The Winslow Incident (35 page)

“C’mon, Aaron,” she told him. Even
in the moonlight she could see he was scared. “C’mon,” she said again ’cause
she couldn’t think of anything else to say. Maybe he felt embarrassed because
he was still in his pajamas.

Violet started to feel scared
again too . . . she didn’t understand what was going on. Think happy thoughts,
her mom always told her when she was afraid, like when she had to get a shot.
So she thought about when Boo was a baby kitten (just a teensy pouf of gray
fur), and about playing on the swings in the park for so long she would dream
all night about swinging, and about her mommy tucking her and Daisy in at
bedtime—snug as bugs in a rug—and she felt better.

It felt better to be out of the
hotel too. What was Mr. Adair so mad about, anyway?
Mrs. Adair is nice; she
gives us treats even when it isn’t a special occasion day. Sean’s nice too.
Violet
knew that Aaron would feel safer if only he could be with his big brother. It
was weird, she realized then, that Sean and Hazel weren’t together like usual.
Violet hoped that when she got older she’d have a cute boyfriend too. Maybe
Aaron, maybe Timmy Hotchkiss.

But Aaron’s dad was really mean
tonight. Violet could hear him yelling all the way down the hallway and when
she heard a door open and then slam shut again, she leaned her head out into
the hall and saw Aaron standing there all alone and told him, “Psst! Come in
here.”

She couldn’t think about her own
daddy right now, wouldn’t let herself think about her mommy. “La-la-la,” she
sang loud to hide it away.

“La-la-la,” Daisy echoed.

“As I was walking by the lake,”
Violet chanted and Daisy laughed. “I met a little rattlesnake.”

Aaron gave her a funny look but
she kept going ’cause it shut up Daisy with her “Look, look!” and kept Violet’s
mind off other things.

She and Daisy chanted together: “I
gave him so much jelly cake, it made his little belly ache! One, two, three,”
they shouted as they ducked under the trees and into the next yard, “out goes
she!”

Daisy giggled like crazy, just
like whenever their daddy tickled her feet.

She’s a good girl
, Violet thought.
I’m a good girl.

When they entered the last
backyard on Park Street behind old Mr. Mathers’ mansion, Violet shushed Daisy.
Every light in the tall house was on, it looked like, all the way up to the
attic. But she never even thought about stopping there no matter how bright it
was. Because Ben Mathers was
not
nice—he yelled at them all the
time, even when they were playing quietly.

He was yelling now too. And wearing
goggles and a funny hat.

As they tiptoed past the back of
the house, Violet could see him through the mudroom window talking to some man
whose back was to them (but it looked like Cal from the Fish ’n Bait maybe) and
she heard Mr. Mathers yell, “How the devil else will we put a stop to this?”

And the other man, Cal maybe, held
up his hands like he didn’t agree but didn’t want to fight about it.

“Why do we let them get away with
it?” Mr. Mathers kept on shouting. “Time after time! It has got to stop!”

Violet looked at Aaron and he
looked back at her really worried. This wasn’t like when they dare each other
to steal candy from the Mercantile or pretend Old Lady Winslow is a witch.

This is
really
scary.

“The shit’s hit the fan,” her
daddy would say.

When they reached the back of the
bakery, she noticed lights on upstairs in her own house . . . shining out from
the bathroom and her and Daisy’s bedroom. The front door hung open. She thought
about hiding inside but then realized,
Isn’t that the first place anybody’d
look?

Leading them up the rise in the
opposite direction of the house, Violet resolved that when they made it there,
they’d hide really good. Like Hazel told them to.

It’s the best place to hide
,
she thought.
We play there every day. Nobody
else, only us. So it’s the very best place.

She just hoped Hawkin Rhone wasn’t
anywhere around.

S
upported against the kitchen sink, staring at
her reflection in the window, it occurred to Honey Adair that it was already dark
out again. The days left quickly now and the nights stayed long. She didn’t
know how that could be. It was summer so that simply could not be.

Yet it was, and behind the image
in the window she recognized as her own, a slideshow played over and over: her
husband Samuel threatening her temple with the hammer he uses to pound nails
into loose boards on the porch, ink-black creatures as big as horses and with
wings like bats skulking out of the Second Chance mineshaft, and her beautiful
sons flung over the mountaintop, away from her forever.

When did I last see my boys?

She glanced briefly over her
shoulder, at the disaster area the kitchen had become.

The hotel was displeased, she
knew. With the infirmity and the malodor and the wailing, the hotel was displeased.
Which was why Honey kept quiet, she didn’t want The Winslow to notice her . . .
didn’t want it to see her like this, not taking care of it like she’s supposed
to.

If the hotel becomes wet with
blood
, she thought,
I’ll never get it
clean again.

Blood—like the time Sean
sliced through the web of flesh between his thumb and index finger on the
pantry door’s split hinge that she’d begged Samuel time and again to fix. She’d
rinsed the wound in this very sink and seeing how deep the gash went, bound up
his hand and ran him to Dr. Foster’s place. Later, after they’d come home with
Sean stitched up, she’d gone back to the sink. She’d made navy bean soup for
dinner that night and four bowls sat waiting to be washed.

The bowls were full of
blood—her son’s blood—and she’d gone weak and queasy with the
helplessness of it then too.

Where are my sons?
she silently asked her reflection as visions of fire
danced behind her.

T
his was Fritz Earley’s worst nightmare.

As soon as he’d hung up with Hank
from Stepstone Feed Supply (Hank had chewed him a new one, all right), Fritz
had jumped in his truck and headed for Winslow. Because between calling him a
cheap bastard and a thieving sonofabitch, what Hank had to tell Fritz was
chilling: he’d found ergot fungus in last week’s delivery of feed.

Driving up Yellow Jacket Pass,
vacillating over whether to stop first at Holloway Ranch or head straight to
Rhone Bakery, Fritz had pleaded with the good Lord that if the fungus hadn’t
also infested the flour he’d delivered to the bakery, he would turn over a new
leaf and become a better man. Clearly his prayers had come too late. Clearly
Fritz would not be considered a better man anytime soon.

Now Fritz was jostling around in
the back of an El Camino making its way along rutted Winslow Road. With every
dip, he slammed painfully against the wheel well.
I should’ve told somebody
I was coming up here.
Before shoving him into the truck bed, Pard
Holloway’s ranch hands had roughed him up enough to make him wish he’d told
somebody he was coming up here and why. Anybody. His bruised eye and split lip
pulsed with the question:
Why didn’t I?

Because you didn’t want anybody
to know, because you hoped to keep it quiet.

An accident, that’s all, surely
people would understand that? Everybody makes a mistake every once in a while.
Only Fritz knew he shouldn’t have bought that grain on the cheap, knew the deal
was almost too good to be on the up and up. But a man’s in business to make a
profit.

Fritz touched his wounded face and
winced. He was beginning to understand how much that inexpensive grain might
really cost him, how quickly the price was rising.

There was going to be holy hell to
pay once Holloway figured this out.
On Fritz’s way up to Winslow he’d
dreaded dealing with Pard Holloway but figured he’d be reasonable once Fritz
insisted on compensating him above and beyond any actual losses. Sure, Holloway
was a hard bastard, but he was a pragmatic bastard at heart who understood the
bottom line.

That was before Fritz had reached
the bridge and saw what was happening up here.

The road surface changed to gravel
and Fritz realized they were headed up the driveway to The Winslow Hotel. He
wondered why they weren’t driving to Holloway Ranch. “Where are we going?” he
shouted at Kenny Clark and Pete Hammond in the cab.

Over his shoulder, Kenny said, “We’re
tossing you in with the sickos to see if you catch it.”

Did I hear him right?

The El Camino stopped with a lurch
that caught Fritz off balance and sent him crashing into the wheel well again.
Then Kenny got out of the cab and leapt into the truck bed with a clomp of
boots, the weight of him bouncing the truck up and down. He lunged for Fritz as
if he might try to escape.

It was laughable. To where would
he escape? There were woods on all sides, it was dark, he didn’t know his way
around, he was too fat to run fast or far, and he didn’t have a Winchester like
the one Pete was aiming at him.

“It can’t be caught,” Fritz said.

“Get up!” Kenny wrenched him forward
by the arm.

“What do you think I was trying to
tell you before you smashed my face in?” There’d been a blond kid at the bridge
and Fritz could tell by his eyes that he got it, but he was battered too and
had looked away.

“Shut up and get moving!” Kenny
pushed him out of the truck and Fritz fell down into the driveway. The impact
cut gravel into his hands and knees.

Fritz looked up at Pete and his
rifle. “Do
you
understand me? It can’t be caught.”

“Guess we’ll find out,” Pete said.

Kenny jumped down into the gravel.
“Get up there.” He shoved Fritz toward the hotel. “And if we catch you anyplace
else, we won’t go so easy on you.”

Pete cocked the rifle.

“I get it, I get it.” Fritz stood
but then stumbled again on his own and felt oddly embarrassed.

Kenny turned, muttering, “We’ll be
back later to collect what’s left of you.”

Despite that harrowing promise,
Fritz felt relieved when Kenny and Pete got back in the El Camino and sped down
the driveway. At least the beating was over. For now, anyway.

With nowhere else to go, he headed
up the wide stone steps—only to stop dead in his tracks once he reached
the top and the hotel revealed itself to him.

What is happening here?

Large red
X
’s marked the
tall windows and doors of The Winslow. An age-old warning of plague that he
knew meant stay away. And an inviolable order that the afflicted are to remain
inside.

This was only the beginning of
Fritz Earley’s worst nightmare.

T
he pain in Hazel’s arm woke her just a few
hours after she’d fallen asleep in the flower-print, burst-stuffing chair that
had been her mother’s favorite place to sit. She felt stiff and out of sorts.

Out of sorts.
That was hilarious and she actually laughed a little.
Oh,
we’re all fine, thank you, really . . . just a bit out of sorts.

With some effort she sat up. The
mantel clock claimed it to be three o’clock. Nothing had changed except for the
stiffness in her back from sleeping in the chair and new tenderness in her ribs
where she’d cracked against the porch railing at The Winslow.

She dug into her pocket and came
up with a few Lemonheads and her last Percocet. She swallowed the pill before
popping the candy onto her tongue. When she chewed into the soft sourness, her
mouth watered.

“Dad?” she called. “Are you here?”

Dead silence, until Hazel’s
stomach growled ferociously, the sugar and saliva teasing it back to life,
making it think it had a chance at some real food. But she was still afraid to
eat, afraid
everything
had become infested with the ergot.

She adjusted her sling where it’d
slipped off her shoulder and sucked in her breath at the pain, wondering if she
were bone-bruised or bone-broken or both. She wasn’t up to poking around the
wounded area to find out.

Scuffling sounds started up from
outside, as if a number of hurried feet were rushing up the stepping stones toward
the front porch. Hazel held her breath, straining to hear their hushed
conversation over her own clamorous heartbeat.

When the footsteps reached the
porch, the voices rose, high and hysterical, before erupting into maniacal
laughter.

Terrified they were about to pound
on the front door (
Did I lock it? I can’t remember!
) or worse, break a
window like zombies always seem to enjoy doing, Hazel shot out of the chair,
prepared to bolt. But then the footsteps and laughter retreated back to the
street, and she released her breath and placed a hand over her chest to try and
calm her belabored heart.