Paradise County (46 page)

His words made no sense to her.

Stay limp. Let your arms hang. They’re dead weight, heavy… .

“We’ll just chain this one little wrist to the wall, and then you can move about as much as you like. I don’t want you to be uncomfortable. I’m nice to my girls, you’ll see.”

He rolled her onto her back again, then gently stroked her face.
Stay limp. Breathe… .
His hand was moist, sweaty. He leaned over her, his breath, which was warm and disgusting with a faint overtone of some kind of mint, all over her as he reached across her for her left arm, which was the arm nearest the wall.

“So you won’t fight me, you know. I’d hate to have to hurt you.” He picked up her wrist. Something metal was sliding around it. Fatter than a handcuff, more like some kind of shackle.

“You’re not asleep, are you, Cornelia? Ah, ah! So naughty to try to fool me.” He was touching her, stroking the shrinking skin of her neck, his hand gliding down over her turtleneck to close over her right breast, squeezing. “So pretty… .”

Neely couldn’t stand it. She couldn’t stand his hand on her, his breath on her, the knowledge of what was to come.

His hand slid beneath the hem of her turtleneck to creep over the bare skin of her stomach… .

Neely screamed. Without even knowing that she meant to do it. Right in his face. With the force of a factory whistle at quitting time. At the same time her eyes flew open and she bunched up her legs and kicked like a kangaroo, catching him full in the stomach with the soles of her feet and sending him careening backward.

“Help! Help!” she screeched, leaping off the bed and flying after him toward the door. She had to escape, had to escape, had to escape… .

Only she couldn’t fly. Her ankles were shackled together, linked by a heavy iron chain that was, perhaps, three feet in length. She lurched in her stocking feet across the cold stone floor, tripped over something, nearly fell, caught herself—and found herself looking down at Eli, huddled and chained and apparently lifeless in the middle of the floor. But she could do no more than glance at him with horror because she had to get to the door. Had to escape before he recovered, before he caught her… .

She wasn’t going to make it, she realized just inches from her goal, and stumbled to a halt. Her captor had regained his balance and was glaring at her, snorting like a bull before the charge, murder in his stance. There was no way she could get out that door and past him… .

“You did a bad thing, Cornelia, and I’m going to have to punish you for that,” he said, and came at her.

He had stumbled back through the cell door when she had pushed him, and it had rebounded back toward her. Its black, floor-to-ceiling bars stood between them now, only partly ajar. Neely screamed again as he rushed her, and grabbed the cold iron bar closest to her, clanging the door shut in his face. It didn’t lock. She had no way to lock it.

The door hit him in the forehead and he howled and staggered back a step.

“Eli! Eli, help me!” she shrieked, swinging a lightning glance around, but Eli didn’t move and she was on her own… .

The metal bracelet was still around her wrist with the chain dangling from it, although he had not had a chance to snap the bracelet closed.
Quick as the thought, Neely wrapped the chain around the bars as many times as she could, fastening them together, then pulled her wrist free of the bracelet. Even as he came at her again, shoving a beefy shoulder against the door, she clicked the bracelet shut around the coils of chain, locking the chain—and the door—in place.

“Open that door.” The light from the flashlight threw his shadow against the stone wall behind him, making him look huge and menacing. “If you don’t—look, Cornelia, look! Look what happens if you don’t mind me!”

He walked a little away from the door, and turned on a camp lantern that was set in the middle of a table. Neely saw that the area beyond the cell looked much like a basement, with a card table and a big armchair and a TV… .

There was something hanging from the wall. Something black hanging from manacles set into the wall. Scorch marks on the stone as high as the ceiling … a tuft of singed blond hair still attached to a horribly burned head … a
corpse …
a burned-beyond-recognition
corpse.

Neely screamed, then screamed again as she realized what she was looking at: that thing on the wall had once been alive, a human being, a woman from the look of that hair… .

“Her name was Cassandra, and she didn’t please me. So I burned her alive. That’s what will happen to you, Cornelia, if you don’t please me. This is your last chance to try. Open that door.”

Neely shuddered, and backed away.

He growled, and threw his full weight against the door with a tremendous crash and rattle of metal. The door gave, but no more than an inch or so. With the chain holding it in place, she saw to her relief, he wasn’t going to be able to break through.

Straightening, he stood there for a moment just looking at her. Then he smiled, a horrible smile that made her skin crawl.

“Uh-oh. I’ve got the key.” He continued to smile at her as he reached into his pocket and extracted a small silver key. For a moment he dangled it where he was sure she could see it. Then he stepped forward and reached inside the bars. Looking through them—it was obvious that he
could not quite see where the bracelet was—he began to feel for the bracelet, and the keyhole that would unlock it.

“Help! Help me!” Neely screamed. She glanced wildly at Eli. He was still unmoving, and she thought, feared, he might be dead.

“No one can hear you,” her captor said.

She had to stop him from unlocking the chain… .

Frantically she looked around for something, anything she could use as a weapon to hold him off. She would fight for her life… .

She spotted her cowboy boots lying on their sides by the bed.

As a weapon, a boot wasn’t much, but it was all she had.

He was having to feel for the keyhole with the end of the key. He found it… .

Neely made a headlong lunge for her boot, grabbed it, and turned around to see the key slide smoothly into the lock.

“No!” she screamed, leaping back over to the door and raising the boot high over her head at the same time. Panting with exertion and terror, holding the boot by its shank, she slammed the heel down on his hand with all her strength. It connected with the sound of a pumpkin smashing against pavement.

“Ow! Bitch! Bitch!” he screamed, withdrawing his hand and leaping back—and the small silver key dropped with a tiny
ping
to the floor.

On Neely’s side of the door.

She dived for it, landing on her stomach, snatching it up just seconds before his hand came through the bars, after it too. She scuttled backward, crablike, stopping only as she came up against Eli’s inert body.

“Give me that!” Her captor was getting to his feet, a big man, enormous, glaring at her through the bars.

Her foot was in something wet, something that was soaking through her sock.

Glancing down, Neely realized to her horror that she was crouched in a pool of Eli’s blood.

Forty-four

H
e was in love. Those were the words that kept running through Joe’s head as he lay on his back with his arms folded beneath his head, watching the dawn light creep into his bedroom. Outside, a rooster crowed from some nearby farm. Birds were just waking up, and their morning chatter made a familiar backdrop for the start-stop growl of the newspaper delivery man’s truck, its tires crunching as it turned around right on schedule in Joe’s driveway.

Alex was sleeping next to him, curled against his side. They’d left his father’s house about two
A.M.
and driven back here. With Jen spending the night at a friend’s house, and Josh, Eli, and Neely at the high school lock-in, there’d been no reason for her to go home.

So she’d spent what had remained of the night in his bed. As a consequence, he’d gotten maybe an hour of sleep.

And he’d fallen in love.

The very thing he’d feared most had happened: He had fallen head over heels in love with Princess Alex.

And he didn’t mind a bit.

Turning on his side, he propped himself up on one elbow and looked down at her face. Her eyes were closed, her lips slightly parted. Her hair
was tangled in a pale cloud across the pillow. The quilt was pulled up around her shoulders, hiding the rest of her from his view, but it didn’t really matter. He’d have plenty of time to look his fill later.

He wasn’t letting this woman go.

She might not know it yet, but she was his.

She stirred in her sleep, murmuring. Even when she took a sleeping pill she was a restless sleeper. He knew: he’d been listening to her slumber every night. Up and down, moving around her bedroom at all hours of the night. He was going to consider it his personal quest to replace her sleeping pills with good, honest nightly exercise. Maybe then he’d be able to get a decent night’s rest.

Smiling at the thought of that exercise, Joe leaned over and dropped a soft kiss on her lips.

“Joe?” she murmured sleepily, one eye blinking open to peer at him.

“I’m going to go check the horses,” he said, smiling at her. “It’s only about six
A.M.
Go back to sleep.”

She murmured something, and closed her eyes. Even before he swung his legs out of bed, her even breathing told him she was once again asleep.

Smiling, Joe got dressed and went out to check on the horses. When they were seen to he walked across the field to his father’s house. It was scarcely past seven—pretty early to be waking a man who was sure to be nursing a massive hangover—but that was just too damned bad. Last night had been the proverbial straw that had broken his camel’s back: it was time to deal with his father’s drinking problem.

He was going to have to deal with Eli, too.
Eli.
The son he had always thought he knew as well as he knew himself. Apparently not.

Being mistaken in the character of the son he loved more than his own life hurt more than he would ever have imagined it could.

Today he lowered the boom.

Using his key, he let himself into his father’s house and headed to the kitchen to make coffee. The coffee was for him. His dad would prefer something stronger: the hair of the dog. Mouth twisting, Joe pulled a bottle of Wild Turkey out of a cabinet stocked with a liquor store’s worth of
booze and poured a generous shot of it into a glass. He knew the exact amount needed to begin the transformation of his dad from a trembling, nauseated, woozy-headed wreck into a reasonably coherent human being: he’d been performing this anti-hangover ritual since he was a kid.

Taking the glass with him, he headed toward his father’s bedroom.

“Hey, Pop!” The smell of sour mash was so strong in the room that Joe checked for a moment on the threshold. Then he recovered, and, setting the glass down on the nightstand, moved over to the single double-hung window and flung the curtains wide. Sunlight poured into the room. Joe opened the window to let some of the smell out so, hopefully, he wouldn’t suffocate, and turned back toward the bed.

“Hey, Pop! Wake up!” Sitting down on the edge of the bed, Joe shook his father’s shoulder, not roughly but not real gently either. Joe had stripped him down to his boxers the night before. Now he sprawled on his stomach on the bed, his still thick white hair looking like someone had taken an eggbeater to it, his mouth open, his snores loud enough to rattle the windowpanes.

“Pop!”

“Wha…? Joe? What?” Cary’s eyes opened a slit. Perceiving Joe, they blinked rapidly, then closed again as he groaned. “My head… . Who opened the damned curtains?”

“I did. Wake up, Pop, we need to talk.”

“Hell’s bells, son, did somebody die?” Cary groaned again, and flopped over onto his back. Like Joe himself, his father had a great deal of body hair. But the hair on Cary’s chest had turned as white as the hair on his head. There were other signs of aging about his father, too, Joe noted. Somehow, without Joe noticing, he had developed an old man’s turkey-wattle neck, and the skin on his face had grown loose enough so that it fell away from his bones. Despite his annoyance at the old man, these visible signs of his father’s mortality moved Joe.

Despite everything, he loved the old fart.

“Sit up and drink this.” His voice was a shade less brusque than it had been.

“Did you bring me my medicine?”

“Yes.”
Pop’s medicine
was the euphemism they’d used for years to describe the after-bender alcohol infusion that Cary invariably required. The term with its painful childhood associations made Joe frown.

“Oh, God.” With much groaning, Cary managed to inch himself far enough up against the shiny pine headboard that he could take the glass Joe held out to him. But his hand shook so badly that Joe had to keep his own hand on the glass, too, and help guide it to his mouth.

Cary swallowed the contents in a series of quick gulps and then gagged, coughing. He leaned back against the headboard for a minute as Joe put the empty glass down on the nightstand.