She thumped the butt of her flashlight on the nearest duct. It made a dull, flat sound. She began thumping the duct from the furnace outward and upward as high as she could reach, which was not quite to the ceiling.
“What are you doing?”
Pearl ignored her. She moved around to the next duct and repeated her thumping. She didn’t stop until she’d checked all of them.
“They all sound about the same,” she said, more to herself than to Sarah.
“Yes? And?”
“I was just thinking that if Christine had ever been down here, she might have stowed supplies or something up in there.”
Pearl went around to the furnace door and leaned in again. Then she backed out.
“I’d like to open up those ducts, but I can’t quite reach them without climbing in there.”
“Maybe we can use a coat hanger or—”
“I’ve got something in the trunk of the car that might work,” Pearl said. “Be back in a minute.”
She walked out and clambered up the stairs. Sarah started to follow, afraid to be down there alone. Then she chided herself for being so paranoid. She moved over to the furnace and touched the nearest duct, feeling the dents where Pearl had struck with her flashlight. She wondered exactly what sound Pearl had expected to hear. She curled her fingers, palm forward, and drew back her hand to thump the duct.
Then she froze.
There was a rustling sound inside the duct. The sound became a heavy scraping and banging.
Sarah stumbled back and stared with horror at the furnace.
It was quiet for a moment.
Then through the open grate came the head and shoulders of Christine Helstrum. Her hair was in disarray, and her pink sweater was streaked with dirt. She turned toward Sarah with a surprised look on her face, as if she hadn’t expected anyone to be there.
Then she smiled and began to climb out—clumsily, though, because she was holding the butcher knife.
Sarah heard herself scream as she turned and ran for her life.
35
SHE PUSHED OUT THE cardboard and wriggled headfirst from the duct into the furnace. When she leaned out the furnace door, she was surprised to see Alex’s wife standing there.
No matter, she thought. She can’t stop me. I’ll take my son and run away from here.
She’d wanted to do it last night, but Alex had surprised her in the foyer. She knew she was lucky she hadn’t been shot. Or that the cops hadn’t run in and caught her. She’d barely had time to open an outside door to make them think she’d left, just as she’d done before. Then she’d run down here and squeezed into her hiding place.
It had been a good hiding place, too, she thought. Always waiting for me after I’d snuck into the house.
She remembered holding her breath every time anyone came nearby, keeping silent, tucked safely away.
Then that damn woman cop, she thought.
She’d heard the cop tell Alex’s wife that she had something out in the car to pull out the cardboard. She’d waited until they’d both left the room. At least she’d thought they’d both left. She’d been wrong, but it didn’t matter. Soon she’d be gone from this place.
With my son, she thought.
She was anxious to be with him. She felt excited but good, warm inside.
She climbed out of the furnace and hobbled on stiff legs to the stairs. She heard Alex’s wife slam the basement door and throw the bolt. She clomped up the stairs, allowing herself a smile when she saw the familiar breaker box.
She jabbed the butcher knife through the thin crack separating the basement door and the frame. Then she pressed down hard on the bolt and wiggled the knife back and forth, moving the bolt. She’d done this enough times before to have a good feel for it.
Within seconds the bolt was free.
She turned the knob and threw open the door.
36
SARAH FLED FROM THE furnace room.
She tried to take the stairs three at a time, tripped, and fell forward, banging her left shin and her right elbow on the hard wooden steps. She clambered to her feet, her eyes watery with pain, and scrambled up the stairs. Just as she slammed the basement door, she heard Christine on the stairs. She slid the bolt in place, then turned and leaned back on the door and shouted for Officer Pearl.
Where is she?
“Pearl!” she shouted again.
Don’t panic, she told herself. Think. Her car’s out on the street. Run out and get her. No. Brian’s upstairs. Get him out of the—
Sarah felt a sudden, sharp pain in the back of her right arm, just above the elbow. She cried out and lunged away from the door. When she turned, she saw a few inches of the butcher knife’s blade protruding through the narrow slit between the basement door and the doorframe. The tip of the blade, pink with her blood, began to wiggle on top of the bolt. Sarah realized now how the scratches on the bolt had been made.
She reached for the bolt to hold it in place, but it suddenly slid free. Sarah didn’t wait for the basement door to open, but turned and ran through the kitchen, yelling for Brian, trying to ignore the painful cut in her arm, and wondering where the hell Officer Pearl was.
She stopped for a split second in the foyer. The front door and safety were a few feet away, and part of her, the part concerned only with self-preservation, urged her to get out of the house now.
“Brian!” she yelled down the hallway toward the family room.
But she’d heard no TV sounds, and the last time she’d seen him he’d been upstairs.
She yelled for him as she ran up the stairs and around the top of the stairwell and burst into his room. He was sitting cross-legged on his bed beside an open coloring book and a shoe box filled with crayons. His eyes were wide in surprise.
“Come on, let’s go!”
She grabbed him by the arm, pulled him off the bed and half-dragged, half-tugged him out the door and down the hall to the head of the stairs. She took one step down, then stopped, her heart in her throat.
Christine stood at the foot of the stairs, one hand on the banister, the other at her side holding the long, wide butcher knife. It rested casually against her leg.
Sarah felt frozen in the moment, intensely aware of everything around her. She could see perfectly every detail of Christine’s lined forehead and thickly made-up cheeks, her straggly golden-brown-tinted hair, and her clothing—the scuffed shoes, the limp skirt, the ruined pink sweater stretched tightly across her body. She could feel a rivulet of blood running down her right arm inside the sleeve of her sweater. Brian’s hand in hers was warm and small, like a trapped, frightened bird. She could hear the faint whistling of his breathing and the fainter dull thuds of her own pounding heart. There was an odor in the air, an odor that Sarah could almost taste—sharp and bitter. But she couldn’t tell whether it was drifting up from Christine or whether it came from inside, whether it was the odor of her own fear.
Christine smiled and tilted her head to one side as if admiring a picture. Sarah saw madness in her eyes. And she saw something else, something that she found even more frightening—love.
“Such a pretty boy,” Christine said in a voice as jagged and brittle as broken glass. “Come to me now, Timothy.”
She began to climb the stairs.
Brian was coloring the handle of Luke Skywalker’s light sword when he thought he heard his mother call his name.
The sound had been muffled because his door was closed, so he wasn’t certain that it had been his name he’d heard. He wasn’t even certain that it was his mother calling, because the sound had been a high-pitched yell.
Then he heard it again. This time he was sure that it was his name and his mother yelling. He’d never heard her sound like that before. It frightened him.
Suddenly she burst through the door with a look of such wildness on her face that he could do nothing but sit and stare. She reached out to grab him. For a moment he thought she was angry because he’d been sitting on the bed wi
th his boots on. But in the next second he knew it was something else, something far more serious than boots on the bed, because she yelled, “Come on, let’s go!” then yanked his arm so hard he thought it would break.
He was pulled off the bed and out the door. He had to run as hard as he could to keep from being dragged down the hallway. When his mother stopped suddenly at the top of the stairs, he bumped hard into her leg.
He looked past her to the bottom of the stairs.
Down there staring up at him was the scariest person he’d ever seen. Her clothes were messed up, and her hair stuck out in all directions. When she smiled up at him, he felt himself shiver, because now he recognized her—the woman from his nightmare, the woman who had somehow become real and taken Patches out of his bedroom and hacked off his tail. And now she’d come back for him.
She said something that he didn’t quite understand, and then she started up the stairs.
Brian knew that he and his mom were trapped. There were no good hiding places upstairs, and there was only one way down.
So they’d have to fight.
He pulled free of his mother’s grip and ran back toward his room to get a weapon. She yelled at him to stop, but he ignored her, ran into his room, and dove for the corner and his toy chest. He yanked open the lid to reveal its jumbled contents. Lying on top was his Sword of Power, its blade tapered to a dull cardboard point.
He picked it up and threw it aside. He began frantically digging down into the chest, pulling out things with both hands and throwing them right and left. Balls, games, sporting equipment, toys—all of them sailing through the air or bouncing off the walls and piling up on the floor.
Just as he found what he was looking for, an arm wrapped around his chest and yanked him off his knees and into the air.
He was carried out the door and down the hall, bouncing on his mother’s hip. He banged his foot on the doorframe of his parents’ bedroom and then cried out, not because of the pain but because of what he saw: the woman with the knife coming around the head of the stairs.
His mother didn’t stop until she’d run through the room and into the bathroom. She dropped him on the floor, slammed the bathroom door, and punched the button in the knob with her thumb. Now Brian knew why they’d come here: It was the only room upstairs with a lock on the door.
He sat on the floor, feeling more scared than he ever had in his life, and watched his mother press her ear against the door, listening for any sounds in the bedroom while her eyes searched the bathroom.
Her eyes frightened him more than anything, more than her yelling and running, even more than the crazy lady who was coming after them. There was fear in her eyes, to be sure, and although he’d seen her frightened before, it had always been brief, nothing like this. But it wasn’t the fear that scared him; it was something else, something that he’d never seen before—a fierce, wild look. He felt that at this moment she might do anything. She might even do something that would harm him.
His mother gasped, as if she’d heard something outside the door. Then she stepped over him and stood in the center of the bathroom, glancing quickly at everything around her—the bathtub enclosed in its shower curtain, the window, the toilet, the sink and countertop with the cupboards underneath, the mirrored medicine cabinet—as if she were searching for something to fight with.
“Use this, Mom,” Brian said.
He stood and held out the box cutter, its thick, scarred metal handle in his hand and its rusty razor blade pointed toward her.
“Where did you—”
The doorknob rattled.
“I know you’re in there,” Christine said from the other side of the door.
Brian expected his mother to take the weapon from him and fight the woman. But she didn’t. She turned away from the door, then practically flung herself at the window, pulled it open, and began yelling for help.
“It’s okay, Mom,” Brian said firmly. “I’ll fight her.” He reached for the doorknob.
Sarah watched Christine start to come up the stairs. She knew they were trapped, and she tried to think if there was something up here that she could use as a weapon. There was nothing. And none of the doors had locks. Except—
Suddenly Brian pulled away from her and ran down the hall toward his room.
“Brian!”
She glanced down the stairs. Christine was a third of the way up now, climbing with purpose, a faint smile on her lips.
Sarah ran after Brian.
When she got to his room, she expected to find him hiding in the closet or perhaps squeezed under the bed. She was surprised, almost shocked, to see him kneeling before his toy chest, throwing out things right and left. She hurried over, scooped him up with one arm, and ran out of the room and down the hall to the master bedroom.
She saw Christine climb the last step and turn toward them.
Sarah hurried into the bathroom, let go of Brian, slammed the door, and locked it. She hoped it was locked; there was no way to test it—if she turned the knob, the button of the lock would pop open.
She looked frantically around the room, mentally searching behind every closed drawer and door for something, anything, that could be used to defend herself. But there was nothing more lethal than a fingernail file.
“Use this, Mom,” Brian said, as if he’d been reading her thoughts.
He was holding something out for her—Alex’s box cutter. The last time she’d seen it had been when Alex was opening boxes of Christmas-tree ornaments in the basement. She started to say something when she heard Christine’s voice just outside the door. It went through her like an electric current. She jumped at the window, reached up for the shoulder-high latch, then slid the window horizontally in its aluminum frame. She began yelling into the cold darkness.
“Help us! We’re upstairs in the bathroom! Help!”
The window faced south, overlooking the side yard and the garage. Sarah had no idea whether her voice would carry along the side of the house to the street.
Where’s Pearl? she thought.
She wondered if Officer Maestas had been parked in the street when Pearl went out there. She could picture them now, idly chatting, perhaps both sitting in Maestas’s patrol car with the windows rolled up against the cold.
She was about to yell again, yell her lungs out because there was nothing else to do, when she heard Brian say something. She turned in time to see him put his hand on the doorknob.
“Brian, no!”
He looked back at her, his face set in determination, his small hand still resting on the knob.
“She hurt Patches, Mom, but we can beat her.”
He was beyond her reach, too far for her to physically stop him from turning the knob and popping open the lock-button, unlocking the door.
“No, Brian,” she said quickly. “If you let her in, she’ll hurt us both.”
He hesitated, then dropped his hand from the doorknob.
Christine pounded on the door.
“It’s time to come out now, Timothy. It’s time to go home with Mommy.”
Sarah glanced at Brian, who now stood petrified in the middle of the bathroom. She turned to the window and twisted the clasps that held the screen in place. She tried to pull the screen out, but it wouldn’t budge, so she pounded its frame with the heel of her hand. The screen and frame came free and sailed down to the snowy yard.
Sarah leaned out the window. From this height, the screen looked no bigger than a postcard lying in the moonlit snow. There was no ledge below the window, nothing but a straight two-story drop to the ground. Sarah had hoped that there would be a way to climb down. But there was none. And it was too far to jump. If it were just her, she’d risk it. But there was Brian, and he might not survive the fall.
She thought of the mattress that she and Alex had hauled outside only yesterday, but it was leaning against the house, not flat on the ground. If only—
The bathroom door shook under a solid thud, as if a heavy weight had be
en thrown against it.
Christine swore from outside the door. She was quiet for a moment. Then she grunted, and immediately there came another thud, this one stronger, making the door shudder in its frame.
Sarah doubted that the fragile lock could withstand more.
She leaned back out the window and looked up. The sky was dark enough now to reveal the brightest stars, except where their light was washed out by the quarter moon or blocked by the overhanging edge of the roof. Sarah reached up for the roof’s edge, stretching as far as she could. It was just beyond the tips of her fingers. She put her hands on the window ledge and hoisted herself partially out the window, holding on with one hand and reaching up and back with the other.
Now she could feel the roofing tiles. They felt dry and rough enough to grip. She slid back down into the room just as the bathroom door shook under a tremendous blow, moving it slightly inward, splintering the old wooden frame.
“Brian, come here quick.” Her voice was a loud whisper. “We’re going up on the roof.”
Brian stared at her as if in shock. She pulled him over to the window, took the box cutter from him so that both his hands would be free, and jammed it in her pocket. Then she lifted him up to the window.
“Mommy, no.”
“Don’t be afraid, Brian, I won’t let you fall.”
She held him so that he was sitting on the windowsill, his feet inside, his back to the void, his face to the house.
“Climb up there, Brian. Hurry.”
She lifted him, then felt him pull up out of her grasp. She gave the bottoms of his boots one final shove and then looked up. He was out of sight.
Now Sarah hoisted herself through the window and tried not to stare at the distant ground below her. She was only halfway through when she heard the crack of splintering wood, the slam of the door banging open against the bathroom wall and the thud and tumble of someone falling into the room. She reached up, grasped the eave, and began pulling herself out of the window as if she were climbing out of shark-infested waters, waiting for the strike that could come at any second to her hip, her thigh, her calf …
Night of Reunion: A Novel Page 26
