“What?” she asked, obviously annoyed at my timing.
“It won’t take a minute,” I said, and I hurried from the car to the pickup, which was parked alongside us in the drive. I winked at Amy as I drove away. She looked back at me as if I had grown another head.
At the cabin I flung the door open without knocking and found Chad standing by the armoire. “Chad,” I said, approaching him. “How well did you do in that English class?” I hit him hard across the chest with a forearm and knocked him down on the bed. “Remember Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? Remember what Claudius tries to do to Hamlet?”
For a moment he looked like he was going to jump at me. Then he seemed to change his mind. He said, “What the fuck are you talking about, Deegan?” He pulled himself along the mattress and sat up with his back against the headboard.
“I saw two guys at Ollie’s farm. They were driving a blue Lincoln Continental and wearing shoulder holsters. I saw them right after Amy and I were invited to dinner by a guy associated with your stepfather, a guy who’s never invited anybody to dinner before in his life.”
Chad didn’t say anything, but his face started to go pale at the mention of the blue Lincoln.
“You recognize the car?”
“It’s mine,” he said. He stopped abruptly, as if he suddenly remembered who he was talking to. “What did they look like?”
“Turns out your stepfather owns HM, Chad. Why do you think he would own a horse like that? That’s a dangerous animal.”
Chad seemed to think a moment. “Sure,” he said, talking more to himself than to me. “Of course.”
“Be gone when I get back, Chad. You can leave Amy some sort of note — but don’t see her again. Is that fair?”
He didn’t answer. He was still pale and looking away from me, at the far wall, as if he were looking through it to the mountains beyond.
I closed the door firmly and drove back to Amy, who was waiting for me with a puzzled, exasperated expression. “All done,” I said, and started for Ollie’s.
It didn’t take long to figure out why Ollie never invited anyone to his home. We weren’t in the house two minutes before Margaret asked us if we were saved. In the years since I’d last seen her, she’d gone from stout to massive, and the glittering intensity in her eyes struck me as half mad. She brought out the Bibles, three of them, one for Amy, one for me, and her own. Ollie watched all this with a sad, impotent expression, letting us know he was sorry for her behavior but unable to do anything about it. Until dinner was ready, Amy and I sat trapped on two uncomfortable, straight-back chairs, answering questions posed by Margaret about our interior, spiritual lives. She asked questions, we answered politely, and then she lectured us, beginning every little speech the same way: When you know Jesus, she’d start, and then she’d tell us how much fuller our lives would be once we were saved.
Ollie and I never got a chance for a private word, though I’m not sure I would have told him anything. From time to time, while Margaret went on and on, I worried over the consequences of what I had done. I imagined a blue Lincoln Continental arriving at our door and delivering a pair of thugs who’d execute us, gangland style, a bullet apiece in the back of the head. At one point, I had a vision of the farm in flames, while a dark-suited young man held a gun to the back of Amy’s head. The image was so disturbing, I think I must have made a noise of some kind, grunted or moaned, because Ollie and Amy both turned to look at me, though Margaret went on, deaf to anything but the import of her message.
Eventually there was dinner, a dried-up, barely edible meat loaf. Margaret had indeed brought out the good china for us, but she had apparently neglected to wash it before setting the table. The plates and glasses, even the pewter candleholder at the center of a wrinkled, white tablecloth, were coated with a thin, greasy substance, the kind of grime that might accumulate after years of disuse on a pantry shelf. It was a strange experience, that meal. It began with a standing grace, during which we all held hands while Margaret intoned St. Francis’ Prayer, the one that begins Lord, make us the instruments of thy peace. No one ate more than a bite or two of meat loaf, which Margaret seemed not to notice. By the time we were back in our car, heading for the farm, Amy had gone from discomfort to distress to amusement. “She’s crazy,” she laughed, grasping her seat belt with both hands, as if she needed to steady herself. “The woman’s out of her mind!” She leaned close and gave me a deadpan look. “Did you see that meat loaf?” She screamed.
I laughed along with Amy, but my thoughts raced ahead to the farm. There was a stretch of driveway right before we reached the garage from which Chad’s cabin was visible, and the spot alongside the cabin where he parked his car. It was late but the moon was almost full and Amy would be able to see the cabin clearly if she was looking — and I suspected she would be looking. I started up the drive speedily, hoping to hurry past the clear view of the dark cabin, and then almost hit the brake when I saw Chad’s chartreuse convertible. Alongside me, Amy stretched and yawned, though I had seen her head turn toward the cabin as soon as it came into view. “I’m sleepy,” she said.
I nodded, my throat suddenly so dry I wasn’t sure I could speak. I got out of the car at the house and stood silently while Amy started for the door. I listened hard but heard only the sounds of the farm: a breeze rustling leaves, a horse rattling a bucket in one of the barns.
“Are you coming?” Amy held the door.
I looked down at the front tires, as if I had been concerned about the car, and then followed Amy into the house. I went to the kitchen and opened the fridge. I cleared my throat. “I think I need something to eat.”
“No kidding,” Amy said. She pm her arm around my shoulder and looked into the fridge with me a moment. “I’m tired, though.” She kissed me on the cheek and said, “I’ll see you in the morning,” and went up to her room.
I closed the refrigerator, and when I heard the door to her room shut, I turned off the lights and looked out the back window. Chad’s car was exactly where it had been when Amy and I left. I hesitated a minute at the sink, looking out at the farm’s shadows, at the fence and the posts and the dark planks of the barns, the only sounds those coming from Amy’s bedroom and the dull knocking of my own heart. I went out the back door and cut through a corral, walking at first but then jogging until I reached the steps of Chad’s cabin. The lights were out, but the door was half open. “Chad,” I said, and it came out sounding like a question I was asking myself. I pushed the door open and called his name again, though it was obvious, even in the dark, that the cabin was empty. In the bathroom I heard a steady trickle of water falling from the shower nozzle. I turned on the lights and the only things I saw clearly before bolting out the door and hurrying to the stud barn were the bloody handprints on the shower stall.
“I told him,” I said aloud. I almost shouted it. When I reached the barn, I was running, and when I saw the light on in HM’s stall, I knew what I was going to find. I stopped running before I got to the stall. HM stood looking out, facing me. He threw his head back twice, cocky and full of himself. “You bastard,” I said to him, and then I said, again, “I told him.” I knew what I was going to find in the stall and I didn’t want to see it, and then when I did finally step up to the door and take hold of the bars and look in, it was as if I had stepped into a dream. I felt the numb paralysis of a nightmare, and I was unable for an instant to understand what I was seeing. When I did finally understand, I couldn’t think about it. I backed away from the stall empty-headed. I backed away from both of them, with their dark suits and dark ties, their heads bashed in. their faces bloody and slack over the crushed bones of their skulls. I backed away from the sight of them and walked out of the barn dazed.