by K. J. Dahlen
Jesse waited for him on the path to the barn. When Sebastian joined him a few minutes later, Jesse asked, “Any sign of the boat?”
Sebastian shook his head. “No, and that worries me. He seemed in an all fire hurry last night. I can’t imagine he would waste a whole day.”
Jesse looked up toward the barn. “Maybe we should check the barn. If he’s been here and gone, there should be some sign in the barn.”
Sebastian nodded and silently they made their way to the barn. Sebastian pulled out his gun as Jesse pulled the door open. The heavy screech of the old iron hinges echoed in the quietness of the farm. Sebastian cringed at the noise the door made and frowned at Jesse.
Kelly was hidden in the tall grass watching them.
Jesse just shrugged. He couldn’t help it, he hadn’t been expecting the noise either.
The barn was dark inside, and smelled of moldy hay and dust. No one, except for mice, rats and the occasional possum, had been inside for years. Jesse knew the utilities had been shut off since his grandfather died, so he grabbed the flashlight he’d brought from the boat, and turned it on. The light barely pierced the darkness and the fading sunlight would be gone soon.
Sebastian looked around as much as he could and was satisfied there was no one in the barn. They couldn’t do much in the dark and he knew that if Tucker were coming, it would be in the daylight hours. He turned and motioned for Jesse to leave the barn. Outside, he holstered his weapon and asked, “Is there somewhere close by we could stay? I don’t want to be far away if Tucker decides to come by here around dawn.”
Jesse nodded. “Sure, we could stay up at the house. I think my family keeps it clean and stocked with groceries for when they come down. Ethan mentioned that they had all just been here a few weeks ago.”
Sebastian turned to look at the river. The path from the barn to the river bank was clear. He could see the expanding girth of the water from where he stood. He turned and looked at the barn. From up on the second story loft area of the barn he could see a double door that faced the river. From that location, Sebastian bet he would be able to see quite a bit more of the river. “What exactly did your grandfather raise on this farm?” he asked.
“Mostly hell, my grandmother used to say.” Jesse told him with a slight smile. “Actually, this farm has quite a history. Back before the Civil War, it was used to smuggle goods to the north. During the war, this was one of the underground slave stops. The caves near the water’s edge made it a perfect place to hide things.”
Sebastian perked up at this little bit of trivia. “Do you know where these caves are?”
Jesse nodded. “Sure, Tucker and I used to play in them when we were kids.” It was then that the significance of what he just said hit Jesse. He looked at Sebastian, “If he needed a safe place to hole up or hide something, he’d use the caves.”
Sebastian grinned. “Let’s go to the caves before we go up to the house. We just might find something.”
Jesse led the way. Collecting Kelly along the way, he showed them where the caves were located. The overgrown brush made the trip hazardous but when they reached the entrance, Jesse noticed that someone had been keeping it up. There were no footprints in the sand so they knew Tucker hadn’t been here in a while. The entrance was through two boulders and it was a tight squeeze for a grown man but they made it through. Kelly slipped through a little easier but not much.
Just inside the cave, they found supplies, candles, matches, and a gas lantern. Lighting the gas lantern, they ventured deeper into the cave. When they came to a side cave, they looked around it before moving on. The walls on the cave seemed to branch off at one point. They followed the left branch but didn’t find anything worthwhile so they retraced their steps and went the other way. There, they came to a wooden door of sorts. Moving the door that had long ago rusted off its hinges, they found what they’d been looking for.
It was another room, but this room had modern amenities. There was a cot and a battery powered lamp. Jesse switched on the lamp and it illuminated the whole room.
Tucker had everything he needed to stay hidden for days. Along with the cot and the lamp, he had a suitcase and a five gallon barrel of fresh water and a few supplies.
Sebastian walked over to the suitcase and flipped the top open. The inside was filled with papers, some jewelry and a lot of money. Sebastian didn’t touch the money, but he was interested in the papers he found. He sat down on the cot and began looking through them.
He found Paul Moran’s driver’s license as well as a bank card and a stained receipt for the houseboat. The stain looked like a blood stain but Sebastian didn’t want to hazard a guess at whose blood it was.
He also found two other drivers’ licenses bearing the names of Tom Danvers and Michael Kennedy, and a press ID bearing Michael Kennedy’s name as well.
“Well, at least we know where he goes underground at. He could stay here for days,” Jesse remarked.
“How often does your family come here?” Sebastian asked.
Jesse tried to remember but couldn’t. “They come down about six times a year just to make sure that no one has broken into the house. Mom and Aunt Joyce can’t bear to part with the house, so it hasn’t been sold yet.”
Sebastian motioned around the cave. “I don’t suppose you can get to the house from this cave can you?”
Jesse grinned. “Actually you can, if no one has moved the piano. Come on, I’ll show you.”
Jesse took the lantern and led the way. They took the other tunnel and walked deeper into the cave. They came to a stop at the very edge of the cave and when Jesse raised the lantern, Sebastian saw a wooden ladder leading upward.
Grabbing the ladder, Sebastian began to climb. He came to the top only to find a wooden door. Pushing the door open, he found himself inside the house.
“Watch yourself, there’s a piano just to your left,” Jesse called out.
Sebastian grabbed the flashlight and the light lit the room. It was the sitting room as far as he could tell. He moved away from the door and waited for Jesse to climb the ladder. Kelly came up shortly after him.
Jesse brought the lantern with him and soon the room was bathed in its light. Sebastian looked around the room and ventured down the hall.
When he returned, Jesse shrugged. “I don’t know if he’s been here or not.”
Sebastian was putting his weapon away when he heard a noise upstairs. He motioned for Jesse to douse the light and he found his way to the stairway in the dark. As he was about to take the first step upstairs, Jesse whispered from behind, “Watch the fifth step, it squeaks.” Jesse turned and motioned for Kelly to follow him. He knew of a safe place for her to hide while they checked out the rest of the house. If Tucker happened to be here, he didn’t want his cousin to find her again.
Sebastian nodded and carefully made his way upstairs. He stepped over the fifth stair and when he reached the top, he turned his head and saw a faint light under the door of the bedroom at the end of the hall. Carefully and quietly, he made his way to the bedroom door. Reaching for the doorknob, he turned it and pushed the door open.
Tucker Briggs was sitting on the bed. When Sebastian pushed the door open, he was caught unaware and unarmed. His gun was sitting on the table five feet away from where he could grab it. Tucker just grinned and held up his hands.
“Don’t you move an inch, or I will blow you to hell.” Sebastian snarled quietly; his rage was barely in check.
“If you kill me, you’ll never find your kid,” Tucker told him.
“Where is he?” Sebastian asked pointing his gun at Tucker.
“That’s for me to know and you to wonder.” Tucker linked his hands behind his head and leaned back against the headboard.
“I will kill you,” Sebastian assured him.
“If you do, know this, I will take your son’s whereabouts to the grave with me.” Tucker taunted him.
Sebastian’s fingers tightened around the trigger of the gun, then wit
hout warning his head suddenly exploded with pain as something hit him from behind.
* * * *
Jesse lowered his weapon to see the surprised look on Tucker’s face as he finally made eye contact with the man who looked so much like himself.
Tucker grinned. “Cousin, what have you done?”
Jesse looked over at the man on the bed. “Where’s the boy?”
Tucker leaned back and smiled. “I don’t think I’ll tell you that, not yet anyway.” He looked at Sebastian then back at his cousin. “You know he’s going to hate you when he wakes up don’t you?”
“I think you’ve goaded him as far as you can. He wants his kid back and you dead. I just saved your miserable life,” Jesse told his cousin.
Tucker’s smile grew as he got up off the bed. “Naw, he wasn’t going to shoot. I still have something he wants and as long as I have the kid, he won’t kill me.”
Jesse shook his head. Tucker wasn’t dealing with the stark reality of his situation. He watched as his cousin gathered together his things and prepared to exit. “Where do you think you’re going?” he asked.
“I still have things to do. You might consider leaving too, before he wakes up. He might just kill you for helping me escape,” Tucker told Jesse.
“You aren’t going anywhere. Sit down.” Jesse motioned toward the bed. “I didn’t knock Sebastian out to help you escape. I knocked him out because he was going to shoot you.”
Tucker’s whole demeanor changed. His smile faded slightly but the biggest change was to his eyes. They glazed over and grew cold.
This was the killer side of Tucker and Jesse became aware of the fact that he was alone with him. Jesse felt a shiver of regret dance across his soul.
Tucker came toward the man that stood between him and freedom. He didn’t have to reach for the knife on his belt. He just had to walk toward him. “Don’t make me kill you, cousin. I’m going to walk out of here and the next time we meet you and me will have issues to settle. Right now, I have some other unfinished business to attend to. As long as I’m in the area, I might have to go see what left of my family. Won’t they be surprised? I mean it’s been what… ten years since I’ve seen any of them. We’ll have so much to catch up on.”
Jesse knew that if he wanted to Tucker would kill him. There wasn’t any doubt in Jesse’s mind about that. He didn’t move but he didn’t try and stop him either. He just let Tucker walk past him. Tucker paused in the doorway and Jesse could feel the burning sensation building in the middle of his back. When he was gone, Jesse took a deep breath.
He sat down on the bed and looked at Sebastian. He knew the other man was going to be outraged when he woke up and Jesse didn’t know what he was going to say to him. How could he justify what he did to the man who only wanted his son back? Maybe Tucker was right, Sebastian might very well kill him before he got a chance to explain why he hit him.
Jesse was curious about something Tucker had said before he left. What had he meant by his statement about seeing the rest of his family? Ethan told Jesse that they hadn’t seen Tucker since he left all those years ago. Jesse’s eyes widened as an errant thought entered his head. No, he couldn’t mean that, could he?
* * * *
Sebastian groaned as he regained consciousness. His head hurt and he knew even before he opened his eyes that Tucker was gone. He sat up and held his head for a minute. When the throbbing in his head was tolerable he opened his eyes and looked around the room. The only one he saw was Jesse. He didn’t understand the other man.
Why had he let Tucker go? They had been after him for almost a week. Sebastian thought he knew Jesse; he had actually begun to trust him.
Sebastian looked around the floor for his gun. He found it underneath his leg. Picking it up, he cocked the weapon. Then he stood up and walked over to Jesse. Putting the barrel against his head, he told him quietly, “Give me a reason I shouldn’t pull this trigger. Make it a good one because my head is killing me and the noise it makes won’t make my head any better.”
Jesse swallowed hard. He wasn’t sure he liked this side of Sebastian. “You were letting him goad you into shooting him. If you had, we would have never found Wyatt.”
“What makes you think for a moment that we’ll find him anyway?” Sebastian asked.
“Because I think I know where Tucker is going.”
“And where would that be?”
“St. Louis.”
“Why would Tucker go all the way back to St. Louis?”
“I think he’s going to kill his entire family,” Jesse whispered. He couldn’t believe it himself, but it was the only thing that made any sense.
Sebastian frowned. The throbbing in his head got worse and he had to sit down and hold the top of his head for a moment. When the throbbing subsided again, he stared at Jesse. “What did you say?”
Jesse stared back at Sebastian and Sebastian could see the truth in his eyes. “Tucker said he had some unfinished business to attend to and then he said he was going to see what was left of his family. I think he’s going to murder them all.”
“Why? Why would you think that?”
Jesse didn’t know what to tell him. Part of him didn’t want to admit the truth but a bigger part of him knew the reason. He just didn’t know how to put it into words that someone else would understand. “All throughout our growing up, people would mistake us for brothers or twins. To Tucker and I it was annoying. We were two separate people, yet to the rest of the world we were identical. Some even saw us, as the opposite of each other, one of us was good while the other was evil. Every time Tucker got into trouble, Joyce or Ethan would say to him, ‘Why can’t you be more like Jesse?’ They were always comparing us to each other and for some reason, Tucker always got the short end. It wasn’t that he was bad, not all the time. They were, in their own way too focused on the twin thing. Hell, twins are not even the same person. They are two sometimes very different people, two totally separate personalities. It’s just that there’s two of them, not one. I don’t think they ever realized just what they were doing to him.”
“I repeat what makes you think he’s going to St. Louis?” Sebastian asked still not understanding where Jesse was going with his explanation.
“Tucker wanted to be appreciated for himself. He didn’t want to be a pale comparison of someone else. They fostered that idea into him every chance they got and they did it until his own separate identity was washed away. Remember how Jerry Springs thought I was Nick Granger. Tucker became Nick because Nick had something he wanted. It was the same with Paul and the others. Tucker killed them and absorbed their place because he needed a new identity. Joyce and Ethan took his away years ago, and now he wants it back. I think he feels he has to kill them in order to get it back.”
“That almost makes sense in a weird sort of way, but you know your cousin a lot better than I do, so I’ll take your word for it.” Sebastian told him. He placed the cold steel of his gun against his aching forehead. “Just don’t ever knock me out again, not even to make a point. Next time I won’t give you a chance to explain why you did it, I’ll just shoot you.”
Jesse nodded.
Sebastian stood up and holstered his weapon. Looking at Jesse he asked, “Well are you coming or are you going to sit there all night? We need to go back to St. Louis.”
By the time they all got back down to the boat, they had very little daylight left. If they started out now it would be dark by the time they got to St. Louis. “Can you drive this thing at night?” Sebastian asked Jesse.
Jesse nodded. “I think so, I did last night.”
Sebastian nodded and cast off the tether lines as Jesse started the engine. Neither of them spoke much on the journey south. Sebastian kept the lookout, peering through the ever darkening skies for Jasper’s black boat. Nobody felt much like talking so nobody did.
Kelly disappeared below decks after a while.
When they reached the port of St. Louis, they wasted very little time at the
docks. They hailed a cab and made their way to the address Jesse gave the cab driver. So as not to alarm anyone, they chose to get out of the cab at the corner of the block where Ethan and Joyce lived.
As Sebastian stepped out of the cab, he took a minute to look over the neighborhood. It was late and there were no outside signs of alarm. He wasn’t sure if that was a good sign or a bad sign. He paid for the cab and as it drove away, both men began walking down the block. Each was looking for any outward sign of Tucker.
Sebastian and Jesse was a house away from their target when they reached for their weapons. Holding them at their side, they approached the house. The house lights were on but there was no sign of trouble inside, not yet anyway. Jesse was reaching for the doorbell when he noticed the door was ajar.
He looked at Sebastian and nodded at the door. Sebastian nodded and raised his gun. Jesse did the same. Sebastian then raised his leg and nudged the door open. There were no sounds from the house or its occupants.
Making their way through the foyer to the living room, they began to notice signs of a struggle. The television was on and the volume was turned up. A table was overturned and a lamp was smashed but the real struggle took place in the kitchen. As they made their way to the kitchen, they found it a mess. Food and broken dishes were on the table and the floor, and Sebastian found signs of blood. They weren’t sure whose blood it was but they found blood.
Jesse left the kitchen and searched the rest of the house. When he returned, he shook his head. “There’s no one here.”
Sebastian nodded at the mess. “Well we know he was here. Where would he take them?”
“The only place I can think of is my Grandfather’s farm.”
“The farm we just left?” Sebastian groaned.
Jesse nodded.
“You’re killing me, but ok. Why? I mean why would he take them back there?” Sebastian asked.
“Because that’s where he arranged the first accident that almost killed them,” a voice from the doorway told them.
Jesse and Sebastian spun around in surprise and confronted an older version of Jesse.
