Chapter 34
THIRTY-FOUR
Rikki
“What are you going to say to him?” Lucas asks as we pull in front of the winding drive.
“I’m not sure.”
I’m not even certain what is propelling me right now—the anger, that secondary emotion, that the man who must be Earl Horner evoked when I was out here the first time?
I called Den on the drive over, telling him what I suspect.
“Don’t go there” were the last words he spoke to me. But I can’t wait for the police, for polite questions and answers.
“Let’s park down the road and walk back,” I say.
A brown fence with scabby paint delineates the house and yard from the spiked vines and the brick-faced stone building in back. A ghost winery, Roberta Matlock had explained, deserted during the phylloxera epidemic. The trees look black silhouetted against the light of the sun.
Barbed-wire coils along the top of a chain-link fence. The gate is closed. We move along the side of the fence toward it.
I peek through the links. All I can see is a white pickup and the back of a car in front of it.
“Someone’s back there,” I say. “Do you have a weapon?”
“Pistol. In the car.”
“Go get it.”
“I’m not leaving you.” His face is grim, his eyes behind the glasses unrelenting.
“I’ll wait here for you. I just don’t think we should go poking around without some protection.”
“I don’t think we should go poking around, period. The police will be here anytime.”
He has a point.
“But if they have the women in there—” I don’t finish the sentence. “We have to find out, Lucas.”
He touches my arm. “I’ll be right back. Promise you’ll stay here.”
“Halt!” The gate jerks open, and I go numb. He’s there, Earl Homer, grimacing down the barrel of a rifle. “Inside.” He bellows it, as if commanding soldiers, the word ejected from his throat in two harsh syllables.
I move through the open gate, knowing he will kill me if I don’t, knowing he will kill me, anyway.
Each step is just buying time, an additional moment so that I can think.
I just need to think. Lucas walks behind me.
He’s in top shape and probably twenty years younger than the guy.
He might be able to take him if we can get the rifle away.
“I want to ask you something,” I say.
“Move.” He scurries alongside me with the rifle. “Past the truck. In there.”
We walk around the truck and the black sedan that is, I’m sure, Princess Gabby’s. Both driver and passenger doors stand open. Sprawled before it, in a still, blood-spattered heap, lies a body.
“God, no.” It’s Princess Gabby’s driver. He shot a man in his own driveway. There’s no hope for us. He’s not sane enough to listen to anything I can say.
“Shut up. Keep moving.”
But I can’t move, not staring at this brutally disfigured body. His hand shoots out, slams against my cheek.
I cry out, and as I do, Lucas tackles him. I scream again, run for the winery, where I know the women are. It’s like stepping into a refrigerator. The air slips over my flesh like a cool film of oil. My face is numb where he slapped me. I taste blood on my lips.
Ellen Homer leans against a barrel, rubbing her head. I ran to her, ask, “Are you okay?” She rubs the bloody gash above her eye. “He’s going to kill them. You have to help.”
I hear the rifle, and pain and fear pierce me. Lucas. No.
“Hide,” she whispers. “I’m his daughter. He won’t hurt me.
“He already has.”
“Hide,” she repeats, her eyes fierce and unfocused.
I scramble up the wooden stairs to a loftlike platform full of implements, equipment that must have once been used to make wine.
They smell of oil, dust, age. I look for anything heavy, anything with a sharp edge, find it with a heavy, spool-shaped piece.
The winery door swings open. He steps into the slanted sunlight, the rifle in his hand. Lucas, I think again, remembering the body of Princess Gabby’s driver. The man points the rifle at a barrel and fires.
Ellen screams.
“Leave now, honey, or stay. I don’t care.”
“Daddy, please.”
He fires again.
Another scream, not from Ellen. He laughs and moves sideways until he is standing almost directly below me.
“That’s more like it.” He takes aim with the rifle, starts to move toward the barrel.
I have only one chance. I must make it perfect.
I aim, as well, then send the heavy piece of iron down over the edge, in the exact direction of his head.
Rochelle
She clamped her hands over her mouth. Don 7 scream, no matter what.
Don’t let one sound escape. Her heart hammered, the way it did after one of the injections.
The toys, all of her rituals, seemed a lifetime away.
Now she thought only moment to moment. The man who’d just fired at her.
Not a sound, though. She must not move. There might still be time.
Time to live, to get out of here, to make everything right.
Rochelle heard a thud, a sharp outtake of breath, a guttural retort, like someone being kicked in the stomach.
She peeked around the barrel. The man lay jackknifed on the dusty floor, hazy sunbeams lighting his form, the blood on his head.
A few feet from him, Ellen Homer stood, as if unable to move.
She hadn’t done this to him. Someone else, someone upstairs, must have.
Rochelle glanced up the stairs, trying to make out a shape among the shadowed shapes.
A woman. She could see a woman there. The reporter. She’d found them.
“We’re down here,” she shouted to her. “Help us.”
A loud explosion thundered through her head, her body. She felt as if she were being cut in half. Pain sliced into her, bringing her to her knees, as the camouflage man knelt, the rifle in his arms, blood gushing out of his head.
He dropped the gun now. See. He was dropping the gun. They were going to be all right, all of them. She was going to have a chance to go back and make her life all right. She could do it, too. She wasn’t a stupid woman. Not just another stupid woman with a killer body.
Rikki
Rochelle McArthur’s shuddering breath reverberates up here, and I know it is her last. She crumples next to the wine barrel that has hidden her but not well enough.
Earl Homer makes a noise of satisfaction, a noise that is mostly throat, a noise that says he isn’t finished yet.
He reaches for the rifle, leans against it, pulling himself up.
He knows I’m up here. Rochelle looked directly at me. I’ve wounded him, I know. The stench of blood and fear and death almost overcomes me. I have to hide, but my only chance is to hurl something else at him. Once he’s up here, I’m dead. Like Rochelle, I think. Like Christopher. Like Lucas.
He makes it to his feet. In spite of his age, he is amazingly agile, and his military man’s bearing is unmistakable.
“Daddy?” Ellen Homer again. More sob than voice. He ignores her, scanning the top of the loft where I crouch behind a crate, lifting his rifle once more.
It’s my only chance. I push the crate down over the edge as the rifle explodes again. I feel the shot tear through me, ripping fire through my flesh. His agonizing shouts filling the air, I crumple into the dust, try to flatten myself on the floor.
“Ellie, help me.” He struggles under the crate.
His voice is still strong, a harsh voice cut by a history of giving commands.
I cannot lift my arm, a fiery slice of pain along my side.
But I’m able to lift my head. To see him trapped there.
To see her standing before him, dazed. “Get over here, girl.”
She moves, not really walking, stumbling as a child might. “That’s right, baby. Get this off me, then get me the rifle. Good girl. That’s right. You’re a good girl.”
“Don’t.” Tania Marie steps from behind a vat. “Leave him there for the police.”
Ellen pauses, looking as if she has just awakened. “The rifle,” he bellows. “Give me the rifle, Ellie.”
Ellen turns, bends.
“No.” Tania Marie moves closer to her now, her expression wild, tears streaking her face. “Julie didn’t want this. You said so yourself. You don’t have to do what he says anymore. Not ever again.”
“Ellie, now.” He pushes the crate from him, his arm extended. My whole body throbs with pain as the crate falls away. I try to shout, to beg Ellen to help us, but my voice comes out a weak gasp.
Ellen reaches down for the rifle.
“Don’t.” Tania Marie makes a run for her, but Ellen already has shouldered the weapon.
She turns, points it at Earl Homer’s head and fires. Then she collapses to her knees in tears.
The last image I have is of Tania Marie, long skirt torn and stained, her arms wrapped around Ellen’s sobbing form.