32

She fell to the floor, toppling a small yellow rose shrub, and lay on the teal slate, her ear ringing, smelling her own burnt hair.

“Are you mad?” she shouted. “Owen, it’s me! It’s me!”

As he lifted the gun once more, there was a blur of motion, a brown streak. The dog’s teeth struck Owen’s injured arm just as they had Michael’s. But her husband, not numb to the pain, cried out. The pistol flew from his hand and clattered behind him.

Then he was frantically kicking the dog, hammering on its solid shoulder with his good fist. The hound yelped in pain and fled out the lath-house door, which Owen slammed shut.

Lis leapt for the pistol but Owen intercepted her, grabbing her wrist and throwing her to the rocky floor. She rolled, opening patches of skin on her elbow and cheek. She lay for a moment, gasping, too shocked to cry or say a word. As she climbed to her feet, her husband walked slowly toward the pistol.

My husband, she thought.

My own husband! The man I’ve lain with the majority of nights for the past six years, the man by whom I would’ve borne children had circumstances been different, the man with whom I’ve shared so many secrets.

Many secrets, yes.

But not all.

As she ran into the living room, then down the basement stairs, she caught a glimpse of him standing, gun in hand, looking toward her-his quarry-with a piercing, assured stare.

His gaze was cold and for her money the madness in Michael Hrubek’s eyes was twice as human as this predatory gaze.

Poor Eve.


No light. None. The cracks in the wall are large enough to admit air. They’re large enough to bleed brown rain, which here falls not from the sky but from the saturated earth and stone of the house’s foundation. If the time were two hours later, perhaps the uneven wall would admit the diffuse light of dawn. But now there’s nothing but darkness.

The scuffling sounds outside the door.

He’s coming. Lis lowers her head to her drawn-up knees. The wound on her cheek stings. Her torn elbows too. She makes herself impossibly small, condensing her body, and in doing so exposing wounds she didn’t know she had. Her thigh, the ball of her ankle.

A huge kick against the wooden door.

She sobs silently at the jolt, which is like a blow to her chest. It seems to send her flying into the stone wall behind her and her mind reels from the crash. In the hallway outside Owen says nothing. Was the blow one of frustration or was it an attempt to reach her? The door is locked, true, but perhaps he doesn’t know it can be locked from the inside. Perhaps he believes the room is empty, perhaps he’ll leave. He’ll flee in his black Jeep, he’ll escape through the night to Canada or Mexico…

But, no, he doesn’t-though he seems satisfied that she’s not inside this tiny storeroom and moves on elsewhere in the rambling basement to check other rooms and the root cellar. His footsteps fade.

For ten minutes she has huddled here, furious with herself for choosing to hide rather than flee from the house. Halfway to the outside basement door-the one Michael had kicked open-she’d paused, thinking, No, he’ll be waiting in the yard. He can outrun me. He’ll shoot me in the back… Lis then turned and ran to this old room in the depths of the basement, easing the door shut behind her, locking it with a key only she knows about. A key she hasn’t touched for twenty-five years.

Why, Owen? Why are you doing this? It’s as if he’s somehow caught a virus from Michael and is raging in a fever of madness.

Another crash, on the wall opposite, as he kicks in another door.

She hears his feet again.

The room’s dimensions are no more than six by four and the ceiling is only chest high. It reminds her of the cavern at Indian Leap, the black one, where Michael had whispered that he could smell her. Lis thinks too of the times as a girl when she huddled in this same space; then filled with coal, while Andrew L’Auberget was in the backyard stripping a willow branch. Then she’d hear his footsteps too as he came for his daughter. Lis read Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl a dozen times when she was young and although she understands the futility of concealment she always hid.

But Father found her.

Father hurt her doubly when she’d tried to escape from him.

Still, she made this castle keep as defensible as she might-stockpiling crackers and water and a knife and flinging all but one of the green brass keys to the ancient lock into the lake, hiding the remaining one on a nail inside, above the door.

But the mice got the crackers, the water evaporated, a cousin’s child found the knife and took it home with him.

And the key proved irrelevant for when Father said open the door she opened it.

Metal sounds on concrete and rings as it falls. Owen grunts as he retrieves the crowbar. Lis cries silently, and lowers her head. She finds in her hand the clipping-Michael’s macabre gift, spookier to her than the skull. As the blows begin, she clutches the newsprint desperately. She hears a grunt of effort, silence for the length of time it takes the metal to traverse the passageway outside then a resounding crash. The oak begins to shatter. Yet her room, so far, is inviolable. It’s the old boiler room next door that Owen is assaulting. Of course… That room has a head-high window. He’d be thinking that she would logically pick the room that offers an exit. But no-smart Lis, Lis the teacher, Lis the scholar after her father’s own heart, has cleverly chosen the room without an escape route.

Another crash, and another. A dozen more. The wood shrieks as nails are extracted. A huge crack. His footsteps recede. He’s looked inside and seen that she isn’t there and that the window is still covered with dusty plywood.

She hears nothing. Lis realizes that she can see again. A tiny shaft of light bleeds into the room around her through a crack in the thin wall shared with the boiler room. Her eyes grow accustomed to the illumination and she peers out, seeing nothing. She cannot hear her husband and she is left alone in this cell with the spirit of her father, a dozen pounds of ancient anthracite, and the clipping, which she now understand holds the explanation as to why she is about to die.


The BETRAYER hIdeS as the crusher of heADs. i AM to be sacrificed to save POOR EVE

The paper is smeared and disintegrating. But she’s able to read most of Michael’s handwriting.

… heADs. i AM…

AD… AM

ADAM


These sentences, circled, are connected by lines resembling blood veins to the photo accompanying the article. The person they point to, however, is not Lis. They extend to the left of the photograph and converge upon the man who holds open the car door for her.

The BETRAYER hIdeS as the crusher of heADs. i AM to be sacrificed…

Michael’s inked lines encircle Owen.

The BETRAYER IS ADAM.

Is this the purpose of Michael’s journey tonight? Has he come here as an angel of warning, not of revenge? She opens the clipping fully. It is stamped, Library Marsden State Mental Health Facility.

Think now…

Michael saw the article in the hospital, perhaps long after the trial. Perhaps in September-just before he sent his note to her. She tried to recall his words… Eve of betrayal. Perhaps his message was not that she was the betrayer but rather the betrayed.

Perhaps…

Yes, yes! Michael’s role at Indian Leap was that of witness, not murderer.

“Lis,” Owen says calmly. “I know you’re down here somewhere. It’s useless, you know.”

She folds the clipping and sets it on the floor. Perhaps the police will find it in the investigation that will follow. Perhaps the owner of this house fifty years from now will notice the clipping and wonder about its meaning and the people depicted in the photo before tossing it out or giving it to his daughter for a scrapbook. More likely, Owen will comb the house and tidily dispose of it, like every other clue.

He is, after all, meticulous in his work.

No more prayers for dawn. The storm rages and the sky outside is as dark as the hole in which she hides. There are no whipsawing lines of colored lights filling the night. Owen’s grisly task will take only seconds: a bullet into her with Michael’s gun then one for the madman with his own… Owen would be found sobbing on the floor, clutching Lis’s body, raging at the same police who’d ignored him when he begged for protection of his wife.

She hears his footsteps on the gritty corridor outside.

And then, the same as with her father, Lisbonne rises to her feet and, dutifully and with a minimum of fuss, unlocks the door then pulls it gratingly aside.

“Here I am,” she says, just as she used to.

Ten feet away Owen holds the crowbar. He’s somewhat surprised to see her appear from this direction and he seems, if anything, disappointed that he was careless enough to let his enemy get behind him. She says to him softly, “Whatever you want, Owen. But not here. In the greenhouse.” And before he can speak, she has turned her back to him and started up the stairs.

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