"Oh, Mom ..."
"I'm hurt, Sheridan darling," her mother said in a clear voice.
"He shot me, and I don't think I'm okay. I don't know who it was who shot me."
Sheridan wailed and buried her head into her mother's breasts. She could feel her mother's strong heartbeat. But Sheridan's hand, which was wrapped around her mother's waist, was warm and wet.
"Oh God," her mom said, with a choke in her throat. "I can't feel anything. Everything is numb."
It had all happened so quickly that Sheridan couldn't yet grasp the situation.
Suddenly, her mother was bathed in light, and Sheridan could see her mother's face and the tears in her eyes and the blood, lots of it, spreading across the floor. Her mother looked from Sheridan to the source of the light, and Sheridan followed.
"Stay where you are, you two," the man said, almost calmly. Then he withdrew the flashlight. They heard him trying to get in the locked back door.
"Somebody let me in," the man said with authority.
Sheridan's mom reached up and squeezed Sheridan's arm. "Get away, Sheridan."
"I can't," Sheridan said. The words tumbled out as she cried. "It's all my fault this happened. He said if I told anyone he would hurt our family. He said he would hurt you and Lucy and Dad. He said he would hurt the baby." Her tears dropped on her mother's face.
"Unlock the goddamned door!" A loud crash accompanied the man's yell as he began to hurl himself against the back door. There was a big crack down the center of the door. Splinters flew across the floor.
"Get away now," her mother said.
"Run out the front door and keep running. Hide and wait for your dad and Wacey to come back." Her voice was not as strong as it had been a minute ago. "Don't you stop, Sheridan."
Her mother's words rooted Sheridan to the spot. The truck outside that looked like her father's but wasn't, the man's familiar voice, and her mother's words all sprang out in sharp clarity and a surge of
recognition hit her.
"But Mom, that's Wacey outside the door," Sheridan cried. "It was Wacey who said he would hurt us!"
But her mom's eyes were closed, and her hand had dropped to the floor. Sheridan could still feel her heartbeat though, and she looked like she was sleeping.
Sheridan said, "I love you, Mom," and then she was up and running, deftly juking around the coffee table in the living room and out the front door just as the backdoor gave way and Wacey Hedeman stumbled into the house.
Running like she had never run before, not even feeling the soles of her tennis shoes on the grass or the broken concrete of the walkway, the screen door slamming behind her, Sheridan ran through the front gate onto Bighorn Road, changed her mind, and turned back toward the driveway.
Sheridan stopped and caught herself as she reached for the handle on the door of the car. She was not thinking clearly, and she realized she had no plan at all once she was inside the car. She could lock the doors, but Wacey could simply smash through the glass and get her. She couldn't drive away because her mom always took the keys with her and they were probably in her purse, on the floor, in the house.
So she dropped to her belly and scrambled under the car like a crab. Gravel from the driveway ground into her bare hands and jammed into the top of her trousers. A piece of hot metal that was sticking out under the car tore through her shirt and into the skin of her back.
Then she was out the other side and up again. She paused and tried to think.
Either she could run out onto Bighorn Road again and maybe be seen and picked up by somebody or she could go around the garage and into the backyard. But in the road, he could see her better, and shoot or run her down. She knew the backyard very well and the grounds around it. He might not look there first, which would give her time. These thoughts shot through her brain, and then she ran toward the garage. For a terrifying few seconds she was in the open where she could easily
be seen if he was looking.
Before she dropped to her hands and knees to crawl through the lilac bushes, she glanced over her shoulder. The lights in the house were on now, and Wacey was coming out the front door. He had one hand on the screen door knob and was holding the pistol in the other. He was looking out toward the road, squinting, and she was sure he hadn't seen her vanish into the dark bushes that formed a hedge between the house and the garage.
As she weaved through the bushes toward the back--she couldn't see well but had done it so many times before--she heard him call her name. Then he called her name again.
Not really seeing but knowing, she cleared the bushes and ran across the backyard. She avoided both the light of the floodlights and the trunk of the cottonwood tree, then raced through the woodpile where the neat rows of logs had been kicked to pieces and then through the corral fence. The stall was empty and dark, and her dad's horse was gone. She pulled down a heavy horse blanket from a cross beam in the tack room and threw it over her shoulder and ran out of the stall toward the Sandrock draw and up into the foothills. She would go to the place where she once thought monsters had come from.
She heard Wacey yell her name again. He was now out on the road.
Sheridan climbed up the draw away from the house. Cactus pierced her feet, and wild rose bushes tugged at her clothes, hair, and skin as if trying to prevent her from climbing still farther, as if trying to throw her back to where she belonged. It was hard to see where she was going so she navigated blindly, using senses she didn't know she had to tell her when to turn, when to duck, and when to step over a rock. Several times, she covered her head and arms in the horse blanket to push her way through thickets that would tear her skin or trip her.
Finally, she stopped. She could go no farther. Her chest hurt from panting, and her legs and arms were too heavy to lift anymore. She sank to the ground, her back to a boulder on the side of the draw. She pulled the horse blanket around her and covered her mouth with it to muffle her racking sobs. Her mind was filled with the image of her mother on the floor. She put the fingers of the hand she had held her mom with in her mouth, and she tasted blood. And she listened, hoping she wouldn't hear Wacey coming after her.
Instead, she heard her name being called very clearly.
"Sheridan, I know you can hear me," he yelled. She figured he must now be in the backyard. His voice carried through the draw and certain words bounced back in echoes.
"I know you can hear me, Sheridan. You need to listen to me." Her head emerged from the folds of the blanket. "Sheridan, I'm really sorry about what happened.
I apologize to you and to your mom. She scared the hell out of me, and I shot before I even knew who it was. Really, believe me. Please." He sounded as if he were telling the truth, Sheridan thought.
"I called for the ambulance, and it's on the way. Your mom is going to be okay. I just talked to her, and she's going to be just fine. It looks a lot worse than it really is. She's just worried about her little girl. She needs you to come back. She really misses you. She's real worried."
But he was a good liar. He had shot her pregnant mother, and he had come after her. The last thing her mom had told her was to get away. Sheridan believed what her mom told her. A lot more than she believed Wacey Hedeman.
"Sheridan, answer me so I can tell you're okay! Your mama needs to know."
He went on like that for a while. She listened but didn't speak or move. Her breath was finally calming, and her chest didn't hurt as much. The blanket was thick and warm, and it smelled like Lizzie and the leather of her dad's saddle. It comforted her.
His voice got harsher. He was now demanding that she answer him. There was no mention of her mother now. That meant he had been lying all along, as she had supposed. He wanted to know if she had told him everything she knew about "her little friends." He had been trying to find those Miller's weasels for two straight days, and all he could find, he said, was a bunch of goddamned turds in the woodpile.