“What’s this?” said Debbie, looking at her to see if she was joking.
“It’s your bed,” said Chris, with a straight face.
“A hammock?”
“You might like it,” Chris said with a grin, imaging her and Andy in it together as she went out the door.
Debbie shrugged gamely. “Why not?” she said, lifting off one end to stretch the hammock out to the opposite hook. It couldn’t be any worse than the backseat of a car.
Andy came staggering in, weighed down by their bags and his guitar. He looked around the room. “Where’s the bed?” he said, puzzled.
Debbie held up one end of the hammock, with a grin.
“All right!” called Chris, hooking the hoist to the hay bale and stepping back.
Rick, standing shirtless up in the hayloft, grunted and hoisted the bale up, swinging it inside through the large square window of the loft. He pulled the bale in, unhooked it, took a deep breath, and sent the hoist back down.
“Chris, I don’t understand why you guys have so much hay,” he called down to her. “You don’t have any horses. You never did.”
Chris hooked another hay bale to the hoist and gave the rope a tug to signal him. “It was my father’s idea,” she shouted to him. “Every year, he makes plans to buy a horse. And every year, he buys all this hay and no horse. You figure it out.”
She didn’t explain that her father had actually almost bought the horse this year, but at the last minute her mother had decided that she couldn’t bear to come back here again when the awful thing had happened to her daughter. And her father had never gotten around to buying the horse or canceling the hay order or any of a dozen other things that he had meant to take care of. Everything was just sort of hanging in limbo. Waiting. Just as her parents were waiting tensely at home right now, wondering how she was doing, feeling helpess and frustrated because she had refused to let them come with her and they hadn’t been able to stop her from going without them. They had been astonished that she had wanted to come back here after what had happened.
Well, she hadn’t wanted to come, but she had no choice. And having her friends with her for the weekend, knowing she could depend on them for support, was incredibly important. Somehow, she had to come to terms with what had happened here and learn to live with it. She couldn’t very well expect her parents to do it until she could.
“You realize, of course,” Rick called down to her from the loft, suddenly breaking in on her thoughts, “I gave up an opportunity to spend the weekend with Mary Jo Conrad for this.”
He gave a heave on the rope.
“You mean you actually gave up a chance to be with the Mary Jo Conrad for little ole me?” Chris called up to him, playing along.
“That’s right,” he said, pulling up the next bale and swinging it inside the loft.
“Boy, are you dumb!” said Chris.
“Okay, Chris,” Rick said, sending down the hoist again. “I realize I’m just a country boy and my feelings don’t really matter, but this is the sweat of a worker, not a lover.”
He gave a sharp pull on the rope and grunted. This was a heavy one.
“Now, I believe there’s a time and place for everything,” he called down to her, straining as he pulled the rope. “And now’s the time and now’s the place, if you know what I mean.”
This hay bale seemed unusually heavy. He gritted his teeth and pulled hard, feeling the muscles bunching in his arms and shoulders. He wasn’t that out of shape, was he?
“So what I think we should do is,” he grunted “set aside three hours a day to fulfill our needs. One hour in the morning,” he gave another heave “and two at night. If you agree . . .”
What the hell, he thought, straining on the rope, this hay bale seemed to weight a ton!
Chris suddently rose up level with him. “Were you talking to me?” she said, standing with her foot in the hoist, hanging on to the rope and giggling.
With a wry smile, Rick let go of the rope and with a yelp, Chris plummeted to the ground as the rope ran out through the block. As she hit, landing in a pile of hay and rolling, a frenzied scream came from the direction of the house.
She got up quickly and ran back toward the house. Rick climbed down from the loft and followed close behind her.
She ran up the porch steps and burst though the front door, looking all around her. There was no sign of anyone.
“Is anyone here?” she called out loudly, badly frightened by the scream.
Rick came bursting in behind her, buttoning up his shirt. “What’s going on?” he said, looking around.
“I don’t know,” she replied tensely. “You check down here. I’ll check the upstairs.”
She ran up the spiral staircase to the second floor balcony, stopped at the door to Andy and Debbie’s room, and looked inside. There was no one there. No one was screaming anymore. That frightened her almost as much as the scream itself had. She bit her lower lip and continued down the corridor. She stopped at the closed door of Shelly’s room.
“Is anybody there?” she called through the door.
There was no answer.
She tried the door. It was stuck. She gave it a kick and it flew open to slam against the wall inside the room.
“Shelly?”
There wasn’t anyone inside, but the door to the antique armoire was slightly ajar. She apprached it, pulled the door open, and screamed as Shelly’s body slumped against the side of the armoire, blood glistening around a hatchet embedded in his forehead. He slid down the inside of the armoire and fell out onto the floor, his glazed eyes staring at the ceiling.
Chris recoiled from
