It was dark. And she was alone again.
The power had gone out forty minutes ago, and Margi had been sitting on the floor in the parlor, listening to the crack of thunder and the fierce rush of rain against the windows. Somewhere under the floorboards, she could hear the trickle of water.
Margi drew her knees closer and leaned her head back against the wall.
She had lived in lots of shitty places and had been in a slew of men’s beds in her twenty-nine years, but nothing had been as bad as this place.
Had Jean Brandt sat here once in this same spot? In the dark? Heart in her throat as she waited for the door to open and Owen to come back?
Margi wiped her face and pulled in a breath that rattled her ribs.
How had this happened? How had she come to this? Owen hadn’t been a monster when she met him. He’d been a friend of her cousin she visited sometimes in the Ohio prison. Her cousin had told her Owen was in jail for throwing a woman from a car. She should’ve known then that he was mean. But he had been so nice to her, and she figured any man could change if he had a woman he loved enough to change for.
Plus, she was so tired of being alone. Willy had kicked her to the curb after he sobered up and decided he could do better than a skinny high-school dropout who couldn’t have no babies.
Owen didn’t care about babies. He told her that on one of the afternoons she spent talking to him through the Plexiglas. Told her he didn’t want any kids, because once he got out, he was going to move to Florida and get a high-paying construction job and a condo on the beach.
She believed him.
Eventually, he’d told her the woman jumped from the car and that she was mental or something and later ended up in an institution.
She believed him.
He told her every woman he ever loved had left him because he was just a poor, hardworking farmer who couldn’t provide luxuries for a woman, but deep down, he had a good heart.
She believed him.
He smiled a lot and told her she was pretty. And when he told her there must be a hundred other guys out there who would love on her and that he was damn lucky to have a woman like her, she believed that, too.
A laser of lightning lit up the parlor. Outside, a piece of glass fell from somewhere and crashed to the porch. The trickle of water under the floor was beginning to sound like a running faucet.
Owen never told her she was pretty anymore. Never kissed her on the mouth and never bought her gifts. Never even thanked her for a hot meal or for sex or for even being there outside the prison the day he got out.
And now he brought her to this hole in the middle of nowhere, took her car keys, twisted her arm so bad it was numb, and left her alone while he walked in the rain looking for a dead woman.
Margi pushed to her feet and felt her way along the walls to the kitchen. She knew there were some candles on the counter, and she found them, but she couldn’t find the matches. Owen hid those, too. Probably afraid she’d set him on fire one night.
Cursing softly, she moved to the back door and stepped out onto the covered porch and into a spray of rain. She squinted into the storm, looking for the beam of Owen’s flashlight. It took her eyes a minute to adjust, and when they did, she saw the sliver of white, jumping in the darkness out in the cornfield.
Margi watched him, more in morbid fascination than anything else. She grew wet from the rainy wind, and she felt a shiver snake up her spine, but she couldn’t take her eyes off Owen. And she couldn’t help but wonder if this particular ghost might just be real. She’d always believed in things like ghosts and ESP and UFOs. Heck, she’d had her fortune read more than once at fairs and by that psychic woman down on Burton Street in Akron.
Not one of them had ever told her she would win the lottery or marry a millionaire or find true love. But one time, a woman dressed like a gypsy told her she would die young and that she should purchase a set of special salvation candles for sixty dollars and light them daily to save herself.
Margi had been nineteen at the time and had brushed the prediction off as something the woman said just to suck her into buying the candles.
But now she was almost thirty and living with a lunatic, and she wondered if the gypsy woman had been right. Was this where it would all end for her? The same way it had ended for Jean and all those other poor people buried out there in that crappy graveyard?
“If you was going to leave him, Jean, I don’t blame you one bit,” Margi whispered to the air.
The jumpy beam of Owen’s flashlight came closer. A few seconds later, she could hear the slush of water around his shoes and his guttural mumbling. Owen stopped at the bottom step and shined the light on her.
“Get in the house,” he said.
She slipped inside and stood against the cupboards as he came inside behind her. He spotted the candles and dug in his pocket for the matches. He was still muttering, but all Margi could make out was Jean’s name.
The candles bathed the kitchen in a yellow glow, with shifting black shadows that jumped with the windy slap of branches on the windows.
“You okay, Owen?” Margi asked.
He spun around. His skin was slick with water, his eyes glinting like some sick animal that knew it was going to die. He held the flashlight in one hand and the broken skinning knife in the other. His palm was dripping bloody water from where he had cut himself.
“No, I’m not okay.” He set the knife on the counter.
Margi let out a breath, her eyes going from the knife to his face. “Owen, please,” she said softly. “You can’t keep doing this. We should leave here. We should go someplace you won’t have to think about her. Maybe Florida. You said you wanted to go to Florida. We could go there and-”
Brandt drew back to smack her. She twisted away from him and his blow caught her behind the ear. She dropped to her knees against the cupboard.
“Stop it!” she cried.
He kicked her in the thigh. With a cry, Margi tried to scramble into the open cupboard. She couldn’t fit her whole body in, but the door gave her some protection.
Brandt reached down and grabbed her hair, jerking her head back out so he could see her face. His hand went up again, but suddenly he froze.
“Get out of there,” he said.
“No!”
He jerked her from the cupboard by the hair and tossed her across the slippery kitchen floor. She huddled up, thinking he would come after her, but he was just standing there, staring at the cupboard. Then he bent and looked inside. When he stood up, his eyes were glazed with something new, something that looked like it scared the hell out of him.
He was clutching something in his hand. For a second, Margi thought it was a dead animal. Then she realized it was just a stuffed rabbit.
“She saw it,” he said. “The damn kid saw everything.”
“What are you talking about?” Margi asked.
“This fucking cupboard,” Brandt said, pointing. “This is where that kid hid the night I killed her slut mother. She saw everything.”
Margi kept silent.
Brandt threw the rabbit down. “Fuck!” he said, pacing. “That’s why she has a damn shrink around her now. They’re trying to get in that screwy brain of hers and dig it out.”
Brandt kicked the cupboard shut and snatched the bottle of Ten-High whiskey from the counter. He stood at the window and stared out as he drank it.
Margi pulled herself to her feet, grateful Brandt had found someone else to be mad at but still scared at the way he was talking.
“She was always weird,” Brandt said, like he was talking to himself and she wasn’t even in the room anymore.
Margi stood perfectly still, her eyes riveted on the knife, still on the counter by Brandt’s elbow.
“She always had this way about her, like knowing people were going to die before they did,” Brandt muttered. “Knowing a tornado was coming before the sky ever clouded up.”
Margi pressed back against the wall, trying to think of something she could say to get him calmed down. “You mean like ESP, Owen?”
He spun to her. “Don’t you understand nothing?” he shouted. “If she was in that cupboard that night, then she knows where Jean went!”
Brandt set the bottle down and grabbed the knife. His eyes scanned the kitchen, finally finding his denim jacket. He snatched it up and started for the door.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m going to get the girl.”
Margi wet her lips. Her heart was thundering, and she could barely find her voice. First he was chasing a ghost, and now he was going to go after a little girl. What was it about this place that turned people nuts?
“Owen,” she said softly. “Why do you have to go after her? In a few days, a judge might give her back to you, and then you can ask her where her mother went. You get caught with a knife, they’ll send you back to jail.”
He was shaking his head. “I told that fucking cop I wasn’t her father. This is the only way.”
“But she’s got all those people around her,” Margi said. “You’ll never get close to her.”
Brandt shoved the knife into his waistband, picked up the whiskey bottle, and took a long swallow that dripped down his chin. “So I’ll kill that nigger cop and that bitch woman and that stupid old doctor if I have to,” he said. “And when the girl tells me where her mother is, I’ll kill her, too.”
Margi brushed back her hair and looked around. The candles were getting low, and soon there would be no more light at all.
“And that motherfucker Shockey,” Brandt said softly. “I’m going to take extra special care of him. He’s going to pay for fucking my wife. He’s going to pay real hard.”
“You going tonight?” Margi asked.
“Yeah.”
Brandt took another drink and turned back to the window. From behind, she could see his reflection. The watery glass gave a distorted shimmer to his face.
“Owen, please don’t go tonight,” she said. “You been drinking, and it’s raining…”
Brandt mumbled something and took another drink, but he didn’t move away from the window.
Margi drew a shallow breath and walked up behind him, never more scared in her life than she was right now. She reached around him and began stroking his zipper. He wasn’t responding real quick, and she knew it would be a grueling effort to get him off, since he’d already finished almost a whole bottle since dinner, but she wanted to try.
“I’m afraid of storms,” she whispered in his ear. “Stay here with me, and I’ll suck you off real good.”
He took another drink, quiet as he thought about her offer. She continued to stroke him. When he started get hard, he turned and faced her, put a muddy hand on her shoulder, and pushed her down to her knees.
As she unzipped his pants, she wondered if Jean had ever knelt on this same floor and done this same thing.
And she wondered if she had enough courage tonight to do what she needed to do. She didn’t want that little girl to die. And she didn’t want to die herself in this horrible place.
She didn’t want that gypsy woman to be right.
He didn’t fall asleep until after one a.m. Snoring and sated and naked from the waist down, he passed out on the old mattress in the dining room.
It was easy to rifle his pockets for the keys to the Gremlin and easy to slip out the kitchen door and lose herself in the darkness. It wasn’t so easy to keep driving through the swirl of rain, the tiny car slipping and sliding on the muddy road and her head filled with guilt and fear and just about everything else a woman could feel when she was about to betray the man she loved.
She couldn’t use the pay phone outside the closed Texaco, because she only had dollar bills, so she had to drive all the way into town. A couple of lights glowed in the murkiness, but as she pulled into a parking lot, she saw the stores were closed. The only thing open was the tavern.
Two bearlike guys sat at the bar, hunched over their beers. They gave her a quick once-over, and seeing her battered face and dripping hair, they looked away. She wondered if either of them or the bartender knew who she was and what she was doing. Men like Owen had pals all over. Would one of these guys quietly slip away and drive out to the farm to tell Owen she was here?
She got four dollars’ worth of quarters from the bartender and quickly left the tavern for the phone booth outside. The light was burned out, and she had to use five matches to get enough light to read the phone number she had written in ink on the back of her hand.
She dropped in the quarters and dialed. As the phone rang on the other end, Margi looked out at the darkness and shivered. A sick feeling filled her belly, and she shut her eyes.
A man’s deep voice broke the monotonous ringing. “Hello?”
“Detective Shockey?” she asked.
“Yeah… who’s this?”
“This is Margi,” she said.
“Margi who?”
“Margi,” she said, glancing around. “Owen’s woman.”
She heard a crash and a bump on the other end of the phone. Then the detective’s voice came back, stronger and wide awake.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“I’m in Hell.”
“What’s going on?”
One of the bear-men came out of the tavern and hurried toward a semi parked under a floodlight. He stopped at the cab’s door and squinted at her.
“Margi, what’s going on?” Shockey asked.
“Owen’s got a knife, and he’s going to come there and kill you and take the girl,” she whispered. “He said he’d kill everyone else, too. That woman and that black guy and anyone who tried to stop him.”
“Where is he now?” Shockey asked.
“Passed out,” Margi said. “He won’t come there till morning.”
“He said he wants Amy? Why?”
The bear-man was sitting in his truck, watching her. She turned her back to him and lowered her voice again. “He thinks the girl saw him kill Jean,” Margi said. “He thinks that lady doctor is trying to get her to remember it all. I’m telling you, he’s just crazy now, Detective, walking around all night looking for a dead woman and talking to himself.”
“Take a breath, Margi.”
She did, but it didn’t help calm down her hammering heart.
“All right, look,” Shockey said. “I want you to come here to me. If you’re willing to say he beat you up and threatened people, we can put him back in jail. You understand that?”
“Put him back in jail?” she said. “Owen can’t go back to jail. He’ll kill himself if he has to go back.”
“He’ll kill you if he doesn’t,” Shockey said. “Can’t you see that? You want to die out there like Jean did?”
Margi closed her eyes against the burn of tears. “No, but…”
“You’ve come this far,” Shockey said. “You’ve taken the first step. You can’t go back now.”
She ran a hand under her nose and looked at the parking lot. The man in the semi was gone, and the light on the tavern roof was out. There was nothing to see but darkness.
“Come to me now,” Shockey said. “I’ll give you directions to my apartment. You got a pen or something?”
“No, but I can remember,” she said. “If I get lost, I’ll call again.”
“Okay. You know how to get to I-94?”
“I think so.”
“Good.” He gave her directions to his apartment in Ann Arbor and made her repeat them back three times. “South State Street. It’s the blue apartment building just before the sports museum. You can’t miss it. Building two, apartment two upstairs. I’ll have the balcony light on.”
Margi shut her eyes again. Her chest hurt, and it was hard to breathe.
“Repeat the directions back to me again,” Shockey said.
She did, surprised that she remembered any of it.
“You’re going to come, right?” he asked.
“Yes…”
“Promise me, Margi,” he said. “Promise me right now you’ll get in that car and start this way. Don’t you go back to that farm for nothing. You hear me? Nothing.”
“I promise, Detective.”
“Okay,” he said. “You’re doing the right thing. I’m proud of you.”
She was quiet. A police detective. Proud of her.
“Go,” Shockey said. “I’ll see you in about a half-hour. Okay?”
“Okay.”
She hung up the phone and pushed open the door to the phone booth. She heard the rumble of another semi pulling in, and a second later, its headlights washed over her. She froze in the glare.
The squeal of brakes, the hard thud of a door. She brought up a hand to shield her eyes as a fuzzy silhouette got out of the passenger side of the truck and advanced toward her. She recognized his walk immediately.
“Who did you call, bitch?”