Page 53 of The Chain House

Sam swallowed hard. “Which body?”

“Is the governor here yet?”

“I told you, he’s on his way.”

“Ask me the same question when he’s here, and I’ll give you an answer.”

CHAPTER24

BETH KNEW IT was coming.

Ever since she’d seen the drill bit come through the floor, she’d known it was coming, and it wasn’t ten minutes later—ten minutes of Billy in the next room panicking through the hole in the wall, what’s going on over there, what’s happening, Beth, and her doing her best to calm him down—that the door to her room opened and Justice Minks walked in pulling a heavy chain across the floor behind him.

From her sitting position on the floor, he looked even taller than before; she didn’t like him looming that large above her, but as soon as she made a move to stand, he said, “Stay there.”

She froze, on her knees now, and did just that—she’d stayed there—but at least she was up higher than before, and in more of a position to move away from him should he come closer and try anything. Which, to her relief, he’d yet to do.

With the ease of connecting a swing set chain to the fixed hook on an overhead bar, he connected the chain he’d brought in with him to the one around her ankle. With tools latched to his belt, he hammered a sharp metal peg into the floor next to the far wall and attached both chains to it. She instantly thought of using that peg with the eyehole loop at the top as a weapon somehow, if she could wrench it from the floor after he left.

He then sank the new chain down through the hole in the floor, easing it through like a plumber using a mechanical snake until she heard the weight of it hit the floor in the room below.

Hardwood on that floor too, she thought, as Justice Minks silently went about his business, connecting chains inside his medieval torture house, what Billy Boyle earlier had referred to as a Chain House from the Mallard Malone novels. The sick bastard. And then her mind went to where it had minutes ago, when the hole had first been drilled—Who was he putting down there? Who was next?

Beth said, “You his biggest fan, Justice?”

Voice muffled behind the Guy Fawkes mask, he said, “Oliver Crown. Not Justice anymore.”

“Is this all some big illusion for you … Oliver?” she asked, at the same time Billy Boyle shouted through the hole in the wall, “What’s going on over there? Beth? What’s going on?”

Minks said, “Shut him up.”

Beth said, “Nothing’s going on, Billy. Just relax.”

“He’s over there, isn’t he?” Billy asked.

“Shut him the fuck up.”

“Billy, stop talking, please.”

It worked, for the moment, and Beth said to Minks, “Something missing from your childhood, Oliver? Something leading you to play out such … fantasies now, as a grown man?”

Ignoring her, Minks opened the door and left the room. He didn’t close it, which she found odd. She considered running but knew it would be futile, connected to Billy as she was, and through a wall. Minks was still out there, his footsteps heavy on the floorboards, in what she assumed was a hallway. She heard another chain moving around out there and then seconds later saw the end of it come through a hole in the wall next to the door, a hole she didn’t even know was there with the collage of book covers concealing it perfectly.

Dear God, she thought, as Minks reentered the room, walked directly to the end of the chain he’d just pushed through, and then walked it toward her. He connected it to the eyehole bolt he’d hammered into the floor. He stood, turned in a slow circle, as if surveying the room, maybe even visually measuring out what he’d done.

“How long have you known Sal Batise?” Beth asked.

Nothing.

“Are the two of you working together?” she asked. “Is this the end, Oliver? The end of some game you two started twenty years ago?”

He faced her but said nothing; she looked away because she couldn’t look him in the eyes, couldn’t mentally face that mask, not again—the PTSD came back in a flash of pain and horror, the corkscrew repeatedly plunged into her flesh.

“Why didn’t you kill me back then, Oliver?” It dawned on her that he’d tried to do just that, and perhaps thought he had when he’d left her bleeding from so many violent wounds. She’d blacked out on the floor of the Hawthorne mansion and awoke in the hospital, remembering nothing in between. “Why did you wait twenty years to come after me again?”

He shocked her by answering, “He waited too long to die.”

“Who? Batise? So this is about him?”