“Heather?”
She stopped and turned around. He knelt with his back to her, hunched over there on the floor with one hand on his back and the other supporting the weight of his torso over his knees. She could hear the labor of his breathing. She knew from the sound that he was in pain, considerable pain. But his voice climbed over it.
“I said I’d kill myself if you ever left me,” he said, “and I will. I’ll take that handgun and spray my brains all over the bedroom ceiling. Only way I’m leaving this house is in a body bag.”
She stared at his back.
“But that’s okay,” he continued, “because you’re not leaving me. You can’t.”
“I don’t need you anymore,” she said. She had always pictured herself saying such things in a ringing declaration of independence, an assertion of strength. But now she found her voice sounding tinny, insubstantial. “I’ve got my own money.”
“You can’t,” he repeated. “And you won’t. You don’t want me along on the trip, fine, go on. But cut the bullshit. You’re not leaving me. Ever.”
He pronounced it as fact, borne on an almost smug air of confidence that rendered her temporarily choked with anger and frustration. Anger at him for thinking he could control her for the rest of her life; frustration with herself for the knowledge that maybe he could. She wanted to say something caustic and witty, something she could be proud of in the days and years to come when she remembered the moment when she’d finally had enough. And let him know in no uncertain terms. Something she could repeat over drinks with friends she’d never had before but would have now, a band of free and happy women enjoying wine and martinis with their comrades in arms. And do you know what I told that nasty son of a bitch? You know what I said to that controlling, bullying little baby asshole when he tore up my kitchen and then tried to tell me that I wasn’t going to leave him?
Her imaginary friends leaned over their drinks, eyes wide. They waited.
And waited.
What did you say?
She couldn’t answer them. She couldn’t answer them because here, on the spot where she was supposed to make history, she couldn’t speak a word. Nothing came.
And so she did what she always did in these situations: she retreated. She turned and fled down the hallway, hurrying for the stairs. Before what remained of her wits eroded and she degenerated into a crying mess.
4.
In the passenger seat, Amber rocked back and forth with her arms wrapped around her knees. Once, Heather would have fussed at her for putting her feet on the upholstery—Mike had a thing about keeping the cars clean. But that time had passed.
She slowed and made a right onto Litchfield Avenue. Leaves from oak and maple trees lay scattered in a brown carpet that stretched from the street to the front porches of the two-story colonials on both sides. The leaves covered each yard without discrimination, the coverage varying in intensity only by the size and type of trees in the immediate vicinity. No one had raked.
Pulling up behind Mike’s Ford F-150 pickup, the feeling of doom that had followed her away from the Shell station intensified. As soon as the Durango rolled to a stop behind the pickup, she threw open the door and jumped out. “I’m going to find your father,” she said.
“Mom, don’t!”
“His truck’s here, and that means he’s here, too. He’s probably inside.”
“Mom, stop!”
But Heather wasn’t listening. She slammed the door and charged around the front bumper, banging her shin on Mike’s trailer hitch in the process. She stumbled but didn’t fall—she didn’t have time to fall. She had to go see Mike. Because Mike was home, he had to be home, because as mad as he’d been at her, as big a fight as they’d just had he would have never…
“MOM! STOP!”
Amber tackled her right on the edge of the leaf-strewn grass. She stumbled with the impact, waving her arms for balance. Amber pulled her backwards until they both slammed against the side of the truck.
“What are you doing?” Heather gasped.
“Mom, the door!”
Heather looked.
The front door to their house stood open. Only a crack, but at an angle just slight enough to make visible the large cross spray painted there. Heather’s stomach flipped, rolled and fell straight into her feet. Her heart hammered against her ribs.
“I’ve got to check on Daddy,” she said. “So let go of me, okay?”
Amber had her enveloped from behind in a bear hug that she tightened now. Heather worked a hand up between her daughter’s arm and her own chest in order to keep breathing. “We don’t know what’s in there,” Amber said. “It could be a quarantine sign or something. Like a disease or something.”
“I know.”
“And if you go in there you’ll get it. You’ll die.”
“If he’s not in there, I’ll come right back out. I promise.”
“And if he is?”
Heather swallowed and closed her eyes.
“Then I’ll still come right back out. Okay? Listen, we went inside that gas station. I touched the screen door up at Mr. Cagle’s house to tell him we were leaving. If there’s some kind of superbug on the loose, we already have it.”
Heather felt Amber shaking. Gently, she reached her other hand up and peeled her arms from around her chest. She turned around and kissed her forehead. Then she opened the door and sat her firmly on the passenger seat.
“Stay here. I’ll be right back.”
She turned and started towards the house.
Please, God, let him be in there napping on the couch or something, maybe him and Clyde passed out on the floor from too much beer, we can work all this other bullshit out if he’s in there, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’M SORRY.
But Mike wouldn’t be in there. She knew this on a very fundamental level as she climbed the porch steps. Mike knew where she had gone, knew where they had gone. He knew how to get there. When the shit hit the fan down here, he’d have come to get them. He’d have done this no matter what she’d said to him before they left.
I will cover him with a sheet so she won’t see him. She will not see his dead face.
“Mike?” she called out. “It’s me! We’re home! We’re okay!”
No response. Closer now, she could study the cross. Mike—or whoever had applied it—had stood too close to the door when he sprayed it, and it had run. Little tendrils had dribbled and dried, giving it the same rushed appearance as the others.
With her leading foot, she reached forward and pushed open the door. When nothing jumped out at her, she peered into the foyer and stepped across the threshold.
Just beyond the door, the sofa stuck part of the way out of the living room, as if Mike had tried to move it into the foyer.
“I’m home!” Louder this time, fear creeping in from the edges. Her voice vanished up the stairs and into the darkness of the second floor. Again, no answer.
But she hadn’t expected one. Fighting to keep stomach acid from reaching up and burning her throat, she sidled through the gap between the edge of the couch and the wooden banister and made her way up the hall into the kitchen.
Mike had cleaned up the mess from his tantrum, but the refrigerator had migrated from its pocket in the wall next to the dishwasher to the back door. The loose power cord lay across one scuffed floor tile. Sunlight made its way in through the gauzy white curtains covering the window over the sink. Next to the sink lay a hammer, a saw and several boards. It didn’t take a degree in crime scene investigation to know Mike had been planning to nail the window shut.
She continued through the dining room to the living room. On its way to the foyer, the sofa had knocked aside the coffee table and loveseat like rowboats before an ocean liner. The curtains were drawn in here, darkening the room in a way she found disturbing. She threw them open. Immediately, the room flooded with sunlight. Her eyes fell on the coffee table. There, face down atop of three months’ worth of Amber’s Glamour magazines, sat her
grandmother’s Holy Bible.
She blinked. She could count on one hand with several amputated fingers the number of times Michael Palmer had ever even touched a Bible, much less opened one. Yet here lay her grandmother’s copy. Heather turned it over and read the passage to which Mike had opened it to the Book of Isaiah.
Therefore the anger of the Lord is aroused against His people; He has stretched out His hand against them and stricken them, and the hills trembled. Their carcasses were as refuse in the midst of the streets.
She slammed the book shut and dropped it on the coffee table. Then she continued through the home.
She found nothing upstairs. His clothes remained on their hangers in the closet, his toiletries a typical scattered mess on the bathroom vanity. Everything remained as it had been when they’d left to go camping. No clues.
Except for one. A box of 9mm bullets lay open on the nightstand, and Mike’s Ruger P89 pistol was gone from its box in the closet. She finally found it on the floor downstairs in the foyer, just behind the door that had concealed it from view when she first arrived. She bent over and picked it up. It held a full magazine.
He’d left the safety off.
“Where are you?” she whispered. The gun felt cold and heavy. Ugly, like knowing that whatever had happened to Mike had happened because she had booted him from the camping trip.
He’s okay. Wherever he is, he’s okay; guys like Mike don’t go down easily. If anybody could survive whatever happened here, it would be him.
Amber stood outside on the porch, arms folded, nervously glancing up and down the street. Heather opened the screen door to admit her.
“Where is he?” Amber asked.
“I don’t know.”
She took Amber on the nickel tour of the Palmer House of Horrors, saying little. When they finished, Amber sat at the bottom of the stairs and cradled her head in her hands.
“Oh my God,” she moaned.
“It could have been worse; I could have found him in here dead. We can still hope.”
“How?” Amber asked.
Good question. Heather turned and looked through the screen door. Beyond the porch, brown and gold leaves littered the yard, the sidewalk, the street. The temperature was falling as the day aged; it would get cold tonight.
And it would get dark. Her watch said it was half past four; at this time of the year, sunset would approach quickly. Another wave of foreboding washed over her insides as she considered the oncoming night. Suddenly, she wanted nothing less than to remain here when night arrived in Deep Creek.
But she didn’t want to be on the road, either. Not at night.
“So what do we do now?” Amber asked.
“I have no idea,” Heather said. “But I think it’s going to involve us driving to Burlington in the morning and seeing if we can find anybody there. If not, we ride on and go to the army base at Fort Bragg. If there was an evacuation or civil emergency or something, people around here would go there.”
“We should check the high school first. Don’t people usually seek shelter in gyms and stuff? We could go now. It’s not far.”
No, it wasn’t. But outside, the wind blew and rustled the leaves, and Heather felt its chill even within the confines of her home.
Stay put, it said. And stay quiet.
“We will,” Heather said. “Tomorrow. But right now, let’s get the truck unloaded. It’s getting late.”
5.
Heather had no parents. She’d had them once, but only for a short while; they existed only in halting flashes of memory that churned intense feelings but provided little else. Framed photographs of her mother that stood on almost every flat surface in her grandmother’s house in Wilmington showed a pretty young woman with long, straight hair parted down the middle. Heather grew up and her grandmother grew older, but the woman in the pictures didn’t age. She watched the progress of years from within the four corners of these reddish-tinged photographs, where nothing changed and time remained static.
But she had no pictures of her father. Her grandmother and the various family members who occasionally visited did not speak of him or even hint at his existence. Consequently, Heather never thought to even ask about him until kindergarten, when her classmates spoke of their fathers and it occurred to her that logically, she must have had one too. Even if he had, as she understood, died at the same time as her mother.
So on the way home from school one fall afternoon, she asked, “Grandma, can I have a picture of my daddy?”
Her grandmother stiffened visibly behind the wheel of her Buick LeSabre. The color drained from her face, and in that instant Heather felt a flash of guilt.
“No, sweetie. We don’t have any pictures of your daddy. They’re all gone.”
“Can you call his mommy and daddy? They might have pictures of him. Maybe they can give me one.”
Her grandmother’s hands became white-knuckled claws around the skinny steering wheel. For a long time, she didn’t speak. Heather tried furiously to rewind time and un-ask the question.
“We can’t do that,” she said. “His mommy and daddy are gone, too.”
The truth came to light later, of course; it was bound to, if for no other reason than a small child gets older and necessarily curious about her own identity. Her grandmother had understood this, and as Wilmington had still been a relatively small town in those days understood also that someone would eventually say something. And so she had told Heather, one night in her third grade year, why she had no pictures of her father.
“He was evil,” her grandmother said. “He was wicked, he was evil and he used to beat your mommy up on a regular basis. And finally, he killed her. She tried to leave him and he killed her with a gun. Then he killed himself, because not only was he evil, not only was he wicked, but he was also a coward who didn’t want to face what he had coming.”
The revelation detonated like an artillery shell. She watched her grandmother shake and cry as she said it, and she tried to connect with that same depth of feeling. But she was numb.
“He wanted to kill you, too, but your mommy saved you. She put you in the closet when she heard him coming. She covered you with clothes and told you to be quiet. And you did what you were told. Because you were a good little girl. You always did what you were told.”
She lay now on the sofa, which she and Amber had propelled back into its proper place after unloading the Durango. Amber lay sleeping in her bed upstairs. Heather had started out curled up beside her but couldn’t sleep, so she came downstairs for a nip from the whiskey bottle in the pantry. It hadn’t helped.
Surrendering herself to wakefulness, she fell onto the couch, where the tears came. Her grandmother hadn’t liked Mike, but she hadn’t known him. Not really. She had known Heather’s father and assumed the daughter would pick someone just like him, but that wasn’t fair. Because Mike got it. An orphan himself, he understood her in ways no one else could.
He hadn’t been a bad husband, far from it. Things had gone poorly as of late, but they had simply reached that difficult period all Navy marriages face when the sailor comes home for good. The point where the rest of one’s life begins, the end of the era where peace comes as easily as the start of the next cruise. Changes. Of course they’d be difficult. Of course they’d both have trouble with it. Mike would naturally have had more than anyone because the Navy had been the closest thing to a family he’d ever experienced and for him, leaving the service had resembled a death. So of course he’d grown a little more clingy, needy. Controlling, even; all the things she’d ever hated in him. But it was just a phase.
You stupid, selfish bitch.
Indeed. Had she approached this with a modicum of understanding, she’d have realized what was going on and done something to change it. She’d have stopped picking fights, stopped her passive-aggressive needling. Maybe she would have found something to like about Deep Creek instead of stewing in the house all day counting the reasons she didn’t want to live here. Mike had
lost his temper and trashed the kitchen. But she’d done nothing to help...
Something rustled in the leaves outside.
Her eyes darted to the window above the couch, her heart rate rising. Beyond the glass, a pair of trees stood in naked silence. She stared at them, and then she heard the noise again: a creeping, rustling sound. Crunching. An animal in the bushes below; a raccoon, perhaps, or a squirrel. A neighborhood cat, lost and confused. Wind in the dead leaves.
She rose from the couch, slowly so as to minimize the creaking of the floorboards. She took the pistol from where she’d laid it on the coffee table, turned and reached for the blinds.
The noise came again. She thought of the empty yards and open doors. The crosses.
Something else her grandmother had said echoed in her skull. Nothing good ever happens after dark. All the good folks are in bed.
She backed away from the window. The floorboards screamed under her shifting weight. She wanted to scream back at them to be quiet. Above her head, footsteps crossed the ceiling and a door creaked open. Amber getting up. Making enough noise to wake the dead in the process.
Heather darted into the foyer to the bottom of the stairs. The front door, windowless and silent, was a black hole in the darkness. Beyond it, the porch creaked with the presence of someone walking on it.
She leveled the pistol at the front door.
“There are people outside,” Amber whispered, descending the stairs and joining her in the foyer. “A bunch of them standing in the yard.”
“Who are they? Are they armed?”
“I can’t really see them,” she said. Her lips were a tight line of worry, her arms coiled around her chest in a self-administered hug. “Too dark.”
Heather swallowed. The creaking had stopped. Whoever was out there stood now just beyond the door. Marauders, she thought, lawless survivors of whatever had gone down in Deep Creek while they were away. They had seen two lone females earlier today and came now in the night to surprise them as they slept, to drag them away for who knew what purpose.
The Last Days of October Page 3
