The Third Hill North of Town (14 page)

Jon knew instinctively that such a sound was not coming from Julianna, which meant that the owner of the house was home after all. Julianna may have been crazy, but after witnessing the unflinching way she had dealt with the trigger-happy trooper, he believed her incapable of the outright hysteria he could hear in the screamer’s voice. He snatched up the plastic bag from the ground and clutched it to his chest, wondering if the woman had seen him break the padlock, and if that was the reason she sounded so upset. It didn’t seem likely, but she hadn’t started screaming until he broke the lock so he supposed it was a strong possibility. Elijah and Julianna might have done something to set her off, too, he supposed, but either way she was seriously out of control.

Which meant bad news for all of them, no matter who was at fault.

He glanced over at the barn door with the ruined padlock still hanging from the latch, but his quest for gas now seemed pointless. He stared at the house and then over at the woods, and he began to swear in a steady stream as the woman’s unnerving screams blotted out every other noise on the hilltop.

“Fuck it,” he said, making up his mind at last. He bolted for the woods, jackrabbit quick, with panic nipping at his heels like a ravenous basset hound.

 

The bathroom door collided with the wall and Bebe Stockton tumbled into the room and sprawled on her knees on the floor, catching a startled Elijah with his hands still on the open zipper of his jeans as he spun to face her. The woman and the boy gaped at each other with equal horror, struggling to digest the unpleasant fact of each other’s presence in this cozy farmhouse bathroom.

The sound of Jon’s first attempt to break the lock on the barn door across the yard made both of them jump, as if someone had just detonated an M-80 right outside the window.

Bebe thought she had fallen into the clutches of Lucifer Himself, and that her time on the earth was limited to the next few seconds if she couldn’t get away from him. She couldn’t see the fright and bewilderment on Elijah’s handsome young face; what she saw instead was a tall, half-naked black man, standing over her and fingering his zipper. She was convinced he was a homicidal rapist, intent on having his way with her and then slitting her throat.

The second outdoor explosion caused both of them to jump again. Bebe was at her wit’s end, though, so this time she misread the boy’s innocent spasm as a prelude to an attack on her person. She could take no more, and her mouth opened to its widest dimensions, like a small, toothy portal into hell.

“OHSWEETJESUSOHLORDOHJESUSJESUS,” she screamed. “PLEASE DON’T HURT ME OHDEARGODOHJESUSOH MYSWEETLORDJESUS, NONOOHNO, PLEASEPLEASE-PLEASEPLEASE I WON’T TELL ANYONE, JUST DON’T HURT ME, OHGODOHGODOHGOD . . .”

Buffeted backward by this volcanic aural assault, Elijah lost his footing and fell on top of the toilet, crying out in pain as he bruised a rib on the corner of the tank. The grandmotherly looking woman on the floor in front of him was plump but not large; he simply could not fathom how someone so short was able to make such a cataclysmic sound.

“Please, lady,” he whispered. He was too shocked and scared to speak any louder, so he put up his hands in a placating manner. “Please,
please
calm down!”

Bebe couldn’t hear him over her own screeching, and his soothing gestures—which she interpreted as an attempt to deceive her—only made her more desperate to escape than ever. Still wailing at the top of her lungs, she struggled to her feet and tripped into the hall, sure at any second she would feel the grip of the black man’s strange, white-palmed hands on her neck. She had forgotten all about the other woman in the kitchen; her only thought was to get away from the madman in her house.

 

Julianna heard the bathroom door crash into the wall, but she thought it was just poor old Ben Taylor being clumsy and knocking something over in the hallway as he returned from his visit to the outhouse. She wished he’d be more careful; Polly Miller would be upset if he made a mess in her nice clean home.

A loud bang out the window drew her attention to Jon and the barn once again, and she almost cried out as she realized what he was attempting to do.

“What on earth is he
thinking?
” she hissed. “That’s vandalism! He’ll break Günter’s lock and get us all in terrible trouble!”

She gathered her breath to yell out the window at him, but she was too late; he had already raised the rock for a second strike, and he now heaved it at the door again, destroying the lock. Her angry protest died on her lips, however, overmastered by Bebe Stockton’s screams from the bathroom.

 

Bebe once again did not take into account the effects of the phenobarbital on her limbs. In her panicked rush to flee from Elijah, her feet got tangled as she plunged down the hall toward the front door, causing her to take a spill right beside the staircase that led back to her bedroom. She was still howling an ear-piercing prayer to God when the side of her head bounced off the edge of the bottom step, and just like that, her screaming stopped.

Jon Tate was a hundred yards from the farmhouse when he realized the hysterical woman had at last shut up. He knew he should just keep on running, but his legs quit moving of their own accord and he bent double, gasping for air and trying not to pass out after his wild sprint across the pasture. The edge of the woods was only fifty feet in front of him, yet all of a sudden the wall of trees looked less appealing. Now that the screaming had ceased he found he was able to think again, and he was no longer sure that an escape on foot through the dark, wet woods was such a great idea. Julianna and Elijah had apparently managed to calm the woman down, because otherwise Elijah would surely have come outside by now, either seeking help or trying to flee, too. The yard remained empty, however, and everything looked as peaceful and reassuring as it had when they first arrived. Jon shielded his eyes to check out the Edsel on the highway; it was still the only car on the road.

“Shit,” he muttered, ashamed for panicking. Julianna and Elijah could have been having a friendly chat with the owner all along, until Jon set her off by breaking into the barn. All the ruckus had probably been his own fault.

He looked at the woods again, and then back at the farm. Any second now Julianna and Elijah would emerge, and if Jon wasn’t there, they’d figure he’d run out on them. They’d get gas from the owner and leave, and he’d be on his own. Almost without realizing what he was doing, he started walking back to the barn. Within a few steps he picked up his pace, and began to jog.

If the dairy lady is pissed about her padlock,
he thought,
I can always say I was going to leave some money for it.

 

“This isn’t Polly Miller,” Julianna whispered.

She was on her knees beside the dead woman in the hallway, and her eyes were full of tears as she gave up trying to find a pulse in Bebe Stockton’s wrist. Elijah stood next to her, holding a hand to his injured ribcage and breathing in hitches; he was so upset it was all he could do to keep from collapsing on the floor and sobbing.

Julianna smoothed the dress on the stranger’s body. “Do you think she might have been Günter’s sister?”

Her voice sounded thin and haunted, even to her own ears, and her hands shook as she touched Bebe’s round face. A small pool of blood was encircling the dead woman’s head like a grotesque halo.

This will not go unpunished
.

Sanity flickered behind Julianna’s eyes, and the person she had been before her break with reality looked down at the corpse of Bebe Stockton and grimly assessed the situation.

Elijah watched in horror as a stream of urine began to spread around Bebe’s body. His gorge rose instantly, and without warning he leaned over and vomited on his sneakers, barely missing the hem of Julianna’s dress.

When the dairy lady had fled from the bathroom he had scrambled to his feet, intending to run also. Then there had been a sickening thump in the hallway, and the woman’s screams ended abruptly, as if somebody had flicked off the siren on a fire engine. This odd
thump
had scared him more than anything else in his life, and for almost a minute he hadn’t been able to move a muscle. He had stood in the bathroom, gazing through the open door into the hall, and there had been no other sound in the house for what seemed an eternity.

Finally, he had heard quiet footsteps in the hallway, and Julianna glided past the bathroom. She had glanced in at him as she passed, but she didn’t speak; her attention was focused on something ahead of her Elijah couldn’t see. When she disappeared from view he followed her as if in a dream, one slow step at a time. She had been waiting for him right outside the bathroom, however, and only when he had joined her in the hallway did she move to examine the sprawled body at the base of the staircase.

The body of the woman who was dead because of him.

Elijah promptly threw up again. Fortunately he hadn’t eaten in a long while so most of what came up was water, but the smell was still foul, and he reflexively muttered an apology to Julianna. She didn’t even seem to notice, though; she just got to her feet, knees popping, and took a slow, shaky breath.

“I don’t think Günter’s sister is feeling well,” she whispered, still staring at the woman on the floor.

Elijah blinked several times before raising his head to gape at Julianna. “What?”

“Maybe we should just let ourselves out, don’t you think?” she asked. “She probably just needs a nap.” She turned her head to gaze at Elijah. “Were you able to find the alcohol and bandages for Steve’s leg?”

She was standing less than a foot from the corpse, on a dry spot of floor between twin puddles of piss and puke, yet she looked for all the world as if she were simply inquiring about a homework assignment.

Elijah shook his head in disbelief as he realized that the hallucinatory narrative Julianna had been telling herself all along was still intact, regardless of the dead woman beside them. “No, but don’t you think we . . . I mean, we can’t just . . . this is . . . this . . .”

He trailed off in despair.

Fifteen minutes ago, Elijah had thought things couldn’t possibly get any worse. The assault on the state trooper had seemed like Armageddon as it was happening, but it didn’t even come close to
this.
Unlike the state trooper, the woman at their feet had not been shooting at them when she died, nor had she threatened any of them in any way. She had done nothing, in point of fact, but to enter her own bathroom and have the misfortune of running smack into Elijah Hunter.

Elijah Hunter, who had no excuse whatsoever to be in her home. Elijah Hunter, whose uninvited, illegal presence had literally frightened the poor woman to death.

“Oh, Jesus,” he whispered. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

Julianna was aware that her friend Ben was distraught about something but her compassion for him was tempered by a growing sense of urgency. Something was telling her they were wasting precious seconds, and if they didn’t leave soon their trip home might actually be jeopardized. She reached out and put her hand on his shoulder.

“We really must hurry, Benjamin.”

She gave him a gentle squeeze. It was a reassuring, loving touch, and Elijah looked down at her hand on his skin and fought to keep from crying. He wanted very much to be held and comforted right then, but he hadn’t yet learned how to ask for this sort of thing, and Julianna was too intent on what had to be done to perceive just how badly he was hurting.

He swallowed hard a few times, still struggling for control. He knew she was right, but he couldn’t seem to make himself care.

I deserve to be put in prison,
he thought.
I deserve the electric chair.

He lifted his head to tell her to go on without him, but as he looked into her face he found he couldn’t speak. Something in her unwavering green eyes—and in the strength of her grip—told him she would never agree to leave her friend “Ben” behind, and for the first time he began to wonder about the boy she had mistaken him for all along. If he were still alive, he’d be in his fifties, like Julianna, but some instinct told Elijah that the real Ben Taylor was long since dead.

He couldn’t have said why, but understanding the reasons behind Julianna’s delusions now seemed critical to him, as if they might help explain why this nightmare was happening. She was clearly on a mission of some kind, and Elijah was part of her insane journey, like it or not. His fate was now bound to hers by at least one death, and probably two, and whatever happened to him would surely happen to her, as well.

Who was Ben, Julianna?
He almost asked aloud, but he knew she’d tell him he was being silly.
What happened to him?