After Darkness Fell (26 page)

“It’s dark at night in the woods, but it’s also very quiet. When I reached the clearing on the other side of the pine trees, I could hear rustling coming from three different directions, so I knew right then that I wasn’t alone, that there were several of them coming toward me, and that I’d be surrounded before I could do anything to prevent it. I knew they weren’t very far away, so I didn’t have much time. I obviously couldn’t outrun them or stand a chance of getting them all with my gun, so I unclipped the holster and placed it on a stump along the trail we’d used several times before. I knew that if they saw the gun, they’d consider me a threat and would kill me and take my gun, or rape me first, then kill me and take the gun. But if they found me unarmed and thought I was doped, they might leave me alone, or just check me out to see what I had on me and go away. But they didn’t. They walked me through the woods, to the road on the other side of the farm. A car was parked there, on Deer Creek Road. They shoved me in the back and took me to Simon’s place out there in the boonies.”

“They didn’t hurt you, then?”

“Aside from getting a little wild when they were patting me down, no, they didn’t hurt me. They just kept pushing me to the car. Simon turned out to be a different story. He wanted to rape me as soon as they brought me into the house. He grabbed me and pulled me into his den and started to undress me, but quickly changed his mind.”

“Where does the part come when I won’t be upset? You obviously haven’t gotten there yet.”

She smiled. “Like I said, he changed his mind even before he tried getting my top off. It was the way I was acting that turned him off. He didn’t know how to deal with me.”

“I’d heard his boys say that he didn’t like messing around with doped women.”

“I didn’t try acting doped. I wasn’t sure how well I could pull that off, so I tried something else. I’d worked with the mentally disturbed during my nursing years, and remembered how they acted, spoke and moved. Not too many guys are anxious to get physical with a handicapped woman, so that’s what I did.”

“It obviously worked, then.”

“Simon helped quite a bit, surprisingly. He’d taken something just a few minutes before I was brought into the house. I think it might have been a popper, so he was pretty buzzed. Just a minute or so after he took me into his den and began tugging on my top, I cried like a little girl. That turned him right off, so I figured I might as well make my performance even more convincing. I told him all about you. I said you were my daddy and that you were crazy, always scaring me and pushing me around and locking me in the basement at night. I told him you’d tried to kill me that morning. You were cleaning a gun after breakfast and when I walked by, I accidentally knocked over your whiskey glass and you got so mad, you picked up your gun and tried to shoot me, but the gun jammed. This made you even madder, so you told me you were going to kill me as soon as you got another gun. I ran out of the house and hid in the woods. I heard gunshots and thought you were shooting at me, but after a while I heard your truck and saw you loading two bodies onto the back of it. That’s when I ran back into the woods and hid there all day.”

“Good thinking. How’d he deal with it?”

“Like I said, he was pretty buzzed, but when I told him that, he got really angry, and kicked the door. He went over to his desk, opened a drawer, took out some powder and poured some on the blotter.”

“Coke?”

“No doubt. He was babbling about his friends Doc and James, and how he was going to kill you for killing them. He did two lines, slumped over the desk and went to sleep. I didn’t know what to do. I knew I could probably sneak out through the window, but since I’d seen people running around all over the place, I knew someone would see me and wake him. There were people in the house, too, but no one would come in the den. They seemed to avoid it, and whenever they came down the hall, they veered away, keeping as far away as possible.

“I just stayed in the room and waited for him to come to. I knew I could probably find a decent hiding place, but something told me not to. Some of those guys living there looked like they’d nail anything, and I didn’t want to give them any ideas. They wouldn’t have touched me because I was with Simon, and there was a strong, unwritten policy about who they could and couldn’t mess with. I just didn’t want to take a chance. Besides, I knew I wouldn’t be there long. I figured you were looking for me and had already found the gun and holster, so I wasn’t worried. I just bided my time.”

“How many were living there?”

“There were at least a dozen of them in the main house. I didn’t get to learn anything about the guest house, but I could tell several of them were living there as well. Most of them living on the ground floor of the main house were women, all around twenty-five or thirty. I saw a few in their early teens. A few were doped, but most were functioning fairly well. The pretty ones acting normal were dressed in shorts, two-piece bikinis or slips. I even saw a tall blond woman around thirty walking around in a leather outfit. It was really bizarre. Not many of the boys were walking around, just two or three of the older ones. They were in their mid- or late twenties, I guess. I imagine the others were living in the basement. From what I learned, they had video games and other things to keep them busy when they weren’t doing errands for Simon.”

“He came a long way from being the classic high school jock.”

“You knew him?”

“Not very well. He was a year ahead of me.”

“Good thing I never told him your name. He wouldn’t have believed you were my father.”

“How’d you get him to bring you back here?”

“I told him I wanted him to come here and take your guns so you couldn’t try and shoot me anymore.”

“That’s all it took?”

She smiled. “I told him a few other things. They were mostly lies, but given the circumstances, I didn’t think you’d mind.”

“What else did you tell him?”

“I told him you had hundreds of guns. He really liked that. I also told him you had canisters of ammo in every room in the house.”

“I guess that would turn him on.”

“It did, but then I told him a few other things to encourage him to bring me here. Like I said, he was pretty upset over Doc and James. At first he wanted to take me somewhere and dump me. I overheard him talking about it when he left the den. I realized I needed some sort of bait to use to get him to bring me back. The gun and ammo thing just didn’t seem quite enough. When he came back in the den, I told him about the special refrigerator you kept in the barn. As soon as I mentioned that, his entire demeanor changed. His eyes grew and his face seemed to glow.”

“Special refrigerator?” This was getting interesting.

“I told him you came back from some hospital or clinic one night a few weeks ago with a carload of boxes of medical supplies you’d found in their drug cabinets. I had to help him carry them into the barn.”

“Smart.”

“I just figured that since he was constantly buzzed, he’d want to get his hands on anything he could, and wouldn’t care how he got it.”

“I overheard some of his boys talking about the same thing. Doc and James drove all around the county, looking for drugs. They made sure Simon always had enough drugs on hand. When we killed them, it ended his constant supply, and he was forced to rely on a few of the other boys to make the trips. That was really good thinking on your part.”

“I remembered what we’d found in the station wagon, so it was really a no-brainer. Anyway, I told him you kept the refrigerator in the barn and had it hooked up to the home generator to keep the stuff fresh. He asked me if I knew what any of it was. I said I didn’t know, but that you’d sampled some of it and went on a trip, and when you came back, you told me you’d seen God.”

I laughed. “That was cruel. I’m impressed.”

“Like I said, he was hooked. That’s when he ordered almost all the boys to go out looking for you. He wanted to drive right to the barn and steal everything, but when word got back that you’d killed three or four of them, he got really upset, and knew it would probably be much better if he brought me back with him so he could find everything quickly, before you came back.”

“Among his other faults, he was a stone coward.”

“It worked out perfectly. I figured that since we’ve got everything booby-trapped here, it was my best chance. I led him into the barn and we went down the stairs. I told him the refrigerator was hidden in one of the horse’s stalls, behind stacks of hay.”

“Did he find the tripwire I rigged across that sixth step?”

“He found it right off and landed pretty hard on the concrete slab. I barely had enough time to get out of his way. It took him several minutes to recover. By that time, I’d already grabbed the revolver you’d hidden behind that loose board in the overhead rafters.”

I was so proud of her. I would have taken her in my arms if I’d had the energy. “He obviously had no idea who he was dealing with.”

“Neither did you when we first met in Breezewood.” She bent over and kissed me again.

I raised my good arm and placed my hand over hers. Then I noticed the bandages. My left hand was nearly covered in dressing, and my left forearm was similarly wrapped, all the way to the elbow. “What happened to my hand and forearm?”

“Oh, aside from serious bruising, more than a dozen cuts and scrapes, and a very large gash on your forearm, you also had a swollen ankle, and your thighs were sliced in more than twenty different places by what I can only guess were thorns or sharp branches. And don’t get me started on all those stickers I found imbedded in your skin.”

I assumed the bruising was the result of my using my hand to drag me across the field. My adrenaline had no doubt kept my mind free of distractions such as pain. “I hadn’t noticed much of anything else at the time.”

She frowned. “I found more than twenty stickers on your face alone.”

“You got them all?”

“I think so. I needed tweezers, of course, and Harry gave me a magnifying glass.”

“I owe you, big-time.”

“It was the least I could do for what you did, silly.” Her beautiful green eyes glistened in the late morning light coming in through the window. Her face was inches away. Once again I wanted to take her in my arms, but she picked up a pair of scissors from the end table and went back to work on my bandage.

My arm throbbed, but it didn’t hurt nearly as much. She’d apparently gotten the infection under control.

“Were you able to get the bullet out?”

“It fragmented in two pieces. The first chunk had already come out, judging by the hole. I found the other piece without too much trouble. It was pretty close to the surface, lodged in your bicep muscle. I cleaned it out and stitched you up. Harry and Vaughn helped. They had all the medical supplies we needed in their trucks.”

“Vaughn?”

“Vaughn Gresch. He got here right after Simon and I pulled up the drive. I heard a truck right after Simon tripped on the step. I’m sure Vaughn would’ve shot him if I hadn’t already done it.”

Once again I was curious about the two men. I wanted to ask her, but she kissed me again and pulled the sheets up to my neck. “You’d better rest. They want to talk to us when you’re feeling a little better.”

“About what?”

“They wouldn’t tell me.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. I also didn’t like Fields’ expression. She was obviously holding something back. “Would you tell me if you knew?”

“They really want you to rest first. They’ve got a ton of questions to ask you.”

“Good. I’ve got a ton to ask them.”

I lay back and wondered if I should tell her what had happened right after I’d blacked out in the grass near the barn.

“Something wrong?”

I just sighed.

“Tell me.”

“I ... saw Reed.”

She sat there, watching me. She didn’t speak for the longest time, just sat there, looking puzzled. “When?”

“Right after I blacked out.”

“Did he say anything?”

“It was kind of fuzzy. I didn’t expect to see him standing over me like that, so I thought I must be dead, too. I asked him what was going on, and he told me that he’d been guiding me when I was looking for you.”

“Was he?”

“When I first went into the woods, I heard a voice. It hadn’t occurred to me what was happening at the time, but I guess I did suspect it was him all along. Now that it’s all over, and I can see things more objectively, I honestly believe Reed was actually out there with me, and that he saved my life.”

Fields was silent as she bent over and kissed me again. Her face was just inches away. “I think it was him, too.”

I could tell she meant it, and hadn’t said it just to humor me. I knew then that I should tell her about something else Reed had said. “He said something else before I...”

“You need rest,” she whispered. “Get lots of it. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do in here.”

Despite my fatigue, her suggestion perked me right up. “What about those two guys who carried me up here? Where are they?”

“They’re around, somewhere. But don’t worry, I’ve seen your work.” She smiled and winked. “I honestly don’t think you’ll need their help.”