Penumbra

by Carolyn Haines

  Ruth moaned and swayed on the step. “Jesus save us.” She clutched at her dress front. “Sweet Jesus up above, please help us!” she cried out and bent double.

  Jonah put his hands on her shoulders and steadied her. “It’s going to be okay, Ruth. You were right to want to send her away. That’s what we’ll do. We’ll send her to New Orleans, help her set up a shop there. Everything’s going to be okay. It’s not too late for Jade, and it’s not too late for us. I’ve got to go and find her, tell her.” He rose to his feet, kissed Ruth’s cheek, and started walking to town.

  Frank wiped the sweat from his eyes. The air was heavy with humidity, as if the storm clouds were a blanket holding in place all the warmth of the earth that attempted to rise. His eyes stung from the sweat, and he blinked them. He caught movement in the gray blur of the tree trunks and reached for his pistol. When his eyes cleared, he saw Joseph Longfeather standing among the trees. Instead of fatigues, he wore the aqua-and-white-striped shirt he’d been so proud of. A red bandanna was tied at his neck, his hat pulled low over his eyes. He smiled and disappeared. Frank’s shirt was soaked with sweat, but he strode through the woods, confident of his trail now, sensing he soon would have his quarry.

  The trail had taken him to an old logging path choked with briars and the remains of pines too straggly for the mills. He’d traveled for better than five miles, winding ever eastward, away from the river. The dense trees had given way to rutted and barren land. The loggers had had their way with the pines, and with them they cut everything that stood in their way. A few lone blackjacks had escaped, growing out of privet and briars.

  When the logging trail fed into a more traveled path, Frank felt a swell of elation. He stopped to wipe the sweat from his brow and run his fingers through his slick hair. There were tire prints in the sand. A vehicle had come this way and in the not too distant past.

  He chose north and kept walking, following the path. The clouds hung low and dense, and thunder rumbled like an angry god. The few trees around him began to quake and shimmy as a hard wind swept through their tops, and Frank tasted rain seconds before the first fat drops began to fall. In the distance he heard the sad howl of hounds, and he picked up his speed.

  A thin wisp of black smoke curled on the horizon. A cook fire, Frank reckoned, since it was too hot for any other kind. He headed for it.

  Bile rose in Dotty’s throat as Dantzler prodded her forward toward the gathering of men who stood, scratching and hawking at her approach. She’d given up trying to talk. Dantzler Archey was an animal. He’d beaten the backs of her legs to a fiery red with his belt, and the skin felt puckered and inflamed. As she walked toward the men she held her skirt so that it didn’t brush against her angry flesh. He would pay. He would pay dearly, just as soon as she figured out where she was and how she could get home. They’d driven at least ten miles into the woods. She was in a place she’d never been, and she hadn’t seen a house or a store or anything the whole time. The right heel on her favorite patent leather shoes had broken, and Archey had tossed it into the woods with a laugh. Now she hobbled like some kind of cripple.

  The men watching her were obviously half-wits and mutes, and she hawked up a ball of phlegm and spat it on the foot of the closet one. Behind her, Archey laughed. “Boys, this here’s Frank Kimble’s woman. She needs to be brought to heel.”

  Dotty kept her chin up, but she felt her gut turn to liquid, and she had the horrible sensation that she might mess herself.

  “Where’d you git her?” a tall, toothless man asked.

  “Oh, I found her. You know, finder’s keepers.” Archey pushed her forward, and Dotty gagged on the stench of the men.

  “Are we gonna keep her?” The man’s eyes glistened, and a string of spittle laced his lips.

  “For a while,” Archey said, grabbing her arm.

  “For all of us?” the man asked.

  Archey hesitated. He looked at Dotty and then back at the men who’d all taken a step forward. “Maybe,” he said. He pushed Dotty forward, away from the men, and she stumbled on her uneven shoes and fell to her knees. Had Archey not grabbed her arm and pulled her to her feet, she would have fallen there and been unable to help herself.

  “Come on,” he said, roughly dragging her beside him. He paused and turned back to the men. “Get the truck started. We’re going to the still tonight. We got a delivery to make, and then we’re gonna have us some fun.”

  His fingers closed over her arm and he pushed her ahead of him. Dotty lost her right shoe completely and kicked the left one off. Up ahead, she could make out what looked like an unpainted cabin. She caught her balance and walked beside Archey, the sharp roots and broken limbs stabbing into her soft feet.

  “What are you going to do to me?” She was beyond fear now. If he touched her—if any one of those filthy, stinking men touched her—she would die.

  “Shut your yap,” he said. He opened the door and pushed her inside. The door slammed behind her and she heard metal running against wood. She turned and saw the large links of a heavy chain in a hole in the door. The room was almost totally dark, only a dim light slipping through a few chinks in the wood. She made out beds, and from the stench she knew the men outside slept here.

  In a far corner of the room was a curtain. She crawled toward it, praying that it led to an outside door. She’d always been afraid of the woods, afraid that she’d get lost and that some wild animal might attack her. That, now, was a pleasant dream. The nightmare was Archey and his men. She had to get away from them, and even if she starved to death in the woods it would be better than the fate he represented.

  Behind the curtain she heard something dragging. A chain. She froze. What if there was some animal chained behind the curtain? A wolf, or a panther, or a bear. She could hear her blood coursing in her ears, but she heard the chain again. It moved slowly across the floor. Slowly. She inched forward, her fingers feeling the worn wood floor, the grit embedded in the unfinished lumber. If she ever got out of this, Dantzler Archey would pay. She’d get a gun and she’d shoot him. First in the balls. After he’d bled and begged a while, she might shoot his knees, cripple him good so even if she let him live, he’d realize he’d always be a cripple. After a while, if he hadn’t bled to death, she’d finish him off with a blast right between the eyes.

  She hung on to her plans for revenge as she moved forward to the gingham curtain, to the thing chained behind it. She stood up and walked to it, pulling it back with one quick jerk. The woman standing at the stove was naked, her body covered in dirt and bruises. Clinging to her side was a boy, his face distorted by horrible scars.

  Dotty felt something in her throat. She lifted her hand and felt the column of her neck, felt the bulge there that choked off her air. She couldn’t stop staring at the woman and the boy, and they, in turn, stared at her. She stumbled backward, unable to breath because her throat was jammed. She fell back across one of the beds, and the jar of the fall broke the scream loose in her throat. Once she started screaming, she couldn’t stop.

  28

  The hospital was still and quiet, the fluorescent lights a feeble attempt to illuminate what should have been day. Jade paced down the corridor to the front door and stopped. The storm was imminent. She opened the door and tasted metal on the air. Lightning forked a mesh of spidery veins across the heavy gray sky, and Jade ran for her car, parked beneath the water oaks in front of the hospital. She’d made it only a few feet when the clouds opened up. Rain dropped in a solid sheet. Beneath her feet, the ground trembled in the grip of booming thunder. Another bolt of lightning split the sky, and Jade ducked just as a limb in the oak tree burst into splinters, showering around her. The smell of sulfur was strong. Beside her, the trunk of the water oak sizzled in the downpour. A gash ran twenty feet up the tree where the bark had been peeled away by the lightning.

  Jade fumbled with her keys, unnerved by the worst storm she could remember. She got in her car, her hands so wet they slipped on the steering whee
l, and drove slowly around the hospital to the back entrance, the place where the janitors and orderlies gathered to smoke and exchange gossip.

  Jade maneuvered the Hudson so that the passenger side of the car was closest to the hospital door. Before she could get out, the hospital door opened and a tall black man stepped into the rain, a bundle of sheets in his arms.

  Jade reached across the car and opened the passenger door, and the man eased Marlena into the seat.

  “Thank you, Tom,” Jade said.

  “Good luck,” he said. He turned and went back inside the hospital, his clothes thoroughly soaked.

  “Where are we going?” Marlena’s face peeped from beneath the folds of the white sheets. She forced the words through her rigid jaw.

  “Someplace safe,” Jade assured her, though she had no idea what to do. Her only thought had been to get Marlena out of the hospital, away from Junior Clements. Jade couldn’t take Marlena to Ruth and Jonah’s and endanger them. Her own house, a place she’d once considered safe from harm, had been violated. The shop was no better.

  “Where will it be safe?” Marlena asked, despair chattering in her tight voice.

  Jade thought of one place where Marlena would be completely safe. She put the car in gear and eased through the puddles to the road. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I know a place.”

  When Jade turned right, Marlena looked at her. “Don’t take me to Mother’s. Please. I can’t go there.”

  “I’m not,” Jade assured her. “We’re going to Frank Kimble’s. No one will ever think to look for you there.”

  “Frank’s?” Marlena said the word as if she didn’t understand its meaning.

  “It’s perfect,” Jade said. “No one ever goes there. Frank doesn’t even use the upstairs at all. He—” She turned to look at Marlena, who was staring at her. “It’ll be fine.”

  They passed the bank and the corner drugstore, where a lone man stood on the sidewalk in the rain. Jade pressed the accelerator harder. They left the town behind, lost in the curtain of rain. The clouds seemed to sit on the horizon, a dark, angry presence that promised no let up.

  Lightning forked again, and Jade heard a loud pop. Marlena cowered in the seat.

  “It’s okay.” Jade reached across and touched her sister’s chilled arm. Marlena felt as if she were already dead. “It was Junior who attacked you, wasn’t it?” she asked.

  Marlena looked out the window, her face blank.

  Jade pressed the gas more firmly, until they turned off to Frank’s house. In a flash of lightning, the third story was illuminated above the trees.

  “The Kimble house is haunted,” Marlena said softly.

  “The dead can’t hurt you.”

  “Not like the living, that’s for sure.”

  Jade slowed the car at a turn in the driveway and stopped. “Are you positive you don’t want to go to your mother’s?” Marlena slowly shook her head. “Not there.” “Why?” Jade eased the car forward.

  “She’ll call Lucas. I’m his property. I see that now. All along, that was my value to Mother. I could be sold to a wealthy man.”

  They pulled up to the front steps and Jade got out and ran around the car to help Marlena. “Can you walk?” Jade asked as she stood beside the car, rain stinging her exposed skin. It was a summer storm, but it held within it the coldness of winter.

  “I’m going to find out,” Marlena said. She let Jade swing her legs so that her feet were on the ground.

  As Jade pulled her up, Marlena faltered and almost fell. Jade grabbed her hips and steadied her. “Marlena, I can’t carry you, but I could drag you on a sheet.”

  Marlena shook her head, the rain running into her eyes and mouth. “I can do it. Just help me.” She put her arm around Jade’s shoulders. Together, they moved slowly to the house and up the steps.

  The front door stood open, and Jade half-dragged Marlena into the foyer and across the wooden floor to a chair in the parlor. She eased Marlena into a sitting position and knelt down at her knees, reaching up to touch the pale face that looked like death. Jade stifled a gasp when she saw that the sheet wrapped around Marlena’s body showed a creeping red stain.

  “Let me look,” Jade said, easing Marlena back and pulling the layers of sheet away. Three stitches had pulled loose, and blood oozed from the opening. Jade closed her eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” Marlena asked, too weak to even right herself.

  “You’ve pulled out some stitches, but it doesn’t look too bad.” Jade rose before she lost control and began to weep. She was terrified. She’d moved Marlena out of the hospital to an isolated place where she might bleed to death.

  “I’ll be back in a minute.” She hurried into the kitchen. For a long moment she grasped the lip of the cold porcelain sink and held on. She’d acted on instinct, and now she was afraid. Before she could continue, her fear had to be conquered.

  She thought of the time Ruth had cut the palm of her hand with a butcher knife. The wound was laid open like a split made in a roast. Blood poured across the kitchen table, dripping onto the floor. Ruth washed the wound and them applied a pressure bandage, but the blood could not be stopped. Jade had been ten, and she watched Ruth sway and fall to the floor. Terrified, Jade had run to get Jonah, and after that everyone said she’d saved Ruth’s life.

  She took a deep breath. She could take care of Marlena. Frank would be home soon enough. Once he was with them, he’d know what to do. Until then, she had to stop the bleeding and get her sister to rest, maybe drink some soup, something hot to ward off the chill of the rain.

  Jade had no idea where Frank kept scissors, or even if he owned any. She opened drawers until she settled on a large butcher knife. When she went back to Marlena, she cut one of the sheets into long strips and fashioned a bandage she could tie around her sister’s hips, applying pressure to the incision. She had to keep the wound from opening further.

  Once Marlena was trussed and sleeping on the sofa, Jade went to the kitchen and began to search the cabinets for something to eat. She found coffee and a single can of tomato soup. She made both, glad to have something to do to keep busy, glad she had hot food to offer Marlena. While the coffee was brewing, she went to the telephone in the kitchen and called the sheriff’s office. There was no answer. She hung up and went back to the kitchen. Her gaze fell upon the butcher knife she’d used to cut the sheets. It was a sharp knife, well-balanced in her hand.

  She put it on the counter within easy reach.

  The roof of the cabin sounded like it was going to collapse under the onslaught of rain. Dotty sat on the floor in the kitchen, the only light coming from a hole around the woodstove exhaust.

  “It’s going to be okay,” she said softly. She held the naked woman’s foot in her lap and carefully worked at the manacle lock, using a bobby pin from her hair and a nail she’d found and sharpened. The boy buried his face against the woman’s thigh, hiding the severely burned portion as if he were ashamed.

  “I’m going to get you free from here, and then you’re going to help me get away,” Dotty said, glancing into the boy’s one good eye. “Right?” It was taking everything she had not to fall on the floor and scream. She could barely look at the boy or the woman.

  “We can’t leave,” the boy said, clinging tighter to the woman. “Zerty will hurt us more. He’ll hurt us bad.”

  “He will not,” Dotty said. “That bastard is going to pay for what he’s done. Now, I’m getting out of here and you’re coming with me. You know the way.” She looked at the boy, glaring. “I’ll take her, too, because no living creature deserves to be chained up like this.”

  “She’s my mother,” the boy said.

  Dotty stopped her furious work on the ankle. “What?” she looked up at the woman, noticing for the first time the beautiful violet eyes that were so empty. “What’s wrong with her?”

  The boy shook his head. His words came out with a struggle, but he managed. “She couldn’t live being afraid all the time, s
o she just left. In her head. It makes Zerty furious, because now she doesn’t even cry when he hits her.”

  “That evil motherfucker.” Dotty pried the last bolt on the ankle band free. The skin beneath the manacle was raw and infected, but there wasn’t time to worry about that. Dotty threw the metal to the floor and scrambled to her knees. “We’re going to have to get out of here on foot, but we can do it.”

  “Where will we go?” the boy asked.

  She studied him, aware that she’d assumed he was slow-witted because of his looks. “To town. To Drexel. Do you know the way?”

  He shook his head. “Zerty never let me go to town. He says I’m a freak and I have to stay in the woods.”

  Dotty stood up slowly. She could feel panic knotting in her chest. “You are a freak, but we have to get away from here. We have to go. We can’t stay here.” Her voice was rising, and she saw the look of dismay on the boy’s face. She stopped talking and walked over to the woman. If she stayed, she would become this creature. She knew it. Her body shook as she inhaled. “What matters is that we all get out of here. If we can get to the road, we can get a ride.”

  “It’s about ten miles through the woods,” the boy said.

  She nodded. She touched the woman’s chin, lifting her face. For a second she stared into the vacant eyes. The woman didn’t blink or flinch. She simply wasn’t there. Dotty gently brushed back a strand of the woman’s matted hair. “Dantzler Archey is going to pay for this,” she said, and her voice was strong and firm. “That bastard is going to pay.”

  She walked to the wall where the exhaust pipe for the wood-burning stove came through. “Here,” she said, tapping it with her knuckles. “This will be the easiest place to get out.” She picked up a piece of kindling. “We’ll have to knock the boards down.”

  29

  As Frank approached the old house, a pack of dogs came out from under the porch, teeth bared and hackles raised. In the barren yard, they looked like plague animals. During the war, Frank had seen starving dogs and starving people. One female hound, her ribs and spine prominent, had teats dragging to the ground. The dogs snarled rather than barked, and he wondered how the animals managed to stand upright they were so poor. He stood in the yard, the rain a physical force as it pelted him. His shoulders and face were numb from the stinging deluge.