When she entered the room, she could see Nell sitting on the edge of the bed. She held Foster’s huge flashlight between her knees, and Cally could not imagine how it had come to be switched on. Nell grinned broadly in the wobbly light. “I knew you’d be back,” she said. It had not been she who had been sobbing, but Sofie, who had made her way to Ian’s side again and was crouched next to him. “Everything is going to be okay now,” Nell told the old woman matter-of-factly.
“We’re not out of the woods yet,” Cally said. “But, Helen, that jacket does not become you.” She sat down on the bed beside her and began undoing the buckles.
“Foster is coming back,” Nell said, shrugging her way out of the sleeves and rubbing her elbows.
“Yes,” Cally agreed. “I still haven’t figured out what the plan is when he gets back.” She honestly wasn’t even sure she would still be present when he did. She found herself struggling with the strangest feeling she wasn’t actually there at all, herself, or if she was, she was just some two-dimensional projection of herself while her real self crouched on a rock next to the pond. Would she simply vanish when that self got up and started walking around? “It doesn’t matter,” she said, shaking her head. She crouched down next to Ian’s still form. “How is he?” she asked the old woman. “Sofie? I’m here to help. I need you to calm down please.”
“She’s right, Mama,” said Nell. Cally knelt beside the old woman and unbound her hands, then helped her to her feet. Nell put her arm around Sofie and made her sit down on the bed next to her, while Cally turned her attention to Ian . He still had a pulse, she noted, though it was shallow and rapid, but his skin was warm. She held the flashlight above him and pushed back one of his eyelids, smiling with relief to see his pupil contract in the light. Then she looked around the room, trying to think how she and Nell together could carry him from the room. It would be difficult, under the best of circumstances, to get him up either stairway. The easiest course would be to take the shorter flight of stairs up to Ian’s quarters, she thought at first. Maybe they could get him out of the house by way of the side door into the shade garden. The problem, she remembered, was that Foster would come back into the house through the front door. He would probably be returning to this room through Ian’s quarters. There was a much higher chance of encountering him that way, so maybe it would be better to try and get Ian out through the cellar.
A crashing sound from above let them know Foster had already entered the house. “Okay, then, let’s go to Plan C,” said Cally. She stood and grabbed the large flashlight. “I’ll distract him,” she said. “Nell, you take your mother and get out through the cellar, okay?”
“She won’t leave Dad,” Nell stated with certainty. “You should be the one to go.”
“Fine, then, you just get out, yourself. Ignacio is coming, I think. You go and help him find us, okay?”
“Cally, I don’t think...” was all Nell could say before a door crashed open above them. The sounds of banging and slamming accompanied Foster’s swearing as he bumped into something in Ian’s quarters above, and then more crashing as he went through the various drawers in the room. He apparently found a flashlight in one of them, as Cally could see a beam of light begin to flicker wildly as his footsteps thundered along the floor above them.
Cally moved to the side of the door and held the flashlight above her head. She jerked her head toward the other door to try to urge Nell to run for the cellar, but Nell had already crouched down in the shadows at the foot of the bed. Cally sighed and switched off the flashlight.
With an angry shout, Foster shoved the door and the broken furniture in front of it back far enough to let himself squeeze through into the room, and then he tripped over Ian’s leg, just missing Cally’s attempted strike at his head with her flashlight. Cursing and kicking fallen books aside, he stood and waved his own flashlight wildly around himself. He was panting heavily and trembling. He stopped when he saw Cally, clearly confused. “How the hell did you get back in here already?” He turned the flashlight beam on Nell, who stood up beside the bed and gazed sadly at him. “And you? Why can’t you ever do as you’re told?” He swung a fist at her and she shrank down into the shadows again. “Oh, it doesn’t even matter anymore. Just stay there, I don’t care!”
Cally took a step toward him, holding the flashlight out at her side as if it were a sword. “Foster, just turn around and leave this room,” she said. “It’s not too late. You are about to make a horrible mistake. Come on, this is nuts!”
“No, it is too late,” he said, more to himself than to her. The flashlight beam wavered in his shaking hands. “I have got to salvage this situation, and fire is the only thing that can save me now.” He switched his flashlight to his other hand and fumbled in his pocket until he withdrew the yellow plastic lighter Ian had used to open beer bottles on his boat. Backing toward the bed, he began flicking the wheel of the little lighter, producing only dim, red sparks. Cally knew she wouldn’t get another chance. She leaped across the debris on the floor and brought her flashlight down on Fosters arm as hard as she could. She felt the flashlight break in her hands as the lighter fell from Foster’s grip. His glasses fell off as he swore loudly and threw his own flashlight at her.
Foster’s flashlight went out when it hit the wall behind Cally, plunging the room into total darkness. Cally heard him scrabbling under the bed for the lighter. She lunged for him and locked both hands in his hair. He twisted in her grip, closing his hands around her throat, but she didn’t care – she still had the strangest feeling she was about to disappear anyway at any moment. She hung on and thought, because she couldn’t speak, “OK, Nell, now would be a good time for you to get out of here.”
She didn’t disappear, but the room definitely seemed to be growing silent around her as the strength left her hands. Foster broke free of her grip and she heard him resume his search under the bed, then she saw him stand up in the light of a tiny yellow flame. He reached out and held it under the edge of the kerosene soaked papers on the bed.
They ignited instantly. Sheets of yellow flame filled the room suddenly with bright, white light as they swept softly across the wall to the drapes. Foster was panting heavily as he stood over Cally, looking around the debris on the floor. “Now,” he said, “Where did that nice, heavy brass statue go?”
“It’s right here,” Nell said cheerfully as she stood up behind him and brought it down on his head. He went down, and this time he stayed down.
—
Cally sat on the third step of the grand staircase, rubbing at the bruises on her throat. Nell was gliding like a nymph through the hubbub of all the people gathered in the Hall, talking to the sheriff’s deputies and encouraging Sofie to sit in the desk chair and drink a cup of tea. The paramedics were trying to persuade Ian to let them put him on a stretcher, but he insisted he would be fine and did not need to go to the hospital. Nell poked him in the chest and said “You just do what the doctors tell you to do!”
“I have to be here to take care of your mother,” he told her gently.
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“I’ll take care of her now.”
Sofie wanted to go back to her room, but the smoke and water damage there would take a long time to repair. Nell put a crocheted throw from the parlor around the old woman’s shoulders and shooed away anyone who attempted to question her. “She’s scared and upset,” she told them sternly. “Just let her be!”
“Who even is that young woman?” Cally asked. “I don’t think I recognize her!”
Bethany, seated next to her, rubbed at her hands which had had to be bandaged after she’d injured them pounding on the inside of her locked bathroom door. “That’s our little Nell,” she said to Cally.
“No.” Cally shook her head. “I believe that is Miss Helen May.”
On Cally’s other side, George sat two steps up and continued to apologize to Cally for not having been able to do anything to help, promising her he was going to learn how to range farther from his zemi, or at least how to unlock bathroom doors. Or maybe how to use a phone to call 911. He was certain if he only had access to his own cell phone, he could pick this up quickly. “Or maybe if I had a computer with a connection to the internet,” he said. “Could you get me one?” Cally shuddered at this idea, though she wasn’t sure why. She knew a long conversation with him was coming later.
A paramedic came and shone a small flashlight into Cally’s eyes, telling her to look into the beam as he switched from one eye to the other several times until he was satisfied. He told her she was going to be fine, but suggested she might ask the doctor for a prescription for pain medication.
“No!”
Cally, Bethany, and Joan all shouted at once. The paramedic backed away slowly and went to find out who else needed attention.
“I think we’ve all had about enough of that stuff!” Joan exclaimed, wobbling unsteadily on her crutches as she tried to lean against the stair railing.
“I don’t think I will ever want a bath again, either!” Bethany joined in.
“And I will never be able to stomach tea again,” said Joan. She wrinkled her face and made hacking noises, still trying to get the taste out of her mouth. “He put six of those things in my tea. Six!” She wrinkled her nose in disgust. “No wonder just tasting it knocked me out.” She gave up with the crutches and sat down on the stairs next to Bethany. “And here he was going around trying to make me out to be the addict, when he’s the one who’s been horfing all the drugs he could lay his hands on for years.”
Cally hated to admit Joan was right for once, but two sheriff’s deputies were busily going through one of Foster’s suitcases on the desk, bagging and tagging a growing pile of pharmaceuticals they were finding tucked within the folds. The stash contained, so far, the remnants of every expired sedative, antidepressant, and mood stabilizer that had ever been prescribed to Nell over the course of her illness, as well as unmarked bottles concealing pain medication he’d lifted from many friends and acquaintances, and plastic bags full of pills whose sources had yet to be identified. Doc was shaking his head, saying, “I should have seen it all along. The symptoms were right there in front of my face but I just didn’t question...”
Nell had made her way across the Hall to see if the three women on the stairs needed anything, and she took the opportunity to explain patiently to Joan, “People don’t become addicted to medicine on purpose.”
“But once they do,” Bethany pointed out, “they will stoop to any level to cover it up. Including finding ways to blame others for their own behavior.”
“And to get more money to support their problem,” Cally noted.
“I just wish I had hit him with that mug!” Joan spat.
Nell smiled generously at her. “Then you would have been the hero!”
“Instead, you are the hero,” Cally told her.
Nell shook her head. “Ignacio’s the hero!” she corrected. “He’s the one who came running with the fire extinguisher.”
“Who knew he was an expert firefighter, on top of everything else?” said Bethany.
“He would have been too late for some of us, though,” said Cally, “if it hadn’t been for your quick thinking. Helen, I apologize for having underestimated you. You are one tough woman.”
Nell shook her head until all her curls fell into her face, and then shook them out again. “Well a girl’s got to leave the nest sometime,” she said with a sly look in her eye. She sat down on the stair next to Cally, being careful not to sit on George’s feet. “I always knew he didn’t really love me,” she said in softer tones. “But everyone said I should be thankful he was taking such good care of me.”
“Oh, he took care of you, alright!” Joan shook her head and pulled herself up on the railing, slinging her crutches under her arms again. Ian had successfully talked the paramedics out of making him lie on the stretcher, but they held onto his arms, one on either side of him, as they led him toward the front door. Joan did not stop to speak to him as she went back into her office.
Nell nodded. “That’s what it was all about, after all,” she said. “Dad just wanted someone to be here to take care of me and of Mama after he was gone. He figured out Foster wasn’t going to do that. Foster was going to have us both put away so he could build a city here. That’s why Dad was trying to change his will. Well, I’ll take care of everything now.”
Cally stood to join the crowd that was following Ian out the door. Fire engines, police cruisers, and ambulances filled the front yard of Vale House, lighting up the night once again with their red and blue flashing lights. Sheriff Mahon was standing beside the squad car where Foster sat slumped in the back seat with a bandaged head.
Ian paused as he was being led to a waiting ambulance. He managed a wry grin as he nodded toward the sheriff’s clipboard thick with case files. “I see you’ve incurred a considerable amount of paperwork, there, Dunn,” he said.
“I hope you’re feeling well in the morning,” the sheriff replied without smiling back. “I won’t hassle you tonight about it, Ian, but we will need to talk soon about this whole harboring of a fugitive thing.”
“She’s not a fugitive,” Ian insisted. “Please don’t make her go back into a hospital. It would kill her.”
“They don’t do things that way anymore,” the sheriff assured him. “Frankly, Ian, I’m just a little bit ticked off that you’ve never told me. And by ‘a little bit ticked off’ I mean, it feels like a goddamned slap in the face.”
“I am sorry. I am.” Ian sighed and looked up at the sky, from which a fine mist of rain sifted down. “We just figured, the fewer the people who knew, the safer it would be.”
“Yes, and I was the newcomer, after all.” The sheriff shook Ian’s hand. “Well, maybe things are changing. One thing is certain: the emergency crews sure do know how to find Woodley now.”
Ian was able, with assistance, to climb into the ambulance himself as rain began to fall in earnest. Away to the south, Cally heard thunder rolling, but it sounded halfhearted, as if there was no point in putting on a good show if Ian May wasn’t going to be there to watch it. Katarina did not even bother to count.
Everyone stood on the porch and watched all the emergency vehicles file out the gate. As Cally started to turn to go back into the house, she heard a voice beside her saying “It’s been a long night.” It was Ben. Her heart fluttered in her chest when he put an arm around her and drew her to his side.
“I thought you weren’t going to be back until morning,” she said.
“It is morning.” He nodded toward the sky over the meadow. It was shining silver through the rain.
A flash of lightning parted the rain curtain for a moment, revealing a shadowy figure standing at the crossroads. Cally nudged Ben. “Do you see that?”
He didn’t answer, because he had turned his head to where Katarina was saying, “Oh, the poor Captain! He’s slept through all the excitement. Let’s get him inside before he catches pneumonia!”
The Captain was slouched in his favorite wicker chair, smiling dreamily, with his flask about to fall from his hand. Ignacio bent over and touched his shoulder, shaking him gently. Then he looked up and regarded everyone thoughtfully in the growing light. “He isn’t asleep,” he said.