was the sound of a jail cell locking up tight. He’d been sentenced to living in a basement and putting up with a warden so insufferable, he didn’t even want to eat her.
If she had known that a flimsy lock wouldn’t keep him in, would she have still taken that precaution? Probably. Humans did silly things to reassure themselves when they were frightened, which she most definitely was, with a strange man in her basement.
Still, if she had wanted to make him feel like a prisoner, she couldn’t have been more effective. Graf decided he could bide his time; the thing about caged animals was, they only stayed caged for so long.
Three
Jessa stood, hands still braced on the heavy wooden bench, and wondered if it would be enough to hold a grown man inside. She wasn’t worried about him running away. Actually, she would prefer it. Contrary to the rumors around town that she was a man-hungry spinster, she did have some established criteria when it came to weeding out the bad ones.
This guy was one of the bad ones. That was why she was so worried about him getting out. He wasn’t bad in the hot-guy-who-was-nothing-but-trouble kind of way, though she had plenty of experience with that type. He was bad in the he-was-always-so-quiet-serial-killer kind of way. It was something about his eyes. There was a void there, an absence that had chilled her the moment she’d seen him. She’d almost been willing to take her chances with It, rather than hide in the gas station with him. But she had stayed, and gotten into his car on a desolate stretch of road in the middle of the night, and even let him sleep in her house. History had proven she wasn’t a very good judge of character before, but this example was like a neon sign that flashed YOU DUMMY.
Keeping him close wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, though. It wasn’t by chance that he was the first person to be able to stop in Penance. Nothing happened by chance anymore. Maybe she was a hard, cynical bitch—no, she was sure she was—but she wasn’t going to trust that he was just a stranded traveler. Having him on her side could be an advantage, or it could be a huge mistake.
She kept one eye on the basement door as she filled the kettle and set it on the stove. The sun would be up soon, and it would be too late to go to bed. Not that she could sleep, anyway, with a stranger in her basement who might or might not be trustworthy.
Then why did you let him stay? She scrubbed her hands over her face, blocking out the kitchen, blocking out the world. Blocking out the knife drawer, the scene of so many failed attempts to escape life, escape Penance, escape everything. Was it that same self-destructive urge that had convinced her to let him in?
It didn’t matter why she had offered up her basement, and it didn’t matter why he was here. What mattered was she had chickens to feed and chores to do.
She had to survive, because, so far, not surviving hadn’t been an option she’d been able to follow through on.
She left the kettle to boil, vaguely aware that it could be used as a weapon if he did sneak out of the basement. That line of thinking was counterproductive. All thinking was counterproductive. Once she thought about one aspect of her situation, she would have to think about all of it. The guy in the basement. The reason he was here. The thing that might have sent him. The town, the past, the future, all of it. The only way she got through the days and nights was by blocking all of it firmly out and pretending something else was happening.
She drifted up the stairs, imagining it was a Friday night, and she tiptoed to avoid waking her parents, who, once upon a time, would have been sleeping behind the closed door to their room. If they found out she’d been running around at all hours, they would tan her hide. There was no way she was going to get grounded this close to the homecoming dance. She went into the bathroom and closed the door, holding her breath when the light clicked on. It was the little sounds that would wake her parents, like the light switch flicking or the creak of the floorboards in front of the sink. She shed her dirty clothes and dropped them into the hamper. Mom did wash on Fridays, so that was why it was nearly empty. Not because Jessa was the only one left.
Downstairs, the teakettle whistled, and she closed her eyes, squeezed them shut tight against the intrusion of reality. She turned off the light and went to her bedroom, not bothering to sneak or avoid the squeaky spot in the hall. Her parents were gone. Jonathan was gone. The only things lying behind those closed doors were empty rooms, shrines to the dead she could hardly bear to look at. Everything she knew and loved had vanished, replaced by a nightmare world that mocked her with its familiarity.
She padded across the white area rug in her room, over the stain where she and Becky had spilled the wine cooler snuck from the fridge in seventh grade. The sky outside the window, what she could see of it through the branches of the tree—the very one that Derek used to climb to get into her room at night—had lightened to the white that preceded the arrival of the sun in the sky. Another fifteen minutes, maybe, and the rooster would start crowing.
She dressed in clean clothes, a tank top and denim shorts, and went downstairs. In the kitchen, she checked the basement door again, then put some dried raspberry leaves in a cup, pouring the steaming water from the kettle over them. Coffee, like everything else that couldn’t be grown or handmade in Penance, had gone from common item to luxury to extinction in the last five years. She had learned to substitute homemade soap for shampoo and live with the results. Coffee … she would kill a stranger with her hands to get a cup of coffee.
The thought of strangers brought her mind right back to the man in the basement. If he hadn’t been such a jerk, he might have actually been attractive. If she went for that slick, well-groomed type, which she didn’t. But she’d always been a sucker for blonds, and his gorgeous blue eyes were the kind a girl could get lost in, if she didn’t know they covered up a whole batch of lies, which they probably did.
He had to go, as soon as possible. If he had been polite—if he’d just been a little less rude—she might have more sympathy toward him. But he hadn’t been, so she didn’t, and she wouldn’t feel bad about kicking him out. She took a sip of the tea, wincing as she scalded her tongue. She was always doing that, always being too impatient, and hurting herself in the process. She finished her tea and headed out to the barn, trying hard to shake the feelings of guilt and responsibility that plagued her. It wasn’t her fault that the guy had stopped at that gas station. It wasn’t as though he’d stopped to help her. He shouldn’t have been able to stop at all.
A light sheen of dew glistened on the lawn, chilling Jessa’s bare feet as she made her away across the grass. There was something satisfying about being up with the sun, or at least there would have been had she actually gone to bed the night before. Lack of sleep aside, the morning seemed as close to normal as it got in Penance. The chickens chased each other through the hard-packed dirt of the farmyard in aggressive anticipation of feeding time. They didn’t know they were locked in a never-ending nightmare, and their ignorance comforted Jessa. She pushed the barn door open, ignoring as best she could the long slashes across the wood. It had come here before, and It liked to leave reminders.
Inside the barn, she checked her feed stores. Damn. She would have to go into town soon. She’d have to go, anyway, to unload her freeloader. But she didn’t have anything to trade, and supplies were running out. She leaned her head against the door, fighting the feelings of hopelessness that washed over her. She usually traded peaches from the orchard, but this year’s crop hadn’t yielded what it had the year before, and she’d lost a batch of preserves when the cans didn’t seal. She’d already traded away the tractor to Jim Wyandot, and he’d melted down the metal to make bullets for black-powder rifles. Without gasoline the farm equipment in town had been pretty much worthless, anyhow.
Gas. She barely thought of the word anymore, after nearly five years without any. They’d tried to ration it, but with It coming so close to the harvest, the majority of it had been sucked down by combines. There hadn’t been a drop of gasoline in Penance in a long, long time…. But there was, now.
Between the time she grabbed the garden hose and a red plastic gas can from the wall, and the time she made it down to the car, she didn’t think about anything but the amount someone, anyone, would pay for a gallon of gas. Once she stood