One Door Away From Heaven (38 page)

He and the dog stand at the foot of the steps and listen to a mere whisper of a breeze that travels to them out of the moonlit plains in the northwest, from beyond the service station that is now blocked from sight by the Fleetwood. Apparently the night air carries a disturbing scent that inspires Old Yeller to raise her talented nose, to flare her nostrils, and to ponder the source of the smell.

The antique pumps are on the farther side of the motor home. As the twins disappear around the bow in search of service, the sniffing dog trots toward the back, not with typically wayward doggy curiosity, but with focus, purpose. Curtis follows his sister-become.

When they round the stern of the Fleetwood to the port side, they come into sight of the weather-beaten store about forty feet away, past the pumps. The door stands half open on hinges stiff enough to resist the breeze.

The dog halts. Backs up a step. Perhaps because the fantastical pumps disconcert her.

On closer consideration, Curtis finds them to be no less magical but less Tinkerbellish than they appeared from inside the vehicle. As he stares up at the globes, which are currently filled with darkness instead of with churning fuel, reflections of the red and amber Christmas lights shimmer on the surface of the glass but appear to swarm within it, and suddenly this display has an air of malevolence. Something needful and malign seems to be pent up in the spheres.

Near the bow of the motor home, a tall bald man is talking to the twins. His back is toward Curtis, and he’s forty feet away, but something seems
wrong
with him.

The dog’s hackles rise, and the boy suspects that the uneasiness he feels is actually
her
distrust transmitted to him through their special bond.

Although Old Yeller growls low in her throat and clearly has no use for the station attendant, her primary interest lies elsewhere. She scampers away from the motor home, almost running, toward the west side of the building, and Curtis hurries after her.

He’s pretty sure this isn’t about toileting anymore.

The store sets cater-corner on the lot, facing the crossroads rather than fronting one highway, and all the lights are at its most public face. Night finds a firmer purchase along the flank of the building. And behind the place, where the clapboard wall offers one door but no windows, the darkness is deeper still, relieved only by a parsimonious moon carefully spending its silver coins.

A Ford Explorer stands in this gloom, its contours barely traced by the lunar light. Curtis supposes that the SUV belongs to the man who’s out front talking to the twins.

The silver Corvette, which passed them on the highway earlier in the night, waits here, as well. Intently studying this vehicle, Old Yeller whimpers.

The moon favors the sports car over the SUV, plating its chrome and paint to a sterling standard.

Even as Curtis takes a step toward the Corvette, however, the dog dashes to the back of the Explorer. She stands on her hind legs, forepaws on the rear bumper, gazing up at the tailgate window, which is too high to provide her with a view inside.

She looks at Curtis, dark eyes moon-brightened.

When the boy doesn’t go to her at once, she paws insistently at the tailgate.

In this murk, he can’t see the dog shuddering, but through the psychic umbilical linking them, he senses the depth of her anxiety.

Fear like a slinking cat has found a way into Curtis’s heart, and from his heart into the whole of him, and now it whets its claws upon his bones.

Joining Old Yeller behind the Explorer, he squints through the rear window. He isn’t able to discern whether the SUV carries a cargo or is loaded only with shadows.

The dog continues to paw at the vehicle.

Curtis tries the door handle, lifts the tailgate.

Disengagement of the latch activates a soft light in the SUV, revealing two corpses in the cargo space. They have been tumbled together in such a way as to suggest that they were heaved in here as if they were bags of garbage.

His heart, a sudden stutterer, spasms on the
l
in
lub,
and on the
d
in
dub.

He would run if he were not his mother’s son, but he’d rather die than, by his actions, cast shame upon her memory.

Pity and revulsion would turn him away had he not been taught to react to every horror like this as though it were a survival text, to read it quickly but closely for clues that might save his life and the lives of others.

Others,
in this case, means Cass and Polly.

Tall, bald, and male, the first of these cadavers appears to be a physical match for the station attendant who’d been talking to the twins a moment ago. Curtis didn’t see that guy’s face; nevertheless, he’s convinced that it will prove to be identical to this one, though not wrenched by terror.

Billowy, glossy, chestnut hair surrounds and softens the dead woman’s features. Her wide-open hazel eyes stare with startlement at the first glimpse of eternity that she received in the instant when her soul fled this world.

Neither victim bears a visible wound, but each appears to have a broken neck. Heads loll at such unnatural angles that the cervical vertebrae must have been shattered. For these hunters, who thrill to the administration of terror and who revel in murder, such kills are unusually clean and merciful.

Necessity rather than mercy explains the simple wounds. Each corpse has been stripped of its shoes and outer layer of clothing. To masquerade as their victims, the killers needed costumes without rips or stains.

If the combination service station and convenience store is a mom-and-pop operation, then here lie mom and pop. Their business
and
their identities have been subjected to a hostile takeover.

The dog’s attention is directed once more at the Corvette. Her interest, though intense, isn’t strong enough to draw her toward the sports car, which she regards with obvious dread. She appears to be as puzzled as she is apprehensive, cocking her head left, and then right, blinking, turning half away from the vehicle but then snapping her head toward it as if she’d seen it start to move.

Perhaps in the Corvette waits something worse than what he found in the Explorer, in which case he’ll keep his distance, too. Instead, seeking to learn what he can by sharing the dog’s perceptions, Curtis opens himself more completely to their bond, and looks at the ’Vette through her eyes.

At first his sister-become seems to see nothing more than Curtis sees—but then for just a second, no longer, the moonlit car shimmers like a mirage. Dream car in more ways than one, internal-combustion illusion, it is merely the
suggestion
of a 1970 Corvette, masking a fearsome reality. The dog blinks, blinks, but the sports car remains apparently solid, so she turns her head away from it, and out of the corner of her eye, for two seconds or three, she glimpses what Curtis can’t perceive from the corner of his: a transport not of this earth, sleeker even than the sharklike Corvette, like a beast born to
stalk
sharks with a vengeance. So mighty-looking is this vehicle that you can’t think of it in the language of designers or engineers, but must resort to the vocabulary of military architecture, because in spite of its sleekness, it seems to be a fortress on wheels: all compact buttresses, ramparts, terrepleins, scarps, counterscarps, bastions made aerodynamic, condensed and adapted to rolling stock.

With this evidence before him, no doubt can linger any longer. The worse scalawags have arrived.

His nerves feel as taut as high-tuned violin strings, and his dark imagination plucks them with dire possibilities.

Death is here now, as always it is here, but it is not always as engaged and
attentive
as it is at this moment, waiting for a third course in its supper of bones.

The hunters must suspect that Curtis is in the motor home. Kind fate and his clever sister-become brought him out of the Fleetwood and around the building to this moonlit killing ground without being detected. He won’t remain undiscovered for long: perhaps two minutes, maybe three if his luck holds.

The instant that he shows himself, he will be known.

In his place, therefore, he sends the dog to Polly.

Fearful but obedient, she trots away, retracing the route along which she led him.

Curtis has no illusions that he’ll survive this encounter. The enemy is too near, too powerful, too remorseless to be defeated by one as small and defenseless as this motherless boy.

He harbors some hope, however, that he might be able to warn off Cass and Polly, that they might escape with the dog rather than be slaughtered with him.

Old Yeller disappears around the corner of the building. Beloved familiar, companion spirit, she walks always with an awareness of her Maker—and she will need Him now as never before.

Chapter 46

THE PENITENTIARY WALLS crumbled away from her, but she restacked the stones around herself, and when the bars fell out of the windows, she repaired them with a welder’s torch and fresh mortar.

From this dream of a self-made prison—not a nightmare, scary only because she labored so
cheerfully
to rebuild her cell—Micky woke, instantly aware that something was wrong.

Life had taught her to recognize danger at a distance. Now even in sleep, she’d sensed a threat in the waking world that called her back from that faraway, comfortable incarceration.

On the living-room sofa, lying on her side, eyes closed, head raised slightly upon a throw pillow, chin tucked down and resting against her clasped hands, she remained perfectly still, breathing softly like a sleeper, listening. Listening.

The house lay enfolded by a shroud of quiet as deep as that in a mortuary after viewing hours, the mourners gone.

Deaf to the threat, she was nonetheless able to sense it, feel it, as she could feel the change in atmospheric pressure when the air thickened just before a thunderstorm flashed and cracked and broke.

Micky had settled on the sofa to read a magazine while waiting for Leilani. The evening waned, and Geneva eventually retreated to her bedroom, leaving instructions to be awakened at once if the girl paid a visit. With Aunt Gen gone, with the contents of the magazine exhausted, Micky stretched out merely to rest her eyes, not to nap. The cumulative weight of the difficult day, the heat, the humidity, and a growing despair had pressed her down into that dream prison.

Instinctively, she hadn’t opened her eyes when she woke. Now she kept them closed, operating on the theory—so dear to every child and sometimes resurgent in adulthood—that the boogeyman could not hurt her until she looked him in the eye and acknowledged his existence.

Frequently, in prison, she had learned that a pretense of sleep, of stupidity, of naiveté, of cataleptic indifference, a pretense of deafness to an obscene invitation and of blindness to an insult, were all wiser responses than confrontation. Childhood can be remarkably similar to prison; the theory of the boogeyman’s eye offers guidance to child and inmate alike.

Someone moved nearby. The soft scuff of shoes on carpet and the creak of floorboards argued against the possibility that the intruder was either a figment of her imagination or a trailer-park ghost.

The footsteps approached. Stopped.

She sensed a looming presence. Someone stood over her, watching as she pretended to sleep.

Not Geneva. Even in one of her movie moments, she wouldn’t be furtive or unnervingly strange like this. Gen remembered being Carole Lombard in
My Man Godfrey,
Ingrid Bergman in
Casablanca,
Goldie Hawn in
Foul Play,
but she shared no darker experiences than those of
Mildred Pierce.
Her secondhand lives were romantic, even if sometimes tragic, and you didn’t have to worry that she would ever be in the grip of a Bette Davis psychosis per
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
or Glenn Close per
Fatal Attraction.

Micky’s sense of smell seemed heightened by her meditative stillness and her defensive blindness. She detected the faint astringent scent of strange soap. A crisp after-shave.

He stirred, betrayed once more by the protesting floorboards. Even over the thump of her bass-drum heart, Micky could tell that he was moving away from her.

Through a fringe of eyelashes, she sought him, saw him. He passed the low buffet divider that separated the living room from the kitchen.

One small lamp, the three-way bulb set at the lowest wattage, didn’t reject the shadows in the living room, but romanced them, and in the kitchen, only the small light under the range hood staved off the full embrace of darkness.

Even seen from behind, and then glimpsed only briefly in profile as he turned in the kitchen gloom to approach the back door, he could be mistaken for no one else. Uninvited, Preston Maddoc had paid a visit.

Micky had left the back door ajar for Leilani if she came. Now Maddoc left it standing wide open when he departed.

Warily she got off the sofa and approached the kitchen. She half expected to find him waiting beyond the threshold, facing inside, amused to have caught her faking sleep.

He wasn’t there.

She dared to step outside. No one lurked in the backyard. Maddoc had gone home.

Retreating into the kitchen, she shut out the night. Engaged the dead-bolt lock.

Fear drained away, leaving a feeling of violation. Before she could work up a proper sense of outrage, however, she thought of Geneva, and fear flooded back.

She had no idea how long Maddoc was in the house. He might have gone elsewhere before entering the living room to watch her sleep.

Micky hurried out of the kitchen, into the short hall. As she passed her own room, she noticed light bleeding under the door. She was certain that she hadn’t left a lamp on.

End of the hall. Last door. Standing ajar.

The luminous numerals and the lighted tuning bands on the clock radio provided the only relief from a clutching darkness that seemed jagged with menace. When Micky reached the bed, this ghostly radiance revealed only the one thing that she wanted to see: Aunt Gen’s face against a pillow, eyes shut, peaceful in sleep.

Micky held one trembling hand before Geneva’s face and felt the gentle breath against her palm.

A knot pulled loose in her breast, freeing her bound breath.

In the hall once more, she soundlessly drew Geneva’s door shut and went directly to her own room.

Scattered across the bedspread were her purse and everything it had contained. Her wallet had been emptied, though no money had been stolen; the currency lay discarded with her social-security card, her driver’s license, lipstick, compact, comb, car keys….

The closet was open. The dresser had been searched, as well, and the contents of each drawer had been left in disarray.

On the floor lay her prison-discharge papers. She’d left them in the nightstand, under the Bible that Aunt Gen had provided.

Regardless of the initial purpose of Maddoc’s visit, he’d taken brazen advantage of the situation when he found the kitchen door ajar and Micky asleep on the sofa. From what she’d learned at the library, she knew that he was a calculating man rather than a reckless one, so she attributed his shameless prowling not to impetuosity, but to arrogance.

Evidently he knew more about her relationship with Leilani than she’d thought he did, perhaps more than Leilani realized, too. The contrived welcome with the plate of cookies either had not fooled him or had sharpened his suspicion.

Now he’d learned enough about Micky’s recent past and about her weakness to make her uneasy.

She wondered what he might have done if she’d awakened and found him in her room.

The Bible lay open on the nightstand, in the lamplight. Maddoc had used the felt-tip pen from her purse to circle a passage. Joel, chapter 1, verse 5:
Awake, ye drunkards, and weep.

She was unnerved that he knew the Bible well enough to recall such an apt but obscure passage. This erudition suggested that he might be an adversary even more clever and resourceful than she’d expected. Also, clearly, she impressed him as being such a negligible threat that he believed he could mock her with impunity.

Flushed with humiliation, Micky went to the dresser, confirming that Maddoc had turned back the concealing yellow sweater and had found the two bottles of lemon-flavored vodka.

She removed the bottles from the drawer. One was full, the seal unbroken. The sight of it gave her a sense of power, of control; to an impoverished and improvident spirit, an untapped bottle seemed to be a bottomless fortune, but it was really fortune’s ruin. After her binge the previous night, little remained in the second container.

In the kitchen, Micky switched on the light above the sink and emptied both bottles into the drain. The fumes—not the lemony aroma, but the quasi-aphrodisiacal scent of alcohol—enflamed more than one appetite: for drink, for oblivion, for self-destruction.

After she dropped the two empties in the trash can, her hands shook uncontrollably. They were damp, too, with vodka.

She breathed the evaporating spirits rising from her skin, and then pressed her cool hands to her burning face.

Into her mind came an image of the brandy that Aunt Gen kept in a kitchen cupboard. Following the image came the taste, as real as if she’d taken a sip from a full snifter.

“No.”

She understood too well that the brandy wasn’t what she wanted, nor the vodka; what she really sought was an excuse to fail Leilani, a reason to turn inward, to retreat beyond the familiar drawbridge, up to the ramparts, behind the battlements of her emotional fortress, where her damaged heart wouldn’t be at risk of further wounds, where she could live once more and forever in the comparatively comfortable suffering of isolation. Brandy would give her that excuse and spare her the pain of caring.

When she turned away from the cupboard where the brandy waited, leaving the door unopened, she went to the refrigerator, hoping to satisfy her thirst with a Coca-Cola. But this was less a thirst than a hunger, a ravenous clawing in the gut, so she plucked a cookie from the ceramic bear whose head was a lid and whose plump body was a jar. On further consideration, she carried the bear and all its contents to the table.

Sitting down to Coke and cookies, feeling like an eight-year-old girl, confused and afraid as she had so often been back then, seeking solace from the sugar demon, the first unsettling thing she noticed was the plate beside the candleholders. The gift plate that she had piled with cookies and taken next door earlier in the evening. Maddoc had returned it empty, washed.

Arrogance again. If Micky hadn’t awakened in time to see him leave, she might have guessed who had searched her dresser drawers and turned out the contents of her purse, but she couldn’t have been certain that her guess was correct. By leaving the plate, Maddoc had made it clear that he
wanted
her to know who the intruder had been. This was a challenge and an act of intimidation.

More disturbing than the plate returned was the penguin taken. The two-inch figurine, from the collection of a dead woman, had been standing on the kitchen table, among the small colored glasses that held half-melted candles. Maddoc must have seen it when he put down the plate.

Whatever suspicions he’d harbored about Leilani’s relationships with Micky and with Aunt Gen had been confirmed and had surely grown darker when he’d discovered the penguin.

The dropping sensation in the stomach, the tightening in the chest, the lightheadedness familiar from the sudden speedy plunge of a roller coaster afflicted her now, as she sat dead still on the kitchen chair.