when she hit the blacktop, just cranked the wheel over and mashed her foot to the floor.
It was freezing in the cab. She pulled the worn terry robe tight around her but it didn’t help much. She could be dead before that leaky heater under the dash started putting out anything significant enough to thaw her out.
June Weaver lived six miles further out from town than the Dixons did, in an old two-story farmhouse set back about a half-mile from the highway. The old house backed up onto a small creek that ran through the Weaver property. June had grown up on the place and then lived there by herself ever since the divorce. Her son was a gridiron star at Prairie High School. Going to college on a scholarship. He lived half the year with his dad and half with his mom. It was his dad’s turn, she knew, because it was football season and his dad had him on some kind of training regimen.
Daisy was going fast as she could push it, over a hundred, and still it took forever to reach June’s place. Her road wasn’t marked very well and she had to slow down real fast to find the wooden sign tacked to a fence-post that said Weaver in faded red letters. She saw it, braked hard, and swerved off the highway and onto the road leading to the house. Just because it seemed to make sense, she’d doused her headlights as soon as she’d seen the sign and turned off the highway.
A quarter of a mile from the house she saw a car pulled over to the side, two wheels half in the ditch. June drove a twenty-year-old Olds Cutlass Supreme station wagon. Faded gold color. This was not that. It looked new, a two-door, and black. A Ford or a Chevy, she couldn’t tell. All cars looked the same these days. Oklahoma plates. She slowed as she approached it, coming up on it from the rear, one hand on the Parker.
She eased up alongside, keeping her gun barrels just below the windowsill. The car was empty. She put the truck in park and climbed out into the frigid cold, taking her gun with her. She bent and looked into the driver’s side window and saw a Hertz map on the front seat and a crushed pack of cigarettes on the floor. She stood up and looked at the big old house, the big dark sky looming over the rooftops. June’s room was upstairs on the nearside corner. It was dark, too.
She reached her hand out and touched the hood of the rental car. It was still very warm and the engine was ticking softly.
Daisy decided she’d best walk the rest of the way. The sound of her truck pulling up in front of June’s house was not going to help anybody tonight. She yanked the keys out of the ignition, stuck them in her robe pocket, and started walking.
A few minutes later, she was standing at the front door listening and not hearing anything inside. Her hands were shaking, but, hell, her whole body was shivering in the cold night air. She tried the screen door and found it unlocked. Her heart thudding in her chest, she twisted the front door knob. The door swung inward without a sound and she stepped inside. She stood quiet a second and then moved on into the living room, the Parker out front, her finger on the forward trigger and the safety off.
“June?” she whispered in the dark. “It’s me—Daisy. Are you home, honey?”
Was she home? Maybe, maybe not. June normally parked the Olds in the garage around the back and she stupidly hadn’t checked to see if it was back there. How dumb can one person be?
“June, listen, I’m just here to see if you’re all right. Okay? I’ve got a gun. If you’re not all right but you can hear me, say something.”
The house was dead quiet.
Not a peep.
Nothing.
Daisy smelled something burnt in the kitchen. Like a pie that had been left in the oven too long. Make that chicken pot pie maybe. Daisy moved carefully toward the rear of the house, wishing she’d been smart enough to remove her damn cowboy boots. The wooden floors were creaky and a deaf man could have heard her coming a mile away.
She also wished she’d brought a flashlight. The house was at least a hundred years old, with heavy drapes covering the windows, and it was black as a crypt inside. Nothing looked the same in the dark anyway. She bumped into a little table with a porcelain lamp on it, grabbing the lamp just before it toppled over and hit the floor in a million tiny pieces.
She went through a wide arched door that led to a long narrow hall going back to the kitchen. At the kitchen door she paused and peeked inside. She could tell the room was empty and was tempted to go turn the damn oven off.
Knowing that this was a really bad idea, she turned around and crept to the foot of the stairs. There was a door on her right, behind it were the cellar steps if she remembered correctly. She tried the knob. Unlocked. She opened it six inches and got that musty, rotted basement smell up her nose. She felt something sticky on the bottom of her boot. She had no idea what it was but since she feared the worst, she was thinking it might be blood. She raised her right foot and swabbed her index finger across her boot heel. She held it under her nose. It didn’t smell like blood. It smelled like mud.
She shut the door quick.
There was a deadbolt on the outside of the basement door and she locked it. Then she headed up the stairs to the second floor, no longer caring that each step made a loud groan as she climbed.
“June? Are you up here?” she said, fingering the safety nervously. She was absolutely ready to squeeze the trigger if somebody suddenly appeared at the top of the steps.
Nobody did, but it didn’t help her heart rate.
At the top of the stairs she stopped to get her bearings. June’s room was at the far end of the hallway, all the way to the left. All the doors along the hall to the left were shut. Same thing to the right. Except there was a bathroom to her right, just across the hall, and she could see inside a little, shadows and shapes. The door was halfway open and she had to stifle the temptation to rush in and rip back the shower curtain just to see what she’d find there. All the shower rings flying and hiding in there was a—
Boo.
Having scared herself silly, she turned left and started toward the door to June’s room.
“June? June-bug, are you up here, honey?”
She’d taken about three more steps along the worn carpeting when she heard a muffled noise behind the door. She raised the Parker to her shoulder, aiming it dead center on the door about four feet from the floor. Her hands were shaking badly again, even though it was a tad warmer in the old house. She was sorely tempted to just blow whoever was waiting for her behind that door to kingdom come and ask questions later.
But she moved toward it instead, dropped her left hand and placed it on the crystal knob. She twisted it, felt it give a half turn, then stop. It was locked. It was an old door with an old lock. All she had to do was put her shoulder into it, force the damn door open and put herself out of her misery one way or the other.
Something made her step back away from it. A noise. Movement inside. She took one, two steps back. She mounted the gun to her shoulder again and planted her left foot square in the center of the door. It slammed inward, splintering to jagged pieces.
She saw a figure silhouetted, standing in the center of the room by the big four-poster bed. Big shoulders. Small head.
“I’ll shoot,” she said. “I swear on a stack of bibles I will.”
Her finger tightened on the trigger.
“Daisy?” the person said, so soft she almost missed it.
“June?”
“Jesus wept! It’s you, Daisy!” June sobbed and took a few small steps toward her.
Daisy lowered the gun and embraced her friend. She was heaving sobs and shaking worse than Daisy was. June was wearing a thickly insulated stadium jacket which accounted for the big shoulders she’d seen.
“June, what happened? I tried to call you but—”
“I-I came up here to get my medicine. Not ten minutes ago. I heard somebody downstairs. Heard a window break sure as I’m standing here. Down in the kitchen. I didn’t know what to do. I locked the door and called the office but I couldn’t get through. I tried to call you, too, but first it was busy and then no answer. I didn’t know what else to—”
“June, listen. We don’t have time. There may be someone down in the basement.”
“What?”
