My left hand broke free of the tape. But I was still wrapped into the chair, and my ankles were anchored to the legs.
“A hand?” Rick's voice suddenly became more calm. “Sure. I've got some tools out in my trunk. Why don't you come with me, I can show you. I got all kinds of stuff in there.”
And the door opened again, and closed. And there were no more voices in the house.
I looked at Sarah. I said, “He's out of the house.” She nodded furiously, her eyes wide with hope above the band of tape. “If I can get to the door, I can lock it.”
I tipped forward, the chair moving with my body, tried to balance on my tiptoes. I put my hands on the table, balanced on one and leaned across to pull the tape off Sarah's mouth.
“Hurry,” she whispered.
I tried to hop, but fell. But with my arms free I was able to drag myself, and the chair, forward. I scrambled across the kitchen's linoleum floor, reached the broadloom with upgraded underpadding in the hall. There wasn't time to try to force myself back into a sitting position, regain my equilibrium, and take another run at hopping. I just kept dragging myself, trying to push with my toes. The rug burned against my elbows as I neared the front door, and if my knees could have screamed they would have. I could see the deadbolt, set in the unlocked position. Only a few more feet. Just a few more.
I reached the door, and, lying on my side with the chair still attached to my body, I reached up and turned the bolt.
“It's locked!” I screamed to Sarah.
“Good!” she screamed back.
“Can you get to the phone?”
“I'll try!” There was the sound of her chair sliding across the floor in short bursts.
I shifted my head over toward the edge of the door, trying to catch a glimpse of what was happening outdoors through the narrow floor-to-ceiling pane of glass. The sun had crested the horizon, and I could see clearly what was happening.
Stefanie's Beetle still sat in the middle of the yard. Benedetto's BMW was parked at the curb, Greenway and Carpington, their hands still cuffed behind them, leaning up against it. From my vantage point, I couldn't quite see Sarah's Camry, or Rick's car behind it. Greenway and Carpington were watching something take place in the vicinity of Rick's car, and it scared Carpington enough that he turned and began running down Chancery Park, toward Lilac. Greenway was shouting, shaking his head no, ordering Rick to do something. It looked like he was yelling “Let him out!”
I was guessing that, by now, Quincy was wide awake.
Now Rick came into view, still waving around his switchblade. He grabbed Greenway by the shoulder and started hustling him in the direction of the front door. He grabbed the handle and pushed as though he expected it would open. When it didn't, he shouted, “Open this fucking door!” He slapped it with the palm of his hand.
“I'm almost there!” Sarah called. “But I can't get my hands free!”
“Open it! Walker! Open this door!”
He kicked at it twice, but it didn't budge. Then he kicked at the glass, but it only cracked slightly. “You're dead!” he screamed. “When I get in there you're dead!”
And he disappeared.
He was running around the house, looking for other ways in. I heard him try the garage doors, but they were locked as well. A few seconds went by and then Sarah screamed, “He's here!” She would have meant the sliding glass doors, but I knew they were locked, too. Would he try to smash them in?
Even from my position at the front of the house, I could hear Rick screaming at the top of his lungs and banging the knife against the glass. “I'm going to cut out your fucking hearts!”
“Oh God!” Sarah said.
“What?”
“The ladder! He's going up the ladder!”
Oh no. The ladder I'd left leaned up against the back of the house so that I could regularly caulk around our bedroom window. And I was betting that our bedroom window was open. We usually left it that way, to allow fresh air in at night while we slept. With that knife, he'd be through the screen in seconds.
“Zack! He's at our window! He's going in!”
I tried to shift around the floor, the chair legs digging sideways into the carpet. I thought about how Sarah would hear him kill me before her. From where I lay, I could see the stairs to the second floor, and of course he'd spot me first on the way down. Sarah would have to listen to me scream as he cut me open. I wondered if there was a way I could face the end with anything resembling dignity. If I could keep from screaming, would it make Sarah's last few moments any less terrifying? At that moment, that was all I could think to give to her, to let her die knowing that I had not suffered that severely. That while not painless, it had not gone on long. It wasn't much of a birthday present, but it was all I had to give.
“He's in! He's in!”
She didn't have to tell me. Rick's entrance into our bedroom had been announced with a crash. Our dresser is under the window, and in coming through it, Rick had sent a lamp to the floor.
I heard him cackle. “Your hearts!” he screamed. “I'm gonna fucking eat them!”
And I thought about Paul and Angie, about how sorry I was to have done this to them, to have allowed their parents to be taken away from them, much too soon, and in such an ugly fashion. Would my dad take them in, or maybe Sarah's parents? Or would Angie turn into an adult overnight, look after Paul herself, tell her grandparents that she could handle this on her own? It would be like her to try, I thought. She was tough, and proud, and she'd feel honor bound to look after her little brother all by herself.
Rick was out of the bedroom and running down the hall. I saw his shadow fall across the top of the stairs.
This was it.
“Sarah,” I said. Not a scream. I just wanted to say her name. And to make one final apology: “I'm sorry.”
Rick came flying down the stairs. I don't mean he was running quickly, taking the steps two or three at a time. He was airborne.
His head was thrust out well ahead of his body. His arms were outstretched, the knife forging out ahead of him in his right hand. His feet were off the ground. If he'd worn a cape, it would have been flowing and rippling in the breeze behind him.
His mouth was open in astonishment. This, evidently, was not how he'd planned to come down this flight of stairs. Now his arms were waving, his legs kicking, trying to make some sort of purchase, to regain his footing.
As he pitched forward, his right arm hit one of the lower steps first, his elbow cracked, and his forearm snapped back, angling the knife toward himself. And then his neck connected with the upturned blade, and the weight of his body drove it deep into him, and his mouth opened even wider, but no sound came out.
He came to rest two steps from the bottom, his arms and legs twisted at unnatural angles. From his neck, the blood spilled forth as if from an open tap. The gathering pool spread from the second step and down to the first.
And tumbling after him, like an afterthought, like a second punch line to a joke you thought was over, came Paul's backpack. It bounced a couple of times, then settled next to Rick's head in the blood.
28
the man who delivers papers to our neighborhood showed up not long after that. He didn't even get close to our door. Who could blame him? Here's what he found:
A man in handcuffs sitting out on our front step.
An abandoned Beetle parked on the front lawn, door open, engine still running.
From inside the house, a woman's screams, a man's cries for help.
From the trunk of a small car parked at the end of our driveway, even louder screams. They sounded like a man's.
The paper man (there are almost no boys anymore; papers must be picked up in the middle of the night and delivered before six, and this was a sight you wouldn't have wanted a young lad to see) went back to his car, where he kept a cell phone, and called for help.
What a production.
Two police cars and an ambulance converged on the scene within five minut
es. When the ambulance attendants, who, I'm told, looked upon our house with a certain familiarity, arrived, they were directed first to the trunk of the car by the paper guy. But the handcuffed man sitting on our front step, Don Greenway, advised them not to think, even for a moment, of opening that trunk. You might, he suggested, want to call someone from the zoo.
I was able to reach up and unlock the door to let everyone in. The police came in first, putting some muscle behind the door so as to move me out of the way, duct-taped to the overturned chair as I was. Their eyes had barely landed on me when they saw Rick at the bottom of the stairs, a much more convincing dead person than I ever was in that same spot, a very long time ago.
They must have thought, at that moment, that whoever'd done that to Rick had been the same person who'd put me in the chair, but gradually, the truth began to emerge. I told them to please check on my wife, in the kitchen, and one officer ran ahead to do just that while another stayed with me, wanting to know who else was in the house, how many hurt.
“There's one guy out there in the trunk,” I said as the officer cut me out of the chair, “but it may be too late for him. And there's another one, not hurt, but running around the neighborhood someplace with his hands cuffed behind his back.”
“There's already a guy here in handcuffs.”
“There's a second one. It's a long story.”
Once I was free, I was on my feet and running to the kitchen where Sarah was now standing, and we threw our arms around each other and started to cry. I held on to her for a very long time.
“Mom? Dad?”
It was Paul, calling from out front. The police wouldn't let him inside. We both ran out to see him and embraced him, so happy that we were all alive, except that Paul had no reason to think that all of us being alive was in any way an extraordinary thing.
“What's going on?” he asked. “What the hell happened to your face?”
“You're a hero,” I said, hugging him again. “And you don't even know it.”
“Huh?”
It was my first time outside of the house since the police had arrived, and it was wild. At least half a dozen police cars, three ambulances, a fire truck, just in case. A couple of SUVs with TV station logos splashed across the sides. And nearly everyone on the street was outside, standing in their yards, gawking. It was the first time I'd ever seen the housecoat lady outside without a hose in her hand.
Trixie approached me tentatively as I stood out there with Paul.
“Oh God,” she whispered. “All hell broke loose.”
“Kinda,” I said. “I need you to get me that ledger.”
She nodded and slipped away. I saw Earl across the street, standing by the back of his pickup. Our eyes met, and he nodded, as if to say “I'm glad you're okay, man, but if you don't mind, I'm going to stay on this side of the street while the cops are around.” That was just fine with me.
Sarah grabbed one of the ambulance attendants as he walked past, and said, “My husband's been hurt.”
I recognized him as the male attendant who'd come to our house during The Backpack Incident. While he might have remembered coming to this address, he made no suggestion that we had met before. My face was too badly bruised and bloodied to be recognizable.
They ended up taking both of us to the hospital. Even though Sarah showed no obvious signs of injury, they wanted to check her out just the same. I told Paul to get in touch with Angie, let her know that we were okay.
“Does she think you're not okay?” he asked.
And tell her not to worry about going to school today, I said. Get one of the officers to bring you to the hospital to meet us once she shows up, I said.
Turns out all Sarah had were some tape burns on her wrists. Hospital officials would later tell the press that she was “in good condition,” but I knew better. Nobody came out of something like this in good condition. I figured the nightmares would begin that night, and would be with her for a very long time.
The doctors and nurses had a fair bit of work to do on me. I needed stitches in three places on my face, my left eye was puffed up the size of an egg but the color of a prune, and I had an assortment of bruises all over my body from my tangles with Rick and crawling across the floor while still secured to a chair.
The police interviewed us separately. Needless to say, I had a lot more to get off my chest than Sarah, who was still pretty much in the dark, and was kept busy with detectives, including my friend Detective Flint, for a lot longer.
Hours and hours longer.
I started from the beginning. I'd considered, briefly, telling them I'd grabbed Stefanie Knight's purse by mistake, but knew I'd get caught in a lie somewhere down the road once they turned on the hot lights and brought out the rubber hoses.
I spelled out for them the whole Valley Forest Estates thing. The blackmailing of Carpington, the murder of Spender, how Stefanie was offered up for sexual favors. They'd found Carpington, by the way, sitting down by the edge of Willow Creek, listening to the sound of the water as it flowed by, and when two officers approached him, he turned to them and smiled and said, “It's beautiful down here, don't you think? They should never build homes around here.”
The police wanted to know: Did I kill Stefanie Knight?
No, I said.
Did I know who had killed Stefanie Knight?
Not for certain, I said. But my money was on Rick. He certainly had an unlimited capacity for violence.
They told me that his full name was Richard Douglas Knell, that he was thirty-eight, and that while he'd spent much of his life working in construction, he'd also spent some time “inside” (where he did his reading), having kicked in a man's head outside a bar six years earlier. There was evidence that he'd acted, in some small way, in self-defense, otherwise the sentence would have been longer. He'd come back to work for Don Greenway, who'd been his employer years ago, and Greenway found a way to exploit Rick's special talents of persuasion.
“He liked snakes,” I said.
My interrogators concurred. But Quincy, alas, was no longer with us. When they popped the trunk of Rick's car, they found he'd already squeezed the life out of Mr. Benedetto, and was in the process of digesting him. He'd only gotten to his knees, and when the panicked officers saw what they were dealing with, they unloaded several rounds into the snake, trying not to disgrace the body of Mr. Benedetto in the process, although they did nick his shoes. They'd remarked later, privately, that since Mr. Benedetto was already dead, it would have been interesting had they opened the trunk much later. They wondered just how much of the guy the snake would have managed to get down its throat. It would have been something to see, no doubt about it.
Anyone else on my list of suspects? they asked.
Well, there was Greenway, of course. Stefanie had decided, it appeared, to get out of Dodge, and she was leaving with her homemade supply of cash, plus a ledger for possible future blackmail purposes, and the roll of film. It wasn't clear whether she had the film because she was tired of being used for such seedy purposes, or simply hadn't gotten around to turning it in to Greenway for developing. I wondered where he normally had his film processed. Mindy's would do it for you in an hour, $6.99 for twenty-four exposures, another set of prints for two bucks.
I promised to hand over the negatives, still hidden in my Seaview model, and the ledger.
Earl's name never came up. As far as the police knew, I'd busted into the Valley Forest Estates office alone. I didn't have to bring Trixie into it, either. The police were left with the impression that I had something of a handcuff fetish. Later, when we compared notes about what we'd been asked, Sarah said to me, “When did you switch from sci-fi modeling to handcuff collecting?”
When the police finally decided to let me go home, with the proviso that they would be wanting to talk to me again, probably several times, I said to them, almost as an afterthought:
“You might also want to take a look in Carpington's and Greenway's cars. I don't th
ink there's any snakes in them. They're out behind the Valley Forest Estates offices. You never know, you might find some interesting things in there.”
“Already have,” said Detective Flint.
i wondered whether they would charge me with something. There had to be lots of offenses to choose from. Not reporting Stefanie's death to them immediately, hindering prosecution, who knew? They take their time with these things, and I knew that if they wanted to lay charges, they might take months to get around to it.
But they didn't waste any time charging others. Greenway, who hadn't bothered to make a run for it that morning, who knew the game was over and simply waited for the cops to arrive, was arrested, as was Roger Carpington.
A couple of days later, with some fanfare, they announced that they were charging Carpington with the murder of Stefanie Knight.
They had found, in the trunk of his car, a bloody shovel. They'd run DNA tests on the blood, and it turned out to be, without a doubt, Stefanie Knight's.
And I thought: I'll be damned.
life took some time to get back to normal. Sarah's bosses told her to take off as much time as she wanted, which meant she probably had about a week. In seven days or so, her editors would be calling to say “You okay? You think, you know, coming back to work and editing stories about murder and mayhem would help take your mind off things?”
There were insurance matters to deal with. We'd lost a car. There was a big hole in the basement wall, from my doing batting practice with the tripod. And there was the grisly matter of the blood-soaked carpet where Rick had fallen on his sword.
And there was some other damage that the insurance adjusters weren't equipped to handle. Sarah didn't want to talk to me.
She was there for me, of course, while I recovered from my injuries. She'd make me tea, bring me an ice pack, get me a glass of water to help me wash down my Advils. But she didn't have much else to say, and I couldn't blame her. I'd nearly gotten us both killed by being a busybody. I'd nearly turned our kids into orphans.
They weren't that pleased with me, either, but they were more upset that their mother and I weren't speaking. Or that their mother wasn't speaking to me.