“That awful man caught me as I was trying to see in a window at the yellow house. I guess it wasn’t dark enough yet.”
Tracy paused, tilted her head sideways, looked into Carrie’s eyes. “But, why was Margaret Culpeper willing to help us against her own sons? I can’t figure that out. And how do you know Dulcey is safe?”
Yes, indeed, Carrie thought, why...and how? What should I tell her?
She swallowed again. “It’s hard for me to talk, so I won’t say much.” She told an abridged version of the visit to Margaret’s house, inventing a story about Margaret’s compassion for a child without her mother, and then went on with events up until the time Habakkuk had brought her into Nahum’s living room.
“Enough,” Carrie said. “I’m going to try and open that window before Habakkuk or someone else comes back. The window isn’t barred, so if it’ll open, we can get out and into the woods. I don’t know where we are or where to run to, but just away from here sounds good enough right now.
“This could be Habakkuk’s house, or maybe Micah’s. Micah Culpeper has dogs. Habakkuk might too, but I haven’t heard any barking. And, I don’t hear anyone coming now, do you?”
Tracy shook her head, and Carrie got on her hands and knees, and stood up, wobbling on rubbery legs until her head cleared and she could walk to the window. She leaned on the wall for a moment, then reached for the catch. It turned easily. She tugged. The window didn’t move. She tugged again. Nothing. She ran her hands down the sides of the frame. Maybe it was painted shut. Her fingers came to rough bumps. Screws! The window was screwed shut.
She stood, staring out the window into the moonlit forest, fighting panic. No! Think! She didn’t have time to be afraid. Was there any way to break a window quietly? Impotently, she pushed against the glass. Think!
To keep her hands quiet she shoved them in her jacket pockets. Ouch! What...? She lifted her right hand, looked at what it held. Then, after testing the object’s strength by trying to bend it with her fingers, she felt for the slot in one of the screws. “Ever seen a guitar pick used as a screwdriver?” she asked Tracy as she worked.
“You can use them for that,” Tracy said. “I have.”
The guitar pick slid into the slot and Carrie twisted. If only it didn’t break. She twisted harder. The screw began to turn. Steady, steady. It was going to work. It was working! In a moment she had the screw in her hands. Now the other one. Yes! It was coming out, just one more turn.
She froze as the second screw dropped free. Heavy footsteps were sounding along the bare wood floor of the hallway.
Hide the screws. They mustn’t know. She threw the two screws behind a bed, shoved the guitar pick back in her pocket, and rushed to push Tracy over and roll her in her quilt. Then down on the floor. No—the quilt was dragging on the carpet! Roll, roll. Lock turning. Roll!
She stopped breathing. The door was open. A light went on. Three pounding steps, a pause; a yanking at the quilt, spilling her out on the floor. Habakkuk, his face wild with rage, jerked her to her feet. He held the forgotten blindfold in front of her face, then dropped it. She felt his whole body tense, draw up.
She was lifted off her feet, and like released high-tension springs, his arms shot out, flinging her into the wall.
Broke the plasterboard was the last thought she had before sinking into dead black nothing.
Chapter XX
Her head hurt. Why? She never had headaches. Everything about her body felt funny...floating. Her hands, at the ends of arms stretched above her head, were tied to something cold and hard.
Somewhere, someone kept saying her name, over and over. The sound came from far away, so far away there would be no point in answering. Still it went on, pleading, “Carrie. Carrie.” She wanted the voice to stop, but it didn’t.
“Carrie. Carrie.”
She opened her eyes. All...dark...black.
But now she recognized the feel and shape of the metal between her fingers. Metal spindles, like the spindles on the shiny brass bed she’d slept in as a teenager.
Strips of cloth bound her hands to the bedstead. Why was she tied to a bed?
Her feet were tied too, probably to the foot of the same bed and in a very unladylike posture. Her mother wouldn’t have liked that. “Keep your legs together, Carrie,” she’d have said. Well, Carrie couldn’t, Carrie just couldn’t. So there.
Someone was still calling her name, sounding closer now. She thought about answering. Maybe then, the person would shut up.
How could she keep her legs together when her feet were tied, wide apart, to the foot of a bed? She tried to laugh, but all that came out was, “Mmmp.”
“Carrie! You’ve got to wake up.”
She heard movement—the sound of metal bedsprings from her childhood—and turned her head, painfully, slowly. Black.
The voice sounded stronger. She knew that voice, it was...it was...
“Carrie, talk to me. Wake up. Please, Carrie, it’s Tracy.”
She concentrated. Tracy...? She shut her eyes and wished her head would stop hurting. She needed to think.
Tracy’s voice began again, but now it sounded like crying. “Carrie, you’ve got to wake up and talk to me. Please, are you all right? Please, please, say something. My hands are tied, and my nose is running and I can’t blow it, so I mustn’t cry anymore. Carrie? Carrie?” It was a wail now.
Carrie opened her eyes again, began to move her head sideways, turning in the direction of the voice. Oh, my. Moving her head that way was not the thing to do.
“Carrie, please, please.”
Tracy? Oh! Dulcey, and the yellow house, and... Nahum-Habakkuk, and...Henry...gone...
“Mmmmp,” she said again, louder this time.
“Carrie! Oh, thank goodness. Are you hurt? I heard the bang when he threw you at the wall.”
And that Carrie did not want to remember, even though memories of a whole evening of peculiar happenings, some of them very bad, now marched around and around in her head.
“Uh, yes, Tracy. I, um, o...kay. Maybe a cut...bled. Can’t turn that way...”
“Oh, oh golly, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” Tracy said.
Shapes began to form in the darkness. The moon must have set, but she couldn’t turn her head far enough to see the window. And turning her head to see the window was certainly not the only thing she couldn’t do.
Before long she was going to have to go the bathroom.
Don’t think about that. Don’t think about anything—where we are, or why we’re here, or that, at any minute, Habakkuk might come. Talk! Talk to Tracy. Get her to talk. Don’t think, talk...listen.
So Carrie asked, “What happened? How long we... here?”
“After that awful man threw you at the wall, he rolled me out of the quilt and tied me to this bed. Then he put you over there and tied you too. He’s been gone a while. I don’t know how long, maybe thirty minutes or more. Um, should I keep on talking? Does it help? Are you staying awake? Please stay awake.”
“I’m awake. Talk.”
“So, let’s see, I came to the yellow house to find Dulcey, remember?”
“Umhmm.”
“It’s my fault. This mess is. Mostly. But if Chase would just listen to someone besides himself. If he understood...”
“I...know.” In fact, Carrie thought, I’ve really known for some time. “Chase wants career...being big music stars. You want family...home.”
“Well, yes. How come you know that when Chase hasn’t a clue? Oh, why won’t he understand? Why? We have a family now, we have...,” her voice wavered, “Dulcey.”
After a pause and a soggy snuffle, Tracy continued, “I don’t know what to do, I just don’t. Oh, I admit at first all the travel and late nights and push, push, push to be perfect was exciting. Like a picture magazine story come true. Things were good, we made big money, we were on a roll, there was all the applause, cheers, the interviews. Didn’t have time to worry about other things, dumb little things like lo
ve. We sang about it, wasn’t that enough? Did we ever have the real thing? I...I thought so. But it came to be that the only time we were a close, loving couple was on stage, play-acting at love.” She laughed. “Wouldn’t that make a good song, ‘Play-acting at Love’? Well, gee, there I go...”
The voice in the dark stopped, and, in the silence, there was another snuffle. Carrie was thinking...yes, Tracy, you still love him. There is love, whether you know it or not.
“On stage. That, Carrie, is the only good thing about being on stage. I’ve begun to hate the performing, the practicing, even the applause. But, when we’re on stage, I can pretend Chase loves me, that we’re a family.”
“You said at first there was real love?”
This time Tracy’s voice was pensive, quiet.
“Hmmm, maybe. I must have thought we were in love at the first. I wouldn’t have married Chase if I didn’t think so, would I? But I was only nineteen. He had big ideas, stardom for both of us. He offered to make me a star, and he did, he did that.”
“Ever tell Chase how you feel?”
“He won’t listen. He hears only himself. I even yelled it at him a couple of times when we were backstage. Thought that would get his attention. It didn’t. He just acted like he hadn’t heard me.”
Carrie was feeling more alert every moment, alert enough to begin worrying about what might happen to them next. Henry and Dulcey should be safe by now, but she and Tracy weren’t safe. They were in real danger, Carrie much more than Tracy, because by herself, Carrie McCrite was worth nothing in ransom. She had to pray… think what to do.
Tracy’s voice was continuing in the background. It was as if her long-suppressed thoughts and words had been given permission to release and flow out. Now, here, in this anonymous darkness where they were bound together by shared peril, secrets could be spilled on the air freely, as if no one listened.
Well, they weren’t going anywhere, and hadn’t she promised herself earlier she’d find out what was wrong between Tracy and Chase? So, listening was a good thing to do. Yes, she thought, God, help me listen and know what to do.
“...so Bobby Lee and Farel and me, we were friends, together all the time. Maybe we might have been just a little in love, all three of us. Of course it couldn’t be real, since Farel and I were cousins, or at least we thought we were. But I did feel like they were, um, boyfriends, sometimes. Oh, it’s so complicated. No matter about cousins, Bobby Lee and Farel were jealous of each other. So I couldn’t be a real girlfriend to either of them without making the other one mad. I had to be so careful. It wore me out.”
“Yes, I understand that,” Carrie said.
“Then Chase Mason began performing in the Folk Center shows. He is gifted, he really is. People stopped breathing when he came on stage. They still do.
“One evening he and I were foolin’ around back stage, singing together. All at once everything just clicked, and when he asked me to work with him, well, how could I not be flattered? It was like we connected! Everyone could hear it, especially Chase and me. It was magic. When we worked on stage together, we created a big, shining bubble filled with magic music.” Tracy laughed, and repeated, “Magic music.
“So, we got married. Everyone expected it. We expected it. It was the next step, the right thing for our music.”
“And ‘Lying to Strangers’?”
“Oh, um...well, I had really learned the music and different words from Farel and Bobby Lee, but I didn’t think they’d care, so, one day I played it for Chase, and he all but jumped up and down. He assumed I wrote it, said I was his little genius songwriter. He grabbed hold of it, re-wrote the words. It was the first time I’d suggested music for us that he liked, and before I realized it, things had gone too far. The song was so big, and then I couldn’t tell him, I just couldn’t. Do you understand? I didn’t think Farel’d mind, or even if he did mind, that he would ever have the nerve to say anything.”
“I see. And...?”
“Oh, well, Farel didn’t say anything. Not until he came to Branson to see me a few months back, while Chase was gone to Nashville. Farel said then he’d found out from some of Uncle Ted’s papers that we weren’t really blood relations at all. He said I was adopted. We could have married.
“You can’t imagine how that felt. Chase didn’t really love me, and now Farel... But there was Dulcey. What was I gonna do?
“Imagine learning all of a sudden that you’re adopted! One second I knew who I was, next I didn’t.
I didn’t have anyone, not Chase, but not Farel either. It was like a platform under me collapsing. It wasn’t that I hadn’t felt like a real daughter to Mom and Dad. I had. They loved me, and I never, never guessed. I don’t suppose they intended to tell me, and maybe I understand that...maybe I do.
“Now, though, I know I have true blood relations somewhere, and I haven’t been able to forget that. What if they’re the kind of people Chase labels as trash, and he finds out about them? Goodness knows most Masons think Teals are bad enough; Chase won’t let me forget that. But what if I turn out to be from a family Chase considers even worse than Teals, and he learns who they are?
“And, of course, Farel and I weren’t related at all, but really, I knew it was way too late for anything with Farel—if it had ever been possible. Besides, Chase and I were at the top and had an image to uphold, didn’t we?
“Funny thing, though. By myself I’m nothing anymore, not to anyone except Dulcey, Farel, and Bobby Lee. Chase? Dulcey and I mean most to him as performers. On stage, we’re the perfect family, but...”
Tracy began to cry, hiccuped, said, “Oh, there, now I can’t cry. Oh, ugh, ugh.”
Carrie heard moist, rattling sounds and then another big snuffle. Poor Tracy.
“So Farel...” Carrie prompted.
“Farel has been having some bad times since Uncle Ted died. He always had dreams of something big happening, all at once, and he’d get lots of money. While Uncle Ted was here, Farel kept that dream pretty much under control. He did love his dad and knew he wouldn’t put up with foolish schemes.
Uncle Ted had worked hard and steady all his life. He believed in hard work, but that was part of the problem, because he never had much, and Farel saw that. He decided hard work just plain didn’t get you anywhere.
“Now, you see, Farel never used drugs, or I didn’t ever know him to, but, he admitted to me then, in Branson, that after Uncle Ted was gone, he got a job distributing drugs for some family around here that grows and manufactures. Not hard stuff— it’s marijuana. Said he was supposed to get a big commission. But I guess he wasn’t even very good at that.
“When he came to me in Branson, he wanted money for ‘Lying to Strangers,’ enough money to get away from the distribution job, away from Arkansas. He said the song should be doing that for him. It was his song. He deserved payment and royalties, and of course he was right. But I just couldn’t let Chase know. Do you understand? I just couldn’t. The song was the only thing he really admired me for.”
A pause. “Carrie?” Tracy’s voice quivered on the word.
“I’m listening.”
“That song means more to Chase than Dulcey does. I gave him the song and I gave him Dulcey, and he thinks more of the stupid song.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“It’s true! So I couldn’t tell him about it being Farel’s song, not if I wanted to keep on performing with him, wanted to keep my job.” She laughed, but there was no hint of pleasure there. “I hadn’t thought of it that way before. I don’t have a marriage or a family, Carrie. What I have is a job! And I brought poor Dulcey into that. Gave her to a father who sees a performer, not a living, breathing, little girl...” Tracy’s voice trailed off into silence.
“Hmmm, so the kidnapping idea was yours? A substitute way to get money, and Chase wouldn’t have to find out about the song?”
“Yes. That’s why it’s all my fault.”
“And, last night, in the dressmaker’s shop?�
�
Tracy’s stuffed-nose breathing sounds stopped, then she gasped air and began talking again. “Chase was more bothered by the kidnapping than I’d expected, and you know, I was glad he was. Maybe that meant he really did love Dulcey at least a little. So, I called Farel from an office in the administration building while you-all went ahead to the dining room. Told him he had to bring Dulcey back. I said I’d admit I stole the song from him, tell Chase everything. Chase would have to pay him royalty then. Farel said okay.
“We were to meet in the dressmaker’s shop after the performance was over, after Chase and Momma Brigid went on to the auditorium. That’s why I pretended to make a phone call. That way they’d go on ahead. Since Farel worked around the Folk Center and was part of the volunteer fire department, he had keys to all the buildings. He put the lights out of commission so we wouldn’t be seen.
“But when we met, he admitted he’d stopped off in the parking lot to talk to a member of the family that he was selling drugs for. He left Dulcey in the car. Then he went to flip the breakers for the lights, but when he got back to his car, Dulcey was gone, and he couldn’t find her anywhere.
“I went wild. Flew at him, well, I just went wild. He tried to hold me off, got a little rough. Next thing I knew that man had rushed into the shop. He pulled Farel away from me, and...and...Farel fell on the floor. The man lit a cigarette lighter for a moment, I guess to look and see if Farel...if he...and Farel was there on the floor...with the knife...”
“Knife?”
“Farel brought it with him. A gift for me. I’d made the knife, back when the three of us, Bobby Lee and Farel and me, were so happy together.” Tracy’s voice broke. “It..it was a gift, a token, a reminder of happier times. Farel’d laid it there on the counter. Maybe the man thought Farel was going to stab me with it. Maybe it didn’t look like what it really was, that I was attacking Farel. But, next I knew, Farel was dead, and the man had run off.
Music to Die For Page 19
