Too Many Cooks

Knowing - Chapter 5

Previously.

Two feet, six inches. Such a small gap and yet to Patty it felt like a chasm. She had to get past the living room doorway but if seen it would probably mean losing her last chance of freedom. She edges slowly forward, pausing every step to listen, wishing her heart would stop beating so loudly, convinced its pounding would betray her.

Patty stops at the edge of the doorway. Opposite her, the stairs to the upper floor disappear into darkness. She can still hear him, scar-face, arguing with himself and can make out a stream of profanity. Little else of his slurred ranting makes any sense.

In two paces she can be on the stairs. But which way is he facing? It doesn’t sound like he’s moving about. From the direction of his voice she guesses he must be sitting in the beat up old armchair, the one that has its back to the kitchen.

She holds her breath and moves swiftly and silently to the staircase, flicking her head to the side briefly as she does so. She doesn’t see him and knows that if he is in the armchair that he won’t have seen her.

Patty stops on the first step and reminds herself to start breathing. She moves haltingly up the stairs, avoiding the squeaky third and fifth steps, and allows herself the luxury of a deep breath when she reaches the landing. She rests a moment to give her eyes the chance to adjust to the darkness and then makes her way to the bedroom.

There’s just enough light from the street lamp to illuminate the room. He’s clearly been in here. Her wardrobe is opened and her belongings scattered over the floor. She moves to her nightstand and nearly slips on a book. She laughs at the title, “The World Is Yours”, a book on Eastern spirituality and meditation techniques. “All the mantras and visualizations aren’t going to help you now Patty.”

She reaches toward the nightstand and realizes she’s still tightly clutching the knife she used to cut the ropes. She places it on the bed and flexes her stiff fingers. Her hand looks so small. A sense of utter aloneness washes over her. She wishes she’d stayed at Ms. Brooks’ place but then wonders if it would actually have made a difference. And what has happened to her dogs? She doesn’t dare think about what he might have done to them.

Patty finds herself fighting back tears as she opens the hidden compartment in the nightstand and takes out the gun her father gave her. She has never liked guns but for the first time is grateful that her Dad showed her how to use one and insisted she have it when she left home. She hears his voice guiding her as she loads the bullets and steels herself for what is to come.

She makes her way cautiously back to the stairs and descends, stepping awkwardly over the creaky steps. She stops at the bottom and listens.

Silence.

Is it to much to hope that he’s passed out drunk? She forces herself to stand in the doorway and look into the living room. She enters and sees that he’s not there. The quiet is unnerving. The nearly finished whiskey bottle lies on its side at the base of the armchair next to an empty glass.

She moves quickly to the door which leads to the entrance hall and presses her ear against it. Nothing. She steps back and reaches for the handle.

“Going somewhere?” His voice turns her blood to ice. She turns her head to one side and sees his hulking frame filling the kitchen doorway. “I want that fucking key.”

Patty turns to face him and he roars with laughter when he notices the gun. “You haven’t got the fucking guts, you stupid bitch. You always were a useless piece of shit, Diana.”

“My name.” She raises the gun and cocks the hammer. “Is Patty.”

A momentary look of doubt crosses his face. Then he laughs again and begins to walk towards her, an evil grin distorting his mess of a face even further.

Patty slowly pulls on the trigger and simply says, “Namaste, motherfucker.”

Knowing - Chapter 4

Previously.

Patty worried her loose front tooth and sucked at her swollen lip, salty and sweet from blood mixed with whiskey, and listened to her captor mumbling in the living room.

The punch had knocked her to the floor, sending her and the old tubular dinette chair skidding toward the refrigerator. Her face was raw where his rough knuckles had torn her skin. And as if the bruises and scrapes hadn’t been enough, he’d dumped his glass of whiskey on her and that still burned. Of course wasting perfectly good booze had just made him madder. “Who the fuck is ‘Patty?’ I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing Diana but get this straight: you’re going to tell me where the key is.”

That was the last thing her captor had said before storming out of the kitchen. Patty had lain on the floor for an hour or more since, wondering if she’d live to see the morning. Her shoulder was numb from supporting all her weight and she was pretty sure she’d broken a couple of fingers when she hit the floor but she choked back the tears and remained as still and silent as the night outside. The only sounds were her captor’s ongoing conversation with himself and the occasional clink of an ice cube. Patty tried to hear what he was saying but couldn’t pick out any words, just the rhythm of his mumbling. It sounded like he was debating with himself but the pace kept getting slower with each glass he poured. “Great,” thought Patty. “He’s an unstable, violent drunk. It’s like I’ve been kidnapped by dear old dad.”

The compressor on the old refrigerator kicked on with a thud, shocking Patty and causing her to lurch. When she did, she felt the left leg of the chair bend. The old welds must have been weakened when she toppled to the floor. Seeing her chance, Patty tried moving her leg but couldn’t get enough leverage. Trying a different approach, she started rocking back and forth and got more torque against the chair leg. She felt it give a bit more and rocked faster. Then she noticed how much noise she was making and stopped. She held her breath and shut her eyes to focus but couldn’t hear anything over the whine of the refrigerator. She could wait for it to shut back off or risk it. She told herself if she couldn’t hear him over the motor, he wouldn’t be able to hear her either and started rocking again.

Patty didn’t immediately notice when the leg came loose. One second it was attached and bending freely and the next it was separated from the seat. She still wasn’t free but was one leg closer and quickly and quietly rolled over to work the other chair leg. The second one went much more quickly and she was able to stand but her arms were still securely tied to the chair and she was bent over at the waist. The mumbling from the living room got louder and more insistent as though his debate with himself was turning violent. Patty knew she had to get out before he came back to the kitchen or - she didn’t even want to consider that alternative - but she couldn’t run, couldn’t use the phone to call for help, and couldn’t do anything with her hands bound to the chair. She’d have to get free.

She couldn’t reach the knife block on the counter but standing on tiptoe she could just open the silverware drawer and reach inside. She felt around behind her back with her fingertips, balancing as best she could, until she found the wooden handle of the steak knife she’d stashed in her purse the last time she’d eaten at Murphy’s. She clawed at it, pulled at it, and finally gained purchase between two of her fingers. She lifted it out of the drawer and dropped to her knees. If she could get out of the chair, she might just make it.

The refrigerator kicked on again and the knife slipped out of her grip and clattered on the linoleum.

She held her breath for half a minute, waiting for the hulking presence to fill the doorway but he didn’t come. She exhaled and grabbed the knife again. He’d obviously grabbed the old rope from the garage and it didn’t take long for the knife to saw through the dry fibers. She got her injured hand free and made quick work of the loops holding her good hand. Her left hand throbbed and the ring finger was an ugly deep purple but she was free. “Now what?” she thought.

“If I open that door, he’ll be on me before I get to the street. I guess the only way out is up.”

Patty took a few deep, calming breaths and prepared to creep past her tormentor and to her nightstand.

Knowing - Chapter 3

Previously

Patty squeezed her eyes shut tightly as she became aware of a piercing light invading the darkness of her unconscious mind. Then the sudden, sickening pain centered on her left temple and shooting down her neck into her spine brought her to full, painful consciousness with a yelp. She was slumped over in a chair, and was restrained with her hands behind her. As sudden panic and dread set in, she fluttered her eyes open several times, but found that she could not keep them open for long as the light was just too bright. It must be just overhead, she thought. And she wondered where she was – where her assailant had taken her. Her assailant. This thought brought her breathing to a stop. She now forced her eyes open against the blinding light as she realized that she was in deep trouble.

Though it felt like every part of her head from the shoulders up was broken, she was able to turn her head away, slowly and painfully, to see a familiar sight: she was in her kitchen. She was sitting at her kitchen table, and there were her mismatched chairs. The light in her eyes was the overhead lamp that hung from the ceiling. She’d always hated the bare bulb sticking out of the bottom of that lamp. Closing her eyes again, she now saw the image of her assailant as she remembered him, hulking and dark, with a monstrous face. Wave after wave of panic swept over her as she struggled to move and found that her feet were roped down, and her upper body as well. She wanted to scream but feared that the man in the duster would be back and who knew what he meant to do to her. Quickly, she gained some composure and tried to think of a possible plan for escape. She was shaking from head to toe. The house was eerily quiet. The thought suddenly occurred to her – “Where are my dogs?”

Just then she heard the front door slam, and several stomp-drag sounds coming from the living room. The swinging kitchen door opened and in limped the stranger in the long jacket carrying a grocery bag that very clearly contained a bottle of liquor. The smells of snow, damp wool, sweat, and stale cigarettes exhaled off of him and flooded Patty’s nostrils. Pulling the bottle of Bushmills out and crushing the bag in his other hand, he growled, “Good, you’re alive. I can’t believe what a teetotaler you are. Had to run to the store to get this.” Patty squirmed trying to break free of her ties as the man with an ogre’s face spoke to her. She couldn’t keep from staring: the knobby, melted skin on the left half dragged his features down several inches from their original locations, and his eyelid drooped open to expose the red membranes beneath.

The man lobbed the bag in the direction of her trashcan but missed, and opened the cabinet to retrieve a glass. He seemed to know his way around her kitchen pretty well. Patty wondered how long he must have been peeking inside her window to know where everything was kept. He helped himself to a few ice cubes from the freezer and cracked the seal on the bottle of whiskey. Pouring a hefty three fingers into the glass he said, “No, you’re not going anywhere this time. Did you think I wouldn’t come back? You did, didn’t you? You hoped I’d just crawl away and die.” His voice was raspy, and the harshness of his words as he spat them out amplified the hissing sound from the back of his throat. “Well I’m back, you stupid whore. Now what did you do with it?”

Patty had been squirming in terror since the man had walked in the door, but now she found herself paralyzed: what was he talking about?

“Listen, Diana, I let you use me, and you had your fun,” he said, knocking his head back and taking a sizeable gulp from the glass, “yeah, have your fun with the gimp at his expense. But fuck you if you think I’m going to let you take credit for that thing. Now where did you put it?”

Patty’s eyes widened and her jaw dropped. Now she really didn’t know what to do.

Knowing—Chapter 2

Previously

Patty explains everything to Mike’s mom when she gets home. Ms. Brook is unnerved and begs her to stay—and while she entertains the idea for a minute, Patty realizes she can’t. Nobody is home to take care of her dogs. And while Ms. Brook offers to drive her home to take care of them and then drive her back here, Patty declines. Even if it wasn’t for the dogs, she would still want to be home, where she knows every corner and cranny, and where she isn’t reliant strictly on a telephone on the wall if something happens. Ms. Brook looks disappointed and a little hurt, but understands. Still, Patty leaves the house with burning cheeks and a paranoid (and probably—hopefully—completely wrong) suspicion that this is the last time she’ll be asked to babysit for young Mikey.

She doesn’t get six blocks before the wind hits her and tries to freeze her eyeballs solid, and this makes her rethink the whole my-puppies-need-me aspect of the endeavor a bit. Two and a half miles in this weather? In the dark? With some wackaloon wandering around staring into people’s windows? Suddenly the prospect of staying at the Brook home seems infinitely preferable. Then she recalls how last week she dozed off on the couch and woke up just in time to see Mikey dropping a wad of bubble gum into her hair.

Patty starts walking faster. The dogs may lose control and drop a deuce on the rug every once in a while, but they’re still better company than Mikey Brook and his prepubescent pranks. Besides, she ate the last of their peanut butter earlier.

It takes between twenty minutes and half an hour to walk the distance from Mikey’s home to hers. It would be faster, but with the snow on the ground and her old old boots interacting badly with it, it’s better to move slowly. She marks her passage with the crunch of each step, and counts each streetlight as she passes it. There are twenty-three of them. She gets most of the way to number fourteen before she hears the footsteps behind her.

At first she thinks it’s her own footfalls, echoing back to her across the empty parking lot of the high school across the street. But she continues to hear them, crunching steps slightly out of time with hers, even after she passes the school. She remembers the man at the Brook’s window; suddenly it dawns on her what a bad, bad idea this really is, and she begins to walk faster. After a moment the footsteps behind her speed up as well. She thinks she hears a muttered curse. Patty mutters a curse of her own and starts to run.

The footsteps behind her speed up even more.

Okay girl, she thinks, now’s when you find out if all that treadmill work you do at the gym is worth it.

With a mile to go before she gets back to her house, Patty lengthens her stride and begins to run faster. Her breath fans out behind her in ghostly plumes. Behind her the pursuing footsteps increase their pace as well, forming a staccato counter-rhythm against her, intruding on her concentration, insinuating that she isn’t fast enough, that she is clumsy, that she will trip and fall, that what she’s doing is useless, it’s a mile, maybe more, she’s cold, she’s tired, better just give in and—

“Fuck that,” she hisses, and puts on some more speed. She is rewarded with a wordless, frustrated grunt from her pursuer. Then he too speeds up. Again.

Patty moans a little and keeps pushing herself, but she can only run so fast. She wants to look back and see how close he is, but knows that if she does she will surely slip and fall on the treacherous sidewalk. There are patches of ice and mounds of half-melted, then refrozen snow every few feet ahead of here, and even under the harsh, unnatural glare of the sodium lights above (sixteen now, seventeen coming up on the left, but still too slow, too slow by half) it is impossible to see some of the hazards until she is almost on top of them. Every few steps she feels her feet wanting to skid out from under her and she thinks, oh my God I am so screwed.

She counts the streetlights.

At number nineteen she hears his breathing, ragged and hoarse, behind her. He’s getting nearer with every step. She tries to ignore it but she can’t, she’s getting a stitch in her side, her legs are beginning to feel like lead, and she’s sure that soon she’ll feel his breath on her neck, his hand on her shoulder, his foot snaking between hers and tripping her to the hard cold ground …

Time to change the rules of the game.

Patty sees a clear patch of sidewalk coming up; on either side is a small hill of snow and ice chunks. Rock salt glitters in the half-light like the fallen stuff of stars. It grinds under her boots as she runs across it, forcing her legs to work harder, to put on extra speed before whoever is chasing her can catch her up. As she runs she reaches down and grabs at a likely looking chunk of snow and ice. It comes up in her hand, not quite rock solid, and as it does she plants her feet, pirouettes with a dancer’s grace, and lets fly.

She finishes her spin and keeps running, but before she does she catches a fast, indelible glimpse of the man chasing her. He’s tall, bulky, and wears a long padded duster that extends nearly to her feet. He wears no hat; bare scalp gleams in the moonlight and the streetlight (twenty now) almost there, but still too slow). His face is a half-boiled mess of scar tissue. A scream bubbles up in her throat but she doesn’t give in to it; instead she lets the adrenaline from her fright pour into her legs and re-energize them. She begins to pick up speed again. Behind her the scar-faced man roars, and she hears him stumble and fall. Apparently her throw was on the mark; that, or he has found a patch of black ice she somehow, fortunately, missed. Either way it is a gift horse, and as far as she’s concerned its mouth is off limits.

The stitch in her side gets worse, but she has her second wind now, and ignores it, ignores everything but her feet on the pavement, and the ice and the snow and the passing streetlights, twenty-one now, and then twenty-two on the corner where she cuts a hard right turn. And there it is, midway down the block, her two story A frame house, the roof a patchwork of badly replaced shingles she can’t afford to have re-done correctly. The living room light is on and Pepper, her chocolate lab, is perched with his feet on the first floor window sill waiting for her. When he sees her he’ll start wiggling around with all the puppy in his soul and then—

—a freight train smashes into her from behind, and her thoughts go whirling. She lands rough, the wind knocked out of her. Her head smashes against the icy sidewalk, hard enough to make her see stars. She rolls over on her back, but her limbs have somehow turned to jelly and refuse to move fast enough. her second wind has suddenly become a tornado, and she’s caught up in it, at the mercy of the moment.

And then her pursuer’s scarred face leans into view above her. His yellow teeth are gritted in a death rictus, and she knows. She knows.

She’s never getting home again.

Knowing - Chapter 1

She doesn’t know what woke her up. Befuddled and sleepy she lies there, rubbing her eyes and trying to figure out what day it is. It is still dark, and as far as she knows, she could have been asleep for minutes or days.

Patty struggles out of bed. She is all tangled in the covers as always, and the dog sleeping up against her back isn’t inclined to move. Finally she sits up, looks at the clock and groans. “Why in hell am I awake at five in the morning?” She steps off of the bed onto the other dog’s tail. He always sleeps there on the floor at her side. She apologizes, pats him on the head and stumbles to the bathroom.

There is no way she will be able to go back to sleep in spite of the early awakening, so she pads down the stairs with the dogs to make some coffee. As she turns to head for the kitchen, she steps in something wet. “Are you fucking kidding me?” She whines to herself and walks on tiptoe to get paper towels. “Who did it?” Patty looks at the dogs. Neither looks guilty, so it is impossible to tell. It must be pee she stepped in. She lives alone other than the dogs, and she hasn’t spilled anything yet.

With a wad of paper towels in hand she cleans her feet off at the sink and goes back to the puddle. She squints after flipping the light switch, and as she starts wiping up the mess, she realizes it isn’t urine at all. In fact, it smells like beer. But that doesn’t make sense. Patty quit drinking last year for good, and no one else has been here.

Back in the kitchen she makes her coffee and decides maybe it was bile from one of the dogs and it just smelled weird. That has to be it. She takes them out and comes back in and looks at them in the light and feels their bellies. They both seem alright, and they gobble their breakfast while Patty drinks her coffee.

Late in the afternoon there is a foot of snow on the ground and with the wind chill it is 30 below zero, but Patty takes the dogs out a last time, puts on five layers of clothing, stuffs her essentials into her myriad pockets and walks a couple of miles across town to Ms. Brook’s house to babysit Mikey.

Mikey is a total pain in the butt because he is 11 years old. He feels he doesn’t need a keeper, but his mother knows him best and she knows he is an idiot so he needs a keeper.  Patty has been babysitting Mikey off and on for a few years. It is rare now, but the extra few bucks will help, especially since the vet clinic cut back her hours. Ms. Brook is in a hurry and has already overly made herself up, so she is out the door while Patty takes off a few of layers and finishes shivering.

Mikey falls asleep watching TV in the basement rec room, so Patty sits upstairs drinking Mountain Dew while she reads one of Ms. Brook’s umpteen romance novels. The men are all closet princes and the women beautiful and uncertain, often suffering from a vague but lovely illness. It’s enough to make Patty gag, but she forgot her own book and she would rather read dreck than stare at the wall in silence.

She shuffles into the kitchen, still reading while she walks, and grabs another can of pop. Something makes the hair on the back of her neck stand up. She snaps her head up with a jolt. It is strange, because she didn’t hear anything but she has the creeps, big time. She looks around and catches movement from the corner of her eye. As she pivots and drops the book, Patty sees a large shadow outside the kitchen window. It is a man. He hesitates for a moment when he realizes she sees him, and then ducks into the darkness. Patty calls the police.

The police come after a while. In a small town, when a girl of 20 calls because she sees a creeper, they just don’t hurry. Small town cops sometimes have small town minds, and they figure Patty is just some nervous girl who is afraid of being alone at night. They don’t know her, or they’d know better.

The squad car circles the block, and then the officers come to the door. They only talk for a moment, and are clearly unimpressed with Patty’s story, but they agree to walk a circuit around the house in the hopes of shutting her up. They want to get back into the warm car, so they walk fast. But when they walk past that back kitchen window, they don’t even need their flashlights to see the footprints in the crunchy snow. Someone had been standing there for a while. They could see a trail to and from the window, and a lot of tramping and position changing directly outside. The snow is recent enough that there are no other tracks in the yard.

Patty is even more disturbed when they tell her of the footprints. Unfortunately, they stop at the shoveled sidewalk, so the officers cannot easily see where the man has gone. They tell Patty to close the blinds and keep the doors locked, and they will make extra neighborhood patrols. They also tell her it was probably just a peeping Tom and he won’t return tonight. This would not be the first case of a peeper in this neighborhood, according to the cops.  Patty offers them hot chocolate. She really wants them to stay a while. But they are cold and in a hurry to leave.

Once the police are gone, Patty locks the door behind them and methodically goes through the small house, checking every door and window to be sure they are locked. She closes all the blinds and curtains, but she keeps finding herself peeking out the kitchen window. She hates having everything closed up like this. What if he is out there again and she just can’t tell because the blinds are closed? Is it worse knowing or wondering what is going on out there? Patty can’t decide.