My Sister's Keeper

Chapter 53

Stumbling over mound after mound, we hurried forward as the beam from the flashlight moved toward the barn and eventually disappeared.

As we approached the far side of the field, a shotgun blast lit the front of the barn like a camera flash, scattering a buck and three does grazing at the edge of the trees. The booming echoes rolling back from distant forests turned the deer in flight and brought them galloping back toward us, the buck leaping right over our heads.

Dropping into the dirt, we held our breath and listened, but heard only the wind flittering lightly through the trees, and mosquitoes buzzing around our ears. Seeing nothing, we advanced to the edge of the trees, then to the cars, and up a lane bordered by giant pecan trees. To our left we saw the silhouette of a sagging two-story farm house—dark, heavy with the sorrow of a century of tears, a porch stretching across its front.

Straight ahead, there was a wide barn, easily forty feet high at its peek, its roof sloping nearly to the ground on each side. The light we'd followed came from a tiny square window in the lower left corner of the barn.

Feeling the first gnawing of fear, I tightened my grip on Sydney's hand and ran with her swooshing through high weeds to the left of the house where we squatted in deep grass. I took her by the shoulders and whispered. "I want you to wait here no matter what happens."

She clutched my arms. "What are you going to do?"

I could hear the fear in her voice and tried to conceal it in mine. "I'm going to look in that window, try to find Sam, and maybe get a picture of Ashleigh." In an instant of fleeting moonlight I saw both love and fear in Sydney's eyes. It was a look I'd never seen on any face other than my mother's. I kissed her and turned quickly, her hands pulling at my shirt as I slipped away before she could change my mind. I negotiated the creaking porch with its rotting cavities and spongy boards stopping at the other end to remove my Nikon from the bag. Looking over my shoulder, I saw Sydney watching, motioned for her to get down, then dashed across the open yard to the barn. With camera in hand, I crept to the lighted window and looked inside.

A kerosene lamp hung from a nail on a post amid a storehouse of rusty tools, tractor parts, bags of fertilizer, large opaque polyethylene drums, and a stack of empty burlap sacks. Ashleigh lay motionless on the dirt floor, her right shoulder a bloody mass. By her hand, a western-style pistol. At the back of the barn, wide doors stood open.

I turned off the flash and raised the camera, steadying it against the milky glass. Pressing the shutter, I made a one-second time exposure. The camera beeped and stored the image. I made a second exposure, this one for three seconds then, moving to my right, crossed the front of the barn to a shed at the other end where round wooden posts and rolls of fencing had been stacked.

Something heavy hit the ground inside the building. Stepping over coils of barbed wire and fence posts, I crept to the right rear corner of the barn to a stack of dried firewood split decades ago for a wintry night that never came.

There, a man, barely visible in the light from the doorway, was bent over one of the polyethylene drums struggling to roll it away from the barn. Beyond the man there was a wide gap in the trees and I could see the silhouette of a sailboat at the end of a tall pier with the lights of Wilmington twinkling behind it. To the right of the pier, a rectangular canal had been cut in from the river to within fifty feet of the barn with a short pier jutting out into it.

Laying against the tank, he pushed with his feet slowly rolling it through thick sand to the edge of the canal where he lifted it onto the short pier one end at a time, then maneuvered it down the dock, its contents thumping with each revolution. At the end, he shoved it with his foot and the drum splashed into the canal, bobbed, and floated with a third of it above water. Pulling a pistol from his belt, the man fired five rounds into the tank; two above the waterline and three below. As hot lead thumped holes into the hard plastic, the container began to sink.

When the man turned and started back toward the barn, I dropped behind the dried firewood and watched as he lumbered back toward the lighted door breathing heavily with gun in hand. I gently eased my foot to the left and had risen slightly to get a better look at his face when a terrified creature pierced the silence with a heart-stopping screech just above my head. Dropping to the ground behind the woodpile with my heart hammering in my chest, I looked up into the face of a long-eared owl bobbing on a low-hanging branch above me, its enormous yellow eyes blinking independently. In its talons it clutched a young rabbit screaming, fighting to get free, pumping its feet uselessly against the air beneath it.

The owl turned its head backward, leapt from the branch, spread its enormous wings, and carried its screeching prey off. A few seconds later the screeches ended in a shrill squeal, but the pounding in my chest remained. Shaking violently, I looked around the edge of the logs and saw the man's face more clearly now.

It was Scott McGillikin!

As he stared in the direction of the owl, more adrenalin flooded into my bloodstream. My muscles flexed. My heart raced. My mind became the puppeteer seeking to force my body to do its will.

Kill him! Kill the bastard!