Just After Sunset (11 page)

Rusty:
“It doesn’t matter, sweetie. You have to get out of here. You have to get yourself some running room.”

As if to prove it, the door between the kitchen and the dining room banged open—almost hard enough to tear it from the hinges, it sounded like.

No,
she thought. All the sensation went out of her middle. She didn’t think she wet herself again, but wouldn’t have been able to tell if she had.
No, it can’t be.

“Want to play rough?” Pickering called. His voice sounded dazed and cheerful. “Okay, I can play rough. Sure. Not a problem. You want it? You bet. Daddy’s gonna bring it.”

Coming. Crossing the dining room. She heard a thump followed by a rough clatter as he stumbled into one of the other chairs (perhaps the one at the “father” end of the table) and shoved it aside. The world swam away from her, growing gray even though this room was relatively bright now that the storm was unraveling.

She bit down on her split lip. This sent a fresh stream of blood down her chin, but it also brought color and reality back into the world. She slammed the door and grabbed for the lock. There
was
no lock. She looked around and spied the humble wooden chair sitting before the humble wooden desk. As Pickering broke into a shambling run past his laundry room and study—and did he have the butcher knife clutched in one hand? Of course he did—she snatched the chair, placed it under the knob, and tilted it. Only an instant later, he hit the door with both hands.

She thought that if this floor had also been oak planking, the chair would have skidded away like a shuffleboard weight. Perhaps she would have grabbed it and stood him off with it: Em the Fearless Lion Tamer. She didn’t think so. In any case, there was that carpet. Cheap nylon pile, but deep—it had that going for it, at least. The tilted legs of the chair dug in and held, although she saw a ripple go through the carpet.

Pickering roared and began to beat on the door with his fists. She hoped he was still holding on to the knife as he did it; maybe he would inadvertently cut his own throat.

“Open this door!” he shouted. “Open it! You’re only making it worse for yourself!”

Like I could,
Emily thought, backing away. And looking around. What now? The window? What else? There was only the one door, so it had to be the window.

“You’re making me mad, Lady Jane!”

No, you were already mad. As in hatter.

She could see the window was a Florida special, the kind made only for looking out of, not for opening. Because of the air-conditioning. So what was next? Hurtle through it like Clint Eastwood in one of those old spaghetti westerns? Sounded possible; it was certainly the kind of thing that had appealed to her as a kid, but she had an idea she’d cut herself to ribbons if she actually tried it. Clint Eastwood and The Rock and Steven Seagal had stuntmen going for them when it came to things like the old through-the-saloon-window sequences. And the stuntmen had special glass going for
them.

She heard the rapid thump of footfalls beyond the door as he first backed up and then ran at it again. It was a heavy door, but Pickering wasn’t kidding, and it shuddered in its frame. This time the chair jerked backward an inch or two before holding. Worse, that ripple went through the rug again and she heard a tearing sound that was not unlike the sound of duct tape letting go. He was remarkably lively for someone who had been beaten about the head and shoulders with a stout piece of red maple, but of course he was both crazy and just sane enough to know that if she got away, he wouldn’t. She supposed that was a strong motivator.

I should have used the whole fucking chair on him
, she thought.

“Want to play?” he panted. “
I’ll
play. Sure. Bet your butt. But you’re on
my
playground, okay? And here…I…
come
!” He hit the door again. It bucked in its frame, loose on its hinges now, and the chair jumped back another two or three inches. Em could see dark teardrop shapes between the tilted legs and the door: rips in the cheap carpet.

Out the window then. If she was going to die bleeding from Christ alone knew how many wounds, she would rather inflict them herself. Maybe…if she wrapped herself in the coverlet…

Then her eye fell on the desk.

“Mr. Pickering!” she called, grasping the desk by the sides. “Wait! I want to make a deal with you!”

“No deals with bitches, okay?” he said petulantly, but he had stopped for a moment—perhaps to get his breath back—and it gave her time. Time was all she wanted. Time was all she could possibly get from him; she didn’t really need him to tell her he wasn’t the sort of man who made deals with bitches. “What’s your big plan? Tell Daddy Jim.”

Currently the desk was her plan. She picked it up, half certain her strained lower back would just pop like a balloon. But the desk was light, and lighter still when several rubber-banded stacks of what looked like university blue books came tumbling out.

“What are you doing?” he asked sharply, and then: “Don’t do that!”

She ran at the window, then stopped short and threw the desk. The sound of the breaking glass was enormous. Without pausing to think or look—thinking would do her no good at this point, and looking would only scare her if the drop was far—she yanked the coverlet from the bed.

Pickering hit the door again, and although the chair held again (she knew this; if it let go he would have been running across the room and grabbing for her), something gave a loud wooden crack.

Em wrapped the coverlet around her from chin to feet, for a moment looking like an N.C. Wyeth Indian woman about to set off into a snowstorm. Then she leaped through the jagged hole in the window just as the door crashed open behind her. Several arrows of glass sticking out of the frame wounded the coverlet, but not a single one touched Em.

“Oh, you fucking annoying bitch!”
Pickering screamed behind her—
close
behind her—and then she was sailing.

–9–

Gravity is everyone’s mother.

She had been a tomboy as a kid, preferring boy’s games (the best one was simply called Guns) in the woods behind their house in suburban Chicago to goofing around with Barbie and Ken on the front porch. She lived in her Toughskins and shell tops, hair scrooped back behind her head in a ponytail. She and her bestfriend Becka watched old Eastwood and Schwarzenegger movies on TV instead of the Olsen twins, and when they watched
Scooby-Doo,
they identified with the dog rather than Velma or Daphne. For two years in grammar school, their lunches were Scooby Snacks.

And they climbed trees, of course. Emily seemed to remember her and Becka hanging out in the trees in their respective backyards for one whole summer. They might have been nine that year. Other than her father’s lesson on how to fall, the only thing Em remembered clearly about the tree-climbing summer was her mother putting some kind of white cream on her nose every morning and telling her,
“Don’t wipe that off, Emmy!”
in her obey-me-or-die voice.

One day, Becka lost her balance and came very close to falling fifteen feet to the Jackson lawn (maybe only ten, but at the time it had looked to the girls like twenty-five…even fifty). She saved herself by grabbing a branch, but then hung there, wailing for help.

Rusty had been mowing the lawn. He strolled over—yes, strolled; he even took time to kill the Briggs & Stratton—and held out his arms. “Drop,” he said, and Becka, only two years past her belief in Santa and still sublimely trusting, dropped. Rusty caught her easily, then called Em down from the tree. He made both girls sit at the base. Becka was crying a little, and Em was scared—mostly that tree climbing would now become an act that was
forbidden,
like walking down to the corner store alone after seven P.M.

Rusty did not forbid them (although Emily’s mother might have, if she had been looking out the kitchen window). What he did was teach them how to fall. And then they practiced for almost an hour.

What a cool day that had been.

As she went out through the window, Emily saw it was a damned good distance to the flagged patio below. Maybe only ten feet, but it looked like twenty-five as she dropped with the shredded coverlet fluttering around her. Or fifty.

Let your knees give way,
Rusty had told them sixteen or seventeen years before, during Tree-Climbing Summer, also known as the Summer of the White Nose.
Don’t ask them to take the shock. They will—in nine cases out of ten, if the drop isn’t too far, they will—but you could end up with a broken bone. Hip, leg, or ankle. Ankle, most likely. Remember that gravity is everyone’s mother. Give in to her. Let her hug you. Let your knees give way, then tuck and roll.

Em hit the red Spanish-style flagstones and let her knees give way. At the same time she shoulder-checked the air, throwing her weight to the left. She tucked her head and rolled. There was no pain—no
immediate
pain—but a vast jarring went through her, as if her body had become an empty shaft and someone had dropped some large piece of furniture right down the center. But she kept her head from rapping the flagstones. And she didn’t think she had broken either leg, although only standing would prove her right.

She struck a metal patio table hard enough to knock it over. Then she got to her feet, still not entirely sure her body was intact enough to do this until it actually did. She looked up and saw Pickering peering out the broken window. His face was cramped into a grimace, and he was brandishing the knife.

“Stop it!”
he shouted. “Stop running away and
hold still
!”

As if,
Em thought. The last of that afternoon’s rain had turned to fog, dotting her upturned face with dew. It felt heavenly. She gave him the finger, then shook it for emphasis.

Pickering roared,
“Don’t you flip me the bird, you cunt!”
and threw the knife at her. It didn’t even come close. It struck the flagstones with a clang and skittered away beneath his gas grill in two pieces, blade and handle. When she looked up again, the shattered window was vacant.

Her dad’s voice told her Pickering was coming, but Em hardly needed that update. She went to the edge of the patio—walking easily, not limping, although she supposed she might owe that to the adrenaline surge—and looked down. Three measly feet to the sand and sea oats. A bunny compared to the drop she had just survived. Beyond the patio was the beach, where she had done so many morning runs.

She looked the other way, toward the road, but that was no good. The ugly concrete wall was too high. And Pickering was coming. Of course he was.

She braced one hand on the ornamental brickwork, then dropped to the sand. Sea oats tickled her thighs. She hurried up the dune between the Pillbox and the beach, hitching at her ruined shorts and looking repeatedly back over her shoulder. Nothing…still nothing…and then Pickering burst out through the back door, yelling at her to stop right where she was. He had ditched the yellow slicker and had grabbed some other sharp object. He was waving it in his left hand as he ran down the walk to the patio. She couldn’t see what it was, and didn’t want to. She didn’t want him that close.

She could outrun him. Something in his gait said he would be fast for a little while and then flag, no matter how strongly his insanity and his fear of exposure pricked him on.

She thought:
It’s as if I was in training for this all along.

Yet she almost made a crucial mistake when she got to the beach, almost turned south. That would have taken her to the end of Vermillion Key in less than a quarter of a mile. Of course she could hail the drawbridge gatehouse when she got there (scream her lungs out for help, actually), but if Pickering had done something to Deke Hollis—and she was afraid that was the case—she would then be toast. There might be a passing boat she could scream to, but she had an idea Pickering was far past any restraint; at this point he would probably be willing to stab her to death on the stage of Radio City Music Hall as the Rockettes looked on.

So she turned north instead, where almost two miles of empty beach lay between her and the Grass Shack. She stripped off her sneakers and began to run.

–10–

What she had not expected was the beauty.

This wasn’t the first time she had run on the beach after one of these brief but powerful afternoon storms, and the feeling of wetness accumulating on her face and arms was familiar. So was the heightened sound of the surf (the tide was on the come now, the beach narrowing to a stripe) and the heightened aromas: salt, seaweed, flowers, even wet wood. She had expected to be frightened—the way she supposed people in combat were frightened while doing dangerous jobs that usually (but not always) came out all right. What she had not expected was the beauty.

The fog had come in from the Gulf. The water was a dull green phantom, heaving shoreward through the white. The fish must have been running, because it was a pelican all-you-can-eat buffet out there. She saw most as projected shadows, folding their wings and plummeting at the water. A few others bobbed up and down on the waves closer in, seemingly as dead as decoys, but watching her. Out there to her left, the sun was a small orange-yellow coin peering dully.

She was afraid her calf would cramp up again—if that happened, she was done, finished. But this was work it had become used to, and it felt loose enough, if a little too warm. Her lower back was more worrisome, broadcasting a twinge with every third or fourth stride and sending out a heavier flash of pain every two dozen or so. But she talked to it inside her head, babied it, promised it hot baths and shiatsu massages when this was over and the feral creature behind her was safely incarcerated in the Collier County jail. It seemed to work. Either that or running was itself a kind of massage. She had reasons to think this was so.

Pickering bellowed twice more for her to stop, then fell silent, saving his breath for the chase. She looked back once and thought he was perhaps seventy yards behind, the only thing about him standing out in the misty late afternoon his red Izod shirt. She looked again and he was clearer; she could see his blood-splattered khaki shorts. Fifty yards behind. But panting. Good. Panting was good.