by John Inman
“It sounded like Tommy,” Jamie whispered. “I think Banyon’s with him in the woods.”
“But why?” Derek asked. “Why would he be?”
In unison, they turned and tilted their heads back, staring up the staircase toward the second floor.
Derek’s breath caught when he spotted Cleeta-Gayle staring back down at them from the shadows on the second floor landing. She wore a long white nightgown, the sort an older woman might have worn. In the light of the burning candle she held in her hand, her eyes were as big as silver dollars, her face slack with fear. At the exact moment when she opened her mouth to speak, to scream out her fears, perhaps, the wind twisted the flame on her candle. It sputtered weakly, then winked out, leaving them all in the darkness once more. A flash of lightning illuminated her gliding quickly down the stairs toward them, one clawlike hand clutching the railing at her side. She sobbed softly as she descended.
Halfway down the stairs, she swayed, as if it were all suddenly too much for her. Derek rushed forward to catch her before she fell. Together, Jamie and Derek half carried her toward the dining room and the comforting light and heat from the fire. As soon as she had a grip on the mantle and Derek knew she wouldn’t fall flat on her face, he rushed back into the hall and slammed the front door, blocking out the storm. For a brief moment before he closed the door, he listened for that same bellowing voice in the night. He heard only thunder and wind and the pelting of rain. If it really was Tommy out there, he had moved too far away to be heard, or either the storm or the killer had silenced him for good.
Derek waited behind the closed door, his hand on the knob. What he was waiting for, he wasn’t quite sure. He rested his forehead against the wood and absorbed the vibrations of the storm as it rattled the house around him. Goose bumps rose at the back of his neck. He blinked in amazement as the truth finally struck him.
Oliver Banyon must be the killer! At least Tommy must think so. He hadn’t been screaming at any of the others—him, Jamie, or Cleeta-Gayle. They were all still inside the house. That left only Banyon for Tommy to be calling a murderer out there in the storm. Or was it the other way around? Maybe it was really Banyon Derek had heard yelling in the dark.
Making sure the front door was only latched, not locked, Derek rushed back into the dining room. There he found Jamie muttering soothing words to Cleeta-Gayle in front of the fire. As he spoke, she cried softly and clutched her nightgown in bunches at her chest. Unknown to both her and Jamie, backlit by the fire as she was, she might as well have been naked. Her thin silhouette, as shapeless as a boy’s, showed clearly through the flimsy fabric of her gown. Derek snagged a blanket off the floor and wrapped it around her. She accepted it gratefully, but more for the heat than to protect her modesty.
“Did you see him?” Jamie asked, studying Derek closely. “Did you see Tommy?”
Derek shook his head. “He’ll come back when he can.”
They both turned to Cleeta-Gayle. She twisted away and stared down into the fire. There was a tremor in her voice when she spoke.
“They were fighting,” she said. “I could hear them across the hall.” Her eyes darted shyly to Derek, then to Jamie. “You didn’t hear them?”
Jamie was the quickest to answer. “We were already downstairs. Our room was too cold, so we came down here to sleep by the fire.”
A clap of thunder made her gasp. She tried to shake off the terror by brushing at the blanket around her, mindlessly smoothing out the wrinkles as if she were about to be presented to the queen and she didn’t know how she had got herself so rumpled. When her eyes returned to Derek’s face, there were tears shining in them again.
“Tommy was screaming at Oliver to leave him alone. He said he was hurting him. I thought they must be joking, or—or playing a sex game, but then I heard a fist striking flesh. And after that, Tommy crying.” She bit at her lower lip as if attempting to stifle her own weeping.
Jamie turned to Derek. “Who’s chasing who out there in the storm? Was it really Tommy we heard?”
Derek had been thinking about that. “I think so. Yes. Banyon’s voice is deeper. I would have recognized it.” He shifted his attention to the one unbroken dining room window. The instant he peered at it, lightning lit the raindrops chasing each other down the pane like little round globules of light. “We have to go out there and help Tommy,” he said.
Jamie paled in the firelight. “You’re not going out there. I won’t let you.”
Cleeta-Gayle reached out and touched Derek’s arm. “Jamie’s right. You can’t go out there. It’s too dangerous. We—we need you here.”
Derek knew she was right. And so was Jamie. He couldn’t leave them alone. But if he didn’t, how could he help Tommy?
Again, he let his eyes drift toward a silver flash of lightning outside the dining room window, and there, in the mist and rain, stood the outline of a man peering in.
In the next flash of lightning, the figure was gone.
Derek turned to see if the others had seen it just as Jamie bit back a cry.
“Who was that?” Jamie hissed.
“I’m not sure.”
Cleeta-Gayle buried her face in Jamie’s chest. “It was Oliver,” she sobbed. “He’s killed Tommy. I know he has. Now he’s coming after us.”
Derek laid a comforting hand to her shoulder. Her thin body shivered beneath his touch. “We don’t know that. It could have been either one of them.”
“No,” Jamie said, “It must have been the killer.”
They spun toward a chorus of sounds out in the hall. There was a clatter of footsteps. The patter of water striking the floor. The swish of soaked fabric. The squeak of a wet shoe.
A figure solidified in the shadows.
“No,” said a voice from the doorway. “It wasn’t the killer. It was me.”
Chapter Thirteen
TOMMY STEVENS looked like he had been run through one of those ringer washing machines. He was dripping wet, his face muddied. One trouser leg was torn from hip to ankle. His hair lay squeegeed flat to his head, and incongruously, on his face he wore a beaming great smile. Tommy’s white teeth flashed in the shadows, catching the light from the fire at Jamie’s back. The kid looked like a fucking jack-o’-lantern.
Derek stared at that weird, muddy smile and opened his mouth to speak, to ask what the hell had happened, but Jamie got there first.
“Is he dead?” Jamie demanded, his eyes serious, his face somber.
Tommy continued to grin his outlandish grin. “No. He almost had me a couple of times, but I finally lost him in the trees. Maybe he’ll lose himself as well.”
With that, Tommy shivered and clutched at his chest. He dragged his wet clothes around him. The smile on his face faded, and a weary frown replaced it. He lurched as if pulled by an invisible rope toward the fire, toward the heat.
Not looking at any of them directly, his eyes focused solely on the welcoming flames. Almost nonchalantly as he reached the fire and put his hands out to soak up the heat, he said, “He has a gun. Ollie. He has a handgun.” He touched a bruise at the side of his face, which until that moment Jamie had not noticed. “I woke up in the middle of the night, and he was sitting there beside me pointing the barrel directly at my head. Before he could fire, I tried to snatch the gun out of his hand. He wrenched it from me and hit me with it.” Tommy’s eyes grew wide with hurt, as if he still couldn’t believe what had happened. “I know we were mainly together for the sex. But still, I thought he actually cared.”
“I’m sorry,” Derek said.
Tommy blinked as if preventing the fall of tears, but his eyes did not shimmer in the firelight. They were dry. A look of resolve crossed his face. He gazed at each of them in turn. “Glass won’t stop a bullet, so we’ll have to stay away from the windows.”
“So it’s really Banyon,” Derek whispered, more to himself than to anyone in the room. As soon as he muttered the words, he turned to the one remaining dining room window that offered a glimp
se of the storm outside—and consequently, if one stood on the outside looking in, offered a glimpse of them as well. He moved quickly toward the window and pulled the drapes shut, sealing out the night and whatever dangers might be out there lurking—for instance, an unexpected pistol shot squeezed off by a maniac.
Cleeta-Gayle pulled the blanket from her shoulders and wrapped it around Tommy instead. He glanced at her with eyebrows raised, and she looked down as if embarrassed by her own act of kindness.
Derek watched this interaction between the two. Meanwhile his heart thudded like a tom-tom inside his chest. Fear? Dread? An approaching aneurysm?
He turned to Jamie to see how he was coping.
With his features lit by firelight, Jamie stared back and asked simply, “What do we do now, kemo sabe?”
Derek studied Jamie for a long moment while the flames crackled on the hearth and that same damn window shutter clattered in the wind. Then he shifted his attention to Tommy Stevens. Tommy’s lips, once blue with the cold, had reacquired their normal color. He had dried his hair as best he could with a hand towel Jamie had given him from the sidebar. The kid’s clothes were still wet, but he wasn’t shivering as much. The heat of the fire was bringing him back.
Jamie contemplated Tommy’s torn pant leg. He pointed at it. “How did you do that?”
Tommy followed Jamie’s eyes. He reached down to slip a hand through the rent in the fabric and stroked his bare leg as if it still hurt. “I fell into a bush. Oliver was chasing me. I had to rip myself free and keep running.”
“Are you hurt anywhere besides that bruise on your face?”
Tommy seemed reluctant to answer. “No, I’m fine. A few scratches is all.”
“You need to change,” Derek said. “You have to get out of those wet clothes.”
Tommy nodded. “I know. I’ll go up to the room in a minute.”
“No. You stay here. I’ll go get some of your clothes,” Jamie said. “Banyon’s still outside, so it should be safe enough for a while.”
“You don’t know anything of the kind!” Derek snapped. He grabbed the cast iron poker from beside the fire and hefted it for a moment to get the feel of it in his hand. “I don’t want any of you to leave this room. I’ll go.”
Tommy slipped the blanket from across his shoulders and let it fall to the floor. “I said I’ll go. I don’t want any of you guys rummaging through my stuff.”
Jamie’s jaw dropped. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Tommy wouldn’t meet his gaze. “It doesn’t mean anything. But I’ll get my own stuff.”
Without giving anyone a chance to argue, he strode off in his wet, squelching shoes, headed toward the hall.
Jamie moved to follow, but Derek grabbed his sleeve and held him in place. “No. Let him go. We’ll wait here,” he said. “You were right. He should be safe enough for a while.”
The blanket Tommy had dropped to the floor lay too close to the flames. Derek kicked it away from the hearth. It was too wet for anyone else to use anyway.
Cleeta-Gayle watched the boy as he disappeared into the shadows. “I always thought Tommy was the killer,” she said under her breath. She lifted her eyes to each of them in turn. “Why would Oliver Banyon want to kill me? I didn’t know him.”
“But you didn’t know Tommy either,” Jamie said.
“No,” she said hesitantly, as if all the suppositions about guilt and innocence were starting to addle her mind. “I didn’t. I don’t. You are all strangers to me. Every one of you.”
Derek watched as Jamie stared at her for a long second, then shook his head. He gave one of his patented shrugs. It was the shrug he always employed when he didn’t quite understand what was going on. Derek almost smiled. Jamie was trying to hold it together. He had to give him that. If he was frightened, he didn’t let on. Derek was proud of him for that. Derek finally responded to Cleeta-Gayle’s comment. “And before you ask, we didn’t know any of you either,” he said. His eyes moved to the pristine patch of wallpaper above the fireplace where a large picture once hung. Once again he silently bemoaned the fact that the answer could have been right there in front of him. If they only had one of the missing pictures, they could figure this out pronto. Was Banyon related to the old couple in the basement? Had he killed them for the sole purpose of using their secluded house to play his sadistic little game of cat and mouse?
But that still didn’t explain what it had to do with him and Jamie!
Footsteps echoed above their heads. Tommy moving around. Jamie edged closer to Derek’s side. Derek smiled at him and reached out to ruffle his hair. He gave Jamie’s cheek a pinch because he knew Jamie hated it. The wind picked up outside with a roar, and a windowpane rattled in its sill behind the curtains Derek had closed. He ached to look outside and see what he could see, but if the killer was out there with a gun, it would be stupid to offer such a tempting target.
“We have to lock up the house,” he said. “Every door that leads inside needs to be made impenetrable.”
“How do we do that?” Jamie asked.
“I don’t know. Nail ’em shut. You got a better plan?”
Jamie frowned. “No.”
“Then let’s do it.”
The hammer still lay on the floor where Tommy had tossed it after securing the broken window. There were nails there too, a little box of them gleaned earlier from among the flotsam in the basement. Derek grabbed both items and headed for the front door.
With Jamie offering moral support—and little else since it was pretty much a one-man job—it took Derek less than a minute to hammer three strategic nails in place that would prevent anyone from opening the door without a crowbar.
The back door off the kitchen didn’t require any nails at all. It was equipped with an old-timey metal bar that fell across it and lay inside two brackets attached to the doorjamb on either side. With the bar down, no one could gain access without a battering ram.
The last door Derek secured was the small door high on the basement wall that led into the coal bin, where the two old people lay side by side in death. It didn’t take either Derek or Jamie long to realize the old couple were not preserving well. The stench of rotten meat lay heavy on the air. Coupled with the wailing of the storm outside and the cobwebs on the ceiling, Derek figured he had never been in a more depressing place in his life than that reeking, filthy basement.
Jamie had his hands over his nose. “Please hurry,” he mumbled.
So Derek hurried. It took less than two minutes for them to be in and out. But when they left, the coal-bin door was nailed tightly shut.
The basement was cold and damp, and with the smell of death surrounding them, they both craved warmth and light and cleaner air. After clattering quickly up the basement steps and slamming the basement door closed behind them, they hurried back to the dining room and the welcoming fire. As they passed along the staircase in the hall, they heard Tommy Stevens’s shower running on the second floor. The kid was cleaning up after his adventure in the woods.
They rushed into the dining room a little too quickly and startled Cleeta-Gayle so badly she almost passed out from fright. That brought a small laugh from the three of them. Then, pulling dining chairs around the fire, they spoke quietly among themselves while waiting for Tommy to return.
“Anyone want a drink?” Jamie asked, eyeing the bottles lined up on the cabinet used as a bar.
Derek gave Jamie a gentle chuck on the arm. “I don’t think we’d better drink. We need to keep our wits about us.”
Jamie frowned but didn’t argue. Neither did Cleeta-Gayle. An odd silence settled around them, interrupted only by the continuing sounds of wind and rain battering the house.
Finally Cleeta-Gayle shyly cleared her throat and glanced at each of them in turn. “You boys live in the city?” she asked. “I mean, together?”
“No, but we will be when we get back,” Derek answered.
He shot a sidelong glance at Jamie to see how he had
reacted. The look of love that beamed out of Jamie’s eyes straight in his direction was everything he might have hoped for.
“We’re lovers now,” Jamie added, still staring deep into Derek’s eyes. “We’ve known each other since the fifth grade, but suddenly we’re lovers. We take our time about things. No sense being in a rush about stuff like that.”
Derek grinned, and even Cleeta-Gayle smiled, although faintly.
“I’ve never really understood gay people,” she said quietly. “I never allowed myself to, I suppose.”
“Because of your religion?” Jamie asked with no sarcasm in his voice. He seemed to really want to understand.
Cleeta-Gayle glanced up at him as if surprised by the question, then quickly lowered her gaze to the fire. “No,” she said, her voice so weak as to be almost soundless. “No,” she repeated, but she didn’t attempt to explain. Perhaps, Derek thought, she couldn’t have explained if she wanted to.
“I’m sorry about your son,” Jamie said. He was watching her closely. “Had he been ill? Is that why he—”
She looked up, startled. Her lips parted ever so slightly as she studied Jamie’s face. “Why he left me, you mean?” she said softly.
Jamie blushed but nodded. “Yes. Why he died.”
Derek sat back, studying Jamie, wondering what Jamie was getting at and wondering, too, how Cleeta-Gayle would respond to such personal questions, since she was usually pretty tight-lipped about herself.
She appeared disconcerted by the last word Jamie uttered. Died. But in the end, she merely trained her eyes on the fire and left them there, staring into the flames. Color rose in her cheeks. “I—I didn’t know him well.”
Derek tore his eyes from Jamie and turned to her instead. He leaned forward in his chair. “He was your son. How could you not have known him well?”
Her cheeks flushed even redder than they had before. She locked her gaze on the flames harder now, as if it were the only place she felt safe. “We weren’t together very long.”
