“I know it now,” Richard said, nodding. “It’s on Lee. A little past where I usually fish.”
“Not a heavily trafficked area, I assume?”
Richard grinned widely. “It’s my favorite fishing spot. There’s not a soul for miles.”
Anna looked over the picture of the serene wooden building. Its back half jutted out over the water and was supported by wooden poles dug deep into the green-blue water. “Anything you can tell me about it?”
“Not particularly,” her father went on. “It’s old though and not as pretty as the picture.”
With Greenbell and Rennard busy pursuing the Mitsubishi, Anna went to the riverside house alone. If it was a dead end, police resources would not be wasted on an unfruitful siege. If the home yielded promise, Anna could trap Cain unannounced and keep him from using the girls as leverage.
The phone rang against her ear as she waited for her old friend to pick up.
“Yep?” the voice replied.
“It’s Anna.” The Chevy peeled down the country road.
“And I was starting to think you forgot about me,” her balding Miami friend replied.
“Never. And actually, I’m calling to make sure no one will forget about me,” Anna replied, setting her phone to speaker mode.
“Sounds sketchy, but I’m listening,” Allen replied.
“There’s a residence on Lee Creek I’m visiting. It’s a lead I can’t pass up.”
“You’re going solo and without a warrant, aren’t you?”
“If I don’t call back within the hour, I want you to contact the Van Buren County Police and FBI Agent Rennard. I’ll text you his contact info. Can you do it?”
“You already owe me a free romantic meal in that dress of yours. I’m not quite sure what else you can offer,” Allen replied from his swivel chair.
Anna shook her head and cracked a smile. “Two dinners.”
“A follow up date, no matter how bad the first one goes?” Allen asked suspiciously.
“... yes,” Anna said, knowing she’d regret it.
She could imagine Allen smiling from his forensics office. “You know I can never say no to you, Anna.”
“Thanks.” Anna saw the house in the distance and slowed her truck.
“Next time, give me something more interesting to do. It’s been awhile since I’ve broken the law, and I’m starting to get antsy.”
“Will do.” Anna replied. “Talk to you soon.”
She eased her Chevy off to the side of the road and relied on a cluster of trees to hide it. Anna stepped out and headed wayward to the two-story home. The tree-flanked dirt road twisted and turned, casting afternoon shadows across the cleared path. The sounds of rushing water and the rustling leaves was as ominous as it was serene. Pregnant with rain, black iron clouds covered the sky. Anna clipped her pistol on her belt and stepped toward the house.
Behind the house, the unclear green river rolled. Scrawny tree limbs and wet leaves surfed across its glassy surface and revealed the river’s true rapid speed. The decaying post holding up nearly a third of the house was bent at a dangerous angle, shifting the entirety of the building closer to a watery doom. The building’s wooden body creaked in the wind and hadn’t been touched by a paintbrush in over thirty years. There was no mailbox or address number, only an old wooden door, swollen and warped from decades in the rain, and a No Trespassing sign nailed to a gnarly tree. Keeping low, Anna made her way up to the front porch, or to what was left of it. The earth had taken part of the slats of white wood and the two steps, leaving behind a ramp of cracked and mossy wood in place of a true porch.
She moved carefully, aware of every sound she made and purposeful to avoid windows. She tried the metal doorknob. It rattled but yielded nothing. Locked. Leaning against the dusty yellow-coated walls, she peered through the wooden shutters. Darkness in the hall, with streams of dusty light streaming through the outside. Anna moved around the side of the building, finding a second entrance. The patch of ground on which she stood banked steeply into the water below. The second door had four musty glass panes joined by a wooden plus sign. Looking both ways, she slammed her elbow against the glass, shattering it into a few large pieces. Her arm snaked through the opening and unlocked the door from the inside.
It opened into the kitchen and smelled damp and moldy. The counter tops and cupboards were bare. The refrigerator had been unplugged eons ago and contained cobwebs speckled with little black gnats. Yellow blotches stained the laminated floor. Anna traced the stains to a waterlogged portion of the ceiling that took the appearance of Rorschach paintings.
The dinner room had a set of four seats, a table, and bookcases packed with faded tomes. Classics, most likely. Out the back windows, Anna could see where the second floor continued over the river, giving the building the design of an L flipped on its head. She twisted back to the hallway that ended with the front door and the ascending stairway, finding nothing but spider webs and dust in the bathroom and downstairs bedroom. She headed for the entrance. The floor moaned beneath her shoes and fat raindrops pelted the roof. As Anna passed by a sideboard supporting a series of striped vases with long wilted flowers, the storm awoke. Torrents of rain smashed against the window so hard, Anna thought that the glass would shatter. Water swirling with dirt inched slowly out from under the warped front door and raced down the cracks of the wooden floor, ending at Anna’s toes.
The house seemed to sway as Anna conquered the steps. Fingers coiled around her pistol, Anna marched as the sound of the storm echoed through the building. The second floor was far darker than the first. She opened the door to the bathroom on her right, finding it to be the cause of the black stains above the kitchen. She went to the adjacent door and opened it.
The first shock came as to how crowded the bedroom was. It had been converted into a study at one point and boasted a desk alongside several shelves and metal file cabinets. Documents scattered on the desk that were far too new for this remnant of a home. Swiping her hand across the wood finish, she fanned out the papers as one would a deck of cards. Pulling out her phone, Anna snapped a few photos.
That’s when she heard the voice.
7
Inferno
The murmur seeped through the wall, only a pinch louder than the rain. Nonetheless, it got the hairs on Anna’s neck to rise. She stepped away from the document-covered desk and navigated through the rusty metal cabinets that were scattered in the room and landed her ear against the cold, damp wallpaper. A monotone voice spoke muffled words. Anna adjusted herself, seeking a weakness in the wooden wall but finding nothing. She eased away from the wall. Her fingers involuntary found the coarse grip of her pistol.
Outside, gusts of wind screamed like banshees and their violent gales rattled the windows. An outdoor shutter smacked the wall repeatedly. Bam! Bam! Bam! like a meat cleaver on a chopping block. The wind and rain raged with the strength of a battering ram. With every hit, the walls and floors groaned. Lightning touched down on the river. Its flash blinked through the orange-slice shaped window at the end of the hall, brightening the terror in Anna’s bloodshot eyes and shining off the raised gun in her palms.
Her feet moved methodically, their noise drowned by the sound of the rain. She could feel where the house crossed over the water. The floor inclined at a fifteen-degree angle and creaked far more often. There was a door to the right and a door to the left. Holding her breath, she twisted the oval doorknob to the left and steadied her shoulder on its surface. Lightning. A few seconds. Thunder. Anna swung open the door. She stayed in the hall, tracing her pistol from the end of the room to the next with a dropped jaw.
Scratched into the wood, walls, and floral wallpaper with the point of a rugged blade was a phrase repeated hundreds of times and sprawled out in every direction. “His gifts were not pleasing unto God. His gifts were not pleasing unto God. His gifts were not pleasing unto God.”
Anna froze, feeling eyes on her from every direction, but there was
no one in the room but herself. Gingerly, she passed through the threshold. All four walls displayed the cryptic sentence. “His gifts were not pleasing unto God.”
If there were such a thing as lingering spirits, she could feel the presence of one dark and sinister, sitting on one dining room chair before her and licking its fat lips. A black pit nested in her belly like lead. Something bad had happened here. Something very bad.
A small TV flickered light across the slanted room. A news reporter dressed in a blue suit spoke from behind his desk. “Hikers Middle School. Home to another horrific act from whom the police are calling Cain...”
Anna kept her gun up and her back away from any dark corner and the open door behind her. Against a wall and beneath a few impressive fishing trophies was a fishing rack with a number of poles and tackle boxes. A few feet away sat a mini-fridge alongside an ice box.
Morsels of charred meat were welded to the blackened coil of a small portable stove nearby. Closer to the TV were aluminum racks filled with self-help DVDs, philosophical books, and religious texts, with some opened to certain pages containing dozens of highlighted passages and scribbled margin notes. Anna scanned them briefly, looking for something demonic or ritualistic that led to a clue or possible motive. However, the passages appeared to be random or focused around finding one’s purpose and overcoming temptations.
A true dining room table sat in the middle of the room. It had one chair that faced the TV and held a cereal box, bowl of fruit, and empty Styrofoam coffee cups. Why the big table was upstairs while a small table was in the dining room made Anna scratch her head. That was, until she saw the long-faded engravings of a heart with the words carved within. “Mom and Dad.”
A boom of thunder caused Anna to jump. This isn’t a safe house, Anna concluded as she looked over aged picture frames displaying a family of four: a sweater-vest wearing man with thick glasses, a curvy woman with a hooked nose and big hair, a prepubescent boy with a baseball bat, and a younger little girl with a clarinet. It’s his home.
Edger Strife died with the reason why a photograph of this house resided in his old basement. Cain would know. Anna shifted her attention back to the table and the outline of a child’s hands drawn out in chalk.
There were notches in the wood, both at the ring and pinky fingers of the hand turkeys. Brown blood lingered in cracks and Anna felt herself about to vomit. She turned her head away and tried to kill her imagination, but it ran free and violent. She wanted to bolt from the home and never look back. She shook out the thought and turned her attention to the covered animal cages at the back of the room.
With a swoosh, she whisked away the white bedsheets from the cages and let them drift to the floor near her feet. The pens were fit for a Great Dane or some larger beast. Inside was an impromptu bed made up of a small pillow and blanket. Bread crumbs sprinkled the scratchy fabric and a few paper plates were crumpled up in the corner. Anna knelt and pried open the latch. She pulled out a long strand of shiny black hair and dangled it before her eyes. Keisha.
Her nose twitched when she caught a whiff of the potent smell. The sharp odor didn’t come from the sheets or cages or the icebox Anna thought held more than fish. It seeped in from the hallway behind her and stank of gasoline.
It took her a second to process what was happening. Gun up, she broke out into a sprint toward the doorway. Lightning. An elongated shadow reached across the threshold. The door slammed with a thunderous boom. Anna skidded on her heels before hitting the doorway and put her back against the flanking wall, pistol barrel pointed to the sky. Memories of a drug den in Miami prepped her to expect a volley of bullets chunking through the closed door. Instead, she got silence and the pool of clear gasoline that leaked through the bottom crevasse of the door.
Hasty footsteps clacked through the hall and vanished down the stairs. The oval doorknob didn’t budge. Anna swiveled to the door and squeezed the pistol’s trigger. Three heavy rounds blasted around the knob and snapped the metal lock. Anna reeled back, took a breath, and slammed the bottom of her foot into the door’s face. With a hearty crack, it blew open. Anna burst into the hall, her shoes splashing through the gasoline.
The smell burned her nose and made her head throb. Tears of gas streamed down the walls and puddled on the floor where the stranger had splashed the can haphazardly through the hall. The trail started in the room opposite of Anna and snaked through the hall and down the stairs. She reached the precipice of the stairway. The wet road ended at the ajar front door. Anna bounced down the first two steps when the path sparked yellow and ignited. She heard the storm howl one last time before the front door sealed.
The fire spread wildly and charged up the wooden steps. Anna turned tail and ran. The heat touched her back. Suddenly, the dark and damp home was bright and blazing. The inferno leapt up the wall and licked the wood and ceiling with tongues of fire. Anna found herself retreating to the room from whence she came. She crashed into the table, spilling cereal and sending fruits toppling down the inclined floor. She reared her head back, expecting to be consumed by fire. The wall of flame ended just past the door.
Waves of heat splashed over her as torrents of rain battered the outside of the house. The building moaned and a distant window shattered, inviting windy howls into the building. Anna twisted about. There was one window over the cages and masked by curtains. She dashed to it as the blaze crawled into the room. With two fists, she tore the curtains down and peered through the barred glass window overlooking a swollen and raging dirty-brown river. Her hands rattled the iron bars until her muscles ached, but they could not be shaken.
The fire crept up the walls at the first third of the room, curling the charred wallpaper, blackening the glass of the family photos and briefly illuminating the repeated phrase. “His gifts were not pleasing unto God.”
The fish trophies popped and sizzled as the TV died and slowly warped under the heat. Fishing rods became spears of fire while holy texts became kindling with black, billowing smoke. Anna hacked and coughed. She steadied herself on the edge of the dog cage and blinked out some of the soot in her eye. Getting low on the ground, she yanked her phone out of her pocket and hit redial.
It rang and rang. Finally someone picked up.
“Yep?” Allen said after slurping from the straw of his Big Gulp.
“Fire.” Anna coughed. “Get help.”
“Anna, what’s happening?”
The ceiling creaked, the floor shifted, and the blaze inched toward her. A thick haze suffocated the room. Every word out Anna’s mouth became a chore. “Hang up, Allan… Call the cops… the numbers I gave you.”
“Anna--”
Anna pressed End on her phone and dialed 9-1-.
Crack!
The room shifted forward and down as the support poles in the river snapped. The flaming dining room table slid toward her alongside burning books, shards of blackened glass, a TV, tumbling chunks of blazing wood, and everything else in the room.
The fire reflected in her wide eyes. Reacting quick, Anna rolled her body up the cages that were at a forty-five-degree tilt now. The table and mini-fridge missed her by a hair, but not the searing flame. She screamed as chunks of burning debris kissed her skin. The weight shifted and fire crackled. The support poles surrendered to the river and gravity shifted under Anna.
There was stillness for a second. Then, the building smashed into the water. Anna’s head and the back wall collided so hard that she tasted copper. The flame-engulfed dining room chair flopped on top of her. Brown swirling water bubbled up through the broken, caged window beside her and chilled her ears. She pushed her face away from the flaming seat and feared grabbing the scalding legs with her hands. Suddenly, the water enveloped her face and snuffed out part of the fire.
Anna pushed herself up, spitting twigs and river water down the front of her button up. She faced a ring of fire overhead while the river continued to pool around her. White steam distorted the room. She flung the partially flaming c
hair and floating black wood to the side and pulled herself up. Water swirled around her wobbly knees and cascaded down her long brown hair. She went to pull herself up but the cage grabbed her ankle. She twisted in an attempt to liberate her foot, but that only brought pain. The water reached her thighs. Debris, coffee cups, burnt books, and more garbage bobbed on the surface.
Anna took a deep breath and dove under the icy water. She shut her eyes and used her hands to find her snared foot. She yanked, battling the cage. Bubbles escaped her lips. She shrugged and pulled at the jaws of the cage. Her stored oxygen escaped her lungs. She opened her eyes into a world of black soot and brown water laced with ribbons of crimson blood. A persistent burning jolted up her leg from the cut on her ankle. Her head became light and her body thrashed under the surface. The more she fought, the more tired she got. Her fingers ached as they worked the metal cages. Her vision blacked as her consciousness faded. Her ankle thrashed and tore free in a sudden burst of pain. With a second of life left, her kicking legs and waving arms propelled her to the surface.
Her head burst from the littered water as she gasped life back into her body. Her submerged ribs collapsed in and out with every new breath. Wet hair stuck to her face and bruised cheek. She sucked air at the new ceiling that was once the wall where she heard the TV the first time. She swam to the doorway that had just gone under and dove again. Her body crossed through the horizontal gap found in the vertical hallway.
She craned her head up to the opening where the house had nearly snapped in half. The ceiling opened jagged jaws of wood to the sky, but the floor that met with the stairs was cracked straight downward and stayed together like a reluctant hangnail. Droves of fat raindrops bombed her, forcing her to blink constantly. White and black smoke filled the sky while small fires fought the barrage of rain to stay alive.
The water swirled around Anna. Submerged debris scraped against her legs and torso. Fuzzy maroon cubes bobbed in the water surrounding her. Ring boxes, Anna realized, dozens of them, twirling around her like soaked velvet flowers. Her trembling fingers pried one open. Her shoulders slumped and she sighed as she stared at the empty box. They were all empty.
Secrets Boxset: A Riveting Kidnapping Mystery Collection Page 51
