"We have to hurry." Sharon leaned down so close Heath felt the warm breath stir her hair. "Mr. Sheppard won't have gone far." Urgency could not counteract the fear that had entered her bones; she continued to push Heath at a lame snail's pace.
Fear had settled in Heath's bones as well, though of precisely what, she wasn't sure. Not death. Fear of something worse than life-worse than life in a wheelchair. Though she couldn't think what that might be at this moment, over the last week she'd come to know it existed. Grabbing the wheels, she rolled herself forward. The handles of her chair slipped from Sharon's grasp, the tires squealed on the linoleum. Moving fast, Heath could hear Sharon's Keds snuffling on the hard floor in her wake. Ahead was the door to the chapel. Heath wished she carried a lance or a battering ram. She wanted to hit something. Hard. And she was afraid if she stopped she'd never find the courage to start again.
One of the side doors opened abruptly. Heath was going too fast to swerve. Her left wheel clipped it, then she struck the opposite wall. The hall, the darkness, the miasma of twisting emotions oozing under closed doors, conspired with this sudden violence and Heath exploded in a bat-tery of language so foul it was a wonder the walls didn't melt and the flooring curl.
Not a door opened. No voice called out to ask what was happening. Lockdown was a serious matter in New Canaan.
Mrs. Dwayne stepped into the hall between them and the chapel door. Light from her room-or the room she'd come out of-lit half of her face and cast long shadows over the other. The usually innocuous dumpling visage was ugly, frightening.
"Filth," she hissed. "You're nothing but filth. The both of you. Get out before I call Mr. Sheppard." Her hands were fisted on lumpy hips. Jowls quivered at her jaw line. Spittle flew, obvious as moths in the unilateral light. Mrs. Dwayne was a caricature of the harridan but Heath had no desire to laugh. A face like that could countenance murder and never suffer a moment's remorse.
The fear that had been shuddering through Heath's frame since Sharon had called for help was suddenly gone. She didn't feel brave, just unafraid. All the ugly and crippled in the world was embodied in the woman standing before her. None was left over for Heath. She felt free.
"Mr. Sheppard's not here," she said, marveling at how reasonable she sounded-and felt.
"Oh," Mrs. Dwayne said. Then: "I don't believe you."
But she did, Heath could tell. She didn't want to admit that her beloved kept her as much in the dark as he did his other wives. For a long moment neither moved, caught in the tension of the dark hallway, teth-ered by the rope of yellow light coming from Mrs. Dwayne's doorway.
"You've come for that little slut, Patty," Mrs. Dwayne said finally.
Heath felt her chair shiver as a spider might feel a helpless thing twitching in its web. Sharon had come up behind her and taken hold of the handles.
"That's right." Quiet authority reverberated in her words. The voice of command; the voice that had talked terrified climbers off ledges and calmed panicked neophytes on icy crags; a voice Heath had never thought to hear again.
Mrs. Dwayne came to a decision. The venom that had been frothing behind her eyes, spewing from her lips, solidified till she looked old and mean and hard. "You can have her," she snapped. "And good riddance. The little whore is no better than her sisters. Casting sideways eyes at my husband, tempting my husband to sin, coveting my husband's attentions."
"My husband" was stressed each time it was uttered, as if Mrs. Dwayne were a priestess calling on the name of her god.
"Stay," she commanded. Pushing by Heath's left wheel, she trotted down the hallway in the direction of the kitchen.
"Where's she going?" The voice of command was gone. Heath was back to whispering, intimidated by a silence only sharpened on the squeaky thumps of Mrs. Dwayne's determined march.
Sharon looked over her shoulder. Mrs. Dwayne had taken keys from her pocket and was unlocking the last door to the right before the kitchen. "Mr. Sheppard's room," Sharon said. "She's the only one besides him that's got a key and doesn't she let the rest of us know it. She acts as ;f that room is her private sanctuary, like she's the priestess of a temple. It's not like she sleeps there much," Sharon finished bitterly. "Nobody but Mr. Sheppard actually sleeps there. Me and Alexis are just called in, then dismissed."
Before Heath had to respond to this unwelcome peek into the lives of the Dennis girls, Mrs. Dwayne reemerged, carefully relocked the door, then steamed back down the hall.
"Come on," she puffed as she passed. Sharon pushing and Heath letting her, they followed toward the door to the chapel. Selecting a key from the jingling bunch she'd fetched, Mrs. Dwayne unlocked the chapel door and shoved it open. "Get your dirty baggage and get out," she said viciously.
Sharon wheeled Heath past her. Mrs. Dwayne didn't give an inch. Though Heath pulled in her elbow, her wheel and shoulder pressed the soft belly. It was not a pleasant sensation.
The chapel was dark, no windows to let in what feeble light the night sky might offer. Heaven forfend any of the natural world He was purported to have created with miraculous love be allowed into the man-made box where Mr. Sheppard held forth.
"Turn on the lights," Heath said to Mrs. Dwayne.
"There are no lights in the chapel."
"There are lights," Sharon said and switched on the overheads. There were three naked bulbs hanging from the low ceiling by electric cords.
A little girl, blond like her sisters, long-legged and reed-thin like her sisters, was kneeling between two of the benches facing the altar. She was dressed in an odd mixture of turn-of-the-century fashions and twenty-first-century workout clothes. A ruffled dress came down past her knees and up to her chin. Beneath the hem were running shoes. Over the bodice was a pink hooded sweatshirt.
"Sharon," she breathed when she saw who'd come for her. Bursting into a storm of tears, she jumped to her feet and ran to her sister.
"He told me you'd gone. Taken Alexis and left me behind." Sharon met the little girl halfway and folded her in her arms.
"Where is Beth?" Mrs. Dwayne asked. "What have you done with my daughter?" she screamed just as Sharon was crying, "Alexis!"
The shouts canceled each other out. Much as they hated one another, there was no doubt that both were genuinely ignorant of the older girls' whereabouts. Not knowing where the limpet was opened a pit inside Heath. She felt the falling sensation she suffered each night in her nightmares.
"Mr. Sheppard, he's taken them," Sharon accused.
"So what if he has," Mrs. Dwayne shot back. "They are his to do with as he will."
It looked as if Sharon would launch herself at her co-wife. Heath would have genuinely enjoyed seeing the harridan taken down, but time was at a premium. Besides, Sharon would come out the loser. Probably she'd never been strong and the time with Mr. Sheppard and his flock had worn away what resilience youth might once have lent her.
"Sharon, she doesn't know he took them," Heath said firmly as she wheeled herself between the two Mrs. Sheppards. "Hell, she didn't even know her husband was gone. She's as much in the dark as we are. Let's get Patty someplace safe. Then we'll worry about-"
The sound of an automobile approaching stopped Heath mid-sentence. Heads cocked, eyes wary, the three women and the girl listened as rabbits might listen to the coyotes howling.
"Out the back," Mrs. Dwayne said quickly. Heath didn't for an instant believe she had decided to help them from empathy or altruism, but she trusted her all the same. They shared a common goal: to get the Dennis girls out of Mr. Sheppard's bed.
Leading Patty by the hand, Sharon ran to a door left of the lectern that opened to the rear of the building. "Hurry," she urged as Mrs. Dwayne fumbled with the keys. Mr. Sheppard had outfitted the compound like a prison. Outer doors needed keys to open from both the inside and out. Heath was willing to bet that the doors of the women's and girls' quarters could only be locked from the outside.
Men's voices broke through the enforced stillness of New Canaan. The kitchen door slammed shut.
"Hurry," Heath repeated Sharon's plea.
"Out," hissed Mrs. Dwayne as she got the key turned and jerked the door open. Sharon and Patty didn't hesitate but bolted down the steps.
Steps.
From the bottom, the sisters looked back. Light from the overhead bulbs in the chapel touched only the planes of their faces and their eyes, giving them the soulful disembodied stare of the cheap velvet paintings Heath remembered from the mid-seventies.
"We could help you down," Sharon offered faintly.
They couldn't. It would have been a struggle for the two of them to lift a pudgy dachshund, let alone a woman. A woman and a chair.
Mr. Sheppard would figure out where they were in a moment, if he hadn't already.
"Go," Heath said. "Get in the RV, lock the doors. If anybody bothers you, drive off. Don't go to the park. Someplace else. I'll be okay. Sheppard won't dare touch me. I've got my cell phone," she finished as if a cell phone were a magic talisman. In a way it was. According to the tales, magic was a whimsical thing working least when needed most. Cell phones were much like that.
Maybe the Dennis girls trusted her. Maybe they didn't give a damn about her. Either way, they ran into the darkness without another word. Mrs. Dwayne did, too, but turned left toward the long end of the building rather than right, around the corner of the chapel. Probably she hoped to return her husband's keys and secret herself back in her room so she wouldn't be blamed for letting his chattel escape.
Heath closed the exit door, hearing the lock snick into place, then moved soundlessly across the chapel, her rubber wheels silent on the hard floor. Having switched off the lights, she rolled into the hallway and shut the chapel door behind her.
"I hope the son-of-a-bitch draws the line at hitting cripples," she muttered, and set the brakes on her chair.
twenty-four
The Mag-Lite was tiny, more for peeping at locks and finding keyholes than any true illumination, and its batteries were small. Anna didn't a ant to waste her only source of light and so she ran, chasing the last gray-mirage of light to the top of the ridge.
At least she ran as much as her middle-aged body and flatlander's lungs would allow. It was a good half-hour and full dark by the time she reached the elevation from which it was purported her radio would work. Drenched in sweat and panting, she threw herself down on the nearest rock to recover before calling dispatch.
Purported to work: it was Rita, her felonious seasonal ranger, now handcuffed to a pine tree, who had told her where the best place to call out was.
Sitting in the duff, Anna wondered why she had believed her so readily. The bottom line was she trusted Rita even while arresting her for importing endangered species into a protected area, the massacre of mice, the slaughter of a squirrel and the murder of a teenage girl. Sitting there, Anna realized she believed Rita innocent of all but the care and feeding of illicit puppies.
Regardless of woman's intuition or its more manly cousin, gut feelings, Anna called dispatch as soon as she recovered her breath. Experience had taught her that she was not the best judge of character. More than once she'd been dead wrong-or nearly dead wrong-about her fellow humans. She would not bet her life that this time she was right.
The chief ranger was out of pocket, the dispatcher informed Anna. She'd gone to the Denver Resource Center and wouldn't be back in the park till the following afternoon. Lorraine would have grasped the gist of things without a lengthy explanation. Anyone else would require chapter and verse. Anna's situation was complicated-baby wolves, a ranger flaunt-ing park regulations and state laws, suspected of murder-she didn't want to broadcast details to the entire park as well as anyone else who might choose to listen in. In the end she merely asked that the Fall River District Ranger be contacted and asked to send a couple rangers up in the morning to assist in walking out a prisoner in a routine arrest.
Her next call was to Fern Lake and Raymond Bleeker. He'd been mon-itoring the radio. "Hang tight," he said. "I'll get together food, water and sleeping bags and head your way. I should be there in an hour or so."
Having done all she could, Anna started back down the hill. The de-scent was slower than the climb. No longer was she headed into the light, however feeble it had been, but into the greater darkness of the forest.
As she picked her way down the ragged slope, she reviewed the plans she had set in motion. There was nothing she could do that hadn't been done. Within an hour or two she'd have backup and enough in the way of worldly goods to pass the night in relative comfort. Tomorrow she'd have hot and cold running rangers to ease the hike and/or carry out, depending on Rita's mood. Yet she didn't feel relieved. If anything, she suffered a deepening disquiet, a sense that somewhere she'd left a fire burning and that fire was going to blaze out of control.
