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Joyce Owen sat behind closed drapes in her living room, the TV flickering but unwatched althoughDays of Our Liveswas on. She had scarcely left the house in two weeks, had become so accustomed to keeping the blinds closed she never noticed anymore how dim the room was. Her world had narrowed gradually as she cut off contact with that hateful Marvella Hatcher first, then the Daleys, Kirk and Marie Merfeld, Alice Simmons, once her dearest friend, the Jurgens…until no one was left. Once she'd enjoyed gardening and talking over the fence with the neighbors to each side, grocery shopping here in town, going to the library, catching up on gossip. It had been years since she'd stepped foot in the Food Emporium here in Tucannon; she drove all the way to Walla Walla now to buy her necessities, just so she didn't have to pretend not to hear the whispers when townsfolk set eyes on her.
All because of Robbie, who couldn't help himself—oh, she knew he couldn't—but he had made her life hard. There was no denying that.
Two weeks ago, she'd had to tell him this was no longer his home, not if he wouldn't take his medicine. He was her oldest, thirty-four years old and no more capable of taking care of himself than a five-year-old. But she had finally become so frightened of him she couldn't live with it anymore.
Since he'd stormed out, she had understood that this wasn't any better. Joyce felt as if a tornado was approaching. The sky was sickly yellow, the stillness absolute, and by the prickling of her skin she knew,knew,that something terrible was coming. She was just waiting to find out what that something terrible was. She slept only in uneasy bursts, every creak of the old house jerking her to wakefulness. Come morning, she did her housekeeping chores out of long habit, hurrying when she had to step outside to water her poor pitiful roses in the backyard or haul the garbage can out to the curb. Then she sat, pretending to watch TV. And all she could think about was what he was doing right now. What he was thinking. How scared he was.
She knew Robbie hadn't left town, the way she'd half hoped he would. She didn't answer the phone, but she did listen to messages. Several neighbors had called to complain that they'd caught him sleeping in their garage or under their lilac bushes beneath the front windows. Sounding mad as hell, Wayne Tindall said, "I looked at him down the barrels of my shotgun and told him if he steps foot on my property again I'd let him have it."
Of course, Wayne hadn't liked the boys even when they were just normal high-spirited kids. He'd called the police when David hit a baseball through his plate-glass window. As if he hadn't known perfectly well that Pete and Joyce would pay for the replacement and then make David work it off in chores. Joyce just plain didn't like Wayne Tindall. She tried to feel sorry for his wife, Betty, living with a man who lacked even a grain of compassion.
Crack.The crack of a gunshot came from so close her entire body spasmed. Joyce dropped to the floor with her heart racing.Oh, God, oh, God,she thought. It had come. Whatever the terrible thing was.
Somebody was screaming, a keen of terror.Crack.The second shot, cutting that scream off, was just as loud, just as near, rattling the window glass. It sounded as if it had been fired right outside her living room.
Or next door, she realized with a shudder. At the Tindalls'.
But she'd heard shotguns fired before, and they didn't sound like this, clean and sharp.
Panic squeezed her chest. Whimpering, she crawled a few feet and then lurched to her feet and ran toward the back of the house. She hardly ever went into Pete's den, only to vacuum and dust every week or so. She hadn't emptied out any of his things since he dropped dead of a heart attack near two years ago. She just…closed the door. She had too much grief already on her mind.
Now she flung the door open and stared in horror at his gun safe, standing open and empty. The key. Robbie had found the key. Pete's hunting rifles were missing, both of them, and Joyce knew without looking that the handgun he kept in the drawer at the bottom of the safe would be gone, too. Lord have mercy on them all.
What had Robbie done?
Right that moment, she didn't even care that he might be coming for her. No, she hoped he would. This was all her fault. Her legs sagged, and she sank down onto the floor right there, in the doorway where she couldn't look away from the awful sight of those missing guns. Tears streaming down her face, she waited for him.
Reeve Hadfield lay on his back on his wooden creeper under the car, Kanye West's "Heard 'em Say" blasting through his earbuds. He wiped sweat from his forehead, not caring that he'd probably smeared grease on his face, then adjusted his light and started to lift the wrench. A glimpse of his watch surprised him. Crap! Walt said he'd probably stop by before one, and it was after that now. He'd have seen that Reeve was under the car, wouldn't he?
Walt Stenten owned the Shell station out by the highway. Reeve had pumped gas through high school and after he graduated had gone to work for him full-time. It wasn't like they were friends, exactly; Walt was probably Reeve's parents' age, maybe forty-five or fifty or something like that. He was this short guy built like a box, who kept his hair in a buzz cut and had crinkles beside his eyes from squinting. They hardly talked at all, and when they did it was mostly stuff like, "Start with the oil change, then let's take a look at the brakes on the Hargers' Voyager."
Reeve had been working on his own car, a '55 Chevy Bel Air. Not a convertible; that would have been even cooler. This was a sedan, but it was in awesome shape considering. Getting parts was the hard thing. Walt had been helping him with that.
Reeve reached down to his waist and turned off his iPod, so he'd hear when Walt did come. The garage door stood open to give him better light to work by, so Reeve knew he wouldn't go to the front door or anything.
Talk about timing: he heard footsteps coming up the driveway. Grinning, Reeve laid down the light and his wrench, then gave a push with his heels to send the creeper shooting out from under the side of the Bel Air. He spun on the wheels and, still on his back, zipped out to the front of the garage, the bumper rearing above him.
Since his eyes had adjusted to the dim light under the car, the brilliant sunlight blinded him for a moment. All he could see was a dark silhouette against the white-hot background.
"Walt?" he said, hearing his own uncertainty. He blinked a couple of times, thinking it was weird that Walt hadn't said anything or moved.
One more blink, and he could see again. Only…it wasn't Walt standing there. It was that freak Rob Owen. And—shit!—he had a rifle slung over his back, a pistol jammed in his waistband, and he was holding another rifle loose in his arms.
His hair was matted and dirty. Was thatbloodspattering his face and the front of his T-shirt? He stared at Reeve, his face expressionless except for his dark eyes, which burned. He was crazy, everyone knew that. But this…this was horror-movie crazy.
Reeve heard himself start to say, "What the…?" when the barrel of that rifle lifted and took aim at his head or maybe his chest. Owen sighted down it, and, as if time had slowed down, Reeve actually saw a finger tightening on the trigger.
I'm dead,he thought incredulously.
And then, God, a body flew out of nowhere just as the first deafening boom sounded. Slam! Somebody came down on top of him, pushing the creeper backward.
Boom!Another shot.
It was deadweight on him. Completely panicked, Reeve shoved the body off him and propelled himself under the car with a scramble of heels and hands.
Walt. God, that was Walt, he realized in horror. Walt, with blood spilling from his mouth, and his eyes.
Reeve came out the back of the Bel Air and leaped off the creeper, crouching behind the bulk of the car, straining for any sound at all.
Nothing. Damn it. Nothing.
He measured with his eyes the distance to the door going into the house, and knew he had to try for it. His heart was trying to slam its way out of his chest, and he wasn't sure hecouldhear over the thunder in his ears.
Now!
Still crouching, he threw himself forward, up the two steps, turned the knob, yanked the door open and all but fell through, into the kitchen. He didn't hear a gunshot, didn't see anything. Hand shaking, he pushed the stupid-ass little button lock that wouldn't keep out anyone, then ran for the phone. It took him three tries to dial 911.
The operator had already answered, her voice faraway and tinny, when Reeve heard another gunshot. Not right out in front; maybe a couple of houses away.
"Somebody's shot," he babbled. "God! I think he's dead. My address."
"I have your address, sir. Do you see the gunman?"
"No!" he screamed. "I don't know where he went! Just…hurry. Tell them to hurry."
Then he dropped the phone and ran for the bathroom. He'd pissed his pants. He couldn't let anyone see. No one.
Somehow he got himself cleaned up, grabbed jeans from his bedroom and raced for the door to the garage again, still hopping to get the jeans on and buttoned.
Somewhere, sirens had started. Not one, but several.
God. He wanted to go out and see if Walt was alive, but he was too freaking scared to do it. Walt might be bleeding to death, after sacrificing himself to save Reeve, and he didn't have the guts to go back out into the garage.
He'd never learned first aid anyway.
Oh, sure. Good excuse.
The sirens screamed right outside. Doors were slamming, feet pounding up the driveway.
Reeve wiped tears from his cheeks and stood up. He had to go out there. He had to explain.
I'mthe one Rob Owen hated. It was supposed to bemelying there bleeding my life away. Not Walt. Me.
The whole damn town was a crime scene.
David Owen had just pulled off the highway and crossed the bridge into Tucannon. Incredulous, he braked to a stop in the middle of the road, not even looking to see if there was another car behind him.
Not only a crime scene, he saw, a thriller-movie crime scene, bigger than life. And this wasn't any town, it was his hometown.
Dear God.He'd known, in one way, since his mother's phone call nearly five hours ago telling him Robbie had taken Dad's guns and killed some people, then himself.
"I saw his body," she'd said, her voice shaky. "He's dead.
Robbie's dead."
"Is that all you can think about?" he had asked sharply. "How many is 'some' people? Who else died?"
She either didn't know or couldn't say. David had a number now; before he'd reached the summit at Snoqualmie, an hour out of Seattle, the massacre in the tiny Eastern Washington town of Tucannon was all newscasters could talk about. Five people were dead, plus the gunman, and two more clung to life at St. Mary Medical Center in Walla Walla. More were wounded. Victims had yet to be identified.
This had been coming for years, in David's opinion. His parents hadn't listened to reason, his mother even less so than his father. All they could see was that Rob was sick. They ridiculed any suggestion that he could be a danger to anyone.
David had turned the radio on compulsively every half hour during the drive across the bleak, empty center of the state and again as he passed Walla Walla and the basalt outcrops gave way to rolling hills covered with vineyards or wheat. As he sat there now, staring in shock at the police cars with flashing lights blockading side streets, the TV news vans clogging Main, the clusters of people hugging each other out on the sidewalks, the commercial jingle on the radio ended and a newscaster declared gravely, "Today, tragic news from Whitman County, Washington. Townsfolk in little Tucannon were gunned down by a man known to all, raised by his parents."
In a violent gesture he rarely allowed himself, David hit the button to turn off the radio.
A man known to all.Robbie, the big brother he'd adored and shadowed when they were children.
He made a guttural sound. No, that Robbie had been gone for a long time, drowned out by the voices he heard in his head.
Tucannon should have been sleepy at seven-thirty in the evening, with August heat lingering and the sun still a couple of hours from setting. Kids out on bikes, neighbors on porches, most of the businesses closed. But it looked as if nobody had gone home today. People congregated outside the storefronts along Main, as if they'd been there ever since they rushed out to hear what others knew, then clung together in shock. Maybe they weren't being allowed to go home.
Traffic crept the half a dozen blocks past police cars, lights rotating, that blockaded Maple, Sycamore and Elm. Inching forward, David looked with disbelief at faces wet with tears. Faces of people he knew.
As a King County deputy prosecuting attorney, he had seen plenty of crime scenes and always succeeded in maintaining the necessary dispassion. What horror or revulsion he felt stayed hidden well enough that he'd acquired a reputation. "He's a calculating son of a bitch," he'd overheard another assistant prosecutor say, and David had taken it as a compliment. On the job he never betrayed emotion unless it served a purpose.
But this. Shock washed over him in icy waves and he turned off the air conditioner. Until now, nothing he'd heard had seemed real. Knowing intellectually and seeing his hometown transformed by horror were two different things.
Robbie did this.
Robbie is dead.
Had Robbie looked around in the end, seen what he'd done and remembered that those people lying lifeless at his feet were friends and neighbors? Or had he still been enmeshed in madness and thought death was his only escape from Satan's creatures—who would not stay silent however he pleaded?
As cold as if the damn air-conditioning were still on, David thought,It doesn't matter.They would never know whether Robbie had been obeying his voices or trying to silence them. What he'd done was so terrible nobody would care.
Except Mom, who would be bereft without the son who had been at the center of her life.
David was able to turn onto Poplar, but Third, Fourth and Fifth were all blocked. Finally, at Sixth, he pulled up to the sawhorses and rolled down his window.
God, he wanted to wake up and discover he'd been having a nightmare.
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