Iris Avenue

by Pamela Grandstaff

  Brian’s father Fitz had been the keenest hunter of the family, but since his accident he could barely make it to the fridge for a beer and back to his recliner. Brian, Patrick, and Hannah’s brothers had all used the cabin as a place to seduce girls and hold the occasional drinking party when they were teenagers. Brian had used it to seduce several women during his marriage to Ava. It hadn’t been used by anyone in many years.

  Brian parked the VW down the muddy track a hundred feet beyond the cabin, back in among some large rhododendron bushes, and dragged some snowy brush over to cover it. He was relieved to find the cabin empty and boarded up, with a “no trespassing” sign on the door. He broke in through a back window.

  Inside he found some matches in a plastic bag in a drawer, cleaned off an oil lamp that still had oil in it, and lit the wick before placing the protective glass column back over the top. He didn’t dare make a fire in the fireplace, for fear the smoke would draw attention to his hiding place. Instead he reconnected the gas line to the stove, opened the valve and lit the pilot lights. The family had mineral rights to this land, so there was no meter for gas service. He lit the oven and left its door open to heat the room.

  Although still weak from the loss of blood, Brian made his way down over the hill behind the cabin to the spring house to get some water. He had to use a rock to break up the thick ice that had formed around the steady trickle of clear, clean water. He filled two plastic milk jugs and then struggled up the hill with them.

  There was coffee, sugar, and whisky in the cupboard, so while he warmed some water for coffee he cleaned his wound with the whiskey. The pain was so intense he almost passed out. He made a dressing out of some paper towels and duct tape, and covered the gash, which was bleeding again.

  The hot sweet coffee tasted good, and warmed him inside, but he was so weary it did nothing to revive him. He lay down on the bottom bunk in the back bedroom, and although he told himself he must stay alert, he fell deep asleep.

  It was a struggle to wake up when he heard the crunch of tires on snow and footsteps on the back porch of the cabin. His heart was pounding as he peeked out the window, and his relief was a cold sweat on his skin as he opened the door for the visitor he was expecting.

  “I’ve helped you this one time, but I won’t do it again,” his visitor said an hour later, as he prepared to leave. “Do what you will.”

  “I won’t need you again,” Brian said. “By this time tomorrow I’ll be long gone from here.”

  “Eventually you’ll have to face the consequences of your actions. None of us gets away with anything, not in the larger sense.”

  “I’m not spending the rest of my life in a prison. I’d rather die.”

  “Heaven help you, then.”

  Brian listened as the engine started and the four-wheel drive struggled out of the muddy driveway. As the sound of the vehicle faded away, Brian took stock of his situation. He had Maggie’s VW, a cell phone with no charger, and $40 he stole from his Uncle’s service station. He knew Curtis left the side door open for the mechanic while he went to the bakery to get his breakfast.

  He’d waited in the bushes behind the station until he heard Curtis go whistling down the street, and then he’d slipped in the side door that led into the car service area. He’d hoped to steal one of the cars in the lot outside, but the customers’ keys were no longer kept on pegs in the service area.

  A quick check of the office revealed a brand new safe, no doubt purchased after Brian’s last robbery of the station a few weeks before. Maggie’s VW key was still hanging on the peg board, however, so he grabbed that, a cell phone left on the desk, and all the money in the petty cash bag kept in the top drawer. On his way out of the garage he took a pair of coveralls and some gloves.

  As Brian warmed his front side before the open oven door, he wondered if he could count on his visitor not to rat him out. He wanted to spend the night here, in the cabin, and then leave before light, taking the muddy track all the way to the other end, where he hoped he could escape unseen into Maryland, and see about exchanging Maggie’s car for another. After that, his plan was to get as far away as possible as fast as he could.

  Brian took some scissors into the bathroom. He took a handful of his long red curls, now matted with sweat and dirt, and cut them off at the scalp. He cut off all his hair as close to the scalp as possible before he shaved his head with one of the disposable razors he found in the medicine cabinet. Then he cut off his beard and mustache before he shaved his face clean. He didn’t spend much time admiring his clean cut, younger-looking face in the mirror. He needed to erase any distinguishing characteristics that made him stand out in a crowd.

  He swept up the hair, put it in a plastic bag along with his prison garb, took it outside, and threw it over the hill. He found an old backpack and filled it with a blanket, some towels, the rest of the disposable razors, the whiskey and the provisions his visitor had brought. He dropped the backpack and the jugs of water by the back door.

  He was exhausted. Despite the painkillers his visitor had delivered, he was still suffering from the pain of his wound. He was afraid to lie down and sleep for fear his recent visitor had alerted the police to his whereabouts. All he could think of was that he must get away.

  The few weeks he’d spent in the county lockup and then the state penitentiary had been the worst weeks of his life. He knew he wasn’t tough enough to survive prison. The bullying that worked so well with women and those weaker than him had no effect on the cold-blooded killers in the state pen. He didn’t think he could bear to do what he would have to in order to survive inside. The feds were willing to work with him on the length of his sentence in order to get what they wanted out of him, but Brian had decided that what he wanted was no sentence. There was no going back now.

  Brian heard a noise outside and was relieved to see it was only a buck nosing around the porch of the cabin. He knew he wasn’t going to be able to sleep in the cabin and feel safe, but he needed to get some rest in order to get through the next few days. He weighed his options as far as alternative places to bunk down were concerned. When the solution came to him, he thought he might have just enough energy left to get there.

  Hannah woke up to the house dogs barking at three in the morning. She pulled on some clothes and hurried to the kitchen, thinking maybe Sam had come home. Although the dogs were carrying on at the back door, she couldn’t see anyone out there. The parking area next to the house was covered with a new, pristine layer of snow, and against the porch light she could see more snow was falling.

  “What are you guys barking at?” she asked.

  The dogs were hysterical to get outside, which probably meant they’d seen a deer or a fox. Hannah decided to let them out so they could run off their energy. They took off toward the barn and Hannah locked the door behind them.

  Since she was wide awake now she poured herself some juice and fired up the computer that sat on a desk in the pantry off the kitchen. This was where Hannah kept track of her household bills and corresponded with people via e-mail. She was surprised to find an e-mail from her husband.

  “I’m so sorry in so many ways for so many things that an e-mail just won’t cut it,” he wrote. “I’ll be home to apologize in person this week. I hope you’ll let me stay. I miss you. Love, Sam.”

  If Sam thought she would be thrilled to hear from him and thankful he was coming home, he was sadly mistaken. She felt only a bone deep exhaustion and a sense of dread.

  Hannah looked at the calendar and thought of all the things she needed to do between now and Sunday. She had to work at the food pantry at the church later this morning, and then assist Drew with some vet clinic surgeries in the afternoon. Thursday the county vet was coming to execute the prisoners; that was a hard day to get through so she hadn’t scheduled anything else. She had planned to set humane traps all over Pine County on Friday, and then scoop up the feral cats she caught and deliver them to Drew to spay and neuter on Saturday.


  Drew was coming out to the farm on Sunday to help her write a grant proposal for money to expand her kennel facility and start the feral cat program. Congressman Green had promised the mayor they could have government-funded Vision workers assigned to the project if they got the grant. This was all supposed to happen in between any calls she received about stray dogs, garbage-raiding possums, or home-invading raccoons.

  She could imagine herself canceling all that and sitting at home waiting for Sam, not knowing if he would show up. She could also imagine him e-mailing her late Sunday night to tell her he was sorry but he wasn’t ready to come home. It had happened before and she’d felt like a fool. She wrote and re-wrote her response several times before she got down what she thought she wanted to say.

  “Sam – if you do come back this week you are welcome to stay here at the farm. I have a lot to do so I may not be here when you arrive. Call me on the cell when you get home or to let me know if you change your mind. We will talk when I see you, Hannah.”

  She clicked on “send” and pictured her response flying up and over the mountains to the little town west of Boston where Sam’s college roommate Alan lived. She couldn’t imagine him sleeping in Alan’s guest room, or doing anything he must have done since he left home. In her mind, as soon as he left the house and drove away, he’d disappeared, and did not exist anywhere but in her imagination, where he was suspended by whatever self-destructive impulse it was that always compelled him to run away from home.

  She knew he would return full of apologies made out of the words he had to use to get back in her good graces, back in their home, back in their marriage. His promises always turned out to be as hollow and brittle as bird eggs in an abandoned nest; they were pretty to look at but crumbled under the slightest pressure.

  The dogs had still not returned, and Hannah feared they were tracking a deer, which meant they might be gone awhile. They would come to their senses eventually, and then Jax’s sense of direction and Wally’s keen intelligence would help them find their way home.

  ‘If no one shoots them first,’ Hannah thought. She put on her coat and grabbed a flashlight before sticking her feet down in the snow boots that stood next to the side door. It was cold outside, but not bitterly cold. Mercifully the snow was falling straight down in big fat flakes, not blowing sideways like piercing needles.

  She called for the dogs and whistled, but only heard the kennel dogs bark in response. She followed her dogs’ tracks to the outbuildings and saw they had circled the shed where Sam kept his four-wheeler and tools. The door was ajar, and Hannah felt a little frisson of fear as she realized her only means of protection had just run off into the woods. There were no human footprints in the newly fallen snow outside the shed, only paw prints, but the dogs were definitely on the trail of something or someone. Hannah slowly opened the door the rest of the way and pointed the flashlight inside. The four-wheeler and wagon Sam used to do chores on the farm were inside, along with all his tools, but nothing seemed disturbed.

  Hannah shut and bolted the door behind her as she left the shed. She followed the dog tracks on out to the barn, which Hannah was relieved to see was bolted and locked with the pad lock. She pulled her keys out of her coat pocket, unlocked the door, and went in to check on the inmates. They were restless, so she decided to let them out for a breath of fresh air.

  The four pit bulls currently on death row had been raised to fight and thus far had resisted all her efforts at socialization. Because they were so vicious, she had to let them out one at a time into an outdoor pen connected to each kennel by a sliding door. She was about to let the first one out when she heard footsteps crunching in the snow outside the barn. All four of the dogs started growling, a deep menacing sound.

  Hannah made a quick decision. She climbed on top of the kennel that held the pit bull she was about to let outside, and instead of unlocking the door to the outside pen, she unlocked the door that opened into the barn. She lifted the pen door a few inches and the dog sniffed and scratched at the opening. She hadn’t turned on the lights in the barn, so other than a night light and her flashlight, all was in darkness. When the footsteps reached the entrance to the barn Hannah shone her flashlight in the face of the person standing in the doorway. The dogs erupted in a frenzy of barking.

  “Take one more step and I’ll let this dog loose!” she yelled. “He’ll tear you to pieces!”

  The pit bull in the kennel below her started lunging against the kennel door, foam flying from a mouth full of wicked looking teeth. Hannah shone her flashlight down on the frothing, scarred muzzle of the dog below her, and when she tipped the light back up at the door the man had disappeared. Hannah thought she could hear running steps in the snow, but the dogs were barking so loud she thought she may have imagined it. She dropped the kennel door back down, secured it, and then climbed down.

  “That was an awful thing to do to you and I apologize,” she told the dog, and then let him out the back of his kennel into the penned area outside.

  She heard the dog rush to the far end of the enclosure and lunge against it, the chain link fence ringing under his onslaught. His snarling made him sound like a beast straight out of hell.

  ‘That ought to make an impression,’ Hannah thought.

  Hannah cursed herself for coming outside without a gun or a cell phone. She hadn’t even locked the door of the house behind her. Her housedogs were who knows where on the trail of some deer, or lured into a trap by the intruder, and she was stuck in the barn with only four vicious dogs for protection. There was no way to lock the barn door from the inside.

  After she exercised each dog, Hannah closed the barn door and locked herself in her barn office. She searched the room for some sort of weapon, and almost cried in relief when she found an old tazer in the bottom drawer. It had an unreliable safety setting which made it dangerous to leave in the glove box of her animal control truck, and she’d intended to get it repaired.

  She turned it on and found it still had a charge. She thanked her lucky stars for her own procrastination. There was no phone connection in the barn and her cell phone was in the kitchen, recharging. She needed to get from the barn to the house in order to call for help, but had no way of knowing where the intruder was.

  Hannah was torn between staying right where she was or trying to get to the house. She cleaned the frosted glass of the office window on the back wall, which faced the long driveway down to the farm, and cupped her hands in order to see outside. In the light from the motion detection lamps on the side of the barn she could see the footprints of the intruder going from around the back of the barn to the front, and then retreating in the same direction. But then to where? They didn’t seem to lead to the house, but what if he was waiting around the corner of the barn for Hannah to make a run for it?

  The dogs had calmed down. She knew they would alert her if anyone entered the barn. She wished one of the inmates was friendly enough to put on a leash, but there wasn’t one she could trust not to turn on her.

  Hannah turned on the milk house heater and sat down in the old horsehair-filled armchair that sat across from its twin. She and Maggie often retreated to this club house to discuss problems and gossip, and it was where she kept the county animal control files.

  It was also where Hannah came to smoke back when she still smoked. She desperately wanted a cigarette right now and knew if she looked hard enough she could find one; but if she was pregnant, she wasn’t taking any chances with the baby. This thought helped her make up her mind. She would stay put until daylight came or until her dogs came home.

  She looked up at the ceiling of the office and spoke out loud.

  “You gotta help me out here, man,” she said. “I need your help.”

  At four o’clock in the morning Maggie woke up worrying about Hannah. She grabbed the phone and punched in her cousin’s number before she was fully awake, and when no one answered after the tenth ring, she jumped out of bed and pulled on some jeans.

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nbsp; Ordinarily she would call Scott and ask to borrow his SUV, but that no longer seemed like a viable option. Instead she threw on her coat and snow boots and quickly walked several blocks through the newly fallen snow, down to the trailer park where her brother Patrick was living.

  All the while she called Hannah over and over on her cell phone. Her brother was cross at being awakened, having only gone to bed a couple hours previously, but he didn’t hesitate to get dressed and drive Maggie out to Hannah’s, only insisting they take his beagle with them.

  “Otherwise he’ll wake up the neighborhood with his howling.”

  Banjo was one of the foster placements Hannah had made from the pack of dogs included in Theo Eldridge’s breeding scam. The dog was so attached to Patrick that he howled pitifully whenever the man left his sight for longer than five minutes. Banjo spent all day in the service station, all evening in the Rose and Thorn, and slept at the foot of Patrick’s bed at night. Patrick didn’t seem to mind him, and it had become customary to see the dog following him everywhere he went.

  Banjo sat between Patrick and Maggie in the cab of the truck and seemed to enjoy getting to go somewhere. Maggie had only told Patrick she couldn’t find Hannah, and now they speculated on where she could be or why she wasn’t answering her home phone or cell phone.

  “Maybe Sam came home,” Patrick suggested.

  Maggie was calling again.

  “If someone called as many times as I’ve called she would answer. It’s the middle of the night. She’s got parents, brothers, nieces and nephews. She would answer.”

  “She shouldn’t be staying out there all by herself.”

  “Well, if her stupid husband would quit running off she wouldn’t be.”

  “He’s been to hell and back,” Patrick said. “He’s got post traumatic stress disorder. She knew that when she married him.”