The Third Hill North of Town Page 11

  As the eldest Larson child had just proposed to do.

  “Put that little pigsticker down, boy,” Rufus hissed. “See what happens.”

  He almost didn’t care if he got stabbed or not now, but he wanted to make sure he lived long enough to get his fingers around Seth’s throat.

  “Shut up, Rufus, and go home,” Eben demanded. He knew nothing of the line Seth had just crossed in Rufus’s mind, of course, but he heard the intensified anger in the big man’s tone and it scared him. “Michael, Seth, back away from him right now, but keep your weapons ready.”

  His sons did what he asked this time. They had sensed the sudden shift in Rufus’s mood, too, and Eben’s alarm was evident. Yet Rufus didn’t budge for a long moment, even after they cleared a path for him to leave. He swung his head from side to side like an infuriated bull, hoping if he waited a few more seconds the boys would give him an opening he could exploit.

  We’ll see about this, he thought, livid with rage. We’ll see who ties who up.

  Michael and Seth showed no sign of relaxing their guard, however, so he finally snarled a string of obscenities at them and stalked off the porch. He kept up this outpouring of impotent curses until he reached his horse on the other side of the yard, but once back in the saddle, an odd, disquieting change came over him. His font of foul words ceased in midsentence, and he sat still on the beast for nearly a full minute.

  His face was flat and unreadable as he studied the two-story Larson home. His gaze took in the living room window, the swing on the front porch, and the storm cellar door on the south side of the house with equal attention; he seemed to be no less interested in the paint job (white with blue trim) than he was in the rain gutters and the windows. He gave no indication of looking for anything specific.

  When he had finally completed this slow inspection, he nodded in an almost friendly manner at Michael, Seth, and Eben, who were all watching him.

  None of them moved a muscle in response. The sun glinted off the tines of Michael’s pitchfork as Rufus at last dug his heels into the horse’s flanks and galloped away.

  No one spoke until he disappeared over a hill by Clyde Rayburn’s place.

  “Christ,” Seth muttered at last, unnerved. “What was that about?”

  His dark hair was wet with sweat as he set the post down on the porch. He glanced over at his younger brother first, and then back at Eben and Julianna.

  Eben had knelt beside Julianna. Her big, green eyes were open again, and Seth wondered how long she had been awake. The blood on her upper lip and chin made her look ghastly, but she managed a trembling smile as their father took her hand.

  “You shouldn’t have let him go, Daddy,” she murmured. Her smile fell apart. “That man is a monster.”

  She had been conscious long enough to see Rufus on his horse, looking at the house, and something in his brutish face had frightened her out of her wits.

  Eben nodded. “I know, sweetheart,” he whispered. “I know he is.”

  He gazed up at his sons for a moment, who were now standing side by side in the doorway. Seth’s arm was around Michael’s shoulders, and both boys were staring down at him, troubled. Eben bit his lip and looked again at his daughter, who was holding tightly to his hand. He wanted to reassure them all, but he had seen the same cold, calculating look on Rufus’s face that they had, and it had frightened him, too. He squeezed Julianna’s fingers and sighed.

  Just fifteen minutes ago, Eben Larson had believed his little farm in Pawnee, Missouri, was about the safest place on earth for him and his family. Now he was no longer sure of that at all, and he was stunned by how swiftly things seemed to have changed. He needed to go find Emma at the post office and warn her about Rufus; he wished she were with him right now, to help him figure out what to say to their children.

  What just happened? he wondered. Why was Rufus looking at the house like that?

  He took a hanky from his breast pocket and began to clean Julianna’s chin. He couldn’t bear it if Rufus hurt any of his children again; he had to find a way to keep them all safe.

  I should have let the boys kill that son of a bitch when we had the chance.

  “Better get the car ready to go to town, son,” he said to Seth. “Julianna needs to see Doc Colby, and your mom needs to be told about all this.”

  And then Eben needed to buy a gun.

  Chapter 5

  “Yoo-hoo! Anybody home?” Julianna rapped on the screen door of the dairy farmhouse a second time. “It’s Julianna Larson, and Ben Taylor.” She lowered her voice and whispered to Jon. “They don’t know you, Steve, so I’ll wait until they answer to introduce you.”

  The main door behind the screen was wide open, allowing Julianna to see a long hallway with a wooden floor leading back to the kitchen, but no response came from within the house. Jon stood beside her on the narrow porch, gripping his bag of belongings and sipping nervously at a warm bottle of Pepsi, but Elijah waited at the bottom of the steps with his hands jammed in his jeans pockets. He felt exposed and childish with no shirt, and he kept his gaze firmly on his white sneakers as he kicked at a stone by the bottom step. He’d noted Julianna’s name without much interest; he guessed it didn’t really matter if he knew what to call her or not.

  The air was thick with sharp smells: cow manure and hay, roses and freshly turned dirt, honeysuckle and cut grass. The sun was beating down on the earth, but mud puddles from the recent rain were everywhere, and the siding on the house was wet. An herb garden next to the porch had attracted dozens of fat, slow-moving bees, and the buzzing they made as they circled the mint plants was peaceful and hypnotic, punctuated now and then by the wild drumming of a woodpecker in a grove of trees behind the barn.

  Jon Tate had an almost overpowering urge to run. His eyes darted down the hill to the Edsel on the shoulder of the highway, where they had left it five minutes ago. He was certain the police would soon find the car, and every instinct was telling him to get as far from this place as possible before that could happen. He knew he wouldn’t stand much of a chance on foot, though, so he was praying for another miracle. In his opinion, the only hope any of them had was to buy (or steal) some gas from the dairy, and get the Edsel back on the road before another New Hampshire state trooper came along.

  “We can’t just keep standing here,” he said impatiently.

  Julianna frowned at the silence coming from the house. “It’s odd that Polly’s not home. I wonder where she could be?”

  She stepped over to the edge of the porch and peered across the yard. There was a silo, a barn, and a long, sturdy milk house that appeared to hold about fifty Jersey cows, but no human beings were in sight. The mailbox by the gravel driveway clearly declared this to be the home of “The Stocktons,” but Julianna paid no heed to it. In her mind, Günter and Polly Miller lived here, and that was that.

  On the way up the driveway, she had informed them that Günter Miller was a first-generation immigrant from Germany who had married Polly Brightman from Hatfield, Missouri, shortly before the couple purchased this dairy farm on the outskirts of Pawnee. She assumed Elijah (Ben, to her) already knew this about the Millers, of course, but considering how strangely he’d been acting she felt he might need to have his memory jogged.

  “Günter’s such a sweet man,” she now said as she leaned on the porch railing. “But he has the funniest German accent, doesn’t he, Ben?”

  Elijah barely even registered that Julianna had once again called him Ben. He, like Jon, was wrestling with a compulsion to run for his life, and was too frazzled to care anymore if she knew his real name or not. He saw she was waiting for an answer, though, and he rolled his eyes at Jon and grimaced.

  “Yeah,” he muttered. “When good old Günter talks he sounds just like Hitler.”

  A swig of Pepsi spurted from Jon’s nose onto his shirt.

  “Gross,” he coughed, wiping his face on his sleeve. He grinned down at Elijah, in spite of himself. “Wise ass,” he said.

>   Elijah gave him a strained smile, but both boys sobered quickly. Their predicament was no laughing matter, and they knew it.

  Julianna missed this exchange; she had returned to the front door and was looking in the house again. She opened the screen door and put a foot over the sill as if intending to enter. “Polly? Günter? Are you here?”

  “I don’t think you should do that,” Elijah blurted. “We should just find some gas and get out of here.”

  Jon nodded vehemently. “Yeah. We’ve got to get going.”

  “Don’t be silly. The Millers won’t mind a bit.” She stepped through the door. “Besides, your leg will get infected if we don’t clean that cut.”

  She disappeared into the house, humming a tune neither Jon nor Elijah recognized.

  Jon glanced down at his leg in frustration. He had used the strip of Elijah’s shirt as a bandage, tying it around his left thigh, and though the wound was no longer bleeding, the white cloth was mostly red and looked none too hygienic. Regardless, they really couldn’t afford to stay here long enough to do anything about it.

  He looked at Elijah, who was fidgeting as if he needed to urinate.

  “What are we going to do?” Elijah asked.

  “I don’t know.” Jon chewed on his lip for a minute, glaring at the Edsel on the empty highway, then he tossed the Pepsi bottle into a nearby rosebush and spun around to hiss through the screen. “We don’t have time for this, Julianna!”

  There was no answer, and precious seconds ticked by, one after another.

  “Okay, that’s it.” Jon hopped off the porch, landing lightly beside Elijah. “I’m going to look around for some gas. See if you can get her out of there, okay?”

  He took off running for the barn, not waiting for an answer.

  Elijah blinked and yelled after him. “What if she won’t come out?”

  Jon ground to a halt and looked back at him. “We’ll just have to leave her.” He frowned at the look on the other boy’s face. “I don’t like it, either, but we really don’t have a choice, do we?”

  This time he waited long enough to see Elijah’s hesitant nod before resuming his run for the barn.

  Bebe Stockton had epilepsy. It never bothered her, though; she just had to remember to take a spoonful of phenobarbital twice every day, and this simple regimen worked like a charm to ward off seizures. Unfortunately, Bebe was easily distracted, and could never remember if she’d taken her medicine or not.

  Her husband, Chuck, however, bless his heart, had the memory of an anal-retentive elephant. Every day he reminded her at lunch, and then again before bed, that it was time for her tablespoon of “ucky juice” (as Bebe insisted on calling it). Quite often he also had to tell her she’d already taken a dose; she simply couldn’t keep track of such things.

  Chuck and Bebe Stockton had owned this dairy farm in southwestern New Hampshire for thirty-six years. They raised two lovely daughters (both grown and moved away, now) and one fine, handsome son, who had been killed in World War II. Bebe was small and squat, with short gray hair and a dimpled double chin. She laughed easily but she also cried a lot; her feelings were easily hurt by a harsh tone or an impolite word, and she didn’t like raised voices, or conflict of any kind. Aside from this hypersensitivity, though—and a poor memory—there was nothing out of the ordinary about Bebe at all.

  Except, perhaps, her fetish for glass swans.

  Her house was chock-full of swan figurines, in every color and size imaginable. (The cobs tended to be red, blue, and green, but the pens were almost always yellow, orange, or purple. The cygnets, though, for some reason, were often sculpted from clear glass.) When her husband, Chuck, was in a bad mood he referred to the place as “a goddamn crystal aviary.” Bebe didn’t care, though; her glass swans were the epitome of beauty and grace, and they made her feel beautiful and graceful by association. The funny thing was she didn’t like actual swans half as well as she liked her figurines. What drew her to glass swans was their stillness; she could hold and caress them whenever she wanted. The living, breathing birds moved too much to suit her, and were fearful of her touch.

  When Edgar Reilly’s stolen Edsel ran out of gas in front of the Stockton farm, Chuck was out making deliveries in the milk truck, and Bebe was home alone, napping with one of her swans in the upstairs bedroom. Saturdays were Chuck’s longest days; he had been gone since early morning and wouldn’t return until almost nightfall.

  Bebe was in a deep sleep. She had remembered to take her dose of phenobarbital at noon, but as she was also baking corn muffins and trying to find batteries for her kitchen radio, she forgot all about the first tablespoon of medicine she had swallowed, and promptly took another.

  This often happened on Saturdays when Chuck was absent. Happily, her dosage was low enough that she could have an extra tablespoon now and then with little risk, and the only side effect she had experienced in the past from this sort of unintentional drug abuse had been drowsiness.

  But today, when she at last located the batteries for the radio and removed the muffins from the oven, she hadn’t been able to remember for the life of her if she’d taken any ucky juice at all. She was almost sure she had, yet when she’d looked in the sink to see if there was a dirty tablespoon as evidence of this, she’d found nothing. (She had forgotten washing the first spoon along with the bowl she had used to mix the muffins, and the second spoon was still in the refrigerator, where she had absent-mindedly left it while getting a splash of milk for her coffee.)

  I guess I forgot again, she’d thought, shaking her head with rue. Lordy, Lordy! Chuck would be furious!

  She’d then slurped down a third tablespoon, and ten minutes later she couldn’t keep her eyes open. Stumbling upstairs to her bedroom, she’d seized a lovely blue swan—a cob, and one of her favorites—from the dresser top, and collapsed on the mattress as if she’d been shot in the head. It was fortunate she’d stopped at three tablespoons; a fourth would likely have put her in a coma. As it was, she was destined to not wake up for several hours.

  Uh oh. Her last thoughts before she lost consciousness were astonishing for their clarity. She’d read about phenobarbital overdoses, of course, and recognized something unusual was occurring. I better call the doctor! I must have had too much ucky juice!

  Thinking this, though, she fell into an untroubled sleep like an enchanted princess, still clasping the blue cob to her bosom. She did not stir from this position one little bit until Julianna’s knock on the door in the late afternoon at last began to filter through the haze in her mind, but even so it would take her several minutes to open her eyes again.

  And at least another five minutes after that to realize she was no longer alone in the house.

  The tune Julianna had been humming on the porch earlier was one her father sang all the time when she was a child. It was no wonder neither Jon nor Elijah had recognized it; Julianna herself hadn’t heard it for almost forty years. She couldn’t remember many of the words, but the chorus was stuck in her head and she was now singing and whistling it as she washed the cut on her right arm in Bebe Stockton’s kitchen sink.

  “Oh, joy! Oh, boy! Where do we go from here?”

  The kitchen was charming, with clean gold linoleum and sparkling countertops. Bebe’s corn muffins were on top of the stove where she had set them to cool earlier that afternoon, and a window over the sink looked out over a lush green pasture, just beyond the barn.

  Julianna winced as she found a small sliver of glass from the Edsel’s rear window still embedded in her forearm. She tugged up the sleeve of her dress and used her fingernails to carefully remove the shard from the wound.

  “Dahdadada, dahdadada . . .”

  “What are you doing?”

  She spun to find Elijah hovering in the kitchen doorway. He looked unhappy and anxious, and his narrow chest was sweating in the heat. He was also shifting his weight from one foot to the other, like a small child with a full bladder.

  Julianna smiled at him. “B
enjamin! You gave me a fright.” She turned back to the sink. “I’m just cleaning myself up a bit. Where’s Steve?”

  “He’s looking for gasoline.” Elijah cleared his throat. “He told me to come get you.”

  She glanced over her shoulder and frowned. “What about his leg? That cut won’t clean itself.”

  “He said there wasn’t time.”

  She made a face and turned off the water. “Boys,” she muttered. She dried her hands on a dish towel and sighed. “I guess we can clean his wound in the car, but we’ll need some alcohol and bandages to take with us.”

  She began opening cabinets and hunting through them, and Elijah decided the fastest way to get her out of there was to steer her in the right direction.

  “They probably keep stuff like that in the bathroom,” he suggested.

  “The bathroom?” Julianna giggled. “You’re so silly. You know full well no one in Pawnee has an indoor bathroom except Judge Mason, and he’s rich as Midas. Mother keeps asking Daddy if we can get one, too, but he says it’s a luxury we can’t afford.”

  Elijah didn’t bother to respond, because the moment he’d said the word “bathroom,” he realized he had a ferocious need to pee, which he’d ignored for about as long as it was safe to do so.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said, turning away quickly.

  He hurried down the hallway. On his way into the house he’d passed several closed doors, and he was praying one of them led to a bathroom. He figured after he used the toilet he could find some hydrogen peroxide and some Band-Aids, then he’d grab Julianna and drag her back to the Edsel. With any luck, Steve would already be there with some gas.

  Elijah had nodded in the front yard when the other boy said it might be necessary to leave Julianna here, but in spite of wanting to get away from her he didn’t feel very good about the idea of running out on someone in her condition without first making sure she was safe. Nonetheless, he didn’t know how long Steve would be willing to wait for them, and he was terrified of finding the Edsel already gone by the time he managed to get Julianna back outside.