Devil's Oven

by Laura Benedict

  The headlights cast the thing on the ground in vivid detail. At first the bloody mass at one end confused him, but he made out a sport shirt and dark blue jeans easily enough. Realizing it was a man—a small one, but still a man—he took two steps back and had to fight the urge to vomit.

  “Tripp?” Lila called. She had the SUV’s door open and had stepped onto the running board. “What in the hell?”

  Unable to speak, Tripp just looked up at her.

  “Tripp?” Leaving the door open, she got down and came around to the front of the vehicle.

  Then the screaming started.

  • • •

  When Lila stirred on the couch, Tripp came right over to her side. He had the phone in his hand, but laid it on the coffee table so he could keep her from trying to sit up. An angry bruise had started to form on her left temple, where she banged it against the truck when she fell.

  In his lifetime—particularly in his job as a Department of Natural Resources officer—Tripp had seen many bodies, some burned so thoroughly that the bones crumbled to gray dust at a touch, others melted into the earth where they had fallen. He didn’t like to think about this one at all, though. He had never seen that kind of violence done to a human being, and hated that Lila had witnessed it, too.

  “Baby,” he said, brushing her hair back from her forehead. “Can you open your eyes?”

  Her lips moved and she seemed to whisper. Tripp bent closer to her face.

  “Lila, you need to wake up,” he said.

  When she finally opened her eyes, she stared at his face, but seemed not to know him. Then she put her hand to his jaw and pushed him away with a cry. Before he could react, she jumped up from the couch.

  “I have to get home!” she screamed. “I have to find Bud!”

  The patterned silk blouse she wore beneath her suede jacket gaped open at her chest, the button lost. Her lipstick was smeared and the ends of her hair were dusty from the driveway. Tripp held his hands out to try to touch her, to calm her.

  “Shhhhh,” he said. “Baby, it’s going to be okay. You don’t want to go outside. Just stay here with me. We’ll get this sorted out. You hit your head.”

  “There’s a freaking person out there,” she said. “I didn’t dream it. I’m not asleep!” She was shaking, holding herself as though she were freezing in the heated cabin.

  Tripp grabbed the throw from the couch. “Listen, Lila.” He tried to put the beer-damp throw around her but she edged away.

  “No,” she said. “We’ve got to get somebody. We’ve got to see if he’s alive.”

  “You need to stay warm. I don’t want you going into shock.” He knew he was probably in shock himself, but he could only fall back on his professional training. Training was supposed to kick in when your emotions were on overdrive, when there was a gun in your face, or a firebreak that wasn’t holding. Why in the hell hadn’t anyone trained him for a mangled—hey, that’s a good word, but hardly sufficient—body in the driveway?

  He didn’t know what did it, but he saw the fight drain out of Lila’s eyes. Her shoulders dropped.

  “God,” she said, “who was he?”

  Tripp put the blanket around her and pulled her close to him. They held on to each other. He buried his face in her hair, and the smell of it broke the pressure inside him. He knew if he pulled away from her, if he saw her tears, he would break down as well. His training against doing that was damn solid, but there were things that even training couldn’t get you through. He told himself it was just his concern for Lila that had him feeling like this, that he could get a grip on himself and everything would be okay again. But the truth of it was, everything had changed the minute he walked out onto his porch and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “Ivy! Ivy!”

  Ivy woke to see Thora bent over her, her thinning hair pushed back by the black elastic headband in which she always slept. For just a second Ivy was confused, thinking it was her father trying to wake her. Thora’s grip on her arm was tight and painful.

  “Where’s the shotgun?” Thora said.

  “What’s wrong?” Ivy said, twisting her arm away. Thora let her go. Outside the window, the only light came from the fixture over the entrance to the barn. It was still night.

  “There’s somebody up at the trailer,” Thora said. “I bet it’s kids. I bet they’re up there drinking. Remember when I found that rubber in the driveway a few weeks ago? I told you I didn’t like those band kids coming out here for uniforms. Get the shotgun!”

  Ivy, now fully awake, knew it wasn’t teenagers. She had to keep Thora from panicking.

  She had lain sleepless in bed for over two hours after she said good night to Thora, who liked to stay up and watch the late-night comedy shows.

  After supper, in defiance of Thora’s morning judgment, she had gone back up to the trailer, wanting to be near Anthony, to touch him. The air felt heavy, like the rain might start all over again, and her feet seemed to drag as she walked up the hill. Something was wrong. She could feel it. She almost turned and ran back to the house.

  Maybe it had been a dream after all.

  Anthony was gone.

  Her sewing materials sat in a neat pile on the kitchen counter where she had left them. The door of the master bedroom closet stood open, but she might have done that herself and forgotten. Thora was always complaining that she was careless that way. Walking from bedroom to bedroom and back to the kitchen, her panic skyrocketed. Had someone found him and taken him away? Impossible. Thora couldn’t have managed it, and even if she had, she certainly wouldn’t have kept it a secret. Also, the blue jeans she’d bought for him even before she had sewn him back together were gone.

  The only answer was that Anthony had left on his own.

  The idea both thrilled and frightened Ivy. She managed to get through Missy’s final fitting, but the girl had what Thora called “bride’s brain” and hadn’t noticed anything beyond her own image in the mirror. After the girl was gone, Thora watched Ivy carefully, so she had retreated to her workroom to sew. Her mind was busy, worrying. Wondering. Marveling.

  What have I done?

  “Go back to bed,” Ivy said. “I’ll take care of it.”

  Thora shook her head. The unadorned nightgown Ivy had made at her request caused Thora to look even larger than she was, like an overfed ghost.

  “Those kids aren’t going to be afraid of you,” Thora said. “We’ll both go. Or maybe we should just call the sheriff.”

  Now it was Ivy’s turn to grab her sister’s arm.

  “We don’t need to call the police,” Ivy said. “Just let me take care of it. You stay here.”

  “Why?” Thora said. She stood up to her full height, dwarfing Ivy. “Who’s out there?”

  Ivy heard the familiar note of suspicion in Thora’s voice, that reminder of Thora’s deep need to be certain she wasn’t being cheated out of some useful bit of information, or missing out on some advantage. Hours earlier, Ivy had been hopeful that her threat to leave would keep Thora compliant. Now she understood that Thora could spoil everything.

  But as miserable as that possibility was, the truly important thing was Anthony had come back to her!

  Glancing at the clock, she saw it was almost four a.m. Dawn was only a couple of hours away. She turned on her bedside lamp.

  “You’ll want to put on some clothes,” Ivy said. “We’ll take the car up to the trailer so you don’t have to walk. I know where the gun is, but we won’t need it.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  He threw open the trailer’s kitchen cabinets, looking for food. But only the scent of it remained, and his frustration grew as he searched. As he moved through the kitchen, he left the cabinet doors standing open, their handles smeared with clotted blood. He needed food to stop the pain in his gut. Claude, whose scent was so rich and inviting, had piqued the hunger that had started when he sat waiting behind the Dumpster, but he understood that Claude wa
sn’t food. Food was something else and there was none of it here.

  The food from his past came to him in vivid images: meat, red and thick and dripping on colorful plates; fish, cold, raw fish handed to him on blocks of wood by smiling, dark-eyed women; bread stuffed with sausage and red tomatoes and onions. Strawberries smothered with white whipped cream, and plates of noodles and sharp cheese and olives. Warm red grapes plucked from vines curling around their wooden staves. He couldn’t name these things, but he could think of them, see them, but not touch. It was maddening, and he slammed the cabinet doors, busting one in with his knee so that the flimsy wood buckled at the force. This need for food was even stronger than his need to find the man called Claude had been. He would have to go in search of it, too.

  The woman had been here, leaving behind her scent of garden flowers and something else, something that reminded him of steam-covered windows and noisy machines and freshly pressed clothes. He put his hands to his chest, as though the answers were there. He left the kitchen to go and find her.

  It didn’t surprise him to discover two women standing in the living room. Surprise was no longer in his catalog of reactions.

  One of them cradled a rusty shovel in her arms and he knew she meant him harm. Her scent was acrid and offensive to him, but there was something sweet in it, too, like the smell of something cooking.

  The second woman, the smaller one, was the woman he was looking for, the woman he knew. He was compelled to be near her, though compulsion was now just instinct to him. She held food out to him, in one hand something brown that smelled of cinnamon and oranges, in the other a banana.

  “Put the shovel down, Thora,” she said, her voice soft.

  Was Thora what he was called? It didn’t sound right, but he wasn’t sure. He looked down at his hands and looked back to the smaller woman for some answer.

  “He’s got blood all over him,” the other woman said. “Sweet Jesus, he’s done something. I know he’s done something and he means to kill us.”

  “He’s afraid of you. Please go outside.”

  “I’ll be damned if I will.” But she took a step back, toward the door.

  He wanted to jump at the food, but knew he shouldn’t.

  The other woman made another slight move toward the door. Now she gave off a smell like Claude did just before he put his hand on Claude’s neck. He knew the smell. She wanted to run away.

  The smaller woman, the one with the light hair and twisted smile, set the food on the table and stepped away.

  “Stay out of his way,” she said.

  Then she smiled at him.

  “Go ahead, Anthony.” She still smelled of garden flowers and he thought about her hands and how they had felt on his skin. It gave him pleasure to think of it, but his hunger overwhelmed him and he grabbed for the food.

  He forgot the women as he ate, filling his mouth with the rich brown bread. It tasted like nothing he had ever eaten before.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “It’s sick, is what it is,” Thora said. “He’s not some stray dog. Good God, Ivy. He could kill us in our sleep. What’s in your head?”

  She was following Ivy up the front porch steps. The monster her sister called Anthony had devoured the loaf of spice bread, shoving it into his mouth in huge, crumbling chunks. After drinking two tall glasses of water that Ivy filled for him, he sank onto the couch. She had watched as Ivy helped him stretch out on the cushions, and then tucked a throw pillow beneath his head. This man—if that’s what he was—was possibly the biggest one Thora had ever seen. He was so long that his lower legs and feet hung over the arm of the couch. He had looked up at Ivy, his eyes expressionless, but his chapped, full lips curved in a drowsy smile. His eyes were mahogany brown, like his hair. Through it all, he hadn’t said a word, making Thora wonder if he could talk at all.

  “But he’s like a child,” Ivy said. “We have to help him.”

  “I want to know how he came to be living in our trailer,” Thora said. On the porch, she propped the shovel against the railing, thinking, We should have taken the shotgun.

  They went inside.

  Dear Lord, there’s a monster of a man in our trailer covered in blood that’s not his own. And Ivy is delusional.

  “He came off the mountain,” Ivy said, continuing toward the kitchen. “I’m hungry. Are you?”

  Thora, too, had awakened hungry; she always did. But her mouth had gone dry and she was so shaken that she thought she might be sick if she tried to eat or drink.

  “What do you mean?” Thora said. “Ivy! Stop, now. Tell me!”

  Ivy shrugged like a recalcitrant teenager. Outside, dawn was breaking and the first rumbling string of trucks from the quarry a dozen miles away had started its run out on the highway.

  Thora had never liked to be rough with Ivy, but now she grabbed her by the shoulder to hold her still. “What do you mean, he came off the mountain?”

  “I never ask you for anything,” Ivy said quietly. “Can’t you let me have this? Can’t you let me have him?”

  “You met him up on the mountain? Tell me!” Thora said, shaking her. Despite the controlled tone of Ivy’s voice, Thora knew her sister wasn’t begging. She had already made the decision to have this…whatever he was. Ivy wouldn’t be moved.

  Thora stared at her, feeling Ivy’s thin shoulder through the wool sweater she had thrown on over her pajamas. Maybe she had always doubted her half sister’s sanity. All the hours Ivy spent alone. All the hours she spent sitting behind her sewing machine, creating just the right shape of a wedding dress for some slut whose parents were able to come up with the seven or eight hundred dollars to fraudulently clothe their daughter in one of Ivy Luttrell’s innocence-white wedding dresses. Ivy, who had never to Thora’s knowledge been on a date with a man. Ivy, who had never displayed anything but shy deference, or a calm, businesslike attitude toward men and women alike. Ivy, who was almost pretty. Ivy, who wouldn’t say boo to a goose. There was something wrong with Ivy that had to have come by way of Mary, the slight, strange young woman who had seduced and married Thora’s father. Whatever that something was, it made Thora afraid, and had kept her from—did she dare even think it?—loving either Ivy or Ivy’s mother.

  Ivy stood up straighter beneath Thora’s hand.

  “His name is Anthony, and I made him,” she said. “I found him buried on the mountain, and I put him back together.” She held up her hands. “I stitched him back together with these.”

  Thora looked more closely into her half sister’s angry face, at her lips with their sad, jagged scar. She looked closely, thinking it might help her understand what she had just heard. She saw only madness. She let her hand drop from Ivy’s shoulder. What has Ivy done?

  “You don’t believe me,” Ivy said, shaking her head. “I knew you wouldn’t. Nothing I do is ever good enough for you.”

  After Ivy’s mother had disappeared, and Thora had discovered their father hanging in the woods, Ivy had retreated deep into a private world, making up stories about her mother coming back, about creatures she met up on the mountain. Thora knew she bore some responsibility. She had been too young to take on a child. Far too young. But hadn’t she tried? Hadn’t she done what their father would’ve wanted her to do? Now, if Ivy had truly gone mad—and oh, yes, it seemed that she had—Thora would have to do something. She felt a headache growing in the back of her skull and knew it was going to be a bad one.

  “It’s not right, Ivy,” Thora said. “You can’t own people. I don’t know what you think you’ve done. That man is all wrong. He’s dangerous.”

  “I knew you wouldn’t understand,” Ivy said. “You’ve always hated all men except for Daddy. You’re the one who’s afraid.”

  Before Thora could stop herself, she slapped Ivy’s cheek. She had never hit Ivy in anger before, and the act left her shaking and afraid of what she might do next.

  Ivy didn’t run from her, or even jerk away. Her lips just tightened with resolve.

&nbs
p; “I’m going in to work for a while,” she said. She started toward the workroom, but then turned back to Thora. “Don’t do anything to Anthony.”

  Thora felt her body go cold.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “Christ on a cracker, Tripp. Something popped this guy’s head like a bean.”

  Tripp knew most of the troopers who worked this part of the state, but he considered Keith Caldwell a friend. When he had called Keith’s cell phone around six thirty, waking him up on his day off, Keith had told him it was no problem. Six foot two and a fit two hundred sixty pounds, Keith had been a talented lineman at the state’s technical university, but a knee injury had prevented him from moving on to the pros. When he got a few beers in him, he didn’t mind talking about his football career, but preferred to talk about coaching his son’s Mini League team. Tripp had waited for him down at the entrance to the driveway, watching a gray dawn spread through the sky and pushing away thoughts about reality in the harsh light of day.

  “So you woke up this morning, came outside, and found him”— Keith swept his hand over the body—“just lying in your driveway? Seriously?”

  Even as a kid, Tripp had been an unconvincing liar, so he tried to meet Keith’s eyes in a sincere, unblinking manner. If he couldn’t pull it off here in his own driveway, how would he hold up at the trooper station or in front of his own boss, who would soon be there as well?

  “I don’t know what to say,” Tripp told him. “I came out to take a leak, you know, to wake up. I thought it was a dog or a deer or something.” He’d had the entire night to think about what his story should be and had decided to keep it simple.

  • • •

  “You know him?” Keith said.

  Tripp shook his head. “It’s not like I could tell if I did.”

  Staring down at the body, Keith gave a grunt of assent.

  “Maybe check his ID?” Tripp said, hoping to take Keith’s focus off of him. He didn’t like the way he had to weigh every word against the lies he had already told. He had only been at it in the hour or so since he had called Keith, and he was already weary of the whole thing. It wasn’t even like he had murdered the guy or was hiding anything significant. That Lila—or anyone else for that matter—had been with him when the body had basically fallen from the sky and onto his driveway was irrelevant. They had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Period.