Abe pushed the woman out of the way and stormed into the house.
“Where is she?” he shouted.
He ran down the hallway, shoving through doors, looking wildly around each room. The rooms were dark, and he fumbled for light switches, blinking at the bright glare only to find furniture, clean and shining, stinking of furniture polish, and beneath everything the scent of bleach.
When Abe returned to the foyer, the woman had vanished, which unnerved him. But he stormed up the stairs, taking them three at a time, yelling Amber’s and Orla’s names.
Orla
“I always had this fantasy that one day I would meet someone, a woman, and this…” he paused, furrowed his brow, “compulsion would die. Whoosh, gone. It was like a fairytale. Young girls imagine their knight in shining armor, and I’m dreaming of a sorceress who has the power to make me stop wanting to kill.”
Spencer had tied Orla to a stiff-backed wooden chair. He sat in a matching chair, facing her.
“I’ve never talked about this before. I sensed I could talk to you in the park that day.” He chuckled. “When you disappeared, I racked my brain for days.” He leaned toward her, hands balanced on his knees. “I thought I might have killed you and forgotten. I searched the woods for two days in a panic.”
“Has that happened before? You killed someone and forgot?”
He shook his head slowly.
“I don’t think so.” He laughed. “Sometimes I’m wasted. The last hours get a little foggy. I remember, but… the memories are different from day-to-day things. I never realized how difficult it would be to articulate all this. Maye I’ll write a fiction book someday. I could put it all down, and no one would be the wiser.”
“Does your mother take part in the killings?”
Spencer recoiled as if Orla had slapped him.
“Of course not. Why would ask that?”
“The morning after I spent the night with you, your mother approached me in the driveway and stuck a needle in my neck,” Orla told him.
He looked momentarily embarrassed, as if they were on a date and Orla had told Spencer that his mother insulted her shoes.
“She’s very protective,” he explained.
“Protective?” Orla couldn’t keep the sarcasm from her voice.
He leaned back and rested his hands in his lap.
“I don’t want to talk about my mother.”
Orla studied his haunted blue eyes. This man intended to kill her. He’d bound her to a wooden chair, duct tape biting into the raw flesh of her wrists and ankles. Her only hope was to keep him talking until Ben returned.
“Does Ben know?” Orla nodded her head toward the closed door of the bedroom.
Spencer’s lips curled away from his teeth.
“That square? He’s the type who’d kill himself before he’d take a life. He’s a virgin, you know? Unless you and he…”
Anger bubbled within Orla at his words.
Don’t provoke him, she thought.
“No, he helped me. He’s a good man.”
Spencer scoffed and touched the handle of a long, serrated knife he’d set on the table.
Orla shifted her wrist back and forth, subtly, imperceptibly, feeling the tape catch on a splinter on the chair.
“When did it start? The desire to kill?” she asked.
He squinted, cocked his head.
“I don’t know. My earliest memory is my mother sitting me inside this box. It was thick metal, soundproof, light proof. I saw her face disappear as she closed the lid and left me in the darkness. I don’t remember ever coming out of that box. Almost like the good Spencer went in and never came back out. Later, when I started to think about girls, and sex, I always thought of that box. I didn’t want to date. I wanted a girl I could keep in that box. Crazy, right?” He lifted the knife and pressed his finger against the point.
“There was no pivotal moment. I fantasized about girls like any young guy does but in my fantasies…” He paused and looked up. His eyes were so dark, not the eyes she’d seen that first day in the park. “The girls were bound, they cried and screamed. I liked it. It aroused me.”
Spencer’s hand moved to his leg. He squeezed his thigh, as if an uncontrollable urge had begun to roll over him. Orla realized she’d made a mistake in probing. He’d begun with honesty, but the telling of the fantasy had ignited something.
From the other room, Orla heard the girl whimper.
Spencer darted his eyes toward the sound. She saw the color rising into his neck, and then his face. His breathing shifted, becoming shorter and faster.
“Please, Spencer,” Orla said. She pushed against the restraints, searching for the words that would calm him. “Spencer,” she said again, louder. She wiggled her arm back and forth, and heard the rip as the tape started to pull apart.
He looked back at her blankly as if he didn’t know who she was.
“You don’t have to do this. Let me help you.”
He had stopped listening, and he had not heard the tape. He stood, eyes vacant, and picked up the knife.
“No,” Orla shouted. “Stop!”
He didn’t stop. From the other room, the girl cried out.
Orla scraped her wrist faster and jerked it up, breaking the frayed tape free. She fumbled, sweat making her hands slip as she removed the tape from her other wrist and her ankles. She stood and heard the woman begging for her life.
“Spencer!” Orla screamed.
She picked up the chair, she’d been taped to, and threw it towards the door. It hit the doorframe and sent a spray of wood splintering to the floor.
As Spencer emerged from the room, dazed, a wild look in his eyes; Orla wrenched open the front door of the cabin and raced into the storm.
Abe
The girls did not respond as Abe rushed down the hallway calling their names.
A huge picture, lit by an eerie pale light, caught his eye. He gazed at an aerial view of the Crows’ property. He saw the house of Mrs. Crow. At the opposite end of the property stood the doctor’s house, and in the center, nestled deep in the thick woods, he saw a small cabin, a ring of smoke curling from the tiny chimney. He blinked at it, followed it to M-22, to that special curve in the road.
He turned toward the stairs and the woman was there, her stance wide and solid. Something gleamed in her claw-like hand. A knife… no, a syringe. His mind flashed to that long-ago prescription for arsenic and her dead husband. He shook his head in vague disbelief. This woman with her made-up face and her string of pearls gazing at him with the eyes of a killer.
It seemed unreal that he could find himself in this moment, in this house of horrors.
He ran toward her, and she lunged at him. He tried to dodge the needle, but she sunk it into his shoulder. Before she could depress the syringe, he grabbed her arms and wrench her back, lifting her from the ground. She shrieked, her colorless eyes blazing, and swung the needle wildly, nearly sinking it into his cheek. He threw her toward the wall. She smacked into it and landed awkwardly, crying out as her ankle twisted. Her head thudded backwards. Not hard enough to knock her unconscious. But she looked dazed as she toppled sideways onto the hall rug.
Abe ran down the stairs and out the door.
Rain poured through the trees. The leaves, heavy and dripping, provided little respite. For the first several minutes he sprinted blindly through the storm, slipping on wet leaves, catching his foot on a root and sprawling on his face. He stood up, tried to get his bearings.
The cabin was located north, somewhere between the doctor’s house and Virginia’s.