Confession by Nancy Pickard
“The end,” I whispered. “Let’s watch what they do at the end.”
When that beating finished, a woman appeared on the tape with a bowl of what looked like water in her hands, and then another woman appeared with a cloth and they gently dabbed the man’s wounds. Meanwhile, the man I had come to think of as the Executioner walked around to the front of Luke and grasped his elbows, and the two men embraced as much as they could, considering one of them was in agony and bleeding.
“They’re both crying,” I pointed out to Geof.
“Fuck!” he said suddenly, sounding so shocked and disgusted that I turned to stare at him. But it wasn’t the men’s tears that had elicited that reaction from him. “Look at the man with the whip, Jenny. The same one who hit the kid. It’s Ron.”
“Oh, no,” I said, the words coming out like a low moan; they were carried away by the sound of the rain falling even harder outside the shed. I heard a loud crack that at first I thought was lightning; half a second later, I realized it was the more frightening sound of a door slamming at the house.
“Geof … !”
“Shh.” He shoved me back into the corner behind the shed door. My spine slammed against wood, causing me to gasp and the rain jacket I had on to rustle noisily. I reached back with my hands to touch bare wood and to keep my balance, and I froze in place, willing the fabric and my breathing to be quiet. The rainy air smelled so fresh at that moment, and it released the heavy sweet scent of the wood in the shed walls; I felt embraced by invisible fragrances that surrounded but couldn’t hide us.
Cautiously, Geof risked a look outside but then quickly stepped back.
I said nothing, swallowing the “What?” that was in my mouth. Someone must be right outside, I thought, or else Geof would be trying to close the door, or—better yet—he’d be leading the way back to our car. My heart began thwapping like loose film on a projector.
“Who’s in there?” I heard a man’s voice shout. And then a yell: “Luke! John! Somebody’s hiding in the shed!”
Silently, Geof reached out a hand to me, and I took it.
There was another slamming of doors back at the house, bam, bam, bam, then a loud movement of people near us, and Geof withdrew his hand from mine. In another moment, I felt something heavy fall onto my right foot, something that made a slight metallic clang when it landed, then my husband stepped forward and around the shed door, revealing his presence there.
But not mine.
I looked down. His car keys lay on my right shoe.
There was the sound of people moving around outside the shed, but very few words reached me over the racket the rain made as it coursed onto the roof and down the drain spouts. I thought I heard Geof identify himself by name and then, very clearly, as a policeman. I heard grunting, and somebody slammed up against the outside wall of the shed. Then there was silence or, rather, only the rain. I could only guess that the men of the Mayer clan had taken my husband with them, presumably back to the house, leaving the shed door wide open and me cowering behind it.
While I waited, afraid to move too soon, heavy footsteps pounded back to the shed. I saw a man’s hand, a flash of a white-covered arm, and I pressed further into the corner as the fingers of the hand grabbed hold of the edge of the door, pulling it shut. Next, I heard metal going through metal.
Please, I prayed, don’t lock it.
There was no sound of the padlock snapping shut, and with that realization came a great wave of relief that weakened my knees. I pushed my shoulders against the wood, so that my legs couldn’t fail me, and I listened to footfalls running away from the shed, their noise disappearing into the rain. And then came a muffled slamming of a door.
I made myself take ten breaths before I moved again, and the first move was to snatch Geof’s keys and hold onto them like a weapon. Then I inched forward until I could see out the crack where the edge of the door met the edge of the building. All was a rainy black outside, no light except from the house, no people in sight, nothing to stop me.
Except, possibly, the padlock, which was once again attached to the door but hanging open.
I pushed the door slightly, just enough to reach my fingers through, and then I jiggled the padlock until the clasp moved up and through the hole. On my first try it fell with a sodden thud onto the ground, and once again I experienced relief so intense it felt like an ocean wave swelling over me.
I pushed open the door just enough to slip through, then refastened the lock, now muddy as well as wet, just as they had left it. Wiping my hands on the rain jacket Geof had lent me, I considered my best course of action.
Run to the car phone in the Jeep?
But my husband was inside that glowing house.
I crept up to the back door again, drawn to it by the magnet that was Geof. Again, I peered through the crack in the curtain. This time, there was nobody in the kitchen, so I looked past it into the living room where all of the clan were gathered, all of them staring intently at the far end of the room.
This time the person in the yellow chair was my husband.
He’d removed his parka and his suit coat, or they’d been removed from him.
One of the big men in white had my husband’s own gun pointed at him.
Geof was talking, looking the way he did at home when he wanted to persuade me to believe something that went against my natural instincts. What kind of story was he giving them, I wondered, to rationalize his presence in that shed with its treasure trove of evidence against these people?
The man with the gun lowered it.
I touched the window pane with my fingers and nearly wept with relief when I saw him actually lay the gun aside on a small table. Then the old man, Ronald Mayer, Sr., the white-haired man we had seen on the country road, stepped into my view, dressed all in white, and started talking to Geof.
Geof’s face was turned up, listening.
Then he looked down at the white flooring. I watched as he put his face in his hands and then raised it, looking suddenly wretched and talking fast, from the looks of him.
And all the while, through all of it, David’s Uncle Matthew was standing to one side, videotaping the whole scene.
I crept away from the door although I wanted desperately to batter it in, to ram my way into that damned house and to scatter men, women, and children as I dived for my husband, freeing him, grabbing his gun, saving him. If he needed saving. Maybe he didn’t, that’s what I couldn’t know. My intelligence overrode my desire, and I left him there, feeling as if it was abandonment. I thought—hoped—that the best way to help him was to get to the car phone as fast as possible.
That short run through the rain was the loneliest I had ever made. The trees I was running toward appeared to be taller and darker than any trees ever had before, and the rain—the same rain that had been falling all day—felt suddenly as cold as the sides of knives pressed against my skin. I was terrified for myself and desperately afraid for the man in the yellow kitchen chair.
These were people who didn’t forgive trespasses; they punished them! These people beat children and made the children believe it was only because the grown-ups loved them. And these people had my husband!
I flung myself at the Jeep as if it were an old friend, and once inside it again, I grabbed for the car phone, knowing the person I most wanted to reach for advice and for help was Sergeant Lee Meredith. But it was a useless effort. After a few increasingly despairing tries, I slammed the receiver back down in its cradle. Because of the interference of the storm or the distance from town or I didn’t know what problems, I couldn’t make the telephone connection to Port Frederick!
Now what? Wait for him to come out of that house?
Barely able to see through the rain coming down the windshield, I sat and waited for five minutes, ten, fifteen, until I got too frantic with worry to be able to bear it any longer. I started the Jeep and would have driven off and rocketed back down the highway for help, but I thought, Wait. I’ll try the phon
“Information. What city, please?”
“Oh, my God! Oh, thank you! Port Frederick. Meredith, Lee.”
I memorized the number the computer gave me.
“Blessed modern conveniences!” I babbled while I dialed again. Water was dripping from my hair, my jacket, from everywhere on me onto everything that I touched. “Oh, wonderful twentieth-century satellite telecommunications system, I love you!”
“This is Lee Meredith. Hello?”
“Oh, Lee, thank God! It’s Jenny. Can you hear me? Let me talk, so I make sure you hear all this in case we lose our connection. Geof may be in trouble, Lee, and I need you to tell me what to do …”
I described the situation to her.
“Sit tight,” she told me. “I’m coming, and I’m bringing reinforcements with me. But it may take me at least an hour to get it together and then to find you. You stay the hell away from those people, all right?”
“Yes.”
She hung up even before I did.
And then I had nothing to do but worry again.
Five more minutes, another ten, fifteen …
I picked up the phone again on a whim of an idea.
“Information, what city, please?”
“I don’t know, operator, but it’s right outside Port Frederick, and the name is Mayer, Ronald, Sr.”
“Would that be a city street or a rural route?”
“Rural route! Oh, yes!”
When the computer gave me that number, I memorized it, then dialed it before I could forget it and before I could stop and think, perhaps more wisely.
Somebody in the farmhouse picked up the phone.
“Mayer Farm,” a woman said.
“Hello!” I said brightly, trying to cover the tremor in my voice. “This is Jennifer Cain. My husband was invited to your church service tonight, and I’m terribly sorry to disturb you, but I have an emergency here at home, and I just really need to talk to him. Could you ask him to come to the phone, please?”
There was a very long pause while I held my breath.
“Yes,” she said finally, courteously. “I’ll get him.”
The next voice I heard was the only one I wanted to hear.
“Jenny?”
“Oh, my God, is that really you? Are you all right? Can you talk, can you listen?”
“Where are you?”
“In the car. Tell them I’m having an emergency appendectomy, tell them something, but tell them you have to leave and come home right away.”
“I’ll be right there!” he exclaimed, faking it. “Will you be okay until I get there? Tell them to take good care of you!”
And then he hung up the phone inside the house.
I didn’t want to let him go; I felt he was only safe while I held on to him via the telephone line.
Now, I thought, I prayed, they have to let him go.
Because now they knew that other people knew he was there.
Again, I waited … five minutes … almost ten … and I was ready to call the farmhouse again when their front door opened. I held my breath, then released it when I saw my husband come out alone, moving slowly, wearing his parka again.
Geof continued to walk away from the farmhouse unimpeded.
No one followed him, though I thought I saw a beam of quick light as if somebody sneaked a peek by drawing a curtain back but then let it fall into place again.
My heart tugged him toward me, willing him to move faster, but he didn’t. He walked slowly, head down, back slightly bent, one step at a time, carefully, as if he were not sure of his footing in the muddy darkness. Once, he turned and looked back at the glowing house as if he’d heard something, but then he turned slowly back around and resumed his long, wet walk.
“Here,” I softly called to him through a window when he was close, and then I couldn’t stand sitting there a moment longer, so I opened the door and ran out into the rain to meet him. He held out his arms, robotlike, and I hurried toward him. He caught me by my hands before I could embrace him.
“Get us out of here, Jenny.”
I didn’t stop to say a word but ran back to the car and started the engine while he climbed in slowly—oh, so slowly, I thought he’d never get in!—on the passenger’s side. As I rapidly pulled us out onto the road leading to the highway, I told him, “I called the Mounties, Geof. Lee’s rounding up some reinforcements and bringing them out here.”
“Stop them,” he said. “Call her back.”
Using one hand to dial and the other to drive, I did as he asked and handed him the phone.
“False alarm, Lee,” he told her. “They thought I was a prowler.” He smiled, and only I could see how false it was. “We agreed to let each other go with only a warning this time.”
“But Geof,” I started to say, “what—”
He reached over and squeezed my right hand until it hurt enough to shut me up.
What about the way they manhandled you? I’d been going to protest. What about the way they videotaped you, what about the gun they took off you and held up to you?
After a little more quiet consultation with his would-be rescuer, he quietly replaced the receiver, and then I could say it. “Geof, what about—”
“Thanks for calling out the troops,” he interrupted, his voice sounding odd, thin, strained. “You did just what I hoped you would do when I threw my keys at you. I’m sorry about all this, I know it probably scared the hell out of you.”
I could only nod my head.
“Yeah, well, me, too.”
In the darkness of the front seat, he looked at me out of the face of a stranger—someone older, haggard, hurting. I moved instinctively to touch him, but again, he fended me off.
“Geof …”
“You mind driving?”
“Of course not.”
“Thanks. I’d rather not talk either.”
All the way back, he leaned forward, his head in his hands as if he was thinking deeply or was too tired even to lean back.
“Geof, are you all right?”
“Apart from being embarrassed, you mean? Jenny, just drive straight on home, will you?”
“Don’t we have to go to the station? Make a report? Get in deep trouble? Take our medicine?”
“Yes.” He was still talking into his hands, not lifting his face. “But we won’t, all right?”
I looked over at him, reached out, and started to touch his shoulder, but he moved a little just at that moment, and my hand fell on thin air. “Okay,” I said. “Whatever you want to do.”
“Let’s just go home, Jenny.”
“You really don’t want to talk to me, do you?”
“No,” he said, his face in his hands.
I drove my husband home, both of us silent, and the only noise coming from the rain and the traffic.
Geof groaned when he saw our driveway. “Damn!”
The Reverend Hardy Eberhardt’s car, his old Pontiac sedan, was parked in front of our house. When I stopped our car in the driveway rather than going on into the garage, my husband moved, his hand angling for the door handle, and I thought I heard him make a sound like a hiss indrawn through his teeth. In a voice so tight and strained it frightened me, he said, “Ministers have a code of confidentiality, like shrinks, right? So if Hardy sees some secrets tonight, he’s damned well got to keep them.”
“Secrets … ?”
Again, I reached out to him, this time intending only to stroke his face, still damp from the rain. But he moved away from me again, and this time he said, breaking my heart, “Don’t touch me, Jenny.”
28
HE WALKED ALONE TOWARD OUR FRONT door, where Hardy was sitting on our stoop under our porch light, gazing out at the rain and at our arrival. He had on a brown suit with a pale red shirt, undone at the neck. When the minister stood up and started down the steps toward us, I saw a necktie stuffed in his coat pocket.
“’Bout time,” he joked. “It’s hell to drop in on peopl
As we neared him, I brought up the rear, hovering over the progress of the man in front of me. Geof took a step on the gravel with his right foot, but when he stepped onto his left again, it buckled, and he lurched forward.
“Hardy, help him!” I cried.
“No!” Geof took another step, faltered again, and swayed where he stood, like a drunk trying to get his balance.
Hardy ran the rest of the way over the gravel toward us and reached out to support Geof, who stopped him by commanding again, “No! I’ll lean on you, Hardy, just let me lean on you!”
“What’s the matter with you, boy?” Hardy’s voice was brusque. “Somebody shoot you? You finally forget to duck?” I heard Geof’s strained laughter as the two big men slowly made it to the door, the one leaning heavily on the other. “I’ve been paying for my sins, Hardy. They finally caught up with me.”
“’Bout time,” the minister retorted, echoing his greeting to us. The gruff, macho persona he was feigning was just the shot of vigor Geof needed; I could practically see my husband draw strength from the tone of his friend’s deep voice and the touch of his beefy shoulder. This is why cops have partners, I thought irrelevantly. And more relevantly, This is why people have friends. But when our friend looked back at me, over Geof’s shoulder, I saw in his eyes the apprehension I was feeling in my heart. I scurried past them with my keys to get the doors unlocked, then we all made it inside as I turned on lights ahead of them.
“Couple of drowned rats,” Hardy observed of us.
Geof headed straight for our kitchen, walking like Frankenstein’s monster, staggering a bit, waving off Hardy and me as we fluttered around him like useless moths around a burning lamp.
“Please,” he instructed us through clenched jaw, “do not fucking touch me.”