Drawn Into Darkness (13 page)

The loud and unpleasantly familiar voice plus the glare of a Maglite in my eyes startled me from a deep sleep into—I wished it were just a nightmare.

Lying flat on my back in the flashlight's glare amid utter nighttime darkness, I could see only that the man steadied a long gun with his other hand, a double-barreled shotgun pointed at me. His head appeared only as a bobbing shadow, but by his gloating voice I knew well enough who he was: the bogeyman in person. Stoat. Come to get me. Us. Justin in the bunk above me—

At the thought of Justin, adrenaline bolted through me so that I reacted like lightning. Feeling Hypatia's weight coiled atop the warmth of my midsection, I grabbed the snake and flung her into Stoat's face.

He screeched and staggered back, arms flailing so that his Maglite showed me only mad flashes of shotgun out of control and snake convulsing as it fell. On my feet, I yelled, “Justin. Justin!” and grabbed at the top bunk where he should have been as the shotgun went off with a blast that traumatized my ears and my heart; what could Stoat be shooting if not the boy? “Justin!” My arms searching the top bunk found it flat and empty. Where was Justin? In a panic to find him and run from Stoat, I slewed around to look, then stood paralyzed by what I saw.

The Maglite lay on the floor, showing me Stoat with a contorted face and his shotgun shaking in his hands. He aimed the shotgun toward a biggish snake writhing at his feet, but it was not Hypatia. Its crisp markings, diamonds running down its spine, identified it unmistakably as a rattler. So did the raised, quivering tip of its tail, although I could barely hear it buzz through the clamor in my ears.

“The fucker
bit
me!” Stoat yelped, sounding incredulous just before his shotgun roared again, the second barrel blowing the rattlesnake into bits. Then, visibly shaken, he raised his unlovely face to glare at me. For the gray man that he was, he looked unusually white, and I didn't think it was the spotlight effect in the darkness. On his hollow cheek above his goatee, paired puncture wounds and trickles of blood showed garishly red against his pallor. He clenched his long yellow teeth as he said, “You threw a
rattlesnake
at me and it bit me.”

“I'm sorry, I didn't realize!” I responded with spontaneous, genuine contrition. “You'd better sit down.”

“The hell I will. Where's Justin?”

“I wish I knew!” Then, top volume, I called to the night, “Justin!” before I realized how stupid I was being, summoning him to where Stoat would kill him.

Or maybe not. Staggering to the back door, Stoat doubled over, vomiting.

I grabbed the Maglite and darted out the front door, running for my life yet yelling, “Justin? Justin!” because I didn't want to leave him behind. I tried to scan with the Maglite as I ran. The beam jumped like a demented flea but did show me something big and white: Stoat's van, left where he had stopped it in the middle of the tall grass. I surmised that he had rolled it down the hill with the engine and headlights off. Please, I mentally begged some unknown deity. Please, if only he had left the keys in it. I sprinted over to it and yanked at the driver's side door handle.

It didn't open.

With desperate, illogical persistence I shone the Maglite inside, pressing my face against the window to see the ignition. Like it would do me any good if Stoat had locked his keys in the van? Anyway, he hadn't. They were probably in his pocket, damn him. But if the rattlesnake venom killed him—

“Miss Lee Anna.” I gasped at the sound of his voice, mean and mocking and not nearly far enough away. “I can see you and I got my gun reloaded and I will kill you if you don't git over here right now. MOVE.”

I moved, but only to duck behind the van. He couldn't shoot me through it. Damn him, why wasn't he inside the cabin, lying on the floor, dying? Probably rattlesnakes died from biting
him
. But he had to be feeling weak, I thought as I fumbled madly at the Maglite, trying to get it turned off so maybe, just maybe, I could get away from Stoat in the darkness.

The Maglite shone on relentlessly, its dazzling bright bulb illuminating everything except its own handle, where I could not seem to find the on/off switch.

“Bitch, I told you git over here!”

Time was running out. Unable to turn off the damn Maglite, I swung it at the end of my arm and flung it—not nearly far enough away from me, damn everything. Nevertheless, still crouching behind the van, I scuttled toward that bulky vehicle's hind end.

“Goddamn you, Lee Anna. . . .” Stoat said several obscene things about me.

Damn absolutely everything. Now that I had thrown the Maglite away, I could see that darkness had turned disloyal to me. A sickly pallor of dawn had sneaked into the sky. It was Thursday fricking morning. I would be a clear target the minute I stood up.

But if I stayed behind the van, maybe Stoat wasn't strong enough to come after me.

“Bitch,” he roared in what sounded like total exasperation, “git your fat ass over here and fetch me some water!”

Huh. He needed me to do things for him?

“On the count of three, I'm coming after you! One . . .”

Maybe if he wanted a nurse, he wouldn't kill me.

“Two . . .”

“All right,” I called, standing up. “Don't shoot.”

I walked toward him none too steadily. He cursed me every step of the way. And even in the persnickety dawn light I could see why. Half of his face had swollen hugely and turned a lurid purple. He could glare at me out of only one eye. His voice had gone hoarse. “Git me water right now!”

He looked tottery. Yet he managed to follow my every move with the shotgun as I walked into the fishing shack and out the back door to the pump, where I plied the handle long and hard before a gush of water saw fit to emerge.

He emptied the mug of water I gave him with one gulp while I stepped out of range in case he wanted to clout me. But hurting me seemed not to be foremost in his mind. As if he'd been through a fight, he panted with his mouth open, his breath rasping in his throat. “More water!” he ordered me, his voice a croak, and he menaced with the shotgun as if he would be watching me.

By the time I got back with his second mug of water, he had sat down at the picnic table and laid his shotgun on it kind of as if he had put it on a stand. He kept hold of it, swiveling it, finger on the trigger. But by now enough morning light had infiltrated the place so that I could see how ghastly Stoat looked, his forehead sweaty, his skin as gray as the shack's splintery unpainted walls. That place was so small I could take in everything with a single glance. Stoat swilling his water. Dead rattlesnake splattered on the floor. Stoat swiveling his shotgun toward me as if he could make me any more terrified than I was already. And under its double barrel, something on the plank surface of the table. Black block letters drawn in marker on the raw wood.

SORRY LEE

DON'T WORRY

I HAVE A PLAN

I
stood owlishly blinking at those three lines like haiku, cryptic and profound, compressing worlds of hope and fear into a few syllables.

SORRY LEE

DON'T WORRY

I HAVE A PLAN

That note hadn't been there the night before. It could have been written—in the dark, in careful printing like that of a blind man—by only one person. Justin. He had been alive a short time ago.

“Justin,” I blurted, staring at the message. “He ran away.”

Stoat put down his mug, swiveled his head in his lizardlike way, and peered at me with the one flinty eye that wasn't swollen shut. “What you mean, Justin ran away?”

I felt like crying because Justin had sneaked away like the coward I knew he wasn't. I felt like laughing because Stoat wouldn't get to kill him today. I had to keep my voice very neutral so that Stoat would not take offense and kill me instead. “Justin wrote that.” I pointed. “He must have left right after I went to sleep.”

“Gee, ain't that too bad.” The water seemed to have lubricated Stoat's wheezing somewhat. “And you lying in wait for me with a rattlesnake in your hand. Fixing to kill me.”

He gave me way too much credit. Me, some sort of superwoman wielding a rattlesnake instead of a zap gun? My mouth hung open but words failed me.

“Stupid bitch.” Creepily calm, Stoat began to feel surreal to me, a horror-movie monster whose ballooning purple face might explode at any moment. “You think I'm going to die, don't you?” He pointed his shotgun at me. “Say it.”

I stood there unable to say a thing.

Stoat said, “It so happens I got double vision right now, but if I shoot one of you, I guarantee I'll get you both.” The shotgun's double barrel wavered, showing how weak he felt, and how dangerous. “Go ahead—say you mean for me to die.”

Just in time I got my big mouth back. “I certainly hope so,” I told him brightly.

“Huh.” He put the shotgun down on the table as if it were too heavy for him. “Well, I ain't gonna oblige you,” he lectured me. “See, I'm the kind of person that if you mess with me,
you
die, not me.”

He paused to breathe heavily. Some sort of comment seemed expected. “I believe you,” I said politely.

“I need you for a couple days, but soon as I can, I
will
kill you, tricky bitch. I—what the hell?”

His voice shot up and his single viable eye widened, staring past me. I turned to see what had spooked him.

“Hypatia!” I greeted the oak snake emerging from under my bunk with the absurd joy of seeing a friend during a difficult time. So graceful, the way she poured herself like a meandering stream—

BAM.
Shotgun, so close, so loud, I jumped and screamed. Hypatia disintegrated. I stood gulping and quaking. Stoat was a good shot.

“Git me some more water,” he ordered, “then clean up them dead snakes.”

•   •   •

Thomas Hart Benton murals distinguished the ballroom-sized lobby of the skyscraper where Quinn Leppo worked. Podunk people touring the Big Apple stood gawking, but Quinn strode through without hesitation, tall, reasonably handsome in a three-piece suit custom-tailored to give his long legs and narrow shoulders the most flattering fit, all banker. Or so he might appear, Quinn thought as the elevator lifted him to his office on the twenty-second floor. Hardly anyone ever looked closely at his tie or his socks. He wore plain socks today, but his tie featured a tiny print of Munch's
The Scream
. Tomorrow, Friday, he would wear his TGIF socks.

In his office—as midlevel management, Quinn had scored an office with a window—he immediately set down his Starbucks coffee and checked his e-mail. He could have done it on his iPhone during his subway ride, but he hated working before he got to work. He rolled his eyes when he saw, again, the e-mail from his mother that had been there since yesterday afternoon. Guiltily aware that he hadn't phoned her, sure it would be mama drama, he had left it unopened at the time, and again last night, and in the bright light of morning he felt inclined to leave it unopened yet once more. But if he did, he'd have to begin actual work. With a sigh, he clicked.

What the ruck?

Hello family of Liana Clymer, aka Liana Leppo. This is Deputy Bernardo Morales of the Maypop County (Florida) Sheriff's Office contacting you.

Quinn read on with rapidly increasing consternation. Schweitzer, dead?
Shot?
Mom had to be heartbroken, especially at this bad time when she was still getting over Dad's defection. But Quinn had learned to distance himself from his mother's feelings, so this concerned him more: Mom would never willingly have gone away and left Schweitzer's dead body on the floor.

And who could have shot Schweitzer? Unbelievable.

Was this e-mail maybe a hoax? Mom was capable of doing outrageous things, such as the time she painted her car with quotes from her favorite philosophers interspersed with daisies, or another time when she had accumulated a variety of concrete animals on the front yard and dressed them up in fancy finds from Goodwill. Could she maybe have sent this e-mail herself as a weird kind of comeuppance to him for not answering her calls?

The reaction she desired from him being, of course, a phone call.

Damn. Trapped. He brought up his mother's name on his cell phone and, feeling doomed, he thumbed the green button with every expectation of hearing her answer ever so innocently, “Oh, hello, sweetie!”

But he didn't even get a ringtone. Just a recorded voice nasally informing him that the subscriber was unavailable.

Huh. Not good. Quinn pondered a moment, drumming his fingertips on his desktop, then swung into serious action. Stepping up to the plate was what had gotten him early promotion to the position he held. He looked at the e-mail's addressees and decided to call his brother first. Grandma and Grandpa might not have seen the e-mail yet; they didn't check every day. Uncle Hi (Hiram, the Hi Clymer) and Uncle Rocky (Rockwell, the Rock Clymer) were not likely to give a shit. For that matter, Grandma and Grandpa would dismiss the situation as “one of Liana's shenanigans” when they heard. Quinn called his brother, who lived on the fringes of the megalopolis in New Jersey.

Forrest answered his cell phone on the first ring. “What's up, Suit? Wait, I bet I can guess. You just got around to reading that weird e-mail from Mom. Or about Mom. Whichever.”

“Yeah, well, when did
you
read it?”

“This morning. I put it off. Like you.”

“Well, what do you think?”

“At first I figured maybe it was her trying to do a number on us.”

“Same here. So I tried to call her—”

“And her phone seems to be shut off,” Forrest finished for him. “Which would never happen. Unless maybe she let her battery funk out—”

“As has been known to happen.”

“True.”

“So what do we do about it?” Quinn asked with more than the usual New York City edge. He had always been quick, and his younger brother had always been—not slow, exactly, but in no damn hurry, and it had always annoyed him that Forrie seemed to do just fine in his lackadaisical way.

“I been thinking about that,” Forrie drawled, and Quinn could have sworn his kid brother was intentionally trying to irritate him. “So I called the Sheriff's Office down there in Maypop.”

“Did you?”
For Forrest, this was an impressive show of initiative. “What did they say?”

“They say yeah, Mom seems to be missing, but they haven't done anything because they need a family member to request an investigation.”

“I'm going down there,” Quinn said. “Where are you now?” An oblique way of asking whether Forrest could go along, or even wanted to.

“Out at a bridge site in a hard hat,” Forrie said, “but I can get to Newark Airport in a couple of hours.”

“Have you spoken to Jeb and Derry?” Meaning Deb and Jerry: Mom's mom, Deborah, and Mom's dad, Gerald. Speaking of the Clymer grandparents so unceremoniously helped Quinn keep them safely distanced, emotionally if not geographically. Jeb and Derry's fieldstone farmhouse south of Philadelphia was not nearly far enough away. Even before the divorce, going to visit there had felt like walking into a thicker dimension in which his childhood, which he wanted to leave behind, hung somehow preserved as if caught in Jell-O.

Forrie said, “Hell, no. You think I'm going to tangle with those two old chain saws?”

“Well, one of us has to call them and tell them we're going to see about Mom.”

“They won't care. They'll be glad they're off the hook.”

Silence, because this was too true.

“All right,” Quinn said finally, “I'll flip you for it when we get to the airport.”

“Call me when you know which airline.” Anyone else would have been concerned about tickets and airfare, but Forrie was content to leave everything up to Quinn.

“Right. Get moving.”

Hanging up, Quinn knew he ought to get moving himself, arranging to take personal days, delegating his workload, finagling project extensions, persuading colleagues to cover for him, providing for the care and feeding of his job as if it were family. After which the biological family, his grandparents and his two uncles, would be happy to stay at home all smug and virtuous.

Quinn took a moment to lean back in his expensively comfortable desk chair, checking on his own emotional weather. It startled and gratified him that he and Forrie seemed to be on the same page for once. But it also gave him kind of a chill he didn't like. Forrie wouldn't be going anywhere unless he felt afraid, as Quinn felt afraid, that something serious had happened to Mom.

•   •   •

Down on my hands and knees on the rough wooden floor, at gunpoint, trying to gather goopy remnants of dead snake with a scrap of cardboard, I considered that Zeno or any other Stoic had nothing on me when it came to accepting the vicissitudes of life.

“Hurry up,” Stoat said.

Why? It wasn't like we were going anywhere. “I need a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser,” I said, thinking of the hypercivilized ads on TV and trying to joke.

“Just shut up and do it.” Stoat sounded extra cranky. I realized he had to be in a great deal of pain, although he would never say it or show it. But surely he felt like killing something. While keeping his shotgun close at hand, he had his knife out also and was flicking it into the table over and over again, as if practicing to improve his short-range accuracy. Cold little lizard feet of fear scampered up my spine, and I hurried to collect the ophidian carnage and carry it outdoors, where, I had decided, I would just keep going. Starving in a wilderness would be way better than being terrorized by Stoat.

But it was as if he had read my mind. “Stop right there,” he ordered as I reached the back door. “Stay where you are and pitch the stuff outside and come back here.”

“But I need to go to the privy!” The moment I said this, it became suddenly and urgently true.

“Privy,” he mocked. “What the hell is a privy?”

I tried again. “I need to pee.”

“Too bad. Either hold it or else squat where I can see you.”

“You've got to be kidding.”

He raised the shotgun and thumbed back one of the hammers with a click.

“Okay, okay!” I threw my cardboard and its contents into the bushes, decided I was going to have to delay urination a little longer, and came back inside to look at the snake blood on the floor. No way could I get it up without a scrub brush and water.

“Would you like something to eat?” I asked Stoat as a diversion.

“Hell, no. I still feel like I'm gonna puke. You eat if you want to.”

This was going to be a very long day. Unless it was shortened by death, either his or mine.

And if he was going to die from the snakebite, I would have thought he'd be doing it by now. Damn.

Although not really hungry, I decided to eat for the sake of something to do, or, more important, something for Stoat to watch me do. I needed to keep him occupied in ways that did not involve shooting me. Looking around our too-cozy hut, I found the multiple-purpose pocket tool. Had Justin intentionally left it for me? Was there any way I could use it to escape from Stoat? Both questions drowned, answerless, in my swampy mind as I looked over the selection of possible food. I saw no cans missing. If Justin hadn't taken the can opener and something to eat, what the heck kind of plan could he have? My whole body weakened with worry for him.

I made myself open a can of peaches and sit down at the table across from Stoat and his gun.

“I hope you don't really think I threw that rattlesnake at you on purpose,” I told Stoat after a while. “I'm not crazy. It's just that you surprised me, that's all, and I thought it was the other snake.”

It was difficult to interpret any expression on his grotesquely swollen face and in his one functional eye. But as far as I could tell, he was staring at me as if I were the freak.

“I didn't mean to hurt you,” I said, which, strictly speaking, was true. I had meant only to escape from him. And looking at him gave me an extreme case of mixed feelings. Vengefully glad I had wreaked such damage. Appalled, shuddering, to know I had grabbed a rattlesnake with my bare hand. Sorry for him, sorry about his pain, and I couldn't believe my own empathy for this creep. Even more unbelievably, I felt grudging admiration for him; the bastard was so tough he wouldn't give in to the poison in his system. He refused to pass out or even lie down.

My face must have shown far too much. “Don't you dare pity me!” Stoat growled. I sensed he would have liked to shout, but his breathing was too shallow, his face pearled with sweat, and a pulse pounded in his temple. “I
thank
you for this goddamn pain because it means I can't sleep and you ain't got a chance in hell to get away until I feel better, at which point you're going to be the one to die, Miss Lee Anna. I advise you to keep that in mind.”