The Red Hunter(34)



When I moved out through the trees into the clearing where the farmhouse stood, I saw the light on in the kitchen and the bottom of my stomach dropped out. Please let it be Mom, I thought. Mom was easy, slow to anger. There was something between us, a shared desire to laugh things off that I didn’t have with my father. I could tell my mother anything. I could tell her that I liked Seth and that I wanted to meet him but that he didn’t show and I wouldn’t have done anything with him anyway. I just wanted to know what it would be like to sneak out in the middle of the night and maybe, maybe kiss a boy. She would get it. We’d talk it through. She wouldn’t hide it from my father, but she’d make it more palatable. If it was him, sitting there in the kitchen, waiting? There’d be yelling and tears, grounding. And that look, the stern frown of disapproval. That was the worst of all. I stood in the trees, trying to see inside from a distance. The gray of my father’s tee-shirt or the pink of my mom’s PJs. Someone walked quickly past the window. That’s when Catcher started to growl, low and deep.

“What is it, boy?” I said. “Quiet.”

I had to think of a lie. Catcher was sick? I took him for a walk? No one would ever believe that. I had to do a project about owls for school; I went out looking for some. Nope. My mother knew every single thing about my schoolwork. That wasn’t going to fly. If there had been an owl project, she’d be out there with me.

We moved closer, Catcher growling, me holding on to the frayed red collar he’d worn as long as I could remember. The brush of his fur rubbed against my fingers, his dog smell strong and weirdly comforting as I crouched down low.

“Catch,” I said. “I’m so dead. Stop growling.”

How did he know there was something wrong all the way back there? How did he know? I stood up slowly and peered around the window frame. The scene was so odd, so strange that I almost couldn’t understand what I was seeing at first.

Two men. One was smallish but muscled and wiry, standing by the door, a gun nearly the size of his forearm gripped in his hand. One tall, broad through the shoulders, dressed in black. Both of them wearing black ski masks. Another man was sitting on a chair, arms tied, slumped, a bag pulled over his head. My father. He wore his Lost Valley Police Department tee-shirt. My mother was on the ground, her pink pajama top open to reveal her belly button—lying quiet and peaceful on her side, as if she were just sleeping. There was a third stranger, someone thin and small, a boyish body, also wearing a mask, at the kitchen table with his head in his hand. The taller man was standing in the doorway with a shotgun.

I drew in a ragged breath and swallowed a scream. Sinking onto my haunches, my mind raced. The next farmhouse was a little over a mile up the road. If I ran as fast as I could, I could make it in twelve minutes. My father kept a gun locker in the old barn. I wasn’t supposed to know the code, but I did. The same code he used for everything, my mother’s birthday. I knew how to fire every one—from the service revolver, to the Glock 9mm, to the Sig, to the shotgun. Never pick up a gun unless you’re prepared to kill someone with it. Hopefully, it won’t come to that. But be ready if it does. Our hunting trips hadn’t gone well. I had bad aim and lacked the hunter’s heart to take the life of a creature who never did anything but munch on leaves. But I knew the shotgun made up for bad aim and the men in my house were not deer or bunnies.

Catcher had gone quiet, issuing a low whine, feeling my fear, knowing instinctively to stay quiet. I put my arms around his neck.

Run for help or stay and fight? I asked him silently.

But when a shot rang out from inside, Catcher pulled away and ran to the door, his explosive barking filling the night. The pounding of footsteps, the screen door slammed open. I was already running toward the barn, fast as I could. A hole opened in the world that minute, a dark doorway though which I passed into a place where nothing would ever be what it was before.

There was a screaming child in my head, one in terror, afraid for herself and shattered by what she’d seen in the window. But there was also someone else, someone I’ve since come to know as “the watcher.” The one who calmly observes the chaos around her, the one who can see exactly how far is the barn, can hear how close is the stranger behind her, the one who knows that there is no running for help now, only getting to the gun locker and arming herself before the man behind her catches her.

Catcher’s barks were vicious and undercut by a feral growling behind me until there was a hard thud and primal yelp of pain, then silence. Then heavy footfalls again. I stopped at the barn door—don’t look, don’t look, don’t look—and had to use all my strength to open it. Then I pulled it closed hard and latched it, just as someone thumped against it.

“Open the door,” said the voice on the other side. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

I ran to the locker and to my great dismay found both the doors standing open. The shotgun was gone; yes, it was the one I’d seen in the stranger’s hand. The revolver. The semiautomatic. The rifle. All gone. The only thing left was a serrated hunting knife. The black oxide grip was molded to my father’s hand, a gift from Uncle Paul on my father’s fortieth birthday. I took and shoved it into the inside pocket of my jacket. It was too big.

“There are no guns in there.”

He was at the window, his voice muffled through the glass. I dove to the side so that he couldn’t see me. Every nerve ending in my body sizzled with terror.

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