Chapter 16 #2
He looked back at the others, a little disappointed, and shook his head. They moved to the next window, then the next and the next.
“We’ll have to go in,” Jeff said.
They went to the kitchen door, which faced an empty piece of land where someone had tried to unsuccessfully grow some vegetables. All that remained were sad, limp stalks.
The door was locked.
“We’ll have to break it down,” Mark said.
“No, no need,” Evelyn said, stepping forward. She pulled out a velvet cloth and with some little tools, she clicked the lock, and the door swung outward. “Ta-da!” she said softly.
“How does your sister know how to do that?” Thomas asked.
Clary smiled at him. “We both know how. Growing up with a stagecoach driver for a father, we learned unique skills.” She walked past him into the room.
Admiration wriggled its way into his heart for Clary.
What a life she had led with her father.
She must have learned that skill for opening locks from someone who had traveled with them.
Not book-learned like he was, but very smart in her own way.
Once again, he thanked the good Lord that she was on his side.
The smell of rotten food and something deathly sweet hit Thomas’s nose before he even got into the room. It was disgusting. He pulled the collar of his jacket up and tried to breathe through that.
“Wow, not big on cleaning, are they?” Evelyn said.
They looked around at the dirt that seemed to have caked every surface.
Dishes were piled high, and things were rustling in the debris on the floor.
To Thomas it seemed there had been a fight or something.
There was a lot of broken crockery and something brown on the floor that might have been blood from the way it had pooled.
Fear gripped his heart. Was he too late? Had Tilda and the children been killed?
“I think this is the wrong house,” Clary said in a small voice.
“Why?” Mark asked.
Clary pointed to the corner of the room. The pantry door was open and a foot was poking out of it. Despite the fear growing in his gut, Thomas moved closer.
To his relief and revulsion, he found a couple of bodies, a woman and a man.
No children, and the woman clearly wasn’t Tilda.
They were obviously dead. No one alive was that bloated or full of flies.
And the smell. It was enough to make Thomas’s last meal come right back up.
Mingled with the deep sorrow he felt for those poor people, he reeled back from the grisly sight.
“Mmm, dead about a day,” Mark said, inspecting the corpses and seeming less than put out by the stench. “It’s been so hot lately that it might be even less.”
“Do you think the hostages could still be in here?” Jeff asked.
Mark shrugged. “I suppose we should take a look.”
“Let’s fan out,” Jeff suggested.
The world was spinning around Thomas. He didn’t have the stomach for the difficult things. Luke was right.
“I can’t do this,” he said and hurried out into the night air.
It was thankfully sweet, if dusty, and he breathed in gulps of it.
He moved around the side of the house while he heard the others going from room to room, searching.
His weak stomach wasn’t helping him. Bent over double, he moved between the side of the house and a thick bush.
Thomas was certain he was going to throw up, but before he could, he heard a voice speaking.
It was a cracked old voice, and it was grumbling loudly.
“Fetch this, do that,” it moaned. “I’d like to see them lift a finger. But of course, they won’t, lazy basta?—”
“Stop your grumbling, Orville, and fetch me some water from the well. The young one went and threw up all over herself again,” a female voice ordered from inside the house.
Orville made some truly horrific noises and then spat. The wad of phlegm hit the ground near the other side of the bush that Thomas was hidden by.
Thomas had to force himself not to throw up. Orville would no doubt hear him, and that would be problematic, to say the least.
Thomas stayed still as a corpse until Orville’s shuffling, grumbling steps faded around the side of the house. Then Thomas headed to the back door again. He hurried inside, ignoring the bodies, and ran right into Clary coming the other way.
“Where did you go? Are you okay?” she asked.
“I’m fine. I think I know where they are,” Thomas said, taking her by the arm. “They’re next door.”
Finding Jeff, Mark, and Evelyn, Thomas told them what he had heard. The window in the parlor of the corpse house looked out onto Orville and his wife’s house. Keeping in the shadows, they watched Orville, a stick-thin, bent-over old man, carrying buckets of water to the house.
“Maybe it’s just the two of them,” Evelyn remarked.
No sooner had the words left her lips than a burly man with white-blond hair and a scar on his cheek appeared on the porch. He was limping, which was probably why he was left behind when the other bandits rode off to save the day in Still Fountain.
“Hurry up,” he snapped. “The brat is really stinking up the place.”
He didn’t help Orville but stood menacingly, looming over the old man, who struggled up the steps.
“Can’t you just shoot them?” Orville asked.
“Nah, you know they have to be kept alive. Now get in there,” the blond man snapped, pushing Orville so that he staggered, the buckets swung wildly, and the water sloshed out onto the floor.
“All right,” Jeff said. “How do we get in there?”
“Diversion,” Clary said. “We set fire to something close by, draw them out, deal with them, and then go in.”
“Won’t that alert any other bandits left here?” Mark asked. “Maybe we could use a different ruse.”
“Like what?” Evelyn asked.
“Like you and I are travelers who are a little lost. We happened on this house with the lights on and we’re innocently asking directions,” Mark suggested.
“No, too risky,” Jeff muttered.
They thought for a while and then Thomas said, “We could use part of your suggestion. If we sneak up to the house and see how many of them there are, then we can knock on the door and draw some of them into the front of the house while others of us go in the back.”
“We meet in the middle,” Clary said with a smile. “I like it.”
It was the only plan that seemed likely to work without alerting anyone to what was going on. So, they split into two teams. Mark and Clary would go to the front door. Everyone agreed that they looked like the most harmless of the lot. The others would head to the back door and go in that way.
Thomas wasn’t happy with Clary being out of his sight, but what could he do? It was his idea in the first place.
“Take care, okay?” he said as they split up into their groups.
Clary kissed his cheek and nodded. “You too, okay?”
He nodded. “See you soon.”
She smiled, and he hoped to heaven that he would see her smile again soon.
Around the back of Orville’s house, Thomas found a flaw in his plan. The back door was hard to reach. There was a lot of debris—boxes, crates, a table with only three legs, and other junk that littered the yard all the way up the steps.
Managing that obstacle course with nothing but moonlight was challenging, and he could only hope that they would reach the back door in time to make the most of Clary and Mark’s diversion.
“No wonder that old man used the front door,” Evelyn grumbled as she hopped over a mound of trash in the grass.
“Shh,” Jeff said.
They hurried as best they could to the front door. When they reached it, Evelyn quietly picked the lock. Just as the last bolt clicked out of place, the sound of loud knocking came from the front of the house.
Thomas’s heart began to beat quickly.
“Here we go,” Jeff said as he and Thomas took up station on either side of the doorway.
“One, two, three,” Jeff counted and pulled the door open.