“I wouldn’t know,” I said, ultrasoothing. “You never told me.”
Stoat glowered at me uncertainly.
I went on. “But you did tell me you made it a point to remain celibate until your parents had passed away.”
“That was just to spare their feelings! I wouldn’t want to know all about what they did for sex, would I? Like, I think my father bruised my mother up some, and I know he used a whip, but that ain’t sick, just embarrassing. I would never let them know I knew. Sex things ain’t nothing to be ashamed of, but they should ought to be kept private.”
“Of course. I absolutely agree.” Then the imp of the perverse got into me again. Dying no longer looked so bad if I could put the screws to Stoat first. “So, are your brothers in prison for sex crimes?”
Saying that was like providing a spark to gas fumes; Stoat’s explosion seemed to fill the room. Rearing to stand ramrod straight, he shouted a stream of obscenities and curses too dizzying to remember and too foul to repeat. “You stupid bitch!” was the mildest of it. “You think I got to be what I am because of my brothers? Screw that! Whatever I done in my life was on my own, with nobody’s damn help, you dumb cow. . . .”
I think throughout the entire rant I did a pretty good job of sitting still and looking vaguely sympathetic, although I kind of curled my arms around myself to protect my tender underbelly in case of attack.
A valid instinct. Way too suddenly, in midobscenity, Stoat fell silent with his lips still moving. Mouth open, he hunched over like a giant fishhook to glare down at me. Then he closed his thin lips while his narrow flinty eyes remained open to stare at me. Eyes with no humanity in them, they might as well have belonged to an anaconda.
Very quietly he said, “Tricky bitch, what the fuck you up to, fucking with me?”
• • •
“You know us?” Quinn blurted, staring at the boy standing in the doorway of the blue shack, the victimized boy he had given hardly a thought in his desperation to find Mom.
“You know us?” Forrest echoed, sounding just as much taken aback.
“I know your mom.” His voice had a pleasant huskiness, a burr.
He spoke quietly, but Quinn nearly shouted at him. “Where is she?”
“Isn’t she right over there?” In the semidarkness, the boy gestured toward the pink shack. “Her house?”
“No!” Quinn could not help stepping forward as if in threat.
The boy reached inside the doorway for the switch to turn on the back porch light. Sixty watts, maybe, but to Quinn it seemed too bright; it showed too much, reminding him that this kid had been through a lot. Quinn saw his pale, bruised face, his wide eyes, his bitten lip, his childish mouth trembling—no, not just his mouth; he shook all over. He had been brave enough to turn on the light, but he quaked and swayed, clinging to the doorway’s frame for support.
Quinn exclaimed, “We won’t hurt you!”
He felt his brother shove past him, hurrying forward. “He’s falling over.” Forrest caught the kid by his shoulders and eased him to a seat on the slab of pavement outside the back door. He knelt beside him. “Are you going to faint? Head down between your knees.”
The kid resisted. “I’ll be all right when I eat.” With one faltering hand he fumbled at the loaf of bread he had dropped.
Quinn stepped in, opening the bread bag and handing the boy a slice. Cheap soft white bread, about as much good as giving the kid a cube of sugar. Quinn found the salami and cheese, sat down on the ground with his long legs crossed, and started to put together a sandwich for the boy. “What’s your name?”
“Justin,” he said with his mouth full.
“Justin. Okay, Justin, take a breath and tell us how you know our mom.”
He waited with strained patience while the boy swallowed bread and took more than one breath. Finally Justin said, “I lived here with my uncle Steve. Um, Stoat.”
Quinn noted the past tense but said nothing.
“And?” Forrest coaxed.
“And Miss Lee Anna came over on Sunday.” Quinn saw the boy’s eyes dart as if looking for a place to hide from things he didn’t want to say. “Unc—um, Stoat knocked her out and put her on a bed with handcuffs.”
This would have been hard for Quinn to follow if he had not already seen that bed. God. That awful bed. Blood on the bare mattress, blood on the handcuffs. Mom’s.
Quinn bit his lip to remain silent, but Forrest cried out, “Why?”
With raw pain in his voice Justin said, “Because of me.” He ducked his head, hiding his face.
Quinn shoved the sandwich into his hands and said softly to his brother, “Forrie, don’t interrupt. Let him tell it his way.” He watched Justin eat and waited until the boy’s head came back up before he asked, “Then what happened?”
Justin swallowed, then swallowed again, then said, “Tuesday it rained. So Tuesday night, he took her out to the swamp to kill her. And me, I figured, because—anyway, I snuck a baseball bat into the truck and when we got there I—I—I don’t know why I didn’t just kill him then and there. Anyway, I hit him on the head, and me and Lee, I mean your mother, we went into the river. . . .”
Unfathomable emotions rattled the boy’s voice like a cage. As if he couldn’t stand to listen, Forrest said, “Justin, take your time. Are you saying you saved Mom’s life?”
Again, Justin gulped twice before answering. “I thought so. We ran off into the swamp and we about starved until last night—no, night before last—we found a shack with some food. Then it took me until tonight to get back here for more food and fresh clothes and some shoes because my feet are a mess.” He stiffened as if remembering danger temporarily forgotten, and his husky voice grew tight. “I need to get away. If Stoat finds me here, I’m dead.”
Quinn said, “We won’t let anybody hurt you, Justin,” surprised to realize how much he meant it. This soft-spoken, scared, gutsy, messed-up kid had walked right into his heart when he wasn’t looking, high-top Chucks and all. Quinn had a pretty good idea that Justin had invaded Mom’s heart similarly. And that Mom had somehow found out he was being sexually abused and had gotten herself in trouble trying to save him. According to Justin, they had both escaped from Stoat. But there was too much the boy wasn’t saying. Where was Mom now?
Forrest surely had the same question, but he broached it indirectly. “Justin, when was the last time you saw Mom?”
“Right about this time last—no, a couple of nights ago.”
“Okay.” It wasn’t really okay, Quinn knew, and he gave his brother points for keeping his voice gentle. “Where?”
“At the fishing shack in the swamp. Asleep.”
“You left when she was asleep?”
Instead of answering, the kid dropped his sandwich to the ground as if he had lost all appetite. He sat staring into the night.
Quinn urged, “Justin, look at me.”
He did, his eyes narrowed with nearly tangible pain; Quinn felt its impact. Justin burst out, “It’s all my fault if Stoat got her. I didn’t rub out my tracks, I left a trail he could see, I’m so fricking stupid, and that really did sound like his van. . . .” He had started to sweat and shake. “But she has to be all right! She has to be home!” Wildly he gestured in the direction of the pink shack. “She has to!”
“She’s not,” Quinn said, and despite his best effort to be gentle, the words sounded stony bleak.
“But she has to be!” Justin cried. “I saw somebody open the windows over there!”
• • •
Stoat grabbed his shotgun, and I saw my death in his anaconda eyes.
I screamed as I had never screamed before. Shrieking, I jumped up from the sofa and ran with vague ideas of barricading myself in my bedroom. But Stoat, already on his feet, caught me easily. I barely made it halfway across the living room before he grabbed me by the arm and flung me onto the floor as if he intended to stomp me into the carpet.
I kept screaming like a smoke detector going off; I cou
ldn’t stop. But I made up my mind that, anything Stoat did to me, he was going to have to face me down. Rolling onto my back, I looked straight up into his eyes, dead leaden things, hiding under the shadow of his brows.
Stoat ranted, “I’m getting out of here on foot if I got to, but first—”
With my big mouth at its most strident, I interrupted. “On foot? Stoat, you don’t have to do that. The car keys are right on the kitchen table.”
“What?”
“The car keys are in the pottery bowl on the kitchen table.”
“Why the fuck didn’t you tell me that in the first place?”
“Because you’re not going to just take them and let me be, are you.” This was a statement, not a question. The past few days had made a good Stoic of me. I met his glare with my own level stare, and maybe, just a little, I hoped the truth would be more than he could deal with.
No such luck. “I got to shut you up for good.”
The Stoics were okay but they had no damn sense of humor. I wanted to go out with some flair. Solemnly I reminded Stoat, “Don’t shoot me. The cops over at your house might hear.”
His mouth writhed like rattlesnakes, venomous, and I could actually see the blackened, dead part of his face start to open up in a sickening chasm as if to display his necrotic soul. Clutching his shotgun by its twin barrels, he lifted it. “I’m going to beat your tricky-ass brains out, you fucking ugly redhead bitch.” He swung the shotgun butt high.
I am nothing if not crazy when it counts. “Stoat, wait a minute,” I told him earnestly. “I’m concerned, and I think you need to seek medical attention.”
The shotgun swung down, but in a disorganized way, as if I had messed up Stoat’s aim and his impetus. I sat up, and the shotgun butt slammed into the carpet behind me. Stoat yelled, “What the fuck you talking about?”
I hoisted myself with my hands to get my feet under me. At the same time I cocked my head back to establish sincere eye contact. I said, “Parts of your face are falling off.”
Stoat didn’t say anything, but his mouth moved, twisting ugly as he swung his shotgun up like a golfer ready to tee off. My head being the metaphorical golf ball, I dived for an entirely different part of the carpet and screamed.
The shotgun butt swished over my head, but I kept right on screaming as I scuttled like an oversized cockroach under the coffee table. I grabbed the legs from below and held on hard. In that moment I comprehended to the bone why drowning people grasp at straws. With all the life energy in my body right down to my toes I shrieked, “Help! Somebody help me!”
“Shut the fuck up!” Stoat roared, swinging his shotgun-cum-club at the coffee table. Maybe he thought he could send it flying off me, but I hung on through the first impact and the second. And the third, for all the good it did me. That blow shattered the wood. Or the pressed processed chipboard or whatever the damn cheap thing was made of—Stoat’s rifle butt struck like a bomb to send jagged hunks of it flying off me.
Trapped between him and the sofa, I rolled over on my back because, damn his septic guts, if he was going to kill me, he was going to do it to my face. He looked like a homicidal gargoyle, lifting his weapon, and I raised my arms in a futile gesture to defend myself, but at the same time my brain burped and words spurted from my mouth. “Stoat! You know Justin actually told me you’re not a bad guy?”
He blinked, barking, “What?”
“Justin! Said! You’re not a bad guy, and he’d be right if—there’s a term the ancient Greek philosophers used. . . .”
“What the fuck you talking about?”
“He’d be right if you weren’t such a consummate ontological asshole!” I ducked.
He struck so swiftly I got out no more than half a scream, fled no more than half an inch, before the butt of the shotgun smashed my upraised arm and bashed the side of my head. I felt no pain, just an odd inner snick, and I heard no whack of impact, not with my ears. My brain registered the bump, and I saw nothing that made any sense, just fireworks behind my eyelids, and then I heard, although I’m not sure it was real, the most clangorous crescendo of sound, crashing shouting yelling pounding bedlam. All my philosophies be damned, there was a hell after all, and it sure seemed as if I was going to it.
TWENTY-SEVEN
“Isaw somebody open the windows over there!” Justin’s words hung echoing in Forrest’s mind for a moment after he had said them.
“When?” Forrest demanded.
“Around dark.”
“Yesterday?” It must have been when they were burying Schweitzer.
“No! Today! Just a little while ago.”
Quinn leaned forward from his seat on the ground. “Are you sure?”
“Sure I’m sure,” Justin said with a country boy’s innate patience. “I was hiding out back, wondering if it was safe to go inside, and I saw somebody over there open the windows.”
Forrest felt Quinn’s stare and turned to face his brother. He knew how Quinn felt, because he felt the same way: incredulous, afraid to hope. He shook his head. “It’s too simple. Why would Mom—”
His words were snatched away by a loud, chilling scream.
It stopped his breath, a woman’s scream of deathly terror, coming from the direction of the pink house.
Forrest had never heard anything like that scream, not even in a horror movie. Such extremity, the terror of the valley of the shadow of death, could not be faked. Its primal power catapulted him into a run toward the pink shack, run, run, the fastest he had ever run in his life, during which he heard that piercing scream again, twice; Forrest felt it like a stiletto stabbing his gut. Quite abstractly by comparison he noticed headlights bearing down on him as he pounded across the asphalt road, but the car swerved to miss him, then turned in at the pink shack. With those screams reverberating in his ears, Forrest couldn’t think; not until the car stopped right in front of the pink shack, its high beams flooding the front door with much-needed light, did he realize it was his brother, Quinn, the quick thinker. And he had Justin with him. As Forrest sprinted across the front yard, he saw the kid leap out of the car’s passenger side, but then limp as he tried to run.
Forrest saw Justin and his brother peripherally, his focus all on Mom’s front door. Thinking his momentum would bust him right through it, he rammed it with his shoulder, but the door shrugged him off, made him mad. As Quinn and Justin ran up beside him, Forrest reared back and kicked in the door, right beside the knob, the way cops did on TV.
Those people, though, on TV, they always had guns to point and warnings to roar. Forrest had neither. When the door burst open, he retained just enough sense to flip on the indoor light switch, but then he stood frozen in helplessness at what he saw.
Justin shouted, “Uncle Steve, don’t!”
Forrest would not have recognized the man as Steven Stoat. He saw a monster with a grotesquely lopsided, blackened, rotting face, with slits for eyes, a snarl for a mouth, a hollow-chested shambles of a body interrupted in the midst of swinging some sort of a club at—Forrest saw red hair and crimson blood, bruised skin and torn clothes, a face way too still: Mom. On the floor, hurt. Forrest could look at nothing else. Yet somehow he kept getting closer; his feet had carried him through the door and inside the house without his knowing he had moved.
Beside him Quinn yelled, “Forrie, he’s got a gun!”
Forrest didn’t really care about anything his brother had to say. He just wanted to get to Mom and make sure she—please, God, she had to be alive—but Quinn grabbed him by the arm and yanked so Forrest’s head flew up. He saw Stoat fumbling with his club to point—
It wasn’t just a club. It was a gun. Long. Big. To Forrest it seemed as big as a cannon.
And he had no weapon with which to fight back, not even a stone to throw. Quinn and Justin looked as helpless as Forrest felt. Quinn still had that stupid jack handle, but what was the use of it against a gun?
One, two, three, Forrest thought crazily. Three beer cans on a fence rail, th
ree ducks in a shooting gallery. Stoat would take out him and Quinn and Justin just like that.
“Uncle Steve!” Justin screamed. “No, please don’t!”
And Forrest yelled, “Mom!”
• • •
All I could see were remarkable special effects—lightning flashes, flaring supernovas, comets, and meteor showers—until the dazzling pain was done with my eyes.
Even then, what I saw was hard to interpret from where I lay bleeding on the floor. My main impression was of feet. Stoat’s scuffed cowboy boots with their pointy toes turned toward the front of the house. Toward wing tips, work boots, and a pair of Chucks.
With horror as heavy as my love I recognized the three young men instantly. I knew them at once by a single look at their shocked bodies, arms outflung, silhouette targets against a surreal blue-white light blasting through the front door. Stoat would kill them, my sons, all three of them. Why were they here in my wretched pink shack for Stoat to murder? Close to my face I saw his shotgun butt freshly bloodied from clubbing me and his big-knuckled, frenzied hands repositioning the weapon so he could shoot them down, Quinn and Forrest and—and the one I loved like my own child—he would slaughter them like three calves on meat hooks.
And I lay stunned, injured, broken, helpless to prevent it.
I could not move.
“Mom!” cried one of my children.
I moved.
I had to, just like I’d had to get up at night when the babies cried; the summons shocked me with high voltage to the heart and could not be refused. Somehow I moved. I rolled to one side, flung my usable arm around Stoat’s ankles, and rolled back with all the kinetic force in my badly compromised body in an attempt to yank his goddamn pointy cowboy-booted feet out from under him.
But the pain of moving made me faint at the same time as I heard the shotgun fire.
• • •
Justin felt as if time had pleated and he had somehow slipped across the folds, because once again he was just a little boy begging for his life, “Uncle Steve, no, please don’t!” The man with the gun had once again loomed to fill the darkness of night, a deity of evil with death at his command, and the only hope of continued existence was to plead and promise, promise, promise to stay and never disobey and never tell the dark secret, never ever. Shaking with terror, Justin knew he had disobeyed and now he must die. He saw his doom incarnate raising the shotgun toward his shoulder, and he cringed, on the point of closing his eyes—
Drawn Into Darkness Page 25
