Found Objects

Early…

Iwasn’t sleeping. I hadn’t been lately. And really, I didn’t much anymore, not like I used to when the world was quieter.

But I missed it, noticed it, and could say with absolute conviction that usually, not being able to rest signaled a change.

Normally, there were small shifts, nothing seismic, not anymore.

But because my restlessness could either be good or bad, I was anxious.

My roommate, Ondine, was gone, so there was no one at home for me to talk to, and another friend who occasionally haunted my sunroom when it got colder, wasn’t around either, so I was out, alone, first checking the edges of my property before moving farther toward town.

It was early in the morning, somewhere between one and two, so the screaming caught my attention immediately. It was easily half a mile away, but sounds traveled strangely in the woods, especially when most in our small town were sleeping.

When I reached the trailer, which was a mile down the road from my property, I saw that all the lights were on.

I headed around the side to the window and saw Missy Harrington, who worked days at the local market while her daughter was in school, sitting in the front room, hair mussed, lip split, nose bleeding, eye bruised, rocking her daughter and a small black-and-white puppy in the chair with her.

The way she was clutching them tight told me that either the child, the puppy, or both could be the target of the man who was pacing back and forth in front of her, yelling.

The little girl—her daughter, Katey, who I knew from all the times she’d bounced into my restaurant for a cinnamon roll after school—was trembling and crying. The puppy was watching the man, shivering, but not making a sound.

“What did I tell you I was gonna do to that dog if he pissed in the house again?” James Harrington growled at his wife.

“He’s just a puppy,” she whispered. “He has to be trained.”

He charged toward her, and he would have hit his wife, but Katey cried out in terror.

“You want something to cry about?” he roared at his daughter. “How about I give you somethin’ to cry about.”

Missy put her hand over her daughter’s head and turned her face toward her. “Just me, Jimmy,” she begged. “Please.”

He clenched his fist, and I moved to the porch and knocked.

“What the hell?” he yelled, charging across the floor.

I couldn’t see him from my angle, of course, but I could hear every step.

The man had a distinct sound to his gait when he was drunk—his work boots on the wooden floor made a scratching noise—and he was very drunk.

I could hear it in the slur of his words, but more importantly, unless he was at work on the road crew, picking up dead animals struck by cars or clearing debris, he was nearly always drunk.

Many a time I had covered groceries for Missy when beer or whiskey had been purchased instead of milk or cheese or hamburger meat.

The door flew open, and it took him a second to process me standing there.

“Merritt?”

“James,” I said flatly before I grabbed him by his jacket, yanked him off his feet and out the door, then shoved him over the railing of the porch.

The fall wasn’t far, but he was winded even from hitting the sliver of grass around the trailer.

Farther down the hill they lived on were various cars and cages that used to have dogs in them before the state police came and shut down his backyard breeding operation six months ago.

That had been me as well. Other people were afraid of James, as he had a mean temper and more than a few equally mean friends, but no one in their right mind was messing with me, so the duty to protect the dogs had fallen to me. I had not failed them.

“Merritt, you son of a whore!” he yelled. Or tried to yell. It came out raspy, all the air having left his lungs.

“Hey,” I greeted the woman, the little girl, and the puppy. “You have bags packed, yes?”

Missy just stared at me.

I crossed the room and crouched down in front of her. “Dear, do we have bags packed?”

She nodded quickly.

“Let’s grab them, and I’ll help you put them in the car.”

“I… Merritt, what are you doing here?”

I never understood the need to clarify the why of something in the middle of emergency situations. Why was it important why I was there?

“I wanna go with Mere,” Katey said shakily, on the verge of tears. We were old friends with how many times she’d been in my restaurant. “Daddy’s gonna kill Lucky.”

“No, he’s not,” I murmured to the little girl, who turned and dove into my arms. “But we do need to go.”

“I wanna go,” Katey agreed.

“I’m gettin’ my gun, Merritt!” James roared, back in full voice. He was on his feet now, and I could see him charging away from the trailer through the open door. “You’re on my property, and that means I can kill ya dead.”

He wasn’t wrong, but I suspected that terrorizing his wife and child would be considered extenuating circumstances.

Missy gasped.

“No, no, let him go,” I said. “But where are the bags?”

She pointed to the hallway.

“Let’s all get up.”

“He’s coming right back.”

It was farther down the hill than “right back,” but I nodded instead of saying anything as I stood, still holding her daughter, and made my way to the hallway.

She scrambled after me, carrying Lucky, who was an adorable little pit bull mix, and grabbed her rolling suitcase.

I put Katey down so she could get hers, and on the way to the kitchen, I made sure to collect Lucky’s bowls and his leash.

“Is there anything else?” I asked when we were at the door.

“No.” Missy was trembling with fear. “I took everything else to my sister’s house last week.”

“Okay, good.” From the porch, I could see that James had reached his pickup, where his rifle sat in the gun rack with the two others.

“I can’t go to her house until I have an order of protection from the court,” Missy told me. “I won’t have that until—”

“It’s fine,” I said, keeping my voice calm. “We’re going to the shelter.”

“Oh no, Merritt, I don’t wanna put those other women in danger or—”

“You won’t,” I assured her as we reached her beat-up Dodge Charger from, like, nineteen eighty-something—much older than the pickup James was on his way back from. Missy should have had the newer car since she was the one driving their daughter, but James’s brain didn’t work like that.

Once Missy and Katey were safely in the car with Lucky, I slipped behind the wheel.

“You both get on the floor,” I ordered, and then I drove directly down the hill at James.

The rifle was loaded, of that I had no doubt, but he worked second shift, so he’d probably only been home maybe two hours.

I was guessing he’d started drinking in his truck on the way, and judging by how many empties there were on the coffee table in front of the TV, he’d probably been slamming back beers since he got there.

Which meant the flood of alcohol was now hitting him hard, affecting his hand-eye coordination quite a bit.

I scared him, driving right at him, and in his mad scramble to level the gun at me, he dropped it.

“Gonna kill you!” he roared, trying to pick up the gun and falling over in the process.

I stopped the car, got out, walked over, picked him up, and threw him into the empty bed of his truck. He hit hard and let out a moan before the sputtering and cursing started. Then I emptied his rifle, hurled it into the brush, and ground the bullets into the dirt under my heel.

“You think I won’t get my cousins and come after you? I know where you’re takin’ my wife and kid. You should worry about what I’ll do to them and all the other girls at the shelter.”

“Stay away from there,” I warned him; then I turned back to the car and got in.

Of course, he sat up in the bed as I drove away, pulled a handgun from the inside of his coat that he’d probably just remembered he had on him—he was very drunk, after all—and shot at us as I steered the car down the dirt hill.

Nothing hit any part of the vehicle, and we were on the road in moments, headed toward town.

“You shouldn’t have provoked him, Mere,” Missy said sadly, sitting up, as did Katey in the back. “He’ll come for us as soon as he wakes up.”

She knew as well as I did that James was moments from passing out in the back of his own truck bed.

“I wouldn’t worry.” I smiled at her. “Everything will be okay.”

“But the other women and children at the shelter—”

“I promise you, all will be well.”

“Yes, but Mere, we—”

“Will the shelter let us keep Lucky?” Katey asked, her voice thready.

“Of course, honey.” And I knew that because The Bower funded the women’s shelter, and I had made certain that all pets were welcome as well.

When I had it built, we’d even included a stable, a large chicken coop, and of course, a small duck pond.

People had to be able to bring their pets along with them when they fled hell; that only made sense.

“You’re such a blessing to our community, Mere,” Missy told me.

“I appreciate that.”

She reached for me, and I took her hand in mine.

“Thank you for saving us. I was so scared of what he was going to do to Katey, and I knew Lucky was…”

She didn’t finish because we both knew the dog would have been dead. James carried a hunting knife on his belt.

“Well, it’s fortunate that I couldn’t sleep and was out for my evening walk.”

She shivered. “Oh, Mere, honey, you shouldn’t walk in them woods alone at night. You never know what’s out there.”

But I did know, and I was the scariest thing out there, no question. It was kind of her, though, given all that had just happened, to be worried about me.

“Let’s just get you all settled in, all right?”

She nodded, crying softly again as Katey hugged her puppy in the back seat.