The Siege (22 page)

Tasha shook her head, confused.

“You started to say, ‘Don’t you think?’ Think what?”

Tasha still couldn’t look him squarely in the eyes, so she pretended interest in checking out the house as she spoke. “I was saying, I think it might not be such a smart idea to hang around this town even for one more night.”

Hocker snorted and waved his hand at her. “Why? Because of those three guys?”

“I mean it,” Tasha said, irritated that her voice was approaching a whine. “You, I mean,
we
…” Her voice choked at the word. “We killed them. If someone finds their bodies, it isn’t going to take a whole hell of a lot of brain power to connect it to us.”

“Don’t sweat it,” Hocker said as he walked into the living room, looking around. “No one’s gonna find ’em.”

“I don’t know,” Tasha said, feeling swept up in a spiral of fear. “When hunting season comes, some guy’s gonna be out in the woods with his dog, and the dog’s gonna catch a whiff. ’N as soon as he starts digging there, he’s gonna find them!”

As she talked, she looked at the closed door, thinking the last thing she wanted on the face of this earth was to be trapped in this house with someone like Hocker! She had to squint her eyes hard to keep from crying.
I’ve been a complete jerk not to dump this creep sooner
, she thought. Her eyes were burning, but she didn’t cry.

Then another, even uglier thought rose in her mind, and try as she might to hold it back, it whispered in a voice as dry and harsh as dead leaves being crushed underfoot.

He’ll hold it over you, you know
… the voice hissed.
He’ll hold it over you and use it to control you! And the only way you’ll ever be free of him will be to
…

“No!” Tasha said, not even sure if it was aloud or not. Tiny tear drops squeezed between each tightly pressed lid.

… Kill him!

She turned away from Hocker and ran her jacket sleeve over her eyes. The fabric felt like sandpaper, and made her eyes water all the more.

You will, though
, the voice whispered, nearly a cackle.
You know it, so you might as well get used to the idea. You may have to beat his brains in like you did to that guy last night!

Her memory filled with the moonlit image of the man’s head, splitting open and oozing not brains, but tangled, rotten fibers as she slammed the stick down again and again and again!

“I think we’ll be comfortable here for a day or two,” Hocker said. “And it sure as hell will be warmer than sleeping in the woods.” He wandered from the dining room to the kitchen while Tasha stood there in the entryway, but his voice seemed to be coming from miles away.

Tasha’s mind was lost, spinning backward in a widening black gulf, hearing Hocker as though his voice was coming over a radio with a torn speaker. She was so bound up in her mounting fear that she hadn’t heard the car when it pulled into the driveway. She became aware of it when she heard two car doors open and slam shut.

“Oh, fuck!” she muttered. Through the tattered lace curtain in the side lights she saw a man and a woman coming up the walkway.

“Hock!” she hissed, moving swiftly on tiptoes to the kitchen and clapping her hand over his mouth before he shouted something.

“Someone’s here,” she whispered close to his ear.

Hocker shook himself free, and leaned his head into the dining room as the front doorknob turned and the door jiggled. One of the windows in the side light vibrated.

“Out the back door?” Tasha asked, but Hocker shook his head and jabbed his finger at the door in the kitchen. “That’s the cellar door. Get down there. Quick!”

Tasha didn’t have time to elaborate on all the reasons why she didn’t want to go down there. She thought they were too obvious, but she didn’t resist when Hocker swung open the door and pushed her toward the stairway. Tasha stumbled down the stairs, but her hand snagged the railing, and she righted herself. The cool, damp air of the cellar surrounded her, and she felt as though she was sinking down, over her head into murky water.

Hocker eased the cellar door shut and came down the stairs right behind her. Sunlight barely pierced the milky-glazed cellar windows, but the view was clear enough for them to see when two people walked by, heading around the house to the back door.

Hocker gripped her by the arm and squeezed hard. “You have all your stuff, don’t you? You didn’t leave anything upstairs?”

Hocker shut up when he heard footsteps on the back porch, and the sound of the back door jiggling in the jamb. A woman’s voice on the outside said something to the other person, but the words were distorted and unintelligible.

“Hide in there,” Hocker said, pointing toward the slatted walls of an old coal bin. Without complaint, Tasha hiked herself over the wall and crouched on the floor. Her motion sent billows of coal dust swirling into her face like a cloud of mosquitoes. She sneezed, but silenced it in the crook of her arm.

Hocker, meanwhile, was looking frantically around the cellar for some left-behind tool he could use as a weapon in case these people came in and found them. He considered using his gun, but he knew the difference between three bums in the woods and two people out looking at a house in broad daylight. A rusted shovel was the best he could find. Clutching the shovel, he leaped over the coal bin wall and joined Tasha, who was huddled on the floor in the darkness.

“I sure as shit don’t want any more trouble,” Hocker said, his breath a warm wash over Tasha’s face. “But if they come down here, I’m gonna have to waste ’em!”

III

“T
here they are,” Dale said. He pressed his face against the window and looked into the empty kitchen while Donna tried the back door. She hadn’t used it yesterday, so she would have been surprised to find it open.

“You’re kidding,” she said, joining him at the window. But there was her ring of keys, lying on the edge of the countertop. “Damn! I must’ve just put them down unconsciously while I was going through the house yesterday. What an idiot!”

Dale smiled and shrugged as he straightened up. “Hey, it’s not the first time,” he said.

But Donna was angry with herself. All her life she had prided herself on not being absent-minded. Other people, not Donna LaPierre, left their keys lying around, and of all the stupid places to leave them!

“Does your sister have spares?” Dale asked.

Donna nodded, biting her lower lip in frustration.

“Well then, you’ve got two choices as I see it. We either go back to your sister’s to get the spare, then drive back to pick up the ones you left inside, or we break a window and get them now.”

Donna’s frown deepened. “If you think you could get a window open without breaking it, I’d rather do that now than get Barbara’s spare. We’ve had more than our share of arguments about the house, and I don’t want her thinking I’d be so damned stupid as to do something like this.”

Dale laughed as he leaned close to the kitchen window, inspecting the lock. It had been made back in the days when you didn’t need high-tech security. This was a simple window with a hasp lock, and if anything, the age of the house would probably make getting in easier because the sashes were old and rotten.

“Yeah, I might be able to do something,” Dale said. He took out his wallet and removed his Visa card. It was easy enough to get the card edge up under the sash, but it took a bit of effort to get the edge to catch onto the lock. After several passes, though, the card knocked the lock aside enough so, with a little upward pressure, it eventually gave.

Dale felt foolish when he hoisted himself up onto the sill and scrambled to get a knee up. Dried paint and crumbling putty dug into his elbows and hands as he pulled himself up and in. Once he finally grabbed the counter edge, the rest was easy.

Inside the house, he pulled himself across the dust-laden countertop and then dropped to the floor. After brushing himself off, he picked up the keys and went to the back door to let Donna in.

“Thanks,” she said when he dropped the culprit keys into her open hand. She made a point of putting them directly into her purse and snapping the purse shut.

“So,” Dale said, scanning the peeling wallpaper of the kitchen, “this is home sweet home, huh?” It took quite a stretch of imagination to see how the place would have looked with fresh paint and paper.

Donna felt a wave of embarrassment as Dale looked around, and she was surprised how, ever since yesterday’s nostalgic trip through her childhood, the house now seemed so much smaller, dingier, and uglier.

“It, uhh, it was a lot nicer when I was a kid,” she said. “It’s funny how small places from your childhood seem when you’re older.”

“I think it’s just great,” Dale said, not entirely convincingly as he wandered from the kitchen to the dining room to the living room. “It must have been cozy.”

They spent the next half hour wandering through the house, upstairs and down. Once she got started, Donna related story after story about things she, Barbara and their friends had done, some funny, some sad. Once they returned to the kitchen, Dale leaned over the kitchen sink and looked out at the distant fields.

“Looks like the harvest has started for some folks,” he said, standing back so Donna could take a look.

Off in the distance, a tractor was making slow passes along row after row of potatoes. Everything was silhouetted against the pale blue sky, and because the closed window muffled the sound, the view had a peculiar dreaminess. Trucks, moving faster than the tractor, sliced back and forth across the field, dropping off empty barrels and picking up full ones.

“Once it starts,” Donna said, her eyes glazing with memory as she watched, “practically everyone in town joins in. If it wasn’t for potatoes, I think a lot of Aroostock County would just dry up and blow away.”

Dale grunted as he watched the workers. They followed in the wake of the tractor, bending over to pick up the potatoes the tractor had loosened from the soil and then putting them in nearby barrels for the truck crew to pick up. They moved slowly, backs bent, their arms mechanically picking up. The sheer drudgery they must feel was obvious as they worked, usually from sunrise to dark, always with one more row to clear.

“God, that looks tedious,” Dale said. It took an effort of will to realize this was not a film, running in dreamy slow motion. These were real people out there, doing backbreaking labor simply to survive!

Donna let out a long sigh. The memory of potato-digging made her shoulders and the small of her back begin to throb.

“It’s wicked hard work,” she said, lapsing for a moment into the Maine accent she had worked so hard to lose over the years. “I picked plenty of potatoes all through high school. The work is hard, and the pay is crap. Why do you think so many kids from the County want to go away to college and never come back? I made a vow when I got out of here that I’d beg on the streets before I’d dig potatoes.” She nodded toward the window. “That’s no way to live!”

Dale stretched out his arm and glanced at his watch. “Hey! If we don’t get a move on, we’re going to be late. Where’s this lead?”

He swung open the door and saw that it led down to the cellar.

“You don’t need to see down there!” Donna said. She crossed the floor and started to swing to door shut, but then something caught her eye and brought her up short. “What the—”

Dale glanced in the direction she was looking but didn’t see anything unusual. It was a rickety stairway leading down into a gloomy cellar. Nothing extraordinary.

Donna swung the cellar down shut and gave the doorknob a firm shake to make sure it was closed. It wasn’t until they were back in the car and driving away that she turned to Dale and said, “Did you see what I saw in there?”

Confused, Dale shook his head. “It’s your house, not mine. I couldn’t tell if there was anything out of the ordinary.”

“On the cellar steps,” Donna said, but her voice choked off momentarily when she remembered the old man’s face, looming out at her from the darkness of the cemetery, looking almost as if he were
dead
.

“What?” Dale said, glancing anxiously up at the house unsure of what he was supposed to see.

“When I came out here yesterday, I never went down there, but just now I saw fresh dirt on the steps. It looked like someone had been down there recently.”

Dale stiffened and scanned the house, but it looked as silent and deserted as it had been when they drove up. “Are you sure you didn’t imagine it? Maybe the dirt wasn’t fresh.”

Donna looked at him with a grim set to her jaw. “I saw what I saw,” she said, her voice low and steady. “I think someone else has been in there. Maybe they’re still there!”

Dale twisted around and put his arm over her shoulder, trying to draw her close. “Look, you’re just getting a little carried away what with last night and all. I’m sure having to go to Larry’s funeral isn’t helping. Your imagination’s working overtime, that’s all.”

Donna shook her head tightly as she put the car into gear and backed around, heading toward the road. When she started forward, she stepped too hard on the gas, and her tires spun out with a scraping hiss.

“Hey, if you’re worried about it,” Dale said, “give your buddy Winfield a call. Have him come out and take a look around. He’s supposed to be keeping an eye on the place, isn’t he?”