The Angel Gang by Ken Kuhlken

Author:Ken Kuhlken [Kuhlken, Ken]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FICTION / Mystery & Detective / General
ISBN: 978-1-61595-109-3
Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press, Inc.
Published: 2011-12-08T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

The sky had been gray-blue for an hour or so, but now the sun had topped the ridge and forest across the lake, lighted the angry black clouds as they fled south. It sparkled on the water, gleamed off the glacier-polished boulders. The shoreline fringed in ice flashed like a shattered mirror.

Wendy sat by the window. The man named Bud had let her move to the other chair. Hands resting on her belly, she felt Clifford squirming. She wondered if he’d be a terror, the kind you have to watch every second or else he’ll bust stuff or disappear. She wondered if he’d have a notch in his chin like Tom did, or Tom’s shiny blue eyes.

Bud sat in a rickety chair that squeaked with his every move. He used a tiny whetstone to sharpen a giant carving knife like the one Tom had saved from the restaurant he used to own, when he was married to the lady. Elizabeth’s mom. Wendy called Tom’s first wife “the lady” because she looked so grand in pictures. Besides, it saddened Wendy to say or even think the lady’s name. Especially after she’d read Mr. Poe’s story about the Usher family where another lady with the same name, Madeline, gets so sick people think she’s dead. They lay her in a casket in the cellar but she scrapes and kicks at the lid, yet they don’t understand the noise until finally they hear her muffled screams. The horrible thing—though Mr. Poe didn’t write it, Wendy could feel the girl’s horror—all Miss Usher wanted was to die or get well, either one. But God wouldn’t set her free.

For days after reading the story, Wendy’d fretted about why God wouldn’t spare the lady. Even if Mr. Poe made up the story out of nothing, God did let some people suffer that way. Twice since reading that story Wendy’d gotten a nightmare, the same both nights, about a house where she and Claire were visiting because it was for sale. It was far from the village, but Claire liked it and talked of moving there. So Wendy was already sad when they stood in the parlor and she heard scrapes, knocks, muffled screams. But she couldn’t tell where they came from. Claire said maybe there was a cellar. They spotted a cellar door and ran for it, threw it open, and plunged into the darkness.

Both times she’d woken up just then, before she had to scream. So Tom didn’t know about the nightmare. If she’d told him, he’d have worried awfully. She only told Claire, who didn’t worry as much, though she’d taken Mr. Poe’s book, traded for Willa Cather, and promised a new book every time Wendy finished the other. Claire was trying to protect her from scary authors like Mr. Poe.

But once you’d read a story, it was part of you.

Here in captivity the plight of Miss Usher gripped her heart once again. She heard the girl’s frantic howling, her bloody fingers clawing the coffin lid, the coffin nails creaking as the girl thrashed harder.

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