Sticks and Stones (20 page)

Sandra woke. A strangled sound caught in her throat. Danny was asleep, turned away from her and resting against the wall.

It felt oily inside her head. There were strings of Xavier Stancliff caught inside of her, holding on and spiderwebbing out as he plotted and waited and thought:
this is all the bitch deserves
. Swallowing, Sandra pushed herself off the bed. It was late and the room was dark. She could see the bundled lump of Jack beneath his own covers. He’d left the television on and the light flickered down the tiny hall. Shadows danced and Sandra shivered as she left the room.

In another life, she would have told Danny and Jack about the man. Danny would have whispered, “It’s alright,” and smoothed back her hair from her face and kissed her, lips dry and coarse on her forehead. Then he and Jack would’ve left while she was sleeping. They would’ve trampled the flowers and climbed into Xavier Stanliff’s window and when Sandra woke up there would have been one less man in the world.

She knew exactly what they would do.

Sandra leaned her head against the cool hallway wall and pressed her fingers against the old paint and deliberately did
not
think about the gun in her bag.

In the room one of the boys shifted. The air conditioner hummed. The television flicker-flashed.

If she didn’t do a thing, that woman would die. He’d do it again. It was possible he would never be caught.

If she did it herself, though…

The next day, when Jack and Danny disappeared, Sandra walked the five blocks to the library. She used the internet to look up Xavier Stancliff. She scoured archives of newspapers until she found the wedding announcement. Dayla Stancliff even owned her own gossip rag. It was easy to find the number in the local phone book. When she phoned the Busybody Babbler, Sandra talked the secretary into letting her speak to Dayla directly – she had a wonderful story for their magazine. “Just what do you know about your husband?” she asked Dayla when she picked up.

Dayla didn’t believe at first, not about his first two wives and their bog-covered graves. As a reporter, Sandra figured Dayla would’ve kept her head well out of the sand. Fortunately, Sandra didn’t need proof. Doubt was more than enough.

Dayla’s bitter contempt would do the rest.

Feeling successful, Sandra hurried home. The boys were still gone. She walked to the coffee shop early.

When Frank and Betty came in, they ordered at the counter and didn’t sit down. They had an air of expectation and Sandra read a hotel room inside Betty’s head.

“Have fun,” she said. They looked sufficiently spooked as they headed out the door and Sandra couldn’t bring herself to apologize, only wait and watch for the following shadow of P.I Haldon.

She felt mean and broken and wrong.

That night, she dreamed and she watched as hands with long, richly lacquered nails pulled open the ornate front door. The window was filled with stained glass. There were antiques in the front hallway – pretty dark-wood tables and canvas paintings on the walls.

Sandra recognized the steep rising staircase.

Xavier came down the steps. He smiled, wrapped one lean arm around her shoulders, and leaned in as he pressed a kiss to the corner of her lips. She remained stiff, head held high, a frown on her face. He pulled back, said, “I’ve a surprise for you.” When he led her up the stairs, he paused at the very top. Then he turned to her, eyes flashing, and Dayla Stancliff pulled the two-inch revolver from her purse and very calmly shot him in the chest.

For a moment, Sandra was Xavier and she was falling and there was a hole burning through her lungs, and then she was awake and gasping and realized just what she’d done.

Swallowing, Sandra climbed from her bed. Jack and Danny’s room was quiet across the hall. The house was dark and silent and she crept into the kitchen. She could call the police. Perhaps Dayla hadn’t even done it yet. She could…

…She could do nothing.

It wasn’t the boys. Sandra hadn’t killed him and they hadn’t killed him and that was all that mattered. Wasn’t it?

She never used to
think like that
.

She felt sick.

“Sandra?” Danny stood at the entrance to the kitchen, a dark shadow in the long lines of the night.

She stared at him, and then turned to stare at the fridge.

Danny’s shadow shifted, leaned against the ragged doorframe. Sandra grabbed a can of pop and settled her hip against the counter. The chipped enamel felt rough through her thin t-shirt. The can lay freezing against her fingers. She fiddled with it, didn’t look at Danny, and thought if he was waiting for her to speak first then he was going to be waiting for a very long time.

“It’s late,” he said.

I know what you’
re up to
, she thought about saying. She figured he already knew. She wasn’t dumb. Did they think she missed them sneaking out the door?

And, yet, she continued to ignore what they were doing. Didn’t bring it up. Didn’t say a word because she was afraid of what they might ask in return. Her own truths were much more horrible than theirs.

“Is Jack back?” she asked. He didn’t say a thing. “You think he’s alright?”

“It’s Jack.”

That was the problem. Jack – who was irritable and impulsive and angry. Sandra turned the unopened pop can right side up and carefully pushed it onto the counter. “Do you think Harvey Davis is still alive?”

Daniel went still, and then he breathed out. “You know. You dreamed it.”

“I dreamed it. Were you ever planning on telling me?”

Danny hesitated, said, “We weren’t sure.”

“Yes, you were.”

Sandra thought about first learning how to shoot a gun. She thought about steadying her stance and squeezing down, how the butt had felt in her hand and how the trigger touched her finger. It had felt like something forbidden. Something awful. Sandra stared at Danny and imagined putting a bullet into his head. She imagined waiting for Jack to get home. She thought about placing the barrel into her own mouth, tasting the cold of the metal just as she died.

She already knew what a bullet felt like going through her chest. Through her stomach. Through so many pieces of her.

“Hey,” Danny said. His palms were rough and warm and smelled like the detergent from the sheets. Her cheeks felt far too brittle beneath them. “We haven’t done anything. It’s fine. We’re going to make this work. I promise, okay? Everything will be alright.”

“I dreamed I had to kill you,” she said. Her voice sounded odd in her throat, got caught there somewhere, went small.

Danny touched her head. He touched her chin. He pressed a dry kiss to the corner of her lips. Sandra gathered her courage and thought: if the only option they had was to die, then Jack and Daniel had the right of deciding that for themselves.

“Tell me what you saw,” he said.

Chapter Twenty

Once upon
a time Sandra had made a promise She’d promised to look after them.

She didn’t want to fail.

Deep down, she was left with the horrible knowledge that maybe she already had.

At dawn, with morning light breaking through the city and slipping between the curtains, turning the world to pinks and golds, Sandra gathered the boys into the living room. She felt tired and old. The couch sunk beneath them, an uncomfortable press of springs through the old material and padding. Jack’s hair was a mess, faint scars still red on his face, his head bent wearily over his mug of coffee.

Sandra wasn’t ready for this.

“Do you remember,” she finally asked, long after Danny had settled near his brother, “when we moved to Respite, right after Mr. Murray?” Jack didn’t look away from her, but his long fingers fisted tight around his mug. It was the silly one with the big happy face and inspirational message on the side. Danny must’ve handed it to him; Jack hated that mug.

The way he was steeling himself reminded Sandra of herself, sitting on the motel bed weeks ago, gripping her gun and trying to convince herself to murder when all she could think of was older times, when Danny helped her with her homework and Jack teased her, either or both of their arms tight around her shoulders. Supporting her. She’d shoved the gun into the bottom of her bag, still loaded and dangerous and not caring as she ran into the bathroom to heave over the beige toilet seat. She hadn’t been able to breathe, her chest tight, throat thick and tears on her face.

No, she didn’t want to think of the gun.

“Lem talked to me afterwards,” she said. “He didn’t really say anything. I mean … I knew what he
meant
. It was something I’d noticed when Mr … when Dan Murray had me.” This time, it was her shifting and Sandra cleared her throat, knuckles turning white as Jack touched her shoulder. “I didn’t notice before at school. But after he took me, I could see it. Like there’s this thing, this darkness, inside of men like Mr. Murray, and sometimes it gets out. And once it’s out there there’s no way of getting rid of it.” Sandra took a deep breath, already wincing at what she had to say next.

“You ever look at that photograph of Lem’s?”

Danny frowned, not catching on, while Jack looked suspicious. He’d moved his arms over his chest, scowling hard.

“What color were his eyes?” she asked.

“Grey,” Danny said immediately. “They’ve always been. Just like mine.”

“But they got darker.”

Jack snorted. Danny jabbed him hard to stop him from saying something dumb.

“Whatever’s inside a person that turns them dark, it was there, in Lem’s eyes, for as long as I knew him. I just didn’t want to see it.”

Jack’s jaw clenched and, this time, Danny didn’t stop him when he made a sound, not exactly rude, but angry as hell. She hadn’t mentioned a word of this to him before. “No,” said Jack. “No.”

“He ripped a man apart with his bare hands.”

Jack closed his mouth. He had nothing to say to that.

“He held on as long as he could because he had his family. He had you. But he knew there was something inside of him. Something dark. Something festering. Even though he could never exactly say what it was.”

She wasn’t implying Lem hadn’t tried. He had – he’d tried very hard to be a great man, especially for his sons – but in the end it hadn’t done a lick of good. He’d still changed. He’d still gotten angry and lost control and gotten shot. In the long run, evil done in the name of good was still evil.

Jack shook his head, then shook it some more.

“Back in Respite he was asking me to make sure it didn’t pass to you. But it’s too late. It’s already inside of us, maybe inside of everyone. We make one bad decision, and then another, and eventually we come to the point when we just don’t care anymore. You go out fighting and conning and eventually it’ll all go wrong. Maybe it already has.”

“You’re talking about Davis, aren’t you?” Jack asked, eyes narrowed and jaw grit. “So we, what, just let him go?”

Sandra stared back. “You call the cops.”

Jack sneered, “And let him ruin some girl’s life before they get there?”

Sandra was tired and confused and all she wanted to do was flee this town. “Just shut up and listen, Jack. For once, please,” she pleaded. “Say you kill him. What happens to the next person I dream of? Or the one after that? What will you do? Kill them all?”

Jack shook his head, but Danny just sat there, and Sandra had to breathe in hard to unblock the lump in her throat.

“In my dream, I watched you kill an innocent person.”

“No,” Jack said again, but this time he sounded defeated. “Sandra…”

“He wasn’t even a bad man. He was just annoying, leaning on the horn. And then you walked right up to his car and shoved your knife into his throat.”

Jack closed his mouth, swallowed and lowered his head. His fingers were back in his lap. The mug rested on the floor, a good thing since Sandra suspected it would otherwise be broken. She kind of wanted to shift over there and put her arms around him. Around the both of them.

“I couldn’t save Lem, but I have to believe that he didn’t have to die. That maybe if he hadn’t been so far down that path…”

“You saved Dad once, remember?” he asked, voice low. “You changed what happened.”

“In the end I couldn’t.” Her vision had become so clouded she could only see the blurred color of their clothing, the room bright with sunlight. She could hear traffic on the road, the surge of early morning school buses and working vehicles. “Trying only made things worse. We can’t change it,” she said, choking it out.

“How can it be worse than us being dead?” There was something dry in Jack’s voice and Sandra’s whole face crumpled. Maybe he regretted asking, maybe not, but Jack’s hands still came up, gently folding her into him.

“It’ll be okay,” Daniel said from beside them and Sandra just shook her head.

“It
will
be okay.” He sounded so certain that it burned behind her eyes, straight through to her chest, hitting hard.

It won’t, she wanted to say. It damn well won’t. “Seen that, have you?”

“Seen you,” he said, and Sandra felt herself breaking all over again.

~

They didn’t take her gun away.

She wished they had.

Jack continued to follow Harvey. Sandra waited, and hoped she wasn’t dooming the world.

The first day of the month, Harvey Davis pulled Marietta Rafferty into the back of his car. He didn’t know he was being watched. He didn’t know he was being followed. When an anonymous payphone call was made to the police, they were given Harvey’s license plate and home address. Marietta was still alive when they arrested him.

On the ten o’clock news, the pretty woman in blue told them that fifteen other bodies had been recovered, all buried beneath the floorboards of Harvey’s urban home. Two were fresh.

Sandra knew they’d find six more before the case was done.

For the very first time, she actually believed Danny when he said they could change this.

Maybe they could.

She waited for the other shoe to drop.

It felt like time was winding down, a stopwatch clicking forward every time they failed. Harvey Davis was over and done with, but there were so many to go, a thousand voices screaming in her ear, waiting to drag them down.

Her eyes ached like there was smoke in the air.

She passed people on the street and wondered if they’d one day become part of the body count.
It’s fine
, Danny said, while Jack didn’t say anything, trying hard not to believe.

When she got home, Jack was gone. Again.

Danny had only returned himself, made obvious by his grease-stained shirt. But he wasn’t back from work; Alan never made his employees stay so late. Sandra couldn’t help but look at them, wonder if they were up to something else, wonder if they were falling.

Danny held a beer, mouth hitched up and not the least bit startled by her sudden appearance.

“Hi,” she whispered, stepping close and resting at his side, wondering where he’d been, where Jack was, when they were getting out of this town. His skin was warm and the room was cold. The air unit sputtered and ghosted cool air across their shins.

The truth of it was, Sandra had always hated how they’d lived after Lem. Whispering through towns and cities, abandoned houses and motels, running place to place as they tried to leave the nightmares behind. And yet, there wasn’t anything she wouldn’t give to be on the road again. They could go too many miles in too few days, stare at the white and yellow lines until their eyes were sore, and still she’d want to go farther.

“Quit thinking.” Danny’s hand was on her arm. The can pressed cold through the right sleeve of her shirt, spreading a slow damp spot. Sandra shook her head and the cold metal dug into her shoulder blade when he kissed her, short and messy. “Quit thinking,” he said again.

“Okay.”

His lips curved up. She was pretty sure he’d gotten grease on her shirt and his skin still smelled like the shop – dusty and gritty and warm. His callused fingers ran across her neck, feather light. A chill spread outward from them, electric fire and frost and Danny’s breath warm on one cheek. “What’re you doing?” Sandra turned her head sideways, caught his lips again.

“Don’t know.” He shoved the can to the side, strong arms snagging her up and resting her on the back of the sunken couch. He kissed her, ferociously, teeth clashing and she had to wrap her legs and her arms around him to keep from sliding off the other side. His fingers got tangled in her shirt and hers in his hair.

Her skin felt raw, over-sensitized. Sandra got her mouth on his neck, leaning over and biting down greedily on the muscle that corded there. She’d forgotten, a little, what it was like with Daniel. She’d never thought of herself as a bad girl, but he didn’t make her feel like a particularly good one. She felt untamed and wild.

He leaned back, just a hair, enough to look at her and see her answering nod. Then he picked her up again, swung her around onto her feet and led her to his room.

Jack’s bed was still a mess, but soon Danny’s was too. They crashed down. The blankets tangled around them. Calloused fingers caressed Sandra’s neck, moved down to the swell of her breasts and then past the waist of her jeans. Her skin and muscles fluttered there. She shuddered as he lifted her shirt, used his lips and mouth on her breasts. Her jeans were off and then so were his. Sandra ran her hands over his skin, down his back and to his thighs. She felt him quiver as she wrapped one hand around the length of him. He moved in her palm, then Danny’s mouth was back on hers. He was hot and perfect and right there and Sandra – she couldn’t see a thing. No premonitions. Only him and her. Her soul felt like it was floating.

They slid against one another and Sandra moaned and bucked up as Danny slid so far within her that it almost hurt.

She flew.

When Sandra woke two hours later, Danny was gone from the bed. It was quiet, a gentle murmur from outside the room and the blue flickering light of the old television set. Sandra grabbed her shirt and pants and tumbled across the floor, went across the hall to pick something clean from her box-dresser. She could only see the top of Danny’s head from the back of the couch, sitting slumped with one arm hanging over the side and his hand dangling down. He was still in nothing but his boxer shorts and the inside air was cooler, pricking gooseflesh across Sandra’s skin.

The clock in the kitchen read ten thirty.

Jack wasn’t home.

She shouldn’t worry, she knew. They were grown men. They knew how to take care of themselves. But they also knew how to kill someone. They knew how to hurt a person. How to mess things up and fuck girls and thieve everyone because they’d been raised that way and most of the time they just
didn’t
care—

Shuddering, in a cold sweat, Sandra gripped the fridge and pulled it open, pretending the chill in her bones came from the opened door where the leftover soup from two days ago resembled blood.

She couldn’t get her brain to shut off.

She had a bad feeling.

There had been a girl in her dream – she’d told Jack. Warned him.

She had seen them in the girl’s apartment suite, warm morning dawn spilling past the sheer curtains of her window. Jack was spread on the bed, sheets pulled to his waist and teeth marks on his pale neck and chest. The woman was thin, bones poking through her ribs and a needle resting on her naked thighs. She had a lighter and a spoon. Her hands shook.

The lamp beside the bed was broken and the sash at the window was ripped. Paint curled on the wood, the windows looking out high over the city.

Jack woke up when she tried to stick the needle in his arm.

“C’mon,” she said, voice smoky, crying out when he gripped her arm, purple-blue bruises forming around the tracks in her skin

His eyes had trouble focusing.

“Aren’t you having fun, baby?”

Before he left, Jack wrapped his fingers around her throat and squeezed because,
no,
he wasn’t having fun at all.

She let the fridge door close, leaving her blinking in the darkness, listening to the television and Danny’s slow, steady breaths. She had her shoes on before she could think.

She could see it in her mind’s eye. Jack meeting the girl – at a bar – because he wasn’t about to take a one-night stand out to dinner. Jack liked the beer and there was a pool table and he’d meet her, be taken in by her pale skin and thin wrists and fiery red hair. She looked tiny and frail and not quite healthy, but the bar light hid that. It hid the tracks on her arms and the flat color of her eyes and the smile that didn’t quite reach them.

Sandra thought she heard Danny call her name before the front door closed.

She could feel it in her bones, the urgency. She turned right. Ran. One block, two, another right turn past the shop sign, left at the brick building, another block, past the grocery, and then there was the bar, dark façade with a flickering neon sign. The outside looked kind of nice. But the inside was gritty, worse than normal. The clientele also looked grungier, like stepping into a back alley and a house of sin and a run-down prison all at once. There were bulbs missing along the left wall. There were deep, dark corners, but Sandra didn’t get a good look. Because Jack was running into her.