Just After Sunset

  "Listen to me," she said. Her voice was hoarse, almost guttural. Her throat was dry. "I don't want to kill you, but I will if you make me. I've got a meat fork here. If you try to turn over, I'll stick it in the back of your neck and keep pushing until it comes out the front."

  Did he believe her? That was one question. She was sure he'd removed all the knives except for the one underneath him on purpose, but could he be sure he'd gotten all the other sharp objects? Most men had no idea what was in the drawers of their kitchens--she knew this from life with Henry, and before Henry from life with father--but Pickering wasn't most men and this wasn't most kitchens. She had an idea it was more like an operating theater. Still, given how dazed he was (was he dazed?), and how he must surely believe that a lapse of memory could get him killed, she thought the bluff might run. Only there was another question: Was he even hearing her? Or understanding her if he did? A bluff couldn't work if the person you were trying to bluff didn't understand the stakes.

  But she wasn't going to stand here debating. That would be the worst thing she could do. She bent over, never taking her eyes from Pickering, and hooked her fingers under the last band of tape still binding her to the chair. The fingers of her right hand wanted even less to work now, but she made them. And her sweat-drenched skin helped. She shoved downward, and the tape started coming free with another ill-tempered ripping sound. She supposed it hurt, it left a bright-red band across her kneecap (for some reason the word Jupiter floated randomly through her mind), but she was far past feeling such things. It let go all at once and slid down to her ankle, wrinkled and twisted and sticking to itself. She shook it off her foot and sidled backward, free. Her head was pounding, either from exertion or from where he'd hit her while she was looking at the dead girl in the trunk of his Mercedes.

  "Nicole," she said. "Her name was Nicole."

  Naming the dead girl seemed to bring Em back to herself a little. Now the idea of trying to get the butcher knife out from under him seemed like madness. The part of herself that sometimes talked in her father's voice was right--just staying in the same room with Pickering was pressing her luck. Which left leaving. Only that.

  "I'm going now," she said. "Do you hear me?"

  He didn't move.

  "I've got the meat fork. If you come after me, I'll stab you with it. I'll...I'll poke your eyes out. What you want to do is stay right where you are. Have you got that?"

  He didn't move.

  Emily backed away from him, then turned and left the kitchen by the door on the other side of the room. She was still holding the bloody chair arm.

  -8-

  There was a photograph on the wall by the bed.

  It was the dining room on the other side. There was a long table with a glass top. Around it were seven red maple chairs. The spot where the eighth belonged was vacant. Of course. As she studied the empty place at the "mother" end of the table, a memory came to her: blood blooming in a tiny seed pearl below her eye as Pickering said, Okay, good, okay. He had believed her when she said only Deke could know she might be inside the Pillbox, so he had thrown the little knife--Nicole's little knife, she had thought then--into the sink.

  So there had been a knife to threaten him with all along. Still was. In the sink. But she wasn't going back in there now. No way.

  She crossed the room and went down a hall with five doors, two on each side and one at the end. The first two doors she passed were open, on her left a bathroom and on her right a laundry room. The washing machine was a top loader, its hatch open. A box of Tide stood on the shelf next to it. A bloodstained shirt was lying halfway in and halfway out of the hatch. Nicole's shirt, Emily was quite sure, although she couldn't be positive. And if it was hers, why had Pickering been planning to wash it? Washing wouldn't take out the holes. Emily remembered thinking there had been dozens, although that surely wasn't possible. Was it?

  She thought it was, actually: Pickering in a frenzy.

  She opened the door beyond the bathroom and saw a guest room. It was nothing but a dark and sterile box starring a king bed so stringently neat, you could no doubt bounce a nickel on the counterpane. And had a maid made up that bed? Our survey says no, Em thought. Our survey says no maid has ever set foot in this house. Only "nieces."

  The door across from the guest room gave way to a study. It was every bit as sterile as the room it faced across the hall. There were two filing cabinets in one corner. There was a big desk with nothing on it but a Dell PC hooded with a transparent plastic dust cover. The floor was plain oak planks. There was no rug. There were no pictures on the wall. The single big window was shuttered, admitting only a few dull spokes of light. Like the guest room, this place looked dim and forgotten.

  He has never worked in here, she thought, and knew it was true. It was stage dressing. The whole house was, including the room from which she had escaped--the room that looked like a kitchen but was actually an operating theater, complete with easy-clean counters and floors.

  The door at the end of the hall was closed, and as she approached it, she knew it would be locked. She would be trapped at the end of this corridor if he entered it from the kitchen/dining-room end. Trapped with nowhere to run, and these days running was the only thing she was good at, the only thing she was good for.

  She hitched up her shorts--they felt like they were floating on her now, with the back seam split open--and grasped the knob. She was so full of her premonition that for a moment she couldn't believe it when the knob turned in her hand. She pushed the door open and stepped into what had to be Pickering's bedroom. It was almost as sterile as the guest room, but not quite. For one thing, there were two pillows instead of just one, and the counterpane of the bed (which looked like a twin of the guest-room bed) had been turned back in a neat triangle, ready to admit the owner to the comfort of fresh sheets after a hard day's work. And there was a carpet on the floor. Just a cheap nylon-pile thing, but wall-to-wall. Henry no doubt would have called it a Carpet Barn special, but it matched the blue walls and made the room look less skeletal than the others. There was also a small desk--it looked like an old school desk--and a plain wooden chair. And although this was pretty small shakes compared to the study setup, with its big (and unfortunately shuttered) window and expensive computer, she had a feeling this desk had been used. That Pickering sat there writing longhand, hunched over like a child in a country schoolroom. Writing what she did not like to think.

  The window in here was also big. And unlike the windows in the study and the guest room, it wasn't shuttered. Before Em could look out and see what lay beyond, her attention was drawn to a photograph on the wall by the bed. Not hung and certainly not framed, only tacked there with a pushpin. There were other tiny holes on the wall around it, as if other pictures had been pinned there over the years. This one was a color shot with 4-19-07 printed digitally in the right corner. Taken by an old-fashioned camera rather than a digital one, by the look of the paper, and not by anyone with much flair for photography. On the other hand, perhaps the photographer had been excited. The way hyenas might get excited, she supposed, when sundown comes and there's fresh prey in the offing. It was blurry, as if taken with a telephoto lens, and the subject wasn't centered. The subject was a long-legged young woman wearing denim shorts and a cropped top that said BEER O'CLOCK BAR. She had a tray balanced on the fingers of her left hand, like a waitress in a jolly old Norman Rockwell painting. She was laughing. Her hair was blond. Em couldn't be sure it was Nicole, not from this blurred photo and those few shocked instants when she had been looking down at the dead girl in the trunk of the Mercedes...but she was sure. Her heart was sure.

  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 hersel
f 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.