Before I Wake (20 page)

Focus. Just think about the now and what you have to do. Don’t think about those other things.

The farm lane led forward to the garage, or left, down the steep slope to a barn that was half stone, half wood, built into the hillside.

She drove down the hill and pulled to a stop, headlights illuminating the wooden door that hung from wheels on a track.

She got out of the car, approached the door, and grabbed the metal handle. Her tactile memory awakened, she leaned back heavily while she pulled. Wheels creaked, and finally the giant door began to move, began to roll on the track.

She’d half expected to see farm machinery parked inside, but the space was empty except for tools and coiled hoses hanging on a far wall.

Back in the car, the occupants coming awake, she drove forward.

“Are we there yet?” Eli mumbled sleepily.

Arden was glad they were awake. Glad Eli was there for the comic relief she so desperately needed right now. Another minute with nothing but her own thoughts and her mind might have turned a corner and slipped away completely.

Arden’s parents and most of their friends hardly ever locked their doors, a few of the rare times being when they went to a funeral or to church on Sunday. That went back to the idea that nobody in the area would steal, but outsiders might come on a Sunday, when they knew the good people were at church.

The doors were locked now.

No good people left.

In the garage, Arden stood on her toes and felt along a narrow ledge to the right of the door—until her fingers came in contact with a small metal box. She got it down, slid the lid open, and pulled out a key. Put there by her father, for emergencies. Not this one. He could never have foreseen this emergency.

The garage was empty, their car gone. Daniel was probably using it. Or maybe he’d sold it. She’d left him to deal with too many things.

The door opened behind her and she jumped.

“Find it?”

Eli.

Find what?

Oh, the key. The key in her hand.

How long had she been standing there? “Right where I thought it would be.”

The sun was coming up. Too bright in the sky, lodged between the garage and house, past a pasture and a field that had been fall-plowed.

Her dad had never fall-plowed. Daniel wouldn’t fall-plow. Someone else must be renting the crop and grazing ground.

She felt a sudden surge of anger. Who was fall-plowing her dad’s ground after the years of care he’d given it?

It doesn’t matter. Not anymore.

Don’t look at it. Don’t think about it.

Go inside.

They walked past the slaughterhouse.

It was a building she’d avoided ever since a young farmhand had introduced her to the captive bolt gun. He’d pulled it from a drawer in the butcher table. “You put it against the animal’s temple,” the teenage boy had told her, holding the heavy device in the palm of his hand. “Then you press the trigger.”

“Does it shoot a bullet?” Arden had asked.

“No bullets. The bolt goes through the steer’s skull, then pops back out. You use it over and over.”

After that, she’d had bad dreams for a long time.

It was the right key. She hadn’t been sure. The only time she remembered using it had been one afternoon when she’d come home from school and the house had been locked. Not for a funeral. Someone in the nearby town of Derbyshire had been murdered and robbed, and the killer was still on the loose.

Arden’s mom had been sure it must have been someone from far away, but it turned out to be the victim’s nephew who’d been in need of a fix.

The heavy kitchen door swung open.

With the others behind her, Arden paused to check the floor.

A fine layer of dust.

She moved forward, doing a quick scan of the house, walking through the rooms on autopilot, not allowing herself even a flicker of emotion that the visuals might evoke.

Clearly nobody was living there. Apparently not her brother. Nobody would be coming, at least not soon.

The electricity had been left on—probably for lot illumination and cattle waterers.

“Don’t turn on any lights,” she said. “Someone might see.”

The propane furnace was running, set on fifty degrees to keep the water pipes from freezing.

In the basement, the pantry shelves were still full of canned food. Left by her mom.

Seeing the jars hurt.

A lot of farmers had the misplaced notion that when the United States government failed and the country’s infrastructure collapsed, people would flee the big cities like lemmings. Where would they go? Why, to the Midwest. They’d invade the farms, where people still had food. Where they were self-sufficient and didn’t depend on semis loaded with staples from California and Texas to sustain them.

Arden had always tried to tell her mother that nobody was coming. That nobody even
knew
about them. But her mother would can her fruit and vegetables, preparing for the end of the world as they knew it. At least her family would have food. And when the city people came, she would stand at the door with a shotgun if she had to.

“You’d feed them,” Arden always said with a laugh. “If starving people came to your door, you’d feed them.”

Her mother would laugh, agree, and keep canning.

Armageddon had come.

Her mother was dead. And Arden and her friends were the lemmings.

They took armloads of food up the bowed wooden steps, depositing everything on the kitchen counter. They popped open preserved apples and peaches. With forks, they ate them right from the jars.

“What’s your name?”

Arden looked up to see Harley staring intently at Franny, a fork in his hand, apple juice dripping down his beard. It was the second time he’d asked the question.

“Franny.”

She probably would have looked scared, at least intimidated by him, if she hadn’t been so tired.

He nodded. “Oh, yeah. That’s right.”

He was suffering short-term memory loss. He was confused. Arden was confused. They were all confused.

And in need of sleep.

They’d left the motel room in the middle of the night, no one but Harley having gotten any sleep while there. After that, there had been catnaps in the car, but nothing substantial. Now, standing around in a stupor, staring blankly at nothing, they were almost too tired to understand that they needed to go to bed.

The farmhouse had four bedrooms. Three up, one down. The structure of the house was solid. Repairs and paint had been kept up, but nothing had been remodeled in years. On a farm, the inside of the house wasn’t as important as what was outside, beyond the house. You didn’t waste money on your sleeping and eating spaces.

“This is okay with me,” Eli said, looking into the first-floor bedroom.

The guestroom, or spare room, her mother had called it.

Arden wasn’t sure if she could ever remember anybody actually using it, which meant it was the least imprinted room in the house.

“I’ll sleep here too.” Franny tossed her bag on the bed. “I don’t want to be by myself.”

Arden and Harley went upstairs.

Harley immediately fell across the double bed in the room that had belonged to Arden’s brother. The old wallpaper was still there. A cream-colored background with a repeating pattern of cowboy boots.

She remembered sitting on the floor playing with little plastic toy cowboys and Indians that had originally been their father’s. The room had been carpeted then, with some kind of brown, multipurpose stuff.

She dug blankets out of the closet, covering Harley.

He was already asleep.

She left the room and walked down the hall, her footsteps echoing.

The house smelled of dust and mold. Stale air. And that lingering, sweet-rotten scent of dead mice.

Rodents would flee the fields when the corn was being picked, running for warmth and shelter, only to end up dying inside the walls, stinking up the house for months. Sometimes the stench was so bad it made Arden’s eyes water, and gave her a pounding headache. She always figured her clothes smelled like dead things when she went to school.

The hall ended.

To the left was the library, full of her father’s books. Mostly nonfiction. History and geography, books about places he’d hoped to one day visit.

Unlike a lot of farmers, Arden’s parents had never been the kind to expect their kids to remain on the farm and carry on somebody else’s dream. Both had been well educated. Her mother was a grade-school teacher. Her dad, although he hadn’t gone to college, had been self-taught and could hold his own in any discussion of politics, history, or science.

That was the mind-set of many farmers. If you didn’t know it, you got the information. You figured it out.

To the right of the library was her mother and father’s room.

She didn’t want to go in there.

Arden forced herself to turn and step inside.

Except for a missing mattress gone from the bed’s box springs, everything appeared the same. The long, low dresser on the right. Her mother’s jewelry case, covered with dust. In the corner, a rack with her dad’s ties. The place where the sloped floor creaked when you stepped on it. The door to the walk-in closet was open. On the inside of the door hung a long, gray wool skirt with red trim that her mother often wore to church.

Arden turned away.

This was where it had happened.

This was where her mother had been murdered.

Don’t think about the mattress and why it is gone. Plenty of time for that later.

Arden had no memory of finding her mother, but she knew the details.

She didn’t want to think about that day, didn’t want to try to remember. Not now. She wasn’t ready. Wasn’t mentally prepared. She would try to remember later.

The room smelled like lingering hints of her mother’s perfume, mixed with her dad’s aftershave.

She missed them.

She missed them so much.

Daniel Davis flew down the road in his blue Dodge Dakota. He was going too fast, and the truck’s shocks were bad.

He hoped the muffler didn’t fall off.

He’d gotten a phone call from Donna Clancy, one of his nosy neighbors. But then, everybody in the country was nosy. What went on down the road was much more entertaining than what you could see on channel four.

In this case, Daniel had been glad to get the report.

Someone in a small station wagon had turned in the direction of the old place. Donna had watched and waited, but never saw the car come back. And there was only one way out. Well, not exactly. If the weather had been dry or the ground was frozen, you could cross the pastures and end up on Roller Coaster Road, but it was a rough ride. And the only person capable of finding his way out would be someone familiar with the farm.

Like Arden.

That was his first thought when he’d answered the phone and Donna had told him what she’d seen.

He’d expected his sister back long before this—at least to settle the estate. But as time had passed, as weeks had turned into months and crops had been planted and harvested, he’d begun to think she’d never return.

He turned left off the hard road, down the hill. Once the land leveled out, he took a right, passing the mailbox with the sloppy letters, up the curved drive.

No car in the driveway.

The ground was frozen; there were no tracks.

Daniel circled around to the other side of the barn, stopped, and set the emergency brake. He jumped from the truck and slid the barn door open a crack. In the hazy darkness, he spotted the car. A little hatchback station wagon.

Shit.

Back at the truck, he turned off the ignition, grabbed his rifle, and headed up the hill to the house.

He entered through the back door, quietly slipping into the kitchen. Once inside, he paused to listen.

A clock ticked above the sink. The furnace was running. The counter was littered with empty jars of his mother’s canned fruit. Un-rinsed. Forks sticking out.

He hadn’t stepped inside the house in months. And he hadn’t been upstairs since the funeral. Now, the sight of his childhood home made him feel sick to his stomach, made his heart pound with the terror of memory.

When the murders first happened, he’d been numb. He’d been able to come in. Walk around. Move through the house. Talk to the cops. The detectives. Make the funeral arrangements.

Just do it.

He’d been in his first year of community college. After two years, he’d planned to go off to a university to get a degree in veterinary science.

He had a couple of friends who’d died in a car wreck, and he’d always wondered how their parents had dealt with the tragedy so calmly. How they’d planned the funeral, and welcomed people to their home, sitting around chatting as if it were just some normal day. Maybe even a fucking holiday. Now he knew that the body—the brain—did something, went through some chemical change or something that made it all pretty easy.

Autopilot plus.

Except for the little episode with Arden when he’d let his buried emotions spill out and had blamed her for everything. She’d known it was true. He’d seen it in her face.

Weeks passed, and the numbness wore off. Things got worse because you felt the pain.

He’d been staying at the house of a family friend and knew it was time to move back to the old place. But he couldn’t do it. Not anymore.

A sick horror welled up in him whenever he’d confronted the idea.

He was just a kid. A kid! He shouldn’t have to feel these emotions. He shouldn’t have to deal with this kind of shit. His friends—his old friends—were going to college, doing things college kids did. Drinking too much. Listening to bands. Meeting girls.

Not fair.

He’d tried to hang out with some of them last summer, but they seemed so much younger, so immature and shallow. He was only twenty-two, but he felt at least forty. Not that forty was ancient, but you weren’t a kid anymore; that was for damn sure.

He still wanted to laugh at stupid things. He still wanted to enjoy a party with a bonfire and beer.

But he couldn’t. That part of life was over for him. He’d passed Go and gone directly to hell.

And one person was responsible for it all. For the death of his parents, and the loss of his youth. If he were lucky, he would find her here. She should have died with them. She was supposed to have died with them.