The Winslow Incident (56 page)

Dinky chuckled. “I shouldn’t’ve
gut shot ya though, Georgie. Ya hardly deserved that.”

“Tiger on my tail!” Penelope
Hotchkiss screamed. She rode fast down the road toward them, legs pumping, wind
in her tangled hair, eyes huge, green bike wobbling wildly beneath her. “
Tiger
!”

When she got closer, they stepped
to either side to let her pass but she swerved and nearly hit Sean anyway with
her bike.

Jinx took off after Penelope,
barking joyfully while she screeched maniacally.

Sean called after her, “Slow down before
you wipe out!”

Then he noticed James Bolinger
standing in the middle of Prospectors Way across from the Chop House, wielding
a ragged, three-foot long board.

Sean figured he must look mad as
hell marching up to James because the tall, skinny kid seemed nervous, saying,
“Guess it’s a good thing it’s hot, seeing as neither one of us has a shirt
anymore.”

Sean came in close to him. “I saw
yours
on
her
, you weaseling bastard!”

James backed up, raising the
board. “Listen—she’s in bad shape. I did what I could to help.”

“I should pound your face right
here and now but I think I’ll save it for later when I can take my time and
really
enjoy it.”

“Aww, let fly,” Dinky urged. “Dry
gulch ’im!”

“Later,” Sean told Dinky. Then to James:
“I came for Aaron.”

“No.” Sweat broke out on James’s
upper lip, dotting his peach fuzz moustache.

“Where’s my brother?” Sean
demanded.

“Why do you want to know?”

“I’m taking him out of here.”

“To where?”

“Home, asshole.”

“The Winslow?” James asked as
though Sean was out of his ever-loving mind. James shifted his weight back and
forth between his feet. “Over my dead body.”

Sean noticed that the board shook
a little in James’s hands. “James, I’m more than willing to step over your dead
body.”

“Sean!” a boy yelled.

The voice sounded like Aaron’s so
Sean swung around to look in the direction of the shout and heard
craack
when the board slammed hard against his head.

This is how Hawkin Rhone felt,
Sean thought
as he went down, down, down—the sun spinning sparks across the
sky—until he fell into the dark.

O
ne cheek pressed into the road, Sean came
around with a banging head, a mouthful of dirt, and Jinx barking loudly in his
ear.

James stood looking down at him,
poised with the board. “You calm now, Adair?”

Sean rolled over onto his back and
sat up, sending his bruised brain crashing against the front of his skull and
bright lights flashing behind his eyes. “I cannot believe you nailed me with
that thing.”

“I can’t let you take Aaron. And
you’d better not go back there either.”

“You’re holding my brother
hostage? Isn’t it enough you finally got what you wanted?”

“You have it completely backward!
Hazel made me promise that if you showed up, I’d take care of you.”

“You’re doing one helluva job.”
Sean closed his eyes against the pain. “
Damn
, James.”

“Sorry, man—you gave me no
choice. They’ve all gone psycho at The Winslow. You can’t take him there.”

“It’s where we
live
, you
dumbass.”

“Not anymore. Just be cool. Stay
here, we’ll take care you.”

“I feel better.”

“No you don’t—you look like
shit.” He raised the board again. “And you’re not taking Aaron.”

Out-weaponed, Sean decided to try a different
tactic. “Okay, we’ll ask Aaron what he wants to do. If he wants to come with
me, you’ll let him go. Deal?”

I
n a filthy room on the second floor of the
Never Tell Brothel, Sean could see Aaron struggling.

“I wanna go with you, but not
there.” The poor kid visibly shook.

“Mom and Dad are at home,” Sean
said. “I bet they miss you.”

“Daddy!” Daisy chimed. “’Member
Mommy hollered at us to eat our eggs?”

“We all got yelled at that
morning,” Sean said.

Daisy pounded Sean’s knee with her
small fists. “You go make those deliveries right now, mister, and I mean right
now!”

“He shouldn’t’ve made you,” Violet
said. “It got moldy.”

James turned from his watch out
the window. “Hazel said that grain guy is in town.”

“Fritz Earley?” Sean stood.
“Where?”

He shrugged. “The Winslow,
probably. That’s where everyone ends up.”

“I have to talk to him.”

“Bullshit you do. Don’t go there,
man, unless you’re spoiling for some serious nastiness.”

“I need to see how my mom’s
doing.”

“Don’t go, Adair.”

“And I need to tell everybody what
happened.”

“They call it the pest house
now—did you know that?”

“The truth. I want the truth out
for once.”

“Trust me—you don’t want
that. Why do you think they call it the pest house, Sean?”

“Patience Mathers is gonna rat me
out anyway.”

“Because they’re all sick and
insane. That’s why.”

“It’ll be better if they hear it from
me.”

James sighed in frustration.
“Fine. But if you want your brother to stay safe, you won’t tell anybody we’re
here.”

“Why would I? Don’t worry.”

“Sean, don’t go!” Aaron cried.

“I’ll come back for you later.” He
mussed up the kid’s hair. “I’ve got things to do.”

Sean pounded down the stairs and
out the empty doorway of the Never Tell, sure that there was only one way to
put Hawkin Rhone back in his grave, the only way he’d finally rest in peace.

Like shadows, Dinky and George
rejoined him on Prospectors Way.

Sean turned to George. “Will you
give me a hand?”

George frowned. “Not sure what you’ve
got brewing is such a smart idea, my friend.”

“Aww, c’mon, Georgie.” Dinky
grinned. “You’ve heard the scuttlebutt rattlin’ this burg like they’s blastin’
up at Yellow Jacket Mine. Let’s get a wiggle on.” He rubbed his hands together
in anticipation. “Sometimes the past needs a good diggin’ up if you aim to make
peace with the nowadays.”

A
ll the ducks are dead—their
heads impaled on stakes lining the driveway to The Winslow. Black eyes stare.
They drip from the neck. And Hazel twitches in fright.

“Wake up, Hazel.”

Sean lags behind her, still
down on Ruby Road. He is barefoot and Hazel thinks maybe the gravel hurts his
feet. Hurry, Sean, she thinks. Hurry.

“Hazel!” Somebody shakes her
shoulder. “You have to wake up.”

Stop it, she tries to say. Wait
for him to catch up to me.
Her back to
the hotel, she cannot see it. She only sees him. But she hears screams erupt
behind her each time the car rounds the third bend and the skeletons jump out
of their graves.

Fingers dig into her cheeks,
moving her head from side to side. “Wake up, wake up!”

Just as Sean starts toward her,
reaching for her, brown eyes smiling, Hazel leaves him there and wills her own
eyes to open, struggling to wake up in Prospect Park.

Marlene Spainhower’s head blocks
the sun. “You’d better come quick!” Marlene gasps.

Hazel bolts upright, blinking away
ducks and wondering how much time has passed since she collapsed to the grass,
unable to take another step.

Marlene stands then and the sun
hits Hazel full in the face. “He’s acting crazy.” Marlene can’t seem to catch
her breath. “He took over the hotel.”

Hazel tries to swallow but her
mouth is too dry. “Who?”

“Mathers.” Rapid, shallow breaths.
“Ben Mathers.”

Hazel squints past Marlene at The
Winslow.

She doesn’t want to go back. She
swore she’d never go back. She stands anyway.

Because she cannot leave her
grandmother alone in the hotel any longer. Not now. Not after the way Ben Mathers
had stared straight at Hazel in church when he preached that wrongs must be
righted, wicked acts atoned for. Not after the way Patience’s eyes had taken on
an especially haunted look last night when she whispered, “Gram and Gramps told
me other forgotten things, Hazel, about you and your family.”

Hazel grabs Marlene’s forearm. “Is
my grandmother okay?”

Marlene is still breathing hard. “Is
anybody okay?”

Hazel releases Marlene’s arm and hurries
to the duck pond to retrieve her tennis shoes. She’ll need them. Otherwise the
gravel driveway will hurt her feet.

Jay is still sitting on the wall
with his feet in the water. “Don’t go up there, Hazel,” he says.

She doesn’t answer him because she
knows she’s going and he knows she’s going, so what’s the point? Instead, she
stands before him dangling her shoes by the laces. “Help me with these, will
you?” she asks because she’s unable to tie them with one arm in a sling.

She doesn’t complain after Jay
knots them too tight. And as she leaves the pond, she wonders where the ducks
are hiding. Though she doesn’t wonder why.

The sun is high, shadows short, so
the world stands in stark relief: no fuzzy details, no soft edges. When she
reaches Ruby Road, she checks both ways before crossing. Just to be safe.
Because
please, please, I can’t take any more pain.

Then she pauses at the driveway
and stares up at The Winslow, trying not to think about the things she saw the last
time she was here, trying her best to forget Samuel Adair raging down the
hallway wielding Sean’s baseball bat or Honey Adair sobbing in the kitchen or
Gus Bolinger and Rose Peabody and all the others quarantined in the
ballroom—the sick growing sicker while spiteful ghosts riot in the tower.

The House of Horrors
, she winces.
The scariest ride in Winslow.

Although skeletons popping out of
their graves would be amusing by comparison.

She shakes her head, tries to
shake off the paralyzing fear.

Don’t think—go!

And that’s that. And that gets her
feet moving.
I’ll go in and get my grandmother and we’ll leave.

Her tennis shoes feel snug, as if
they’d shrunk while drying in the sun.

There are no duck heads impaled on
stakes. Likewise, Sean is nowhere to be seen and she is relieved at that. This
is no place for him. He doesn’t live here anymore. Nobody does. Only the ghosts
belong here now.

She plods up the long driveway
concentrating on nothing more than putting one foot in front of the other, her tennis
shoes going
crunch crunch
with each step in the gravel. She hitches up
her loose shorts—she’s been running around so much, not eating, her hips
barely hold them on anymore.

A chestnut brown horse tethered to
a weathered post swings his big head to watch her pass.

Left, right, left right left she
marches until she reaches the stone steps.
Don’t think. Go.

Cautiously she climbs, her eyes
glued to her feet, and then she’s moving through the soft yard where each step
releases a green grass smell that reminds her of Saturday mornings and trying
to sleep in late but it’s impossible with her father’s lawnmower already going
outside and a football game blaring from the television downstairs.

At the porch steps, she looks up.
Sunlight glints off tall windows in spikes that stab at her eyes. It’s her
family’s hotel: the mansion her great-great-grandfather built with marble fireplaces
carved by a hysterical Norwegian stonemason, where countless summer mornings
she and Sean ate blackberry pancakes together in the kitchen nook, where her
grandfather fell dead to the floor in his bedroom upstairs, where likely her
grandmother now hides, afraid.

With sudden sorrow, Hazel realizes
that never again will her family lay claim to The Winslow. As if corrupted by the
bedlam occurring within, the structure has developed a nasty personality and
now stands beneath the baking sun sweating out absorbed malevolence.

Dark red
X
’s adorn both
walnut doors and each ground floor window.

Beware the pest house
, the lunatic in the Second Chance mineshaft had warned her
yesterday
.

And suddenly she remembers:
plague. Gus Bolinger had taught them about plague during history class. The
Black Death, he called it, and she flashes on the gangrene crawling up Tanner’s
leg. Gus told them the authorities would shout from the streets, “Bring out yer
dead!” and mark the doors of the afflicted with
X
’s to warn away visitors.

Keep away
, she shudders, yet forces herself to climb the steps to
the porch.