The Red Hunter(95)

Claudia’s mother died from ovarian cancer when Claudia was still in college; Claudia never got to ask her the hard questions about marriage, about motherhood, about what compromises she felt she’d made. She got to know her dad a little better then; he was more awkward, maybe with a touch of Asperger’s. Distant because he didn’t know how to be with people. But then he died from a heart attack two years after Mom.

She and Ayers didn’t have huge fights; neither one of them were up to that. It wasn’t an angry, nasty split. Claudia took Raven to spend a summer at Martha’s retreat in New Mexico. She wrote there, the beauty of the place, the energy of it—it healed her. He called every night after work, begged her to come home. She finally did, but then she moved out a few weeks later into an apartment on the Upper West Side. They shared custody of Raven, who was almost five then—a loved, normal little girl who, like so many kids, had two homes. Ayers, true to form, just let Claudia go. If that’s what you want, Claudia. Even as she left him, she wondered why he didn’t fight for her.

Now, Claudia could see that she drove away a good man who loved her. Melvin Cutter had smashed in the front door of her life and hurt her terribly, left her world in ruin. But she was the one who’d burnt the remains to the ground. In fact, she could smell the smoke.

Smoke.

Slowly, the world came back—tilted, wobbling, in ugly patches. The pain in her head, at the bridge of her nose, the hard, cold ground beneath her.

“Raven,” she croaked.

Josh at the door. His brother. Running for the stairs. The hammer in her hand. She tasted blood in her mouth. As she pushed herself up, she saw a deep red swath down her shirt.

There were voices, yelling. Where were they coming from? Her head cleared a little. Oh, God. The men were gone. Where was her daughter?

“Raven?”

“Mom!” Every mother knows the pitch of panic, of pain. She crawled toward the sound.

“Raven!”

Muffled, terrified. “Mom, we’re trapped in here. He’s coming. He’s coming to the house.”

But Claudia was alone. The door at the top of the stairs was closed, even though she knew it had been opened. And the door to the crawl space was also shut and locked. She searched around for the key she’d seen, the smell of smoke growing stronger. She pounded—frantically, uselessly—on the tunnel door.

“It’s locked,” she yelled, her voice cracking with fear. “There’s no key.”

The drill, that’s what she needed. She needed to drill the lock and break it.

“Get back!” A male voice yelled from inside the tunnel with Raven. Was that Josh? Was that freak in the tunnel with Raven? Where was Troy?

“Stay away from her,” Claudia screeched.

There was a hard pounding then. She backed away.

Once. Twice. Three times. The door burst open and a pair of work boots stuck out. Josh slid out, panting, red in the face. He pulled Raven out, who leapt into Claudia’s arms. Troy climbed out behind them, looking stunned.

“Mom,” Raven sobbed. “Mom, are you okay? What happened to you? There’s so much blood.”

Claudia held on to her daughter, weeping. She couldn’t talk, just clung to her girl.

“Mom,” Raven said. “It was there. A huge bag of money. He took it. The bad guy.”

Claudia could barely hold on to what was happening. It was chaos. She started to cough. What was that smell? What was burning?

Josh was already on his way up the stairs. They watched as he put his hand on the door and pulled it back quickly. He looked back at them, stricken.

“Fire,” he said. “He started a fire.”

? ? ?

THE THINKER CHATTERS. SHE YAMMERS on about this and that, an incessant soundtrack of worries and wants, judgments, observations. She’s shallow, distracting, bossy—always telling you what you should do, or could have done, or why things would be better if circumstances were different. The thinker is the enemy of wisdom.

The watcher is the one who knows, the one who sits and waits. The part who connects to the net of universal wisdom. Calm resides in the watcher.

And I was there in the watcher mind. I observed as Rhett Beckham hefted the bag from the tunnel, then slammed the hatch door closed. It was a door I never knew, in all my years in this house, was there. I watched as he fastened the lock and shouldered the bag. I slipped into the shadows of the barn, and he didn’t see me or intuit my presence, as he exited—voices down below calling behind him. Ghosts on the wind.

Outside, a woman waited in a primer-painted black car; she got out when she saw him approach and held up the copper key between two red fingernails.

“You closed and locked the door?” he asked. She nodded. “The basement door, too? Latched from the outside?”

“Just like you said,” she said. “The woman was unconscious. I just left her.”

“Good girl,” he said.

“Well?” she asked, looking at him eagerly, rising up on her toes.

“Well,” he said. A wide smile cut across his face.

He dropped the bag, and they knelt in front of it. He held it open for her, and she let out a whoop that carried up into the trees.

“Oh my god,” she said, face slackening with surprise. “Oh my god!”

He stood and helped her to her feet, too. They embraced, and then he started to spin her around and around.