Maiden Rock (16 page)

Roger had his anger. It saved him.

Emily felt like all she had was her sorrow and it was endless. She was swimming in it and there was no shore in sight. She might never touch solid ground again. But she had to stay in the world. Her other daughter needed her. Roger needed her.

Never before had she known how much she had needed Krista.

***

All he had wanted to do was finish brewing the batch. That’s all.

But these people had to come knocking at the door, bugging him, asking him about the girl.

He didn’t want to think about the girl. It wasn’t his fault she couldn’t handle the drug. He tried to tell them that. But they wouldn’t listen.

There had been a fight.

When the knife went in him, Hitch thought that he had been kicked. Then he knew what had happened. He recognized the pain—thin and sweet.

He fell to the floor, his legs giving out. All he could see was the haze of the air. Another moment of life pulling away from him.

Out out out, buzzing around him.

The sky was falling on top of him and he couldn’t push it away.

Just another trip, sliding out through the cracks. The knife had slit him open and his soul was winding its way out.

They were all gone. Everyone who had ever known him. All the people who had wanted everything from him. They were gone.

He wondered if his mother would be there to greet him. Please, let her be there, he prayed. Please let her forgive me. Pain was his only company and he blinked it away.

Back.

Blink.

Back.

Done.

W
hen Claire walked into the gingerbread house, she felt as if the witch was still living there. A deep foul smell made her gag and clap a hand to her mouth. What had the witch been brewing? She pulled a protective mask out of her pocket and slipped it over her head.

Two steps into the house and she could see the kitchen. Cupboards hanging open, every counter covered with crap.

Three steps in and she could see two jean-clad legs on the floor of the kitchen, in a pool of liquid. But it was not blood, not red.

The only noise she could hear was the hiss of the gas burner on the stove.

Four steps and she saw a skinny, dark-haired, unshaven man stretched out on the floor, a pot by his head and liquid all over the kitchen floor. Even through the mask, the stink was overwhelming. She knew she shouldn’t even be in there. But she had to check on him.

Three more steps brought her to the body. Claire kicked his foot. Nothing.

She stepped up to his head, leaned over and put a finger to his neck. No pulse. Nothing stirred.

Reading the scene in front of her, it looked like he had fallen into the poisonous brew and drowned in it. Was that even possible?

Claire brought her eyes back to the skinny man. He was lying on his side, his feet stretched out straight. When she walked around him she saw the knife.

A knife stuck out of his back, right under his rib cage.

“Claire?” Bill yelled from outside the house. “You okay in there?”

“Yeah, come on in,” she called.

Claire reached over the man and turned off the gas on the stove. The place was volatile enough on its own. Didn’t need a spark from the stove to set the place off. She tried to open the window in the kitchen but found it was nailed shut. Paranoia.

“Prop the door open,” she said. “And put on your masks.”

Amy came in behind Bill. With their masks and their hats on it was hard to tell them apart. They both looked down at the body.

“Quite dead,” Claire said.

“Good riddance,” Bill said.

Amy snapped. “Don’t even say that.”

“He was a waste.”

“He was a person.”

“He quit being a person the first time he did meth, as far as I’m concerned,” Bill said.

“He had a mother, a family. People loved him,” Amy said.

“Doesn’t sound like they loved him very much anymore. He was a loser,” Bill argued.

“What do you know about it, you judgmental slob? My sister died from an overdose of cocaine. Nobody deserves to die like that.”

That shut Bill up. He mumbled something that might have been, “sorry.”

“You two need to focus,” Claire said. “There’s a knife in his back. I don’t think he put it there himself.”

“Why couldn’t he have just died on his own?” Bill asked. “Then we wouldn’t have to do anything.”

Claire ignored his question although she had had the same thought. “Look around, try not to touch anything, and then let’s get out of here. I don’t want any of us in here for very long.”

***

Amy stared down at the meth dealer, the first dead person she had to deal with on her watch. Hitch’s mouth was slightly open as if he were about to say something. His eyes stared into the farthest distance. His fingers were frozen into claws as if he had been trying to grab hold of the last bit of life.

It was less traumatic than she thought it would be. She was glad it wasn’t a kid or a woman. That would be hard. But this skinny, scabby man looked like he had been aimed at death for a long time. A wave of sorrow came over her, remembering her sister. They hadn’t even found her for three days after she overdosed.

The condition of the house was more shocking to her than the body. She had heard of such places, but couldn’t believe people actually lived in them: the woman with forty cats, the man who never threw anything away, and now these meth users who fouled and trashed their own nest.

Amy carefully walked around the living room, looking for something that would tell them who had done this murder. How would she even know a clue if it was there—in among all the beer cans, newspapers, and fast-food bags?

Bill and Claire were going over the kitchen. Amy looked down the hallway and saw three rooms, two with closed doors. One she guessed was the bathroom, another the bedroom. Maybe she could get a window open in one of the rooms.

Amy pushed open the door of the bathroom, but didn’t go in. The toilet wasn’t working anymore, plugged up with toilet paper and excrement. The bathtub was filled with scummy water. The sink was not even visible under a pile of clothes and grungy towels. She left the door open.

She walked down the hallway and tried to open the other closed door. There seemed to be a slight resistance. She pushed harder.

The door flew open and she started to fall forward into the room.

A string ran from the door to a chair holding a shotgun. First she felt the spray slam into her shoulder. Fire licked her cheeks, her shoulder and her arm.

Then she heard the slap of the shot that cracked the air.

C
laire heard the shot, then a thud. Amy yelped, a short high cry that sounded like the noise a dog makes when it gets hit by a car.

Bill turned and ran toward the sounds. “Amy,” he yelled. Claire was right behind him.

Amy had crumpled onto the floor in the doorway of a bedroom. Bill knelt next to her on the floor and checked her over. Blood gushed out of a hole in her arm and her face was smeared with red.

“I’m okay,” Amy insisted as she tried to sit up, pushing his hands away. As she sat up her eyes rolled back in her head and she slouched forward in a faint. Bill caught her before she could fall.

“Where did she get hit?” Claire asked, looking back into the room at the shotgun that had blasted the deputy.

Bill was busy checking Amy’s wounds. “It looks like the shoulder’s the worst. She must have been turning away as she got hit only on one the side of the face. I can’t find any bleeding on her torso.”

“Thank god.” Claire let Bill handle Amy as she put in an emergency call for an ambulance.

They managed to staunch the blood flow from the worst wound on her upper arm, but Amy came to and screamed, a horrible screeching sound that made Claire want to stop and cover her ears.

Bill put a very competent tourniquet at the top of the injured arm but the lacerations on her face and neck were still oozing blood. Unfortunately, by the time he got the tourniquet on, she had already lost a lot of blood. Claire hoped not too much.

When they settled Amy on the floor, she stopped screaming, but the occasional whimpers that escaped her lips were almost worse.

Claire whispered to Bill, “I’m worried about her going into shock. We’ve got to keep her warm.”

Bill sat down on the floor and lifted Amy’s head into his lap while Claire elevated Amy’s feet on a cardboard box. He wrapped his jacket around the front of her body but Amy had already started to shake.

“Are you going to be okay? I want to see if the ambulance is coming,” Claire asked.

Bill nodded and muttered. “Get out there and get them. She needs help.”

Claire stood out by the highway for what felt like an hour but was only ten minutes. Then she went back in to the house to check on Amy and saw that the young deputy was, in fact, going into bad shock, probably stage 2 as they had called it in her last CPR class.

The young deputy seemed agitated and wasn’t clear about who Bill was. She kept saying, “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot,” and pushing his hands away as he tried to soothe her.

Claire knew that Amy’s agitation and confusion were not good signs. They meant she needed oxygen, possibly even a blood transfusion.

Claire stuck her head back out the front door and was hugely relieved to see the ambulance pull into the driveway.

She ran up to the ambulance, yelling to the EMTs to go into the house, then decided to stay outside. They didn’t need another person in that space; it was crowded enough as it was with two bodies stretched out on the floor.

Her phone rang. “Yeah.”

Rich said her name.

“I can’t talk now.”

Rich spoke fast. “Claire, listen to me. Meg’s gone. She took the old truck.”

“What?” Claire leaned against the side of the ambulance. Why did Meg have to do this now when she had a badly injured deputy and a dead man to deal with?

“I went down to the Fort to grab a bite and when I came back she was gone. The truck is gone.”

“How much gas was in that thing?”

“Enough.”

“A note?”

“Nothing here on the kitchen counter. I haven’t checked her room that thoroughly.” “You call Bridget?”

“Yeah, I called her. She hasn’t heard from Meg.”

Claire looked at the house. The EMTs were bringing a struggling Amy out of the house on a stretcher.

“I gotta go. We went into a meth house and Amy got shot up by a trap. I’m just about to call her parents.” She decided not to

mention the dead man—it would just take too long to explain. “Rich, can you find her? Can you just please find Meg?”

***

Amy fought as hard as she could against the guards, but they were winning. She tried to get the man to help her, but he wouldn’t. She knew his name was Bill. She was sure she knew him.

The guards were going to take her away. She didn’t want them to hurt her anymore.

They had already clawed into her arm. She wasn’t sure why they were doing this to her, but she had to fight them off.

Amy felt like she was going to throw up. Did they poison her?

Her face burned as if a cat had raked it with its claws. Her hand and arm were covered with blood. The man named Bill was trying to hold her hands, to quiet her.

She felt like he was on her side. “Why are they doing this to me?”

“You’re going to be fine. They’ll get you fixed up in no time,” Bill said, but he wasn’t looking at her face. He was just looking at her eyes.

“My face hurts.”

Another voice said to her, “Ma’am, we need you to lie down.” An arm pushed her back down on the stretcher. “Are you coming with me?” Amy asked Bill. “I’ll be there soon.”

“Don’t leave me,” she screamed as the guards put her into a prison wagon. The man wasn’t coming with her. She was on her own. The guards were pushing her onto a bed and strapping her down.

Someone grabbed her arm and jabbed her with something. She screamed. No more. She couldn’t take anymore pain.

Shivering wracked her body. They were trying to force something over her mouth so she couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t breathe.

“This is oxygen. You need it.”

They were lying. Amy was sure they were lying. It was poison they were trying to force into her body.

She tried to push them away, but she couldn’t even lift her arms. She felt so weak. The poison was flowing through her body.

She couldn’t stop them.

She was dying. Faces stared down at her, then the world flashed black and vanished.

***

Rich ran up the stairs to Meg’s room. He stood outside her door for a moment, looking at the poster of a galloping horse she had pinned to her door. He had given her that poster for her twelfth birthday.

Sometimes he wished she was twelve again.

She had been so much easier to handle.

Meg had told him that she would stay home when he had left for the Fort. As far as he knew it was the first time she had ever lied to him.

Rich had checked her room when he was first looking for her, but hadn’t really gone in and looked around. He pushed the door open and scanned the room to see if he could spot a note. Nothing. At least not in plain sight.

The covers of her bed had been tossed over it in what she claimed was “making the bed.” Most of her clothes had been kicked into her closet, which left a small clear space in the middle of the floor. About once a month, Meg went on a rampage and cleaned her room. Then she let it get messy again. He wasn’t sure what the tipping point was for her, when she couldn’t stand it anymore.

Her desk was a pile of books and notebooks. Her laptop hummed but the screen was blank with a small light pulsing on the keyboard. As many times as Meg told him it was okay to let the computer run all the time, it went against his ways.

Rich decided to check her email. He hit the return key and the screen came to life. Hating himself for snooping, he clicked on her mail program.

When Meg’s email folder opened, it made him sad to see that Krista’s file was at the top of her screen. They had been such good friends. He knew how much Meg was missing her.