Twenty-four
Evie regained consciousness in the warm, late
afternoon sun. She lay on a hard surface with one arm gone numb. When
she rolled over to orient herself, the cool cement driveway brought her to
full alertness.
She climbed unsteadily to her feet, and the towel
fell away, reminding her that she had not dressed. The back of the garage
had closed up into a featureless wall of stone. After a moment of panic,
she saw the clothes piled at her feet, slacks, a blouse, underwear, tennis
shoes and socks. She dressed with the evening sun in her eyes and hurried
down the long, winding drive to the highway. When she reached it gate, it
opened for her.
She started toward home along the highway, too numbed
to think clearly, but clear-minded enough to know that it was too soon to
try to face Abe and tell him of Lazarus’ treachery and Noah’s death. She
crossed the highway instead and went down through the trees to where the
power lines from the distant nuclear power plant hummed above the Silver
Ridge River. She wandered along the shores of the river and stopped a
short distance from the burned out husk of the mill.
Lazarus would lie about everything. He’d blame Billy
for everything. She sat on a flat boulder overlooking the shallow river
roaring down a rocky slope to the old swimming hole and tried to feel some
emotion. For the moment, she couldn’t feel much of anything except hurt,
and fear, and a cold anger for what her brothers, and Billy Trevor, had
done behind her back.
She had come to the flat stone and the peaceful river
as a child to escape the pressures of the world and to formulate
strategies for survival. She needed now more than ever to think her
plight through with care. In time, her anguish spilled over and she
finally burst into tears. The intensity of her despair intensified until
she thought she would scream and never stop.
Noah was dead. The tough, arrogant little boy who
had once defended the Darker name so ardently during their school years
had lost his single-handed battle against the world. Abe would be
inconsolable. Lazarus would go crazy with grief. But it had been Noah
who had harbored the greatest hatred for the Trevors. Even when she had
seen the body being rolled so ignobly into the car trunk, she had known
that Noah had been responsible for his own death.
Billy was more enigmatic. He had been so impossibly
complicated. Emotionally, he was nothing but a bright-eyed, enthusiastic
child, and it had been that part of his personality that had appealed to
her. His intellect had confused her. She had been in awe of the things
it could do. Apparently, it had been more than the little boy inside
could handle.
The fading light of day forced her to make short-term
decisions. Her place was with Abe, regardless of the risk. They would
grieve together as they had grieved when their parents had died and left
them alone in the world and so ill-equipped to fend for themselves. And
she had to defend Billy against the lies Lazarus would tell him and
Sheriff Krueger. She started up the difficult, mile-long road to the
highway thinking that the most promising part of her life had been aborted
like a lost child. She had been thrown back into the hills where an
uneducated hills girl belonged.
She hadn’t heard sirens, but red and blue lights
flashed through the trees when she neared the highway. She emerged into
the open directly across from Ella May’s grocery store. A fire truck had
backed behind the store in the stand of saplings near her own house.
Evie joined a sparse crowd converging on the scene.
Nobody took notice of her presence. She stopped when she had a view of
firemen backing a tow truck through the trees to the old well. She felt a
stab of pensive despair knowing the well had finally taken a life. Abe
would have told the sheriff about the lid being off the well-opening. Abe
loved children, and now she suspected that one had died because the county
had not wanted to spend the money to fill the death-trap like Abe had
wanted.
A fireman slung a harness over his shoulders. They
lowered him into its depths. Sheriff’s deputies called down after him.
She could hear the dim echo of his excited, breathless voice calling back
instructions. Slowly, cautiously, with the woods filled with silent
crowds and flashing lights, they began to haul something up from the
depths.
Evie moaned in misery piled upon misery. She didn’t
want to see. She started to turn away even as a body suspended by the
rope tied around its ankles spun into view.
She recognized Ella May in an instant. She had too
few emotional resources remaining to react to what she was seeing. A part
of her mind mercifully clamped down on her ability to feel anything at
all. She turned away from the scene like a zombie, and walked home.
She stumbled into the house through the front door
calling Abe’s name in a trembling voice. She found him passed out across
his bed. The stench of liquor and stale urine permeating the entire house
gagged her. She found Lazarus in the ruins of the kitchen, sprawled
across the floor in a pool of his own blood. At first she thought him
dead, but his chest rose and fell perceptively, and he wheezed with each
labored breath.
She hurried out the back way and stumbled at random
into the trees. The wilderness ran for miles. Nobody would ever find
her. Pushing her way into a wall of bushes, she found herself an
abandoned deer bed and dropped into the shallow depression after a long
walk, curling up into a tight little ball with her arms folded about her
head.
The hills, Abe had warned since childhood, were
dangerous. She would rest here until daylight regardless. If she
survived the night, she would simply walk into the hills until she starved
to death, or was killed by a bear. And that would end the pain, and the
betrayal, and the hopelessness of life.
Darkness had enshrouded her when she smelled the
familiar odor of burnt metal. She had only to lift her head to catch
sight of the ruby light creeping through the underbrush. It stopped
before she panicked. She resisted the temptation to rise to her feet and
flee, but if it had found her here, it would follow her anywhere. After a
moment’s thought, it occurred to her that the little machine was better
than dealing with Billy face to face, and there were still questions
nagging at her beneath the overpowering weight of her despair.
“Billy needs you,” Corin’s distant voice said
through a tiny speaker. “I’m responsible for Noah’s death, not Billy.
“Evie, it’s going to get so much worse than this.
Billy doesn’t think he can deal with it. And look at you. Poor Evie, you
can’t just throw it all away. Everything you and Billy ever wanted is
still possible. I have no other reason to be here, no other reason to
fight to make it happen. And I can do it, Evie. Even Billy is having
second thoughts about that. You’ve only seen a sample of what I can do.
The danger we face together is beyond anything you can imagine, but so is
my ability to defeat it. You needn’t believe what I say, but I beg you to
give me a chance to show you. Cast aside the self-pity and come back to
us. There is far more danger here in our little fortress than in the
woods, but the only hope we’ll ever have for our future is here as well.
I’ve prepared this place for the three of us. Come back to where you
belong.”
