Intensity Read online

  passed.

  Under the killer’s guidance, the Honda coasted downhill and onto the right shoulder.

  She could go after him, shoot him in the car or as he got out of the car. But he was fifty yards away now, sixty, and he would surely see her coming. She would have no hope of keeping the advantage of surprise, so she would have to shoot to kill, which would do Ariel no good at all, because with this bastard dead they would still have to search for the girl wherever she was hidden. And they might never find her. Besides, the creep probably had a gun on him, and if this turned into a shooting match, he would win, because he was far more practiced than she was—and bolder.

  She had no one to whom she could turn. As in childhood.

  So now get out of sight quickly. Don’t be rash. Wait for the ideal situation. Pick the moment of the confrontation and control the showdown when it comes.

  Fierce lightning again, and a long hard crash of thunder like vast structures collapsing high in the night.

  She reached the motor home.

  Oh, God.

  The driver’s door stood open.

  Oh, Jesus. Oh, God.

  She couldn’t do it.

  She had to do it.

  Downhill, on the shoulder, with a rattle of twisted steel, the Honda was coasting to a stop.

  She had the revolver. That made all the difference. She was safe with the gun.

  Who will save this girl hidden in a cellar, this girl ripening for this sonofabitch bastard freak, this girl like me? Who is ever there for frightened girls hiding in the backs of closets or under beds, who is ever there but twitching palmetto beetles? Who will be there if not me, where will I be if not there, why is this the only choice—and when the answer is so obvious, why even ask why?

  Downslope, the Honda came to a full stop.

  With the revolver heavy in her hand, Chyna climbed into the cockpit and behind the steering wheel. She swung around in the driver’s seat, got up, and hurried back through the motor home, murmuring, “Jesus, Jesus,” telling herself that it was all right, this crazy thing she was doing, all right because this time she had the revolver.

  But she wondered if even the gun would give her enough of an edge when the time arrived to go face-to-face with this man.

  Of course a direct confrontation might never have to take place. Chyna intended to hide until they arrived at his house and then find out where the girl was being held. With that information, she would be able to go to the police, and they could nail this creep and free Ariel and—

  And what?

  And in saving the girl, she would save herself. From what, she was not sure. From a life of merely surviving? From the endless and fruitless struggle to understand?

  Crazy, crazy, but there was no turning back now. And in her heart she knew that risking all was less crazy than living a life that had no higher goal than survival.

  As if thrown forward by the hard knocking of her heart, Chyna reached the rear of the motor home. The closed door to the only bedroom.

  Jesus.

  She didn’t want to go in there. With Laura dead. The man in the closet. The sewing kit waiting to be used again.

  Jesus.

  But it was the best place to hide, so she opened the door and went in and closed the door behind her and eased to the left through the palpable darkness and put her back against the wall.

  Maybe he wouldn’t drive straight home. He might stop at some point between here and there to come to the back of the motor home and have a look at his trophies.

  Then she would kill him the instant that he stepped through the door. Empty the revolver into him. Take no chances.

  With him dead, they might never find Ariel. Or they might find her only after she had perished of starvation, an excruciatingly painful way to die.

  Nevertheless, if the killer entered this bedroom, Chyna wouldn’t rely on half measures. She would not attempt to wound him and keep him alive for police interrogation, not in this tight space with him looming over her and with so many ways that things could go wrong.

  Lights off, windshield wipers off, Edgler Vess sits in the dead car by the side of the road. Thinking.

  There are numerous ways that he can proceed from here. Life is always a laden buffet of treats, a vast smorgasbord groaning with infinite choices of sensations and experiences to thrill the heart—but never more so than now. He wishes to exploit the opportunity to the fullest possible extent, to extract from it the greatest possible excitement and the most poignant sensations, and he must, therefore, not act precipitously.

  Luck had given him a glimpse of her in the rearview mirror: as fleet as a deer across the blacktop, hesitating at the open door of the motor home, and then up and inside and out of sight.

  She must be the woman from the Honda. When she passed him earlier, he had looked down through the windshield of her car and had seen her red sweater.

  In the accident, she might have received a hard blow to the head. Now perhaps she is dazed, confused, frightened. This would explain why she doesn’t approach him directly and ask for help or for a ride to the nearest service station. If her thoughts are addled, the irrational decision to become a stowaway aboard the motor home might seem perfectly reasonable to her.

  She did not appear to be suffering from a head injury, however, or any injury at all. She hadn’t staggered or stumbled across the highway but had been swift and surefooted. At this distance and in the rearview mirror, Vess wouldn’t have been able to see blood even if she had been bleeding; but he knows intuitively that there was no blood.

  The longer he considers the situation, the more it seems to him that the accident was staged.

  But why?

  If the motive had been robbery, she would have accosted him the moment that he stepped onto the highway.

  Besides, he isn’t driving one of those elaborate three-hundred-thousand-dollar land yachts that, by their very flashiness, advertise their contents to thieves. His vehicle is seventeen years old and, though well maintained, worth considerably less than fifty thousand bucks. It seems pointless to wreck a relatively new Honda for the purpose of looting the contents of an aging vehicle that promises no treasures.

  He has left his keys in the ignition, the engine running. She already could have driven away in the motor home if that had been her intention.

  And a woman alone on a lonely highway at night is not likely to be planning a robbery. Such behavior doesn’t fit any criminal profile.

  He is baffled.

  Deeply.

  Mr. Vess’s simple life is not often touched by mystery. There are things that can be killed and things that can’t. Some things are harder to kill than others, and some are more fun to kill than others. Some scream, some weep, some do both, some only tremble silently and wait for the end as if having spent their whole lives in anticipation of this awful pain. Thus the days go by—pleasantly straightforward, a river of raw sensation upon which enigma seldom sets sail.

  But this woman in a red sweater is an enigma, all right, as mysterious and intriguing as anyone Mr. Vess has ever known. What experiences he will have with her are difficult to imagine, and he is excited by the prospect of such novelty.

  He gets out of the Honda and closes the door.

  For a moment he stands staring at the forest in the cold rain, hoping to appear unsuspecting if the woman should be watching him from inside the motor home. Maybe he is wondering what happened to the driver of the Honda. Maybe he is a good citizen, concerned about her and considering a search of the woods.

  Multiple bolts of lightning chase across the sky, as white and jagged as running skeletons. The subsequent blasts of thunder are so powerful that they rattle through Mr. Vess’s bones, a vibration that he finds most agreeable.

  Unfazed by the storm, several elk suddenly appear from out of the forest, drifting between the trees and into the bordering sward of ferns. They move with stately grace, in a silence that is ethereal behind the fading echo of thunder, eyes shining in the
backwash of the headlight beams. They seem almost to be apparitions rather than real animals.

  Two, five, seven, and yet more of them appear. Some stop as though posing, and others move farther but then stop as well, until now a dozen or more are revealed and standing still, and every one of them is staring at Mr. Vess.

  Their beauty is unearthly, and killing them would be enormously satisfying. If he had one of his guns at hand, he would shoot as many of them as he could manage before they bolted beyond range.

  As a young boy, he began his work with animals. Actually, he’d begun with insects, but soon he had moved on to turtles and lizards, and then to cats and larger species. As a teenager, as soon as he had gotten a driver’s license, he had roamed back roads some nights and in the early mornings before school, shooting deer if he spotted any, stray dogs, cows in fields, and horses in corrals if he was certain that he could get away with it.

  He is flushed with nostalgia at the thought of killing these elk. The sight of their blood would intensify the redness of his own and make his arteries sing.

  Though usually reticent and easily spooked, the elk stare boldly at him. They do not seem to be watching with alarm, are not in the least skittish or poised to flee. Indeed, their directness strikes him as strange; uncharacteristically, he feels uneasy.

  Anyway, the woman in the red sweater awaits him, and she is more interesting than any number of elk. He is a grown man now, no longer a boy, and his quest for intense experiences cannot be satisfactorily conducted along the byways of the past. Edgler Vess has long ago put aside childish things.

  He returns to the motor home.

  At the door, he sees that the woman is in neither the pilot’s nor the copilot’s position.

  Swinging in behind the steering wheel, he glances back but can see no sign of her in the lounge or the dining area. The short and shadowy hall at the end appears deserted as well.

  Facing forward but keeping his eyes on the rearview mirror, he opens the tambour-top console between the seats. His pistol is still there, where he left it, sans silencer.

  Pistol in hand, he swivels in his chair, gets up, and moves back through the motor home to the kitchen and dining area. The butcher knife, found on the service-station blacktop, lies on the counter as before. He opens the cabinet to the left of the oven and discovers that the 12-gauge Mossberg is securely in its spring clamps, to which he returned it after killing the two clerks.

  He doesn’t know if she is armed with a weapon of her own. From the distance at which he’d seen her, he hadn’t been able to discern whether she was empty-handed or, equally important, whether she was attractive enough to be a fun kill.

  Farther back, then, through his narrow domain, with special caution at the end of the dining nook, behind which lies the step well. She’s not crouched here either.

  Into the hall.

  The sound of the rain. The idling engine.

  He opens the bathroom door, quickly and noisily, aware that stealth isn’t possible in this reverberant tin can on wheels. The cramped bathroom is as it should be, no stowaway on the pot or in the shower stall.

  Next the shallow wardrobe with its sliding door. But she isn’t in there either.

  The only place remaining to be searched is the bedroom.

  Vess stands before this last closed door, positively enchanted by the thought of the woman huddled in there, unaware of those with whom she shares her hiding place.

  No thread of light is visible along the threshold or the jamb, so she no doubt entered in darkness. Evidently she has not yet sat upon the bed and found the sleeping beauty.

  Perhaps she has edged warily around the small room and, by blind exploration, has discovered the folding door to the closet. Perhaps if Vess opens this bedroom door, she will simultaneously pull aside those vinyl panels and attempt to slip swiftly and quietly into the closet, only to feel a strange cold form hanging there instead of sport shirts.

  Mr. Vess is amused.

  The temptation to throw open the door is almost irresistible, to see her carom off the body in the closet, then to the bed, then away from the dead girl, screaming first at the sewn-shut face of the boy and then at the manacled girl and then at Vess himself, in a comic pinball spin of terror.

  Following that spectacle, however, they will have to get down to issues at once. He will quickly learn who she is and what she thinks she is doing here.

  Mr. Vess realizes that he doesn’t want this rare experience with mystery to end. He finds it more pleasing to prolong the suspense and chew on the puzzle for a while.

  He was beginning to feel weary from his recent activities. Now he is energized by these unexpected developments.

  Certain risks are involved, of course, in playing it this way. But it is impossible to live with intensity and avoid risk. Risk is at the heart of an intense existence.

  He backs quietly away from the bedroom door.

  Noisily, he steps into the bathroom, takes a piss, and flushes the toilet, so the woman will think that he came to the back of the motor home not in search of her but to answer the call of nature. If she continues to believe that her presence is unknown, she will proceed on whatever course of action brought her here in the first place, and it will be interesting to see what she does.

  He goes forward again, pausing in the kitchen to pump a cup of hot coffee from the two-quart thermos on the counter by the cooktop. He also switches on a couple of lights so he will be able to see the interior clearly in the rearview mirror.

  Behind the steering wheel once more, he sips the coffee. It is hot, black, and bitter, just the way he likes it. He secures the cup in a holder bracketed to the dashboard.

  He tucks the pistol in the open console box between the seats, with the safeties off and the butt up. He can put his hand on it in a second, turn in his seat, shoot the woman before she can get near him, and still maintain control of the motor home.

  But he doesn’t think that she will try to harm him, at least not soon. If harming him was her primary intention, she would have gone after him already.

  Strange.

  “Why? What now?” he says aloud, enjoying the drama of his peculiar situation. “What now? What next? What ho? Surprise, surprise.”

  He drinks more coffee. The aroma reminds him of the crisp texture of burned toast.

  Outside, the elk are gone.

  A night of mysteries.

  The mounting wind lashes the long fronds of the ferns. Like evidence of violence, bright wet rhododendron blossoms spray through the night.

  The forest stands untouched. The power of time is stored in those massive, dark, vertical forms.

  Mr. Vess shifts the motor home out of park and releases the emergency brake. Onward.

  After he cruises past the damaged Honda, he glances at the rearview mirror. The bedroom door remains closed. The woman is in hiding.

  With the motor home rolling again, perhaps the stowaway will risk turning on a light and will take this opportunity to meet her roommates.

  Mr. Vess smiles.

  Of all the expeditions that he has conducted, this is the most interesting and exciting. And it isn’t over yet.

  Chyna sat on the floor in the darkness. Her back was against the wall. The revolver lay at her side.

  She was untouched and alive.

  “Chyna Shepherd, untouched and alive,” she whispered, and this was both a prayer and a joke.

  Throughout her childhood, she frequently prayed earnestly for that double blessing—her virtue and her life—and her prayers were often as rambling and incoherent as they were frantic. Eventually she had worried that God was growing weary of her endless desperate pleas for deliverance, that He was sick of her inability to take care of herself and stay out of trouble, and that He might decide that she had used up all of the divine mercy allotted to her. God was busy, after all, running the entire universe, watching over so many drunks and fools, with the devil working mischief everywhere, volcanoes erupting, sailors lost in storms,
sparrows falling. By the time Chyna was ten or eleven, in consideration of God’s hectic schedule, she had condensed her rambling pleas, in times of terror, to this: “God, this is Chyna Shepherd, here in”—fill the blank with the name of the current place—“and I’m begging you, please, please, please, just let me get through this untouched and alive.” Soon, realizing that God, being God, would know precisely where she was, she reduced her entreaty further to: “God, this is Chyna Shepherd. Please get me through this untouched and alive.” Finally, certain that God was exasperatedly familiar with her panicky presumptions on His time and grace, she had shortened her plea to a telegraphic minimum: “Chyna Shepherd, untouched and alive.” In crises—under beds or lost in closets behind concealing clothes or in cobwebbed attics smelling of dust and raw wood or, once, flattened against the ground in a mire of rat shit in the crawl space under a moldering old house—she had whispered those five words or chanted them silently, over and over, indefatigably, Chyna-Shepherd-untouched-and-alive, ceaselessly reciting them not because she was afraid that God might be distracted by other business and fail to hear her but to remind herself that He was out there, had received her message, and would take care of her if she was patient. And when each crisis passed, when the black flood of terror receded, when her stuttering heart finally began to speak each beat clearly and calmly again, she had repeated the five words once more but with a different inflection than she had used previously, not as a plea for deliverance this time but as a dutiful report, Chyna-Shepherd-untouched-and-alive, much as a sailor in wartime might report to his captain after the ship had survived a vigorous strafing by enemy planes—“All present and accounted for, sir.” She was present; she was accounted for; and she let God know of her gratitude with the same five words, figuring that He would hear the difference in her inflection and would understand. It had become a little joke with young Chyna, and sometimes she had even accompanied the report with a salute, which seemed all right because she had figured that God, being God, must have a sense of humor.

  “Chyna Shepherd, untouched and alive.”

  This time, from the motor-home bedroom, it was simultaneously a report on her survival and a fervent prayer to be spared from whatever brutality might be coming next.

  “Chyna Shepherd, untouched and alive.”

  As a little girl, she had loathed her name—except when she had been praying to survive. It was frivolous, a stupid misspelling of a real word, and when other kids teased her about it, she wasn’t able to mount a defense. Considering that her mother was called Anne, such a simple name, the choice of Chyna seemed not merely frivolous but thoughtless and even mean. During most of the time that Anne was pregnant, she had lived in a commune of radical environmentalists—a cell of the infamous Earth Army—who believed that any degree of violence was justifiable in defense of nature. They had spiked trees with the hope that loggers would lose hands in accidents with power saws. They had burned down two meat-packing plants and the hapless night watchmen in them, sabotaged the construction equipment at new housing tracts that encroached upon the wilds, and killed a scientist at Stanford because they disapproved of his use of animals in his laboratory experiments. Influenced by these friends, Anne Shepherd had considered many names for her daughter: Hyacinth, Meadow, Ocean, Sky, Snow, Rain, Leaf, Butterfly…. By the time she had given birth, however, she had moved on from the Earth Army, and she had named Chyna after China because, as she had once explained, “Honey, I just suddenly realized one day that China is the only just society on earth, and it seemed like a beautiful name.” She had never been able to recall why she had changed the i to y, though by then she had been a working partner in a methamphetamine lab, packaging speed in affordable five-dollar hits and sampling the merchandise often enough to have been left with a few blank days in her memory. Only when praying for deliverance had young Chyna liked her name, because she had figured that God would remember her more easily for it, would not get her confused with the millions of Marys and Carolines and Lindas and Heathers and Tracys and Janes.

  Now her name no longer dismayed or pleased her. It was just a name like any other.

  She had learned that who she was—the true person she was—had nothing whatsoever to do with her name, and little to do with the life that she’d led with her mother for sixteen years. She couldn’t be blamed for the dreadful hates and lusts she had seen, for the obscenities heard, for the crimes witnessed, or for the things that some of her mother’s male friends had wanted from her. She was not defined either by a name or by shameful experience; instead, she was formed by dreams and hopes, by aspirations, by self-respect and perseverance. She wasn’t clay in the hands of others; she was rock, and with her own determined hands, she could sculpt the person that she wanted to be.

  She hadn’t reached this realization until a year ago, when she was twenty-five. The wisdom had come to her not in a dazzling flash but slowly, in the way that a plot of bare earth is covered gradually by creeping ajuga until one day, as if miraculously, the brown dirt is gone and everywhere are emerald-green leaves and tiny blue flowers. Worthwhile knowledge always seemed hard-won while the winning was in progress—but seemed easily acquired in retrospect.

  The old motor home lumbered through the night, creaking like a long-sealed door, ticking like a rusted clock too corroded to register every second faithfully, toward dawn.