by Jack Kilborn
Until the helicopter exploded.
It was already over the water before Sal noticed it. Black, without any lights, silhouetted by the moon. And quiet. Twenty years ago Sal had taken his wife Maggie on a helicopter ride at the Dells, both of them forced to ride with their hands clamped over their ears to muffle the sound. This one made a fraction of that noise. It hummed, like a refrigerator.
The chopper came over the lake on the east side, low enough that its downdraft produced large eddies and waves. So close to the water Sal wondered if its wake might overturn his twelve foot aluminum boat. He ducked as it passed over him, knocking off his Packers baseball cap, scattering lures, lifting several empty Schmidt beer cans and tossing them overboard.
Sal dropped his pole next to his feet and gripped the sides of the boat, moving his body against the pitch and yaw. When capsizing ceased to be a fear, Sal squinted at the helicopter for a tag, a marking, some sort of ID, but it lacked both writing and numbers. It might as well have been a black ghost.
Three heartbeats later the helicopter had crossed the thousand yard expanse of lake and dipped down over the tree line on the opposite shore. What was a helicopter doing in Safe Haven? Especially at night? Why was it flying so low? And why did it appear to have landed near his house?
Then came the explosion.
He felt it a moment after he saw it. A vibration in his feet, as if someone had hit the bow with a bat. Then a soft warm breeze on his face, carrying mingling scents of burning wood and gasoline. The cloud of flames and smoke went up at least fifty feet.
After watching for a moment, Sal retrieved his pole and reeled in his lure, then pulled the starter cord on his 7.5 horsepower Evinrude. The motor didn’t turn over. The second and third yank yielded similar results. Sal swore and began to play with the choke, wondering if Maggie was scared by the crash, hoping she was all right.
Maggie Morton awoke to what she thought was thunder. Storms in upper Wisconsin could be as mean as anywhere on earth, and in the twenty-six years they’d owned this house she and Sal had to replace several cracked windows and half the roof due to weather damage.
She opened her eyes, listened for the dual accompaniment of wind and rain. Strangely, she heard neither.
Maggie squinted at the red blur next to the bed, groped for her glasses, pushed them on her face. The blur focused and became the time: 10:46
“Sal?” she called. She repeated it, louder, in case he was downstairs.
No answer. Sal usually fished until midnight, so his absence didn’t alarm her. She considered flipping on the light, but investigating the noise that woke her held much less appeal than the soft down pillow and the warm flannel sheets tucked under her chin. Maggie removed her glasses, returned them to the night stand, and went back to sleep.
The sound of the front door opening roused her sometime later.
“Sal?”
She listened to the footfalls below her, the wooden floors creaking. First in the hallway, and then into the kitchen.
“Sal!” Louder this time. After thirty-five years of marriage, her husband’s ears were just one of many body parts that seemed to be petering out on him. Maggie had talked to him about getting a hearing aid, but whenever she brought up the topic he smiled broadly and pretended not to hear her, and they both wound up giggling. Funny, when they were in the same room. Not funny when they were on different floors and Maggie needed his attention.
“Sal!”
No answer.
Maggie considered banging on the floor, and wondered what the point would be. She knew the man downstairs was Sal. Who else could it be?
Right?
Their lake house was the last one on Gold Star Road, and their nearest neighbor, the Kinsels, resided over half a mile down the shore and had left for the season. The solitude was one of the reasons the Mortons bought this property. Unless she went to town to shop, Maggie would often go days without seeing another human being, not counting her husband. The thought of someone else being in their home was ridiculous.
Reassured by that thought, Maggie closed her eyes.
She opened them a moment later, when the sound of the microwave carried up the stairs. Then came the muffled machine-gun report of popcorn popping. Sal shouldn’t be eating at this hour. The doctor had warned him about that, and how it aggravated his acid reflux disease, which in turn aggravated Maggie with his constant tossing and turning all night.
She sighed, annoyed, and sat up in bed.
“Sal! The doctor said no late night snacks!”
No answer. Maggie wondered if Sal indeed had a hearing problem, or if he simply used that as an excuse for not listening to her. This time she did swing a foot off the bed and stomp on the floor, three times, with her heel.
She waited for his response.
Got none.
Maggie did it again, and followed it up with yelling, “Sal!” loud as she could.
Ten seconds passed.
Ten more.
Then she heard the sound of the downstairs toilet flush.
Anger coursed through Maggie. Her husband had obviously heard her, and was ignoring her. That wasn’t like Sal at all.
Then, almost like a blush, a wave of doubt overtook her. What if the person downstairs wasn’t Sal?
It has to be, she told herself. She hadn’t heard any boats coming up to the dock, or cars pulling onto their property. Besides, Maggie was a city girl, born and raised in Chicago. Twenty-some years in the Northwoods hadn’t broken her of the habit of locking doors before going to sleep.
The anger returned. Sal was deliberately ignoring her. When he came upstairs, she was going to give him a lecture to end all lectures. Or perhaps she’d ignore himfor a while. Turnabout was fair play.
Comforted by the thought, she closed her eyes. The familiar sound of Sal’s outboard motor drifted in through the window, getting closer. That Evinrude was older than Sal was. Why he didn’t buy a newer, faster motor was beyond her understanding. One of the reasons she hated going out on the lake with him was because it stalled all the time and—
Maggie jack-knifed to a sitting position, panic spiking through her body. If Sal was still out on the boat, then who was in her house?
She fumbled for her glasses, then picked up the phone next to her clock. No dial tone. She pressed buttons, but the phone just wouldn’t work.
Maggie’s breath became shallow, almost a pant. Sal’s boat drew closer, but he was still several minutes away from docking. And even when he got home, what then? Sal was an old man. What could he do against an intruder?
She held her breath, trying to listen to noises from downstairs. Maggie did hear something, but the sound wasn’t coming from the lower level. It was coming from the hallway right outside her bedroom.
The sound of someone chewing popcorn.
Maggie wondered what she should do. Say something? Maybe this was all some sort of mistake, some confused tourist who had walked into the wrong house. Or perhaps this was a robber, looking for money or drugs. Give him what he wanted, and he’d leave. No need for anyone to get hurt.
“Who’s there?”
More munching. Closer. He was practically in the room. She could smell the popcorn now, the butter and salt, and the odor made her stomach do flip-flops.
“My…medication is in the bathroom cabinet. And my purse is on the chair by the door. Take it.”
The ruffling of a paper bag, and more chewing. Open-mouthed chewing. Loud, like someone smacking gum. Why wouldn’t he say anything?
“What do you want?”
No answer.
Maggie was shivering now. The tourist scenario was gone from her head, the robber scenario fading fast. A new scenario entered Maggie’s mind. The scenario of campfire stories and horror movies. The boogeyman, hiding under the bed. The escaped lunatic, searching for someone to hurt, to kill.
Maggie needed to get out of there, to get away. She could run to the car, or meet Sal on the dock and get into his boat, or even hide ou
t in the woods. She could hurry to the guest bedroom, lock the door, open up the window, climb down—
Chewing, right next to the bed. Maggie gasped, pulling the flannel sheets to her chest. She squinted into the darkness, could barely make out the dark figure of a man standing a few feet away.
The bag rustled. Something touched Maggie’s face and she gasped. A tiny pat on her cheek. It happened again, on her forehead, making her flinch. Again, and she swatted out with her hand, finding the object on the pillow.
Popcorn. He was throwing popcorn at her.
Maggie’s voice came out in a whisper. “What…what are you going to do?”
The springs creaked as he sat on the edge of the bed.
“Everything,” he said.
The following is an excerpt of Snowbound by Blake Crouch, available everywhere from Minotaur Books…
1
In the evening of the last good day either of them would know for years to come, the girl pushed open the sliding glass door and stepped through onto the back porch.
“Daddy?”
Will Innis set the legal pad aside and made room for Devlin to climb into his lap. His daughter was small for eleven, felt like the shell of a child in his arms.
“What are you doing out here?” she asked and in her scratchy voice he could hear the remnants of her last respiratory infection like gravel in her lungs.
“Working up a closing for my trial in the morning.”
“Is your client the bad guy again?”
Will smiled. “You and your mother. I’m not really supposed to think of it that way, sweetheart.”
“What’d he do?” His little girl’s face had turned ruddy in the sunset and the fading light brought out threads of platinum in her otherwise midnight hair.
“He allegedly—”
“What’s that mean?”
“Allegedly?”
“Yeah.”
“Means it’s not been proven. He’s suspected of selling drugs.”
“Like what I take?”
“No, your drugs are good. They help you. He was selling, allegedly selling, bad drugs to people.”
“Why are they bad?”
“Because they make you lose control.”
“Why do people take them?”
“They like how it makes them feel.”
“How does it make them feel?”
He kissed her forehead and looked at his watch. “It’s after eight, Devi. Let’s go bang on those lungs.”
She sighed but she didn’t argue. She never tried to get out of it.
He stood up cradling his daughter and walked over to the redwood railing.
They stared into the wilderness that bordered Oasis Hills, their subdivision. The houses on No-Water Lane had the Sonoran Desert for a backyard.
“Look,” he said. “See them?” A half mile away, specks filed out of an arroyo and trotted across the desert toward a shadeless forest of giant saguaro cacti that looked vaguely sinister profiled against the horizon.
“What are they?” she asked.
“Coyotes. What do you bet they start yapping when the sun goes down?”
After supper, he read to Devlin from A Wrinkle in Time. They’d been working their way through the penultimate chapter, “Aunt Beast,” but Devlin was exhausted and drifted off before Will had finished the second page.
He closed the book and set it on the carpet and turned out the light. Cool desert air flowed in through an open window. A sprinkler whispered in the next door neighbor’s yard. Devlin yawned, made a cooing sound that reminded him of rocking her to sleep as a newborn. Her eyes fluttered and she said very softly, “Mom?”
“She’s working late at the clinic, sweetheart.”
“When’s she coming back?”
“Few hours.”
“Tell her to come in and kiss me?”
“I will.”
He was nowhere near ready for court in the morning but he stayed, running his fingers through Devlin’s hair until she’d fallen back to sleep. Finally, he slid carefully off the bed and walked out onto the deck to gather up his books and legal pads. He had a late night ahead of him. A pot of strong coffee would help.
Next door, the sprinklers had gone quiet.
A lone cricket chirped in the desert.
Thunderless lightning sparked somewhere over Mexico, and the coyotes began to scream.
2
The thunderstorm caught up with Rachael Innis thirty miles north of the Mexican border. It was 9:30 p.m., and it had been a long day at the free clinic in Sonoyta, where she volunteered her time and services once a week as a bilingual psychologist. The windshield wipers whipped back and forth. High beams lit the steam rising off the pavement, and in the rearview mirror, Rachael saw the pair of headlights a quarter of a mile back that had been with her for the last ten minutes.
Glowing beads suddenly appeared on the shoulder just ahead. She jammed her foot into the brake pedal, the Grand Cherokee fishtailing into the oncoming lane before skidding to a stop. A doe and her fawn ventured into the middle of the road, mesmerized by the headlights. Rachael let her forehead fall onto the steering wheel, closed her eyes, drew in a deep breath.
The deer moved on. She accelerated the Cherokee, another dark mile passing as pellets of hail hammered the hood.
The Cherokee veered sharply toward the shoulder and she nearly lost control again, trying to correct her bearing, but the steering wheel wouldn’t straighten out. Rachael lifted her foot off the gas pedal and eased over onto the side of the road.
When she killed the ignition all she could hear was the rain and hail drumming on the roof. The car that had been following her shot by. She set her glasses in the passenger seat, opened the door, and stepped down into a puddle that engulfed her pumps. The downpour soaked through her black suit. She shivered. It was pitch-black between lightning strikes and she moved forward carefully, feeling her way along the warm metal of the hood.
A slash of lightning hit the desert just a few hundred yards out. It set her body tingling, her ears ringing. I’m going to be electrocuted. There came a train of earsplitting strikes, flashbulbs of electricity that lit the sky just long enough for her to see that the tires on the driver side were still intact.
Her hands trembled now. A tall saguaro stood burning like a cross in the desert. She groped her way over to the passenger side as marble-size hail collected in her hair. The desert was electrified again, spreading wide and empty all around her.
In the eerie blue light she saw that the front tire on the passenger side was flat.
Back inside the Cherokee, Rachael sat behind the steering wheel, mascara trailing down her cheeks like sable tears. She wrung out her long black hair and massaged the headache building between her temples. Her purse lay in the passenger floorboard. She dragged it into her lap and shoved her hand inside, rummaging for the cell phone. She found it, tried her husband’s number, but there was no service in the storm.
Rachael looked into the back of the Cherokee at the spare. She had no way of contacting AAA and passing cars would be few and far between on this remote highway at this hour of the night. I’ll just wait and try Will again when the storm has passed.
Squeezing the steering wheel, she stared through the windshield into the stormy darkness, somewhere north of the border in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. Middle of nowhere.
There was a brilliant streak of lightning. In the split second illumination she saw a black Escalade parked a hundred yards up the shoulder.
Thunder rattled the windows. Five seconds elapsed. When the sky exploded again, Rachael felt a strange, unnerving pull to look through the driver side window.
A man swung a crowbar through the glass.
3
Will startled back into consciousness, disoriented and thirsty. It was so quiet—just the discreet drone of a computer fan and the second hand of the clock ticking in the adjacent bedroom. He found himself slouched in the leather chair at the desk in his small home off
ice, the CPU still purring, the monitor switched into sleep mode.
As he yawned, everything rushed back in a torrent of anxiety. He’d been hammering out notes for his closing argument and hit a wall at ten o’clock. The evidence was damning. He was going to lose. He’d only closed his eyes for a moment to clear his head.
He reached for the mug of coffee and took a sip. Winced. It was cold and bitter. He jostled the mouse. When the screen restored, he looked at the clock and realized he wouldn’t be sleeping anymore tonight. It was 4:09 a.m. He was due in court in less than five hours.
First things first—he needed an immediate and potent infusion of caffeine.
His office adjoined the master bedroom at the west end of the house, and passing through on his way to the kitchen, he noticed a peculiar thing. He’d expected to see his wife buried under the myriad quilts and blankets on their bed, but she wasn’t there. The comforter was smooth and taut, undisturbed since they’d made it up yesterday morning.
He walked through the living room into the den and down the hallway toward the east end of the house. Rachael had probably come home, seen him asleep at his desk, and gone in to kiss Devlin. She’d have been exhausted from working all day at the clinic. She’d probably fallen asleep in there. He could picture the nightlight glow on their faces as he reached his daughter’s door.
It was cracked, exactly as he’d left it seven hours ago when he’d put Devlin to bed.
He eased the door open. Rachael wasn’t with her.
Will wide awake now, closing Devlin’s door, heading back into the den.
“Rachael? You here, hon?”
He went to the front door, turned the deadbolt, stepped outside.
Dark houses. Porchlights. Streets still wet from the thunderstorms that blew through several hours ago. No wind, the sky clearing, bright with stars.
When he saw them in the driveway, his knees gave out and he sat down on the steps and tried to remember how to breathe. One Beamer, no Jeep Cherokee, and a pair of patrol cars, two uniformed officers coming toward him, their hats shelved under their arms.
