Devil's Oven (6 page)

Inside, he turned on the lights. Anyone who had been in the cabin before Lila started spending time there would certainly know the difference. Now there were taupe pillows on his army green couch, a couple of prints of masculine paintings of dogs, and dead game on the wall instead of the sports-car-and-beer-girl posters he’d had since college. There was also a cappuccino maker on the kitchen counter. He didn’t even like coffee.

He set his wallet and keys beside his holstered .44. Lila gave him hell about keeping it out in the open, but he had gotten very good at changing the subject with her. Usually it entailed telling her how glad he was to have her there or just putting his mouth on hers.

Taking himself out to dinner at the mall in the next county over had done nothing to cheer him. Lila hadn’t answered her phone or any of his texts all day long. Knowing Bud was out of town didn’t help. What the hell was she doing? Was she with another man? The thought made his body tense. It was bad enough that he had to compete with Bud, but he had learned to handle it. After all, she was married to Bud, a situation he hadn’t been able to convince her to change. If she was punishing him by screwing someone else, that was bad. She didn’t get to do that.

After getting a beer from the refrigerator, he cued up an episode of a cop drama on the DVR and sat down in front of the television. But the show didn’t hold his interest, and he fell asleep thinking not of Lila but the dancer, Jolene, and how she had seemed out of place entering the single-wide in which she was staying, like she was some kind of princess in disguise. He wanted to forget how he had thought of her the night before, hated the part of him that had imagined her hurt and helpless on the mountain trail. He had never had threatening thoughts about a woman before, and certainly had never actually hurt one. Ever.

•  •  •

Tripp startled awake at the sound of three beeps from a car horn down on the road—Lila’s signal that she was on her way up the hill. There were no lights for at least half a mile around the cabin, so even on clear nights like this one, when the moon was high, she wanted him to come out and meet her. As he stumbled out of his chair, he knocked over the half-empty beer bottle, spilling flat beer all over the coffee table. Swearing, he grabbed the fuzzy brown throw Lila had brought on her last visit and soaked up as much as he could. The show had ended. It was ten minutes before midnight.

Had she decided to forgive him? Or was she just there to bust his chops? Assuming it was the second choice, he took a wide stance on the front porch to show her he wasn’t at all concerned that she was angry.
Where did she spend the day? Who has she been with?

The lights of the big SUV bounced as it came through the rut at the front of the driveway. But before it was halfway up the five-hundred-foot distance to the cabin, Tripp saw, in the truck’s stark halogen beams, a flash of movement in the woods to the west. There was a rushing noise as well, as though an animal were about to break out of the trees, but the sound disappeared in the roar of the truck’s engine. Tripp stiffened. Lila wasn’t driving fast enough for a deer to do serious damage to the truck, but it wasn’t going to be pretty. He could only watch, helpless, as something burst into the open and landed thirty feet or so in front of the vehicle.

Had Lila seen it? Tripp ran toward the truck, waving his arms and shouting for her to stop. What the hell was lying in his driveway? A deer? And why wasn’t it moving away? The SUV stopped just a few feet short of whatever it was, and sat idling.

He raised his arm to keep Lila in the vehicle. “Stay back!” he shouted, hoping she could hear him in the truck’s quiet interior.

The headlights cast the thing on the ground in vivid detail. At first the bloody mass at one end confused him, but he made out a sport shirt and dark blue jeans easily enough. Realizing it was a man—a small one, but still a man—he took two steps back and had to fight the urge to vomit.

“Tripp?” Lila called. She had the SUV’s door open and had stepped onto the running board. “What in the hell?”

Unable to speak, Tripp just looked up at her.

“Tripp?” Leaving the door open, she got down and came around to the front of the vehicle.

Then the screaming started.

•  •  •

When Lila stirred on the couch, Tripp came right over to her side. He had the phone in his hand, but laid it on the coffee table so he could keep her from trying to sit up. An angry bruise had started to form on her left temple, where she banged it against the truck when she fell.

In his lifetime—particularly in his job as a Department of Natural Resources officer—Tripp had seen many bodies, some burned so thoroughly that the bones crumbled to gray dust at a touch, others melted into the earth where they had fallen. He didn’t like to think about this one at all, though. He had never seen that kind of violence done to a human being, and hated that Lila had witnessed it, too.

“Baby,” he said, brushing her hair back from her forehead. “Can you open your eyes?”

Her lips moved and she seemed to whisper. Tripp bent closer to her face.

“Lila, you need to wake up,” he said.

When she finally opened her eyes, she stared at his face, but seemed not to know him. Then she put her hand to his jaw and pushed him away with a cry. Before he could react, she jumped up from the couch.

“I have to get home!” she screamed. “I have to find Bud!”

The patterned silk blouse she wore beneath her suede jacket gaped open at her chest, the button lost. Her lipstick was smeared and the ends of her hair were dusty from the driveway. Tripp held his hands out to try to touch her, to calm her.

“Shhhhh,” he said. “Baby, it’s going to be okay. You don’t want to go outside. Just stay here with me. We’ll get this sorted out. You hit your head.”

“There’s a freaking
person
out there,” she said. “I didn’t dream it. I’m not asleep!” She was shaking, holding herself as though she were freezing in the heated cabin.

Tripp grabbed the throw from the couch. “Listen, Lila.” He tried to put the beer-damp throw around her but she edged away.

“No,” she said. “We’ve got to get somebody. We’ve got to see if he’s alive.”

 “You need to stay warm. I don’t want you going into shock.”  He knew he was probably in shock himself, but he could only fall back on his professional training. Training was supposed to kick in when your emotions were on overdrive, when there was a gun in your face, or a firebreak that wasn’t holding. Why in the hell hadn’t anyone trained him for a mangled—
hey, that’s a good word, but hardly sufficient
—body in the driveway?

He didn’t know what did it, but he saw the fight drain out of Lila’s eyes. Her shoulders dropped.

“God,” she said, “who was he?”

Tripp put the blanket around her and pulled her close to him. They held on to each other. He buried his face in her hair, and the smell of it broke the pressure inside him. He knew if he pulled away from her, if he saw her tears, he would break down as well. His training against doing that was damn solid, but there were things that even training couldn’t get you through. He told himself it was just his concern for Lila that had him feeling like this, that he could get a grip on himself and everything would be okay again. But the truth of it was, everything had changed the minute he walked out onto his porch and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.

CHAPTER TEN

“Ivy! Ivy!”

Ivy woke to see Thora bent over her, her thinning hair pushed back by the black elastic headband in which she always slept. For just a second Ivy was confused, thinking it was her father trying to wake her. Thora’s grip on her arm was tight and painful.

“Where’s the shotgun?” Thora said.

“What’s wrong?” Ivy said, twisting her arm away. Thora let her go. Outside the window, the only light came from the fixture over the entrance to the barn. It was still night.

“There’s somebody up at the trailer,” Thora said. “I bet it’s kids. I bet they’re up there drinking. Remember when I found that rubber in the driveway a few weeks ago? I told you I didn’t like those band kids coming out here for uniforms. Get the shotgun!”

Ivy, now fully awake, knew it wasn’t teenagers. She had to keep Thora from panicking.

She had lain sleepless in bed for over two hours after she said good night to Thora, who liked to stay up and watch the late-night comedy shows.

After supper, in defiance of Thora’s morning judgment, she had gone back up to the trailer, wanting to be near Anthony, to touch him. The air felt heavy, like the rain might start all over again, and her feet seemed to drag as she walked up the hill. Something was wrong. She could feel it. She almost turned and ran back to the house.

Maybe it had been a dream after all.

Anthony was gone.

Her sewing materials sat in a neat pile on the kitchen counter where she had left them. The door of the master bedroom closet stood open, but she might have done that herself and forgotten. Thora was always complaining that she was careless that way. Walking from bedroom to bedroom and back to the kitchen, her panic skyrocketed. Had someone found him and taken him away?
Impossible
. Thora couldn’t have managed it, and even if she had, she certainly wouldn’t have kept it a secret. Also, the blue jeans she’d bought for him even before she had sewn him back together were gone.

The only answer was that Anthony had left on his own.

The idea both thrilled and frightened Ivy. She managed to get through Missy’s final fitting, but the girl had what Thora called “bride’s brain” and hadn’t noticed anything beyond her own image in the mirror. After the girl was gone, Thora watched Ivy carefully, so she had retreated to her workroom to sew. Her mind was busy, worrying. Wondering. Marveling.

 
What have I done?

 “Go back to bed,” Ivy said. “I’ll take care of it.”

Thora shook her head. The unadorned nightgown Ivy had made at her request caused Thora to look even larger than she was, like an overfed ghost.

“Those kids aren’t going to be afraid of you,” Thora said. “We’ll both go. Or maybe we should just call the sheriff.”

Now it was Ivy’s turn to grab her sister’s arm.

“We don’t need to call the police,” Ivy said.  “Just let me take care of it. You stay here.”

“Why?” Thora said. She stood up to her full height, dwarfing Ivy. “Who’s out there?”

Ivy heard the familiar note of suspicion in Thora’s voice, that reminder of Thora’s deep need to be certain she wasn’t being cheated out of some useful bit of information, or missing out on some advantage. Hours earlier, Ivy had been hopeful that her threat to leave would keep Thora compliant. Now she understood that Thora could spoil everything.

But as miserable as that possibility was, the truly important thing was Anthony had come back to her!

Glancing at the clock, she saw it was almost four a.m. Dawn was only a couple of hours away. She turned on her bedside lamp.

“You’ll want to put on some clothes,” Ivy said. “We’ll take the car up to the trailer so you don’t have to walk. I know where the gun is, but we won’t need it.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

He threw open the trailer’s kitchen cabinets, looking for food. But only the scent of it remained, and his frustration grew as he searched. As he moved through the kitchen, he left the cabinet doors standing open, their handles smeared with clotted blood. He needed food to stop the pain in his gut. Claude, whose scent was so rich and inviting, had piqued the hunger that had started when he sat waiting behind the Dumpster, but he understood that Claude wasn’t food. Food was something else and there was none of it here.

The food from his past came to him in vivid images: meat, red and thick and dripping on colorful plates; fish, cold, raw fish handed to him on blocks of wood by smiling, dark-eyed women; bread stuffed with sausage and red tomatoes and onions. Strawberries smothered with white whipped cream, and plates of noodles and sharp cheese and olives. Warm red grapes plucked from vines curling around their wooden staves. He couldn’t name these things, but he could think of them, see them, but not touch. It was maddening, and he slammed the cabinet doors, busting one in with his knee so that the flimsy wood buckled at the force. This need for food was even stronger than his need to find the man called Claude had been. He would have to go in search of it, too.

The woman had been here, leaving behind her scent of garden flowers and something else, something that reminded him of steam-covered windows and noisy machines and freshly pressed clothes. He put his hands to his chest, as though the answers were there. He left the kitchen to go and find her.

It didn’t surprise him to discover two women standing in the living room. Surprise was no longer in his catalog of reactions.

One of them cradled a rusty shovel in her arms and he knew she meant him harm. Her scent was acrid and offensive to him, but there was something sweet in it, too, like the smell of something cooking.

The second woman, the smaller one, was the woman he was looking for, the woman he knew. He was compelled to be near her, though compulsion was now just instinct to him. She held food out to him, in one hand something brown that smelled of cinnamon and oranges, in the other a banana.

“Put the shovel down, Thora,” she said, her voice soft.

Was
Thora
what he was called? It didn’t sound right, but he wasn’t sure. He looked down at his hands and looked back to the smaller woman for some answer.

“He’s got blood all over him,” the other woman said. “Sweet Jesus, he’s done something. I know he’s done something and he means to kill us.”

“He’s afraid of you. Please go outside.”

“I’ll be damned if I will.” But she took a step back, toward the door.

He wanted to jump at the food, but knew he shouldn’t.

The other woman made another slight move toward the door. Now she gave off a smell like Claude did just before he put his hand on Claude’s neck. He knew the smell. She wanted to run away.