The Red Hunter

by Lisa Unger

  But really, when she looked at it in moments of clarity, it was Claudia who was to blame for how it all fell apart. She thought he couldn’t understand her pain. Ayers wanted so badly for her to move on, for them to go back to where they were. But nothing in Claudia’s body, mind, or spirit could allow that, and there was no way back to the person she was before Melvin Cutter raped her. Ayers wanted her to forget. But every time she climbed the stairs, or the room got too dark, she saw Melvin Cutter lurking in doorways. Ayers wanted her to stop writing, stop posting, stop talking about it, but that was the only thing that made her feel better, that gave her any power.

  Claudia grew to hate him for his distance from the rape. She hated him for not being the first man through the door. She hated him for being able to forget—from her perspective—what happened. She even hated him—darkly, secretly—for loving Raven with his whole heart as he clearly did. She was ashamed of that more than anything else; it was baser than she knew herself to be. Because Ayers had promised Claudia that he could love the baby completely, that he would convince himself that there was no way she might not be his. The universe would not punish them in that way. And he did that. And somehow, even though she did exactly the same, she hated him for it. She’d have had more compassion, hated him less, if he’d had to work at it.

  Ayers wasn’t raging, holding on to anger, filled with a desire for revenge against the man who hurt her. He forgave; he moved forward. She’d been beaten and raped in their home. She’d lost her freedom, her identity, her sense of safety. And Ayers was as evolved as a monk. That’s what undid them, she realized much later, how easily he got past it all. She saw it as a kind of betrayal.

  She confided in Martha when, after so much therapy, she finally got it.

  “It’s primal,” her sister said. “You want him to beat his chest, turn back time, and protect you. You want him to be in the house with you that night and stop all of it before it happened. But you didn’t fall in love with Ayers because he was a tough guy. You married him because he was everything Dad wasn’t.”

  Dad. Distant. Strict disciplinarian. Ruthless businessman. Never showed either of them an ounce of affection. Claudia could never remember him even kissing their mother. He was gone most of the time, a fearful stick figure in their lives. Mom was the soft one, the loving one who was always there—hosting sleepovers, going on field trips. If Mom was unhappy with Dad, she’d never showed it.

  Claudia’s mother died from ovarian cancer when Claudia was still in college; Claudia never got to ask her the hard questions about marriage, about motherhood, about what compromises she felt she’d made. She got to know her dad a little better then; he was more awkward, maybe with a touch of Asperger’s. Distant because he didn’t know how to be with people. But then he died from a heart attack two years after Mom.

  She and Ayers didn’t have huge fights; neither one of them were up to that. It wasn’t an angry, nasty split. Claudia took Raven to spend a summer at Martha’s retreat in New Mexico. She wrote there, the beauty of the place, the energy of it—it healed her. He called every night after work, begged her to come home. She finally did, but then she moved out a few weeks later into an apartment on the Upper West Side. They shared custody of Raven, who was almost five then—a loved, normal little girl who, like so many kids, had two homes. Ayers, true to form, just let Claudia go. If that’s what you want, Claudia. Even as she left him, she wondered why he didn’t fight for her.

  Now, Claudia could see that she drove away a good man who loved her. Melvin Cutter had smashed in the front door of her life and hurt her terribly, left her world in ruin. But she was the one who’d burnt the remains to the ground. In fact, she could smell the smoke.

  Smoke.

  Slowly, the world came back—tilted, wobbling, in ugly patches. The pain in her head, at the bridge of her nose, the hard, cold ground beneath her.

  “Raven,” she croaked.

  Josh at the door. His brother. Running for the stairs. The hammer in her hand. She tasted blood in her mouth. As she pushed herself up, she saw a deep red swath down her shirt.

  There were voices, yelling. Where were they coming from? Her head cleared a little. Oh, God. The men were gone. Where was her daughter?

  “Raven?”

  “Mom!” Every mother knows the pitch of panic, of pain. She crawled toward the sound.

  “Raven!”

  Muffled, terrified. “Mom, we’re trapped in here. He’s coming. He’s coming to the house.”

  But Claudia was alone. The door at the top of the stairs was closed, even though she knew it had been opened. And the door to the crawl space was also shut and locked. She searched around for the key she’d seen, the smell of smoke growing stronger. She pounded—frantically, uselessly—on the tunnel door.

  “It’s locked,” she yelled, her voice cracking with fear. “There’s no key.”

  The drill, that’s what she needed. She needed to drill the lock and break it.

  “Get back!” A male voice yelled from inside the tunnel with Raven. Was that Josh? Was that freak in the tunnel with Raven? Where was Troy?

  “Stay away from her,” Claudia screeched.

  There was a hard pounding then. She backed away.

  Once. Twice. Three times. The door burst open and a pair of work boots stuck out. Josh slid out, panting, red in the face. He pulled Raven out, who leapt into Claudia’s arms. Troy climbed out behind them, looking stunned.

  “Mom,” Raven sobbed. “Mom, are you okay? What happened to you? There’s so much blood.”

  Claudia held on to her daughter, weeping. She couldn’t talk, just clung to her girl.

  “Mom,” Raven said. “It was there. A huge bag of money. He took it. The bad guy.”

  Claudia could barely hold on to what was happening. It was chaos. She started to cough. What was that smell? What was burning?

  Josh was already on his way up the stairs. They watched as he put his hand on the door and pulled it back quickly. He looked back at them, stricken.

  “Fire,” he said. “He started a fire.”

  • • •

  THE THINKER CHATTERS. SHE YAMMERS on about this and that, an incessant soundtrack of worries and wants, judgments, observations. She’s shallow, distracting, bossy—always telling you what you should do, or could have done, or why things would be better if circumstances were different. The thinker is the enemy of wisdom.

  The watcher is the one who knows, the one who sits and waits. The part who connects to the net of universal wisdom. Calm resides in the watcher.

  And I was there in the watcher mind. I observed as Rhett Beckham hefted the bag from the tunnel, then slammed the hatch door closed. It was a door I never knew, in all my years in this house, was there. I watched as he fastened the lock and shouldered the bag. I slipped into the shadows of the barn, and he didn’t see me or intuit my presence, as he exited—voices down below calling behind him. Ghosts on the wind.

  Outside, a woman waited in a primer-painted black car; she got out when she saw him approach and held up the copper key between two red fingernails.

  “You closed and locked the door?” he asked. She nodded. “The basement door, too? Latched from the outside?”

  “Just like you said,” she said. “The woman was unconscious. I just left her.”

  “Good girl,” he said.

  “Well?” she asked, looking at him eagerly, rising up on her toes.

  “Well,” he said. A wide smile cut across his face.

  He dropped the bag, and they knelt in front of it. He held it open for her, and she let out a whoop that carried up into the trees.

  “Oh my god,” she said, face slackening with surprise. “Oh my god!”

  He stood and helped her to her feet, too. They embraced, and then he started to spin her around and around.

  “This time tomorrow,” he said, breathless when he put her down. “We’ll be in Anguilla.”

  This time tomorrow, I promised silently, you’ll be in the ground
.

  I watched as he went around to the trunk of the car and retrieved red cans of gasoline, a pile of rags. He stowed the bag in the back of the car, pulled the girl into a long, passionate kiss. They were both dark, clad in denim, both thin in a wiry, tough kind of way. Against the black of the car and the gray of the sky and the ash of the trees shedding their leaves, there was a kind of beauty in the scene, a dark beauty.

  “Wait here,” he said. “Keep the engine running.”

  He took the cans inside. I calculated.

  Do I need to kill her first? I wondered. Since I didn’t know her or who she was or if she deserved to die, I guessed not. Maybe she was just some small-town fool, one who fell for the wrong guy because she didn’t know any better. Maybe she was only guilty of poor judgment. I’d only killed one person in cold blood, and I didn’t like the way it had changed me. Could I follow Beckham into the house without her seeing me? But her head was bent over her cell phone—like everyone’s. Every free moment, no matter what, people reach for those devices. Such a blessing for someone who doesn’t want to be seen. Lucky for her, she didn’t even look up as I slipped from the barn and took the long way around the far side, and up the tree line to the back door.

  I stood there a moment, remembering how I looked inside that night and saw them, how confusing it was, how I didn’t understand what I was seeing at first. It was all still there, memories as vivid as photographs in my hand.

  The door opened easily, unlocked, waiting for me.

  I walked through the laundry room, into the kitchen. I could hear him banging around upstairs, and already I felt the tickle of smoke on my sinuses. I pulled up my hood and walked down the long hallway and came to stand at the foot of the stairs. I felt it rise up, all of it, all my anger and all my pain, the throb of adrenaline and, yes, the thrill of the pending fight.

  He stopped halfway down the stairs, frozen, confused, his face sloping into surprise.

  “Hi, there,” I said, tilting my face up so that he could see me. Slowly, recognition dawned and I couldn’t help but smile.

  “Remember me?”

  thirty-nine

  There are two different worlds, two different versions of me. There’s the girl I used to be, the one who went to the mall and the movies with her friends, the one whose mother was still reading to her, still tucking her in at night, right up until the night she died. In that Zoey’s world, it was a big deal to sneak out and meet a boy. That Zoey would be upset if she got anything less than an A on her biology exam.

  The night my parents died, I became a different kind of girl, and the world I inhabited afterward was a strange, frightening place full of dark alleys and trap doors, where strangers lurked in the shadows looking to do harm. A part of me died that night; a part of me came alive. This girl is stronger than she was—broken, twisted, but sharper and more dangerous for it.

  Rhett Beckham kept coming down the stairs, stopping at the bottom, his dark eyes on me. He’d aged badly, raggedly like Didion. I was taken aback by the deep lines on his face, the gray in his hair. He didn’t seem as tall as I remembered; he was thinner.

  “You,” he said, like Didion. Surprised. As if I only existed in some vague ugly memory he had of his own life. As if I wasn’t the person who bore the scars of his misdeeds. I moved in front of the door.

  “You knew it was here,” he said. He held me in an almost amused gaze. He wasn’t afraid of me. He thought I was small, weak, just a girl. Always better to be underestimated. The smell of smoke was strong and growing stronger; it tickled at the back of my throat.

  He wasn’t wrong. I did know there was something down there in the basement. I didn’t know what or where. Just like I knew that there was something wrong with my dad, that he was distant and far away, more than usual. Or that there was something wrong with my parents. Whispered arguments behind closed doors, my dad on the couch in the mornings. But it was white noise in my consciousness; I was aware, but it wasn’t affecting me in any real way. I was that other girl, in that other world. There was nothing dark in that place. I was sheltered, protected, and loved.

  He moved in fast, tried to knock me aside with the back of his hand. I easily caught his wrist with my left hand and pulled. He was tall, strong, but I immediately determined that he was inflexible, with bad balance. I used the momentum of his swing to lead him off center. I came in close, grabbed his shirt with both hands, and drove my knee up hard into his groin. Then I used my elbow to strike him in the jaw—an ugly crack, a spray of blood and saliva.

  He crumbled, curling up in pain too great for noise. Then he lay at my feet, helpless. And I stood looking down.

  It was too easy. I wanted a fight, I realized. I wanted Didion and Beckham to be the monsters I imagined them to be. I wanted to fight them and win, emerge victorious from battle with the titans that destroyed my life, that killed my parents, that broke me in two. But in the end, they were just men, weak and dirty, criminals greedy and base. They could only do what they did to me because I was an innocent girl, because my father was surprised and bound, unarmed, because my mother never knew what hit us. There was almost nothing to either one of them.

  I dropped to straddle Beckham, turning him on his back, pinning his elbows with my knees. I withdrew my father’s hunting knife, the same one I’d driven into Didion’s heart.

  When life leaves, it’s just a breath exhaled and not drawn in again. I had wanted to feel something when Didion died. I wanted to feel something now.

  But there was nothing. Just numbness, the emptiness of my actions expanding to fill the world. What would Mike say to me now? That there is no true justice delivered between men and women, the world is too complicated, we are all too tightly connected. You never do something to anyone without doing it to yourself. My rage billowed and plumed inside me.

  I brought the knife to Beckham’s throat and he watched me, eyes twitching. The amusement and dismissiveness was gone from his gaze. There was fear there now, and I was glad to see that at least, that he knew a fraction of the terror I felt that night. Soon his pain would subside and he’d easily topple me. Then, we’d fight again.

  From upstairs, a noise swelled—a kind of blowing wind, a whir. The sound of things being devoured by fire, crackling, snapping, breaking apart. Something else. Voices? Was I hearing voices faint and far away?

  “Who were you working for that night?” I asked. It was the question I never asked Didion, my rage getting the better of me. “Who sent you to get that money?”

  I used the butt of the knife to bash him hard on the bridge of his nose, but not hard enough to knock him out. He released a deep groan of pain as a river of blood gushed from his nostrils.

  “Who?” I yelled.

  He moved his head from side to side, insensible. In my imagination, in my child’s memory, these men were invincible, and I was defenseless against them, a rag doll. I was almost disappointed that he was so weak.

  He tried to buck beneath me, but I brought my elbow down hard on his solar plexus, then leaned in close to lace my fingers through his hair and pull. He let out a desperate wheeze, struggling for breath. I saw another hard flash of fear in his eyes, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it. Once, I’d screamed and struggled to get away from him. Now, he was helpless beneath me, in spite of his superior size and strength because I had worked and trained. Because I was the Red Hunter, the embodiment of my own rage.

  “Who?” I asked. “Who sent you for that money?”

  “Are you sure you want to know?” asked my father, who stood at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at the smoke that was starting to plume. He had a cigarette in his hand, took a deep drag, and turned to me. “Do you want all your childhood illusions dashed?”

  “Of course, I want to know,” I yelled at him. “I’ve been looking for answers for ten years.”

  “No,” Dad said, with a slow shake of his head. “You’ve been looking for revenge. You think it’s going to end your suffering. It’s not. You ge
t that now, right?”

  I turned my attention back to Beckham, who was looking at me with eyes wild. His breath was coming back; he was bucking and struggling beneath me.

  I brought the hunting knife to his throat. The blade was so sharp, so carefully honed that just the slightest pressure drew a little bit of blood from the crepey skin of his neck.

  I didn’t ask him again who he was working for. Maybe my father was right; maybe I didn’t really want to know. All I had to do was press and draw the blade across his throat and watch him bleed out. Listen to him gurgle, watch him thrash until life left him. It was the only thing I wanted. Not answers, not justice. Didion stood over by the stairs, ghastly pale and small. I pressed the knife deeper and Beckham began to struggle, lifting my weight with his hips. A thick line of blood trailed down his throat, black and twisting like a snake.

  “Then what?” said my father, coming closer. “After that, who are you?”

  I hesitated, drew the blade away. Just a millisecond. Who was I now? Who could I ever be with everything behind me, and everything I’d done?

  The number one rule of fighting is to never let down your guard. Never leave yourself vulnerable to what may be coming up behind. I saw the flash of hope in Beckham’s eyes right before I felt the blow to the side of my head. I toppled, stunned, looking up into the drawn, pocked face of a woman with long dark hair. She stood over me with a shovel, panting.

  Then nothing.

  forty

  I wasn’t out for long. Either she wasn’t that strong, or she chickened out. Because I’ll tell you that not many people wake up after a whack to the head with a shovel. That’s a killing blow. Still, I grappled to orient myself, my ears ringing, my head throbbing. I held on to my stomach; I could feel bile climbing up my throat.