And There He Kept Her (Ben Packard #1)(16)

The day Myra finally decided she’d had enough, Emmett had passed out in his rocker, wearing stained boxers and nothing else, while a dirty movie played on the basement television. He came awake to the squeal of aluminum and the smell of cheap beer as sharp as the stink from a urinal. Struggling up from his chair, he found Myra in the backyard, red-faced and gasping, a pitchfork in her hands. The beer from the basement fridge was scattered on the lawn. Cans geysered white foam from where they’d been stabbed. The shiny entrails of a shattered VHS tape moved like hair in the breeze.

“The hell has gotten into you?” Emmett asked. “That’s my goddamn basement beer.” He glanced back at his television and knew where the videotape had come from. “Christ. Wha’d I do?”

Myra was dressed in a plaid western shirt buttoned to the throat, a frill of lace at the collar and the cuffs her one nod to the idea that she had a feminine bone in her body. She held the pitchfork up and glared at him through her splattered glasses. A can caught in the tines poured beer down her sleeve. “You’ve done nothing, Emmett. For decades, nothing. That’s the problem.” Myra pushed up her enormous glasses with a knuckle. “Why do I continue to live like this? Why do I work so you can spend all your time watching filth and getting drunk in your underpants?”

“‘Work,’” he scoffed. “And I do nothing? Who do you think pays for this house?”

“Don’t kid yourself. You do the bare minimum to keep us out of poverty. You might make the money, but I put it to work. We’re not starving or sleeping in a ditch because of me.”

“Baaaah,” he said, turning away from her and pulling at the back of his underwear.

“Baaaaah,” Myra aped as she pushed by him. “You sound like an old goat. That’s the sound you’ll make the first night I’m gone when you realize there’s nothing to eat.” She stomped up the basement stairs to the kitchen, rolling up her wet sleeve like she had work to do.

Two weeks later, her sister and brother-in-law came from Iowa with a moving truck. Emmett stayed in the basement while they loaded Myra’s things. The next time he went up the stairs, she was gone.

He never saw her again.

It took him a month to get used to feeding himself and doing his own wash. The dusty rectangles on the floor where Myra’s furniture once stood made it easy to remember things the way they used to be. He walked around the missing love seat and sometimes reached up to turn on the lamp by his chair only to find empty air where the knob used to be.

A year after she’d gone—when clutter and a creeping filth had wiped out all traces of Myra—he started construction in the basement. Sandy Lake Building and Supply delivered the load of concrete blocks and bags of cement. He used his own skid loader to bring the pallets around to the back side of the house. It took six months for him to wall off the corner into its own room. Many nights, he’d collapse in his rocking chair with a beer and a cigarette, while a bright work light illuminated the staggered blocks climbing as high as the floor joists. He felt like a pharaoh watching his pyramid go up. He felt like he’d been waiting all his life to do this for himself.

When construction was done, he rested for two months while he planned his next step.

Then he kidnapped Wanda from the gas station.

***

Emmett flicked his cigarette butt into the yard.

How long ago now since Wanda? he wondered. Fifteen years? Twenty?

He went to his bedroom, dropped his pants, and lay down on a sagging mattress. The girl had been locked up for almost eighteen hours now. What happened in that room was supposed to be long behind him. He was an old man now. If it had come down years ago like it should have, he wouldn’t be in this mess.

He’d been lying in this same spot when he was wakened by the storm last night. His chest hurt and his breathing felt labored, so he’d gone to the living room and was sitting in the dark with his oxygen on when he saw a car with just its running lights go back and forth in front of his house. A few minutes later he saw someone dressed in black come down the driveway.

“Sonofabitch,” he said as he struggled up from the chair. He forgot the oxygen mask on his face and had to yank the hose from the machine before he could get the shotgun from where he kept it in the kitchen cabinet with the broom.

A chance to finally catch the cocksucker who’d been breaking into his house had felt like a stroke of luck at the time.

He hadn’t stopped to consider what would come next.

Just putting on pants and going down the basement stairs left Emmett exhausted and breathless. Looking at the dead boy and the unconscious girl, he knew immediately he was in trouble. Calling the police wasn’t an option. He’d managed to stay off their radar all these years. He wasn’t about to invite them into the basement where he’d kept Wanda and the others. One look into the pink room and he’d be done.

He needed help.

An hour later, a ’70s-era Ford long-bed truck rolled into Emmett’s yard. It had a yellow body, a gray hood, and a red driver’s side door, all scavenged from other wrecks. Its owner called the truck Frankenstein.

Everything about the man who ducked through Emmett’s basement door was just as monstrous—his height, his hands, the crowded teeth in his mouth. A dark beard tried to obscure a face that had been ravaged by acne. He was wearing a hunting coat spotted with old blood, a gray T-shirt, and dirty jeans. A camo cap topped a sloped-back forehead and a prominent brow ridge. Over one shoulder he carried a blue backpack heavy with something inside.