“You’re hurt!” she cried.
They embraced briefly then he turned, gasping, and gazed outside, surveying the yard like a soldier. Pulling his pistol from his pocket he said, “I’m all right. It’s just my shoulder. But, Christ, Lis-the deputy! Outside. He’s dead!”
“I know. I know… It was horrible! Michael shot him.”
Leaning against the doorjamb he gazed into the night. “I had to run all the way from North Street. He snuck past me.”
“He’s upstairs.”
“We’ve got to get away from the windows… What?”
“He’s upstairs,” she repeated, stroking her husband’s muddy cheek.
Owen stared at his wife. “Hrubek?”
She held up Michael’s filthy gun and handed it to him. Owen shifted his gaze from Lis’s haggard face to the pistol.
“This is his?… What’s going on?” He laughed shortly, then his smile faded as she told him the story.
“He wasn’t going to kill you? But why did he come here?”
As she fell against Owen’s chest once more, mindful of his shoulder, she said, “His brain’s gone completely. He wanted to sacrifice himself for me, I think. I don’t really know. I don’t think he does either.”
“Where’s Portia?”
“She’s gone for help. She should’ve been here by now so I guess the car got stuck.”
“The roads are mostly out in the north part of town. She’ll probably have to walk.”
Lis told him about Trenton Heck.
“That’s his truck outside, sure. Last I heard he was going to Boyleston.”
“Bad luck for him he didn’t,” she said. “I don’t know if he’s going to make it. Could you look at him?”
Owen did, examining the unconscious man with expert hands. He knew a lot about wounds from his military service. “He’s in shock. He needs plasma or blood. There’s nothing I can do for him.” He looked around. “Where is he? Hrubek?”
“I locked him in the small bedroom upstairs, the storeroom.”
“And he just walked up there?”
“Like a puppy… Oh!” Her hand flew to her mouth. Lis went to the closet and set free Trenton Heck’s dog. He was not pleased at the confinement but strode out unhurt.
She hugged Owen again then walked into the greenhouse, picking up the newspaper clipping. She read, The BETRAYER hIdeS as the crusher of heADs. i AM to be sacrificed to save POOR EVE
She exhaled in repulsion at the madman’s macabre words. “Owen, you should see this.” Lis glanced up and saw her husband studying Michael’s pistol. He flipped the cylinder open and was counting how many bullets were inside. Then he did something whose purpose she couldn’t understand. He pulled on his leather shooting gloves and wiped the gun with the soft cloth.
“Owen, what are you doing?… Honey?”
He didn’t respond but continued this task methodically.
It was then that Lis realized he still intended to kill Michael Hrubek.
“No, you can’t! Oh, no…”
Owen didn’t look up from the gun. He spun the cylinder slowly so that, she supposed, a bullet was aligned under the hammer. With a loud click the gun snapped shut.
Lis pled, “He wasn’t going to hurt me. He came here to protect me. His mind’s gone, Owen. It’s gone. You can’t kill him!”
Owen stood very still for a moment, lost in thought.
“Don’t do it! I won’t let you. Owen?… Oh, God!”
A ragged white flash of light enveloped his hand and all the panes of the greenhouse rattled at once. Lis threw her palm toward her face in a mad effort to deflect the bullet, which narrowly missed her cheekbone and snipped a lock of her tangled hair as it streaked no more than an inch from her left ear.
32
She fell to the floor, toppling a small yellow rose shrub, and lay on the teal slate, her ear ringing, smelling her own burnt hair.
“Are you mad?” she shouted. “Owen, it’s me! It’s me!”
As he lifted the gun once more, there was a blur of motion, a brown streak. The dog’s teeth struck Owen’s injured arm just as they had Michael’s. But her husband, not numb to the pain, cried out. The pistol flew from his hand and clattered behind him.
Then he was frantically kicking the dog, hammering on its solid shoulder with his good fist. The hound yelped in pain and fled out the lath-house door, which Owen slammed shut.
Lis leapt for the pistol but Owen intercepted her, grabbing her wrist and throwing her to the rocky floor. She rolled, opening patches of skin on her elbow and cheek. She lay for a moment, gasping, too shocked to cry or say a word. As she climbed to her feet, her husband walked slowly toward the pistol.
My husband, she thought.
My own husband! The man I’ve lain with the majority of nights for the past six years, the man by whom I would’ve borne children had circumstances been different, the man with whom I’ve shared so many secrets.
Many secrets, yes.
But not all.
As she ran into the living room, then down the basement stairs, she caught a glimpse of him standing, gun in hand, looking toward her-his quarry-with a piercing, assured stare.
His gaze was cold and for her money the madness in Michael Hrubek’s eyes was twice as human as this predatory gaze.
Poor Eve.
No light. None. The cracks in the wall are large enough to admit air. They’re large enough to bleed brown rain, which here falls not from the sky but from the saturated earth and stone of the house’s foundation. If the time were two hours later, perhaps the uneven wall would admit the diffuse light of dawn. But now there’s nothing but darkness.
The scuffling sounds outside the door.
He’s coming. Lis lowers her head to her drawn-up knees. The wound on her cheek stings. Her torn elbows too. She makes herself impossibly small, condensing her body, and in doing so exposing wounds she didn’t know she had. Her thigh, the ball of her ankle.
A huge kick against the wooden door.
She sobs silently at the jolt, which is like a blow to her chest. It seems to send her flying into the stone wall behind her and her mind reels from the crash. In the hallway outside Owen says nothing. Was the blow one of frustration or was it an attempt to reach her? The door is locked, true, but perhaps he doesn’t know it can be locked from the inside. Perhaps he believes the room is empty, perhaps he’ll leave. He’ll flee in his black Jeep, he’ll escape through the night to Canada or Mexico…
But, no, he doesn’t-though he seems satisfied that she’s not inside this tiny storeroom and moves on elsewhere in the rambling basement to check other rooms and the root cellar. His footsteps fade.
For ten minutes she has huddled here, furious with herself for choosing to hide rather than flee from the house. Halfway to the outside basement door-the one Michael had kicked open-she’d paused, thinking, No, he’ll be waiting in the yard. He can outrun me. He’ll shoot me in the back… Lis then turned and ran to this old room in the depths of the basement, easing the door shut behind her, locking it with a key only she knows about. A key she hasn’t touched for twenty-five years.
Why, Owen? Why are you doing this? It’s as if he’s somehow caught a virus from Michael and is raging in a fever of madness.
Another crash, on the wall opposite, as he kicks in another door.
She hears his feet again.
The room’s dimensions are no more than six by four and the ceiling is only chest high. It reminds her of the cavern at Indian Leap, the black one, where Michael had whispered that he could smell her. Lis thinks too of the times as a girl when she huddled in this same space; then filled with coal, while Andrew L’Auberget was in the backyard stripping a willow branch. Then she’d hear his footsteps too as he came for his daughter. Lis read Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl a dozen times when she was young and although she understands the futility of concealment she always hid.