead was the door to the chapel. Heath wished she carried a lance or a battering ram. She wanted to hit something. Hard. And she was afraid if she stopped she'd never find the courage to start again.
One of the side doors opened abruptly. Heath was going too fast to swerve. Her left wheel clipped it, then she struck the opposite wall. The hall, the darkness, the miasma of twisting emotions oozing under closed doors, conspired with this sudden violence and Heath exploded in a bat-tery of language so foul it was a wonder the walls didn't melt and the flooring curl.
Not a door opened. No voice called out to ask what was happening. Lockdown was a serious matter in New Canaan.
Mrs. Dwayne stepped into the hall between them and the chapel door. Light from her room-or the room she'd come out of-lit half of her face and cast long shadows over the other. The usually innocuous dumpling visage was ugly, frightening.
"Filth," she hissed. "You're nothing but filth. The both of you. Get out before I call Mr. Sheppard." Her hands were fisted on lumpy hips. Jowls quivered at her jaw line. Spittle flew, obvious as moths in the unilateral light. Mrs. Dwayne was a caricature of the harridan but Heath had no desire to laugh. A face like that could countenance murder and never suffer a moment's remorse.
The fear that had been shuddering through Heath's frame since Sharon had called for help was suddenly gone. She didn't feel brave, just unafraid. All the ugly and crippled in the world was embodied in the woman standing before her. None was left over for Heath. She felt free.
"Mr. Sheppard's not here," she said, marveling at how reasonable she sounded-and felt.
"Oh," Mrs. Dwayne said. Then: "I don't believe you."
But she did, Heath could tell. She didn't want to admit that her beloved kept her as much in the dark as he did his other wives. For a long moment neither moved, caught in the tension of the dark hallway, teth-ered by the rope of yellow light coming from Mrs. Dwayne's doorway.
"You've come for that little slut, Patty," Mrs. Dwayne said finally.
Heath felt her chair shiver as a spider might feel a helpless thing twitching in its web. Sharon had come up behind her and taken hold of the handles.
"That's right." Quiet authority reverberated in her words. The voice of command; the voice that had talked terrified climbers off ledges and calmed panicked neophytes on icy crags; a voice Heath had never thought to hear again.
Mrs. Dwayne came to a decision. The venom that had been frothing behind her eyes, spewing from her lips, solidified till she looked old and mean and hard. "You can have her," she snapped. "And good riddance. The little whore is no better than her sisters. Casting sideways eyes at my husband, tempting my husband to sin, coveting my husband's attentions."
"My husband" was stressed each time it was uttered, as if Mrs. Dwayne were a priestess calling on the name of her god.
"Stay," she commanded. Pushing by Heath's left wheel, she trotted down the hallway in the direction of the kitchen.
"Where's she going?" The voice of command was gone. Heath was back to whispering, intimidated by a silence only sharpened on the squeaky thumps of Mrs. Dwayne's determined march.
Sharon looked over her shoulder. Mrs. Dwayne had taken keys from her pocket and was unlocking the last door to the right before the kitchen. "Mr. Sheppard's room," Sharon said. "She's the only one besides him that's got a key and doesn't she let the rest of us know it. She acts as ;f that room is her private sanctuary, like she's the priestess of a temple. It's not like she sleeps there much," Sharon finished bitterly. "Nobody but Mr. Sheppard actually sleeps there. Me and Alexis are just called in, then dismissed."
Before Heath had to respond to this unwelcome peek into the lives of the Dennis girls, Mrs. Dwayne reemerged, carefully relocked the door, then steamed back down the hall.
"Come on," she puffed as she passed. Sharon pushing and Heath letting her, they followed toward the door to the chapel. Selecting a key from the jingling bunch she'd fetched, Mrs. Dwayne unlocked the chapel door and shoved it open. "Get your dirty baggage and get out," she said viciously.
Sharon wheeled Heath past her. Mrs. Dwayne didn't give an inch. Though Heath pulled in her elbow, her wheel and shoulder pressed the soft belly. It was not a pleasant sensation.
The chapel was dark, no windows to let in what feeble light the night sky might offer. Heaven forfend any of the natural world He was purported to have created with miraculous love be allowed into the man-made box where Mr. Sheppard held forth.
"Turn on the lights," Heath said to Mrs. Dwayne.
"There are no lights in the chapel."
"There are lights," Sharon said and switched on the overheads. There were three naked bulbs hanging from the low ceiling by electric cords.
A little girl, blond like her sisters, long-legged and reed-thin like her sisters, was kneeling between two of the benches facing the altar. She was dressed in an odd mixture of turn-of-the-century fashions and twenty-first-century workout clothes. A ruffled dress came down past her knees and up to her chin. Beneath the hem were running shoes. Over the bodice was a pink hooded sweatshirt.
"Sharon," she breathed when she saw who'd come for her. Bursting into a storm of tears, she jumped to her feet and ran to her sister.
"He told me you'd gone. Taken Alexis and left me behind." Sharon met the little girl halfway and folded her in her arms.
"Where is Beth?" Mrs. Dwayne asked. "What have you done with my daughter?" she screamed just as Sharon was crying, "Alexis!"
The shouts canceled each other out. Much as they hated one another, there was no doubt that both were genuinely ignorant of the older girls' whereabouts. Not knowing where the limpet was opened a pit inside Heath. She felt the falling sensation she suffered each night in her nightmares.
"Mr. Sheppard, he's taken them," Sharon accused.
"So what if he has," Mrs. Dwayne shot back. "They are his to do with as he will."
It looked as if Sharon would launch herself at her co-wife. Heath would have genuinely enjoyed seeing the harridan taken down, but time was at a premium. Besides, Sharon would come out the loser. Probably she'd never been strong and the time with Mr. Sheppard and his flock had worn away what resilience youth might once have lent her.
"Sharon, she doesn't know he took them," Heath said firmly as she wheeled herself between the two Mrs. Sheppards. "Hell, she didn't even know her husband was gone. She's as much in the dark as we are. Let's get Patty someplace safe. Then we'll worry about-"
The sound of an automobile approaching stopped Heath mid-sentence. Heads cocked, eyes wary, the three women and the girl listened as rabbits might listen to the coyotes howling.
"Out the back," Mrs. Dwayne said quickly. Heath didn't for an instant believe she had decided to help them from empathy or altruism, but she trusted her all the same. They shared a common goal: to get the Dennis girls out of Mr. Sheppard's bed.
Leading Patty by the hand, Sharon ran to a door left of the lectern that opened to the rear of the building. "Hurry," she urged as Mrs. Dwayne fumbled with the keys. Mr. Sheppard had outfitted the compound like a prison. Outer doors needed keys to open from both the inside and out. Heath was willing to bet tha
t the doors of the women's and girls' quarters could only be locked from the outside.
Men's voices broke through the enforced stillness of New Canaan. The kitchen door slammed shut.
"Hurry," Heath repeated Sharon's plea.
"Out," hissed Mrs. Dwayne as she got the key turned and jerked the door open. Sharon and Patty didn't hesitate but bolted down the steps.
Steps.
From the bottom, the sisters looked back. Light from the overhead bulbs in the chapel touched only the planes of their faces and their eyes, giving them the soulful disembodied stare of the cheap velvet paintings Heath remembered from the mid-seventies.
"We could help you down," Sharon offered faintly.
Nevada Barr - Anna Pigeon 13 - Hard Truth Page 22
