The Road Out of Hell (26 page)

Mr. Guernsey’s expression was that of a man who has just witnessed a small dog lift its leg on his shiny new shoes. He visibly recoiled, took a step backward, then turned and walked away without another word. Jessie sat back deeper in the booth.
Now where was I
? she asked herself. 375?
Right. 376 … 377 … 378….

She hit 925 before she caught sight of Uncle Stewart’s Buick. The big yellow car stood out against the other traffic while he pulled up to the curb, just down the street across from the bus station. On the streets of 1928, most cars were painted utilitarian black, sometimes dark blue, occasionally tan or a shade of brown. Something like a bright yellow soft-top large-engine roadster tended to catch eyes everywhere it went. Gordon Stewart Northcott was not a serial murderer who craved anonymity.

He had the soft top fastened down, so that Jessie was looking straight at the back of his head while he stayed in the car and honked several times. She placed enough cash on the table to cover the bill and a tip, then slid out of the booth. She picked up her small valise with her left hand, clutched the shoulder strap of her heavy purse with her right, and quick-stepped out of the café and over toward Uncle Stewart’s big yellow car.

He caught sight of her in his rearview mirror and scowled at her approach. “So it’s you,” he said when she got within twenty feet of the car, rolling his eyes. “I thought your mother was coming.”

Jessie opened the passenger door, climbed in, and slammed it behind her. She took a quick pause for a deep breath, then turned and offered him her best sickeningly sweet satire on a smile. “That’s funny, I sent two telegrams telling Grandma that I was coming. If she didn’t talk to you, how would you have known to come and get me here?”

Stewart gave her a blank stare, then turned back to the wheel and put the car in gear. “Bitch.”

“Liar.”

“Don’t test me, Jessie! I’m not some kind of pushover like your old man. This is a dog that bites.”

She dropped her voice to a near whisper, a velvet cannonball. “No, don’t you test me, Uncle Stewart. You think I came all this way to
argue
with you? I’m here to see Sanford. I spent every penny I have to get here, and I don’t care about anything else!”

They locked eyes for a long second. He shook his head. “Bitch.”

“Liar.”

Uncle Stewart drove off without bothering to reply.

Sanford paced the ground behind the little ranch house with his heart thumping.
Jessie’s coming. Jessie’s coming.
Time dragged. The panic that he had been able to repress when he was chained by the neck in a damp and darkened pit now overwhelmed him, out here in the warm air and sunlight. He had begged Uncle Stewart to let him ride along to greet Jessie, but made the mistake of showing how much he wanted to go, which naturally caused Uncle Stewart to insist that he stay behind and “prepare” himself to handle Jessie. Uncle Stewart had worked it all out. He had their story straight. Now it was up to Sanford to memorize it and not slip under pressure.

Uncle Stewart and Sanford were in complete agreement on that, Uncle Stewart eager to repel her curiosity so that he could continue bringing Hell to the world and Sanford wanting her to leave before something drew her into the evil there. He had already seen innocent children killed and his own future doomed in that place. He would rather die ten times over than allow Jessie to be swept up in it, but he had to work fast. She was all eyes and ears, usually too smart for comfort. There was no way to keep her in the dark for long. But his feeling of panic was so intense that it was making him stupid, as if all that his brain and body wanted to do was to pick a direction and run like a scalded cat, as if he had no energy for anything else.

His problem was not in remembering what to say. That part was easy. He was fine, he was attending school, going to Scouting events, and working on the ranch learning all about the business. Uncle Stewart had also concocted stories for two of the supposed Scouting events, just in case she asked. One was an overnight camping trip in the desert outside town, and the other was a Boy Scout Jamboree near the town of Riverside. Uncle Stewart described everything to Sanford in perfect liar’s detail so that he could just repeat the description of the whole picture to Jessie, and do the same thing for the fictional camping trip. Sanford was drilled on the size of his class, the name of his teacher at Wineville School, and the names of two alleged best friends. Sanford named two neighbor boys who had dropped by a couple of times until Uncle Stewart made them feel unwelcome. At least they really existed and Sanford knew what they looked like if he ever had to describe them. So that pretty well buttoned up his story, as Uncle Stewart put it, so that all he had to do was keep it straight, the way guys do in prison.

Sanford squelched the urge to ask why Uncle Stewart would copy the behavior of men who had gotten themselves thrown into prison, or to wonder out loud if it might be smarter to find out what men do who
don’t
end up in prison and copy them instead. But he didn’t need a knot on his head or a black eye when Jessie arrived. There was too much to explain already. Uncle Stewart’s fits of violence had become more unpredictable, even in situations where it was in his interest to control himself. He was losing either the ability or the will to do that.

Sanford could imagine about a dozen ways that his plan to get her out of there could go wrong. He was still pacing behind the ranch house when he heard the approaching rumble of the Buick’s big engine.

His legs did it again. This time they turned his body toward the rear chicken coop with the filled-in graves. Before he had time to give it any thought he was sprinting there. He kept the house between himself and the car so that by the time he made it behind the coop’s wooden walls, Uncle Stewart and Jessie were just pulling past the front of the house. His legs had already delivered him to the safety of the sturdy coop, and he peeked from the behind the doorframe to watch them pull around into the detached garage next to the house.

Inside the garage, Uncle Stewart set the parking brake and killed the engine. The shack was stuffy with the smell of hot tires and engine fumes. He sat for a moment without moving. Jessie did the same, waiting for him. The only sound was the ticking metal of the cooling engine. After a moment, he broke into a giggle and turned to her with a mischievous gleam in his eyes. He gestured toward the floor of the semi-dark garage and spoke in a deliberate, dramatic voice. “This,” he intoned, “is where we keep our dead.”

He waited another moment, then broke up laughing. “Niece-ee, come
on,
that was your welcome-home joke! You would be so much cuter if you had a sense of humor. ‘Course it’s not
your
home, I guess. My home, then. Welcome to my home, and this is where we keep our dead. Ha-ha-ha! All right, I am still joking, don’t you get it? Time to smile!”

Jessie was tired of waiting for him to get out. She opened her passenger door and stepped out. “I’ll come back for my bag and my purse after I find Sanford. I would have thought that he would be around.” She walked out without looking back.

“Hey! You should wait for me to show you around the place! You can get hurt around here, I’m telling you! All right, then. But be careful! When you find Sanford, tell him to come on up to the kitchen and get dinner started!”

Jessie kept walking, giving no indication whether she’d heard him or not. He let her go. Regardless of any urges he may have felt about bashing in the back of her head as a comment on her attitude, he bided his time at that point, maybe to give her some kind of a chance to satisfy her concerns and get out of there. He decided to just go in and put in some work on the piano before Sanford fixed their dinner. Then it would be time to sit down with the two of them and judge whether or not Sanford was going to be able to keep his story straight.

Sanford huddled inside of the coop at the rear of the property and listened to Jessie calling his name while she went from building to building. There was no way for him to get out of there now without running into her. His discovery was imminent, and still he remained petrified by his sense of panic over having to confront her. It made no difference that he missed her desperately and longed for the sane sense of family and familiarity that her company represented. The problem, of course, was not Jessie: it was him. The last time she’d seen him back up in Canada, he might have been as worthless as Winnie claimed, but he was surely not the broken thing that he had since become.

She was fifteen yards away now. There was one more shed for her to check before she would be there. Desperation finally moved him. He stumbled out into the daylight, making a show out of stretching and rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. “Jessie?” he called out. “Did I hear you out there?”

Jessie popped back out of the next shed and immediately broke into a wide smile. “Hey there, you! What did you do, fall asleep?” She hurried over to him and gave him a firm hug.

“Hi, Jessie. Yeah, I guess I fell asleep for a while. I’m sorry.”

“Well, don’t you even worry about that for a minute. It’s so good to see you!”

“Thanks, Jess. I’m glad you’re here, you know, even though we’re so busy and all. You’ll understand if I don’t have a lot of time, won’t you?”

She pulled back a bit to look at him. “Hey Sang, it’s me.”

He winced at the sound of his private nickname. It was all he could do to maintain his mask. He could not meet her gaze, so he rubbed his eyes again as if he was having trouble waking up. “I don’t mean it like that. Sure I’m glad to see you.”

“So why have you lost all that weight? Doesn’t he feed you enough?”

“Who, Uncle Stewart? I feed us. He buys the groceries. But I eat enough. You know, for me.”

“Doesn’t look like it.”

“Well, it’s the work. A lot to do. Come on—I’ll show you around.”

“Didn’t I just look around?”

“But this time
I’ll
be showing you.”

“… Okay, then. Why don’t you show me whatever it is that’s your favorite thing around here?”

Sanford froze, struck by the idea. His favorite thing to do at Uncle Stewart’s chicken ranch? The attempt to run that through his mind was like walking at top speed into deep quicksand. He stood staring into space and muttering to himself under his breath, lost in the attempt to come up with an answer.

When Jessie stood and silently watched, it was her turn to look troubled. She quickly changed the subject and nudged him back into action, pretending that she had not noticed anything. “All right, then. Why don’t you show me how you candle the eggs before you sell them? I’ve never watched someone do that. Do you ever find anything really disgusting?”

He turned to her, his eyes gradually focusing on her again. “Oh,” he said in a low voice. “I do that over in the main henhouse, that one over there.”

Jessie pretended to be oblivious to the fact that he would not look at her for more than a second or so. She kept her tone light. “So I guess this means that I’m not going to get my hug, is that it?”

That one cracked Sanford’s face just a little bit and he exhaled sharply, grinning in spite of his anxiety. In that moment, he finally raised his eyes to meet hers. He nearly cried out, there was so much emotion wrapped up in the act of seeing her again. His throat seized up and he knew better than to try to talk. Instead he stepped over to her and gave her a hug. It lasted about two seconds, but that was all. He was so raw that he could not tolerate more.

A large part of him wanted to latch onto her and scream for help and confess all the terrible things and beg her to help him find some way out, any way out at all. How good it would have been to be four years old again, back when Jessie was eight and so grown-up. Somewhere underneath the thick layer of scar tissue created by the process of toughening him up, there was that same small boy whose terrors could still be eased by his sister. She had always seemed to know everything and gladly took him anywhere she went. Back then, Jessie would have made a nightmare like this go away with some sort of older-person magic.

But today the layers of adult scarring worked perfectly and restrained any feeble hope before it could grow in him. That small boy was trapped, as good as dead. Instead Sanford smiled, dropped his eyes again, and walked off toward the henhouse. “Come on,” he said, walking away as if this was something that they did all the time. He walked a half step ahead of her so that he could keep his eyes on the ground and run Uncle Stewart’s whole cover story through his mind again. To protect her.

Sanford was relieved that night at dinner when he saw that Uncle Stewart was not trying to fool Jessie into trusting him. Any plan that he might have had was crushed by his own need to make himself the center of attention. He was in one of his big-man moods, and Sanford was happy to let him do all the talking.

He recognized this agitated and talkative side of his uncle. At least it was not his killing side; if it had been, he would have looked more focused and displayed a wolfish stare. They were all safe enough for the moment. Sanford simply noted the extra glint of intensity in Uncle Stewart’s eyes and the additional shine to his forehead and knew to remain alert. His uncle could flare up without warning. Sanford was especially relieved to see that Jessie seemed to know how to take such behavior in stride—she didn’t bother to contradict Uncle Stewart or try to slow down his rhetoric. This was good. The thing to do at moments like this was to step back and just let Uncle Stewart run himself out.