Ripping Abigail, a Quilted Mystery novel

by Sullivan, Barbara

  The urgency to find Abigail expanded, so I left and moved into the fourth bedroom, this one on the left but with the entrance around the corner, out of sight. Ahead was the kitchen. To the left I knew was the bottom leg of the L.

  I almost didn’t make it around this turn. My terror was growing exponentially as I listened to the fighting at this part of the house, Eddie’s part.

  My breathing slowed. Another loud retort pushed me forward and I rounded the corner and slipped quickly inside this last bedroom. There she was!

  She had clothes on! She was tied, but apparently not raped, nor bruised.

  “Rachel!”

  “Shhh.” Which is librarian-speak for be quiet.

  I rushed to Abigail’s side and began undoing the ropes that painfully twisted her wrists above her head.

  She was their prize, the one they needed to keep undamaged for optimum resale value.

  With that bitter thought, I whispered, “You’ve got to help me. I can’t get Betty Wolftooth to respond.”

  She swung her legs over the side of the bed and swayed for a moment as she realized her hands were inoperable. She shook them, trying to move blood through them again. I watched, waited. Until I could tell she was with me.

  Abigail whispered, “Where…show me.” Her voice was scratchy-dry and I wished I had water to give her. But we had to move.

  I led her, my arm around her thin back, pushing her forward toward the front of the house and Betty.

  “Brace yourself. This is ugly. We need to get her up and outside.” Me.

  Abigail nodded, and I felt her spine stiffen under my half embrace.

  It took a few seconds for Abigail to adjust to the horror that Betty had been reduced to. But finally we pulled her and tugged her into an upright position, and moved her into the living room.

  “I can’t…she’s like dead weight…I need to rest,” Abigail half moaned. She seemed to be slipping into depression right before my eyes.

  I looked at the still dark freedom waiting just outside the front door, but Abigail was too weak, so reluctantly I moved us toward the couch that was on the eastern wall of the living room under a large window.

  My mind was racing, trying to decide how to proceed, and the thought that helped me to move them to the couch was that maybe I would be able to see Matt and friends arriving through the front window. Maybe that sight would stir them forward again. I lowered the two girls down on to the couch, and stood to search the gray dawn.

  Instead, I saw the first arc of brilliant yellow as it popped above the dark horizon. It took my breath away and I stood for what seemed like hours mesmerized by the sight I’d seen so many times in my life.

  Inexplicably, an image taken by a powerful lens--made for the purpose of peering into the distant universe, by motes of life on planet Earth that we call astronomers--popped into my mind. This light about to ascend before me reminded me of that image. I’d seen it at Mount Palomar Conservatory, when our boys were young and Matt and I had first lived in California. The memory held me tightly in its grip.

  The image was one of several photographs of galactic activity--ancient light’s passage through the void to the camera’s lens, and thus to our eyes--of surging gas formations, eternally billowing flames, rising and swirling. From our distant vantage, the radiant red and yellow clouds, captured by cameras attached to a Mount Palomar telescope, formed horses’ heads out of the blind and deaf energy swarming the universe. As wide as our galaxy and as high as heaven itself, the horses’ heads reared majestically against a black backdrop of nothingness sprinkled with blue diamonds.

  The pictures have stayed with me for decades, not just because of their intense beauty but because I had seen and would see lesser examples of them in other places and at other times—including times like this one.

  The many random configurations pretending to be life had echoed repeatedly in other marvelous sights on my trip across life. They spoke to me of what ultimate purpose that seemingly random, blind and deaf energy could possibly have.

  The stunning was everywhere, in wave-etched sands of beauty on a beach, in clouds with names like unicorn and griffin, in rocks pretending to be human faces staring yearningly down at us—as if wishing to be what we were, as if the inanimate stuff was trying on life without the spark of it, and finding it wanting.

  There could only be one reason for all the experimentation--life. Life was the purpose of the universe, life for reasons we may not ever understand in this existence, life because it is capable of perception, life, because the inorganic image was not enough for the force that created the universe.

  Life was the sole reason for it all.

  And finally I began forming my humble understanding into words I could give to Betty, urging her to rise and look at the sunrise, to think of the source of that vision, and to go with Abigail and me toward the doorway that would lead to the rest of her life.

  With feeble words I tried to translate this ten or fifteen seconds of thought into something that would reach Betty Wolftooth and move her forward.

  “Betty, pay attention. Abigail’s quilted Dawn Dragon is rising. Look, see it to the east?”

  Remarkably, I watched as Abigail’s face finally sloughed off the lethargy a night of terror had left behind and lit up with the same sense of urgency I felt.

  And Betty turned away from death long enough for us to reach her. I’d spoken Abigail’s childhood words, and somehow they had reached the child still alive within both of them.

  And then the sun completed its part in this effort. It rose. It rose below heavy black clouds and above the dark, tree-broken line of the horizon in all its glory.

  The clouds above the sun sprang to life with the reflection of its hot spirit, in reds, oranges and yellows, and turned the gray dawn blanket into a magnificent quilt of many colors.

  I heard myself say, “You get two of these each day, one in the morning and one at night, Betty. They’re worth everything that happens in between. We need you to fight to live, honey. We need you to help us get you to safety.”

  The words were whispered as we held her swaying between us, facing the rising sun. But I saw the change I needed, not just on Betty’s face but on Abigail’s as well.

  Together we moved her off the couch, and finally toward the front door and her escape. But behind me Rosalia waited, and I knew Abigail could never manage to get Betty far enough away from this hell-bound house alone. I was suddenly torn anew.

  In that moment, a second—or was it a third, Eddie being the first--small miracle of the night appeared in front of us. It was Zen Hannah and Glam Gerry.

  My silly brain looked down at Gerry’s sandled feet and saw that she’d found my spare pare of socks and covered them to protect her painted toenails from the underbrush on their trip down Snakebite Hill, and all the magic evaporated.

  “Where’s Rosalia?” Hannah barked. She was a guard dog, taking command.

  “I don’t know. I’m going back for her now. You two take them to safety. Matt’s on the way.”

  At that second, the arriving army of rescuers broke from cover of the copse and came into view. The sunrise continued to amaze me by lighting them up to look like King Richard’s Crusaders on horseback.

  Another scream from the back of the house turned me around and headed me down the dark hall. I knew I was crazy. I knew I would get killed. I knew I had to find Rosalia.

  So did Hannah and Gerry, who nevertheless called after me to stop. My heart was pounding in my breast again.

  Before taking a handful of steps, I spotted movement at the other end of the hall. My gun raised up as if to face whoever was there, as if it had a mind of its own. A dragging, foot-stepping sound was making its way down the hall to the left. I waited in terror.

  It was Eddie, standing only a few feet away now, still bathed in darkness, still all in grays and that ridiculous cowboy outfit, only looking much healthier than the last time I’d seen him.

  He was almost handsome.


  He was dragging and pushing two of the Mexican bandito’s toward the back door. They looked terrified.

  He took the time to flash me a grin. Then he dragged his two charges out the back door and down the steps.

  My skin tried to run away from the sight of him but my mind had locked up. I must have stood there watching him for untold seconds, before breaking free of some demon spell.

  It was uncanny to see him again, to be aiming a gun at him again.

  Then I turned and rushed to help Rosalia, still not knowing who else was back in the small, bloodied den.

  EPILOGUE

  Sunday evening

  Abigail’s final words as she was being led away into the rising sun by Hannah and Gerry had been, “But will life be worth anything without Buddy?”

  Words I didn’t register at the time.

  But they became the last worried thoughts that I’d carried into the land of sleep with me after returning home Sunday morning, along with one happy thought.

  We’d found Wisdom healthy and sleeping soundly at the foot of our bed. He merely raised his great, gray head and looked at us reproachfully for having stayed out too late, and then returned to sleep.

  Looks like we get to keep him for another day or two. One day at a time, as the saying goes.

  A ringing phone woke me way too soon, but the sky was darkening again, so I answered the call, sighing loudly as I slumped back on my half-used bed, phone to ear.

  It was Abigail. She opened the conversation by shouting that Buddy Zinzer had been found alive. Now I was awake.

  I turned on the bedroom television and listened to a story already growing old in news-time, that indeed Buddy was alive. Unfortunately, another Pinto boy had been found quite dead and quite mutilated only twenty feet away.

  Not that Buddy had escaped harm. He had been cut in many places. I told myself that if any of them had been life-threatening, they’d be saying so. But…

  “How badly?” slipped from between my lips before I could stop it.

  “I don’t know. My mom just left for the hospital. She said she’d call. Of course he’s in ICU.”

  But before I could grow too morose over the slaughter of innocents, Abigail switched mental gears and told me she’d just had the weirdest dream.

  How like a teenager to say she’d had the weirdest dream, right after having lived through the weirdest nightmare. How quickly youth began to heal, I mused as I listened. And then I worried that she wasn’t really healing, just suppressing.

  “I think it was because of your dragon comment. You know, Dawn Dragon?”

  I knew.

  “I think that’s why I was riding one in my dream, swooping across some bucolic landscape. But he wasn’t a fire breather, my mount, he was a kind animal, a gentle hero. Maybe like the creature in the NeverEnding Story. Have I ever told you that I love fantasies?”

  A good thing to love.

  I told her no, but of course I knew. I’d just helped sew some of her first dragon quilt. I felt there would be others. And her magnificent flowers were fantasies.

  “And…there were maidens, all kinds of them, all in trouble, tied to trees, locked in dungeons. They were in all kinds of situations. I was flying from one to the other and freeing them. Of course I know I was dreaming about what has just happened, but it seemed different. Like there was a truth in the dream that wasn’t in the real thing. I told my mother. She actually listened to me this time.”

  Another good thing. But maybe she had her assumptions backwards. Maybe the truth was in the real thing, not her chimera-dream.

  “I mean she didn’t talk down to me like she sometimes does. So then we talked more and she agreed—at long last—that I could continue to go to Pinto Springs high school.”

  She stopped. I just listened.

  “But now I’m not so sure. Maybe I’d rather not…of course I can’t go back to the home school group…it’s just that I don’t have the warmest feelings about Pinto Springs high anymore.”

  “Maybe another school.” Me, not just listening.

  “Yeah, maybe. Anyway, I still can’t let the dream go, you know? There’s something there, me flying around, saving maidens in distress.”

  “Like a social worker might?” Me, just giving her feedback.

  “Yeah, like that, I guess. Or maybe…a lawyer. Or a doctor. You know, not the ones just after money, but like a public lawyer, a doctor who works in a poor community. Or, maybe a cop.”

  “Or a tailor, or candlestick maker.”

  She giggled.

  “Yeah. I guess it’s too early to discuss careers.”

  “Or an artist.”

  “Of course. But there has to be more. I’ll keep thinking about it. I did love riding that dragon, saving those maidens.”

  “Good thing to love.”

  I dressed and went to see where the boys were.

  I found Wisdom on our back deck listening to his wilder spirit-buddies. Matt was soundly sleeping in his favorite recliner in front of an unseen and unheard television, so I took off for another visit with God.

  It was getting to be a bad habit, me showing up at St. Peter’s Church to sit and ponder and yes, even pray. I was hardly what you would call a regular churchgoer. I didn’t even take communion I was so riddled with sin.

  I was riddled with sin because I couldn’t get up the nerve to confess. I’d never really felt comfortable with confession—the process by which you un-riddle yourself--having been a failed Protestant and all.

  But the church was still a good place to think. Lots of nice thoughts hanging around you in the air. Sort of kept your musings from going too dark.

  So what drove me there, you might ask, besides familiarity? Well, maybe it was the second call from Abigail, the one I’d illegally taken while driving to church, the one where she’d told me Buddy had been razor cut in so many places they’d just stopped counting. More importantly, he would survive and nothing vital had been removed, no missing parts. So, He-She needed to be thanked.

  No, that hadn’t been what sent me to church. I’d already been on my way. So I decided understanding why I have this urge to connect with God in this Catholic place could wait for another day.

  Anyway, in church, thinking back on Abigail’s trials and her indomitable spirit, I said a prayer for her, and thanked the unknowable force. The fates. The gods, or God, or whatever-whoever that makes the world come back together mostly okay when chaos lets loose its random confusion.

  It’s only one God. We know this because there is only one message.

  I brushed aside the fantasy that this strong-willed thought had been from anyone but me. Me to myself.

  Abigail was going to be okay. Definitely the best thing of the night had been finding Abigail and Betty, and helping them escape. Thank you, God, for that.

  And then I thanked God for helping us find Buddy, by sending in the flies, who called the cops. It was their buzzing that attracted the searchers’ attention.

  My thoughts and I wandered and finally I found myself back home. Matt was still before the television, but this time listening.

  “The locals are calling this final Pintos victim a hero. I concur. His name is Javier. I think he took Buddy’s death. His mom and dad say he was like that, a brave and true believer.”

  I wished I was.

  I wished I was a true believer and brave. But I wasn’t. I was just driven to help others when the chips were down. Some random gene. Some….

  By design.

  My Marine continued as I wandered into the kitchen for some of what he was drinking and snacking on.

  “Buddy’s awake, but he can’t remember what happened after they first started cutting him on his parents’ bed,” Matt called after me.

  That meant Buddy couldn’t explain why the Pinto boy had been killed.

  “Gloria says Abigail only remembers being taken in another direction by the Hidalgo gang and listening to Buddy’s screams as she was leaving. I think Gloria is going t
o need your help.”

  I reminded myself to call her.

  “Anyway, Buddy’s mom and Abigail are taking turns watching over him now, along with the Zinzers. They’re talking about moving to Cardiff-by-the-Sea, for an extended stay with a relative there. I can’t see how they’ll ever sell that house.”

  Poor Abigail, find him alive and lose him to a move. I reminded myself that she was thirteen, and settled down on the couch.

  But that thought brought my wandering mind back to early this morning, after I’d raced back into the house to find Rosalia. Fact is I didn’t. But I found a room full of dead Hidalgos, three of them to be exact, at the end of the L-shaped house. One had had his left eye replaced with a bullet hole.

  It gave me chills to know Eddie Stowall was now that good a shot, like it had given me chills to think about where he went with the other two bad guys, before I’d found out.

  “And Harks called.”

  The Deacon.

  “Guy has amazing connections. He’s in awe of Eddie’s capabilities, the ones that allowed him to confront and survive dealing with five drug terrorists. That’s what Harks calls them, drug terrorists.”

  I was in awe of Eddie’s capabilities as well, but probably with a different take-away.

  “I wonder if the man is sane.”

  Matt looked at me, thoughtfully. “So do the FBI and cops. I’m on the fence.”

  “But he saved Rosalia.”

  “Right.”

  We stared at each other for a long time, probably sending the same conclusions to each other. A long marriage makes that possible.

  I sipped my drink, decaf diet Coke--otherwise known as expensive, bubbly water. Ate two chips dipped in salsa.

  As I ignored the television and mulled over Eddie’s behavior, I decided that for me the most important part of Eddie’s actions during the final hours of this event was the saving of Rosalia Fousat. She was found lying in a heap out next to one of the Hidalgo get-away cars—still alive. The Hidalgos had almost gotten away with her. They’d almost killed her before they tried to flee with her, and then they’d almost placed her into a car and fled south.