Holly had never heard of the Tender House, although she’d encountered her share of victims of domestic violence. It was hard to be a woman in this world and not pick up on rumors, or even glimpse the evidence, but she never imagined she’d end up in a shelter herself. It made her feel ashamed. She wanted to knock on doors and explain that she wasn’t here because a husband or boyfriend had beaten her, threatened rape, or abused her child. She was hiding behind these walls because it was possible that a violent man might want to hurt her and her boy. But then she realized that had she made such an admission, the other women might well have nodded their heads in understanding, and pointed out that they were all in this place because of the fear of injury or death at the hands of men, and it didn’t much matter what mask their assailants might wear, or what their relationship to them might be. No one here was any better or worse than another, and there was no shame in seeking help when faced with male rage.
Now Holly sat Daniel on the double bed that they were to share, in a room filled with just enough color and quirk, and Holly held her son to her as he sipped his hot chocolate, and said:
‘I have something to tell you.’
116
Events move fast in a gunfight, particularly when the participants are in close proximity, as Heb Caldicott had learned to his cost. The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral lasted just thirty seconds, and left six of the nine participants dead or wounded at the end. So by the time Parker had retrieved his gun, and was ready to fire, Louis was already slumped against a tree, bleeding heavily from one wound to his right shoulder and a second to his groin; Quayle and Mors were disappearing into the woods; and the yard was bathed in the glow of fire. Somewhere inside the old house, Owen Weaver was screaming.
It had taken about fifteen seconds for everything to go to hell.
Parker first tended to Louis. The injury to his shoulder looked like a bad graze, but the wound to the groin was serious. Parker took off his jacket, wadded it tightly, and forced Louis to maintain pressure on the injury. Louis moaned, but managed to hold the compress in place.
‘I hit her,’ said Louis, ‘but she didn’t go down.’
Parker wanted to head after Quayle and Mors. He wished for nothing less than to watch them bleed, but he would not leave Louis, and Owen Weaver was trapped by the conflagration. Parker thought he heard a car starting over the crackle and roar of flames, but he ignored it. Instead he called 911 and gave the dispatcher directions to the property, even as he was pulling a blanket from the trunk of the Audi and dousing it with the container of water he stored there in case of emergencies. He soaked a rag, tied it around his face as best he could, and headed for the house.
The heat and smoke were already intense, and the fire was feeding on the staircase. It couldn’t have progressed so far, or moved so fast, without an accelerant, and Parker knew then that Quayle had never intended for him or Owen Weaver to survive the night. Parker placed the blanket over his head and upper body and tried to stay low, moving as quickly as he could up the stairs as the fire bit at his shoes. The ends of his jeans ignited, and he could feel the skin on his legs start to blister, but he held off until he got to the landing, which was still clear, before reaching down to pat out the flames.
Owen Weaver was lying on his side in a room to the left, still tied to a chair. His feet were bare, the left foot badly swollen, its toes misshapen; the work of Mors, Parker guessed. He figured that Owen Weaver must have fallen while trying to free himself, and it might just have been for the best. The fire had not yet risen to this level, but the smoke had, and the floor offered the possibility of breathable air. Parker knelt beside the semiconscious man and examined the plastic restraints used to bind him to the arms and legs of the old Carver. Parker’s knife lay on the dirt outside, and he couldn’t risk using a boot to break the arms and legs of the chair because he might well fracture Weaver’s arms and legs in the process.
Parker searched the room and found some old cardboard. He rolled it into a cylinder and held it to the flames that were now spreading to the landing. The staircase and its walls were now entirely ablaze; he and Weaver wouldn’t be going out the way they’d come in, if they were lucky enough to escape at all.
The cardboard caught, and Parker returned to Weaver, closing the door behind him. He placed the flame against the ties and watched them melt, burning Weaver’s skin in the process but also shocking him back to full consciousness. When he was free, Parker raised him up and helped him to the window.
‘I’m going to lower you down,’ Parker told him, as Weaver kept his injured foot off the floor. ‘It’ll hurt when you land, but being burned alive will hurt a lot more.’
Weaver nodded, but his eyes were glazed. Parker realized that Weaver would be largely a passive participant in what was to come.
The window was painted shut, and Parker had to kick out its panes. He gazed into the night, hoping to see fire engines coming up the road, just as they would in a movie, but he could discover no trace of their approach, although he heard, or imagined, sirens in the distance. Louis was still sprawled against the tree, and lifted a hand to let Parker know he was holding on.
Flames were sprouting from between the floorboards, and the smoke was now so thick that Parker could no longer see the chair to which Owen Weaver had been tied. He made sure the sharp edges of glass on the window were all removed before he maneuvered Weaver into position so that his lower body hung down and his upper half remained over the frame. Holding on to Weaver’s forearms, Parker managed to get him out of the window, his feet dangling about twenty feet above the yard.
‘I’m letting go,’ said Parker. ‘Try to keep your legs bent.’
But Weaver was already deadweight, his eyes closed and his chin at his chest. Parker dropped him. Weaver landed awkwardly, but by some miracle he came down on his right side, largely sparing his left foot further injury.
Seconds later, Parker followed him down.
This time, he heard the sirens for real.
117
Daniel left Holly sleeping in their shared room. The Tender House was quiet as he walked down the stairs. He didn’t know where he was going, or what he was looking for. He just knew he needed to be alone for a little while.
He was trying to process what he had been told, even though some small part of him had always suspected it; had felt it as a dislocation, and glimpsed it in the way his mom looked at him sometimes when she thought he would not notice. She was his mother, yet there was also another. She had lied to him, she and Grandpa Owen both, but Daniel was not angry. Confused, yes, and sad, but not angry. He could not have said why, but it was so.
He found the toy room and sat down amid dolls, and board games, and jigsaw puzzles. Before him was a large painting of mountains against a blue sky, the landscape rendered in big bright colors, the kind that existed only in cartoons.
Cartoons, not fairy tales.
Daniel heard a noise from one of the toy boxes. It was almost as though he had been hoping for it, and his hope had made it happen.
It was the sound of a toy phone ringing.
He rummaged among wood and plastic until he found the source: a plastic phone on wheels, not entirely dissimilar to the one he had owned, the one on which Karis would call him.
But she was no longer just Karis. She was something more.
Daniel put the phone on his lap, lifted the plastic receiver, and held it to his ear.
‘Mommy?’
Jennifer watched the gray form kneeling amid the trees, speaking in a voice that sounded like the rustling of dead leaves.
Jennifer had been mistaken. She believed it would be for her father to name the dead woman, and thus bring her peace, but she was wrong. In these final moments, she was no longer a vestige of Karis Lamb. Karis Lamb was Before, but with the crying of a child she had been transformed. What came After was another.
What came after was Mommy.
And as she listened to the voice of her child acknowledge her at last, the gray being began to slip away, disintegrating into splinters, dirt, and dust, carried off into the darkness until all that was left was the memory of her, held in the heart of a boy.
Daniel hung up the phone. He was tired. He wanted to sleep now.
Candy stood at the door. Daniel did not know how long she had been there.
‘Come,’ said Candy. ‘I’ll bring you back to your mother.’
And after only the slightest of hesitations, Daniel took her hand.
118