The 'Geisters (20 page)

There had been a limo waiting for Ann and Michael when the wedding was done. Ann had thought it was vulgar, and later, when she finally mentioned it as they were waiting for their flight at Pearson Airport, Michael would agree. Rickhardt had ordered it; a long SUV-style limo, the sort of thing rap stars and upwardly mobile movie actors rode around in. It had been idling outside the winery for a couple of hours before they finally departed in it.

Ann had rolled down the window. There was a long gravel road from the concession line leading into the vineyard. On one side of it, rows of grapes blanketed the land to the south. To the north, there was a higher line of orchards. She couldn’t see a thing this time of night, but she liked the scent off the vines; it was fresh, and good.

Michael put his hand on her arm and told her that he loved her, and Ann smiled to herself.

“Do you now?” she said, intending it to be flirtatious. But she wasn’t good at that sort of thing, obviously.

Michael took his hand back. “Of course,” he said.

That was then.

Now, Ann had trouble even finding the place. She’d bought a road atlas for North America back in Alabama, and she had to stop and refer to it three times. She might’ve excused that by the simple fact that she was coming at it from the west, and the numerous times she and Michael had driven here had been from the east—from Toronto. Fatigue might’ve had something to do with it; she’d been on the road for nearly a dozen hours.

But as she slowed down and stopped at the last turn, and just sat, staring into the dark—she thought that might not have been it.

On some level, she just didn’t want to do it. Or more precisely, she did want to—but she feared it.

“What are we going to do?” she said to the dark. “I need to get Philip out of there. But I can’t just do that. We need to . . . we need to plan.”

Ann felt a cool breath on the back of her neck. “Ah,” she said.

She shut her eyes. The spectrum of colours drew across her thoughts wordlessly, and she breathed deep. She had seldom come to this place so wordlessly. Might that be because she had, on some level, stopped fearing it?

She felt the deeper darkness; and coalescing before her came the corridor, the stairs, the doors along it, all shut.

“This is the new tower, isn’t it?”

Yes.

The word came as a rattling of lockers, as though this high school corridor were the Insect’s throat.

“And you’re finally talking to me—not just sending messages in the morning dew.

Yes.

“Well thank you.” Ann took a breath in the world; here, the air smelled of sweat, and furnace oil. “Can we make a plan?”

We already have.

The lockers stopped rattling entirely, and were quiet.

“What is it?”

And Ann felt the breath again at her neck. She turned.

There was nothing but darkness. Behind her now, the lockers started slamming, open and closed.

Ann opened her eyes.

The transmission shifted into drive, and the van began to move through the intersection. The signal indicator switched on. Ann slammed her foot on the brake, but it wouldn’t move. She took hold of the steering wheel, tried to turn it straight; but it was no good. It turned to the right, and the van wobbled down the concession road.

Ann mashed her hand down on the horn; it tooted once, briefly, then became as immobile as other things. In desperation, she twisted the ignition key, and tugged on it. It stayed put.

The van accelerated, and the blue light of the dashboard indicated the headlights had switched to high beams. Far down the road, she could see the Rickhardt Estates sign on the road—a deep purple backing with a delicate curled font in white that mimicked the label. It was two kilometres off.

Ann undid her seatbelt, and twisted around to look back as the van continued on its course. It was dark there; no sense of any presence, or any movement whatsoever. She was about to try and crawl out of the seat—head back there—when she heard the squeaking sound again. She turned to look.

Words were appearing letter by letter—and disappearing, wiped away as fast. She could make out:

TOP IT STOP IT

. . . before the wipe took the entire thing and left the windshield clean, and dry.

The van lurched to the left.

Out the front window, she could now see lights, at the end of a long narrow roadway.

She swore. The van was taking her along the drive to the Rickhardt Estates.

And she was pretty sure it wasn’t the Insect doing it.

The van was going more slowly now. She tried to open the door, but of course it was locked. She shuffled over to the passenger side, tried it too, expecting and receiving nothing. She twisted around in her seat and kicked at the window, but it held firm, and so she kicked again.

The van stopped, and there was a shudder as the engine shut down.

The van began to rock back and forth. The engine started again, but this time it went into reverse. There was a crunch, and Ann was thrown in her seat. The van switched gears, pushing forward and turning and lurching through the narrow ditch at the side of the drive. It bumped again, and crashed through branches. It was going into the orchard.

The window fogged, and in it, the words

RUN

wrote themselves, followed by

I WILL HELP.

The driver’s side door swung open as the van snapped the trunk of a young apple tree and juddered to a halt.

Ann didn’t waste time. She pushed the door open and stumbled out. Back at the road, she could see flashlight beams cutting through the dark. There had been a car shadowing her—without its lights on, obviously. But now they were on and it was three-point-turning into the orchard.

Ann stepped into the shadow of the van before the light could catch her. Without even giving her eyes the chance to adapt to the dark, she ran.

She made it a long way before stumbling; the trees were in rows, and she kept going straight through. Behind her, the headlights speared through the trees, the now-leafless branches. When she finally stumbled, it was more from exhaustion; the adrenaline had been spiking her along for the past six hours. It was a resource of very diminishing returns.

Ann fell against a narrow trunk, gasping for breath. She wanted to vomit, but held it back. She needed to hunker down, find a place to hide. She thought about climbing the tree she was leaning on. It was an apple tree, small and not very high, but the branches were low. She gave it a try. Something in her shoulder started to tear. She let go, and fell back to the loamy earth.

“Fuck.” She sat there, huddled against the trunk of the tree—feeling like nothing so much as a field mouse knowing there were owls about.

But the light was gone. The low clouds glowed slightly to the east, and the south, where lights from towns reflected back. But even that seemed muted. And the orchard had become very quiet. It was almost as though she had stepped over a ridge when she slipped from the tree—fallen into a cleft or a valley where she was entirely alone.

After a moment, Ann stood. She was feeling better. At least she had caught her wind.

She started to piece together what had happened. Of course, they had been waiting for her here. These men may have had enough connections to hire a hit man and a Miami lawyer, but they didn’t have the means, clearly, to watch every border crossing twenty-four hours a day. On the other hand, they’d known that one of the few places she’d be going was right here, if she were coming back at all.

So here was where they’d waited. Ann hadn’t considered that but it made sense—it was a logical way to grab her, if that’s what they were going to do—and if they didn’t want to involve U.S. law enforcement to do it for them.

They hadn’t wanted that. Which was why they’d sent Hirsch to the hospital, and offered up a respite home in St. Augustine, against the bogeyman of Ann’s humiliation in front of the Federal Aviation Authority.

She began to shake. Part of that was the cold—it was three in the morning in November, and she wasn’t dressed for it. But that was a small part. More chilling than the cold was that realization: they’d seen her coming.

She pulled her legs close to her and tucked her head into her knees. Like a tongue to a broken tooth, her mind settled back on the colours of the spectrum. But there were no colours; just the words: Red. And orange.

Yellow.

Yellow.

Light.

“There.”

Ann opened her eyes. The speaker turned the mag-light away from her. He was taller than she remembered, had a bit of a paunch that had been hidden by his broad shoulders. His brush-cut hair stood out in spikes, by the light cast by the other flashlights that wove through the tree branches like searchlights, moving
toward her.

“Are you hurt?” asked the man. His voice sounded different now than it had in her cabin in the Rosedale Arms.

“No,” said Ann. She pushed herself back against the tree trunk; the bark bit into the thin denim jacket she’d bought on the road.

“Good. You hit my truck pretty hard; back of your van took most of it. Should have been wearing your seatbelt.”

Ann looked up at him. The other flashlights were shining on both of them now, and she could see his face. His hair was greying, but he didn’t look much older than forty.

He looked kinder than he had tossing her cabin, Taser ready in one hand. . . .

She murmured to the Insect:
Kill him
. Shame came and went, like a wave over beach pebbles.
Kill all of them if you have to.

He smiled a bit and bent down as one of the flashlights came up beside him. It was held by a child, or someone very small; it just came up to his waist. It wore a hood. As it moved into the light, Ann saw that it was a little girl. Dark-haired—ten years old, maybe twelve. And yes. The same girl she’d seen for an instant outside the cabin. Of course.

“She’s trying,” said the girl. “But Mister Sleepy has it all sewn up. Don’t worry.”

“I’m not,” said the man, and patted the girl on the back of her head. “Thank you, Mister Sleepy,” he said, looking not at her but into the night sky. “Thank you, all of you.”

The branches rustled as though there were a breeze, and the man extended his hand down to Ann.

Because she could think of nothing else, she took it. He hauled her to her feet, but it was hard to stand.

“I’ll try and be a gentleman,” he said as he slipped his arm underneath hers.

“See that you do,” said another voice from behind her. It was one that Ann thought she might recognize. Just then, she couldn’t say from where. But he didn’t speak again until much later.

“Now come on, Mrs. Voors,” the first man said.

He led Ann for a few steps, then dragged her, and finally—apologizing again—bent down, drew his other arm behind her thighs, and lifted her.

“You’re shaking like a leaf.”

“She’s afraid,” said the little girl, “of Mister Sleepy.”

Ann shivered, and shut her eyes. She didn’t fight; it was as though all the energy had fled from her. She felt as though she were deflating.

“Who are you?” she asked.

He said something, but she couldn’t make out what, exactly.

The music was not especially loud, but it was too loud to ignore. It was choral. It reminded her of Orff, a bit. One of the middle bits of
Carmina Burana
. But more primitive.
Carmina Burana
as arranged for piano movers and orchestra.

Ann opened her eyes. Her mouth was very dry. Her head was propped up on sofa pillows. The rest of her was prone, on a sofa. It felt velvety and lumpy. But it was warm. She looked around; she was in a large room. There may have been windows, but it was hard to tell; thick green curtains hung along two of the walls. The other two walls were painted burgundy. There was a stained pine dining room table, and some chairs near Ann’s couch, and an overstuffed dark leather recliner.

The room was not brightly lit, and what light there was came from the far end.

That was also where the music came from: the speakers next to a big, flat screen TV. Ann propped herself up and looked. There was a game playing on it—a first-person shooter type of game, but with a bow and arrow rather than a big gun, and the fellow wielding it was running around some mountainous terrain on a beautiful autumn afternoon. The view was only partly occluded by a high-backed leather chair, faced away from Ann.

Ann swallowed. It hurt a little to do so. She put her feet on the floor. The game shifted to a menu screen, showing a compass rose of choices.

“Mrs. Voors?”

Ann stood, carefully.

“It’s Ann,” she said. “Yes. Hello Susan.”

The chair turned around. Ian Rickhardt’s wife, Susan Rickhardt, was clad in a dark fleece sweater and pale blue track pants, thick-toed feet proudly bare. The music from the game had devolved into a series of grunts: the piano movers were hefting the Heintzman up the stairs, Ann thought, and suppressed what she was pretty sure would be a crazy laugh.

“You’re awake,” Susan said simply.

“Barely,” said Ann. And it was true; she felt doughy, as though something were holding her down. Something might have been holding her down, she realized. It was somehow easy to forget that she had just been abducted; it was in fact impossible to remember the point at which she had apparently passed out. Which she must have, because here she was, on a couch in this very simply appointed room, looking at Ian Rickhardt’s wife playing a video game. She wasn’t a guest here. She was a prisoner. Was Susan Rickhardt the one they’d left to guard her?

“I take it this room is somewhere in the winery?”

Susan shrugged. “I call it home,” she said.

Ian’s wife Susan—the simple fact of her—had always been a puzzle for Ann. She was heavyset and dull-eyed. The only time she’d seen her out of sweats was at the wedding, when she’d also had her dark, too-thin hair done as nicely as you could ever expect. When they’d first been introduced her hair was as it was just now—flat on her scalp, unwashed. Susan had shaken her hand perfunctorily, almost sullenly. She didn’t seem like the sort of woman a man like Rickhardt would marry. It would have to be love—though Ian didn’t seem to be the type for that.