Just Like Home(82)

She couldn’t make out their words. That at least was a mercy. She didn’t know if she could handle seeing him, hearing him, smelling the cheap tobacco on his breath. Not after last night and not now, not with that hunger trying to climb up out of her throat. She didn’t know what she might do.

“Vera?” Daphne called again from the other room. “Vera, are you in there?” She sounded frail, needful.

Vera felt her seams fraying. She clenched her jaw, determined to keep herself together, because she knew that if she fell apart, there would be no one else to put her back together.

“I’m coming,” she called. There was no point in trying to delay. She couldn’t avoid Duvall forever. She pulled a fresh bottle out of the refrigerator, leaving the soiled one on the kitchen counter, and braced herself for the way the corners of his mouth would creep up at the sight of her.

But he was already gone. The front door closed just as Vera twisted the cap off the lemonade bottle.

“There you are,” Daphne said.

Vera set out a row of paper cups in front of her mother. “Here I am. That was good timing, wasn’t it? I must have just missed James.”

Daphne looked back at her with wide, wet, gray-filmed eyes. “He’s coming back soon,” she whispered.

Vera poured with a steady hand. “I’m sure he is. Listen, before I went into the kitchen, you said—”

“He’s coming back soon,” Daphne said again. “You should go. You should run.”

She didn’t sound like herself. There was no sly threat in the words, no disdain tucked into the edges of her voice. There wasn’t low, practiced, rehearsed resonance, either.

She sounded open. She sounded sincere.

She sounded afraid.

Vera looked up at her mother, trying to understand. Daphne lifted a trembling hand to wipe a slick of dark gray film from the corner of one eye. “Vera-baby,” she said softly. “Run.”

The sound of her voice sent an electric jolt through Vera’s belly. She took an involuntary step backward, her hand releasing the lemonade bottle so it shattered at her feet, splashing her bare legs and soaking her socks. “Mom,” she whispered, and her mother did not recoil at the name.

But that was all Vera got the chance to say, because in that same instant of shocked recognition, the front door slammed open and James Duvall descended once more upon the Crowder House.

“You,” he growled, pointing at Vera as his long strides devoured the space between them. “What did you do?”

“James, don’t,” Daphne started to say—but Duvall cut her off with a sharp gesture.

“No, Daphne. I agreed to give her space before I saw what she did to my work. Did you know about this? Of course you didn’t. But you,” he added, jabbing a vicious finger at Vera. “You are coming with me right now.”

Lemonade was drying sticky on Vera’s legs and there was glass all around her feet. She felt like a cornered cat, wanting to hiss and bite and run all at once, ready to taste blood if she couldn’t find her way to a dark quiet place.

She lowered a hand to her side and snapped her fingers softly as she could. Once, twice. Three times.

Before she could snap a fourth time, Duvall had her.

His grip on her upper arm was sudden and strong in a way that made her realize how ostentatious his gentleness had been until this moment. He hadn’t hurt her yet and she knew all at once that it was on purpose, that he’d been making a point of not hurting her, and now he was making a point of letting her know just how much he’d been holding back. He pulled her over the broken glass, not letting her move slowly enough for care, and she had to leap to avoid impaling herself.

She only let him yank her a few steps before she wrenched her arm away. “What do you want?” she snapped.

“I want to know what you did,” he snarled. “And I want you to fix it.”

He didn’t try to grab her again. Instead, he stalked across the kitchen, flung the back door open, and stood there, waiting for her. Vera’s instinct was to stay where she was, to try to remind Duvall that he didn’t get to tell her what to do. But the ache in her arm made her think again.

Duvall, she realized, was hungry too. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to test the limits of that hunger.

She followed him out, keeping space between them, staying out of reach. The dew had mostly evaporated off the lawn but the grass was still a little damp and her already-wet socks were quickly soaked through.

Duvall was moving toward the garden shed with furious purpose, his fists clenched at his sides. “Fix it,” he shouted, not looking back at Vera. “Fix it right now.”

“Fix what?” She asked it one instant before she saw what he meant, and then she understood exactly what needed fixing.

All the boards he’d torn up from the porch were propped up against the side of the garden shed. There were perhaps twenty of them in all, of various sizes. Enough for a small gallery show, Vera supposed.

James Duvall’s great work of art, illuminated at last by the summer sun.

All of it ruined.

Thick black ooze was smeared across each panel, long slick trails of it. As Vera came closer she could see what looked like deep, cruel fingernail grooves dug into the layers of plaster—the sculptural element Duvall was so proud of. It was so thick in places that Vera could see the weight of it, the heft, could see the surface tension of it about to break. In other places it was thin enough for layers of color to show through, undertones of red and gray and green like the slip of intestines in the belly of a fresh-caught fish.