House of Steel (8 page)

Only two people had known about that night
and now, one was dead and the other, herself, was a silent doll.
The police wouldn’t find Gunnar. The man was obviously a trained
killer, plunging the knife in the precise location to minimize the
blood loss in the most efficient stroke. Gunnar had also made it
exceedingly clear that he would have no problem finding her because
he already had. Her body toyed with the twisted sense of relief
that the only living, breathing connection to that night had been
immortalized in the trunk of that car.

The Ford truck blazed through what snow
remained on the road after the blizzard had ceased. The snow
crunched beneath the wheels and spurted out the sides with ease.
The snowplows had emerged from their sheds, clad with their salt
and large blades, moving the snow off the freeway and piling it
high in the ditches below. The salt and warm sun worked to melt the
remaining snow that covered the roads.

“Please tell me that was enough to convince
you that the Civic has to go,” Mark said with his eyes still
focused on the road ahead. Delaney smiled. Her lips felt stiff,
almost cruel in their gesture. She didn’t expect anything different
from Mark. Michael Jones would say the same.

“Joe’s getting it out of the ditch. It still
could be in good shape,” she said. She couldn’t wrap her mind
around how she could possibly tell Mark what she had witnessed. “By
the way, Joe has some ties with your new employer, Holston
Parker.”

“Good shape, huh?” He laughed before looking
down at her in the passenger seat. “And Parker Enterprises is
everywhere. Wisconsin. The Midwest. Even the East Coast now. You
realize his net worth is over a billion dollars, right?”

“Yeah, I realize he shits money, but don’t
you think it’s strange that he is connected to a redneck auto shop
in the sticks? Why would Parker be connected to such a small shop?”
she asked, turning to look outside the window at the flat
landscape, its redundancy lulling her eyes.

“Did you go through his stuff, Delaney?” he
prompted, accusing her from beneath his sunglasses.

“No,” she replied, thinking about the key
underneath the stone. “His signature is everywhere. A stack of
invoices are sitting on the desk with the header of Parker
Enterprises, as if the shop is owned by Parker. The shop itself was
located on Parker Drive, as you obviously saw. Even the cat is
named Parker.” Her voice rose as she finished the details, unable
to even process the words coming from her mouth. She didn’t care
about Holston Parker.

“So, obviously Parker Enterprises owns Joe’s
shop. Maybe he’s a longtime friend and helped him get started. I’ll
check it out. He owns a conglomerate, Delaney. That’s what makes
him a billionaire. He’s not working on the floor at the brewery.
He’s out investing and growing businesses,” he replied, looking
back at Delaney who was leaning forward in her seat, pushing her
hand against the dash.

“Low blow to dad,” she shot back. “I see how
it is. New job. New status.”

She was edgy, but the topic of their
father’s profession was always a sensitive one. She had spent most
of her adolescence defending her father’s job to the wealthy
students of Xavier Academy - the private school just blocks from
their house - whose pedigrees often included a long line of
doctors, lawyers, and independent business owners. When Mark had
turned fifteen and been accepted to the prestigious school, with no
financial assistance, Ann and Michael had poured most all of their
middle-class earnings and savings into his education because, as
their father had once said, “None of you damned kids will be blue
collar, not if I can help it.” They had hoped tuition would stretch
to the remaining two children, but they never had to stretch or
make a decision about whether Delaney or Ben would attend the
academy. One month prior to Delaney’s first day of school, they had
received a stamped letterhead from Xavier Academy’s Admission Board
and Foundation stating that, “They were pleased to extend a full
scholarship through a private donation to such a remarkable young
girl full of promises for a strong future.” The family had rejoiced
in the fact that they could now send all three of their children to
the academy.

“I just mean it as a frame of reference,
Delaney. Holston Parker is not you or me or ninety-nine point nine
percent of the rest of society, for that matter.” He moved his hand
off the steering wheel for emphasis. The hum of the road hung in
the air.

“By the way, you could have warned me about
the massive snow storm that was looming.” She was blaming him
without reason, but she couldn’t stop herself.

“It came on pretty fast, and I didn’t know
that I was your personal meteorologist. Didn’t Dad call you?”

“Of course, he did and of course, my phone
didn’t have reception so I didn’t get his message until
after
I was in the ditch,” she said, looking down at her
phone that was plugged into Mark’s charger. Her mind rushed to
Theron’s last message on the morning he left her. She hadn’t heard
from him in over twenty-four hours. Gunnar had known about Theron
and the night they had spent together.

“Well, you better call Mom and Dad. I
figured I would let you –” Mark started before he paused, looking
at her.

“Right after I send a message to a friend.”
She stopped, returning his gaze. “Okay, I’ll call her.” She moved
the screen away from Theron’s message and onto her contacts screen,
scrolling through to find her mother’s smiling face, flush with
color and rich brown hair.
A healthy Ann Jones.

“A friend?”

“Yeah, June, from my department. Co-worker.
Friend,” she lied, but not about June being her friend. She
actually considered June a friend so she might be able to pass
through Mark’s scrutiny.

“You have a friend?”

“Yeah. I actually have two, believe it or
not.”

“Yeah, you were never that good at making
friends, were you?” Mark teased as he sat straight, both hands on
the wheel. Mark had always been a real sucker for following the
rules. There was no way she could tell him about Gunnar. Not after
she didn’t call the police.

“Not really,” Delaney said while looking out
the passenger side window. “You know I prefer it that way.” James
Anderson’s face surfaced in her thoughts as she stared at the white
landscape suffocating the fields to her right. James was one of her
only friends growing up. They had met during a lunch break in the
first week of high school, not in the cafeteria of the school where
the rest of the four hundred some students sat, but in the back of
the school library, next to the stuffed shelves of classic
literature. She had just pulled John Irving’s
The World
According to Garp
and was idly paging through it, crouched near
the bottom shelf. She hadn’t heard him come up from behind her;
instead, she had spotted a shadowed movement in the wall of windows
ahead of her. Her body had quickly turned and jolted up as he had
leaned forward to look over her shoulder at the book.

“He dies at the end,” he had said, looking
straight into her blue eyes. “So now you know.”

“Thanks for sparing me the pleasure of the
book,” she had replied, looking back at the boy with his shaggy,
brown hair that hung low near his brown eyes. The ends, bleached
with the remnants of the summer sun, curled with a youthful touch.
His smooth, olive skin lay stark against his bright white,
uniformed shirt. Her heart had fluttered in adolescent excitement
despite her complete annoyance with his sabotaging statement.

“Anytime, Delaney. You know, the library is
a bore,” he had said, turning to go with two books tucked securely
beneath his arm. He had disappeared in the shelves before she could
reply. They would meet again the next day, in the library, in a
different row of books. This time, Delaney had come up on James,
blurting that Lenny would accidentally kill the puppies. He dropped
Steinbeck’s
Of Mice and Men
back on the shelf. They had
spent every lunch hour together for the next four years in the
library at Xavier Academy.

Delaney snapped back to the truck at the
sound of her brother’s voice. “My sister, the lone wolf,” Mark
said, staring back at the road ahead.

“All right, get off it. I’m going to call
Mom and Dad. I’m sure they’re wondering where the hell we are,” she
said as she looked down at a smiling, older version of herself on
her phone. She clicked call.

“How long until Dad tells me to get rid of
the Civic?” she asked Mark while waiting for her mom to pick up the
house phone. The answering machine clicked on, Ann Jones prompting
her to leave a message.

“No answer at home. Is she with Ben?” she
asked, clicking back through the contacts to find her parents’ cell
phone number. They had finally gotten a cell phone, albeit a shared
one, a few years ago after much cajoling from their three children.
She called the number only to hear her mom’s voicemail again.

“Nothing?” Mark asked, looking back at
Delaney. His eyebrows disappeared beneath the darkness of his
shades.

“That’s strange. They always answer that
phone. I remember once when Mom answered my call during a wedding.
She had whispered into the phone, telling me to call her back
because she was in church.”

“Typical,” Mark replied.

They rode in silence for twenty minutes,
Delaney still worrying over being unable to tell Mark what she had
witnessed. She had tried again, just like she did with calling the
police back at the shop. Every time her voice threatened to become
audible, her throat suffocated the noise, burying it deep inside
her. The memory of Gunnar would settle with Mr. Rowan, forever
wrapped in a sealed package. There were just some things in life
that were never meant to be said or remembered. Surely, Mark would
understand.

12

DAY 2: Friday, December 19 – 3:15 p.m.

As she secured the door with the key, V
rotated her head into the pelting snow and torrential wind. She
wasn’t ready, yet, to go back to her apartment for the evening to
deluge herself into more research; her rented space was not exactly
what she considered a home. She hadn’t had a home since she was
fifteen, though, and quite possibly, she thought, as she crept
around Delaney’s backyard and onto the sidewalk, had never had one
at all.

V’s childhood, of what she remembered, was
lonely and still. Her days often filled with being passed from one
neighbor to the next while her father was away, working tirelessly
to provide a “better life” for them both. As an adult, she still
didn’t know what that meant. Her dead mother was never spoken of,
her father never bringing home a replacement to dote on the
pixie-like child. Her parents, for all she knew, had abandoned her
to fend for herself.

She grew quiet, watchful through school as
girls and boys played and teased each other. A self-inflicted
wallflower, she often wondered if she would blow away in the wind.
One day she had tried, jumping ten feet from a playground’s steel
support in a summer dress onto the pebbles below, but she had only
cut her knees instead, soaking small dots of blood through the
cotton. Her father had burned the dress when the neighbor woman he
paid to do their laundry hadn’t successfully removed the stains. V
had tried to blow away again the next day.

Her only friend as a small child was a boy a
year older than herself who had come to live with her and her
father for a short time when she was five – Ethan, with a broken
leg and blue welts all over his scrawny body. They huddled together
for that year, Ethan teaching her how to play and fight back
against older kids, if trouble ever stirred. But for the
wallflower, trouble hadn’t arrived until she was fifteen, and Ethan
was long gone. She had returned to him some time after the summer
of two deaths – the black summer she now referred to it as – for
help and guidance; he had dutifully obliged.

It had been years of silent preparation and
studying, anticipating the right moment for her revenge. She had
enrolled in basic nursing courses at the technical college near her
apartment, using the alias of deceased Jane Frieburg from Missouri.
Identity theft and tampering with the school’s recordkeeping system
had turned out to be an alarmingly simple, yet gratifying, task for
her. And the blood and needles, well, that had never bothered her.
The human body was an intricate system of organs and tissues,
fragile in its entirety.

The target training at the same facility was
what she found pleasure in the most, though. The handle of the gun
sent a feeling of life coursing through her veins; she became one
with her own body. Her precise shots were dead-on from the
beginning once she had found her .9 millimeter. “A light, deadly
pack from a tiny punch,” the instructor had told her. It had all
been so natural.

13

DAY 2: Friday, December 19 – 4:15 p.m.

As Delaney and Mark made their way back to
the house on 7th Street that they had called home for more than
twenty-two years, she couldn’t help but feel the memory of their
first meeting flood back to her. Ben and Mark had set foot on her
uncle’s driveway with her father; the man she had not seen from age
three to six. Her Uncle Walt, Ann’s brother, had taken Delaney and
Ann into their home in Milwaukee when they had left their former
home in Amberg.

Ann and Michael were indisputably in love
with each other despite what the rest of the small, rural town in
northern Wisconsin had thought. In fact, during those
excruciatingly long three years apart, a day had not passed without
her parents telling each other anything different. Each night,
before Delaney and Ann had crawled into the twin bed they had
shared in the upstairs spare bedroom of Uncle Walt’s house, Michael
had told his two girls it wouldn’t be long before he would be with
them again. He had stayed true to his promise when he arrived three
years later on the driveway.