Page 161 of Never Flinch

Barbara doesn’t argue. She puts an arm around Betty’s waist and together they make their slow, stumbling way over the railroad ties to the foyer.

Corrie stands up, then sags. “I can’t walk. My legs are all needles and pins.”

Jerome carries her, shambling along in the Frankenstein clumps of his sneakers but managing to stay on his feet. Flames are racing over the crisscrossed beams, making orange checkerboard patterns.

Kate is also unable to walk. She tries, then sags to her knees. Holly hooks a hand into her armpit and hauls her up, calling on strength she didn’t know she had.

“You keep saving me,” Kate says in her husky, growling voice. Her chin and shirt are a bib of blood. The glimpses of teeth Holly can see between her swelling lips are little more than fangs.

“It’s what you hired me for. Help me.”

They make their way, first to the foyer and then outside with the growing fire at their back. When they are in the blessed coolness of the May night, Jerome goes back in and seizes Donald Gibson’s legs. He drags him out and says to Holly, “There’s another one, just as dead. I don’t think I can get him… or maybe it’s her… until I get these off.” He sits on the ground and begins pulling off one half-melted sneaker.

Holly goes in. The fire hasn’t reached the foyer, but the arena itself will soon be engulfed and the heat is already baking. She grabs one of the legs of the person Gibson must have killed—Chris Stewart. Chrissy. She thinks,I can’t, too heavy. Then Kate is there, and grabbing the other leg. “Haul,” she croaks. Always the boss.

They pull Chrissy Stewart out into the thickening twilight. Barbara is sitting against the side of the Mingo van with her head on Betty’s shoulder. Jerome has managed to pull his sneakers off. His feet are red, but only the left one is raising blisters.

Kate sits down hard, looking at the body they’ve just dragged out of the rink. “This is the bitch who’s been stalking me,” she says. “Stalkingus.”

“Yes. Kate, we have to get out of here. That building’s going to go up like a torch.”

“One minute. I need to get my breath, and she surely needs to get hers.” She means Betty. “Good thing she had that knife, or we would have roasted like the chestnuts in that Christmas song.”

Kate lifts Chrissy Stewart’s arm, and examines it. “Cute outfit. Or was, before this. Did he want to be a girl and his church wouldn’t let him? Is that what all this has been about?”

“I don’t know.” What Holly knows is they have to move soon. She goes to the van, and God is good: the keys are in the cupholder. She opens the driver’s door, then turns to look at the others, who are brightly lit silhouettes in the orange glow of the fire.

“We’re getting out of here,” she says. “In this. Right now.”

Barbara and Betty help each other to their feet. Jerome hobbles over with the help of Kate, who is taking as much of his weight as she can.

“What about them?” Jerome points to the corpses.

“Oh God, no,” Corrie says, but she goes to Gibson and grabs him by one arm. She pulls him to the back of the van. “There’s another one… a girl, but… burning now.Cremating.” She moans.

Holly doesn’t want anything to do with either of them. What she wants is to sleep for about twelve hours, then wake up to coffee, a jelly doughnut, and about a dozen cigarettes. But Kate is walking back to him… or her… the person in the pants suit. Holly joins her. They drag Stewart to the van, but neither of them have the strength to throw the bodies in. Jerome does that, grunting with pain as his injured feet take their weight. He shuts the doors, then staggers.

“You drive,” he says to Holly. “I can’t. My feet.”

“I’lldrive,” Kate says, with a touch of her old certainty.

And she does.

Chapter 26

1

On a warm and sunny morning in late June, a few days after Dingley Park has reopened, Holly sits at the picnic table where she and Izzy often have lunch. It’s the same one (she doesn’t know this) where Betty Brady stopped, unable to go any further and convinced she had signed her new friend’s death warrant thereby.

Holly is early; she’s always early. The food trucks aren’t open yet, but from the nearby playground, she can hear the shouts of children playing tag and climbing on the monkeybars. The equipment shed is still blocked off with yellow police tape. It was looted at the height of the riot and the stuff inside—uniforms, pads, balls, bats, shoes, even athletic supporters—was scattered across the converted softball field, along with broken bottles, torn-off red and blue shirts, even a few teeth. The bases were looted and carried off, perhaps as souvenirs. Holly can’t understand why, but so much about human behavior (including her own) will always be a mystery to her.

Her friend John Ackerly suffered a broken jaw in the melee. He didn’t realize it until the next morning, when he looked in the mirror and saw the lower half of his face swollen to the point where “I looked like Popeye in one of those old cartoons, only without the pipe.” He was treated at the Kiner ER, waiting his turn among five dozen or so other walking wounded from the Guns and Hoses softball game. The doctor gave him a prescription for oxycodone tablets, which he usedfor three days and then flushed down the toilet. He told Holly that he liked those pills just a little too much.

She and Izzy used to be able to see the round roof of the Holman from this table, but it’s gone now; nothing is left of the rink but blackened, smoking rubble cordoned off by police tape. Donald Gibson, aka Bill Wilson, aka Trig, apparently meant to burn his victims like seventeenth-century witches. State Police detectives searching Gibson’s home at the Elm Grove Trailer Park have found a stack of notebooks, some labeledCharacter Defects, as in the AA program, and others labeledLetters to Daddy. The latter make it clear that Annette McElroy’s murder was Gibson’s first.

The Daddy Chronicles (so dubbed by Buckeye Brandon) also accuse Donald Gibson’s father of murdering Bonita Gibson, who disappeared in 1998, when Donald was eight years old. Avery McMartin, a long-retired city detective, confirmed (on the Buckeye Brandon pod) that Mr. Gibson was a suspect in his wife’s disappearance, but the woman’s body was never found and the case of Bonita Gibson has long been consigned to the department’s open-but-inactive file.

Kate McKay is now the most famous woman in America. Her picture—bloody mouth, disheveled hair, tape-burns on her face and neck—has been seen all around the world, including on the cover ofPeoplemagazine. She refused to wash until that iconic photo was taken back at the hotel. The tour has been repurposed to much larger venues, where Kate’sc’mon, c’mon, c’mongesture brings roars of approval. Millions of women are wearing tee-shirts with Kate’s face on them, some with bloody mouth, some without, always with the fingers spread in that gesture. More states, two of them deep red, have enacted laws that safeguard a woman’s right to abort.

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