Holden: Hollow Duet: Part 2 (The Hollow Duet) Read online

  “I love you even more, Isabella.” He was winded.

  Coming together with Holden was so magical; it felt like we were one person for just a moment. I blinked away the emotion leaking from my eyes.

  He flipped our pretty white-with-sunflowers quilt up and over me. His heart was pounding through his chest against me. His heart. My husband’s heart. He was alive and breathing and holding me, loving me. God, I hoped I hadn’t screwed this up beyond repair.

  “Not possible,” I insisted. “I definitely love you most.”

  “Mm mm.” He kissed the back of my neck. “My beautiful angel with the golden hair saving me from the emptiness. Giving me a home, a family. This beautiful body to wring pleasure from.”

  I planted a kiss on his chin.

  Okay, obviously we weren’t holding anything back now. What was the point?

  “No one was meant to have me but you, Holden. Two guys who almost got there before you…it didn’t happen. One died, one had his home burn down and he got sent away for work. The universe wouldn’t let me be anyone else’s. I was meant to be yours.”

  He looked at me with fierce possessiveness and ran his fingers through my hair. “I was told of you by a gypsy. About how perfectly happy I would be with you. How you would be the perfect wife, a loving and nurturing mother, and yet you would continue to stoke my fire until both our flames gently went out, a large family left behind. She was right. She told that it would be a difficult road to reach happy, with many trials and tribulations, but that you were going to be for me and only me. You’ll be mine, always mine. We’ll be leaving a big family behind when our time comes. This will come true, too. That gypsy’s relatives, a coven of witches, are who helped us that night here, whispering to me from that stallion that prevented me from harming you. The one called Erica that’s coming is powerful, and there’s got to be a way.”

  I blinked in surprise.

  And then I blurted, “I was so scared at the idea of being pregnant by what I could only guess was a ghost and thought I should have an abortion. Where they, uh…”

  “I know what it means, sweetheart.”

  “B-but the clinic was set on fire, so I thought it was fate, saving our baby. And for twenty-four hours, I began to fall in love with the idea of a baby, even if I had to raise it alone. And then I began to bleed. And they said there was no baby and I thought I’d wished the baby away because of not knowing what you were, because of my fears. So, I felt like it was my fault. I wanted to tell you so badly. I couldn’t.”

  He sighed. “He’s been safe. They’ve kept him safe. I knew how you felt, because in chains for one year between our first night and our next one, I felt your pain. Since being married, I couldn’t figure out why you hadn’t gotten heavy with our child yet because Erica’s sister had told me he was safe, and then I found out about those silly pills. As soon as I threw them out, he obviously descended.”

  I choked on tears. “I love talking to you,” I said, stroking his chest with my hand. “There’s been so much I’ve wanted to say. It’s been so awful having to be so careful.”

  “I know,” he whispered against my forehead.

  “It’s so amazing to not have to hold back,” I added. “But, Holden, your eyes, the warmth of your eyes? They could keep my naked body toasty warm in a blizzard. You have no idea what it does to me, how it’s as if it’s food for my very soul. The way your eyes hold mine. I feel your love. You’ve done such a good job of showing me how much you love me without us being able to share freely. And I feel so guilty right now because I feel like I’ve withheld my feelings from you because I was being so careful. I feel like you have no idea how much you mean to me.”

  “No. Not true. Not a bit.” He shook his head. “This past year with you? The way you show your love for me, little darling wife? If my love for you shines from my eyes, yours for me emanates from every pore on your body. You make me so happy, precious Isabella. I don’t know how I got the gift of you especially after how it began, but…”

  “That wasn’t in your control, Holden. And I would go through it again and again if it meant I got to be with you, have a family with you.”

  His mouth devoured mine in a passionate, hungry kiss.

  “We’re going to give one another a toothache. How apt for Halloween,” I said.

  He burst out laughing.

  It was a beautiful sight, looking down at him through my messy hair, in our bed with his baby growing in me, laughing at one another in broad daylight when he had work in the fields and when I was playing hooky from work.

  And when a witch was on her way to us from hours away to hopefully help us figure our way out of the mess I’d gotten us into. My heart ached with the notion of our reality.

  “I’m going to shower. Come with me. Then you can taste me.” He wiggled his brows and tugged my hand and led us to the bathroom.

  “You’re too much of a gentleman to let me go down on you after you’ve been inside me. More sweet.” I let out a dreamy sigh.

  “This time,” he said. “Maybe next time I won’t be such a gentleman.” He wiggled those dark brows some more and it made my belly dip.

  In our shower, behind my pretty fall-themed shower curtain, we washed, and then I got on my knees and took him enthusiastically with my mouth. He wouldn’t finish there. Instead, he lifted me out of the shower, and I think he intended to take me back to bed but as if unable to stop himself, he put me on the bath mat and we energetically finished there, him slamming into me over and over, our eyes locked and telling one another how much we loved one another without words.

  And then he lovingly dried me with a towel and carried me back to our bed. I cuddled into him and closed my eyes.

  “I love you so much,” he told me. “Never forget that. No matter what.”

  “I love you more. Don’t you forget that.” I sleepily told him, then after having had several lovely climaxes and running on near empty from a sleepless night the night before, I drifted off to sleep.

  6 – Now: The Storm

  “Protect our son, Isabella. From me, if you must.”

  My eyes snapped open. He wasn’t here.

  Just a dream. Just a bad dream, maybe.

  Hopefully?

  I heard a door slam. And my blood went cold at the same time as my heart sped up.

  I guess the lovefest had helped me catch up on some of the sleep I’d lost the night before, thinking about the pregnancy test.

  The alarm clock said it was eleven fifty-four. Almost noon. A wave of all of it washed over me and left behind pure fear.

  What now?

  I got out of bed and pushed my still damp and tangled hair out of my eyes, quickly dressed in a pair of jeans, a tank top, and an orange and blue flannel button down shirt. I pulled a brush through my hair as I went downstairs in search of my husband. The house was locked up.

  I slipped into my flipflops and went out to look for him. The garage was wide open and his silver sportscar was gone. He usually closed up the garage behind him when he went anywhere.

  I stood there, hands on my hips, fear building in my blood, and then I felt something thwack the back of my head as my hair blew forward with a sudden gust of wind.

  I spun around.

  It was on the ground in a pile of leaves. A black witch hat. My eyes bulged. It was just like the hat I wore that night. I lifted it and examined it. There was a tiny tear on the back of the brim. I looked inside and recognized the tag. This wasn’t like that hat. This was that hat. Katie’s hat. Her borrowed hat had been left in the ashes of the fireplace of the old cabin two Halloweens ago.

  Oh fuck.

  ***

  His big pickup truck was there, my car was there, and he was gone in the sportscar. I hadn’t driven my car in weeks. We were thinking about selling it, because he needed a pickup truck for the farm, loved his sportscar, and I rarely drove because he took me to school and back either by picking me up or by meeting me so we could walk home.

  The pickup’s spare keys were under the seat, so I started it up, determined to look for him. Where would he have gone? He knew Erica was coming to see us, to try to help us. If he was in the fields or at the barn, he’d be on his ATV that he always used to boot back and forth from the barn, but that was still parked where he’d left it a few hours earlier.

  ***

  “You’re here!” Trina exclaimed.

  I was getting out of the truck near the town square, because I saw Holden’s car double-parked and at a forty-five-degree angle across the street, as if he’d pulled in abruptly and abandoned his car for some urgent reason.

  She was walking, a smoothie cup in her hand. She was walking with Linda, the school secretary. Lunch break.

  Trina was dressed as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. Linda was dressed as a flying monkey. I was screwing the party theme up by not showing up in my scarecrow costume.

  “I’m actually not here,” I said, looking at Holden’s parked car, not seeing him anywhere. “You never saw me.”

  “Oh?” Trina inquired.

  “Yeah, I’m… something’s come up and I won’t be in today. I…” I thrust my hands into my hair at both sides, frustrated.

  “Oh.”

  “I’ll drop the costume off if someone else can wear it?” I offered.

  “No need,” Linda waved her hand. “Rush wore one. There are also two Glinda the good witches. And one of them is Cathy, if you can believe that.” She rolled her eyes.

  “Oh. Okay. I’m sorry. I have to go find my husband,” I replied distractedly.

  “We saw him go into the police station on our way to the café,” Linda replied. “Nice parking job.” She chuckled.

  “Oh. Thank you.” I waved and rushed off.

  “I hope everything’s oka
y, Isabella,” Trina called out after me.

  “Thanks. I’ll talk to you later.”

  I rushed across the street to see what Holden could possibly be doing at the police station. I had a bad feeling about this. The way he left abruptly, the words I was fairly certain I heard him say, the way he’d parked the car…

  As I approached the glass doors, they flew open and three people spilled out, looking distraught, almost trampling me. One was an older man who looked sheet white as he rushed to the left. A younger couple headed right, the man holding the woman against his side protectively. She was crying.

  “Don’t go in there,” the young woman warned me. “A guy went crazy in there with an axe. It’s a bloody mess.”

  I blanched, and rushed in. I heard them calling from behind me. I didn’t acknowledge what they were saying, the way they were calling after me, imploring me to stay out of there. I did catch a man say, “They’ve radioed all units to help.”

  I kept moving, on a mission to find Holden, praying he had not been the one to go crazy. But I knew. I just knew.

  Instead of Holden, I found chaos. And blood. A group of people were crowded around a uniformed officer whose face was purple and whose neck had bled out all over the acrylic floor. It was that one cop who kept writing speeding tickets to Holden.

  He’d had four, the latest one just a few days ago. I’d even commented that the guy had a hard-on for Holden and that got me a very angry ‘what-the-fuck’ look from my husband. I explained it was a figure of speech, and he’d lost that look on his face and agreed with me that this cop had it out for him.

  Holden and I were convinced that this particular cop went out of his way to catch Holden going even a mile over the speed limit.

  The cop was a dick. It was well-known in the community that he picked on people, pushed his weight around. But here he was: eyes wide, mouth agape, face purplish blue, and his neck bleeding as if he’d been slashed across the throat.

  The room spun a little and the voices around me echoed. I was going to throw up. I barely made it to a trash bin three feet from me and did just that. Two paramedics with a gurney were rushing in. So were three officers.

  I tried to go out the back way, thinking I’d maybe find him, but a large cop blocked me physically. “Can’t go that way, the perp went that way. Too dangerous.”

  I spun and ran back the way I came in, then headed toward the street, seeing that his car was still there. Where was he?

  Tires squealed from about a block up and there was a crunch sound. I booked it and ran in that direction and found more chaos in the middle of the intersection.

  Two cars had their fronts crunched together and there was a mess of blood on the road between them. Was a pedestrian struck? The woman from one car had gotten out and was standing there with her door open, her mouth wide.

  She was shouting about the sight on the road. “Oh God. He was thrown. Did anyone see that?”

  My eyes moved to the road in what felt like slow-motion. A man was lying there, awkwardly with one of his arms facing the wrong way, his shoulder crushed toward his throat. No, not a man, a teenaged boy. It was Cade Ryerson; he was a little punk that vandalized, that shoplifted, that was a year or two away from federal prison because his crimes got progressively worse and eventually luck would run out. For him. For whoever his future victims were.

  Cade’s name came up constantly in staff room gossip at the school in terms of problems in the Drowsy Hollow area, including an accusation of sexual assault against a thirteen-year-old girl. Holden had seen him bold-faced shoplifting a hunting knife at the hardware store two months earlier. Holden grabbed him by the collar when the kid tried to run out and there was a tussle. That cop, the now dead cop, had turned up and been a dick to Holden as he arrested Cade, who was the cop’s nephew by marriage.

  “Who hit him?” someone shouted.

  “Neither one of us,” the lady in the other crunched-up car defended. “We crashed when he was thrown at us. He was already bleeding, I think. I think he was already d-dead.”

  “It was her husband,” an old lady on the sidewalk called out, pointing at me. “I saw her husband throw that boy in the middle of the street bodily, with the strength of that green comic book character.”

  Eyes were on me. Her pointy finger seemed huge and so full of accusation. My heart began throbbing wildly. I tore my eyes away from that large pointy finger and looked back at Cade’s body, at his ripped apart throat.

  “He bounced off both windshields and made ‘em crash,” the old lady continued, “but it’s cuz that Holloway fella threw him. And I tell you, that kid was already bleeding. Beaten to a pulp.”

  “Oh God,” I breathed.

  Cade Ryerson was dead. Definitely. Eyes wide open. Throat a mangled mess. Broken shoulder. Busted arm. I couldn’t tear my eyes off his throat.

  “Her Holden is a good man. I see him every week at the feed store. That don’t make no sense,” a man’s voice called from behind me sounding hollow and far away. My pulse throbbed in my ears.

  “He’s on a killin’ spree or somethin’,” another male voice called out, “’Cuz they’re sayin’ he just finished killin’ Deputy Chester.”

  “What?” the old lady that had finger-pointed asked. “Deputy Chester’s dead? He’s my next-door neighbor!”

  She glared at me like it was my doing.

  “Which way did he go?” I shouted, cutting them all off. “Which way?”

  “That way,” the old lady pointed with that massive pointer finger the way I’d been traveling, toward the other end of town.

  What was down there? Residential, mostly. And then it hit me. The garage. The garage with the guy that Holden was convinced screwed with the radiator in our truck when it was in for a tune-up. He was a little bit pissed, saying he was sure the guy had pulled some hoses and done some damage so Holden would have to get more work done. When my car needed scheduled maintenance a few months ago, Holden took it to the next town over to avoid going to Larry’s Garage.

  Please, God, don’t tell me he’s out to kill everyone he’s ever had a beef with.

  ***

  No one was there when I got to Larry’s Garage, on foot. I heard music playing in the garage, but saw no one.

  “Hello? Larry?” I called out.

  The stereo loudly played the song, Freak on a Leash. My blood was running cold at the eeriness.

  As I got near the back of the garage, I spotted the trail of dark liquid making its way across the concrete floor toward me. Blood. It traveled a path that reminded me of the curling mist that night. That night.

  I rushed to the other end of that trail and found Larry, face down, expression contorted and eyes wide, bleeding from the back of his head, a tire iron half on the floor, half on his back, as if he’d fallen after having been struck, and then the tire iron had been dropped.

  No Holden in sight. Oh, God, Holden.

  ***

  I got the heck out of there, running back to the town square to get to the truck. Sirens, flashing lights, and chaos littered the streets. There was mayhem between the intersection where Cade Ryerson was down and the police station. Two officers were standing near Holden’s car. A firetruck was coming down the road, lights flashing. I didn’t know if there was a fire or if it was just an ‘all hands on deck’ scenario.

  Rain started to pour down. Hard.

  “Mrs. Holloway,” A cop called out. “Where are you going?” He rushed toward me. This cop was named Billy Quinton. His twin daughters had been in my second-grade class the year before.

  “I’m trying to find him. I was just… the garage… Larry’s Garage. He’s, he’s hurt. Um… dead, I think.”

  The cop straightened his back.

  “Larry’s dead or your husband is?”

  I nodded. “Larry. I’m pretty sure he’s dead. I ran looking for Holden because someone said he went that way, but he wasn’t there, so once I saw Larry, I just ran back here.”

  “No sign of your husband?”

  I shook my head. “I’m trying to f-find him.”

  Another cop came up behind him and tried to get his attention, so I ran to the truck and got in.

  I saw the other cop waving at me, asking me to wait.

  “I’ve gotta find him and try to s-stop him,” I shouted out the open window.

  “You should wait here,” the other cop said. “One second, I’ll get someone to escort you into the station. We need to ask you a few questions.”