“Abby?”
The screen door banged softly in the wind.
Huey looked to his right and saw the door hanging open. His face went slack. After a long sequence of thought, doubt, and realization, he dropped the bowl and the cell phone and charged onto the porch.
The second Karen closed the bathroom door, her survival instinct kicked into overdrive. She turned on the sink taps, then opened the cabinet behind the mirror, revealing bottles of vitamins, drugs, facial cleansers, gauze bandages, and all the other sundries of a doctor ’s home medicine cabinet. On the bottom shelf was a stack of Lo-Ovral birth control pills. She grabbed them and threw them into the cabinet under the lavatory so Hickey wouldn’t see them if he came in.
She scanned the drugs in the cabinet. Zithromax, an antibiotic. Naproxen for Will’s arthritis. Methotrexate. Stuck behind the gauze bandage pack was a small brown prescription bottle. Her heart quickened as she picked it up and read the label: Mepergan Fortis. Demerol. But when she opened it, she saw only two red pills in its bottom. Not enough to put Hickey out quickly, even if she found a way to slip them into the Wild Turkey bottle. Raking frantically through the cabinet, she saw nothing that could help her. As she closed the door, she caught her reflection in its mirrored surface. She looked like a ghost of herself.
Splashing water on her face, she reached down for a hand towel and froze. Standing in a ceramic cup by the sink were three toothbrushes. But beside their blue and orange handles, a different sort of handle stuck up. A thinner one. She reached down and lifted it out of the glass. It was a disposable scalpel, its thin blade shielded by a plastic sheath. As she studied it, an arc of instinct closed, completing the circuit begun when Hickey dropped his pants.
“Christ, how long can it take?” he complained.
Hickey sounded like he was right outside the door. Dropping a washrag over the scalpel, Karen yanked off her panties, sat on the commode, and watched the doorknob.
It didn’t move.
She got up and took the scalpel from beneath the rag, then removed the clear protective sheath from the blade. Its edge was twice as bright as its side, honed to a sharpness that could lay open the human dermis like the skin of a peach. She straightened before the mirror and looked at herself. Was the scalpel concealable? After a moment’s thought, she raised it point-first toward her forehead and slid it neatly into her hair.
It vanished.
She turned her head right and then left, to see whether the scalpel was visible. It wasn’t. She felt her hair to see how obvious it was. Too obvious. If Hickey held her head for any reason, he would instantly discover the blade.
She pulled the scalpel from her hair and looked at it again. Six inches of plastic and surgical steel, flatter than a key and lighter than a pencil. The Papillon solution was not an option. She turned away from the mirror and looked back over her shoulder. She could see down to the upper cleft of her buttocks. For the first time in her life, she was glad to be carrying a few extra pounds. Using the mirror as a guide, she slid the scalpel, handle first, down between her cheeks. It felt cold and alien, but only the silver tip of the blade was visible at the base of her spine.
It would have to do.
All she could hope for now was to stack the odds a little in her favor. She opened the dirty clothes cabinet and stood on tiptoe. In the top section were two shelves she used to store clothes she rarely wore. She reached up and dug through them with feverish intensity.
There.
She wriggled into the claret-colored teddy Will had bought at the mall last year, a garment she’d never even tried on. The top half must have been designed by Wonder Bra, because it lifted and pressed her modest breasts together until the cleavage reminded her of the beach bunnies on Baywatch. The bottom half was ridiculously tight, with a sheer lace triangle over the crotch, leaving her fully exposed.
She looked like a French whore.
Perfect.
Crouching in a lightless thicket, Abby watched Huey lumber past her in the moonlight.
“Abby?” he called. “Why did you run away? You’re scaring me.”
She looked down at her doll, which she had laid across the ice chest to keep it out of the briars. She was trying hard not to make a sound, but her shins had already been scratched bloody, and they stung like a thousand paper cuts. She hadn’t wanted to go far from the lights, but she knew Huey would find her if she didn’t get into the dark.
He paused twenty feet to her left, looking into the wall of trees. “Abby? Where are you?”
She wondered how long she could wait here. The woods didn’t scare her. Not usually, anyway. Their house was in the middle of the woods. But she’d never spent the night in them, at least not alone. Only with her dad, at the Indian Princess camp-out. Already she’d heard sounds that made her shiver. Scuttling in the undergrowth, like armadillos, or maybe possums. There was a possum that kept eating the cat’s food at Kate Mosby’s house up the road. Abby had seen the cat fight it once, and the long, needlelike teeth of the possum as it hissed at the cat. If a possum came close now, she wouldn’t be able to sit still.
The other thing was her sugar. She felt like it was okay, but her mother wasn’t there to measure it, and if she started to “go south,” as her daddy put it, she would need a shot. She had never given herself a shot before.
“Come out!” Huey yelled, sounding really mad now.
Abby watched him pick up a big stick and poke some bushes with it. Then he moved off farther to her left, going along the line of trees.
She looked at the cabin, the lovely yellow light streaming from the windows. She wished she could wait inside, where there were no animals or bugs. Huey’s voice floated back to her on the wind.
“There’s bad things in the woods at night! Wolves and bears and things! You need Huey to look out for you!”
She hugged herself and tried not to listen. There might be bears in these woods, but she didn’t think so. And certainly not wolves. There weren’t any more wolves.
“There’s snakes, too,” Huey called. “Creepy crawly snakes looking for warm bodies in the dark.”
A chill shot up Abby’s spine. There were snakes in Mississippi, all right. Bad ones. She’d learned about them at Indian Princesses. Copperheads and cotton-mouths and ground rattlers and coral snakes. They’d seen a coral snake on one camp-out, sunning itself on a rock by the creek. The fathers didn’t even try to get close enough to kill it. They said if it bit you, you could die before you got to the hospital. Her dad had taught the Princesses a rhyme to help them tell the difference between a coral snake and a scarlet king snake, which looked almost exactly like it: If red touches yellow, it can kill a fellow.
“If the snakes get you, it won’t be my fault!” Huey yelled, beating the bushes off to her left.
Abby shut her eyes and tried not to cry.
When Karen emerged from the bathroom wearing the teddy, she saw Hickey lying under the covers in the middle of the bed. The only light came from the lamp on the end table. He gave a long, low wolf whistle.
“Man alive. That’s better than naked. Talk about getting with the program.”
As Karen moved toward the bed, she saw Will’s. 38 lying on the floor by the dust ruffle. That was how confident Hickey was in the diabolical cage of circumstance he had constructed.
He patted the side of the bed.
As she moved toward him, she slid the gun under the bed with her foot, then turned her back to him and slipped under the covers, being careful to keep her legs together as she moved. She tried not to stiffen as her hip and shoulder touched Hickey’s side, but she knew that her tension would be transmitted to him in a thousand subtle ways.
“Damn, you’re cold,” he complained.
“Sorry.” He smelled like a stale ashtray. She stared up at the ceiling as though she had nothing in her mind but enduring what was to come with stoicism. “What do you want me to do?”
“You’re not gonna whine about it?”
“Not if it keeps you from hurting Abby.”
“Thank God for small favors.” He turned sideways and propped himself on an elbow, and she felt him press
