A Maiden's Grave (31 page)

She falls silent.

'There's more, isn't there? There's something else you want to tell me."

It hurts so much! She only thinks these words but according to the fishy rules of her music room de l'Epée can hear them perfectly. He leans forward. "What hurts? Tell me?"

And there's so much to tell him. She could use a million words to describe that night and never convey the horror of living through it.

"Go ahead," De l'Epée says encouragingly. As her brother used to do, as her father never did. "Go ahead."

"We left the concert hall and got into Danny's car. He asked if I wanted some dinner but I couldn't eat a thing. I asked him just to drive home."

De l'Epée scoots forward. Their knees meet. He touches her arm. "What else?"

"We left town, got onto the highway. We were in Danny's little Toyota. He rebuilt it himself. Everything. He's so good with mechanical things. He's amazing, really. We were going pretty fast."

She pauses for a moment to let the tide of sadness subside. It never does but she takes a deep breath – remembering when she had to take a breath before saying something – and finds herself able to continue. "We were talking in the car."

De l'Epée nods.

"But that means we were signing. And that means we had to look at each other. He kept asking me what I was sad about, that the hearing aids didn't work, was I discouraged, had Dad been hassling me about the farm again?… He…"

She must breathe deeply again.

"Danny was looking at me, not at the road. Oh, God… it was just there, in front of us. I never saw where it came from."

"What?"

"A truck. A big one, carrying a load of metal pipes. I think it changed lanes when Danny wasn't looking and… oh, Jesus, there was nothing he could do. All these pipes coming at us at a thousand miles an hour…"

The blood. All the blood.

"I know he braked, I know he tried to turn. But it was too late. No… Oh, Danny."

Spraying, spraying. Like the blood from the throat of a calf.

"He managed to steer mostly out of the way but one pipe smashed through the windshield. It…"

De l'Epée kneads her hand. "Tell me," he whispers.

"It…" The words are almost impossible to say. "It took his arm off."

Like the blood running down the gutters into the horrible well in the center of the killing room.

"Right at the shoulder." She sobs at the memory. Of the blood. Of the stunned look on her brother's face as he turned to her and spoke for a long moment, saying words she couldn't figure out then and never had the heart to ask him to repeat.

The blood sprayed to the roof of the car and pooled in his lap, while Melanie struggled to get a tourniquet around the stump and screamed and screamed. She, the vocal one. While Danny, still conscious, nodding madly, sat completely mute.

Melanie says to De l'Epée, "The medics got there just a few minutes later and stopped most of the bleeding. They saved his life. They got him to a hospital and the doctors got his arm reattached within a couple of hours. For the past year he's had all sorts of operations. He's having one tomorrow – that's where my parents are. In St. Louis, visiting him. They think he'll get back maybe fifty percent use of his arm eventually. If he's lucky. But he lost all interest in the farm after that. He's pretty much stayed in bed. He reads, watches TV. That's about all. It's like his life is over with…"

"It wasn't your fault," he says. "You're taking the blame, aren't you?"

"A few days after it happened my father called me out on the porch. There's something about him that's funny – I can lip-read him perfectly."

(Like Brutus, she thinks, and wishes she hadn't.)

"He sat on the porch swing and looked up at me and he said, 'I guess you understand what you've done now. You had no business talking Danny into doing something as foolish as that. And for a selfish reason all your own. What happened was your fault, there's no two ways about it. You might just as well've turned the engine over on a corn picker when Danny was working on a jam inside.

" 'God made you damaged and nobody wants it. It's a shame but it's not a sin – as long as you understand what you have to do. Come home now and make up for what you done. Get that teaching of yours over with, get that last year done. You owe your brother that. And you owe me especially.

" 'This is your home and you'll be welcome here. See, it's a question of belonging and what God does to make sure those that oughta stay someplace do. Well, your place is here, working at what you can do, where your, you know, problem doesn't get you into trouble. God's will.' And then he went to spray ammonia, saying, 'So you'll be home then.' It wasn't a question. It was an order. All decided. No debate. He wanted me to come home this last May. But I held off a few months. I knew I'd give in eventually. I
always
give in. But I just wanted a few more months on my own." She shrugs. "Stalling."

"You don't want the farm?"

"No! I want my music. I want to
hear
it, not just feel vibrations… I want to hear my lover whisper things to me when I'm in bed with him." She can't believe she's saying these things to him, intimate things – far more intimate than she's ever told anyone. "I don't want to be a virgin anymore."

Now that she's started it's all pouring out. "I hate the poetry, I don't care about it! I never have. It's stupid. Do you know what I was going to do in Topeka? After my recital at the Theater of the Deaf? I had that appointment afterwards." Then his arms are around her and she is pressing against his body, her head on his shoulder. It's an odd experience, doubly so: being close to a man, and communicating without looking at him. "There's something called a cochlear implant." She must pause for a moment before she can continue. "They put a chip in your inner ear. It's connected by wire to this
thing
, this speech processor that converts the sounds to impulses in the brain… I could never tell Susan. A dozen times I was going to. But she would've hated me. The idea of trying to cure deafness – she hated that."

"Do they work, these implants?"

"They can. I have a ninety percent hearing loss in both ears but that's an average. In some registers I can make out sounds and the implants can boost those. But even if they don't work there are other things to try. There's a lot of new technology that in the next five or six years'll help people like me – grass-roots deaf and peddlers and just ordinary people who want to hear."

She thinks: And I
do
. I want to hear… I want to hear you whisper things in my ear while we make love.

"I…" He's speaking, his mouth is moving, but the sound dwindles to nothing.

Fading, fading.

No! Talk to me, keep talking to me. What's wrong?

But now it's Brutus who is standing in the doorway of her music room. What are you doing here? Leave! Get out! It's
my
room. I don't want you here!

He smiles, looks at her ears. "Freak of nature," he says.

Then they were back in the killing room and Brutus wasn't talking to her at all but to Bear, who stood with his arms crossed defensively. The tension between them was like thick smoke.

"You give us up?" Brutus asked Bear.

Bear shook his head and said something she didn't catch.

"They picked them up outside, those little girls."

The twins! They were safe! Melanie relayed this to Beverly and Emily. The younger girl burst into a smile and her fingers stuttered out a spontaneous prayer of thanks.

"You let them go, didn't you?" Brutus asked Bear. "Your plan all along."

Bear shook his head. Said something she didn't catch.

"I talked to…" Brutus snarled.

"Who?" Bear seemed to ask.

'The U.S. attorney you cut a deal with."

Bear's face grew dark. "No way, man. No fucking way."

Wilcox came up behind him and said something. Bear stabbed a finger at Melanie. "She's the one…"

Brutus turned toward her. She gazed back coldly at him then rose and walked slowly over the wet tiles, almost choking on the smell of gasoline. She stopped and stood directly over Donna Harstrawn. With her finger she gestured Brutus forward. Her eyes locked into Bear's, Melanie lifted the woman's skirt a foot or two, revealing bloody thighs. She nodded at Bear.

"You little bitch!" Bear took a step toward her but Brutus caught his arm, pulled Bear's gun from his belt, tossed it to Stoat.

"You stupid asshole!"

"So? I fucked her, so what?"

Brutus lifted an eyebrow and then pulled a gun from his pocket. He pulled the slide and let it snap forward then pushed a button and took out the little metal tube that held the rest of the bullets. He put the pistol in Melanie's hand. It was cold as a rock, it gave her power like raw electrical current and it terrified her.

Bear was muttering something; in the corner of Melanie's eye she saw his lips moving. But she couldn't take her eyes from the gun. Brutus stood behind her and directed the barrel toward Bear's chest. He wrapped her hands in his. She smelled him, a sour scent of unwashed skin.

"Come on!" Bear's face was grim. "Quit fooling…"

Brutus was speaking to her; she felt the vibrations on the flesh of her face but she couldn't understand him. She sensed he was excited, almost aroused, and she felt it too – like a fever. Bear raised his hands. He was muttering something. Shaking his head.

The gun burned, radioactive. Bear eased away and Brutus adjusted the pistol to keep the muzzle pointed directly at his chest. Melanie pictured him lying atop Mrs. Harstrawn. She pictured him gazing at the twins' thin legs, their flat chests. Pull the trigger, she thought. Pull it! Her hand started to shake.

She again felt the vibrations of Brutus's words. In her mind, she heard his voice, an oddly soothing voice, the phantom voice. "Go ahead," he said.

Why isn't it firing? I'm ordering my finger to pull.

Nothing.

Bear was crying. Tears down his fat cheeks, running into his beard.

Melanie's hand was shaking badly. Brutus's firm hand curled around hers.

Then the gun silently bucked in her hand. Melanie gasped as the hot wind from the muzzle hit her face. A tiny dot appeared in Bear's chest and he gripped the wound with both hands, looked into the air, and fell backwards.

No, it fired by itself! I didn't do it, I didn't!

I
swear
!

She screamed those words to herself, over and over. And yet… yet she wasn't sure. She wasn't sure at all. For an instant – before the horror of what had happened hit home – she was enraged that she might
not
have been the one responsible for his death. That Brutus, not she, had applied the final ounce of pressure.

Brutus stepped away and reloaded the gun, pulled a lever, and the slide snapped forward.

Bear's mouth moved, his eyes darkened. She watched his miserable face, which looked as if all the injustice of the earth were conspiring to cheat a good man out of his life. Melanie didn't even try to figure out what he was saying.

She thought: Every once in a while deafness is a blessing.

Handy stepped past Melanie. He looked down at Bear. Muttered something to him. He fired one shot into the man's leg, which kicked violently in reaction. Bear's face contorted with pain. Then Handy fired again – into his other leg. Finally he aimed leisurely at the huge gut; the gun exploded once more. Bear shuddered once, stiffened, and went still.

Melanie sank to the floor, put her arms around Emily and Beverly.

Brutus bent down and pulled her close. His face was only inches away. "I didn't do that 'cause he fucked that woman. I did it 'cause he didn't do what I'd told him. He let those girls get away and was gonna snitch on us. Now you just sit on back there."

How can I understand his words if I can't understand him?

How? Melanie wonders. I hear him so perfectly, just like I hear my father.

So you'll be home
-

How? she wonders.

Handy's eyes looked Melanie up and down as if he clearly knew the answer to her question and was simply waiting for her to catch on. Then he looked at his watch, bent down, grabbed Emily by the arm. He dragged the little girl, hands pressed together in desperate prayer, into the main room.

Handy was singing.

Potter had called and said, "Lou, how're things going in there? Thought we heard a few gunshots."

To the tune of "Streets of Laredo" Handy sang in a half-decent voice, "I see by my Timex you got fifteen minutes…"

"You sound like you're in a bright mood, Lou. You doing okay foodwise?"

His voice didn't reveal his concern.
Were
they gunshots?

"I'm feeling pretty chipper, sure am. But I don't want to talk about my moods. That's fucking boring, isn't it? Tell me about my golden helicopter that's flying through the air right now. You get me one with diamond rotors, Art? Some babe with huge tits in the cockpit?"

What were those shots?

Looking at the monitor, the telescopic camera fixed on the window, he could see ten-year-old Emily Stoddard's waved blond hair, her big eyes, heart-shaped face. The silver glint of Handy's blade rested on her cheek.

"He's going to cut her," Angie whispered. For the first time that day her voice cracked with emotion. Because she, like Potter, knew he'd do it.

"Lou, we
have
your chopper. It's on its way."

Why won't he wear down? Potter wondered. After this much time most criminal takers're climbing the walls. They'll do anything to cut a deal.

"Hold on, Lou. I think that's the pilot now. I'm going to put you on hold. I'll be right back."

"No need. Just get me that chopper in fourteen minutes."

"Just hold on."

Potter hit the mute button and asked, "What do you think, Angie?"

She gazed out the window. Suddenly she announced, "He's serious. He's going to do it. He's tired of the bargaining. And he's still mad about the assault."

"Tobe?"

"It's ringing, there's no answer."

"Damn it. Doesn't he keep the phone in his pocket?"

"You still there, Lou?"

"Time's awasting, Art."