Good Deeds: A Thriller

by Aaron Polson

  “You’ll have to get out,” he said, circling to the back of the car for the spare and jack.

  “I know,” Stacia said. To Wayne’s surprise, she’d already climbed from the car and was standing on the shoulder in front. “It’s cold.”

  “Here.” Wayne tossed her a blanket from the trunk, an old, tattered thing they carried for picnics and outdoor concerts—not that they’d enjoyed either lately. He groped around in the trunk, searching with his fingers for the nut to release the jack and spare. His knuckles scraped against metal, and Wayne grunted. He shook his sore fingers. “It’s too dark. Can you grab the flashlight from the dash?”

  Stacia didn’t answer.

  Wayne lowered the trunk lid as his gaze roved over the road.

  She was gone.

  He slammed the trunk with a heavy, metallic thunk.

  “Stacia?”

  He spotted a tiny, bobbing light down the slope on the opposite side of the road, heading for the dark farmhouse. Stacia had the flashlight. Stacia was heading for—

  “Shit,” he muttered. He shoved the sore knuckles, one of them bleeding, into his mouth and staggered across the road. The shoulder dropped and headed down a slope. The field some fifteen to twenty feet below stretched toward the house. Wayne hesitated, hoping perhaps his eyes might adjust to the moonlight enough to see his way down.

  No such luck.

  Stacia’s tiny light was still visible, but almost gone now, almost impossible to see. The night was too black, too dark to see anything else. Cursing under his breath, Wayne scampered off the road. His sneakers crunched gravel and then the dry crackle of dead grass. The uneven ground snatched at his feet, seemingly intent on knocking him down. Wayne’s ankle twisted when his foot slid into a hole. He tumbled forward, catching his weight on both hands. A lance of pain shot through his left forearm.

  “Damn,” he muttered, cradling his hurt wrist. He pushed up to his knees. Stacia’s light was gone. Vanished. He found the house silhouette, the line of trees beyond, and a deep blue star field even further than that. His mouth opened; he thought of crying out, of trying to get his wife’s attention and somehow maker her come back. Crazy, that’s what this was. He said it earlier—regretfully in front of Stacia—but he knew it now.

  Crazy.

  He should have never turned the car around.

  He shouldn’t have given Dan a ride in the first place.

  Struggling to his knees, Wayne began ticking through his next steps, the plans he needed to put into place. The car waited on the road up the embankment behind him. He tested his wrist and scowled with pain. It was sore, probably sprained. He could still change the tire, slip the spare on the Camry and be ready to fly once Stacia came back from her momentary Nancy Drew fantasy. But that was the problem, wasn’t it?

  Stacia.

  What if she needed help? What if she was right about Dan? As crazy as it sounded, he’d entertained the same thoughts before she made him slow down and turn around. No—not exactly. He’d decided to turn around on his own, influenced by his wife’s interpretation of events.

  Crazy.

  But he loved her. He’d been a little short with her after the flat, too.

  Wayne tucked his arm across his midsection and started for the house. Whatever he found, whatever nonsense Stacia had brewed in her head, he still loved her and he had to take care of her. He had to keep her from… Something. A sense of unease bloomed inside Wayne’s chest, high and hot and constricting. He had to pull Stacia away from the flame. A line of sweat formed at Wayne’s brow. He brushed it aside with his good hand. He felt the pound of his feet as he jogged. Images formed and unformed. The corpse of a strangled woman appeared in the front seat of a Caprice Classic. Stacia lay in a pool of blood, her blood, with a razor blade lying on the bathroom floor. Wayne quickened his pace. He didn’t know what—if anything—he could or would do once making the house.

  It was a foolish thought.

  The last hour of his life had been foolish.

  Less than fifty yards away, he spotted the barn. It sat, grey and heavy, to one side of the house, a reminder of the place’s agrarian history. No lights were on in the house, none that he could see, anyway. A line of trees and bushes obscured some of his view. He slowed to a trot and bent over, right hand against knee, to catch his breath.

  “Pssst.”

  Wayne’s sweat-soaked forehead went cold.

  “Psssst… Wayne.”

  “Stacia?”

  “Behind the trees. I don’t want to risk the light.”

  He moved slowly toward the sound of her voice. “Stacia,” he started, lowering his voice to match hers, “what the hell are you doing?”

  No answer.

  “We need to get back to the car.”

  A twig cracked under Wayne’s shoe, but in the near silence, it sounded like a rifle shot. He froze, heart-pounding and filled with frustration at the absurdity of his position.

  “Will you be quiet?” Stacia whispered.

  Wayne sighed and crept toward her voice. The faint starlight painted her dark blue. Her skin, pale as ever, shimmered. She pointed her eyes toward him.

  “That’s his place,” she whispered.

  “His place?”

  “Dan’s house. I don’t see the car, so I figure it’s in the barn.”

  “We should go.”

  “There was a person in his car. A woman, I think. Remember. What if she needs help? He’d left her in that car on the road.”

  “What if you’re wrong?”

  “Wayne, I’m not wrong.” Stacia’s voice rose slightly. “I have a feeling.”

  Wayne huffed.

  “I hate when you do that.” She turned away. “Just go fix the tire. I’ve got to make sure.”

  Wayne’s gaze glided a hundred yards across the field and up the embankment toward the shoulder of Wellman Road. His Camry was out of sight. “What do you mean?”

  “Make sure it’s his place. After that, we can go. I’ll call the cops and report what I saw, okay?”

  “We should go.” He lifted his hand and touched Stacia’s arm. “Now.”

  She yanked it away. “Don’t be stupid. Look.”

  A light shone from a window on the second floor of the house. A shape moved across the yellow square. Being backlit, it was impossible to see to whom the form belonged. Wayne blinked and imagined Dan’s face, embarrassing little mustache and all, pasted on the black silhouette. It had to be Dan. Wayne’s eyes fell from the window toward Stacia, but Stacia was gone again.

  “Damn it.”

  A flicker of black, a moving shadow, darted across the drive toward the looming barn.

  Wayne swallowed hard and followed, keeping his back low and one eye on the lit window. Dirt and gravel whispered under his feet. Thoughts rattled in his head: Stacia the stubborn—she won’t listen to him. She never has listened to him. At one point, years ago, he fell in love with her because of that stubbornness. Now, he stayed with her in spite of it. Wayne, panting and sweating, fell against the barn wall away from the window. Dan—whoever—in the window upstairs couldn’t see him now. Wayne ran his fingers along the splintery wall. His sore left wrist gave an uncomfortable jab, a sharp quick reminder of its presence. The main barn door was open to the driveway and naked to the house.

  Stacia hadn’t used the main door.

  A tiny swell of buttery-yellow light spilled onto the grass at the barn’s side, spilled from a rectangular door frame. Wayne hurried to the opening and stepped inside.

  The Caprice waited along with his wife.

  “It’s the car,” Stacia said. She stood next to the car with the flashlight pointed toward the ground.

  “Okay, Stacia. You’ve found it. We need to go.”

  “I told you to go already. I told you I’d be there in a minute.”

  “I don’t need you playing detective. We’re trespassing. If he catches—”

  “Wayne… Come here.”

  He hesitated.

&nbs
p; “In the car… Come here. The door’s locked, but—”

  “Will you come with me if I look?”

  Stacia tilted her head to one side. “With you? Whatever. You need to see this.”

  He joined her next to the passenger door. Stacia held the light high enough that it filtered through the grimy windowpane. Bits of paper, candy wrappers, and other small debris littered the car’s interior. On the beige vinyl seat, a length of rope lay in a lazy coil.

  “Rope,” Wayne said. “It’s just a bunch of rope.”

  “What for, Wayne? What’s the rope for?”

  “Tying something—”

  “Someone. Tying someone. He had her tied up in here. He had her tied in the car.” Stacia wiggled the flashlight, trying to shine it through the window. “Wait.”

  Wayne, one hand on the door frame, stopped and turned. “What?”

  “Blood.”

  He blinked. “Blood? What do you mean blood?”

  “Here, in the car.”

  Curiosity pulled him like a toy on a string. He stood next to Stacia and craned his neck. He stood on his tiptoes for a better angle to see just inside the door where her flashlight was pointed. A tiny black mark stained the seat with another mark on the door near the lock. It glistened in the flashlight beam.

  “That’s not blood,” he said.

  “It’s wet, Wayne. It’s blood.”

  “It can’t be blood,” he said.

  “The rope… The blood…” Stacia backed away from the car and started working the flashlight back and forth across the barn’s packed earth floor. “Maybe there’s a trail.”

  “A trail of blood?”

  “Something.” She circled around the car’s front. “Come over here. Do these look like footprints?”

  “This isn’t a TV show, Stacia…”

  “Wayne. Come over here, damn it.”

  Wayne followed her, his eyes roving the ground at his feet. He warred in his head. The cool, rational Wayne explained how ridiculous his actions; the confused, frightened Wayne stumbling along in the dark, sure he would find a blood trail. What the hell was he doing there, anyway? Eighty years ago, rednecks would hang black men like him in a barn like that—a foolish thought, but one he couldn’t hold back. He was out of his element.

  “See,” Stacia said.

  She had found footprints—at least the remnants of foot prints. The dirt floor showed several strange, horseshoe shaped marks along with a trail of something else. Something which forced a cold flop in Wayne’s gut. A jagged line followed the footprints.

  “He dragged her.”

  Stacia’s mouth hung open. She nodded. “Yes. He dragged her from the car.”

  He shook his head. “This is impossible.”

  “What, Dan didn’t look like a murderer?”

  Wayne scowled. “You were nice to him in the car. You were pissed at me because I was being rude, remember? Maybe I knew. Maybe my intuition was telling me something.”

  “But you don’t have any intuition, Wayne,” she scoffed. “You were just being rude, being a jerk. That was before I saw the car.”

  “Right. Sure. But we know now. We know what’s happened. We should just turn around and get the hell out of here. I can have the Camry ready to go in a few minutes, and then we’ll drive back into town. You can call the police then. You can call the sheriff and—”

  “And what, Wayne?”

  “What you were going to do. Tell them about what you felt. About what you thought you saw.”

  “What I did see?”

  His shoulders lifted and fell. “I’m not going to play word games. You said you’d go with me once you found out whose car it was—now you know. You can call the cops.”

  Stacia’s head wagged slowly from side to side. “I can’t go now.”

  “What?”

  “Because I know. Now I have to do something.”

  “Jesus, Stacia. You don’t have to do anything.” Wayne felt his fingers curl into fists, and he couldn’t blame them. “We need to get out of the guy’s barn and find help.”

  “She might need me.”

  “Please, Stacia.”

  She fixed him with her big eyes. She came close to him and touched his chest with one hand. “Weren’t you the one who kept saying, after the babies… After what I did… That everything happens for a reason? Didn’t you say that?”

  Wayne chewed his tongue. His fists dangled at his side like lead sinkers on a fishing line.

  “You did. And I never told you, Wayne, but that helped me more than anything the doctors said. It helped me more than the six months of therapy with that woman in Topeka. It helped me know that you’d be there. No matter how much shit we have to go through, you’ll be there.” She rubbed her hand back and forth, warming his chest. “And now, somebody might need our help, Wayne. Somebody in that house. Dan’s wife or—”

  “What if she’s dead? The blood…”

  “I don’t think so, Wayne. Everything happens for a reason. Maybe this is my chance to repay your good favor. No good deed goes—”

  “Unpaid.” He sighed. The fists melted into ordinary hands. “Grandma used to say that. I always thought she was full of shit. But nobody bothered telling her.”

  “Wayne.”

  He opened his mouth again, but a sound stopped him.

  Shouting.

  From the house.

  “It’s—”

  “Dan,” Stacia said. “He’s arguing with someone.”

  Wayne hurried to the side of the barn nearest the house. He and Stacia pressed against the lone window, both peering through the grimy glass.

  “What’s he saying?” Stacia asked.

  “I can’t tell. Something about late. Something about being late.” Wayne rubbed the window with his shirt sleeve, trying to clear the view. “The other voice sounds like a woman.”

  “She is alive.”

  The gunshot which followed lit the first floor of the house. The sound hit them a moment later, a quick hard pop like a crack of wood amplified. Wayne felt the concussion in his chest—at least he imagined he had. It would be impossible, but the gun’s report squeezed his heart as though he was standing feet away from the barrel. The next minute passed slowly. Wayne focused on the steady rising thud of his heart. When it seemed as though the noise would drown the world, Stacia grabbed his arm.

  “He’s coming out.”

  The back door of the house—they could only see it in side view from their vantage in the barn—swung open. A figure rushed down the steps and through the yard behind the house. The figure was dark, hardly more than a shape with flickering blue highlights.

  “It’s Dan. Now’s our chance.”

  “Chance for what?”

  “To help. To go in there and help her.”

  “How do you know?” Wayne asked.

  “It was a man.” Stacia stood and backed away from the window. “Now’s our chance.”

  “What if he shot her?”

  Stacia shook her head. “He didn’t. Not now.”

  Wayne watched as the figure seemed to vanish into the trees behind the house. “Right. We can make it to the car and he’ll never know we were here. The police—”

  “I’m going to get her,” Stacia said.

  “What?”

  “She’s still alive. I know it.”

  “The gunshot. He shot her. Aren’t you listening?” Wayne’s mouth was dry; words were hard to form.

  Stacia didn’t listen. She had already circled the car already and stood at the doorway. “Grab a weapon.”

  “Weapon?” he asked, but too late. She had slipped through the doorway. Jesus, he was going to have to go get her. He walked around the car, his pace quickening, with eyes roving everywhere for something, anything he could use as a weapon. He searched and searched and found, in the corner by the big doors behind the car, a cluster of garden tools—a rake, a hoe, a broken-handled pitchfork, and an ax. Wayne swallowed hard and hefted the ax.

  Once o
utside, he shivered. The cool night air froze the sweat which had gathered on his skin. He followed the wall of the barn around the front, past the big doors where Dan had driven the car inside earlier. He hesitated at the corner. He scanned the drive and lawn between the barn and the house.

  The house.

  Stacia turned on the flashlight. A tiny glow bounced in the windows.

  Damn.

  He’s eyes shifted to the trees. No sign of Dan. He sprinted for the back door. His knees ached with the effort, and he realized he’d been crouching in the barn with Stacia. His lungs burned for air. The ax sagged in his hands, pulling on his sore left wrist. He slumped into the shadow at the side of the house and summoned the courage to enter.

  The door was slightly ajar. Stacia must have turned them on when she entered, he thought.

  He needed to get her out of the house. He needed to get her to their car and go. Stepping inside, he moved through Dan’s kitchen. Even in the dim light, he could tell it was clean but dated, ancient linoleum floors and wooden cabinets painted white. He paused at the window over the sink and glanced into the yard. No sign of Dan. He opened a few cabinets—all were empty.

  Strange.

  “Stacia?”

  The ax handled slipped in his sweaty hands. He moved through an archway into a small hall. The house was bungalow, probably built in the 1920s or ‘30s. Wayne had worked on plenty of houses with a similar layout. The stairs would be in the front of the house since they weren’t in the kitchen. His sneakers touched carpet. He ran one hand over the smooth hallway wallpaper. Something was out of place, missing. Wayne paused, his palm against the cool wall.

  No pictures. There were no pictures on the wall. He glanced ahead.

  The flashlight bounced.

  “Stacia?”

  “Wayne. Oh God. Wayne…” Stacia was pale, shaking. Her eyes darted back and forth.

  He rushed forward, ax swinging at his side. “What is it?”

  “Up there. In the bedroom.”

  “Did you find her?”

  Her shoulders shook.