Страница 19 из 58
“You wait here,” she demanded. “I’ll be right back.” And with that, his mother disappeared into the night.
“Dariah?” the man whispered, his voice hoarse. His eyes opened halfway. “What are you—” he began, then fell silent, his shallow gurgling almost drowned out by the loud croaks of distant bullfrogs.
A moment later, his mother returned out of breath, carrying a shovel. She threw it to the ground, then grabbed the boy by the shoulders and dug her long, red nails deep into his skin.
“Dariah?” the man whispered again. “What’s—?”
She released him and stared at the man for a long moment. Suddenly, she went calm. When she spoke next, she formed her words slowly. “I’m going to the house,” she said, and handed him the shovel. “When I get back, I don’t want him breathing none, you hear?”
An odd light went on inside his head. It glowed brightly, then dimmed. The rain felt like popsicles on his bare back as the man started the repulsive gurgling again.
“I don’t want you to think that you can go into town and begin tellin’ stories. You can’t because you’ll be as guilty as me. You hear what I’m tellin’ you? We’re in this together. A grin crept across her face. “If you don’t remember anything else, you remember that.”
“But—”
“But shit!” she snarled, the calmness forgotten. Rainwater dripped from her chin. “I’m yore mama and you do what I say!” She pointed at the shovel. “You just do what I told you to, and after I gather the things we need, I’ll be back.”
She charged toward the house and he watched on until he couldn’t make out her form any longer against the night. Then he turned to the man, who was still gurgling, his eyes small and frightened.
“Son, you. . . gotta help me,” he managed. “You’ve got to hide me from Dariah. Somethin’s. . . somethin’s snapped in that fool woman’s head.”
His head cocked, he studied the man. His heart pounded so hard he thought he’d topple over. He didn’t want to do it. He didn’t even know if he could. But if he didn’t, she’d make things far worse, and he knew he couldn’t bear anything worse.
He began having trouble breathing.
“Please boy,” the man pleaded. “Please. I can’t feel my legs. . . and we don’t have much time. That woman’ll hunt us both down. She’ll kill the both of us. You gotta. . . you gotta hide me.”
But he’d already come to his conclusion. It was either the stranger or him, and it would have to be the stranger. Taking short, uneven breaths, he raised the shovel high above his head.
“God. . . please forgive me,” he begged.
His and the man’s screams pierced the night. . . as he did what his mother had told him to do.
His cheeks streaked with tears, he shook the memory from his head and climbed out of bed to get a glass of water. This time, when he moved down the hallway, he didn’t pause outside his mother’s bedroom. There was no need to.
Chapter 23
HALEY BLINKED IN the darkness and turned her head so she could see the time: three o’clock. It was already Thursday morning and odds were that Tiffany was still missing.
She wiped beads of sweat from her forehead and untangled her feet from the top sheet. A sliver of light streamed in from Becky’s room and she could hear Seacrest laughing.
She rose and peered through the moth-eaten tarp that covered the spaces in the unfinished wall that separated her room from Becky’s. Shortly after her father’s accident, Tiffany had stood in front of the four by fours and the ribbons of tape. “I think your father was doing a piss poor job with this wall.”
Haley knew Tiffany hadn’t meant to insult her father, it had just been Tiffany’s way. She always said what was on her mind without much thought, an uncouthness that she seemed to always get away with because of her looks.
Since Haley and Becky were getting older and sharing a room in the modest, two-bedroom house was growing uncomfortable, their father decided to build a wall in the middle of the large room to give them each their privacy.
The Saturday of his accident he had gone to the Home Depot in Chester and come back with several two by fours, drywall, and some new tools. A colleague helped him carry everything inside and nail the wood in place.
When Haley left to go to Tiffany’s for the night, the two men were standing in front of the begi
Seacrest lay on her stomach across the foot of Becky’s bed in only a pair of red panties and a small t-shirt. Her dark hair partially hid her face as she flipped through pages of a magazine. Becky sat against her headboard, also with a magazine. She tapped a finger against her mouth, concentrating on something she was reading.
“No shit,” Seacrest muttered, shaking her head. She giggled. “I don’t care how bad you have to pee, you always turn on the bathroom light before sitting on the toilet.”
“Huh?” Becky said absently, still focusing on her own magazine.
“This chick was at her friend’s house and ran into the bathroom without turning on the light. She pulled down her pants and went to sit on the toilet and ended up sitting on this dude’s lap,” Seacrest said, shaking her head again. She rose to her knees and pulled her long hair back. “And she had a crush on this guy. She peed on him. Right on his lap. How stupid is that?”
Becky giggled.
Seacrest stretched and exposed her abdomen. Her full lips parted in a yawn and the emerald nose ring glistened. Haley realized, with a touch of envy, that even when the girl didn’t try to look stu
Seacrest turned to Becky. “You said your sister is friends with that girl, right? The one who disappeared?”
Becky laid her magazine on her chest. “Tiffany? Yeah, they’re best friends.”
“Think she’s dead?”
“No way.”
“Then what do you think happened to her?”
“I don’t know,” Becky said slowly. “But things like that. . . they don’t happen around here.”
“Bet she’s dead.”
Becky’s brow furrowed. “Don’t let Haley hear you say that. She’d have puppies.”
But Haley had heard it.
“Bet that boyfriend of hers killed her,” Seacrest said. “Happens all the time. Sometimes they don’t find people until years later when they start finding pieces of them in different towns. Fingers, feet, arms. Sometimes their heads. They found a head in that dude Dahmer’s apartment. He was a necrophiliac.”
Haley crawled back in bed, burying her head in her pillow. She didn’t want to hear anymore. She wished Becky hadn’t met Seacrest. She was what Mama would call canaille, mischievous and wayward. Bad news from the other side of the tracks, or at least the other side of town, Grand Trespass being a town without tracks. Foul-mouthed and a questionable dresser, she was a bad influence for her younger sister Becky, who like the rest of them, still didn’t know quite who she was.
And to talk about Tiffany like that. What right did she have to say she was—
A floorboard creaked in the living room. Haley propped herself back up and saw that both of the girls were still in Becky’s bedroom, silent and reading.
She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood, pulling on a pair of shorts. She felt grit beneath her feet. Fine sawdust from her father’s work on the wall nearly a year ago. Sometimes she even felt it in her sheets. Feeling it always made her think that her father was close by.
Once, when she was nine, they visited a house that was under construction. Every time Haley got a whiff of the dust, she thought of that big house. The big house they hadn’t been able to afford because her father was a community college professor.
“Educators are damned to modest means, I’m afraid,” Haley had heard her mother say once to Mrs. Perron when she’d asked when they pla