Drawn Into Darkness (7 page)

Justin brought cheesy unbleached tablet paper from school. Stoat made me pull out a page from the back so Justin's fingerprints would not be on it. Justin supplied me with a school-issue wooden pencil. There were no pens in this house, and no envelopes, and certainly no postage stamps. “I'll take care of it next time we go to town, can't I, Uncle Steve?”

“Sure, Justin,” Stoat said with expansive generosity. “I'll give you money to buy a stamp next week sometime.”

Sitting to write, I discovered that my hands were clumsy, shaky, so I printed the mailing address first—c/o my ex-husband, the only address I could remember clearly, because for a long time it had been my own. Then, switching over to handwriting necessarily a bit larger and more childish than usual, I wrote,
Dear Forrest and Quinn
—

“Forrest and Quinn,” said Justin, maybe as a weak attempt to joke or tease. “You gave them those names, Forrest and Quinn?”

Yes, I had, meaning only to prove them a bit different, when in fact they had turned out quite conventional. Quinn, my firstborn, had become a banker, of all things, and Forrest a civil engineer, which did not mean that he was polite but rather that he constructed efficient sewer systems. Neither of them had married yet, having too much head and not enough heart; being, I thought, too much like their father, Georg with no
e
.

“It's too bad babies are named at birth,” I told Justin.

“Go do the dishes, Justin,” growled Stoat.

I continued my letter.

Dear sons, please remember life has not been kind lately so this news is not terrible to me. I have encountered a man who needs to kill me. He promises to do so as quickly and painlessly as he can. By the time you receive this, I should be dead. This is my last will and testament in which I divide all my belongings equally between you. There is much I want to say but cannot, except that I wish you long and wonderful lives.

With greatest love,

Mom

Stoat read this over my shoulder—revolver in hand, of course. When I had finished, he nodded. “I reckon that won't hurt anything. Leave it lay where it is. Justin can mail it next week.”

I looked at Justin, who had just finished washing the dishes. Drying his hands on a dingy kitchen towel, he nodded, giving me a flickering glance of acknowledgment. I barely glimpsed his eyes, yet saw there a near replica of the blank terror that might have been in my own.

Maybe he realized, as I did, how extremely theoretical, almost fictitious, “next week” was for him; otherwise, Stoat would not have allowed me to write the letter. Logic told me that Justin was in as much danger of death as I was. Even before I came along, Stoat had wanted to replace him with a younger victim, and now would be the perfect time to kill him. Two for the price of one. Would Stoat leave Justin at home while he went to murder me? Of course not. He would keep Justin with him so the kid could not turn against him, run away, alert the police. And would he keep Justin alive after Justin had witnessed my murder? I doubted it.

“We can't go till deep dark.” With a stab of his gun barrel, Stoat ordered me toward the living room. “Sit down and watch TV.”

So I did. Wrapped in my towel as if in an overlarge diaper, I sat on the sofa and looked at some program without comprehension. After a while Justin joined me on the other end of the sofa, while Stoat slumped in his chair, keeping the gun aimed at me. All the while my mind trolled near and far, fishing for any possibility of escape, any improvised weapon, any plausible ploy, but came up with none. I remembered having heard once that, when held at gunpoint, one should run while dodging back and forth, the rationale being that most criminals neglect their target practice, are indifferent shots, and it is better to risk a flesh wound than to be killed. My body, however, felt watery after being punched and kicked and handcuffed to a bed—not that I had ever been an athlete, far from it. My memories of school phys ed class, dodgeball in particular, were dismal. And the decades since had not helped any. (Jogging? I have
never
seen a smiling jogger.) After just two days of Stoat's abuse, I felt incapable of jumping up and running to the door, much less dodging. Maybe later, once we got outside?

Maybe if adrenaline kicked in?

Maybe?

S
toat showed no impatience, not even a jiggling leg, as the television babbled and the sky darkened outside the living room window. He had decided beforehand what time to proceed, I inferred, and his plans were not to be rushed even by himself. When the TV changed programs at exactly nine o'clock, he stood up. “Leave it on,” he told Justin, who had reached for the remote. “If people drive by, it'll look like we're home. But they don't need to see me standing here with this pistol. Kill the lights.”

Justin did so. Hardly anyone drove past in the daytime, much less at night, but Stoat took no chances.

“Go get a pair of handcuffs,” he ordered Justin.

The boy returned almost at once. Obviously it had not been necessary for him to untie some cuffs from the bed. I wondered how many pairs of handcuffs Stoat kept around this place.

“And an extra towel. So she don't stink up the upholstery in the van.”

Or leave evidence there either. As I had come to expect of him, he had planned down to the smallest detail.

With my hands cuffed behind my back, I gave up thoughts of possible escape, thus, unintentionally, freeing myself in a different way. Freeing myself to breathe deeply of the wet nighttime air, to feel the raindrops with a perverse joy, to listen with a bittersweet pang to the frogs chiming, their croaking somehow as tuneful at a slight distance as a choir of angel bells. I had time to stand breathing and listening, for Stoat our goat man, so meticulous, would not turn on the porch light; someone might see us. So it took Justin a few minutes to feel his way down the steps before Stoat prodded me ahead of him with a hard little hollow circle pressed to my back.

I felt for the edge of the step with one foot. “Take your time so you don't fall,” Stoat whispered. He sounded as if he meant it sincerely, frightening me worse than if he had cursed me. The scariest thing about Stoat was how normal-nice he could be. A little bit of good in the worst of us? A little bit of bad in the best of us? Bullshit. I knew then, as never before, that there is unfathomable capacity for both good and evil in every single one of us.

The rain poured down, drenching me to the bone, and I tilted my face up and opened my mouth, not because I was thirsty but because I needed to open myself and be cleansed. Rain, please wash away the stink of pee and sweat and fear. Rain, be my baptism into night, my last rite.

Across a stretch of darkness I heard the side door of the van slide open as Justin got in. No overhead lights came on; of course Stoat had disabled them. I heard him open what seemed to be the passenger seat door, feel around with his gun-free hand for something, then say, “In you go.”

No. I wanted to keep standing in the rain, all night if it would help. I did not lift a foot to feel for a step.

“Get in.” With his free hand he grasped my upper arm and hoisted, but I became limp and unhelpful.

“
Move
, or I'll kill you right here and now, ditch you afterward.”

His voice remained quiet and steady but conveyed a remorseless logic, making me suddenly cooperative. I fumbled with my feet, he maneuvered my handcuffed arms, and I landed more or less on the passenger seat, which felt unaccountably, ever so kindly fluffy and soft. Dry, warm. As if the loving mother of my earliest memories had somehow reached out to embrace me from heaven on this hellish night. Even though I didn't believe in heaven or hell, not under normal circumstances, and even though I fully realized my comfort came from a towel meant to protect Stoat's upholstery from my personal pollution, still the touch of terry cloth wrenched sobs out of me, one after another.

Nothing Stoat could do to me would ever make me cry? Riiight.

Did Stoat get credit if fabric softener made me quake with tears?

On my shoulder I felt a touch, tentative and quickly withdrawn. Justin, in the backseat. Meanwhile, Stoat slammed doors, started the van, and told me, “Shut up.” I saw no light, not even headlights as I felt the van begin to roll, but I did not need to look at Stoat's face to know I'd better stop crying. Not that his voice growled or menaced. Not at all. It was his starkness that terrified me. His hollowness.

I shut up.

Stoat drove without headlights onto the road, and accelerated even though the asphalt showed only as a shinier blackness in the night. Somehow Stoat kept us more or less on the pavement, and when we hit the shoulder by mistake, no one spoke, not even him. Not even swearing broke the silence inside that van and the susurration of rain outside. We encountered no other vehicles for some time, but when one appeared in the distance, Stoat turned on his low beams.

“We're far enough away from the house now, it don't matter,” he remarked genially.

No one responded. Stoat turned off the paved road onto one of the gazillion dirt roads that I had not yet gotten around to exploring, meaning I had no idea—did people live back here? Since I could not lean back with my hands cuffed behind me, necessarily I perched on the edge of my seat and peered through the windshield. All I could see in the headlights, through a blur of rain, were trees and brush as oppressive as a tunnel, forest crowding the road into a single lane. Forest as thick as jungle, spiked with palmetto and slathered with Spanish moss like massive weeping cobwebs.

Since it had been raining hard all day, fervidly I hoped that Stoat, driving on a dirt road, would get his van stuck in the mud.

My mistake. Did I say dirt road? These roads were yellow sand plus maybe some orange clay. Sand roads don't make mud in the rain. They just get nice and hard. It's when they're dry and soft that people get stuck in them.

Stoat turned onto another one of them, and we slowed to go over—yikes. The bridge consisted of two spans of wooden planks, each just wide enough to accommodate a vehicle's tires, plus timber supports but no rail. Just below what should have been the middle of the bridge, I saw water rushing. I flinched and closed my eyes as Stoat sent the van across the bridge that was barely there.

We turned onto another narrow, serpentine sand road, crossed another two or three minimalist bridges, and duh, I realized we were driving not through forest, but through swamp. Or into swamp. Most of Maypop County consisted of forest or swamp, forest being trees plus undergrowth, and swamp being trees plus water. Through forest the yellow sand roads ran arrow straight. But in swamp they wriggled to find higher land.

Since we had left the paved road, we had not met up with another vehicle, not one single car, and it had been quite a while since I had noticed a shack or a trailer or even a mailbox to show that anybody lived back here. I supposed it was not the best place in the world to locate one's home, what with mosquitoes, flooding, and the omnipresence of the nastiest of all native poisonous snakes, the water moccasin. I gave up forlorn hopes of encountering anyone who might rescue me. These twisting roads ran deep into places where my body most likely would be eaten by alligators before it was ever found.

If Stoat had not handcuffed me, I would have made a move before now, grabbing the keys out of the ignition, twisting the wheel to send us into a creek, anything for one last chance. Now I thought about throwing myself bodily against Stoat the next time we came to one of those sketchy so-called bridges. All I had to do was send the tires off the planks and the van would drop—

“Where's that mouth of yours, Lee Anna?” Stoat drawled. “You're awful quiet.”

I opened that mouth of mine. “I was just wondering who's going to miss me first, the Mormons or the Jehovah's Witnesses. I couldn't decide which to join, so I went to both, and—”

Stoat chuckled. “Good try. I like you, Lee Anna. Don't feel bad about what I'm fixing to do. It's nothing personal, just what has to happen, logically speaking.”

Behind me, Justin hadn't said a word, and I could not think what on earth to say to him.

I watched and waited for another bare-bones bridge.

But I had missed my chance. We crossed no more bridges. Stoat turned the van onto another—not a road, really, but two tire tracks in the sand, weeds thick and tall between them, undergrowth scrubbing against the sides of the van, thick skeins of Spanish moss dragging, sodden, across the windows and windshield. In the wet night it was kind of like being in a car wash.

And this was a fine time for me to be thinking such clever thoughts when, face it, I was running out of options. Next moment I heard no more brush, saw no more Spanish moss. Night opened into nothing I could see. The track sloped slightly downhill and ended. Or, really, I didn't know it ended, but Stoat did. He stopped the van and turned it off. Its headlights shone through rain amid darkness in which I heard a bedlam of frogs. All around us, they no longer seemed to sing so much as babble, bark, bleat, and belch.

“Get out,” Stoat said, apparently to Justin; obviously I wasn't going anywhere without assistance. Stoat himself got out, but Justin didn't move. I watched Stoat, ghostly in the rain and headlights, cross in front of the van and come to open my door.

He snapped his fingers hard. “I told you to get out!”

I turned sideways on my seat and felt for a step with my feet before I realized he wasn't speaking to me.

Justin said, “No.”

“What you mean, no?”

“No. I'm staying here.”

“You get out of this van, boy, or I'll beat you like you never been beat before.”

“No. I don't care what you do to me, I want no part of this. I'm not moving.”

Shouting obscenities, Stoat snagged me by the shoulders and flung me straight down out of the van to sprawl with my face in wet sand. I didn't care. Somehow the flipped-out, raging Stoat was easier to handle than the marginally nice Stoat. I heard him rampaging inside the van, trying to grab Justin, but evidently Justin had lodged himself someplace impregnable, maybe under the backseat. Meanwhile I struggled to my feet—oddly, I seemed to be standing on open sand, because I felt no vegetation groping me—and I began to stumble away, blindly, into the unknown. Sure, I felt a faint hope, but realistically I was trying not so much to save myself—with handcuffs on?—as to distract Stoat from Justin.

And maybe Justin was trying to distract him from me? How ironic.

“Hey! Hey, stupid woman!” Stoat caught up to me in seconds and whacked me on the side of the head with what felt like the butt of his gun. I saw stars and nearly fell, but he yanked me upright by the handcuffs and started marching me down a slight slope.

Behind us, the van headlights went out, dumping thick darkness as well as heavy rain all over us.

“That miserable ass-reamed snot-nosed punk thinks he's so smart!” Stoat sounded as if he might just possibly blow a major artery, which would have been wonderful. “Screw him. I got a flashlight.” He demonstrated by turning it on, and its wavering circle of white, plus his own triumph, seemed to calm him down as suddenly as he had flipped out. Stoat, a man like a lightbulb, but cracked.

Now his hand on my elbow felt gentle and ceremonious as if we were going on a date. “This way, Miss Lee Anna.” He had to raise his voice in order for me to hear him, there was so much noise in the night—the frogs twanging their soggy concert, and the patter of rain on leaves making the trees sound like an audience applauding. Stoat led me down an area of open sand between what sounded like two walls of forest. We seemed to be on a narrow beach of sorts, ending at some fairly large body of water.

“Is this a lake or what?” I asked, stopping as if to look, though I could see very little through rain so thoroughgoing it had already washed the sand off my face.

“Chatawachipolee River, running so high it's nearly covered the boat ramp down yonder. Now stop stalling,” he added in the kindest of voices. “My gun's right here in my belt. Move.”

Crap. There seemed to be no point in delaying the inevitable. I walked on.

“Okay, this is close enough.”

It certainly was. The beam of the flashlight showed the sand ending a scant two feet in front of me. Beyond that I saw swiftly running water.

Stoat let go of me and drew his gun. “Kneel down.”

I started trembling, and not from cold. “Why?”

“Just do it.” With the gun barrel poking my back and his gun hand gripping the handcuffs, he shoved me to my knees at the edge of the water, then stood back.

“Now, Miss Lee Anna,” he told me in avuncular tones, “you are going into the river, but you'll be dead before your darlin' little face hits the water. You ain't gonna drown, and I promise you, you ain't going to feel a thing.”

Not going to feel a thing? I felt sickening fear. I shook so hard my handcuffs rattled.

Maybe that reminded him. “No use wasting a good pair of cuffs,” he remarked. Bending down to take them off, he set the flashlight aside, on the sand, since he was not about to relinquish hold of the gun and he did not have three hands.

The moment the handcuffs came off, my arms swung forward and I boosted myself to my feet.

“Hey! Crazy bitch!” Stoat barked, no longer sounding the least bit avuncular. “Stop right there!” I heard him backing away, presumably so I could not grab the gun. “I'll shoot you in the gut, slut! You want that?”

“I want you to look me in the
face
, you creep,” I yelled, beginning to turn—

Wham.

•   •   •

A dull cracking noise, but to my gun-shy mind it sounded like a shot. I should have felt the pain; he couldn't have missed me. I didn't get it—until I swung around and saw Stoat crumpling to the ground.

“Justin!”

I grabbed the flashlight off the ground to verify. Yes. Standing over Stoat, Justin held a wooden baseball bat, and even in the downpour I could tell that the water running down his face was not entirely rain.

“Justin,” I repeated, dumbfounded, and also weak in the knees with relief.

He spoke between sobs. “Is he—dead?”