Burn Daughters Read online

  “I’m not always nice to Evie,” I confessed. “Sometimes I hate having her around so much. It would be easier if it were just me. Pretty self-centered, huh?” Truth was Momma should have never had children if she didn’t want them.

  Palms flat on the metal, leaning over the engine, he glanced at me. His blue eyes were startling. “I never said I’m the perfect brother. You invited your sister to come with us. That was a nice thing to do.”

  Clay’s muscles flexed under his red t-shirt. “Found it!” He held up the hose he pulled from deep within the engine. Part of the end was rotted.

  “Think it will work?” I was skeptical as I made my way to him, placing a hand on his shoulder.

  “Enough to get us home. That’s all that matters.”

  Clay tensed at my touch. He turned to face me, my chest against his. I peered into his eyes, not sure what came next, so I stepped back, giving him space.

  His hand slid around my waist, and he pulled me closer. My heart raced. Clay’s other hand moved over my lower back, gripping me tightly. “Now we can get out of here,” he said holding up the hose between us. The smile he gave me caused chills over my flesh. “That’s what you want, right?”

  “Yeah, that's what I want.”

  Clay wet his lips. I could feel his warm breath against my cheek. Smell the nicotine on his breath. “I’m sorry I got you into this, Mill,” he said.

  I couldn’t help smiling, I already had a nickname.

  “I’ll explain to your parents that the truck broke down. I don’t want them thinking I’m a bad influence right off the bat.”

  What he didn’t know was that Momma was probably already sloppy drunk, that her boyfriend would do nothing more than yell profanities at me for my lack of respect when I made it home. Then he would grope me.

  “They won’t,” I said.

  Clay leaned toward me. I could feel the pounding of his heart under his t-shirt. I stood on the tips of my toes and closed my eyes.

  “How did you manage to get grease on you?” he asked.

  My eyes popped open. “What?”

  “You got…” Clay reached up and rubbed my cheek. When that didn’t work he slowly wet those same fingers with his tongue and gently scrubbed the grease off. “There. Got it. All clean.” The hand lingered, soft against my skin.

  I blinked, speechless, lost in the depths of his eyes. When a whistle interrupted us, we immediately separated.

  “Problem incoming!” It was David, yelling from around the front of the house.

  Clay shoved the hose in his back pocket and reached for my hand. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  We jogged across the back yard, past a stone wellhouse with a roof where a bucket dangled from rope. A rusted horseshoe hung under the overhang. I should have grabbed it; maybe we would have had better luck.

  “What is that sound?” I asked. The silence that possessed the site had been broken by the low rumble of a motor. “A tractor?”

  “That’s what it sounds like.” Clay pulled me into the overgrown shrubs next to the side of the house.

  “What about Evie?” My eyes darted around the property. “Where is she? I knew I shouldn’t have left her. What was I thinking?”

  “It’s okay. David will look out for her.” The tractor continued to growl up the long drive toward us.

  The first good look I got of the old woman she was sitting on the metal seat of the tractor, bouncing up and down. She was old and worn, her expression angry and unhappy like one of those old-timey black and white portraits, looking hard because life was hard.

  Clay and I flattened our bodies against the side of the house, still holding hands.

  “Where did the others go?” I asked him.

  “Relax. I’m sure Evie’s okay.”

  “I can’t relax. I’m responsible for her.”

  “Calm down,” he told me.

  “What are we going to do? She’s going to call the cops, get us all arrested.”

  Clay let my hand slip from his. “Let me think.”

  Frustrated, I let the back of my head thump against the wood siding of the house. Big mistake: the window sill was directly above me. The dogs inside charged.

  I jumped, startled, slapping a hand over my mouth to keep from screaming. The dogs would tear us apart if they could get to us. I didn’t want to stick around long enough to give them a chance.

  Clay turned to face me and took hold of my arms. “Breathe, Mill, stay with me. Be strong. You can do this.”

  “Find my sister and get us out of here.”

  “That’s what I’m working on,” he returned. “Do you trust me?” I nodded. “Good.” His eyes scanned the area, stopping on the abandoned farmhouse. “In there.” He gestured toward it. “That’s where David would have taken them.”

  “They could have gone into the woods,” I suggested.

  “No.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “David would wait on us.”

  The tractor stopped and the rumbling died. I peeked out of the bushes, careful to stay out of sight. The woman crawled down from the tractor, precise in her movements, but slow, as if every joint in her body needed oil. The dogs in the window above me barked.

  “Shut up!” She growled. The dogs just barked. She smacked dust from a coat with big black buttons that swallowed her thin frame. She reminded me of the malnourished grizzly. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

  For the first time since we left the main road, we saw someone other than us way out on the Keller’s Land. An old truck came up the drive. The truck’s heavy tires stirred up dust until it parked near the front of the house with the smoke. I half expected the woman to run the man off; instead she welcomed him as if his visit was planned.

  “Dogs up?” the called from the rolled down window. The woman nodded.

  The driver’s door swung open. Boots crushed gravel. The man was dark skinned; Indian, I think. His black hair hung past his shoulders. He moved around to the tailgate and lowered it. The tailgate protested; its joints squealing setting off the dogs into another fit of barking and pawing at the windows.

  The man paid the dogs no attention.

  The woman followed him but never got close, only close enough to peer over the side of the truck into the bed, mildly curious.

  “Brought you goodies.” The man smiled. The woman’s expression didn’t change, concreted into a grumpy frown. “More crates, those are handy.” He said pulling on a pair of leather gloves the color of deer hide. He slid the crates off, and then picked up a roll of barbwire tossing it to the ground as well. “Couple bags of flour, corn, should last you till next month, at least. Wife sent over all her extra fabric, there’s a nice bag of it, thought you might be able to do something with it.”

  The woman stood stiff, cautious while the man loaded up a corner of her porch. She didn’t say much. Only answered when spoken to. No thank you. No invitation inside the house. When the man was finished unloading, he slammed the tailgate and paused. I thought he was waiting for money, but no money changed hands. “How you holding up?” he asked the woman.

  “Fine,” the woman told him.

  “You have to get lonely. Why don’t you visit, have a meal with the wife and me?” The woman shook her head. The man cracked a smile and shook his head as he walked back around to the driver side. “I figured as much. Guess you’ve gotten used to being on your own. Ever change your mind…you know where we are.”

  Evie was tired. I was tired. I didn’t love the idea of explaining to the man our reasons for trespassing. It would be awkward. We could end up spending the night in jail. I’d never spent a night in jail. I had been in a jail though, with momma whenever she had to go down and bail Frank out. He didn’t seem to mind jail too much otherwise he would’ve drank less and not started fist fights in bars.

  My eyes lingered on the man. He seemed nice enough. “Shouldn’t we go out, ask him for a ride back into town?” I asked Clay.

  “Then what
?” Clay returned. I shrugged. I didn’t have all the answers, only a sick feeling the man was our only hope, our last chance. Clay shook his head. “Come on,” he mouthed. “While the woman is preoccupied, it’s the perfect time to find Evie and head through the woods. You want to get out of here, right?”

  “Lead the way.”

  That was the plan, to go around to the back of the barn and enter the old farmhouse through the rear. I was not so sure the idea was a good one. Had Evie been by my side, I would’ve headed for the woods and never looked back. But she wasn’t. If Clay thought David had taken her to the farmhouse then that was where I was headed.

  My gaze, once I pulled it away from the woman, landed on the deer hides stapled to the barn like trophies. Clay motioned for me to run first. I was happy to; happy to distance myself from the woman, her tractor, and her coat with the big black buttons, eager to find my sister.

  By the time Clay and I made the backside of the barn, we were running together, and lucky to be, because what I saw under a towering pecan tree there made me stop dead. Clay covered my mouth with his hand, knowing enough to catch the scream that would come.

  “It’s ok,” he whispered in my ear. “Not a big deal.”

  Not a big deal?! My chest heaved beneath his tight hold. Under the pecan tree was a bucket full of blood. Thick, crimson red blood, splattered on the white sides of the bucket where it dried a shade lighter. Beside the bucket was a huge steel triangle, dangling from its highest point, dead-center, was a chain and hook: this triangle was not intended for anything good, or anything nice; the entire scene was ugly.

  I calmed my breathing and Clay removed his hand from my mouth. “What is that thing?” I asked, pointing at the triangle. The woman’s house was a straight shot from it. We could only hope The woman wouldn’t see us as we raced from the back of the barn to the rotting farmhouse.

  “Tripod,” he replied.

  “What for?”

  Clay’s hold on me remained firm. “Field slaughter,” he replied.

  I should not have asked the question. Other than how to get out safely, I didn’t want to know anything about this place. “Slaughter?” I would be brave, for Evie’s sake, but I didn’t think I could stand any more. It was all blood and stink and death and rot.

  “It’s okay. Lots of hunters have them, Mill. My dad has one. It keeps the carcass hanging so it doesn’t get dirty. I won’t let anything happen to you. Now come on, let’s find the others.”

  Clay slowly released me, rubbing my arms and kissing the back of my head. He nodded toward the back of the farmhouse, just past the tripod and a dense growth of shrubs.

  “How are we getting over there without being seen?” I asked Clay. The woman was tinkering with the tractor, in clear view of the only path at our disposal leading from where we were standing behind the barn, to where we wanted to be, the backside of the farmhouse.

  “We’re going through the Laurels,” he said.

  I knew the plant; we’d studied it in class. It was a close relative to the Rhododendron and often referred to as Laurel Hells. It was an odd time to think about what I learned in the classroom but what I remembered about the plant wasn’t good. Fitting, I guess, for the plant to have the word Hell in it because the thicket was overtaken by dense intertwined stems that were nearly impossible to get through. The stems seemed to grab at you as if to intentionally drag you under. At one point I was practically crawled through.

  My palms worked over barbs and broken sticks. Bramble and branches caught at my hair, pulling it. Rough bark scraped my skin; twigs whacked me in the face. I went down on my knees. My jeans drank up moisture from the ground. Mudding. I pushed to my feet glad Clay had gone first, braving the way through spiderwebs, scaring away snakes, and clearing a path for me.

  A granite slab served as a step leading to the covered rear porch. The wood decking was rotted and littered with old whiskey bottles and car batteries. A jar of marbles and a doll with a ceramic face sat on a dusty shelf. Her eyes were wide as saucers, like she was scared to death.

  The screen door shrieked as Clay pulled slowly. Ready to fall off, the doorknob wobbled in his hand. He kicked the door open. Inside the farmhouse it was nearly too dark to see. I heard a tiny squeal and knew Clay was right, we’d come to the right place and Evie was found. I rushed to her and threw my arms around her.

  “Thank God! I thought something happened to you!” I kneeled in front of her, my hands sliding over her face, pushing her bangs back, drowning in the sight of her, making sure she was unharmed. She was still the same Evie. Undamaged. Every freckle was there. Not a scratch marred her flesh.

  I was not so lucky. “You’re bleeding,” she said. “What happened?” She turned my hand over and inspected it closely. She frowned, her sad eyes finding mine.

  “It’s nothing. I fell.” I glanced up at the others. “Clay found the part.”

  “Thank you,” Emily said. “Finally, we can get the hell out of here.”

  “As soon as the old bat goes inside, we’ll go,” said Clay.

  “What? I want to go now.” Emily stepped toward the back door.

  “It’s not going to kill us to wait a few minutes,” David told her. He moved a dusty curtain aside and peered out the window. “Is that a walking corpse or a woman? I’ve never seen so many wrinkles in my life.”

  “Let me see.” Brooke yanked him back, elbowing for a position at the window. “What’s she doing?”

  “Feeding her chickens, I think,” David replied.

  I was sad to see the man gone and had no desire to watch the woman feed chickens. Instead, I looked around what had to be the living room. There was a stone fireplace climbing the height of one wall all the way to the ceiling; the stone wider at the base, skinnier at the top. The walls were gray and dingy with age, the plaster cracked and breaking off in great chunks. Everything was covered with dust and cobwebs.

  A slip of what light remained of the day caught a corner of the drapes along one wall. That dismal reminder of what was coming made me anxious. Soon there would be no light, we would be stuck in the old house in pitch black, with only one flashlight to get us back to the truck.

  “Think she suspects we’re in here?” Emily asked, her fingers hanging on the thin seam of the drape.

  “Not a chance.” David kissed her forehead. “No worries.” But he spoke quietly, not wanting the conversation to go any further than the dismal room, and I knew, at least, that he was worried.

  “Some night out, huh?” Emily told him. “Turned into a real horror show.”

  “I’m here. You’re perfectly safe,” he reassured her. “Once the crazy old lady goes inside, we’re ancient history.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  But the woman had ideas of her own. It was as if she had a sixth sense about us, coupled with a desire to do everything contrary to what we hoped she’d do. She did not go inside her home. She did not leave the yard at all. Her shoulders slumped but sturdy, her steps solid like a soldier storming into battle, wearing black rubber galoshes and that thick coat, she made her way into a chicken pen. The pen was right in the middle of the yard, made from sagging chicken wire and wood pallets.

  She gathered a few eggs, what must have been too few for her liking because she began kicking and screaming. “Blasted chickens, good for nothing. I have a mind to pop all your necks and be done with you. Git!” The chickens scattered, squawking, wings slapping the air in frantic haste. They settled quickly, forgetting the scuffle. Clucked. Strutted. Seeming proud but cautious, aware danger hovered close by.

  Crouching as low to the ground as a woman her age could get, the woman stretched her arms wide and forced the flapping chickens toward a lonely corner of the pen. One chicken darted between her legs.

  She turned toward it, throwing it some feed, clucking. The chicken paced back and forth, squawking, its head bobbing nervously as the woman approached. Suddenly she lunged and scooped the chicken into her arms. The chi
cken screamed, but the woman only held it more tightly against her chest, its wings bent and useless, its feet held firmly in the old woman’s rigid hands.

  “What is she going to do with the chicken?” Evie asked, pulling on my shirt sleeve.

  Emily’s mouth fell open. “Somebody please tell me she’s not going to do what I think she is.”

  “Better look away, girls,” David said. “This is going to get ugly.”

  “Not funny,” Emily told him.

  “Hell yeah, it is. Jesus, it’s a chicken, ladies. Not a kitten. I’ve heard chickens can still run around after their head gets chopped off.”

  Emily swatted him. “Don’t say that.”

  Out the window, the woman had set the chicken down on a wood stump, holding it firmly with one hand to keep it in place. In the other hand, she held an ax. I covered Evie’s eyes. The woman raised the ax. Evie squirmed in my hold.

  “I want to see. I want to see,” she chanted.

  “No. You don’t,” I told her.

  “What’s happening?”

  I shut my eyes, knowing what was coming. Whack! The ax fell into the wood stump and was still. I opened my eyes again, unable to resist knowing without doubting what just happened. A circle of thick, rich blood pooled in the stump and dripped down the dried bark. The old woman set the ax against the wood stump and raised the chicken in the air, blood oozing from its neck.

  “Dinner’s served,” Brooke remarked. She turned away from the window. “Breast or drumstick?”

  Evie gasped. “Did she kill the chicken?” She pried my hands off her eyes. “She did.”

  “That’s how it works, kid,” Brooke told her.

  Emily shuddered, rubbing her hands over her arms. “I feel filthy in this place. Like the nastiness is crawling all over me. What is it with these people? Do they have some morbid fetish with killing?”

  Evie’s eyes were full of tears. She loved animals. She loved happy endings. She loved the idea that Momma could magically stop drinking tomorrow, and Frank could crawl back into whatever deep-hole he slithered out of. In Evie’s world, everything was nice, and men didn’t overstep boundaries and steal your trust. In Evie’s world, the Reid women would eventually get their happy ending.