Bond With Death (20 page)

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Authors: Bill Crider

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BOOK: Bond With Death

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“What about a note?” Sherm said.

“No note,” Jennifer said. “She wouldn't write one anyway, and we don't want people to think it's a suicide.”

“I know that. I was thinking about a note from you about how she had been tried and convicted.”

“No. We don't want to leave any more evidence than we have to.”

Sally didn't know a great deal about police work, but she knew they'd already left plenty of evidence. Jennifer's fingerprints would be all over the duct tape, and Sherm's would be on the chair. The
rope could probably be traced. They might even forget to pick up the knife from the coffee table.

“How will people know why she's been hung?”

Hanged, you moron, Sally thought.

“The whole town knows she's a witch, Sherm.”

“But what if they think she did it herself?”

“Nobody's going to think that. Stop all the arguing and move the chair.”

Sally thought that Sherm didn't really want to go through with it. Now that they'd come to the crucial moment, he couldn't bring himself to kill her.

Sally couldn't believe it was going to happen, either. Even when they'd taped her hands and feet and mouth, she couldn't believe it. Maybe, she thought, the hardest thing to accept in the whole of existence is that you're about to become something other than a part of that existence.

Sally thought about Sarah Good and the other women who'd been executed in Salem all those years ago. How must they have felt? Surely most if not all of them believed in their own innocence and knew the injustice of what was about to happen to them. They must have wondered how blame had come to fall on them. They must have wondered how they could possibly be about to lose their lives for something of which they were entirely innocent. There was no one to speak up for them then, however, just as there was no one to speak up for Sally now. They had been condemned, and they were going to hang.

And yet they must have believed that they would somehow escape. That they wouldn't die at the end of a hangman's noose. Certainly Sally believed that she was going to escape, no matter how things might seem to be headed in another direction. She would escape, and then she would make Jennifer and Sherm sorry they had ever messed with her.

“You sure about this?” Sherm asked Jennifer.

“Of course I'm sure. This woman's done harm to you and me
and to all the people of this community, and she's gotten away with it. She wants to destroy the minds of the children with satanic books. Plus, she's an evil woman, descended from an evil woman. She deserves what she's getting, and nobody's going to give it to her if we don't. Everybody resigned from the Mothers Against Witchcraft today because of the scene she made last night. No one will stand up for the right except us. And that's exactly what we're going to do. What's right.”

“Are you sure it's right?”

“Absolutely. It has to be done, and we're going to do it right now. Move the chair.”

Sherm didn't look too happy about it.

“If you say so.”

Sherm took hold of the back of the chair.

“Ummmmmmmpf!”
Sally said.

“Do it, Sherm,” Jennifer said. “If you don't, I will.”

“I don't like it,” Sherm said, but even as he said it, he jerked the chair from beneath Sally's feet.

A
fter thinking it over, Seepy Benton decided that Sally must have gone out to eat and that she would be coming back to her house soon. He thought it would be okay to drop by, and if she was surprised to see him, he could tell her that he had called and gotten no answer. If she wasn't there, he could just come on back home. So he put on a fresh aloha shirt, a green one with parrots that were yellow and red and blue. He thought it looked pretty darned spiffy, as did the wide-brimmed, flat-crowned hat he put on his head.

Looking at himself in the mirror he wondered if he might be just a tad too rabbinical, so he changed to a western straw hat that gave him what he believed to be the look of an authentic singing cowboy.

Roy Rogers, eat your heart out, he thought.

The cats had come out of hiding, and, not seeing the guitar, they had gone to their four food bowls and begun to eat.

When Seepy came into the kitchen, carrying his nylon guitar case, the cats gave him a startled look and scampered away.

“I'm not going to play,” Seepy said, a little disappointed in them, though he knew you couldn't really expect a cat to appreciate poetry and a beautiful melody. “I'm going out for a while. You guys will have to fend for yourselves.” He always referred to the cats as
guys
even though Emily clearly wasn't. “You can come on out now.”

The cats had been fooled before, however, and they remained in hiding.

“All right, if that's the way you feel, stay where you are.”

Seepy went out the back door to his car, a sensible Saturn instead of a trusty steed like Trigger or Champion. He put the guitar in the backseat. He thought that Sally would like his songs if she'd just listen to them. She was an English teacher, after all, and English teachers were supposed to like poetry, unlike certain cats he could name. And the musical accompaniment just made the poetry that much better.

He had checked Sally's address in the faculty address book before leaving, and he knew her house wasn't far, not that anything in Hughes was very far from anything else. He hoped that Sally was back from dinner, and he was already looking forward to their visit.

It took him only a few minutes to get to the house. It appeared at first glance to be dark, but he parked at the curb and got out anyway. Since he was already there, he might as well try the door.

After he got the guitar out of the backseat, he noticed that the house wasn't entirely dark, after all. The plantation shutters were closed, but not so tightly that little strips of light didn't shine through. Seepy thought that Sally just liked her privacy. He got a good grip on the handle of his guitar, squared his shoulders, and strode up the walk. Roy Rogers would have been proud.

When he reached the door, he set down the guitar and rang the bell.

Sherm, not being a professional hangman, had made one serious miscalculation, and Sally was grateful for it.

When he'd tied the rope to the fan, he'd left it just a little bit too long. So when he moved the chair from beneath Sally's feet, her toes actually came in contact with the rug.

The shock of the drop had been bad, as had the burn of the rope on her neck, which felt as if it had stretched a foot or so. But her neck wasn't broken, mainly because she hadn't come to a sudden stop at the end of the rope. She had, in a manner of speaking, landed on her feet. Or her toes. She was able to balance there for a second or two at a time like a ballerina with an inner-ear problem, just enough to keep from strangling.

“Look what you've done, Sherm,” Jennifer said. “She's not dead.”

Sally didn't see or hear Sherm's reaction, if he had one. She was too busy trying to maintain her balance.

“We have to do something,” Jennifer said.

“What?” Sherm asked.

“Go over there and hang on to her. That way she'll choke to death.”

Sherm said he didn't want to do that.

Jennifer insisted.

Sherm gave in and started toward Sally.

Then the doorbell rang.

Seepy knew that someone was inside Sally's house. He could hear voices. They were muffled, so he couldn't tell if one of them was Sally's. He wondered if she might still be gone. What if burglars had closed the shutters so they couldn't be seen while they took Sally's TV, VCR, DVD player, computer, and all the other things that burglars took?

Seepy knew he wasn't really Roy Rogers, or even Gabby Hayes, but he couldn't allow burglars to make off with Sally's property. He set down his guitar case and pushed the bell button again and again.

“Who
is
that?” Jennifer said.

Sherm shrugged. “Maybe he'll leave.”

The bell kept ringing.

“Go to the door, Sherm. And be careful. Don't show your face, and don't let anybody in. We can't afford to let anybody see us.”

“I know that,” Sherm said.

He went to the door and opened it, leaving the safety chain on as Sally had done earlier.

“Yes?” he said, staying behind the door and out of Seepy's sight. “What can I do for you?”

“I'm here to see Miss Good,” Seepy said.

“She's busy right now. She doesn't want to see you.”

Seepy couldn't see who was doing the talking, and he didn't believe
that Sally didn't want to see him. She hadn't even known he was coming. He craned his neck, trying to see into the room.

“She asked me to stop by,” Seepy said. He picked up the nylon guitar case. “She wanted to hear some of the new songs I've written.”

“Well, she must have made a mistake telling you that,” Sherm said. “She invited us over.”

“Who's
us
?”

“None of your business,” Sherm said.

He started to close the door, but Seepy got his shoe in the crack.

“What's all that noise?” Seepy said.

The noise was Sally, who was dancing around on her toes and making the loudest noises she could with the duct tape across her mouth.

“It sounds like someone's in trouble,” Seepy said. “I'm coming in.”

“No. You can't do that.”

Seepy shoved on the door with his shoulder. It stopped at the end of the chain. Seepy thought he saw movement in the room, as if someone else had come to the door. The noises from inside the house got a bit louder.

Seepy took a step back. As Sherm tried again to close the door, Seepy rammed into it with his shoulder.

Seepy was not a small man, and he worked out for an hour a day on his home gym.

Sherm, on the other hand, was small and didn't work out at all. The door smacked him in the face, and the screws of the safety chain pulled out of the wall.

Seepy went through the door, carrying his guitar case and looking around for Sally.

He didn't see her at first. Instead he saw Sherm, who was holding his hands over his nose. Blood was coming from between his fingers.

“I didn't mean to hurt you,” Seepy said, just before he saw Jennifer, who was coming at him with a knife raised above her head. If her hair had been in a bun, she would have been a dead ringer for the deranged Anthony Perkins in
Psycho
.

As she brought the knife down, Seepy put his guitar case up to
protect himself. The knife sliced through the nylon and crunched through the wooden base of the guitar with a sound that would have broken Seepy's heart in a different situation. As it was, he didn't have time to think about it. He twisted the guitar case, jerking the knife, which was still embedded in the guitar, out of Jennifer's hand.

As he turned the case over to remove the knife, he saw Sally dangling at the end of the rope.

“Holy crap!” he said.

He wrenched the knife from the case just as Jennifer and Sherm landed on his back.

Sally had no idea what Seepy Benton was doing in her house, but she was happy to see him, even if he had ruined her door frame. But it didn't seem that he was going to be able to do much for her, as now he was rolling around on the floor beneath a pile of Jacksons, who seemed intent on getting their knife back from him and then, no doubt, cutting his throat or something equally messy, unless Sally could do something about it.

She thought she had noticed that the fan above her was beginning to give way. Maybe if she bounced around some more, it would tear loose from the ceiling. Then, if it didn't kill her when it fell, maybe she could do something to help Seepy, who seemed to be getting the worst of it.

Jennifer Jackson was kicking and spitting like a cat, and Sherm was trying to get a grip on Seepy's neck to choke him.

Sally jumped up and down, straining against the rope, abrading the skin of her neck, which was rubbed raw already. A little more skin loss wouldn't look any worse. She'd just have to wear turtlenecks for a while. No scarves, however, though that's what her mother would no doubt have suggested.

The fan was definitely loosening. Sally jumped up and down again, and with a loud squeal the rod holding it to the base on the ceiling tore away. Sally threw herself to the side as the fan crashed to the floor, breaking a couple of the wooden blades.

Sally lay still for a second, and then, somehow, she managed to get
to her knees. With a little fancy maneuvering, she got the rope to slip off the rod. After doing that, she hopped on her knees over to Seepy where Jennifer Jackson had gotten hold of the knife and rolled away.

Jennifer got to her feet, and whirled around, looking even more crazed. She brought the knife around in a wide arc, slashing at Sally's face. Sally leaned back. Before Jennifer could recover from the swing, Sally lunged forward and butted her in the abdomen.

Thrown off-balance, Jennifer stumbled over Sherm and Seepy and fell, hitting the back of her head hard against the floor. Her eyes rolled up into her head, and the knife dropped from her limp fingers.

Sherm turned away from Seepy to look at Sally, his face a bloody mask. She didn't feel a bit sorry for him, and she fell across the back of his legs.

He loosened his grip on Seepy's neck to make a grab for Sally, who rolled up to his thighs, throwing him forward across Seepy.

As Seepy squirmed out from under Sherm, Sally moved up onto Sherm's back, pinning him to the floor.

Seepy got to his feet and looked around. When he saw Jennifer, he picked up the knife that lay beside her. Then he cut the tape that bound Sally's feet and ankles. He didn't try to cut the rope. He loosened the noose and pulled it over her head, tossing the rope aside.

“You can get up now,” he said.

Sally wasn't sure she could. She just rolled off Sherm and lay on her back in the floor.

Seepy reached down to pull the tape from her mouth.

Sally wanted to tell him to be careful, but all she could say was
“Ummmmmpf.”

Seepy grabbed one end of the tape and jerked as hard as he could. It made a loud ripping sound as it came away from her face.

“EEEEyooooooow!”
Sally said.

“My feelings exactly,” Seepy told her.