From A Dead Sleep Page 21

  Lisa was a disheveled, nervous wreck and her frame of mind wouldn’t allow her to react. Her appearance didn’t go unnoticed.

  She could see the concern in his eyes through his thin, circular-framed spectacles. He squinted, hesitating as he then asked, “Ma’am, are you okay?”

  “Yes,” Lisa instinctively answered as she shook her head and rubbed a hand to her swollen eyelid. “I . . . I’m sorry. I . . . I thought you were someone else.” Her muddled mind struggled to find clarity.

  The man chuckled and smiled. “Well, I’ve got the opposite problem. Some friends of ours are expecting us for brunch and we can’t seem to find their cottage.”

  “Brunch?” she asked with resigned confusion.

  “Yes. Ronnie Wilson and his wife Mary. My wife and Mary went to school together. We’ve never been over to their summer home before, and, well . . . Ronnie assured us that it would be a cinch once we drove in through the front gate, but apparently my ability to read directions isn’t what it used to be.” He chuckled again, holding up a half-sheet of notebook paper with sloppily handwritten notes.

  Her eyes went from the piece of paper to the beige Volvo coupe whose tail end she saw sticking out from her driveway.

  Lisa was in no mood for talking, and she felt she could get rid of him quickly by just pointing him in the right direction and sending him on his way.

  “Oh . . . yes. Of course, the Wilsons,” she said through a raspy voice. “Ronnie and Mary are at lot one-twelve. This is lot one-fourteen.”

  The older gentleman’s eyebrows raised, and he removed his hat to wipe a bead of sweat from his forehead. His bald scalp was red from sunburn, but it was the quarter-sized, darkened bruise partially covered by a butterfly bandage that was more noticeable.

  “Honey!” he yelled in the direction of his car. “It’s lot one-twelve, not one-fourteen!” He turned back to Lisa. “I’m so sorry, ma’am. I appreciate your help.”

  “It’s not a problem.”

  “Now, do I want to go left when we get to the bottom of your driveway?” he asked while scratching the top of his freckled head.

  She tried to keep her diminishing patience concealed. “No, you need to go right, and then turn . . .” She shook her head. “Just a second . . .” She closed the door to unchain it and then stepped out onto the short wooden patio alongside the lost stranger. “It’s kind of complicated. Their place is even more secluded than ours.”

  She turned and pointed toward the bottom of the winding driveway. “At the bottom of the hill, take a right. You want to go down to the second road and turn left. Don’t turn at the first left. That’s just another driveway. From there, I believe it’s the third or fourth lot. The driveway is clearly marked out front, so you shouldn’t have any problems.”

  Standing behind her, the man said. “Great. Thanks. You’ve been a big help.”

  Her eyes narrowed as a memory from the day before suddenly skipped across her mind. While running along the beach, she had heard a couple of resident blowhards joking about how Ronnie Wilson’s wife wanted to go to the Hamptons that month, so the couple wouldn’t be making it to Traverse City until later in the season.

  Lisa’s face turned pale, but it wasn’t from the conflicting recollection of the previous day’s conversation. It was from the full view she now had of the Volvo parked in her driveway. From inside the house, she could only see the back end. Now she could clearly see the entire automobile, more specifically, the driver and passenger seats. Both empty. No wife to be seen.

  She quickly spun around to face the stranger who had asked her so innocently for directions. What she saw wasn’t his face, but a bare-knuckled fist headed straight below her mouth.

  Then nothing.

  The metallic taste of her own blood forced her to spit up the soggy, claret-colored liquid pooled behind her throbbing mouth. A couple of teeth seemed loose and her jaw didn’t feel right. It was either a bit off center or maybe just swollen. A dizzy spell flattened her back to the floor when she tried to climb up from her hands and knees. She felt a depressed weight on the floor beside her. The rasp of a floorboard signaled that he was standing right next to her.

  “Why, Mrs. Kimble,” greeted the man whose voice was eerily calm. He spoke almost cordially, as if he was still standing on her front step.

  Lisa forced herself to crawl toward an extra dining chair that stood against the wall beside her. Her rapid breathing caused her to gag on some remaining blood that had trickled down the backside of her throat. She latched onto the seat of the chair with her arms and pulled herself up to her knees. That’s when she felt the large sole of a shoe pressing against her shoulder. With a single shove of his leg, her body spun sharply and she toppled onto her back.

  From the floor, she could see him now. Looking every bit as harmless as he did when she’d opened the door, the man even formed a kind grin when their eyes met. He removed the hat from his head and leisurely tossed it onto the top of a small end table beside him. That’s when she saw another object resting along the table that drew a startled gasp that sprayed up from her chest. It was a black pistol. She assumed he must have set it there while she had faded in and out of consciousness. She dug her heels into the carpet and briskly scooted against the wall behind her.

  He grabbed onto the back of the chair beside her and dragged it a few inches away from her before sitting down in it, crossing his legs.

  A drop of blood diluted a strand of drool that webbed along the side of her chin as she sat up on the carpet.

  “What do you want?” her shaken voice inquired.

  “Your chin,” he expressed with the nod of his head before reaching into his front pants pocket to retrieve a cream-colored handkerchief.

  He tapped the side of his own cheek like a mother indicating to her child that she’d missed a smudge of jelly after lunch. He tossed the handkerchief underhand, down to the floor beside her. Her eyes followed the piece of cloth but they quickly returned to him.

  “You know, I saw your picture once,” he said. “You and your worse half, smiling with glee. Backpacks across your shoulders. A fun, desert hike on a sunny day. A precious memory, I’d imagine.”

  Lisa fought to wrap her mind around the situation she was in. She knew immediately which photo the man was describing. It was taken by a young couple she and her husband had met on a hiking trip over two years ago, near Lake Tahoe. Kyle had kept the photo in his wallet. Who is this man? How did he know my husband?

  He continued. “I must say that you’re far more stunning in person. It makes me wonder what hidden talent the man must have had to be such a killer with the ladies. What? Was he hung like a horse?”

  She said nothing. Her eyes nervously danced around the room looking for a means of escape or at least a weapon she could use to defend herself against him.

  A boyish smirk rippled along his mouth before he spoke again. “Listen, I just heard you talk. I know I didn’t whack you hard enough to mess up your speech. I just want to chat for a moment.”

  After some formulation, she envisioned herself quickly climbing to her feet, sidestepping the intruder, and dashing toward the front door. However, those hopes were dampened when she realized that the man had secured the multiple locks that lined that door.

  “Just tell me what you want,” she asked with a quiver in her words, immediately fearing how he might react. “How do you know my husband?”

  “Well, I don’t think that’s all that relevant of a question,” he quickly replied before sitting straighter in the chair and placing his open hands across his knees. “I’ve got a better one. What brings you to the great state of Michigan today? Why did you come out here?”

  She struggled with how to answer, confused with the unknown context of the man’s question. Was it possible he was someone her husband had investigated? His presence had to be tied to the timing of her husband’s death, but she hadn’t a clue how.

  “Oh, come on! You can tell me!” he persisted before throwing his h
ands up in the air excitedly. He glared into her confused, sunken eyes. The subtle curve of his eyebrows seemed to almost express a sense of enlightenment. “Maybe I’m asking the wrong question,” he speculated before leaning back in his seat. “Let’s try this one, Lisa. What did your husband do for a living?”

  She hesitated to answer, unsure if releasing the truth would escalate eminent harm upon her.

  “A traveling salesman?” he said with the shrug of his shoulders. “Nah, too easy. Oh, how about a bus driver? A Greyhound bus driver! Now that would have been a good one. It would explain all those lonely nights. Wait, wait, I got it! A circus mime! He’d have been made for that job!”

  She just stared. This man clearly knew her husband well, including his schedule and disability. She conjured up the most conservative job title she could think of and answered. “An accountant! He’s an accountant.”

  “Oh, come on!” An almost devilish grin draped above his chin. “That’s no fun! Although I suppose keeping it real made it easier to bullshit you.”

  Staying seated, he straightened out a leg and jammed a hand into his shorts pocket where he retrieved a small white, plastic tube. It had a cone-shaped cap that he quickly unscrewed to reveal a nozzle.

  Lisa’s heart seemed to stop as the thought that it might be some sort of syringe overcame her. She breathed in relief once he raised the tube up and implanted the nozzle inside one of his nostrils. He squeezed the tube and inhaled deeply to greet the rush of saline that jetted up his nasal cavity. He did the same with the other nostril. The process ended with a satisfying sigh.

  As he returned the container to his pocket, he nonchalantly shrugged his shoulders and explained: “Allergies.”

  “Listen, my husband’s not here right now. I don’t know what kind of business you have with him, but I haven’t heard from him in days. Tell me what you want and . . .”

  “I know you haven’t heard from him in days, Lisa. Can I call you Lisa?”

  She offered a timid nod.

  “I know you haven’t heard from him because he’s been dead since Saturday.”

  Her eyes widened and she swallowed hard, unsure of how to respond.

  “But you already knew that, didn’t you? You see, I suspected it when you answered the door with those sad, puffy, red eyes.” He mockingly put his hands on his hips and folded his lower lip. “But what clinched it was the fact that I’ve been talking about Kyle in the past tense this entire time, and you haven’t asked why.”

  He snickered, causing his loose jowls to waver like a curtain behind an open window. He seemed to enjoy reading the fear and confusion in her eyes, as if he were getting off on preemptively narrowing any wiggle room she had in telling him anything other than the truth. “That raises yet another question, of course . . . How did you know he’s dead when no one else knows he is?”

  He leaned back again, this time recoiling his elbow along the top of the end table beside him and using the tip of his index finger to tap the grip of the pistol he’d left there.

  Lisa squirmed along the carpet and wondered if the man who sat before her could hear the pounding of her heart. She hadn’t enough ammunition in her arsenal of knowledge to predict the answers that would ensure her safety. She decided that a web of deceit would be obvious and counterproductive. Careful emissions of information were a safer gamble.

  “A man . . . someone I’d never met before. He came to my door this morning and told me.”

  The intruder’s face turned dead serious. He stood up from his chair and her heart stopped. A bad gamble, she instantly thought.

  “What man? What was his name?”

  She swallowed and answered, “Coleman. Sean Coleman.”

  The intruder’s mouth gaped open and he snatched his pistol from the coffee table.

  “Oh, God, no!” she screamed. Her hands flailed in front of her and she hid her face behind her shoulder.

  “How long ago was he here?” he yelled.

  “Just now!” she cried. “He left right before you got here! Please, don’t!”

  The intruder’s free hand clogged the pocket along his shorts. His breaths were short as he pulled out a small, gray cellphone and punched in some numbers with his thumb. He held the phone to his ear with his teeth gnashed together, cursing the delay of waiting for the other party to pick up.

  “Come on, come on!” he grunted impatiently.

  With his attention directed at the phone, Lisa eyed a stout, glass candleholder that rested on top of the same end table where the intruder had previously laid his gun. She knew it was heavy and thick and that its size would make it a perfect fit for the grip of her hand. Her gaze then flipped back to the diversion in his eyes, waiting for an opening, perhaps once he was engaged in whatever conversation he was about to have.

  Chapter 30

  The lengthened stride of Sean’s legs winded down as he rounded the long driveway on his way back up to Lisa’s house. His mind was wandering and he nearly overlooked the brand new Volvo V70 parked in front of the garage. It hadn’t been there the first time he’d showed up at the cottage, but its color resembled that of a car he’d seen from a distance through a curtain of trees as it skimmed its way up Bluff Walk Road. Sean had been headed in the opposite direction, making his way down the slope of the forest floor.

  He clasped a thin manila envelope in his hand, having played the hunch that it had arrived from Colorado, and sure enough, it was sitting in Lisa’s mailbox at the bottom of the hill. It may have arrived as recently as that morning. The envelope looked small in his large hand. Across the top of it was the slightly smeared ink postmark from the main post office in Lakeland, Colorado. The postmark had cancelled out a row of first class stamps that looked to have been hastily sealed to the envelope, judging by their uneven placement to the edge. The destination address was written in red ink and the envelope itself displayed a fair amount of wear from travel.

  The Volvo had Michigan plates. Sean assumed it belonged to a friend of Lisa Kimble’s: possibly a neighbor, though the car had a rental decal on it. It made sense to him that she would want a familiar shoulder to cry on in the wake of the terrible news he’d delivered to her a mere thirty minutes earlier.

  He deduced that he’d be far from a welcome sight to the grieving widow who’d essentially kicked him out of her house, but it mattered little. What mattered was what he had to tell her.

  He lurched up the steps, still breathing heavily from the jog up, and let the stately door have a set of sharp knocks from the back of his knuckles. Almost immediately, he heard an abrupt crash as if something had fallen to the floor close inside. The sound’s peculiarity was instantaneously replaced by the harrowing scream of a woman that heightened his pulse in an instant. His eyes broadened, and he reached for the doorknob.

  His stomach was clenched into a ball at what could have made the sound from inside. The doorknob wouldn’t budge as he twisted it, and he continued to hear sharp movements from the other side of the door. Another wail of distress from the person he was now certain was Lisa filtered out from behind the walls.

  He reached for the back of his pants to retrieve his gun and dropped the envelope to cup his other hand beside his mouth.

  “Mrs. Kimble!” he yelled into the air. “What’s going on?”

  His mind was fluttering with possible explanations of the calamity inside—other than the one that seemed almost an afterthought in the letter he’d just read. Could they have found her?

  With his heart racing and his adrenaline bubbling over, he erred on the side of disaster. He took two steps back across the front deck. He couldn’t say for sure what he was about to get himself in the middle of, but his combative nature was about to get him there.

  With a clenched fist, he readied himself to launch a fierce kick into the door to bust it wide open, but his eye caught movement in the front paned window to his left. He quickly twisted his head, and despite some glare from the sun, could make out the figure of a man who stumbled backwa
rd and into the glass with a thud. His back shattered a section of one of the panes, sending broken glass crashing down along the inside sill.

  The intruder turned to face Sean and the two men’s eyes met for a chilling, mutually confused moment. With blood noticeably dripping from the side of the man’s head, Sean froze. He quickly snapped out of it when his eyes found a black pistol rising along with the man’s arm. The sunlight highlighted the weapon for Sean with such clarity that there was no mistaking what it was.

  Eyes widening, Sean gasped and threw himself over the railing on the opposite side of the deck. As his body awkwardly hit the ground below shoulder-first with an echoing thud, he heard the clamor of more glass shattering behind him. Despite there being no sounds of a weapon discharging, he knew he was being shot at. With his elbows, he quickly pulled himself along the dense ivy and moist earth, keeping low to the ground.

  It was them. They had come for her.

  Inside, Lisa heard the intruder stagger back to his feet among the thick glass shrapnel that littered the floor. His gun remained in his firm grip despite his momentary disorientation. His arm swung toward her as she retreated, but she had already disappeared around the corner of the living room hallway.

  Lisa recognized Sean’s voice calling from outside, but upon hearing the wicked sound of crashing glass coming from the living room she feared he could very well be dead. Her life may again be in her own hands. She raced down a hallway toward the backdoor where she came to an abrupt halt. A heavy oak bookcase blocking the exit made her heart stop. She and her husband had placed the bookcase there at the end of the previous summer to make room for a new desk in the office. She had forgotten about it. Filled full of large hardback novels, she knew she couldn’t move it aside in the amount of time that meant life or death. She glanced over her shoulder as she heard running footsteps quickly approaching. Her stomach clenched in a large knot as she realized that she had no direction to go but up. Beside her was the spiral stairs that led to the lofted bedrooms above.