Helltown (20 page)

Jenny glanced at the tree. She wouldn’t reach it in time. The other man would be down below her any moment, waiting for her.

She only had one option remaining.

She jumped.

Cleavon stared in disbelief as the stupid cunt jumped off the small ledge. She hit the ground with a hundred-pound thump. For what seemed like a long moment she didn’t move, didn’t make a sound, and he thought she was either unconscious or dead, and it served her right—

She began to scream, high pitched and glassy, like a stuck pig.

“What did you expect, darlin’?” he muttered, then went downstairs to see how badly she was hurt.

Jesse was bent over her when Cleavon got to them. She was still screaming and crying at the same time. It wasn’t doing his headache any good. But he didn’t think she’d quiet down no matter how nice he asked, and he didn’t have a sock to stuff in her mouth, so he ignored the noise the best he could.

“It ain’t pretty,” Jesse said, his owlish face frowning.

Cleavon studied the girl. She had large blue eyes and what would have been a pretty face when it wasn’t wet with tears and rain and twisted in pain.

“You see what you did?” Cleavon told her. “You went and broke your goddamn legs. I told you I wasn’t gonna hurt you.”

Jesse said, “What we gonna do, Cleave?”

“Give me a hand getting her to the car.”

“I mean, about all this.” He swallowed. “Lonnie’s dead, for fuck sake, Cleave. Both Lonnie and his boy. How we gonna cover this up?”

“Just give me a fuckin’ hand getting her to the car.” He crouched next to the girl and set Lonnie’s rifle and his machete in the mud. “You take her left arm. I’ll—”

“We gotta call Mr. Pratt.”

Cleavon paused, one hand on the girl’s shoulder. She was moaning now, which was better than screaming. “What the fuck is Spence gonna do?” he snapped. “He some sort of clean-up man, Jess? He gonna come out here and clean up this mess? What’s calling him gonna do?”

“He might think of a way to explain all this.”

“What needs explaining, Jess?”

“Lonnie’s dead, Cleave! Lonnie and his boy. How’re we gonna explain that?”

“We’re not.”

“We’re not?”

“We were never here.”

“We were never here?”

“Do I have a fuckin’ echo? No, we weren’t never here. Whatever happened, happened between some out-of-towner and Lonnie and his boy. We weren’t here. We don’t know nothing.”

“But won’t the sheriff wonder where that buck inside, where his friends went? Surely they told people where they were going, people’re gonna know they were travelling together, they’ll wonder what happened to the rest of them.”

“Let them wonder, Jess. No one took a picture of us, did they? We weren’t never here. That’s all that matters. Now give me a fuckin’ hand with the girl.”

Jess set his rifle aside and took her left arm, Cleavon her right arm, and they hefted her upright. She shrieked but there was little else she could do with only one good leg. They carried her between them to the Chevy El Camino and set her in the flatbed.

“Why…?” she said between sobs, propping herself up on her elbow. “Where…what are you…doing to me?”

“Keep your hands and feet inside the vehicle for the duration of the ride, darling,” Cleavon told her. “And if you try another jumping stunt once we get going, and don’t break your other fuckin’ leg, you better believe I’ll do it for you.”

He slammed the tailgate shut.

CHAPTER 16

“These are godless times, Mrs. Snell.”
Carrie
 
(1976)

“Would you like any more potatoes, dear?” Lynette asked Spencer Pratt, her husband of seventeen years—who, she was nearly positive, was cheating on her with another woman.

He dabbed his lips with the cotton napkin. “Thank you, no,” he said.

“Are you going to the hospital this evening?”

“Are you so eager to have the house to yourself?”

“Of course not. I was just wondering,” she said, collecting her dishes and taking them to the kitchen. “You’ve been spending a lot of time there this year.”

“Yes, well, work’s work, isn’t it?” he said, following her with his dishes. He set them in the sink and rinsed them with hot water. “These two new patients I have require…extensive work.”

Lynette placed the jug of milk in the refrigerator. “Work that can’t be done during regular working hours?”

Spencer didn’t reply, and Lynette wondered whether she’d said too much, overplayed her hand. Smiling kindly, she turned around, assuming the role of the doting, naïve housewife. Spencer was scribbling something in a notepad he had taken from his pocket, apparently oblivious to her question.

Lynette went to fetch the rest of the dishes from the dining room table. They’d had roast pork, vegetables, and mashed potatoes with gravy. As usual, Spencer finished off most of the pork and potatoes but barely touched the vegetables. When she returned to the kitchen, Spencer was still scribbling notes.

He was the Psychiatrist-in-Chief of the Boston Mills Psychiatric Hospital, which had once been called the Boston Mills Lunatic Asylum. Lynette still thought of it as the latter. She had grown up in Boston Mills, and her first memory of the asylum had been overhearing her parents talking about a lunatic who’d gone on a rampage and killed a caseworker and two nurses. At six or seven she didn’t know what a lunatic was, but she could tell by the way her parents were acting that she should be scared. Her mother would use this fear to keep her in line with ominous sayings such as, “You better be good or the lunatic will get you.” She would also threaten to ring up the director of the asylum to have Lynette committed, telling her, “It’s a rat trap, very easy to get in, impossible to get out.” These threats were made all the more real and frightening because Lynette’s father, a gardener at the hospital, brought home any number of stories about what went on there. Patients who would be forced to eat everything on their plates at mealtime even if it made them vomit it all back up. Patients who would be tied to their beds with wet sheets layered in ice in the pit of winter. Orderlies who would beat patients to within inches of their lives with wiffle ball bats before locking them away in solitary confinement. An old woman who wandered into a closed-down ward and died, her corpse remaining undiscovered for so long it left a permanent body-shaped stain on the floor. And then of course there was the debacle in 1962 when a man escaped the asylum and murdered a local woman and lived in her house for a week, eating her food and dressing in her clothes, before being discovered by the mailman. After this the community came together to form a civic association that convened with hospital administrators on how to keep the community safe, an association that existed to this day.

Given how terrified Lynette had been of the lunatic asylum growing up, it was ironic she would wind up working there. But when you grew up in a small town, and had no ambitions of leaving it, you took whatever work came your way. After graduating high school, Lynette was hired as a part-time receptionist at the local doctor’s office to cover for a woman away on maternity leave. When the woman returned a short month later, Lynette worked the odd shift at a dairy bar before hearing about a position for a medical transcriptionist at the asylum. Thankfully most of her father’s horror stories proved to be false. The lunatic asylum was by no means paradise. There were metal doors that locked behind her everywhere she went, most of the patients wandered in circles, and only a few had teeth due to the psych meds that dried out their mouths. However, there were no sadistic orderlies or rotting bodies or murderous patients—none that she came into contact with, at least.

When Spencer began working there as a psychiatrist, Lynette fell for him right away. He was not a particularly attractive man. He was stout and had a weak chin. But he had a full head of glorious red hair, and he was positively charming. They went steady for six months before he proposed to her. They married soon after and tried for years to conceive a child but were never successful. Eventually, after several consultations with their doctor, it was determined that Lynette was infertile.

Over the next decade they grew apart. Lynette stopped working at the asylum and became something of a lonely spinster, while Spencer did the opposite, immersing himself in the community and his work. Their relationship deteriorated to such an extent she now sensed he privately resented her, as if she were his ball and chain, preventing him from fully enjoying his life. She no longer thought of him as a husband but more of a stranger—a stranger living in her house and sleeping in her bed. This was accentuated by the fact that Spencer, physically, barely resembled the young man who had swept her off her feet. Some years ago he’d gotten into bodybuilding, and he could no longer be described as stout; he was a wrecking ball, with a bull neck, barrel chest, and bulging biceps. Also, he’d grown a beard. It had been her suggestion, because she’d known how self-conscious he’d been about his weak chin. But he continued to grow it out until it reached its current length, which stopped just short of his waistline.

Lynette dumped the remaining dishes she’d collected in the sink and filled the basin with hot water and dish soap. Spencer stuffed his notepad back in his pocket just as the telephone on the nearby table rang.

Spencer picked up the receiver and said hello. He listened for a few seconds, turning his back to her. “Stay there,” he said finally in a low voice. “I’m coming right now.” He hung up.

“Has something happened?” she asked.

“Yes,” he told her curtly. “You’ll be fine by yourself?”

“I think I’ll draw a bath, then retire early. I’ve been a little tired recently.”

“Can’t imagine why,” he said. “You never leave the house.” He cleared his throat. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

“No, you’re right. I should look into a hobby of some sort.”

“Why don’t you join that book club at the library? They meet every Tuesday, I believe.”

“I’ll think about it.”

He nodded, took the car keys from the pegboard, then left through the back door.

Without his briefcase, she noted.

Lynette watched Spencer through the window over the sink as he hurried through the rain to the garage, pulled up the roller door, and stepped inside. A few moments later headlights flooded the gravel driveway and his silver Volvo sedan appeared momentarily before disappearing from her line of sight.

Lynette dried her hands on a dish towel, then hurried to the front of the house. She pulled aside a blind in the darkened foyer and peered through the small beveled window as the Volvo continued down the driveway and turned left, disappearing behind the forest of trees.

Lynette went immediately to Spencer’s study. She’d been contemplating divorcing Spencer for some time now, but she’d been reluctant to file the necessary paperwork. She knew Spencer would be furious at the embarrassment it would cause him, at the hit his sterling reputation would take, and he would paint Lynette as a disillusioned, raving housewife. The small community would turn against her. She wouldn’t be able to go to the supermarket without someone talking about her or snickering behind her back. She would be ostracized from the town in which she had grown up, the only home she knew. However, if she could produce proof Spencer was having an extramarital affair, nobody would believe the lies he whipped up. She would be viewed sympathetically. She could live out the rest of her life in relative peace and quiet. A fly on the wall, a nobody. And that was fine by her. Better a nobody than the target of scorn and ridicule.