When She Left: A Thriller, page 22
“Why not?”
“I got tired of seeing things like this,” he said. “Doing things like this. That’s why Marley was trying to kill me.”
The baton lowered. The Vigilante headed back up the stairs. Lucky followed her. He helped the Vigilante carry Marley out into the dark, cold, quiet night, noticing how the Vigilante stepped smoothly while Lucky strained. They reached an old Civic, and she unceremoniously dropped Marley’s upper body on the street to open her trunk. Lucky lifted the other man on his own and, with a heave, dumped him inside. Marley was stirring awake, eyelids fluttering, but the Vigilante reached into one of her pockets, pulled out a small case, and removed a syringe. Injected something into Marley’s neck. Moments later, he was back asleep.
“Well,” the Vigilante told Lucky and slammed the trunk shut. “I’m going to bounce.”
She climbed into the front seat of her car. Lucky stared after her, unsure what to do. In one day his secrets had been exposed to his family and the Winterses. The former probably wanted nothing to do with him. The latter, to kill him.
He needed help. And there was only one person who could help him.
Lucky followed the Vigilante.
A couple of times he called Renee and Marybeth, but neither of them answered or returned his messages. He wasn’t worried that the Winterses had found them; the cabin was a secret, hidden and remote and barely connected to Lucky.
Renee and Marybeth, he realized, must have run from him. Were too scared to even speak with him.
And so Lucky drove in silence.
The truth about Ruby dejected him. She had either been working for the Winterses this entire time, even after he thought he’d helped her escape. Or perhaps she’d returned to them once Jake was in danger. In either case, she’d betrayed him.
And Ruby was the only person he’d ever known who had left the Winterses.
But, in truth, no one had ever left.
He was so lost in thought that he didn’t realize nearly an hour had passed since he’d been following the Vigilante. Lucky had been too distracted to pay attention to where they were driving, but he assumed that, by now, they were somewhere in Virginia.
They drove onto a dirt road, and then turned onto another, narrower road. An old, decrepit barn came into view. Lucky slowed to a stop in front of it, glanced around the empty lot. He had no idea where her car had gone, wondered if she’d driven into the barn. Lucky cursed himself for his distraction, his age, his carelessness, whatever had caused him to lose focus.
His door was suddenly yanked open, and Lucky was pulled from the car. He caught himself on the dirt, palms burning from the impact.
The Vigilante stood above him, her striped mask lit by moonlight.
“Why are you following me?”
Lucky lifted himself slowly to his knees. “I need you to tell me how you’ve fought them. How you’ve won.”
The Vigilante walked to her car, half-hidden behind a pair of trees. She popped the trunk. “You want advice, then give me another hand with this guy.”
“I can’t work for them anymore,” Lucky told her as he helped her pull Marley’s bound body out of the trunk. Marley was still sleeping, and Lucky wondered what she’d drugged him with. “The Winterses aren’t just going to let me go. They’re going to come after me and my family.”
“Yea, verily.” The Vigilante grunted as they dragged Marley out, dropped his body on the ground. She indicated the barn. “Over there.”
Lucky reached under Marley’s arms.
“What are you, what . . . ,” Marley slurred. “Lucky?”
Lucky ignored him as he and the Vigilante half carried, half dragged Marley to the barn. Marley kept talking, his words becoming clearer, sentences filling out.
“You double-crossed me,” Marley said, struggling, but feebly.
The Vigilante pushed open a door leading inside the barn with the back of her foot.
“You’re gonna die, Lucky,” Marley said.
“He’s probably right,” the Vigilante agreed. “Also, your name’s Lucky? Weird.”
The barn was dark, but the Vigilante dumped her half of Marley on the floor and turned on a lantern next to the door. She walked around, lighting lanterns until a dim glow filled the space. This looked like the kind of structure that had been built as part of a larger property, and then that property had been torn down, the barn left for some other purpose that had never been realized, until it was forgotten. It might have been, Lucky considered, a neglected historical landmark, a remnant of the slavery days that left Virginia’s land drenched in blood. The floor was dirt, and the wooden walls were full of holes, some chewed by animals, some ripped by weather. The only thing in the barn that wasn’t aged or rotted was on the other side of the room, and when Lucky saw it, he knew what the Vigilante intended to do.
“How have you stayed alive this entire time?” he asked her.
The Vigilante grabbed Marley’s bound feet, dragged him across the dirt. “The secret’s in being the hunter, not the hunted.”
“You’re going to die too,” Marley told her, and then he looked up. Saw what waited.
It was a gallows, three long brown boards. One had been plunged deep into the dirt. Another board protruded from its other end, close to nine or ten feet, the height of a basketball hoop. The third board was supportive, stretched at an angle between the other two. A small metal loop had been fixed to the end of the highest board, and a rope ran through it. A noose hung.
“Lucky, help me.”
Lucky ignored Marley. “Are you ever going to stop?” he asked the Vigilante.
“Twelve men from the Winterses were in a room when someone I loved died,” she said. “Marley was the last one there. He’s the last one I needed to find.”
“What do you mean?” Marley asked. He was gaining strength as death neared. “What do you mean?”
She pulled a rope hanging over a low rafter in the middle of the room. The noose rose.
Marley had recovered enough to scream, so she grabbed a wadded ball of paper towels on the floor and stuffed them into his mouth.
“Talk to me,” the Vigilante told Lucky. “What’s your deal?”
Lucky told her about his early days with the Winterses as he helped fasten the noose around Marley’s neck, as she wrapped the other end of the rope around her hand and pulled it, slowly walking away, the rope over her shoulder.
Lucky told her about the anguish he’d suffered recently as Marley’s body rose and thrashed.
And Lucky explained how he’d left the Winterses as the Vigilante grunted, and Marley was lifted until his feet couldn’t touch the ground. The Vigilante wrapped her end of the rope around a hook on the wall.
“Well, Lucky,” she said, rubbing her hands, staring up as Marley’s body kicked, “you sound like a real a-hole.”
“I just need to make sure my family’s safe. Is there anything I can do to help them?”
The Vigilante didn’t respond. Just kept staring at Marley. She and Lucky looked up at him like people gazing at stars.
“Do you know who Medusa was?” the Vigilante asked after Marley’s feet had finished kicking and his body hung like a pencil mark in the middle of a blank page.
“Greek myth, turned people to stone with a look, Perseus cut off her head? That Medusa?”
“That’s the one.” The Vigilante walked back to the hook.
“You know,” she went on, “all those myths are really just stories about how people are supposed to act or behave. And I always thought Medusa was so interesting. A woman so powerful that just looking at her turned men into stone. That’s crazy. I read up on her.”
There were no sounds except for the Vigilante’s voice.
“Medusa had two siblings, and she was the only one of them who was human, and she was beautiful. After the god Poseidon raped her in the temple of Athena, Athena was so mad about it that she changed Medusa into a monster so hideous that just seeing her turned men to stone.”
The Vigilante started to unwrap the rope from the hook.
“And I was thinking about that, why Medusa was turned into something so gross and violent? I think the truth is something different. Medusa froze men when they realized the evil of what they had done.
“Men looked at her, and they couldn’t look away. That was their curse.”
Marley’s body fell to the ground like an invisible hand had thrown it.
“If you want to defeat them, Lucky, then you have to look at my face.”
“You mean,” Lucky asked, “under the mask?”
The Vigilante knelt, loosened the noose from Marley’s neck.
“When I left who I was,” she told Lucky, “I lost everything in my life. My family was either killed or abandoned me; my friends are gone. Even though no one knew who I was, I couldn’t keep these two sides separate after a while. You have to look at my true face.”
Lucky stared as the Vigilante undid the noose. He didn’t understand what she meant, but now he knew this couldn’t be Melissa Cruz. This was someone with no connection to anyone in the world, and he felt an immense, overwhelming loneliness at that thought.
“I still don’t get it,” Lucky said.
“You have to look at my true face,” the Vigilante said a third time, and she turned toward him. “That’s the only way you can be helped.”
He just stared at her mask, into the three black stripes, the stains that darkened it like water.
“I think it’s too late for you,” the Vigilante said.
CHAPTER THIRTY
JAKE
Sunrise battered Jake’s face.
Pain throbbed through his chest, so much that it hurt to breathe. He didn’t feel like he could sit up and didn’t try. Instead he gingerly touched the source of the ache, felt the soft cotton of a wrapping and the coarse texture of medicinal tape.
He recognized the arched ceiling above him. Ruby’s bedroom. That was enough to tell him where he was.
Enough to tell him, finally, they were safe. Somehow he knew it.
Jake marveled at that. Billions of tiny experiences happen over a lifetime, sights and sounds and smells, yet it’s the moments from childhood and adolescence that remain. He couldn’t even figure out how he remembered the ceiling. Maybe summer days when Ruby was drunk or asleep, and he would come up here and watch television.
Jake tried to sit up, and his shoulder felt like a saw was chewing through it. He gently rolled to his side, taking deep breaths as the pain subsided to something manageable. Lowered himself to the floor.
Jake stayed still for a few minutes, then lifted himself from his hands and knees, teeth gritting.
I can stand.
He did.
I can walk.
Barely.
Jake crept to the bedroom door, paused at the full-length mirror hanging on its back.
He was shirtless, just that white bandage over his shoulder. He looked even more gaunt than normal—he’d always been naturally thin, but now his stomach was withdrawn, sunken.
He still had on the same jeans he’d been wearing over the last several days, and, Jake realized with embarrassment, at some point he’d peed on himself. He wondered if Ruby still had some of his clothes here, if he could even fit into them anymore.
Jake doddered down the hall, his hand pressed against the wall for balance.
Ruby was sitting at the kitchen table. A coffee cup next to her.
“Hey,” Jake said. He was suddenly aware of his breath after days of unbrushed teeth, and grimaced.
Ruby didn’t look up.
Jake walked around her and the table, to the chair on the other side, using the kitchen counter for support.
The kitchen had changed. There always used to be a half-empty bottle of something alcoholic on the counter. At first Ruby had hidden the bottles, and then they’d been left out as her drinking had increased. Jake used to sip from them when he was ten or eleven or twelve, shyly and secretly, just tasting the brown liquid. He didn’t enjoy the taste or the uneven feeling afterward, but he did like the way his face contorted, like eating a sour candy. Not something you tasted because it felt good, but because it didn’t.
Those bottles were gone now. Jake assumed Ruby had hidden them, hoping to present some sort of dignified appearance to him and Melissa. Not that Ruby had ever cared what people thought of her, but Jake could sense a change in her. It was in the house. The sign above one of the windows in the kitchen that read, “He hath blessed this home.” The pictures he’d passed in the hall from the bedroom to the kitchen, colored illustrations, six on each side, depicting Jesus as he was being led to his own crucifixion. The Bible on her nightstand, a rosary draped over the cover.
Jake couldn’t remember a time when Ruby had mentioned religion, but he wasn’t surprised she’d found it. She’d always been given to excess, attracted to the idea of surrendering to something greater than herself. The Winterses. Alcohol. God.
Jake pulled out the chair and sat, carefully, his breathing louder as he lowered, a sudden moment of pain nearly causing him to cry.
Ruby’s head was down, eyes closed. Her lips were moving, but she wasn’t saying anything he could hear. A rosary was in her hands, beads passing through fingers.
She’d aged. A little heavier, her face rounder. Thinner hair.
After a few minutes her lips and hands stopped moving. A cross dangled off the rosary, and Ruby brought it to her lips, kissed it. Opened her eyes.
“You have a rosary in the kitchen and one in the bedroom?” Jake asked. “Why two? Prayer emergencies?”
“I was praying for you.”
“Where’s Melissa?”
“Not here.”
“She went out?”
Something about Ruby’s pause made Jake uneasy.
“She left you.”
Jake felt a flash of alarm and pain. “What?”
“The Winterses came, and she ran off. You were asleep. Steve had put you under. You didn’t wake up when they were there.”
The comfort Jake had felt had vanished, his world overturned.
“Steve? The doctor?”
A rosary bead between her fingers, her fingertips pressed against it. “Steve didn’t make it.”
“Where’s Melissa?”
The beads continued. “Not sure. They’re looking for her.”
“We have to find her!”
“We’re far from wherever she is,” Ruby told him. “In a different state.”
Jake was standing, hands on the table for support, crumbs under his palms, tiny points pressing into his flesh before crumbling.
“You left her?”
“She left you.”
“She’s in trouble! They could have her!”
Jake couldn’t stay still any longer. He had to do something. He gripped the edge of the table, and his legs buckled.
Ruby set the beads on the table, the rosary curled.
“Jake,” she said slowly. “I need to tell you something, and it’s not going to be easy to hear. You should sit down.”
“What?”
“It’s about Eric.”
“Eric?” The word so faint it seemed like someone else had spoken it, someone far away.
“They killed him.”
A demon writhed inside Jake’s chest, tried to pull itself through his ribs, through the bullet wound, tear itself free.
“How did . . . how did we . . . ?”
“They showed mercy. I begged for your life, and so they showed mercy. But I have been told that, after we left, they were attacked by an old friend of mine. Lucky Wilson. He was with the Vigilante.”
Jake felt like he was swimming under a sheet of ice and searching for air. “Was it Chris?” he asked. “Did Chris kill Eric?”
“It was his men.”
There was something in Ruby’s voice that Jake remembered, something plainspoken and honest, the same way he remembered the ceiling in her bedroom. The way, when he was a child, she’d calmly tell him at night, “Stay here, I’ll be back,” and she always was. The tone she took when something needed to be believed.
“I was asleep through . . . through Eric?”
“Like I said, Steve gave you medicine for the pain. I have it here.”
“We have to find Melissa. I have to find her. I have to go back. I can’t lose her too.”
“I think it’s too late, Jake,” Ruby said.
Jake’s breathing worsened, breath coming loud, wheezing. Ruby stood, and her arms were open and around him. He nearly sank to the floor. She held him up.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
MELISSA
The door was open but the chapel was empty. A sign outside listed a 7:00 a.m. service. Melissa didn’t wear a watch, and her phone and handbag were in Dr. Steve’s basement, but the light from daybreak led her to assume services were close to starting.
Melissa slipped inside. Didn’t see anyone watching her as she closed the door.
It had been years since Melissa had been inside a church.
Her mother made her go every Sunday, communions and confessions and Sunday school, standing next to her and singing loudly as Melissa mumbled along. There had always been that distance between the two of them, and Melissa wondered if it affected her relationship with religion, her reluctance a reaction to her mother’s urges.
Truthfully Melissa had always felt a calling to church, some compulsion that may have come from all those hours of kneeling in pews, or the surety her mother and the priests and her Sunday school teachers had in their beliefs, or the beauty of the congregation slowly walking forward to receive communion, their heads humble and bowed. The embrace of Jesus, the grateful abandonment of an exhausted life.
She’d always imagined returning to church. But, as Melissa pushed open a door to a restroom, she’d never expected it to be like this.
Melissa locked the door to the bathroom and quickly unfastened and slipped off her shoes, pulled her jeans off her waist, ran water over the knees. No matter how much soap she used, regardless of how briskly she rubbed paper towels against her jeans, Melissa couldn’t remove Dr. Steve’s and Eric’s blood. The stain deepened.
Melissa caught a glance of herself in the mirror and expected to see a haunted figure, lost and frightened, but what she saw surprised her.
