On the Run (6 page)

The birds milled around at the fence, some making that odd, thrumming-drumming sound, others contributing the grunts. I thought there were twelve of them, although it was difficult to count when they bounced around like popping popcorn. Considering that we were total strangers, they seemed inordinately glad to see us. Or maybe from an emu point of view, people all look alike.

“The females make the drumming sound. Males do the grunts.” Abilene studied them a moment longer. “I think they’re hungry.” She strode toward the fence before I could say more than, “I don’t think we should—”

“And thirsty too. They don’t have any water.”

She turned on a faucet, and the birds crowded around to get drinks from the shallow trough.

“These people ought to be thrown in jail for running off and leaving these birds to get hungry and thirsty!” she declared indignantly, and she sounded as if she’d gladly help round up the errant owners herself.

A big shed stood at one end of the fenced-in area, one side of it open to provide shelter for the birds. Abilene opened the door on a small room at the end of the shed. Several metal barrels stood inside. She grabbed a bucket and scooped feed into a trough that could be filled from inside and accessed by the birds outside. I stayed outside the shed, watching. A noisy squabble started at the trough, with much flapping of ridiculously small wings.

I admired Abilene’s initiative and concern for the birds, but I kept expecting angry Northcutts to come running out with shotgun—or crossbow—yelling at us to get away from their emus. Were they valuable creatures? I had no idea. I suspected, however, that not even a shotgun would keep Abilene from giving the Northcutts an earful about neglecting their animals.

However, no armed Northcutts appeared, just more dust from the milling crowd of emus. I waved a hand in front of my nose.

“I guess there isn’t any point in our hanging around,” I finally said.

Abilene turned, slowly surveying the whole layout. A large old barn with shingles missing from the steep roof stood at the far end of the clearing. It had an abandoned, unused look. Closer were several newer metal outbuildings, purposes not readily discernible. Two huge tanks on metal stands stood off by themselves, one marked with a red, hand-painted G, the other with a D. Over near the woods, a big target of red and white circles was fastened to a protective backdrop of hay bales. For crossbow target practice, perhaps?

“Will you come back later about the job?” Abilene asked.

“I don’t think so. I’ve been here twice now. I think I’ll just move on.”

Abilene stuck her thumbs in the front pockets of her jeans and stretched her shoulders. “I’ll just hang around here for a while, then.”

“Hang around? Why?”

“I wouldn’t mind working here. Taking care of emus and stuff. Maybe when the people come back they’ll give me a job. If I leave, who knows when the emus will get fed again?”

I appreciated her concern for the big birds, but remaining here by herself was surely out of the question. “You can’t just stay here, with no one around—”

“I don’t see anyone to stop me.”

True, but . . . “You don’t know how long they may be gone, and you haven’t any clothes, or food, or place to sleep—”

“I’ll manage.”

It occurred to me that she’d probably spent a night, or perhaps several nights, hiding and sleeping along the road before she’d knocked on my door.

“But if no one comes, or if they come home and won’t give you a job, how will you get back to Dulcy?”

“Hitchhike. Walk.”

I couldn’t approve of that plan, but I could see that Abilene was a most self-sufficient, resourceful—and stubborn—young woman. I still didn’t like the idea of leaving her here. “Okay, I’ll stay too. For a while.”

The day was getting warm. A big oak shaded the deck on this back side of the house. A set of modern, sliding glass doors had been added to the house, the aluminum framework again looking out of place against the old logs. The drapes on this side of the house were also closed, although those covering the sliding glass doors showed a gap at the top where they weren’t quite pulled together. I was tempted to climb up and peek inside. I squashed the temptation. What kind of person visits someone’s home and starts climbing around to peer in the windows? We sat in a couple of wooden lawn chairs on the back deck. There were only two, as if the Northcutts didn’t invite guests to sit with them.

The emus, satisfied now, squished those long legs under them and settled down on the ground, looking rather like long-necked feather dusters. Insects droned in the quiet air. Within a few minutes my eyes drooped. Between the beer drinkers at the Lariat and the truck with the refrigerated unit, I hadn’t slept much last night.

Abilene sat for a while, but within a few minutes she started prowling restlessly. I heard her, but my eyes stayed shut anyway. Next thing I knew, when I opened them, I saw that she’d carried her lawn chair over by the sliding glass doors and was standing on it so she could peer through that gap at the top of the drapes. Her nose was pressed to the glass, hands shielding her eyes.

I started to chide her, but curiosity got in the way. “Can you see anything?”

“I’m not sure,” she said slowly. “But I think you’d better come look.”

6

Something in her tone made me discard my “nice ladies don’t peek” reluctance. She stepped off the chair, and I climbed up on it.

It took my eyes a moment to adjust to the drape-dimmed rooms. The one I was peering into looked as if it had once been the dining room for lodge guests. A heavy, oblong table big enough to seat at least twenty people stood in the center of the room, but there were only two high-backed chairs next to it now. And apparently only a small section at one end of the table was now used for dining. Piles of books, magazines, and manila folders covered every other inch of the surface. A heavy, old-fashioned manual typewriter sat on a metal typing table nearby, and another larger wooden desk held a computer and printer. Shelves filled with books covered an entire wall, and two four-drawer filing cabinets crowded one corner. But I didn’t see anything to put that odd tone in Abilene’s voice.

“In the other room,” she said. “Look in there.”

Not much of the other room was visible through the arched doorway. As I looked down on it through the high-up gap in the drapes, all I could see was one end of a dark sofa, and only the lower half of that was visible. An oversized table lamp blocked the top. Then I spotted them.

Feet. Legs.

Two people were sitting on the sofa.

My first reaction was a panicked and embarrassed,
They’re
going to stand up and catch me looking in their window!
I stumbled backward. Abilene caught me before I tumbled off the lawn chair.

“What do you think?” she asked.

I hadn’t seen anything about the feet and legs to indicate anything unusual, but it did seem odd that the people hadn’t come out to investigate our presence. We hadn’t been particularly quiet. And there was a peculiar immobility, almost a mannequin-like lifelessness about the legs, as if . . .

I hastily detoured that warped train of thought.

“Perhaps they’re napping,” I said.

“Maybe the doorbell isn’t working, and that’s why they didn’t answer it,” Abilene suggested.

I could see we both wanted to come up with mundane explanations for the unmoving feet and legs, but I had to reject the possibility of a non-working doorbell. “I could hear it buzzing, so they surely could too.”

“Two people napping sitting up seems . . . peculiar,” Abilene said.

True. We looked at each other uneasily.

“I’m going to knock.” Abilene ran down the deck to another door and pounded. I climbed on the chair again. The feet and legs on the sofa didn’t move even though Abilene hammered hard enough to rattle the door. I knuckle-rapped the sliding glass door. Still no movement from the legs.

“Maybe we should go back to town and call the authorities,” I said. The creepy feeling now was strong enough to add crashing cymbals to yesterday’s sinister mood music. “This doesn’t look right.”

Abilene didn’t answer, and I turned to look at her. I couldn’t see much of her complexion under the bruises, but I thought she’d paled. At mention of authorities?

I remembered that last night when I asked if she’d done anything criminal she’d hesitated momentarily before saying she didn’t think so. But she hadn’t sounded positive. Perhaps we should get down to specifics on a definition of criminal activity?

Not right now, because another thought occurred to me. “Maybe they’re ill! A heart attack or stroke or—”

“Both at the same time?”

Unlikely, but who knew? Margaret Rau hadn’t mentioned how old the Northcutts were. Maybe something had happened to one of them, and when the other tried to help, that person had collapsed too. Such things happen.

If that were the case, driving all the way back to town to tell someone about this would take much too long. If they were ill, so ill they couldn’t come to the door, they needed help
now
. Oh, for that cell phone Margaret had recommended! But I didn’t have it, so I trotted along the side of the house looking for a way in. All the curtains were pulled, sliding windows tightly shut. Around the corner, on the stubby back side of the house where there was no deck, a frosted-glass window, smaller and higher up than the others, probably a bathroom window, was open an inch or two. Abilene saw me eying it.

“I don’t think I can crawl through that,” she said doubtfully.

“I can.” I was reminded of a flying leap I’d once taken through a bathroom window to escape a guy with a gun. This would be a piece of cake next to that. “But I don’t think the lawn chair will put me up high enough to do it. Can you lift me?”

Abilene inspected my petite-cum-scrawny frame. “I’ve lifted bales of hay that weigh more than you. I grew a
squash
that was as big as you.”

I suspected that, size aside, she was doubtful about my being limber enough to climb through the window, but she politely didn’t voice her doubts. She knelt below the window. I climbed on her shoulders and draped my legs around her neck. She stood up, hands gripping my ankles, and together we edged closer to the wall. I yanked the screen off first, then got my hands on the edge of the sliding window and pushed and pulled until it was open as far as it would go. I braced a hand on the window ledge and scrambled to a standing position on Abilene’s shoulders. She didn’t wobble under my weight, didn’t even complain when I accidentally jammed a finger in her ear.

“We’re pretty good at this. Maybe we should try out for one of those cheerleading squads where they do that pyramid stuff.” Abilene’s voice was muffled, maybe because I now had a foot blocking her mouth.

I scrunched and squeezed through the opening. The bathroom was a simple oblong shape, with the window over the toilet stool. I clambered down to the stool, wishing the lid had been left down because the curved seat was slippery—

I crashed, glasses flying, one foot plunging into the toilet bowl, hands spinning the toilet paper dispenser as I frantically grabbed for anything to keep my face from smashing into the counter.

“Are you okay?” Abilene called.

“More or less.” What looked like acres of toilet paper now covered the bathroom. Coils of it spread on the floor. Banners of it draped the sink. I yanked a streamer of it out of my hair. “But forget trying out for that cheerleading squad.”

I hauled my foot out of the toilet, grabbed a towel, and dried off my pants leg and shoe as best I could. I fumbled around until I found my glasses, blessedly unbroken, and washed my hands. I followed a hallway to the kitchen, squishing wet blobs in the carpet along the way, and opened the outside door. Abilene wrinkled her nose when she stepped inside. Yes, there was a smell, I realized now. An extremely unpleasant smell. I’d been too involved in my tangle with the toilet bowl to notice it before.

Abilene tiptoed warily from the kitchen through the dining room to the room where we’d spotted the legs. Something about the ambiance seemed to call for a tiptoe. I followed. A few feet from the sofa, we both stopped short.

Two people sat on the sofa.

They were holding hands.

They were both quite dead.

And the smell . . .

I couldn’t tell what kind of wound the woman had, something ghastly in the throat or chest area, and what I guessed was coagulated blood covered her body in dark, unmoving streams and clots and blobs from the neck down. It had soaked into her clothing, into the sofa, into the clothing of the man beside her.

The man’s wound was more precise. A neat hole punctuated his temple. I didn’t look at the exit wound beyond a quick glance to see that most of the side of his head had been blown off.

Flies buzzed everywhere. On the bodies, on the bloody furniture, on
me
. I swatted at them frantically.

Then I couldn’t see to swat because my eyes started watering and spinning in dizzy circles, and nausea rose like something live clawing its way up my throat. Death. The smell, the blood, the flies . . . the sickening
awfulness
of it all. I circled around behind the sofa to get away from seeing it all. The sofa was at the rear of the big room, but there was a wide space to walk behind it going from front door to dining room.

“I-I’ve seen dead people at funerals,” Abilene said in a strangled-sounding voice. She put a hand over her nose and mouth. “But never like this.”

“Don’t touch anything.” Although it was an unnecessary warning, since neither of us were making a move toward the bodies. It was well beyond time to check for a pulse.

I moved around to the front side of the sofa again when my eyes—and stomach—finally stopped spinning. Now I saw that a handgun lay on the sofa next to the man’s fingers.

This time it was Abilene who croaked, “We’d better call someone.”

I appreciated that whatever her personal apprehension about the authorities, this was more important. “Right.”

What I wanted to do was plop down somewhere until my knees gained some stability, but I forced myself to look for a phone. It was on an end table beside another sofa set at right angles to the one the bodies were on. I brushed away more flies as I staggered unsteadily to the end table and reached for the phone to dial.