Whispers at Midnight (2 page)

“What’d you do with it? You don’t even like baloney.
Did you feed it to that dog?”

No, she couldn’t leave the dog behind. Tightening her grip on it,
glancing fearfully back as she braced herself and jerked the door wide, Marsha almost had a heart attack. Keith was no longer leaning over the guardrail but was striding with angry purpose toward the top of the stairs. Even the cloud of steamy heat that embraced her as she darted out into the night was not enough to stop an icy shiver from racing over her skin.

“You did, didn’t you?
You fed my baloney to that fucking dog!”

He was coming after her. Her heart pounded with primal fear. He was good and wound-up now. He would beat the crap out of her if he caught her.

Jesus, Jesus, please don’t let him catch me.

One of her sandals came off as she ran across the parking lot toward her car, an eight-year-old junker of a Taurus with a broken air conditioner, a permanently stuck-down front passenger side window, and 127,264 miles on the odometer. Stumbling, cursing, she kicked the other sandal off too and ran on. Although it was only the twentieth of June, the summer so far had been a scorcher and the asphalt was hot as a griddle beneath her bare feet. The air was almost too thick to breathe. The single glowing yellow light atop the pole at the far end of the parking lot seemed to shimmer in the heat. Having guiltily wolfed down a McDonald’s hamburger and fries on the way home from work, she’d parked next to the Dumpster so that she could dispose of the evidence before she forgot about it and Keith found it. Keith didn’t like her eating fast food. He said it would make her get fat.

The Dumpster was at the very back of the lot, next to the light. She had to run through three rows of parked cars to reach her Taurus. If Keith caught her, it would be all the fault of that damned hamburger and fries.

Keith was always telling her that if she’d just do what he said, it would save her a lot of grief.

A radical thought occurred to her: Maybe she’d had just about enough of Keith.

“We’re out of here, sweetie,” she said breathlessly to the dog, yanking open the door and dumping the animal inside the car. It hopped into the passenger seat as she flung herself behind the wheel. The
black vinyl seat was hot against the backs of her thighs, left bare by her ragged denim cutoffs. The stifling interior still carried the incriminating scent of McDonald’s. Thrusting the key into the ignition, she glanced over her shoulder and saw that Keith, moving quickly now, was coming out of the building, his body-builder’s frame looking even bigger than it was because of being backlit by the dim hall light.

“Marsha! Get back here!”

What did he think she was, dumb? No way was she going back. Pulse racing, she slammed the car into reverse. It shot backward. Braking, she looked around again to find Keith breaking into a run. Jesus, he looked like he wanted to kill her.
Keith’s mad. Keith’s mad.
The words pounded a crazy, panicked refrain through her head.
’Roid rage,
they called it from the steroids he used to get big. Whatever, when it got hold of him like this it was like he was out of his mind.

He reached the third row. She shifted into drive. Cold with fear, she stomped on the gas pedal just as he emerged from between two parked cars. He was only a few feet away now. Their eyes met for one terrifying instant through the windshield. Then the Taurus rocketed past him.

“You get your ass back here, you bitch!”

Her eyes flew to the rearview mirror to find him shaking both fists after her in impotent fury.
Psycho,
she thought. Then she hung a sharp left out of the lot, and peeled rubber toward the blacktop road that led into Benton.

Praise the Lord he couldn’t follow her. A friend had dropped him off; his pickup was in the shop.

It took her a few minutes to calm down. By the time her heart rate had returned to something approaching normal, she’d decided what to do: she would go to her friend Sue’s for the night. It was late—a glance at the dashboard clock told her that it was nearly midnight. But Sue, who worked third shift at the Honda plant alongside Keith, would be up. Sue had a husband and three kids, and they all lived in a double-wide on the other side of town. Sue’s place was filled to bursting with her own brood, but Marsha was positive that Sue
would let her stay for tonight. Tomorrow, she’d see if she couldn’t come up with something else.

It was a cinch she wasn’t going back to Keith. Not tonight, and not tomorrow. Maybe not ever.
So you can just stick that in your bong and smoke it,
she said to her mental vision of Keith. Her uncharacteristic defiance felt good.

The dog made an anxious sound. Marsha glanced over to find that it was sitting dainty as could be in the passenger seat, its eyes fixed on her face.

“It’s okay,” she said, reaching out to stroke its delicate head. “Everything’s gonna be all right.”

The dog licked her wrist as she withdrew her hand, and Marsha suddenly felt a whole heap of a lot better. If she didn’t go back to Keith, she could keep the dog. It would be tough, but if she scrounged around she could probably scrape together enough money so that she could get her own place. She even had a Plan B—a secret scheme to provide herself with a little nest egg that might or might not pan out. If it didn’t, she might have to waitress or something at night to earn a little extra so she could afford to feed herself and the dog and pay the rent all in the same month, but getting rid of Keith might be worth it. No more hiding fast-food wrappers before he got home. No more waiting anxiously to see what kind of mood he was in. No more lectures, no more crap.

Possibilities as tantalizing as an empty four-lane highway suddenly seemed to open up before her.

“I’m going to do it,” she said to the dog, all at once feeling almost cheerful. The dog looked at her, its eyes gleaming in the reflected glow from the instruments in the dash. Although she knew it was silly, she thought it was almost like the animal understood. “No, baby,
we’re
going to do it.”

She was clear on the other side of Benton now, just a few minutes away from where Sue lived. The fluorescent lights of one of Benton’s two open-all-night convenience stores caught her eye. Her Visa was pretty much maxed out, but she’d sent in a fifty-dollar payment just last week, which meant that she should have at least that much credit, she calculated as she pulled into the parking lot. She could get a few
things, like a toothbrush and some moisturizer, that she would need in the morning. Clothes were going to be a problem—she couldn’t show up at work in what she was wearing, shorts and a tube top—but now that she thought about it, maybe calling in sick would be the best idea. By morning, Keith would probably be madder than ever because she hadn’t come home all night. He would come looking for her. Where was he gonna look first? Work.

Pleased with herself for thinking things through enough to stay two steps ahead of Keith, she parked, got out and started to walk inside. Looking worried, the dog tracked her every movement with its eyes, and ended up by standing on its hind legs in the seat with its delicate front paws resting on the stuck-down window, still watching her. Its intention to follow couldn’t have been more clear.

“Stay,” Marsha said, stopping to shake her head forbiddingly.

The dog hopped out onto the pavement with the grace of a ballet dancer.

“Bad dog.” Good thing she didn’t have any kids, Marsha thought. She couldn’t even sound stern enough to convince a dog. Reaching her, it abased itself at her feet. She frowned down at it for a moment, then sighed and scooped it up in defeat. It was as light as if it had hollow bones, and warm and wriggly with gratitude. There was no way she could make it stay in the car with the window stuck open as it was. If she left it outside by itself, it might wander off or get run over or something. She was surprised by how much the thought of that bothered her. Already, it was like it was her dog.

The store had a rule against dogs. It also had a rule against bare feet. She had both, and she was going in anyway. What were they going to do, she thought with another spurt of her newfound defiance, have her arrested?

She ended up getting toothpaste and Oil of Olay and a box of Puppy Chow, which was the only kind of dog food they had. On impulse, she picked up a package of Twinkies from the display by the checkout. No Keith meant she could eat whatever she liked, and she liked Twinkies. A lot. The clerk, a kid with three earrings in one ear and a silver tongue stud, took her credit card without saying a word about the dog or her feet, which, she saw as she glanced down, looked
so dirty that her toes curled in embarrassment against the cold linoleum. She could only hope the woman in line behind her was too intent on scanning the tabloid headlines to notice.

“Want me to add a lottery ticket to this?” The kid, having clearly just remembered that he was supposed to ask, paused in the act of scanning her card to look at her.

“No,” she said. There wasn’t any point. She wouldn’t win. She had never won anything in her life, not even a stuffed toy at the fair. Like the TV commercial said, somebody had to win, but as sure as God made little green apples it wouldn’t be her. She had to work hard for her money.

“I heard somebody over in Macon won LottoSouth last week,” the woman behind her said, reaching out to pat the dog, which wagged its tail in appreciation. “Twenty-four million.”

“Yeah, I heard that too. Must be nice.” Had she
ever
heard. Her friend Jeanine, whose sister lived in Macon and worked in the grocery that had sold the winning ticket, had told her. Marsha’s reaction had been to hang up the phone, run to the toilet and puke. Sometimes life was so unfair it hurt, but what was new about that? She smiled at the woman, who smiled back. The clerk handed Marsha her card. Tucking it inside her purse, she scribbled her name, picked up her bag and headed back out into the overheated night. Unsurprisingly, there were only two other cars in the parking lot besides the Taurus. At this time of night, Benton was, by and large, asleep.

In that, Benton was sort of like her. She was just beginning to realize that she’d been asleep for most of her life.

“You know, maybe we could move to Atlanta,” she said to the dog as she opened the car door and slid in behind the wheel. At the thought, which had just popped into her head out of nowhere, she felt an unfamiliar glimmer of excitement.

The dog, which had settled into the passenger seat, made a soft sound and came to its feet, watching her with a sudden fixed intensity that caused her to glance at it twice. Then she realized why it was looking at her like that: she’d just fished the Twinkies out of the bag. The dog was clearly a Twinkies junkie too.

“Hang on a minute.”

Holding the package one-handed, Marsha ripped it open with her teeth as she drove out of the lot. The sweetly intoxicating scent of the world’s ultimate junk food filled her nostrils. She took a bite—it was so good she thought she might die—then broke off a piece and passed it to the dog. The road was deserted, a narrow ribbon of black losing itself in the deeper blackness of the rural countryside as it led out of town. Except for the red glow of the last stoplight before she got to the turnoff to Sue’s, there was an almost complete absence of light. The Taurus could have been alone in the universe, she mused as she braked. This little three-stoplight town—was it really the best she could do in life? As she took another bite of the Twinkie, her head was suddenly full of thoughts of Atlanta. Marsha Hughes in the big city—wouldn’t that be something? She could make a whole new—

She sensed rather than saw it, felt rather than heard it: a movement in the backseat. The dog, scuttling backward so that its tucked-in tail was pressed up against the door, began to bark hysterically, its eyes fixed on something over her shoulder. Her heart leaped. Instinctively she started to glance around—and an arm whipped across her neck from behind. Giving a scared little cry that was almost immediately choked off, she grabbed at it with both hands. Her nails clawed desperately at sweaty, hairy male flesh. The smell—the smell—she remembered that smell… .

The sharp point of what she guessed was a knife pricked the skin below her ear. She went abruptly still. Eyes widening, she felt the warm slide of liquid down the side of her neck and realized that he had drawn blood. Gasping for air against the brutal hold that felt like it was crushing her throat, she broke into a cold sweat.

“I told you not to tell,” a hoarse voice whispered into her ear.

The hair stood up on the back of her neck. Everything—the barking dog, the changing stoplight, the night itself—receded as she realized who was in her backseat.

Horror turned her blood to ice.

2

“H
ERE, PUP, PUP, PUP.
”

The dog backed away, its white teeth showing in a near-silent snarl. The man looked at it with hate. It should be dead. When it had jumped over the front seat at him, he’d hit it hard enough to send it crashing into the rear windshield. Stunned, it had bounced off the windshield and dropped onto the seat beside him, landing on its side but struggling to get up, its feet feebly paddling the air as if it were trying to run. He had put his knife through it in a vicious downward chop even as he’d grabbed Marsha by the hair to keep her from leaping out of the car. The dog hadn’t moved after that. By the time he had Marsha under control again, its bloody little body had been limp. He had pushed it down onto the floor between the seats, and hadn’t thought about it again.