This Dark Road to Mercy: A Novel (16 page)

“Quillby,” I said. Wade turned around and looked at me.

“What?”

“Quillby,” I said again. I stared right back at him. “Her last name is Quillby, and mine is too.”

I’d always wanted my hair to be brown, and I hoped it would be as dark as Ruby’s, as dark as Mom’s.

After reading the directions, I put on the plastic gloves and stood in the tub with the shower off and squirted the dye all over my head, and then I used my fingers to rub it in. I counted off the minutes, and then I turned on the shower and rinsed it out.

When I finished bathing, I wrapped a towel around me and opened the bathroom door. The mirror in the bathroom had been too fogged over to look in, and that was fine; I wasn’t ready to see myself anyway. Wade and Ruby were sitting side by side on one of the beds. Ruby was wearing her new sunglasses. She had her head leaned up against Wade and he had his arm around her.

“Cardinals are playing tonight,” Wade said. “McGwire’s going for fifty-eight.” I acted like I didn’t hear him, and I looked at Ruby and gathered my hair over my left shoulder so she could see it.

“What do you think?” I asked. “Is it brown?”

Ruby just stared at me, and then she lifted up her sunglasses to get a better look. She wrinkled up her forehead like she was thinking of exactly how to put it, and then she dropped her sunglasses back over her eyes. “I don’t know,” she finally said. “It’s too wet.”

That was the last thing I wanted to hear, and I went back into the bathroom to put on my T-shirt and shorts, which I realized were the only clothes we had with us except for our nightgowns. I heard Wade out in the bedroom. “I think it looks great,” he said. “I really do.”

I walked out of the bathroom in my towel with my wadded-up shirt in my hand. “We need clothes, Wade. And underwear. We can’t wear the same thing every day.” I went to unfasten my towel and put on my shirt, but then I caught myself. “And we need our own room too. I bet you’ve got enough money to pay for it.” I picked up all my clothes and walked toward the bathroom.

“Hold up,” Wade said. “I need a shower. You go ahead and get dressed out here.” He picked up a couple of things and walked toward the bathroom, but before he closed the door he looked back at me. “We’ll go shopping for more clothes tomorrow,” he said. “I promise.” He smiled at me and closed the door.

I rolled my eyes and sighed and hung my towel on the back of one of the chairs and started getting dressed. I looked at Ruby. “Is my hair brown or not?” I asked.

“It’s wet,” she said. “I told you it’s too hard to tell.”

“You probably can’t tell because you’re wearing those stupid sunglasses.”

“You’re just jealous that he didn’t get a pair for you,” she said.

“No—I’m not,” I said.

There was a little sink and a counter just outside the bathroom, and I walked over and opened one of the drawers. I heard Wade turn the shower on. I found a hair dryer and stood up and plugged it in, careful not to look in the mirror; I didn’t want to see myself until my hair was dry and I knew for sure just what it was going to look like. It took a few minutes to blow-dry my hair, and then I turned the dryer off and brushed my hair back with my fingers. I walked around in front of the bed where Ruby was sitting. She lifted up her sunglasses and looked at me for a second, and then she took them all the way off.

“It’s brown,” she said, smiling. “It’s definitely brown.”

I wanted to believe her, but I just couldn’t, not after seeing how much dye had been washed out of my hair and down the drain. I walked back to the mirror and stood in front of it with my eyes closed. I took a deep breath and held it, and then I opened my eyes.

Ruby was right; my hair was brown. I turned my head back and forth, looking at myself from all the different angles I could. The girl in the mirror didn’t even look like me, and I saw that with the brown hair and all the sun I’d gotten yesterday that I looked more like Ruby than I ever had before, and I finally looked like Mom.

Ruby had crawled off the bed and come over to get a better look. She stood beside me and both of us stared in the mirror. We looked like sisters for the first time in our lives.

“You look different,” she said, “but I like it.”

“I do too,” I said, still turning my head and looking at myself out of the corners of my eyes. “I love it.”

The shower had turned off in the bathroom, and now the toilet flushed. The knob turned and the door opened. Me and Ruby both looked over. Wade stepped out of the bathroom, smiling, already dressed like he was ready to go somewhere.

“What do y’all think?” he asked. I couldn’t believe it; he’d shaved off his whiskers and gone and dyed his hair brown too, and he’d gotten just as much sun as I had. He kept smiling and turned around slowly like he was a model. Ruby laughed and clapped her hands; I felt like crying.

The three of us finally looked like a family.

Pruitt

C H A P T E R   16

T
he first thing Lane Kelly saw when he woke up was me standing at the foot of the bed. The room was dark except for the faint green light coming from the alarm clock on the table by his head. He’d opened his eyes to the sound of me tapping the Louisville Slugger’s barrel against the footboard. His wife lifted her head from the pillow and stared out into the darkness.

“Get up.” Neither of them moved, as if they hoped that lying still would make me disappear. The bat tapped the footboard again. “Get up.”

In the green glow, I watched Kelly’s hand feel around for the pistol he’d left sitting beside the alarm clock. He didn’t know that while he was sleeping the room had already been cleared, the gun found and moved to the dresser behind me, just like he didn’t know that a stranger had been in his house for twenty minutes, moving from room to room after coming through the front door with one of their spare keys. I reached into the darkness for the pistol. My thumb cocked the hammer. “No use looking for that gun. It’s right here.”

Kelly’s hand froze when he realized what he’d heard, and then it lifted up toward the lamp. “No lights,” I said. His hand kept moving, and I set the pistol back on the dresser and closed both hands around my bat. The lamp on the table clicked on just as I was in midswing. The bulb exploded with a
pop
and the base of the lamp shattered against the wall. His wife screamed in the one second that light filled the room before it fell into darkness again.

My eyes readjusted after the blast of light as Kelly’s face and shoulders set themselves off in blurred edges. The bat came to rest barrel down against his neck, pinning him to the bed, his Adam’s apple sending a vibration through the wood when he swallowed. His wife whimpered beside him, the sheets rustling as her hand searched the bed, reaching out for him. I slid the barrel of the bat from his neck to his chest, pushing the covers off him and his wife and down toward the foot of the bed until reaching the footboard. “Both of you. Get up. Now.”

The inside of the house was pitch black as Lane Kelly and his wife inched down the hallway in front of me, their fingertips tracing the wall, grazing both the framed photographs as well as the empty frame whose picture was still folded and tucked inside my glove compartment along with the picture of Wade Chesterfield’s kid.

Their back door was newly repaired, and it squeaked when Kelly pulled it toward him. His wife stumbled when she stepped out onto the deck, and she fell to her knees and stayed that way, crying, her hands covering her eyes. He bent down and whispered to her, and then he helped her to her feet and down the steps into the grass.

Neither of them seemed surprised to find that the door to the garage was unlocked or that the blinding construction lights had been turned on and pulled into a circle with a folding chair in the center. It wasn’t until Kelly was sitting in the chair in that bright light with his wrists bound together that he thought to ask a single question. “What do you want?”

His wife was also sitting in a chair somewhere in the dark in front of him, just far enough outside the light that he couldn’t see her. I’d already fastened her wrists behind her back, and her ankles were now being duct-taped to a chair just like the one he was sitting in. “Who are you?” she asked.

“It doesn’t matter.”

She was crying and trying to see my eyes through my sunglasses where I knelt at her feet, my hands tearing strips of duct tape from the roll. Her short white gown left her legs exposed.

“Are you going to hurt us?” she asked.

“That depends.”

“On what?” Kelly asked behind me.

“On what you know.” I used my teeth to tear off a long piece of tape that wrapped twice around his wife’s head, covering her mouth. She screamed into it.

“If you hurt her I’ll kill you,” Kelly said.

“You shouldn’t be worried about her.”

He wasn’t wearing anything but a pair of white jockeys, and his stomach sagged slightly over his waist. In the bright light, both his underwear and his skin were whiter than they should’ve been. An industrial table saw sat eye level with him in the center of the lights. He stared past it in the direction my voice had come from, and then his eyes focused on the saw as if he’d never seen it before.

But his wife must have seen it before, and she must’ve been thinking about what she’d seen it do, because she began to grunt and toss her head from side to side, rocking her chair back and forth off the concrete floor. Kelly looked in her direction and called out, “Honey! It’s okay!” She either didn’t hear him or didn’t believe him, because she didn’t stop rocking. “If you hurt her—”

“Stop talking and listen.” My shadow fell across him, blotting out the light. “Do you know why this is happening?”

“The money?”

“Yes. This is definitely about the money.”

“Let her go, and I’ll talk.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I don’t know anything,” he said.

“You haven’t been asked any questions yet.”

“I saw Wade take it. That’s all.”

“See? You do know something.” I’d taken off my batting gloves earlier to string the zip ties and tear off pieces of duct tape, but my right hand found them in my back pocket and slid them on before removing the safety guard from the saw. Kelly’s eyes followed my gloved hand while it moved, but his eyes stayed on the blade once it was exposed.

“I don’t know anything,” he said again. “I swear.” His voice had changed, gone higher, more desperate.

“How much was it?”

“How much what?”

“How much did he take?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “A lot. Couple hundred thousand—maybe more. It was too much to count.”

“Where is he now?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I swear. I have no idea.”

“You need to have a better answer than that.” When the saw turned on, a sharp, guttural whine came from the darkness behind me and immediately melded with the scream of the blade until the two sounds were indistinguishable. My fingers closed around Kelly’s forearms and pulled him out of his chair. His wrists slammed down on the bridge of the saw. “Wait!” he screamed. “Wait!” His hands clenched themselves in tight fists, but they weren’t strong enough to keep his right index finger from being pried loose and pushed toward the blade. “Charleston!” he screamed.

My hands let go of his wrists, and Kelly fell back against the chair, knocking it over onto its side. The saw powered down and the sound of it faded away.

“What about Charleston?” He laid at my feet in the fetal position, his right hand tucked against his stomach as if it were already missing. He wasn’t going to answer, so my hand closed around his face and squeezed his cheeks together before the question came again. “What about Charleston?”

“His mom,” he finally said. When my hand let go of his face his head bounced against the concrete floor.

“Is that where he’s going?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I just can’t think of anything else. Please.”

The sounds of his wife’s crying came out of the darkness, and he raised his head and looked toward her. The saw turned on again, and the sound of it sucked the air out of the garage. When he heard it, Kelly closed his eyes and lowered his chin to his chest, but he opened them when he felt my hands on his again, and he screamed when his wrists hit the saw’s bridge.

My mouth was right by his ear, the wind from the saw blowing across my face. “Is that where he’s going?” But if he answered, I didn’t hear him.

My eyes opened into the blinding construction lights, and my hands reached out on either side of me and searched the concrete floor for my sunglasses. When my fingers closed around them and lifted my sunglasses to my eyes I felt something warm and wet. Blood.

When I stood, I stepped on the heavy framing hammer she’d used, and the toe of my shoe kicked it, sending it skittering across the floor and into the darkness.

The garage door was open, and Lane Kelly and his wife were gone.

Outside, the floodlights showed two sets of footprints in the shiny, damp grass that led to the woods behind Kelly’s house. They’d known better than to go back inside. They must’ve also known that those woods would go on for miles and miles before crossing the South Carolina state line, that they’d be walking barefoot and bare-legged in the pitch black for hours before stumbling upon another house. There was no one coming to help them, and there was no one they could go to for help.

My truck was parked in the grass about a quarter mile down the road, but within minutes it was rolling through Lane Kelly’s front yard on the way behind his house. It came to a stop at the spot where the sets of footprints disappeared into the woods, the high beams and the lights on the roof rack piercing the darkness and throwing long shadows out away from the trees.

The truck idled in neutral for a few seconds, and then my foot eased on and off the gas and the sound of the engine revving echoed back toward the house from the woods. My eyes scanned the trees where they were lit up like a stage, looking for any sign of movement, any flash where the light caught an open eye or a piece of white fabric. Lane Kelly and his wife were out there somewhere in those trees, hunkered down, holding their breath, listening to the sound of the engine and praying to hear it die away. It could’ve taken hours to find them, and it would be near daylight before they were marched back into the garage. And that would be time taken away from the search for Wade Chesterfield and the money.