Bloodstone (22 page)

A few minutes later they had moved back into the living room, and he slipped up the stairs to the closet, where he
kept his gun. He waited for them to come upstairs to the bedroom, but they hadn’t, and somehow, that had made it worse. In the living room, for Chrissake, right in front of the windows. On his couch.

He moaned softly to himself. The closet was filled with cleaning supplies. Brooms, dusty rags, buckets, a mop, bottles of lemon and pine-scented liquid.
Lemony-fresh!
one of them trumpeted.
Smells like a pine forest!
was printed in large letters on another, just visible in the dim light. The stink of them filled the air, making him feel light-headed and sick to his stomach. The noises were louder now. He could hear her groaning, and the whole house seemed to rock gently in an answering rhythm.
She’s responsible
, something whispered.
You know that, don’t you? All the
stress you’ve been under, that’s what’s been giving you
those bad dreams. Are you going to let her get away with it?
Who wears the pants around here? I want to speak to the
man of the house!

“Me,” Pat Friedman croaked. “That’s me, Goddammit.” He stood, ignoring the cracks and pops in his knees, and smoothed a sweaty palm over his thinning scalp. Sweat trickled down the back of his neck into his shirt. He licked his lips. He could see things so clearly now; his nightmares had been caused by stress, worry over the fact that his wife was screwing Jeb Taylor. Everybody in White Falls knew it; he was the laughingstock of the town. Nobody respected him enough to bother saying it to his face.
My own
fucking wife
, he thought miserably.
I’ll teach her. I’ll teach
her good
.

Settling his grip on the shotgun, he opened the folding closet door and stepped out into the upstairs hall, blinking in the bright light. Cracked the barrel one more time. Yep, still loaded. Moving down the hall to the stairs, he grinned to himself.
Gonna teach her good. Been putting up with her
crap too long. Who wears the pants in this family?

Me, that’s who
.

When her husband stepped out from the shadows of the kitchen, Julie Friedman screamed once, very loud. Then she shut her mouth with a snap, looking at what he was carrying. Her first thought was,
that couldn’t be Pat; he looks
…
well, he looks crazy
.

“Honey,” she said. “Baby, I—”

“Get off her.” Pat motioned with the gun, and Bob Rosenberg rolled to the side, slipping out of her with a soft sucking sound. Pat looked momentarily confused when he saw who it was; she took that chance to try to regain the upper hand.

“Jesus
Christ
. What the hell do you think you’re doing? Put the gun
down
.” Her face flushed pink. She pulled the blanket from the back of the couch and wrapped it around herself.

“Bob?” Pat still looked a little confused, disoriented, as if he had expected someone else. The gun wavered a bit in his grasp, and then he brought the barrel up again, centering it on Bob Rosenberg’s chest. “Bob. You fucking prick. Thought you’d get in on the action too, huh? Everybody’s doing it, why not me? That what happened, Bob?”

“Pat—” Julie began.

“Shut the fuck
up
!” he roared at her, his eyes rolling in his sockets, and she thought,
my God, he is crazy
…

Bob Rosenberg was slowly reaching for his pants, one hand searching blindly on the floor, the other outstretched, palm up. “Listen, Pat, it’s not what it looks like…” His penis stuck out like a third hand, bobbing softly, telling the whole world it was exactly what it looked like. “Is that thing loaded?”

As if in answer, Pat advanced to the middle of the room and settled his grip more firmly on the gun. “Get dressed,” he said quietly.

“Oh Jesus, Pat, don’t shoot, look, it’s no big deal, right, I mean, we’re both men—”

“
Get dressed
.”

Bob slipped into his pants as fast as he could. His hands were shaking; he had a bit of trouble with the zipper.

When he had finished, Pat said, “Now get the hell out of my house.” Bob nodded again, tried to scoop up his shoes, missed, and went for the door.

When the door closed, Pat turned back to his wife. Julie had gotten herself up from the couch, and now stood in a half-crouch, the blanket clutched to her chest. He grinned at her, and she thought his face looked like a bare skull in the afternoon light.

“Nothing I haven’t already seen,” Pat said. He waved the gun at the blanket. “Come on. Naked you came into the world, naked you’ll go out of it.”

“Pat,” she said, “honey, don’t, please, you’re scaring me.”

He frowned and took a step toward her, pointing the gun at her chest. She dropped the blanket, feeling a shiver of fear and revulsion rack her body, and stood naked in front of him, hands at her sides.

“Good,” he said. An odd look passed across his face, then a procession of them; sorrow, pain, anger. He licked his shiny lips. “You slut. That’s perfect. Now. You go to hell.”

He let loose with both barrels.

Harry Stowe sat bolt upright in bed, the sheets damp with his sweat, a scream lodged in his throat. He looked around his empty bedroom. The nightlight he had used ever since he was a child (one of his cowardly secrets, being afraid of the dark) did not press the blackness back during these early morning hours, but only blunted it, throwing monstrous, misshapen shadows upon the walls, turning his ordinary pine dresser into a crouching demon, his racks of clothes in his open closet into rows of bony shoulders.

He had dreamed of Ruth Taylor. The dream would not remain with him, however, leaving behind only its handprints; a vague feeling of dread, guilt hanging like a heavy cross around his neck. A sense of frustration over the fleeting
glimpses the dream left him was enough to keep his heart beating hard and fast but not enough to remember. Flashes of blood splashed against a wall, someone tumbling…

He had been feeling guilty ever since his visit to the Taylor home. Yet he had done nothing, unsure of what he should do, knowing he would need permission from next of kin to put her into some kind of home and also knowing somehow that the boy would never permit it. And he couldn’t see Ruth in a retirement home, one of those musty little rooms with their double beds and flowered curtains and get-well cards tacked to the wall.

He had a professional responsibility, didn’t he? It wasn’t like him, such an unreasonable hesitation to do what was right.

And now, this feeling of unnamed dread coming over him at the end of a moonless night. Sleep bringing his subconscious to light, he supposed. Or to dark, for that was more appropriate.

He got up out of bed and went to the window, shivering in the cold. A heavy frost lined the edges of the glass. The lawn outside was dark and still, covered in a fine, swirling mist; he stood, motionless, watching the horizon. Dawn, just touching the edges of the night sky. Still early. She would be asleep, along with the rest of the town.

It was crazy, what he was thinking.

Hurry, please, she’s in trouble. Please hurry
.

He stood and watched the sky lighten by degrees, but the thought would not leave him, along with that one vivid image from the dream; a splash of blood against a white wall.

He dressed quickly, not knowing why, and as he left the house the feeling of dread and urgency grew until he was running for the car.

Ruth sat up in the gray light and still silence of early dawn and felt disoriented for a moment before she realized she was in the living room, and not in her big soft bed.
Fell
asleep downstairs again, you foolish old lady
, she chided herself.
Right here in this chair
. But the truth was, she didn’t remember how she got here, what day it was, or whether she had been dreaming when she saw Jeb come in through the rear door and stumble up the stairs to bed. It had
seemed
real enough; and then the faint light had caught him as he closed the door, and that had given her a scare. For just a second she had thought her dead son was home again after all these years.

She worried about her grandson, when she felt up to worrying. Her mind worked every once in a while; she could almost feel it cranking up like somebody had clipped a set of jumper cables to her ears and turned on the juice. She knew Jeb spent these nights drinking, she wasn’t a complete fool. Yes, Jeb was drinking, and he wasn’t working anymore, she didn’t think, though whether he had quit or been fired was a mystery to her. But he was a stubborn boy, like his daddy. Nothing she said or did would change that.

Now something had gotten her up; a noise somewhere deep in the house. Shivering in the cold, she stood and fumbled her way to the foot of the stairs and peered up into the darkness. The early dawn light hadn’t yet penetrated the upstairs corners, and the hallway that led to the three bedrooms was alive with shadows. She fancied she saw things moving in the inky blackness, shapes that twisted and turned and would not remain still.
Never liked shadows much
, she thought.
At least, not since Norman died
.

That got her thinking about her husband, and she looked around to see if he was standing with his arms crossed the way he did and shaking his head at her silliness. But the house was empty. Her mind had started buzzing again, like it sometimes did, and it was so loud she couldn’t remember what she was looking for. Ronnie, that was it. Ronnie had come home—

You crazy woman. Ronnie’s long dead. That was your
grandson, Jeboriah
.

Oh, yes. She remembered now. Norman had set her straight.

A noise like a cracking board. There was one that did that, at the door to Jeb’s bedroom. If you stepped on it just right, it went off like a gunshot. She took one step up and held onto the railing. “Jeboriah?”

At first she thought she had imagined the sound. Then he materialized out of the blackness, the white vertical slash of his t-shirt seeming to float five feet from the floor, his open leather jacket blending with the background. She couldn’t see his face. The dark hid it well. Was that a shadow moving behind him, or something else…?

“Jeboriah? Something wrong?”

“Come up here a minute,” he said softly. “I think Norman’s had an accident.”

“Norman?”
Oh my lord
. Confusion washed over her and she hurried up the steps, one hand pressed to her mouth, filled with that image of her husband crumpled awkwardly at the bottom of the staircase.
He’s fallen again
.

No. That was years ago. She paused halfway up, something in her raising an alarm. She couldn’t see his face. But the way he stood, the jacket he wore…

Her voice trembled. “Ronnie?”

“Please. It’s Norman, Gramma. He’s hurt bad. You’ve got to hurry.”

The pain in his voice was unmistakable, and she went to it without thinking, a mother’s instinct, as pure and mindless as the sun’s heat. At the top of the stairs she paused and he stepped out into the gray light that filtered in through one of the bedrooms.
Jeboriah
, she thought immediately. It was his face, long and pale, full-lipped like his mother. And yet his eyes, hooded, burning from a well of shadows. His eyes told her something else. What was it in those eyes, some sort of glint that hadn’t been there before?

A scream died in the back of her throat. Ruth Taylor took a trembling step back, felt the awful lurch and emptiness of
the drop, and teetered. Her two gnarled hands came up, grasping. They scrabbled across the cool leather jacket and brushed his shirt, and she felt the smooth round stone of the amulet, and it was warm,
Lord, like the body of some living
creature sucking on him
. Her fingertips tingled. He had let her hands touch it. He wanted her to
know
.

And then she was twisting backward over the drop. She felt an odd, dreamlike sensation of flight before her hip connected with the third riser from the top and she heard the bone snap. The pain was immediate and terrible.

Then her head struck the wall and mercifully, she felt nothing else.

When Harry Stowe pulled up outside the Taylor house, dawn was lightening the treetops and sending bright prisms of color through the morning frost. The clock on his dash read 7:05 a.m. As he stepped from the car the air was crisp, light, with a touch of warmth already beginning to seep in from the sun.

Jeb Taylor’s big Chevy was parked sideways across the lawn, a series of tire marks dug deep into the grass marking its passage. Harry touched his hand to the hood. Not quite cool. He walked quickly to the front door, paused one last time with his finger on the bell. Jesus, what the hell was he doing? Getting hysterical over a dream? He would wake up the whole house, and he wasn’t on the best of terms with them already.
What ever happened to that logical evenheadedness
of yours? You’re acting like, well, like
…

Ruth
.

He stepped away from the door, the thought of her starting something clamoring within him again. An insistent voice, urgent, frightened. He stepped through the wet grass and looked in the kitchen window, cupping his hands to the glass. It was empty and dark inside.

He went around the side of the house, his shoes soaked through now (grass was getting long, nobody had done any
mowing here this spring), and looked through a side window. From here he could see Ruth’s favorite chair, the little table where she had spilled the tea. The chair was empty, the table bare. He squinted. And if he looked at just the right angle, through the living room to the front hall, he could see what looked like a body, crumpled at the foot of the stairs.

Everything else fading from his mind, he hurried back around the house to the front door, rapping loudly on it before he remembered the bell. He could hear the chimes echoing loudly in the bowels of the place. He rang the bell again, rapped hard on the door, finally twisted the handle. It was unlocked. The door swung open.

He paused briefly on the step in spite of himself. This was what he wanted, wasn’t it? He could check on her in bed, didn’t even have to wake her up. But the fact of the open door, such a subtle, innocent thing, told him something was wrong. People locked their doors at night around here, as they did most places. Not because of the threat of crime, but because some deep, instinctual warning light blinked on and said,
You’re sleeping. Anything can happen
.