Authors: Nevada Barr
Even the all-powerful Prophet Sheppard had a yellow streak down his back. Why else work so hard to dominate weak people and children?
Cowards were dangerous.
Elizabeth was one of the bravest people Heath had ever known. Until this. This onslaught of threats and secrets and lies, and something E wasn’t telling her or Gwen or Anna, was disabling her.
Heath knew herself to be a coward. Being disabled scared her. Being a mom terrified her. That she couldn’t keep E safe made her blood run cold. As far as she was concerned her only saving grace was that she’d learned to hide what a big fat scaredy-cat she was. According to Aunt Gwen, that was courage, to be afraid and not let it stop you from doing what was right.
After what had happened to Elizabeth and the other girls when she was nine—what they had done, what had been done to them—it didn’t surprise Heath that E’s courage had holes in it. Being frightened was like getting a soft-tissue injury. Once, and you recovered. If injured again in the same place, it could cripple you. This web of mystery and unknown horrors was the third strike at the core of who Elizabeth was, how she fundamentally viewed herself.
The razor and the bath had been a call for help. It had also been an indicator of how deeply E had suffered—was suffering.
Elizabeth never spoke of the bad old days, not unless she talked about it with her therapist. As far as Heath knew, she’d never spoken to the other two victims about their experience, never contacted anyone from the old compound, never reached out to her mother, never even asked what became of them when the compound was shut down and the families scattered.
Once she’d admitted that sometimes she missed the compound. There were always lots of kids around. They played simple games like tag and Mother-may-I. All the girls played with dolls, handmade of rags and buttons. A lot of the dolls were pretty. The sister-wives took pride in their sewing. As an adult Heath understood that the simplicity and safety Father Sheppard promised were false, but to a little girl, they would have felt real.
For a little kid, it would all have been real: Sheppard’s brand of religion, angels, plural wives, demons, pedophilia, ghosts.
For a long time after she’d moved in with Heath, E was afraid to sleep alone in her room at night for fear demons would get inside of her. Mormons—real Mormons—weren’t big on ghosts or demons. Mormons were a practical people. Heath and Aunt Gwen explained over and over that Sheppard invented the evil spirits to use as another tool of control. Mostly she believed them.
Most wasn’t all.
Then there were those damn ethereal footsteps. Given the situation, even Heath’s skin had gone prickly and cold. Heath guessed that E, who still slept with every part of her under the covers because exposed bits were irresistible to monsters living beneath beds, had been more freaked out than she’d let on.
Elizabeth was hiding her emotions. Heath suspected it was a result of too much unconditional love. Gwen and Heath loved E way too much. Even Anna showed glimmers of it. None of them could hide the fact that they were bleeding to death behind their eyes, could diguise the great howling need to do something. If Elizabeth had said, “Hey, if you guys chop your hands off, I’ll feel better,” Heath would be rolling up her sleeves while Gwen ran for the surgical saw.
That kind of love had to be a burden. Like having a Dodge Ram parked on one’s shoulders. Dealing with that, and the fact that she was being called a whore—with the pictures to prove it—to everybody she knew, and about a zillion people she didn’t, that her social life was deader than roadkill, that there was no way she could go back to school in the fall without wearing a paper bag over her head so nobody would recognize her, and that some creep might actually be slithering out of his hole to lay his creepy hands on her to …
Take her,
Heath thought suddenly. For a minute she thought she would vomit. Grabbing the bar over her bed, she dragged herself into a sitting position.
Take her.
The psycho who had taken her and the other little girls so long ago was dead, Heath reassured herself. Not imprisoned, not appealing his death sentence, not getting out for good behavior: dead. Good and dead.
Copycat.
She was definitely going to vomit.
Was E’s stalker planning to re-create the Rocky Mountain horror?
Heath knew lightning did strike twice in the same place.
“Don’t go there,” Heath said out loud, but not so loudly E might hear and come down. “Not at night when there are ghosts whisking around.” “There” was a place to be avoided. “There” was supposed to be where the bad things were. Tonight, “there” was here.
“Wily,” she whispered. He was already awake and watching her, his eyebrows cocked. “Come up on the bed.”
Using the noise of Kurt’s tires crunching on gravel for cover, Denise moved through the dark as fast as she dared, heading toward the porch light. She cursed herself for not having gotten closer earlier. There were plenty of woods, plenty of darkness. It would have been safe enough to have halved the distance. More than that; she should have lain under the back porch or squatted behind the trash cans at the side of the house.
Paulette had timed the walk during the day, over country that was as familiar to her as the floor plan of her house. Denise should have timed it for herself, in the dark, with her lack of familiarity. There had been time to pace it off half a dozen times. Instead, she’d sat in the hot darkness of the nursery and toyed with the wicked imp called Hope.
The crunching stopped before she’d traveled thirty feet. Kurt’s truck door screeched open, then slammed shut. One hand on a tree, a foot not yet fallen, Denise froze. The truck engine ticked as it cooled. A night bird called. She had no idea which one. She was law enforcement, not interpretation. An image of the Indians in old Westerns imitating birds to signal an attack struck her as horrifically funny. Hysterical. She held the laughter in with an effort, her chest twitching and her throat clenching.
No more sounds from the soon-to-be dead man. Was Kurt lighting a cigarette or checking his cell phone? Did he stand by the truck listening, sensing danger? Had Paulette accidentally tipped him off, and he was waiting for Denise with a knife or a pistol? Laughter dried up in her lungs, tickling like ashes when she breathed too deeply.
Denise really had to pee.
Crunch, crunch, crunch: gravel tread under heavy boots. He was coming for her. Fear paralyzed her mind, and Denise could not run. She could not even lower her raised foot, or draw in breath. Clomp, clomp, clomp: ascending the three wooden steps to the front door.
All was well.
Home, to the shower, to his death, just like it was supposed to be. As Kurt banged the screen and front doors, Denise sucked in a lungful of air, then ran lightly toward the lamp on the porch, her light in the darkness, her star of Bethlehem. The flame the moth incinerated itself in.
Panting as if she’d sprinted a hundred yards rather than crept thirty, she stopped short of the circle of light leaching into the dirt-bare yard.
Kurt was inside the house.
Maybe
Kurt was inside. Denise had heard the front door slam. Was it possible he’d quietly opened it again, gone back to the truck for something? No, he wasn’t the quiet type; she would have heard him. Maybe he’d only pretended to go inside. Maybe he’d heard her and slammed the doors to make her think he was inside when, all the while, he was sneaking around the side of the shack with an axe raised over his head.
Don’t even think that,
Denise commanded herself silently. They’d been careful. He suspected nothing.
He was in the house. That was the end of it.
The end of Kurt the baby killer.
Denise breathed in slowly to settle her nerves. Everything was as it was supposed to be. No muss, no fuss, like clockwork. That was the plan. So the trek from nursery to house had cost Denise a few minutes they hadn’t counted on. There were plenty of minutes left to blow Kurt Duffy into the next world. Bullets were fast, just short of Superman-fast. Three seconds. Bang. Bang. Bang. Kurt is dead. Denise is headed for Otter Cove. Paulette is making eyes at the bartender miles away. Everyone lives happily ever after.
Stiffly, she started across the dusty yard. The scratch of her sneakered feet on the sand was as the grinding of boulders in the surf, an internal cacophony more sensation than sound. Step and step and step and no matter how many steps she took, the light didn’t get any closer, the kitchen door looked tiny, wrong-end-of-a-telescope tiny, Alice in Wonderland tiny. Denise noticed her hands had balled into fists. Her vision was blurring, and sweat ran from her forehead in rivulets.
Suck it up,
she ordered herself. It wasn’t like Duffy didn’t need killing. It wasn’t like anybody would miss him. Killing him would be no worse than dropping a rock on a black widow or stomping a brown recluse. A spider, that’s all Duffy was, spinning a web that caught her sister and held her paralyzed while it fed off her soul. It needed to be removed from the world. It needed to be crushed.
The porch, a couple of rickety steps up from the bare dirt of the backyard, cracked into her shins. Shocked, she blinked twice, confused by how she had closed the distance from not possible to bruising her legs. It was as if she’d gone to sleep for a while, her brain in Zombie Land while her body traversed the ground. How long had it taken her? How much racket had she made? Was Kurt in the shower yet? Paulette hadn’t timed his showers. She’d just said he’d come home around nine, take a shower, and go out around ten.
Had he showered already and left to go bowling?
Denise dropped to her knees, hiding in the shadow of the raised porch. She rubbed her palms against the dirt, drying the sweat and working feeling back into her fingers. Forcing her lungs to obey, she began breathing slowly in and out through her nose. Sweat wiped from her brow with dirt-smeared hands, she put her brain back in its skull case and sat back on her heels. Nerve returned—or at least motivation. She pushed the tiny button on her watch.
Nine eleven. A good number for terrorists. A bad number for innocents. Was she both? Neither? It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but that she focused, stay on point. Back in the days when the government dared to let its officers shoot for scores, she’d been one of the best. Now there were no scores. Too many juries would want to know why an officer with a perfect score on the range didn’t just shoot the gun out of the bad guy’s hand since she was such an Annie Oakley.
With an act of will, Denise got to her feet. She unzipped the black nylon pack on her belt where she carried car keys and water when she went running. With two fingers she lifted out her .22 caliber Smith and Wesson revolver. The gun was untraceable. It had belonged to a foster mother’s boyfriend. Denise had stolen it when she was thirteen. Ever since she’d had a nightstand that wouldn’t be searched by some interfering do-gooder or rotten foster “family” member, she’d kept it in her bedside drawer.
As she eased the .22 from the rip-stop nylon, her wrist jerked as if hit by an electrical shock. Her fingers flew open, and the gun thudded into to the weeds beside the steps. For a moment she stared at the offending hand.
Nerves.
After she’d killed Kurt, when she and her sister were free of the spider, her nerves would heal. When they were free of the park and the state of Maine and settled in their cottage far away somewhere warm, the spastic nervous movements would stop.
She picked up the revolver, then checked the barrel to make sure it hadn’t become jammed with detritus. Having squeegeed muddy sweat from her forehead with the side of her palm, she dried her hand on her jeans. Mentally she began singing “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” On each syllable she took a small silent step. By the time the spider was up the waterspout, Denise was between the kitchen door and the bathroom window, her back pressed against the wood. Kurt was in the house, and was in the shower; she could see the water running through the clouded glass, and hear it through the thin walls of the shack.
Back on track. Back on point. Nerves back in alignment.
Once more she dried the palm of her gun hand on her trousers, then crept to the kitchen door and turned the knob. Bless Paulette! Not only was it unlocked, it was ajar. Not enough anyone could see, just enough the closing mechanism wouldn’t catch. A gentle push and she was inside.
The kitchen was small, the linoleum old—real linoleum, not vinyl. Paulette had moved the scarred table—no bigger than most TV trays—and the two wooden ladder-backed chairs against the wall between stove and refrigerator.
Clearing the way for the exterminator coming to kill the spider.
Denise loved having a sister, a twin. Nobody, but nobody, had ever looked out for her the way Paulette did. Peter had pretended for a long time. Denise had been fooled for a long time. No more. Blood was the only thing you could count on. Family.
The door to the bedroom was open, the bedroom light off. Holding the gun at her side, Denise walked in. She didn’t crouch, come in low or high, sweep the room, or step back against the wall. This wasn’t like that. This was straightforward. A simple task: You walk in, you dispose of the spider, you walk out. She would touch nothing. When she’d been here before, she’d touched things. At the time she hadn’t known fingerprints would matter.
Today Paulette had cleaned the house, scrubbed every surface, then touched them. No fingerprints was fishy. The wife’s fingerprints were expected. Did twins have identical fingerprints? Denise would have to Google that.
The bathroom door stood half open. Light spilled onto the double bed, drawing up the one bit of color in the dim room, peach blossoms on a white background, branches cutting across in slashes of black. Denise moved to the foot of the bed, shoved the door to the bathroom open with the toe of her shoe, stepped over the sill, and, holding it with both hands, raised the .22.
The shower curtain wasn’t the kind you could see through. Colorful fishes swam on a dark blue sea. The spider was big, though, and Denise could see his bulk where he elbowed and shouldered the curtain as he scrubbed himself.