Mockingbird (31 page)

  He called Katey from the guard gate – Homer let him use a landline wired to the booth. Louis' cell phone remains back at the truck. Lost now, probably.

  "They say…" Katey's voice drifts away.

  "What?"

  "They say she hurt one of the security guards in there. Real bad. Slit his throat ear to ear."

  Louis feels drunk. Like his center of gravity is a tiny boat on a rapid river.

  "She killed him?"

  Katey shakes her head. "He's not dead. Not yet. Critical condition but somehow he's still alive. I guess you can survive having your throat slit if it isn't too deep. If it doesn't hit an artery." She sniffs. "But they say he's barely holding on."

  "Miriam didn't do it. Or if she did, she had good reason."

  The wind picks up, casting stinging cold rain underneath the umbrella. Louis doesn't even notice it.

  "They took her, Katey. Took her and the other girl."

  "We need to tell the cops. Soon they're going to look at the tapes. And want to talk to me. Might as well get ahead of it." She pats his chest.

  "No. They're in on it. Don't tell them anything."

  She pulls away. "Now you're sounding a bit paranoid."

  "One of them came at me. I was following after this black Mercedes, and a cop car came hurtling through the intersection and blocked me. Next thing I knew, he started shooting at me."

  
And now I've got his gun.

  And it has only three bullets left in the cylinder.

  "Black Mercedes," she says. Blinking. Thinking. "Well – no. No, that can't be right."

  "What? What is it?"

  "It doesn't seem like it should even matter but… the headmaster, Edwin Caldecott, he drives a black Mercedes."

  "Is he here?"

  "No, he never showed up this morning–"

  Then Louis hears the sound of tires splashing through deep puddles.

  Katey says, "Speak of the Devil, and the Devil shall appear."

  Louis turns.

  Sure enough, the black Mercedes. Coming up the drive. Soon it will pass directly in front of them.

  That's the car.

  He's sure of it. Sure as he's been of anything. He feels that certainty crawling around in his marrow like a canal of hungry worms.

  "Katey, I'll have to talk to you later."

  She says something in response but it's swallowed by the storm.

  Louis reaches for the gun and steps out in front of the Mercedes.

  It's time to find Miriam.

 

She doesn't know how long she's been out here.

  She doesn't know where to go.

  All she knows is the rain. And the lightning and the thunder. And the time passing. Time that might be minutes. Time that might be hours.

  The Caldecott estate is sprawling. The house. The greenhouse behind it. A large pond with a white gazebo nesting on an island at its center. Tennis courts. Pool. Barn. Four-car garage. Another smaller barn. A shed, smaller yet.

  The one place she wants to run – the driveway, the one that will presumably take her to the road – is around the front of the house. She tried to run that way but heard voices. She went the other way.

  
You need to get back.

  
Find Louis.

  
Find Wren.

  
Then kill these monsters.

  Now she's at the back of the property. She found a small springhouse of crumbling wood and crooked stone over a spring that has run dry.

  Here she waits. With the cellar spiders and centipedes. Behind a warped wooden door that rattles and bangs any time the wind kicks up.

  Around the property are woods. She could just run wildly through the trees in the rain and the muck. But where would it take her? She's not even sure she has it in her to run that far, that fast.

  And the last thing she wants to do is break her goddamn ankle in a muddy hole. Drown face-down in a puddle fifty yards from the Caldecott estate.

  That leaves the driveway.

  There's probably a gate.

  And a camera.

  It's time, then, to look for a weapon.

  All she has here is the circle of flat stones surrounding the dry spring source (now just a moist dirt pucker like a cancerous asshole). She tries to pick one up, but they're mortared together. The shed, then, she thinks. The shed will have something. A shovel, rake, hedge trimmers, pool skimmer, wasp spray.

  She's about to open the door and peer out–

  But then, a sound.

  At first she thinks it's just the rain. Leave a fan on in a room or listen long and close to a hard rainfall and you'll hear things: murmurs and footsteps and voices calling your name.

  Then it comes again.

  "Miriam!"

  Someone calling her name.

  Except–

  Not just someone.

  Louis.

  It can't be. It's not possible.

  But again: "Miriam.
Miriam
. Where are you?"

  The voice is close. Not a shout, not a holler.

  
My protector
, she thinks. She fiddles with the iron latch on the door and a warm, strange tide of comfort washes over her. She's warm despite stepping out into the cold rain once more. With Louis on her side, she knows she's guarded, protected, shielded from evil.

  She steps out onto the loose stone pavers, clambers up over one of the small grassy berms bordering the springhouse. Her feet barely find purchase over the wet grass and smeary earth.

  Miriam hisses his name. "Louis!
Louis
, over here."

  She pulls herself over the top on her hands and knees.

  And there he stands.

  Not Louis.

  The cop.

  The one from the Keener's junkyard. With the handlebar mustache. Short and stout – not like a little teapot but rather like a thick-shouldered pit bull.

  Miriam is on her hands and knees before him.
You fell for it again. The Mockingbird.

  The cop's got a gun in his black-gloved hands. A small pistol – a .380 maybe. Walther PPK. Water beading on the oiled metal.

  "Please," she says. But she already knows he's foe, not friend.

  He laughs. Coughs. Rain cascades over the brim of his cop hat.

  Then he says, "Miriam, Miriam, it's me, it's me."

  And he says it in Louis's voice.

  Of course.

  "You're the Mockingbird," she says. All the energy and hope is sucked out of her as the wind casts needles of rain against her cheek. The grass is slippery between her fingers.

  "We're all the Mockingbird. Whole family of 'em." He chuckles. "Your man should've killed me when he had the chance."

  He slams the gun into the side of her head. A head already wracked by the pain and daze of a concussion.

  Miriam rolls over.

  Fetal position.

  Everything hurts.

  His fat little hand gets a grip on her hair. A good grip. He twists his wrist so that he winds the hair around his hand, closing his fingers.

  He begins to drag her past the springhouse. Caveman-style. Through the rain and the mud. Not toward the house.

  Toward the pond.

 

The pond's edge is naught but gray clayey sludge. Miriam's knees sink into it as the cop wrenches her arms behind her back, snapping a pair of cuffs tight, too tight. Her chin falls to her chest. She can barely keep it up.

  The pond water shakes and shudders, pocked with rain so hard and so heavy it looks like a hail of pebbles pelting the surface. She cranes her head – dizzy, vision blurry, wondering how much more punishment her poor ruined pumpkin of a skull can take – and can barely see the gazebo at the center.

  Behind her, the cop checks his clip, draws back the action, fires a round.

  Her ears ring from the shot.

  She thinks,
I'm dead, he got me. Bang bang.

  The stink of expended powder worms into her nose.

  He didn't shoot her. Just fired up into the air.

  A signal.

  "Here they come," he says.

  Miriam barely manages to turn her head. She sees two figures crossing toward the pond from the house. Beck holds the umbrella over his mother's head.

  His shirt is soaked with blood on the side.

  Eleanor steps up next to Miriam. Light as a feather. She doesn't even seem to sink into the mud. Clucking her tongue, the old woman bends her knees and crouches down next to Miriam.

  Miriam notices the rain no longer pounds her hair into her scalp. Beck hunkers on the other side of her, holding the umbrella up over her.
Ah.

  "I find you very disappointing," Eleanor says.

  "Sorry, Mom," Miriam croaks.

  A voice hissing at her ear. Beck's. "Be
respectful
, Miss Black."

  "
Fork you
," Miriam hisses. Then she laughs so hard she coughs, almost tumbles forward into the water. It's still a great joke.

  "You're going to die here today," Eleanor says.

  "I thought you wanted me to join your little family."

  "It seems we're past that."

  "Yeah, I'm kind of a
lone wolf
type. I'm also not a psychopathic fuck-faced monster like you lot of lunatics." She hacks again. Spits.
Ptoo
. There's blood in her saliva. "So. There's that."

  The old woman sighs. Looks to her son. "She won't be your bride, then, Beckett. I know you had a romantic connection. I'm sorry."

  "Oh, I'd say that connection is broken," he says.

  "Bride? You really thought–? Jesus, you fucking people. So what's the plan?" Miriam asks. "You gonna do me here? Where's all the pomp and circumstance? The doctor's table and the fire axe and that fucking creepy song you sing? Don't I rate a bad girl's death?"

  Eleanor smiles. Strokes her hair. "You do, dear. But we don't have time for that. Find some peace that your death will be quick. A mercy the other girls did not and will not have, I'm sad to say."

  A small column of fire, a sirocco of bitter and petty rage, rises inside Miriam's heart and she licks her lips and says, "Your husband? Carl? That fucking mutant gurgled so loud when he died. You should've seen his throat, Eleanor. When I was done with it, it looked like a road-killed possum. Like an animal on a highway. Hit again and again, tires pulping the fur and the blood and the
bones
until it's just a pile of red nasty shit."

  "You think to shock me," Eleanor says. "I hated my husband. He served a purpose for us, a purpose that my sons will now pick up."

  "Oh, but you love your sons."

  "Of course. With all my heart."

  Fine. She didn't like that story?
How about another, you old bitch?

  "I saw how your son Beckett is going to die," Miriam says. Grinning now, ear to ear. "He shoots himself, Eleanor. Blows his mind out the back of his head and paints his office walls with brain salad. Boom."

  "That's a lie," Beck seethes. "I'd never–"

  "Shush," Eleanor hisses, a new serrated edge to her voice. "I won't hear any more of this. Beckett, let's go–"

  "It's the guilt!" Miriam yells over the downpour's din. "He can't hack it. Can't deal with what you made him."

  From behind her she hears Eleanor's icy proclamation. "We're going inside. I don't want to be here for this. When we're gone, kill her. Weigh her down. Dump her into the pond." To Beck she says, "Earl will handle this. Won't you, sweet Earl?"

  The cop says, "I will, Mother."

  "Can't hack the grisly bit?" Miriam shrieks as Eleanor leaves. "You're soft, Eleanor! That's where Beckett gets it!
You fucking witch!"

  A hard pressure at the base of her skull appears: the gun.

  The cop – Earl – takes a knee next to her but keeps the gun at her head. "You shut your bitch whore mouth. You say one more thing about my mother and I won't make this quick. I'll blow your fucking feet off. I'll shoot you in the knees. In the hands. In the elbows. One bullet from the side will erase your jaw. But you'll still be alive. Bleeding and screaming. But alive."

  Miriam whispers, "Mommy's boy. But I guess she doesn't feel the same about you, huh? You're just the fucking clean-up boy, aren't you? Mommy's least-favorite little shithead."

  Earl grunts in rage, then clips her again on the side of her head. She doesn't go down this time. Her knees are mired in the mud.

  
Answers that question
. The thought swims laps in her dizzy head.

  The cop stands up. Gets behind her.

  Begins to hum that song, "Wicked Polly."

  Miriam looks over her shoulder.

  She sees two figures under one dark umbrella.

  They're at the house.

  At the side door.

  About to go inside.

  
This is it
, she thinks.

  Makes sense. What put her on this path was a gunshot to the head, and now that's how it ends. Such lovely symmetry. Like two grisly book-ends.

  It's then she hears a flutter of wings.

  Real wings? Or an illusion? She sees, or thinks she sees, a fat-bellied crow fly through the rain and over the pond water, landing at the apex of the gazebo. Miriam can barely see the bird – just a black dot, a shadow on an X-Ray.

  But that changes when the rain stops.

  It doesn't stop falling. Rather, it stops in mid-air.

  Slashes of rain like gray threads. Paused. Frozen in time.

  A dream. An hallucination. An impossible reality.

  She sees the bird better now. Black eyes, shiny like buttons.