9
The Thunder House
IT WAS A TWO-STORY WOODEN HOUSE WITH A GABLED ROOF, A widow’s walk with broken railings, and a wide porch that went around the lower floor. A path of fieldstones, overgrown with weeds, led from the road to the porch steps. The house might have been beautiful once, a long time ago. It was past saving now. The salt breeze and Pacific spray had long ago scoured off what paint there had been. The house was dark gray, its walls covered with green moss and lichens the color of ashes. What looked like cancers had taken hold on the wood, grown tendrils and linked with other tumors. Part of the porch’s supports had collapsed, the floor sagging. Vandals had shown their hand: every window in the house was shattered, and spray-painted graffiti was snarled like gaudy thorns between the lichens.
Laura started up the steps. The second one was already broken, as was the fourth. Laura touched the banister, and her hand sank into the rotten wood. There was no front door. Just beyond the threshold there was a hole in the floor that might have been the size of Mary’s boot. Laura walked inside, the smell of saltwater thick and the inner walls dark with growths. Moss hung from the ceiling like garlands. The decorations for a homecoming, Laura thought. She walked toward the staircase, and her left foot slid through the floor as if into gray mud. She pulled free, little black beetles scurrying out of the hole. The first riser of the stairs had given way. So had most of the others. The house was decayed to its core, and the walls were about to fall.
“I know you’re there,” Laura said. The saturated walls muffled her voice. “I want my baby. I’m not going to let you have him, and you know that by now.”
Silence but for the thunder and the noise of dripping.
“Come on, Mary. I’ll find you sooner or later.”
No answer. What if she’s killed him? Laura thought. Oh Jesus, what if she killed him back in Freestone and that’s why the police were—
She stopped herself before she cracked. Laura walked carefully into another room. Its bay windows, long broken out, gave a majestic view of the ocean. She could see waves crashing against the rocks, spume leaping high. Mist, a silent destroyer, was drifting into the house. On the cratered floor lay beer cans, cigarette butts, and an empty rum bottle.
Laura heard what she thought at first was the crying of a sea gull on the wind.
No, no. Her heart kicked. It was the crying of a baby. From upstairs, somewhere. Tears burned her eyes, and she almost sobbed with relief. David was still alive.
But she would have to climb the stairs to get him.
Laura started up, over the broken risers. David was still crying, the sound ebbing and then strengthening again. He’s tired, she thought. Worn out and hungry. Her arms ached to hold him. Careful, careful! The staircase trembled under her weight, as it must have shaken under the weight of Mary Terror. She climbed into the gloom, moss glistening on the walls, and she reached the second floor.
It was a warren of rooms, but David’s crying guided her. Her right foot slid down into the floor, and she nearly fell to her knees. On this second level, much of the floor had already given way, the rest of the boards swollen and sagging underfoot. Laura eased around the rotten-edged craters, where black bugs swarmed, and followed the sound of her child’s voice.
Mary could be anywhere. Lurking around a corner, standing in the darkness, waiting for her. Laura went on, step after careful step, her gaze wary for the big woman suddenly appearing in a doorway. But there was no sign of Mary, and at last Laura came to the room that held her son.
He was not alone.
Mary Terror was standing in the far corner of the room, facing the doorway. She had David in the crook of her left arm. Her right hand held a revolver, aimed at the baby’s head.
“You found me,” Mary said. A smile flickered across a face tight with madness. Her eyes were burn holes, beads of sweat like blisters on her skin. A patch of blood and pus had soaked through the thigh of her jeans.
The hairs had risen on the back of Laura’s neck. She’d seen the gore spattered on the woman’s sweater and the Smiley Face button. The revolver’s hammer was cocked and ready. “Let him go. Please.”
Mary paused. She seemed to be thinking about it, her eyes staring off somewhere beside Laura. “He says I shouldn’t do that,” Mary told her.
“Who says it?”
“God,” Mary said. “He’s standing over there.”
Laura swallowed thickly. David’s crying waxed and waned. He was calling for his mother, and her legs wanted to carry her to him.
“Throw your gun down,” Mary commanded.
She hesitated. Once the gun was gone, she was finished. Her brain was smoking, trying to think of a way out of this. “In Freestone,” she said. “Did you find Jack Gardi—”
“DON’T SPEAK THAT NAME!” Mary shrieked. Her gun hand trembled, the knuckles white.
Laura stood very still, her lungs rasping and cold sweat on her forehead.
Mary’s eyes closed for a second or two, as if she were trying to shut out what she’d seen. Then they jerked open. “He’s dead. He died in 1972. Linden, New Jersey. There was a shootout. The pigs found us. He died…saving me and my baby. I held him while he died. He said…he said…” She looked to God for guidance in this. “He said he’d never love anyone else, and that our love was like two shooting stars burning bright and hot and people who saw it would be blinded by that beauty. So he died, a long time ago.”
“Mary?” Laura kept her voice steady with a supreme effort. If she didn’t do something in a hurry, her infant was going to die. The thought of a police sniper and a madwoman on a balcony whirled through her mind in a horror of flashing blue lights. But that woman had killed the baby because of the death reflex. If Mary had to make a sudden choice, would she kill Laura first, or David? “The baby is mine. Can you understand that? I gave birth to him. He belongs to—”
“He’s mine,” Mary interrupted. “And we’re going to die together. Can you dig it, or not?”
“No.”
It was the only way. Laura’s eyes calculated the inches as her mind measured the dwindling seconds. Time was almost gone. She lunged forward and dropped to her knees, the quickness of her movement catching Mary Terror by surprise.
A single memory passed through Mary’s fevered brain, like a cool balm: Drummer’s small hand, tightening around her index finger as if to stop it from pulling a trigger.
The revolver didn’t go off.
As Laura lifted her pistol and took aim, the gun in Mary’s hand left the child’s head and began to turn toward Laura.
But Laura got off the first two shots.
She was aiming at the woman’s legs, from a distance of ten feet. The first shot missed, hitting the wall behind Mary, but the second bullet grazed Mary’s wounded thigh and burst it open in a hot spray of blood and pus. Mary screamed like an animal, her legs buckling and her gun firing before it could train on Laura. As Mary’s knees hit the floor, Laura scrambled toward her and swung the automatic at the woman’s head, striking her a blow across the left cheekbone. Mary’s gun hand began to spasm uncontrollably, and the revolver fell to the floor. Then Laura grabbed hold of the green parka David was zipped up in. She wrenched him out of Mary’s grasp, and then she kicked the revolver through a hole in the floor and backed away.
Mary fell onto her side, grasping her ruined leg and moaning.
Laura began to sob. She pressed David against her and kissed his face. He was squalling, his eyes bright with tears. “It’s all right,” she told him. “It’s all right. Oh God, I’ve got you. I’ve got my sweet baby, thank God.”
She had to get out of there. The rangers’ station wasn’t far. She could go there and tell them where Mary Terror was. Her heart was beating wildly, the blood rushing through her veins. She felt faint, the ordeal about to smash over her like the ocean on the rocks. She held her baby close, and staggered out of the room. “I’ve got you, I’ve got you,” she kept saying as she carried him toward the stairs.
>
She heard a whuff.
Behind her.
She turned.
And Mary Terror took one last hobbling lurch and hit her in the face with her right fist, the blow snapping Laura’s head back. As Laura fell, her mind ablaze with pain, she hugged David close and swiveled her body so the impact would not be on him but on her right shoulder. The gun left her fingers, and she heard it thud down somewhere in the gloom.
Mary was on her, trying to pull David away. Laura let go of him and clawed at Mary’s eyes, her broken fingernails raking across the big woman’s face. Mary hammered a punch into Laura’s chest, cheating her lungs of air, and as Laura gasped for breath she felt David being taken from her again.
Laura hooked an arm around Mary’s throat and squeezed. Mary let go of the baby to beat at Laura’s ribs, and then she swung Laura up and around with fierce strength and both the women crashed together against a wall with David on the floor beneath them.
The rotten wall gave way. They went through the soft insect-eaten boards and onto the floor of another room. As they fought, Mary’s knee slammed against Laura’s splinted hand, and the pain was like incandescent light, startling in its power. Laura heard herself moan, a bestial sound. She struck out with her right fist, hit Mary’s shoulder, struck out again, and got her jaw. A blow from Mary hit Laura in the stomach, and then Mary had her by the hair and was trying to slam her head against the floorboards.
Laura fought back with the raw strength of the doomed. She got her fingers in Mary’s eyes and tore at them, and then Mary cried out and was pulling away from her. Blood was spattered all over them from Mary’s thigh wound, splattered all over the floor. Laura kicked out, hit Mary in the ribs, and drew a grunt from her. Another kick missed, and Mary Terror was crawling away, blood dripping from the corner of her right eye. Laura staggered to her feet, and suddenly Mary turned on her again and grabbed her legs, lifting her off the floor and throwing her back into another wall. Laura went through it as if it were damp pasteboard, and then Mary burst after her through the rotten timbers and sodden plaster with a strangled bellow of fury.
Blood was in Mary’s eyes, her face a crimson mask. She kicked at Laura, who got to her knees and desperately tried to protect her face and head with her arms. She warded off one kick, was struck in the shoulder by another. Freighted with pain, she fought to her feet. And then Mary—half-blinded, her right eye white in its socket—clamped her arms around Laura’s body, trapping her arms at her sides. She began to crush the life out of her.
Laura thrashed, couldn’t break free. Her vision was fading. When she passed out, Mary would beat her to death. Laura rocked her skull back and brought it forward, smashing her forehead as hard as she could against the woman’s mouth and nose.
Bones snapped like twigs. The pressure on Laura’s ribs eased, and she slid down to the floor in a heap as Mary staggered across the floor, her hands pressed to her face. She hit a wall, but this one was solid. And then she shook her head, drops of blood flying, and she leaned over and breathed like a bellows as red drooled from her mouth.
Laura was shaking, her nerves and muscles almost used up. She was about to pass out, and when she put her hand to her face it came away smeared with blood.
Mary snorted gore, and came at her dragging her mangled leg.
The big woman reached down for her, grabbed her hair with one hand and her throat with the other.
Laura came up off the floor like an uncoiling spring, her teeth gritted, and she grasped the front of Mary’s sweater with her good hand and kicked with her last reserve of power into the woman’s bleeding thigh.
A howl of pure agony burst from Mary’s mouth. Mary let go of Laura’s throat to clutch at her leg, and she toppled backward off balance, her shoulders slamming against a wall five feet behind her.
Laura saw the gray wall break open, rusted nails popping like gunshots, and Mary Terror kept falling.
There was a scream. Mary’s bloody hands clawed at the edges of the hole she’d gone through, but more of the rotten wood gave way beneath her fingers. The scream sharpened.
Mary’s hands disappeared.
Laura heard a moist-sounding thump.
The scream had stopped.
She could hear sea gulls. Mist, the silent destroyer, drifted through the broken wall.
Laura looked out. Mary Terror had gone through the side of the house and fallen to the ground forty feet below. She lay on her stomach, amid rocks and weeds and broken bottles, the detritus of someone’s party. A graffiti artist had been at work on the larger rocks, adorning them with names and dates in Day-Glo orange. Twenty feet from Mary’s head was a spray-painted peace symbol.
There was something in Laura’s right hand. She opened it, and looked at the Smiley Face button that had been ripped from Mary Terror’s sweater. Its pin had pricked her palm.
She shook it out of her hand, and it clattered facedown to the floor.
Laura staggered out of the room, and near the staircase she knelt down on the floor beside her son.
His gaze found her, and he shrieked. She knew she was no beauty. She picked him up—a major effort, but a pleasure she would not be denied—and rocked him, slowly and gently. Gradually, his crying subsided. She felt his heart beating, and that miracle of miracles broke her. She lowered her head and sobbed, mixing blood and tears.
She thought she must’ve passed out. When she awakened again, her first thought was that Mary Terror was coming after her, and God help her if she got up and looked out and saw that the woman was no longer lying where she’d struck.
She was afraid to find out. But the thought passed, and her eyelids drifted shut again. Her body was a kingdom of pain. Later—and exactly when this was she didn’t know— David’s crying brought her back to the world. He was hungry. Wanting a bottle. Got to feed a growing boy. My growing boy.
“I love you,” she whispered. “I love you, David.” She zipped him out of the parka and inspected him: fingers, toes, genitals, everything. He was whole, and he was hers.
Laura held him close against her, and she crooned to him as the ocean spoke outside.
It became time to think about what she was going to do.
She believed she could get the Cutlass out of the bog. If not, maybe the keys were still in the Jeep wagon. No, she couldn’t bear to drive that. Couldn’t even bear to sit in it, because that woman’s smell would be in there. If she couldn’t get the Cutlass out, she would have to walk to the rangers’ station. Could she do that? She thought so. It might take her a while, but she’d get there eventually.
“Yes we will,” she told her baby. He looked at her and blinked, no longer crying. Her voice was froggish, and she could still feel the pressure of that woman’s fingers on her throat. “All over now,” she said, shunting aside the darkness that kept trying to claim her. “All over.”
But what if she looked out and Mary Terror’s body was not there?
Laura attempted to stand. It was impossible. She had to wait awhile longer. The light seemed brighter. Afternoon light, she thought. Her tongue probed around her mouth and located no missing teeth but some blood clots. Her ribs were killing her, and she couldn’t take deep breaths. Her broken hand…well, there was a point in pain where pain no longer registered, and she had passed that. When she got back to civilization, she was going to be a doctor’s delight.
Getting to the rangers’ station was not the real test. The real test involved Doug, and Atlanta, and where her life would go from there. She didn’t think Doug was in her future. She had what belonged to her. He could keep the rest.
And there was another question, too. The question of a woman who did not want to be forgotten, and who feared strangers might pass her grave and never know her story.
Laura would make sure that didn’t happen, and she would make sure Bedelia Morse got home.
She thought Neil Kastle of the FBI might take her calls now, too.
Laura got her legs under her, held David against her, and tri
ed to stand. She almost made it. The next time, she did.
Moving slowly and carefully, she descended the staircase. Downstairs, she had to rest again. “Your mama’s an old lady, kid,” she told David. “How about that?” He made a gurgling noise. She offered him a finger, and his hand curled around it with a strong grip. They had to get to know each other again, but they had plenty of time. There were scrapes on his face; he wore his own medals. “You ready to try it?” she asked. He offered no judgment, only a curious blue-eyed stare.
Laura hobbled out of the house into the afternoon light. The mist was still drifing in, the Pacific thundering against the rocks as it had for ages. Some things were steady, like a mother’s love for her child.
The road beckoned.
But not yet. Not just yet.
Laura went around the house, her heartbeat rapid in her bruised chest. She had to see. Had to know that she could sleep again without waking up screaming, and that somewhere in the world Mary Terror was not driving the highways of night.
She was there.
Her eyes were open, her head crooked. A rock was her pillow, red as love.
Laura released her breath, and turned away with her son in her arms.
Both of Thursday’s children had far to go.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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