She bolted the front door. She checked the belt on the back door. She laid the fireplace poker across the kitchen table where she could reach it, and she sat down to wait out the storm with a cup of tea going cold in her hands, telling herself that Dale Kessler was not fool enough to come out in this. The house shuddered under the gusts. Snow hissed against the windows. Somewhere down the street a trash can went over and rolled, clanging, into the white. Evelyn thought of Nora on the road somewhere between Columbus and Meredith and prayed they had the sense to stop. She thought of Preacher's number taped to the refrigerator, and was glad — suddenly, fiercely glad — that she had asked for help that morning. Whatever happened now, she had not gone back to disappearing.
He was fool enough. Or desperate enough. At half past three, over the howl of the wind, she heard the back door shudder in its frame — once, twice — and then the sound of the belt snapping taut, and then a man's voice, low and furious, cursing the belt, cursing the door, cursing her. Then a crack of splintering wood, and the door burst inward with the table skidding half a foot across the linoleum, and Dale Kessler stood in her kitchen with snow in his hair and a wrecking bar in his hand, and behind him, white-faced and shaking, his nephew Cody.
Afternoon, Evelyn, Dale said pleasantly, as if he had been invited. He kicked the door shut against the storm. "Storm moved my schedule up. Hope you don't mind."
Cody would not meet her eyes. He stood dripping meltwater onto her kitchen floor, holding a canvas duffel bag, and he looked — Evelyn thought with a lurch — like a boy caught stealing apples, not a man of twenty-three.
Get out of my house, Evelyn said. She was on her feet. Her hand had found the poker. "Get out, or I swear — "
You'll what? Dale leaned the wrecking bar against the counter and smiled. "Call somebody? On what, that dead flip phone? In this storm?" He took a step closer, and she smelled whiskey and wet wool. "The bikers are snowed in at the Starlight. The preacher's snowed in at his church. Nobody's coming, Evelyn. It's just us. So here's what's going to happen. You're going to sign those papers — the real ones I brought today, all filled out nice — and then Cody here is going to help me carry out anything worth carrying, to settle your account. And then you're going to keep your mouth shut about all of it, because if you don't, I'll tell the county you're a confused old woman living alone who can't remember what she signed, and they'll put you somewhere with nurses and locked doors. Understand?"
No, Evelyn said.
Dale's smile thinned. "Cody. Bedroom. Jewelry box, silver, anything that shines. Go."
Cody hesitated — one terrible, stretching second — and then he went, his shoulders hunched, the duffel bumping against his leg. Evelyn heard drawers opening in her bedroom, in the room where Robert's watch sat in the top drawer of the dresser, where her mother's silver waited in the sideboard. Fury rose in her so fast it frightened her.
You leave his watch alone, she said.
Dale pulled the folded papers from inside his coat and smoothed them on the table. "Sign."
No.
He moved faster than she expected, catching her wrist — the bad wrist, the November wrist — and twisting. Pain shot up her arm like a lit fuse, and she cried out, and the poker clattered to the floor. He shoved her back against the counter, and her hip struck the edge, and the room tilted.
Sign the papers, Evelyn.
Her good hand found the kettle. It was still half full from her tea, still hot enough to steam. She swung it without thinking, and boiling water arced across Dale's forearm and hand, and he roared — a sound more animal than human — and let go of her wrist to clutch at his scalded skin. Evelyn lunged for the poker, got her fingers around it, and swung it two-handed at his knee. It connected with a crack. Dale went down sideways into the table, and the table went over, and the candy dish — her mother's cut-glass candy dish, the one by the front door that she had moved to the kitchen for safekeeping — slid off and shattered on the linoleum, cellophane-wrapped candies scattering like bright teeth.
For a moment they stared at each other across the wreckage, both breathing hard — Evelyn with the poker raised, Dale with water dripping from his scalded sleeve. Then the pleasant mask came off his face entirely, like something falling off a wall, and he came up off the floor with the wrecking bar in his hand. Evelyn understood, with a clarity that surprised her, that she was not going to survive this by being reasonable. She feinted left and swung the poker at the kitchen window — not at him, at the glass — and the window exploded outward into the storm with a crack like a gunshot, and the wind screamed in, and she screamed with it, a raw full-throated scream that the blizzard swallowed whole. Nobody heard. The white took her voice the way it had taken forty-seven cars' worth of looking away. Dale laughed — a short, ugly bark — and closed in.
Cody appeared in the bedroom doorway, the duffel sagging with stolen things, Robert's watch glinting where it had slipped half out of the top. He stopped dead at the sight of them — Evelyn backed against the counter with blood starting above her eyebrow where the table edge had caught her, Dale advancing with the bar raised.
Hold her, Dale said without looking at him. "Hold her still while I get her hand on this paper."
Cody didn't move.
I said hold her!
And Evelyn, bleeding, her wrist screaming, her hip on fire, looked past Dale at the young man in her bedroom doorway and saw him clearly for the first time — saw the shape of his face, the set of his mouth, the guilt that had been eating him from the inside for longer than this night. Something cold and certain settled in her chest.
I know you, she said.
Dale glanced back, annoyed. "What?"