“Drop it, or I’ll kill you right now.” The gravel voice.
I saw the shadow in the dark, let go of the oar, and fell back to the carpet. I knew. I knew, except all was black.
MAMA BEA RANSEY came back with the oar and poked me in the side. “Get up.”
Some time had passed, but I didn’t know: hours, days. The whispering had gone on for a long time. In and out of memory, I heard the voices, felt the skin on my face grow hot with fever. I threw up, only able to wipe my mouth feebly. I thought of Joshua and I did not cry. I watched a thin line of sunlight move across the room and fade, but lost track. Slept. Woke. Slept. Heard Aidan crying far down in a well, and scratched at the floor, trying to reach for him. Woke and heard the whispers moving toward me: “Make them tighter. I have to do everything—”
“Let’s just—”
“Pretty big talk, ‘Let’s just.’ You do it, if it’s so easy.”
Slept. Woke.
My thoughts had risen all at once, but now they started to line up. Into sense. Into fact. I saw the curtains behind me and calculated how I might get through that window. I could not get there. I would never be able to move fast enough through the woods, even if I could reach the window and heave myself outside. Even if my truck still sat in the drive. I felt with my elbow at my left pocket. Fact: the keys were gone.
I had to try, though. I stretched and squirmed toward the window, managing only an inch or so.
Bea. Concerned grandmother. On TV. In Russ’s office. I could not make order from this. Kidnapping your own grandchild and killing a young woman to do it. But—there was no sense to it. Not yet.
Exhausted from stretching, I lay panting on my side, curled around my deadened hands. The binds so tight. They would have to amputate my hands when I got out of here. I imagined trying to get analysis work, not being able to write. Saw myself, like a Winged Victory, armless. Saw myself armless, ditched in a shallow grave.
I braced myself for another effort toward the window. The door opened.
Bea Ransey entered the room, the oar at her side. “Get up,” she said.
Chapter Thirty-nine
I got to my hands and knees, retched. The pain.
“If I were you,” Bea said, “I’d keep what you had.”
Another voice behind her, a whisper. “Oh, hell.”
“Shut up,” Bea said to her daughter. “This is your fault.”
My head was heavy, my neck too weak. I let it drop.
“I said get up. Come on.”
“How is this my fault? I didn’t beat her brains in.”
“We wouldn’t’a had to, if you’d had half a brain yourself,” Bea growled. “Jesus. Another ten minutes and you’d had her peeling potatoes and staying to dinner.”
I grabbed at the oar. Bea shook me off.
Bonnie said, “I think she needs help.”
“You’d pick her over your own kid? What do you think Bobby’d do?”
“I mean—I think she needs help up.”
The oar dropped into view. I grasped at the handle and let it lead me upright. My head swam, the corners of my vision going to television static.
“No, no,” Bea said. “That’s right. Just going for a little walk.”
My knees buckled but I was on my feet. The sharp blade of the oar slipped out of my hand. My hand. I was untied. My hands were swollen and the wrists scraped raw, but they were free.
The old woman jabbed the oar at me. I took a step, another. I used the wall to catch myself, pressing my palm flat and hard. Fingerprint. In the hallway, I scooted along the wall, letting my hand find purchase on the light switch plate. Fingerprint. We inched through the kitchen. All the blinds and curtains had been pulled. I used the back of a kitchen chair to catch myself. Fingerprint. I reached for the back of my head and brought back red-tipped fingers. Bea prodded me toward the door, but not before I found the doorjamb, the doorknob.
“Bonnie, damn it. Get the blood, will you?”
“What about the baby?”
“You can look after him and wipe up the gore, too. The things you and your brother—I swear.”
The screen door slapped behind us. We stood under a night sky, the black trees waving. To my right, the lake and sky had become one. Bea heaved me by my elbow and guided me into the yard.
My tongue was too large for my mouth. “Where—” I choked.
“Oh, now, don’t worry. We just need you to be somewhere else.”
Bea took me to my own truck. The oar helped me step up, and then stuffed me in, like a loaf of dough into the oven. The television static came again. When I came to, I was curled on the floor, my head on the seat. We were moving.
Finally I understood that I would die.
Bea Ransey’s face was lit by the dashboard. Her hair blew out of a knot in long strands. I had the feeling this was the first time I had ever really seen Bea Ransey. She was no church lady now. She was no concerned grandmother rending her shirt on TV. Her eyes were black slits in deep wrinkles; she had the squint of an old ranch hand, even in the dark. The slits turned on me.
“Just so we’re clear,” the woman said. “I have more than one way to open up the back of your head. The other way, you won’t be getting up at all.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“You think you know me?” Bea Ransey said. “Best reason to shoot you yet.”
I had no argument for this. I had started to think about other things I had never really seen before. Things that made no sense until they began to make perfect sense. “You wouldn’t,” I said. My mouth was stuffed with my bitten tongue. I talked around the taste of old blood. “You wouldn’t leave my kid without a mother.”
The slits turned on me again and then the linen skin at the sides of Bea’s mouth pulled tight and youthful. She threw back her head and laughed. We could have been on a Sunday night drive. The truck turned. I felt the surface beneath the tires change. “I’m not the goddamned orphan prevention society, you idiot. I’d rather make your kid an orphan than see my grandkids with their own damn parents. Aidan with that slut? Steve’s no-good dad had the decency to leave the state.”
“My son—”
“I don’t give a dang about your kid,” she said. “It’s my kids I’m saving.”
“Why are your kids worth protecting”—we hit a bump in the road, and I lost my nerve for a second at the searing pain in my head—“and not mine?”
“Because mine are mine. They are worth fifty of you.”
“Even though you tell your daughter how stupid she is. Even though your son beats his wife.”
“You’ll be wanting the rest of your brains spilled, then?”
“You have a pretty rotten sense of worth,” I said.
“Nah. I’m worth a million, believe it or not. My kids’ll do anything for me,” she said. “Even if it’s just to get their share someday.”
I remembered the look Bonnie had given out the door over my shoulder, the apartment and job she wanted on her own. “They don’t love you.”