“Just put your glasses on, Mag,” he said.
Margaret pulled a pair of thick-lensed frames from the patch pocket on her nightgown, slipped them on, and gasped.
“My God. What in the world happened to her?”
“You tell me. She just knocked on the door. When I opened it she said ‘help me’ and fainted right into my arms.”
Margaret moved a step closer across the carpet. She turned on a stained glass lamp sitting on an end table.
“Is that blood?” she asked.
“Yeah. She’s got a bad cut right here. And her arms and legs are all torn up.”
“I’ll call nine-one-one. Or should we just take her to the medical center? I’ll drive.”
Charlie lay his ear against the woman’s heart, her mouth.
“No, she’s breathing. Just tell them to send an ambulance.”
While Margaret called 911 from the adjacent kitchen, Charlie leaned in close to the woman on his sofa and spoke in a low and calming voice into her ear.
“You’re safe now. An ambulance is coming and they’re gonna take good care of you.” Charlie felt her burning forehead, then held her swollen shattered hand. “Just hang in there, okay? Everything’s gonna be fine now. You came to the right house.”
Margaret walked in from the kitchen, sat down on the end of the sofa.
“Ambulance is on the way and they’re also sending a police car since I told them she might’ve been attacked. What do you think happened to her?”
Charlie shook his head.
He stared at the television for a moment, then reached for the remote control and turned it off.
The woman stirred.
Eyes opening.
Wide with fear.
“Remember me?” Charlie asked.
A nod.
“You’re safe now. The ambulance is coming.”
There was a knock at the front door.
“That was fast,” Margaret said, rising from the sofa.
“See, there they are,” Charlie whispered. “Lightning quick.”
As Margaret reached to open the front door she said, “Wonder why they didn’t use the siren or the lights?”
Charlie was staring into the woman’s glazed eyes when Margaret opened the door.
He said, “We’ll come see you in the hospital tomorrow, maybe bring you some—”
Margaret emitted a strange gurgling sound.
Charlie glanced over his shoulder at his wife.
She turned slowly.
Faced him.
Standing in the open doorway, stunned, face gone pale as sand, sheets of blood flooding out of the long dark smile under her chin.
“Mag!” Charlie shrieked, coming to his feet, leaping awkwardly over the coffee table as his wife went to her knees and fell prostrate across the carpet.
A man with long black hair stepped into the lowlit living room as the sound of distant sirens grew audible.
Charlie lunged at the intruder who simply held fast to the ivory-hilted bowie, letting the old drunken sailor impale himself with his own inertia, the carbon blade turning, riving its quiet devastation inside him.
Charlie tumbled backward and fell dying onto his dead wife.
Luther drew the blade between his thumb and forefinger, flung blood onto the walls, and turned his attention to the leather sofa.
Beth was gone and the sirens were approaching.
62
THE inside of the wicker clothes hamper smelled of fishguts and mildew. Beth had burrowed down into the laundry, covering herself in underwear and panties and damp jeans and a blanket that stunk of gasoline.
The old man was no longer keening and above the distant moan of sirens she could hear hallway doors opening and closing.
Having managed to put the lid on the hamper from inside, her only view of the master bedroom was through a gap in the wicker. But there was little to see. A blue nightlight by the doorway provided the sole illumination.
Footsteps stopped behind the door.
Doorknob turning.
Sirens closing in.
Stay alive one more minute and you get to live, see your children again. He can’t stay once the police are here.
The bedroom door swung open.
“Elizabeth.”
A voice without a shard of emotion.
Through the wicker she could see his legs in the electricblue glow of the nightlight.
“We don’t have much time. Come on.”
The flashing lights of the ambulance passed through the bedroom’s only window, bursts of vermilion streaking across the walls. She could hear the rocks crunching under its tires as it sped down the dirt road toward the saltbox.
“I’m just gonna cut your throat and leave. You’ll be dead in a minute tops. I think that’s very reasonable.”
Beth watched him walk past the hamper, kneel down, and glance under the bed. He rose, moved toward the adjoining bathroom, disappeared inside.
Her heart banging.
Sirens blistering the frozen November night outside.
Reaching out of the clothes, hands on the wicker lid, she heard him rip the shower curtain from its rings.
Go now. Climb out. Go.
A cabinet under the sink opened and closed.
She started to lift the lid when his footsteps reentered the bedroom.
Walk past. Please just go. Leave. Run away. They’ll catch you.
The ambulance parked in front of the house. She could hear its engine, doors opening, slamming.
The man sighed and rushed past the hamper to the doorway.
Oh yes thank you God thank
He stopped abruptly in the threshold.
Paramedics pounding on the front door.
“Almost,” he said. “Almost.”
And he spun around and moved toward the hamper, Beth peering up through the stench of strangers’ laundry as the lid disappeared.
The man with long black hair gazed down at her and smiled, flashing lights rouging his pale and bloodless face.
The voices of the paramedics reached them, yelling for someone to unlock the front door.
What Beth heard next was the sound the blade made, moving in and out of her— footsteps in squishy mud.
He did the work with the casual efficiency he used to clean fish, then put the lid back on and ran out of the bedroom.
Beth heard a window break across the hall. He was escaping through the backyard.
Her heart sputtered, trying to beat, failing, the pain tempered by the expanding vacuum the life left as it rushed warmly and fast out of her throat.
It occurred to her that she couldn’t breathe but she was gone before it mattered.
63
MY head was clearing, the bleary shapes clamoring back into focus.
Still disoriented from a bash on the head that had knocked me unconscious, I found myself immobilized in an uncomfortably straight chair in a lowlit stone room that smelled of solder and copper and freshly-hewn oak.