Landfall (7 page)

As she came into the front yard area, she felt an expanding in her chest that had nothing to do with the exertion of running. The kids were right there. Right up there behind that door.

She managed to push herself just a bit faster, and had just hit the second stair when the butt of the gun slammed down onto the back of her neck. She seemed to go down and up at the same time somehow, landing almost vertical on the stairs. With no way to break her fall, she had to watch the step rush toward her face, and she slammed nose-first into it.

She instinctively rolled to her side a bit to get off of her face, and blinked a few times against the blinding pain. She could hear him wheezing, felt the stairs shake a bit as he leaned against the rail.

A couple of inches in front of her eyes was a bright red pool as big as her palm. As she watched, two fat raindrops splashed down into it. Then she heard him grunt, and his boot slammed into her side.

W
hen the man opened the door, Sky and Kyle stared in shock for a moment. Sky was out of her chair, and was squatting down behind Kyle’s with her back to him, trying to get his wrists untied. She hadn’t made much headway, if any.

“Mom!” Kyle yelled.

“What did you do?” Sky screamed at the man.

“Get back in that chair,” the man snapped. As Sky did as she was told, the man shoved Maggie hard, and she fell to the floor a few feet from the table. She managed to land mostly on her left side, and to protect her face from another slam, but her right side screamed at her and she wondered if he’d broken one of her ribs, or if this was just what it felt like to take a boot to the torso. She didn’t know she was going to pass out until she did.

When she came around, she was on her back. Her hands had gone numb, but her wrists hurt from her weight pressing them against the wood floor, and she rolled herself partly onto her left side again. A few inches from her face was an already slightly tacky pool of blood about five inches around. Rooster tracks ran into and out of it in several places.

Maggie curled her body a bit so that she could see the dining room table. The kids’ feet were still in front of their chairs. Beyond them, the man’s boots paced from the dining room table to the kitchen counter several times. Maggie struggled for a moment, but finally managed to sit up. Her side protested, and she could have sworn she heard something creaking inside of her.

She scooted over and back a bit on her butt, until she could slump back against the back of the couch. The kids watched her over their shoulders, and Maggie tried to give them some kind of reassuring look, but she doubted it had come across that way.

“Are you okay, Mom?” Sky asked. Maggie managed a nod.

“Shut up!” the man barked.

Maggie looked over at him. He’d stopped by the kitchen counter and was pulling a cell phone out of his back pocket. Maggie watched him dial and wait for an answer. Apparently, he didn’t get one, because he disconnected the call. He smacked the phone down onto the counter, then slammed his palm down on the countertop.

“What’s going on?” Sky asked Maggie, twisting her neck to look on Maggie’s direction.

“His truck won’t start.”

“Y’all shut up,” the man said.

Sky turned back around and looked at the table. “Too bad my Dad’s keys are in the creek,” she said.

“Get in my face and you will be, too,” he said, his voice quieter, but menacing.

Sky gave him an insolent look, but then shifted in her seat and stared at a spot on the front door.

For the next hour or so, Maggie and the kids listened to the rain pounding the tin roof, and the wind rattling at the boarded windows. Every now and then, something would scrape or bang up against one of the house’s pilings, or into one of the boarded windows. If it had been any other time, Maggie and the kids would have sat around the table, talking about past storms and wondering if the garden would be okay.

They watched the man pace around the house like an outside dog that had been forced to stay inside. He wandered around the living room and kitchen, opening cupboards, turning his head sideways to read the spines of the books that almost filled one wall. He didn’t look at Maggie or the kids very often; he almost seemed to avoid it, and that worried Maggie.

He tried placing a call several more times, but never spoke to anyone. He didn’t leave a voice mail, either, and Maggie wondered if his cell service was out.

Every now and then, Maggie heard whining coming from underneath her door at the end of the hall, and she knew that Coco had her nose pressed into the crack at the bottom, as she used to do when Maggie was still married, and she and David would close the bedroom door behind them.

The man finally settled down a bit, and leaned up against the counter, drinking a Dr. Pepper he’d pulled out of their fridge.

When Maggie opened her mouth to speak, she had to clear her throat. She could taste blood in the back of her mouth. “Can one of us please give my dog some water?”

“No,” he said.

“She left you alone,” Maggie said. “It’s hot in there with the windows boarded up. Please just let her have some water.”

“You thinkin’ I’m gonna untie you, or one of them, to give your dog a drink?” He grinned at her like she was stupid.

“Then you do it,” Maggie said.

“Let me tell you somethin’, lady. You treating me like an idiot isn’t gonna help you much.”

He drained his Dr. Pepper and, as he lowered it, caught Kyle’s eye. His lip curled a bit, and he turned away to toss the empty can in the sink. Then he grabbed a small mixing bowl from the drainer and filled it half full from the tap.

Maggie watched him walk down the hall to her bedroom, and heard Coco’s low growl from under the door. The man bent and poured the water under the door, then came back with the empty bowl.

“You happy now, boy?” he asked, and dropped the bowl onto the counter.

“You’re a regular Shriner,” Sky said.

“Keep runnin’ your mouth, girl,” he said.

Sky looked away from him, and he resumed his pacing.

S
everal hours later, she wasn’t sure how many, Maggie heard Stoopid tap up the hall and into the living room from one of the kids’ rooms. He half-walked, half-flapped around the room, then located her behind the couch, and proceeded to advise her, in quiet, almost hen-like
brrps
that his dinner was late, the weather was inclement, or that her situation looked grim.

Maggie glanced over at the man, who was sitting at the far end of the dining room table. He’d been there for some time, and had either ignored her questions or told her shut up every time she’d tried to engage him in conversation.

Kyle, and then Sky, had eventually fallen asleep with their heads on the table. Maggie had nodded off a couple of times, but only for a few minutes. Each time her head jerked back up, her heart fell again.

Maggie shifted her position a bit to try to relieve the pain in her lower back. As she did, the man got up and walked to the kitchen counter and checked his phone. He’d gone through their chargers earlier, until finally finding that Kyle’s fit his phone, and had plugged his phone in a few hours earlier. An hour later, the power had gone out.

The man had demanded to know where Maggie’s candles were, then had lit a few emergency candles and put them on saucers on the kitchen counter. Maggie had stared at them for a while, wondering how long it would take to burn through the rope on her wrists if she could get to one of them.

As the man stalked over to the sink and got a glass of water from the tap, Kyle stirred, then sat up and looked over at his mother.

“Mom,” he said in a near-whisper. “I have to pee.”

Maggie sighed and looked over at the man, who leaned on the counter drinking her water from one of her grandmother’s canning jars.

“Kyle needs to use the bathroom,” she said. “Please.”

The man put a hand on his hip and stared at Kyle, who glanced over at him, then stared down at the table. Maggie hated the man more for this than she did for her broken face.

She watched as the man stalked down the hall and disappeared into the bathroom, heard him opening and closing the cabinet and the vanity drawer. After a minute or two, he came back out. By then, Sky had roused as well.

The man stood near the table and stared down at Kyle.

“Don’t mistake it for kindness, boy,” he said. “I don’t want to smell your pee the rest of the night.” He stepped behind Kyle’s chair. “Get up.”

Kyle stood, his legs weak and shaky from sitting so long. The man yanked at his wrists and began working the rope.

“I have to go, too,” Sky said, less belligerently than she’d spoken earlier.

“You just might have to do without it,” the man said. “Might teach you some manners.”

Maggie watched Sky chew at the corner of her lip, a mannerism she’d inherited from Maggie, but which Maggie had never really noticed before.

The man left one side of the knot hanging loosely from Kyle’s left wrist, and grabbed his shoulder. “Let’s go,” he said.

He pushed Kyle down the hall to the bathroom and shoved him in, pulled the door shut. He stood there and waited by the door, and a few minutes later, the toilet flushed and the man opened the door. “Come on,” he said, and brought Kyle back out to the table.

Kyle’s face was wet, and Maggie gave him a mental high-five for thinking to get a drink while he was in there, but there was an angry heat in her chest. Her child had to drink from the bathroom tap and ask permission to pee in his own home, from someone who would never be half the man that Kyle promised to become. If he could.

The man stopped Kyle at the chair, retied his wrists, and then pushed him back down. Then he stood there for a moment and regarded Sky, who refused to look at him.

“Get up, then,” the man told her, and she struggled to her feet. He untied her wrists, and she rubbed at them for a moment, the rope hanging from her left wrist, before the man yanked her away from the table and followed her down the hall.

He waited outside the bathroom again, and after the toilet flushed, he waited a moment for her to open the door, then opened it himself. “Hold up,” Maggie heard the man say.

“I don’t have anything,” Sky said after a moment, and Maggie realized he’d been checking her pockets. A moment later, they came back into the main room, Sky in the lead.

Maggie watched the man retie her daughter’s bonds. Sky sat up straight, stiff as a board, but Maggie saw her wince as the ropes were cinched around her small wrists. Then the man looked over at her.

“Come on,” he said. He bent down and grabbed her under the arm, and pulled her up as she clumsily got her footing. The man looked her in the eye. “I’ll put a bullet in this boy’s head if you come out of there with so much as a Q-Tip, you hear?”

Maggie stared back at him, and he jerked Kyle back up out of his chair and pulled the .22 from the back of his jeans, then jerked his head toward the hall. Maggie walked past them, and the man followed.

As they neared the bathroom door, Maggie heard snuffling underneath her door, followed by scratching and a small whimper.

“It’s okay, Coco,” she said, and her voice was hoarse, her throat sticky and sore. Coco whined a reply and sniffed the crack again, then Maggie heard a thump on the door as the dog laid down against it.

When she got to the bathroom doorway, she stopped and turned. The man stepped forward and made a circling motion with his free hand, the .22 right up against Kyle’s temple. Maggie turned around to face the bathroom.

The man began untying her rope. It took a bit of time with one hand. “You got one minute to do your business and get out,” he said.

Maggie had little feeling in her wrists and hands. She only knew her hands were loose when her shoulders relaxed and her arms fell to her side. The man pushed her into the bathroom and shut the door behind her.

Maggie hadn’t realized she needed to use the restroom until Kyle had asked, but now she was desperate to do so. She’d had several cups of coffee and glasses of iced tea that day, and hadn’t used the bathroom since before she’d called Wyatt.

As her numb fingers fumbled with her khaki shorts, Maggie pictured Wyatt asleep in his hotel room, and wished that she were curled up behind him. Actually, she wished that all three of them were.