Fourteen
Monday evening at dusk, Joyce Blair went outside to
fetch the evening paper. She would not have otherwise heard the stealthy
approach of the darkened pickup and had a chance to hide. She backed into the house with a scream caught in her
throat. Roy forced the lock of the front door, giving her just enough
time to flee into the bedroom and crouch in a corner of her closet.
Roy Rockingham uplifted the recliner in the living
room and shoved it into a wall. "Where are you, you two-bit whore! I
know you're in here somewhere!"
The dining room table thudded into a wall. The fruit
bowl on the refrigerator shattered. She heard glass kicked disdainfully
aside. When Roy came tearing through the bedroom, Joyce pulled a winter
coat down over her head and again resisted the blind urge to scream for
help.
But John might not hear. Even if he did, would he
have time to save her from Roy's murderous rage?
Roy Rockingham tore open the closet's folding door.
He ripped it from its plastic channel and tossed it disdainfully aside.
He tore handfuls of clothing from the rack and stood teetering
precariously when nothing but the back wall appeared to view. And the
coat heaped upon the floor.
"Fuck," he said mildly. "The bitch ain't here after
all." He guzzled the rest of his bottle of whiskey, dashed the empty
bottle against the side wall, and turned clumsily away.
"Joyce!" he roared with a maudlin break in his
voice. "I love you!"
Joyce waited in the silence for hours, expecting at
any moment to feel his callused hands drag her into the open and his fist
plummet her face and body.
"Mommy, don't let him hurt me!"
Her experience with physical abuse went back that
far, all the way back to childhood. Kenny had been her mother's
boyfriend, and it had been no different then. Her mother had had nowhere
else to go. She had promised the abuse would end. It never did. When
her mother tried to run and hide, she wound up with another man just like
him.
Like mother, like daughter?
There was a little girl inside her that had never
known love and security. The pain that child suffered was more than any
human being deserved. If she went to Portland like John wanted, she would
make the same bad choices all over again, just like her mother.
"We can make John love you."
The voice shattered her reverie and snapped her back
to stark reality. It was a little girl's voice, not particularly
frightening, but terrifyingly out of place in the empty house.
"Roy!"
But even Roy had deserted her. The house had fallen
deathly silent.
"John! Somebody!"
She inched her way through the now darkened house,
feeling out the obstacles of broken furniture and debris to the back
door. John would help. It was the last favor she would ask of him.
Joyce opened the back door. A little girl was
standing in the yard. A man emerged from the gloom and stood behind the
child. He threw an arm around her and put a knife to her throat. "You
there!" he called out. "Unless you want to see this kid get her throat
slit, you're going to help me!"
The girl clutched at the man's arm. "Don't let him
hurt me, Miss Blair!"
"If you want to know who we are," the man said, "take
a look on the front page of today's paper!"
"It's in the bedroom!" the girl cried frantically.
"You left it on the dresser!"
"Front page!" the man roared at her. "You have no
time to waste unless you want to see this child wasted!"
But Joyce had already read the paper.
CHILD MOLESTER TO BE PAROLED IN EAGLE JUNCTION, the
headlines had read. FATHER OF FORMER VICTIM WARNS COMMUNITY.
And below it: JACKIE KAHL REPORTED MISSING. ORVILLE
KAHL OFFERING FIFTY-THOUSAND DOLLARS FOR SAFE RETURN.
Joyce turned away to call the sheriff.
"I don't want to hurt the girl," the man said in a
quieter tone of voice. "I just need your help."
Her help? Since when had anyone ever needed her
help?
"You will help, won't you?" Jackie Kahl said softly.
Jackie waited for an explanation.
"I changed my mind about what I was going to do," the
man said. "I'd never get away with it. All I want is to get the girl
back to her family unharmed. You take her back for me. There's a
reward. Fifty thousand dollars, just like the paper says. All I need is
time to get away."
The man studied her for a quiet moment, anticipating
her train of thought. "Not here. You'll call the sheriff." He gestured
with a nod toward the open expanse of the slope behind him. "I'll turn
her over to you out there so that I’ll have time to get away."
Jackie Kahl dangled in his arms like a broken doll.
She shared that in common with the child. She knew what it felt like, the
horror and the pain and the mind-numbing fear and humiliation.
She slipped out into the night and reached for the
child.
The man retreated, dragging the child into the
darkness. "Not here. Just follow me."
Joyce followed the man and the child out onto the
slope. For the first few hundred yards, the yard lights of the houses on
the Ridge illuminated her way. Beyond that, only the starlight and a
crescent moon showed the barely discernible silhouette of the man and
child moving against the greater darkness.
They walked to a stand of trees looming like a dark
sentinel in the night. There, it occurred to her that the man may have
lied to her. Perhaps she had walked blindly into the jaws of her own
death.
Joyce stopped when the two vanished into the trees.
"I'm in here!" Jackie Kahl called out. "He
let me go, but I can't see my way out. I think he's gone now!"
Joyce sensed a trap of some kind, a conspiracy
between the two, but the notion made no sense. Jackie Kahl was but a
child and the man with a knife a dangerous stranger who had been in prison
since before her conception.
She edged closer to the wall of underbrush. She
pushed through the foliage with her heart hammering hard in her chest.
She stopped at the edge of a tiny clearing.
“I can make John love you.”
She had almost forgotten about the voice that had
whispered in her head. Dread turned her insides to ice.
"Please."
She held her hand out to the darkness.
"Come to me, child, and let's go home. I'm very
frightened."
"Where will you go?" Jackie said softly. "He's still
looking for you, you know. He thinks he should break your arm for hiding
from him. You're all he has, but he'll hurt you if he has to. He really
will."
Tears rolled down Joyce's cheeks. How could a child
know such things? What awful nightmare had she gotten herself into?
"We can make John love you," Jackie Kahl said again,
and this time the statement was clear and unequivocal. "We have to give
Marlene back to her family just to show that we understand who you are.
We can all play a part, but you know important things about love between a
man and woman, so yours would be the most important part. In return,
you'll have everything you've ever wanted."
Joyce stared into the darkness wondering how
something like this could be happening.
"You wanted to die anyhow," Jackie said. "It's
easier this way. You won't lose a thing except the bad things you feel,
and John will love you."
It made no sense, but it was not a lie. She could
feel it too strongly in the mind of the child to doubt. She was not being
tricked. She was being offered an opportunity she could not refuse,
because if she turned away and went back to the wrecked house, she knew
with a certainty as absolute as the madness of this moment that she would
not survive the night. She would take her own life, or Roy would do it
for her.
"We'll meet half way," Jackie said in a whisper.
"Just one little step forward to be with us."
Joyce took that one little step. She gave no thought
to what might happen, but the consequence of her decision was upon her in
an instant.
Her extended foot never touched ground.
For an instant, she thought she had stepped into a
hole. Even so, she expected to weather a fall to the ground without undue
consequence.
Except that she spun head over heels into a void, and
the fall did not end.
A mine shaft then. Any second now, she would strike
bottom and be dead.
She looked forward to it.
But it never came to be. Something entirely else
happened, a thing her human imagination could not have entertained in a
million years.
