“He’s sick,” Ellen said. “He did try to help Jules, but no one could help her.” She stood with her back to them, addressing the wall of barrels, her voice harsh with tears. “She didn’t want you to hurt them, Daddy. She just wanted to scare them.” She turned to him. “Come on. Let’s leave now.”
“No.” He pulled back the rifle, turned it on her. “Get out of here.”
“I’m not going. You killed that man out there.”
A short silence, and then his voice, strangely distant. “Well, then. You don’t leave me much choice, do you?”
He hit her with the rifle, as if swatting a fly. A loud smash, a moan. Ellen collapsed into a heap. Gabriella gasped, unable to control her trembling, in spite of Tania Marie’s strong fingers digging into her. Tears coursed down her face.
The silhouette holding the rifle stopped and swung slowly toward her.
THIRTY-FOUR
Rikki
“What are you going to say to him?” Lucas asks as we pull in front of the winding drive.
“I’m not sure.”
I’m not even certain what is propelling me right now—the anger, that secondary emotion, that the man who must be Earl Horner evoked when I was out here the first time?
I called Den on the drive over, telling him what I suspect.
“Don’t go there” were the last words he spoke to me. But I can’t wait for the police, for polite questions and answers.
“Let’s park down the road and walk back,” I say.
A brown fence with scabby paint delineates the house and yard from the spiked vines and the brick-faced stone building in back. A ghost winery, Roberta Matlock had explained, deserted during the phylloxera epidemic. The trees look black silhouetted against the light of the sun.
Barbed-wire coils along the top of a chain-link fence. The gate is closed. We move along the side of the fence toward it.
I peek through the links. All I can see is a white pickup and the back of a car in front of it.
“Someone’s back there,” I say. “Do you have a weapon?”
“Pistol. In the car.”
“Go get it.”
“I’m not leaving you.” His face is grim, his eyes behind the glasses unrelenting.
“I’ll wait here for you. I just don’t think we should go poking around without some protection.”
“I don’t think we should go poking around, period. The police will be here anytime.”
He has a point.
“But if they have the women in there—” I don’t finish the sentence. “We have to find out, Lucas.”
He touches my arm. “I’ll be right back. Promise you’ll stay here.”
“Halt!” The gate jerks open, and I go numb. He’s there, Earl Homer, grimacing down the barrel of a rifle. “Inside.” He bellows it, as if commanding soldiers, the word ejected from his throat in two harsh syllables.
I move through the open gate, knowing he will kill me if I don’t, knowing he will kill me, anyway. Each step is just buying time, an additional moment so that I can think. I just need to think. Lucas walks behind me. He’s in top shape and probably twenty years younger than the guy. He might be able to take him if we can get the rifle away.
“I want to ask you something,” I say.
“Move.” He scurries alongside me with the rifle. “Past the truck. In there.”
