Carrington lifted the gun. “Enough is enough, Julia. I’m impressed. But, truly, there isn’t any point. No more games.”
“You’re going to kill us anyway!”
“If you don’t stop the car,” he answered, calmly, “I think I probably will.”
“Killing is a sin against God’s gift of—”
“Stop the car, Julia.”
“As you wish,” said Julia, and, turning the wheel hard, floored the accelerator and slammed the Escalade into the biggest tree she could find.
(III)
THE WORLD WAS RENDERED DOWN to a crystalline simplicity.
Frank was stunned. Julia was stunned. In the back seat, Mary was moaning. She was not belted, but the side-impact air bag had likely saved her. Nevertheless, the angle of her leg suggested a pretty bad break. At the last minute, Julia had swerved the car into a skid, intentionally striking the tree with the side of the car rather than the front: but striking it hard all the same. The gas tank had ruptured, and the smell was intense. Mary’s groans grew louder. Without speaking, Julia and Frank worked their their doors open and staggered around, trying to get their bearings. The former deputy, remarkably, had not lost the gun. Julia didn’t care. She didn’t want the gun. She wanted Mary Mallard’s purse, and found it, on the floor of the car.
“All right, Julia,” said Frank, breathing hard. “That was fun. Now playtime is over.”
“Who’s playing?”
“You didn’t do that because you were scared. You didn’t do it for fun. You did it because you know something, and you want me not to know it. What do you know?”
Julia said nothing. Stooping beside the car, she was scrounging in poor Mary’s purse as gasoline puddled on the snow. She was remembering high-school science, and something Vanessa had told her after visiting Frank, about bows and arrows and armor.
“Stop faking, Julia. Get up from there. You’re not seriously hurt.” He saw what his captive was doing. “And get away from that purse!”
Julia stood up. She was holding Mary Mallard’s cigarette lighter.
“My friend smokes too much,” Julia said.
“What?”
“I want you to put down the gun, turn your back, walk into the woods in that direction”—pointing away from the trail—“and count to, oh, say, a thousand.”
Frank shook his head, the gun steady. In his other hand was a flashlight he had pulled from some pocket—likely to prove useful now that winter dark was falling. His confidence was appalling.
“Do it,” she said.
“Or else what?”
She flicked the lighter on. The dealer jumped back.
“Have you ever seen a gasoline explosion, Frank? How high the flames reach? How far away they sear? Have you ever seen that?”
“What are you going to do, Julia? Throw the lighter at me?”
“No.” She held it higher, then pointed down at the gas that had run everywhere. “I’m just going to drop it.”
Silence in the woods. At least between the two humans. Animals squiggled through the underbrush. Wind crackled the branches. The fuel continued to drip, drip, drip.
“You won’t do it, Julia.” But he did not sound so sure. “You want to burn up? You want your buddy in the car to burn up?”
“As opposed to what?”
“As opposed to telling me what you figured out just before you crashed the car, and telling me where the other clue is hidden in the woods, after which I vanish from your life.” He smiled. “Or were you telling the truth about Mitch Huebner’s house? Tell you what. Let’s walk over there and see. If the diary’s there, we call 911 for your buddy, and I’m gone. If it isn’t, if you lied to me, well, that’s another matter.”
Julia shook her head. The hand holding the lighter shook wildly. In the distance she heard sirens. “No. You can’t afford to let me live. I know too much.”
“What do you know, Julia?”
“Too much,” she said again. In the car, Mary was weeping from the enormous pain, and Julia knew that if this did not end fast she would break down in empathy.
“We’re wasting time, Julia. Put the lighter away. Let’s get the diary. Then we can get some help for your buddy.”
“No.” Stepping closer. “If you shoot me, it falls. You see that, don’t you?”
He obviously saw that. He edged away.
“You’re still too close.”
“Julia, please. Think about it. You’re not your husband. You don’t see the world as simple, there’s my way and the wrong way. The world is complex. You appreciate nuance. You’re not some sort of comic-book—”
“I’m going to count to five, Frank.”
The former deputy lowered his gun. He smiled. “Look, Julia. Even if you do know the truth—or think you do—if you go around talking about it, who’s going to believe you? The world is too divided, Julia. Nobody cares about ‘real’ truth. They only care about what helps their side, or hurts the other.”
Another shake of the head. Julia refused to accept that the world was so cynical. There were people who believed in truth.
There had to be.
And Frank’s worried eyes said he believed it, too.
“Go,” she said softly. “Just go. Please. Get out of here.”
“Julia—”
“I’m counting to five. Then I’m dropping the lighter.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“One.” Hand rock-steady again. The sirens said officialdom was minutes away. “Two.”
“You won’t do it. You won’t kill your friend. You want to see your children grow up.”
“I don’t think you’re going to let that happen. Three.”
“Suicide is a sin,” he tried, playing to Julia’s other side.
“Four.” Julia lifted the lighter high, astonished at the power throbbing in her arm. “Better get going, Frank.”
“It’s a sin against God’s gift of life, and so is killing somebody else—”
“Five.”
She opened her fingers.
Where Frank Carrington had stood was a patch of bare snow, and brush snapping.
Instinct made Julia grab for the lighter. Her natural clumsiness made her miss.
The lighter tumbled and spun and struck the puddling, running gasoline.
CHAPTER 63
THE SCIENCE QUIZ
(I)
TO THE LAYMAN, and, sometimes, to the expert, scientific knowledge is little different from faith. It is believed in the absence of analysis, and often evidence—that is, we do not trouble to study the evidence ourselves but rely on our high priests to tell us what is so and what is not. And sometimes the high priests know no more than we do, yet their impassioned instruction forms the templates through which we view the world. If they are in error, so are we.
The lighter struck.
Flame, sudden and orange.
Spreading, leaping, hot.
Julia leaped back.
The fire flared, hissed, and then winked out, as Julia, former science teacher, had known it would. The high priests of Hollywood got it wrong every time, as every science teacher in America knew but dared not teach, because some fool would try. In the movies, cars crash and explode. Heroes shoot cars and they explode. Cars fall off cliffs and buildings and explode. In real life, gasoline hardly ever explodes unless confined, and, even then, only after the vapor has built up adequate pressure—but never if it builds up too much. Gasoline is difficult even to burn, especially in cold weather.
Frank Carrington had seen too many movies.
(II)
THE ONLY PROBLEM with Julia’s theory was that it was incomplete. Because there was no explosion, Frank would soon be back. In a foul mood.
Julia decided not to wait around.
She hurried back to the car, but with the airbags deployed, it would not move. She leaned in close, took Mary’s pulse, then kissed her on the cheek. The skin was slick with perspiration. The writer was no longer moaning. Julia did not know
if she was conscious. She squeezed Mary’s hand. There was an awful lot of blood.
“Listen to me,” she said. “There are sirens. Somebody’s on the way. They’ll help you. Otherwise I’ll send help. But I can’t stay here.”
An answering squeeze, the eyes briefly open.
“Go,” Mary whispered.
“I’m sorry.”
“This isn’t going to make me more charming.” She laughed. Then groaned. The eyes closed, and opened again. “Go!”
Julia went.
Frank Carrington had run off the way they came, so Julia decided to plunge deeper into the woods, and did, kicking and snarling through the high drifts, and higher underbrush. In two minutes she could no longer see the clearing. In three she was lost. Great. Just great. Exactly what she needed. For all she knew, Frank was circling back, and she would blunder into him trying to escape. She should have stayed where she was. Surely the sirens meant salvation.
Still she ran, and stumbled, and got up and ran some more, not sure where she was going, only sure she dared not stop, as snow trickled into her boots and into her collar and soon chilled her skin. She laughed or cried, both were the same; she had avoided death by gunshot and death by suicide, and here she was, asking to freeze to death.
She reached for her cell phone, but it was in the car.
The road. She saw the road. No, another road, the fork she had chosen not to take.
And heard the gunshots. A pair, echoing in the woods. A second later, animals and birds were in full flurrying flight. Julia reared around, deciding that she would follow the fauna, who would surely know, with their perfect sense of direction, which way was away.
It occurred to her that the gunshots had been aimed in her direction.
Frank Carrington knew where she was.
She ran. She ran from her past and toward her future, ran from the Clan and from the heart of whiteness and from the world of expectations and also the world of hope. She ran from her husband and toward her children, from her job and toward her dreams. She ran, feet seemingly skimming the surface, pelting through the forest, as the cold seeped into her bones now from all the snow that had sifted into her clothes, but still she ran and ran and ran.
And stumbled into a ditch.
She was still trying to squirm out of it when she heard, behind her, a crunch in the snow.
“Well, that was a lot of fun,” said Frank Carrington, the gun firmly in his hand. “I always heard you were quite the science teacher.”
CHAPTER 64
THE HEART OF WHITENESS
(I)
THE WORST PART WAS, as Frank happily pointed out, they were less than half a mile from Mitch Huebner’s shack. Julia begged to get help for Mary first, but Frank told her it was her own fault for wrecking the car. When she tried to defy him, he promised that if she did anything right now but walk with him to the Huebner place, he would shoot her in the back and let her bleed to death, then go back to the car and do the same to Mary.
“That’s inhuman,” said Julia, unable to come up with a sharper line.
“Come on, haven’t you read any history? It’s very human.”
So they marched through the snowdrifts on the forest floor, avoiding the roads, Frank now in charge, because he knew the way. The trek seemed interminable, and her feet were soon so cold she could not feel her toes, but it hardly mattered, because she was too scared to worry.
“That Zant was something, wasn’t he?” said the killer. “Kept everybody guessing.”
“He was something, all right,” said Julia, but Frank was not in the mood for irony.
“He was a real character. A showman. I liked him.”
“I noticed.”
“I didn’t have a choice, Julia. He’d worked it all out.” He was suddenly furious, perhaps detecting her unexpressed objection. “I was a kid, Julia. I was twenty-four years old! You can’t hold me responsible for what I did when I was twenty-four years old!”
“You were a little older when you shot Kellen,” she said softly.
They marched, snowy trees slipping past, each hiding its dark, archival history in the night. Kellen, country boy that he was at heart, professed to love snow. He loved it for its randomness, he said. For the fact that it needed us to give it a reason. Nothing in Kellen’s world had a purpose or meaning other than the one Kellen determined. All of creation was new and fresh to Kellen, because he did not care what anyone else thought. This quality of lightness, this casual rejection of convention, had once attracted her to him, because she saw it as rebellious and ideologically exciting, before admitting, after years as one among his companions, that Kellen was merely narcissistic; and, years later, that he was in some basic way evil.
“Here we are,” said Frank Carrington, with the same mad joy.
They had arrived at the rutted path leading to the dooryard of the slanting, empty shack. Mitch Huebner, as she had expected, was off plowing.
“I haven’t been here in years,” said Frank. “Not since I had to deliver a check one day or the old bastard wasn’t going to clear my driveway any more.”
“I can see where paying for services rendered would be inconvenient.”
“You really don’t know when to stop, do you?”
“Not lately, no.”
Frank Carrington put a hand on her shoulder, slowing her down. His flashlight played over the yard, picking out the scattered cords of wood, the broken windows of the lightless shack, the doghouse…the doghouse. “What’s that?”
“That’s Goetz,” said Julia, nervously.
“Dog?”
“Yes.”
“Is that a chain?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t like the looks of him. Maybe I should shoot him.”
She had recovered a bit of her hauteur. “He’s a she.”
They began to cross the dooryard. As they reached the steps, the dog growled. Frank glanced over his shoulder, let his light play over the chain, muttered to himself. “I should have shot him.”
“Be my guest,” said Julia.
“What, you have something against dogs?”
“Just that one. The last time I was here, she knocked me down.”
She felt his cool scrutiny in the darkness, wondered if she had said too much. But Frank only laughed. “Tell you what. If you try anything, I’ll feed you to her. How does that sound?”
Her shudder was genuine. “Let’s go in.”
They reached the door.
Julia carefully did not touch the knob. “It’s usually unlocked,” she said. “Do you want to go first?”
He said, “Do I look like six kinds of fool?”
“Are you sure?”
“Don’t waste time, Julia. Open the door.”
She nodded, and swallowed, and put her hand on the knob. Without her gloves it felt slimy, a live thing, twisting and squirming in her hand like a dying fish. She turned the knob, and pushed.
Silently, Goetz charged.
(II)
FRANK WAS VERY FAST. He turned and crouched and brought the gun across his wrist, sighting down the barrel, all of this in less than a second, and it would have been plenty of time, he would have blown the massive dog to bits, except that Julia spoiled his aim when she smashed the shovel against his ear: the same shovel that had so ineffectively shielded her on her first visit to Mr. Huebner’s shack.
The former deputy was not wounded, but he was woozy, and both shots went high and outside, and he grabbed shakily for Julia’s ankle, and was strong enough to bring her down, even as Goetz landed on his stomach. Another shot, and then he dropped the gun, and then he was shouting, and then he was screaming, it was awful, the worst sound she had heard in her life, and she covered her ears and crawled away, legs aching from the fall, wanting Frank Carrington to deserve what he got, wanting to be the force of earthly punishment and decision, wanting his flesh torn and mutilated by the dog for what he had done to Kellen, and to her family, and she prayed with all her might for the stre
ngth to will herself to hate her neighbor, to stand by indifferently, or even gleefully, as Goetz tore him to death.
And could not do it.
She could not let another mother’s child die this way.
Up on her knees, she swung the shovel hard, and smacked it against Goetz…
…and it was not hard enough…
…Frank screaming and scrabbling and helpless…
…blood everywhere, spurting blackly in the moonlight…
…she had never seen a mess like this…
…she hit the dog again and again, like a woman in a fever, and maybe sometimes she slipped and hit Frank instead of the dog, and maybe sometimes she hit Frank on purpose, swinging and swinging, again and again…
Julia turned.
The dog was dead.
She sat down on the porch.
Finished. Done.
Or not quite: beneath the dog’s battered carcass, something bloody and dangerous was beginning to stir.
Frank Carrington was alive, but when she looked into his eyes, something darkly inhuman gazed out at her. He spoke not a word but grinned shabbily, blood streaming from a badly torn face, and struggled upright, half dragging one foot at an impossible angle, and his dripping red hand again clutched, impossibly, the gun.
When, at last, his mouth opened, the empty, sepulchral sound was the voice of all her nightmares come to wakefulness.
“Julia,” the thing said, gurgling and coughing. “Not nice.”
He reached out with both hands, the gun shaking, but any hit would do, and Julia, her courage and strength running out, leaned back and waited for his demonic embrace.
Don’t be a fool, Sis, said her brother, Jay, from deep inside.
She got up and ran.
(III)
FLEEING ON FOOT through snow leads only to the fool’s freedom. Julia realizes this after she has run ten yards. In the crisp moonlight, her tracks stand out in bold black relief from the gleaming white crust of the field. Frank Carrington, if he can walk reasonably fast, will have no trouble following her trail. She has no time for analysis, so she trusts the instinct that has so often preserved her.
Instinct warns her to make for the trees, where the gloom will make her tracks more difficult for a man in a hurry to see. Her cell phone would be easiest, but it is plugged into its carrier in the Escalade. So the trees are her only hope.
Stephen L. Carter Page 57
