It was only dumb luck that made him stand up again so quickly that Pat’s gun came down hard on his right shoulder rather than at the base of his skull. As he lost his footing, he got a look at Pat’s face. It had transformed into something ugly and fierce.
“Shit a G.D. brick!” Dwight said. The 9mm cut into his back, reminding him he didn’t have to go down helpless. He grabbed for the vacuum cleaner to right himself. But Pat’s pearl-handled derringer—a prissy-ass piece for a gangster, Dwight had always thought—was pointed at his face.
“Why did you make me do this?” Pat’s face was screaming red. Spittle flew from his mouth onto Dwight’s cheek. “You’re such an asshole!”
Dwight felt his bowels start to loosen, but he held on.
“It was a mistake, man,” he said. “You’re right. It was business.”
“Even Marie,” Pat said. “Even she thought it was a suck-ass idea and I didn’t listen. She’s smarter than you are. You had to go and screw me over.”
Pat was genuinely upset. Dwight could see that now. He regretted that part.
“I said, you’re right.”
The big advantage he had over Pat was Pat’s own ungainliness. Dwight kicked the wheeled mop bucket into Pat’s legs, causing Pat to stumble forward. He didn’t fall, but dropped the gun onto Dwight’s stomach as he tried to catch himself.
Dwight pushed up off the floor and launched himself at the larger man. When Pat went down, Dwight rolled on top of him. His shoulder hurt like hell, and he didn’t like what he was doing. Pat was the innocent party here. Pat, who had only tried to help.
Pat grabbed hold of Dwight’s hair with one hand and landed a wobbly punch in his side. But Dwight just took it as he worked to get at the 9mm. Getting his hand on the grip, he tried to pull away to get a shot at Pat, but Pat suddenly pulled him close, like a lover. Dwight could feel Pat’s soggy breath, his lips on his ear. The warm tingle that spread through the bottom half of his body scared the hell out of him, and his mind answered it with a blank wall of rage. Then Pat had his ear between his teeth.
Dwight felt the cartilage tear as Pat worked to get the ear loose. He roared.
Riveted by the pain, Dwight pushed the 9mm between them and got off a shot into the left side of Pat’s rib cage.
Pat’s scream entered one side of Dwight’s head and stayed there. He pushed off of his friend and onto the floor. Dwight lay there, breathing hard and staring up at the ceiling, not wanting to watch Pat die.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Bud was sweating like a pig, but there was no way in hell he was going to take off the leather jacket Lila had made him put on that morning. The jacket was the color of the dried leaves and pine needles carpeting the ground, and he was counting on it to camouflage him from the helicopter buzzing overhead. When he found a low place that looked like it recently had water running through it, he knelt and scraped some dirt into his hands. He hesitated only a second before smearing it over his head and nose and cheeks. At first, he had thought the people in the helicopter were looking for Lila, but now he understood they were after him.
As a kid, he had stayed out of trouble unless someone really provoked him. Because of his size, people assumed he played football, or was a natural bully. He had played football for a while, but he stopped after his first year on the varsity team, because he felt miserable every time the coach told them to go out and put the other team in a world of hurt. Bud started to think about the world of hurt as a real place, where the maimed and injured hid themselves and their pain behind fragile walls that would only stand until the next game, the next big competition where they would again get their asses handed to them. It shamed Bud to put people in that place. It had only recently occurred to him that not all coaches demanded that kind of thing from their players. Only coaches like the ones his old man was fond of.
The police obviously thought he had killed Danelle, and had done something with Lila. Morons. They probably saw it as a crime of opportunity. Everyone knew some creep was on the loose, so Bud had taken advantage of the situation by making it look like the creature had killed Danelle, then killed Lila. And done what with her, exactly?
He had no reason. No motive.
Lila was his treasure—his beautiful, lovable, funny, pain-in-the-ass treasure. And now some kind of beast had her.
Had the sonofabitch touched her? The coroner, who liked the occasional, discreet evening at the club, had let Bud slip into the morgue at the county hospital to take a look at Claude. It was the image of Claude’s tortured body that propelled Bud forward, panting and desperate.
Finally, it got almost quiet. Bud could hear dogs in the far distance, but the helicopter had moved to the other side of Devil’s Oven, or had gone off to refuel. He slackened his pace enough to catch his breath. When he put the back of his hand to his brow, it came back muddy brown and wet. Dirty sweat trickled around his thick brows and into the outer corners of his eyes. Lila would be embarrassed for him to be seen looking like this. And what about her? Naked, dragged up the hillside. What a joke on them both.
He unfastened several shirt buttons to cool off and sat down on a log. Now was the time to keep moving, he knew. If the dogs were off their leashes, he was screwed. But the adrenaline that had driven him up the mountain had abated and he was exhausted. Worse, his chest felt tight, like the breath was being squeezed out of him.
His mother’s brother, Stephen, had died of an enlarged heart. They said it was as big as a grapefruit and had crowded the walls of his chest until it burst with the effort of keeping him alive. Bud didn’t want to die out here, leaving Lila alone with the beast. Though maybe the police would actually start looking for her then.
When Bud heard the dogs again, closer, he knew it was time to move on. He wished for water. There had been no time, no thought of bringing anything with him except the gun.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Ivy forced herself to work, putting the extra couple of inches into the pregnant bridesmaid’s dress. She teased out the seams she had already made, not really minding that she was undoing her own stitches. It was the nature of her business, changing things, transforming things. Nothing was ever truly finished.
The house was quiet, except for the rainy patter of dead oak leaves that the afternoon wind brought to her window. For once, she had the door open to the hallway because there were no sounds to shut out, no grating snores from Anthony or the soap operas Thora had always watched at full volume. When had she last been alone in the house? Probably in early March, when one of the women from the church had picked up Thora for the monthly women’s lunch because Ivy was too busy to drive her.
Ivy had never been a worrier, but she was worried now. Something was going to happen to Anthony, and it would be her fault because she hadn’t paid attention, hadn’t kept him occupied and happy.
What was happy to Anthony? Piles of food on the table. A passive hour in Thora’s chair watching television game shows, his eyes blinking as slowly as a cat’s.
She wondered what went through his mind when he watched people acting silly on those shows. Sometimes he smiled his hideous smile, or grunted his approval, but no matter how ridiculous the people were, she never heard him laugh. More than anything, she wanted to be able to see inside his mind, to learn how to please him, to keep him out of trouble. Be a friend—or more—to him. She had always suspected she was meant for someone besides the truck farmers, government drones, miners, and handymen who managed to eek out some kind of living from the region. For a long time, she had thought she would eventually have to leave Alta and Devil’s Oven to find the man she was meant for. But Anthony had come to her.
• • •
When she finished the bridesmaid’s dress, she hung it on the hook on the back of the door and steamed it so the few wrinkles she had put into it would fall out. The way she had fashioned it, working a barely noticeable dart into the seam where the skirt was attached, guaranteed that no one would know the girl was pregnant.
&
nbsp; Was she carrying a baby girl or baby boy? Did the girl know, or even care? She had seemed pretty smart, but Ivy knew that having intelligence didn’t provide immunity against making stupid decisions about boys.
Once upon a time it had mattered to her deeply to have a boyfriend or husband. Someone to make babies with. She had even secretly enjoyed it—just a little bit, hadn’t it been thrilling?—when in sixth grade, Lila and one of her more obnoxious friends had “accidentally” locked her in the sports equipment shed behind the grandstand with Tripp Morgan and Sheryl Dixon’s younger brother, Isaac. Isaac, two years her junior, had been the one to kiss her, his dry lips pressing against hers until she thought the edges of her front teeth would cut through and draw blood. Tripp was there to make sure they didn’t chicken out. He had stared down at the dirt floor, where the lines of sunlight coming through the badly hung door made a kind of ladder near his feet.
“This is stupid,” Tripp had said before Isaac could kiss her a second time.
His words made Ivy feel stupid, too. She had pushed Isaac away, suddenly ashamed, hating that she had told Lila about liking Isaac. Why had she let Lila talk her into doing it? She wondered if Tripp remembered that day. She saw him in Alta a few times a year, and still didn’t feel completely comfortable looking him in the eye. She didn’t know what had happened to Isaac. Now his brother-in-law was dead, murdered by Anthony.
Like a circle, it came back to her.
• • •
The pregnant bridesmaid would be back the next day. Had she told anyone about Anthony? Surely she hadn’t, what with her own secret so precious to her. That secret wouldn’t remain one for all that long, though. And what then? Ivy’s secret would mean nothing. The girl could tell anyone she wanted about the naked man she had seen in Ivy’s hallway.
They would come for Anthony, and there would be questions about Thora. Just the previous day, she had thought to fry up hamburgers with fresh-cut French fries for Anthony’s lunch. But Thora was in the freezer, swathed in the same clear, thick plastic Ivy delivered her wedding dresses in. Thora’s body was covered with paper-wrapped packages of meat, the remaining blueberries from last summer, and the two bags of ice they kept in case they had to fill a cooler for a shopping trip or church potluck. It had felt wrong to violate Thora’s resting place for something as trivial as hamburger.
She hadn’t loved Thora enough. She had been too selfish.
It wasn’t Thora’s fault that her own mother, the first Mrs. Luttrell, had died so young, leaving Thora to the tender mercies of her barely interested father. Ivy’s own mother had tried and tried to be a friend to Thora. Ivy wasn’t sure how she knew this; she had been so young. She just remembered what her mother was like. Still, Thora had rejected her.
I needed you, Mama.
At night, when she was overcome with sadness about Thora and feeling afraid of Anthony, she talked quietly to her mother in the darkness of her room. Asked her what she should do. The only answer she got was more wind coming off the mountain, whispering things she couldn’t understand.
• • •
Burying Thora was going to be like Anthony’s resurrection, in reverse.
Ivy set up her Sorry, I’m busy sewing message on the answering machine, and went to change into a comfortable pair of corduroy pants and her soiled barn coat. When she opened the gardening cabinet in the carport to retrieve the shovel and spade, her eyes rested on the axe she often used for breaking up small tree limbs that came down near the house. A shudder moved through her. Thora, lying bleeding on the floor, the flesh of her neck rent by the carving knife. No, I’m not going to do to Thora what some monster had done to Anthony.
When Thora had stopped bleeding, and Ivy had sopped up the pooling blood, she mended Thora’s wound with the same thread with which she had repaired Anthony. Thora’s skin was so fair that the color didn’t quite match, but somehow it made Ivy feel better to see her half sister whole again.
As Ivy loaded the sled with the shovel and spade, she also tied on a couple lengths of burlap and some heavy twine. Last time she came out of the woods, Missy had been waiting for her. She wasn’t expecting anyone, but it wouldn’t hurt to show up with a small, wild rhododendron in tow. Just in case there were questions about why she had spent her afternoon digging up on Devil’s Oven.
Sometimes Ivy wondered what else she might find up on the mountain. She had found Anthony, so anything was possible. Her mother’s body had never been found on the mountain—or anywhere else, for that matter. Everyone in town, including the police, had just assumed she either ran away or was murdered by Ivy and Thora’s father, who then hung himself out of guilt. What if she found her own mother’s bones as she was burying Thora?
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The woman wouldn’t move.
He kicked at her leg once, twice, with all the rancor his empty stomach engendered. She didn’t cry out or try to roll away. The flesh on her thigh jiggled some, but that was all. Her eyes were open.
The cave was getting dark. There were noises—animal noises—from deep inside it that raised the hair on the back of his neck. It wasn’t good to be there. He had to leave the cave.
He stood over the woman so he could see her face better. He liked her, liked the way his prick felt when it was inside her. When he was there, pictures of other women came into his mind. Women like her who screamed and tried to hurt him, but also many women who didn’t scream, but gasped and cried out Anthony! Ohmygodohmygod, Anthony! They never wanted it to stop.
Moving closer to the front of the cave, he undid his pants and urinated against the wall, just as he had at Ivy’s house. He thought of Ivy’s face and her name together now. She had yelled at him, but she didn’t always yell. She gave him food. A lot of it. When he was with her, his stomach never felt empty like this.
The air coming into the cave’s entrance carried in the scent of men, dogs. He didn’t like dogs. But he could run from the men if he had to.
He looked back at the woman. Like Claude, she wasn’t food. It was possible that whatever was living far back in the cave was food, but he wasn’t certain enough to venture back there.
It was time to leave the cave and go back to the house where Ivy and her food lived.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Bud stepped out of the derelict shack he had been searching, and held the dusty water jug he had found to his nose. It didn’t smell of vinegar or piss, so he brought it to his lips and drank and drank until the stale water ran over his chin and he began to cough. When the fit subsided, he sank down onto the four-by-four stoop pressed into the dirt.
It was almost evening. The police hadn’t found him, and he still hadn’t found any sign of Lila or the creature. That’s what it was—inhuman. Bud had seen it in the way it handled Lila, the way it was able to move away so quickly, like an animal with a prize.
He listened. No helicopter. No dogs.
About an hour earlier, the sound of barking dogs had stopped. He thought maybe he had been wrong, that they hadn’t been police dogs after all. Just a feral pack, or someone’s guard dogs. People were always getting busted for growing pot up here, and the woods were dense enough in some places that you could hide a still or a meth operation pretty easily.
Did the bastard still have Lila? Was she even alive? She had to be cold as hell. She was always complaining about being cold. Lila was the only woman he knew who could wear a mink coat all through a service in a steaming church while the other women shedded layers like molting snakes. He smiled to think that her body temperature probably wasn’t the whole reason for the coat.
He liked that she enjoyed nice things. The women in his family—his mother and aunts—mocked people who took pleasure in their clothes and appearance. It was a prejudice that only the very wealthy could carry off convincingly, but it had always irritated the hell out of him. They seemed like hypocrites to Bud, in the way they amassed money but refused to enjoy it.
Setting off, he figured he would be at the to
p of Devil’s Oven within half an hour. It was only about three miles square with a couple of tourist lookouts and a fire tower. No one lived up there that he knew. Would the creature know that and take Lila there? Or was he just running, even more blind than Bud himself was?
He hadn’t been walking more than two minutes when he heard the sound of something moving quickly through the woods. He had been fooled by squirrels or deer or his imagination twenty times that day, but he pulled the 9mm from the waist of his pants anyway.
Whatever—or whoever—it was, was moving to the west of him. The sound of its progress was fast, assured. After hours of feeling drained by the climb, Bud was suddenly primed and ready. He moved at an angle so he would end up slightly above whoever it was. He knew it was the creature; he could feel it. He clenched his jaw to stop himself from calling out Lila’s name so she would know he had come for her. Everything would be all right once he had her. When they were together again, there would be plenty of time to deal with the mess he had made of the businesses. Nothing was more important than to have her safe with him again. An inexplicable surge of happy anticipation flooded his chest.
Dusk was falling fast, but it wasn’t dark enough to hide Lila’s hair, which darted like flames between the thin trunks of the pines. Then he saw the rosy flesh of her back, which he knew far better than his own. He ran toward her, not caring what kind of noise he made.
When they were finally in full view just twenty feet below him, he ran the slide. The bastard had Lila draped across his shoulders as though she were a dead lamb or a calf he had killed.
Now he did scream Lila’s name to get her attention, so that she might fight her way clear if the creature were distracted enough. Bud didn’t have enough confidence in his aim to try to take out the son of a bitch with her right there.
The creature stopped and turned to look up at him, but Lila didn’t move.
Devil's Oven Page 14
