“In the bathroom, hiding in the shower.” She motioned at one of the archways.
“You come inside here that night?”
“No, but later I saw the photographs. I had to stay with Oriana till the county social services said they couldn’t send anybody out for her. Then I took her to the Scurlocks’, where I interviewed Virge and she spent the night.”
“So she let Virge comfort her?”
“Oh, yes. Virge has a special way with children and she relates to another person’s pain. She and Will lost their only son to a drunk driver when he was fifteen.”
Pain. Loss. Death. Jesus, why was he here in this gruesome memorial to wasted and truncated lives? Why, when he had finally begun to heal from his own pain, loss, and death, had he placed himself in a situation where he was forced to confront these things all over again?
“Guy?”
He pivoted, scanning the room with a professional eye. Forced himself to separate his own emotions from those that must be trapped here. At the Blakeley house he’d felt fear and panic, but now...
“Guy?”
He shook his head, motioned for her to be quiet.
It felt different here. Fear and panic were present, yes, but there was something else. He pictured Susan Wynne’s empty dark eyes as they appeared in the second photograph he had of her. Pictured Forrest, and realized the reason behind his apparent lack of humor. It was present in the musty air, as strong as if they had died only yesterday.
Resignation.
Susan and Forrest had gradually been giving up on life, perhaps since the day they arrived in the canyon. Work had slackened off into idle talk and drug use, and the accompanying death of the spirit. That last night they’d heard the shots at the Blakeley house and realized what was coming. Susan had the presence of mind to send her children away, possibly to tell Forrest’s sister, Devon, to conceal herself, but otherwise they’d done nothing.
“Guy?”
He turned. Rhoda was looking at him with the same surprised expression as must be on his own face.
She said, “They just gave up. You feel it too, don’t you?”
Chrystaclass="underline" Before
Friday, October 6
12:11 P.M.
Running down the canyon like a scared little kid. Like me and Heath did that day. Gotta get a grip—
Jesus! What’s that noise?
Oh yeah, one of them hawks. Real screamers. Make awful sounds like they’re being tortured. Like the scream I heard when I came down the hill on the deer path that last night. Only it wasn’t no hawk.
No, Chryssie, don’t go there.
Yeah, like I could stop now.
Jude and Leo left me alone in our cabin that night. They were going down to the canyon but they said I couldn’t come along because they had to talk about grown-up things with the others. They were real serious, kinda nervous too.
After a while I got scared. They hardly ever left me alone at night, and it was windy outside. All sorts of sounds, and even though I knew it was just the trees and stuff, I hid under the covers. The cabin really creeped me. It was so old and crummy and smelly, no wonder nobody minded us squatting there. After a while I decided anyplace was better, even outside in the dark, so I got up and put on my jeans and a sweatshirt and headed for the canyon.
The moon was out, so I could see the path where the deer wore down the grass real good, didn’t even need a flashlight. When I came up on the pond, I scared off a couple of does that were drinking from it. That was when I started to hear something that sounded like Fourth of July firecrackers. And people yelling.
They were having a party down there, I thought right then, but Jude and Leo hadn’t taken me along. Everybody was having a good time but me.
At first I wanted to cry, but then I got mad and started walking faster. It wasn’t fair. I hadn’t done anything bad. Why was I left out?
After the pond, the path went under some trees. It was awful dark in there, and I kept tripping over roots and stuff. I walked straight into a tree trunk and smacked my forehead. It bled, and then I did cry. But not for long because I heard a booming sound, closer by than the others. And I knew it was a shot. I’d heard lots of those. Leo had a gun and he liked to plug beer cans on the stump behind our cabin.
I stopped. Wanting to go down there and see what was happening. Wanting to run back to the cabin and hide in my bed.
Noises in the bushes. Mountain lion! They lived in the hills. One of them snuck down into the canyon and ate Eric’s cat.
Run, Chryssie!
He’s getting closer!
Then Jude came out of the bushes, nearly on all fours. Her hair had leaves in it and there was a big scratch on her face and her hands were muddy. She didn’t see me, went right by.
I called to her and she stopped. Turned around. She was out of the trees, standing in a patch of moonlight. Her face looked as white as the moon and I’d never seen anybody that scared.
“Chryssie?” she whispered.
And then we heard him. A man yelling, “No no no please no!” And we heard the scream.
It started low and went up and up till every little hair on my arms was standing up straight and my skin got all pimply. I put my hands over my ears but they couldn’t block out the shots. Rat-a- tat, over and over again like in a war movie.
Jude grabbed me and we ran all the way back to the cabin. Leo was there with the bus. By the cabin door Jude squatted down so she could look me in the eyes and put her hands on my shoulders.
She said, “Something very bad happened tonight, Chrystal. A grown-up thing you don’t need to know about. We’re never going to talk about it again. You understand that?”
And I said yes, I understood. I didn’t dare ask any questions, not when Jude looked at me like that.
Right away we went into the cabin and cleared out all our little stuff and packed it in the bus. Leo said to leave the furniture. And then we split for Oregon. In Portland Leo switched license plates with a car parked in a dark corner of some lot and we left the bus with the keys inside on the street. Then we hitched over to Vancouver, Washington, where he had a buddy who would let us stay with him for a while.
We never did talk about that night again, not till last Saturday when Jude had that real bad seizure and was afraid another one would be the end of her. Yeah, she told me about the murders and the secret she kept all those years. But she sure didn’t tell me anything as scary as what I remembered today.
Monday, October 9
Afternoon — Evening
Rho no longer felt as if she were sleepwalking. A moment before she’d connected with the events of that long-ago night on a visceral level. She watched Guy nod in reply to her question and said, “How can we know that the Wynnes just gave up, after all this time?”
He shrugged and motioned for her to precede him outside, where she sucked in fresh air. Everything now looked different, as if she’d removed a pair of dark, distorting glasses.
Guy said, “I’ve always subscribed to the theory that powerful emotions become trapped in the place where they’re experienced. A receptive person can tap into them simply by being in the physical environment. It’s similar to the so-called art of psychometry, where the receptor reads something about the owner of an object by handling the object itself.”
“You believe that stuff?”
“Yes and no. What I do believe is my experience of it.”
“But you said powerful emotions. Resignation — that’s weak, passive.”
“Not always. I’d define it as powerful when it comes to allowing yourself to be killed. And there’s another element operating here: The Wynnes may have been creating a diversion so their children could escape. In short, laying down their own lives for Heath’s and Oriana’s.”