Locked Doors

Locked Doors by Blake Crouch Page A

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Authors: Blake Crouch
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Horace would follow.  
    This was as much of a story as any writer could dream of.      
     
    I lay awake in bed, the sleepless hours ticking away.   My suitcase was already packed in the Jeep and when I woke in the morning I had only to walk outside, climb behind the wheel, and drive away.   Whitehorse, Yukon was 158 kilometers to the east.   There I’d catch a flight to Vancouver and from Vancouver, on to America.   In a storage locker in Lander, Wyoming, there were things that might help me find Luther Kite—my brother’s journals containing poetry, photographs, even a record of his and Luther’s activities.   I’d put it all in storage after fleeing Orson’s cabin seven years ago because some of it incriminated me.  
    Now something was needling me about Luther and how I would find him.   It seemed I’d read somewhere in Orson’s journals that he’d grown up on an island.     
    There was a cracking in the distance.   I knew this sound.
    My first autumn in the Yukon I woke in bed one night petrified by a mysterious cracking in the forest.   Unable to fall back asleep, I dressed and crept through the trees, arriving at last at a frozen pond where a bull moose was stamping his hooves into the ice.   I’d watched him finally break through and dip his muzzle into the frigid water for a drink.
    Hearing that sound again, I imagined it to be a goodbye of sorts and it threatened to unglue me.   But I wouldn’t cry anymore tonight.   I’d loosed all the tears I was going to shed and now existed in a state of shock—shock that I was willingly leaving my harbor to sail back into madness.   It was the uncertainty that haunted me, mostly for Beth Lancing, selfishly for myself—as I lie in bed watching fireshadows dance along the rafters of my precious home, I couldn’t purge the thought that I would never see this place again.

25
     
    EARLY Friday morning Vi pulled into the driveway of her new home and turned off the car.   The far left window on the façade of her house glowed and through half-drawn blinds she saw her husband rising out of bed.   She climbed out, shut the door, sat down on the back bumper of the Cherokee.   She glanced at her watch.   It was one minute before five which meant she’d been awake now for forty-six hours.  
    Dawn was imminent.   She gazed out across the treeless subdivision, hushed and still.   The drone of the interstate reached her from beyond the field, a quarter mile distant, hidden behind a sliver of pines.   There was never a moment in Arcadia Acres when the interstate fell silent.   But she loved its transient undertone, found comfort in it.   And she relished the ordinariness of this neighborhood.   When Vi looked down Briar Lane she didn’t see a street of soulless homogeneous starter homes.   She saw herself and Max earning an honest living.   Because Vi wasn’t raised on entitlement she aspired to simple things—a family, comfortable home, occasional vacations to Gatlinburg and Myrtle Beach, finding an identity in her community, her church, her precinct.
    In the cold misty silence of Arcadia Acres she meditated on the blessings in her life.   After the crime scene she’d just processed she needed this stabilizing solace.   
    On the way to the front door she gathered up the broken necks of Ben and Hank Worthington, the evisceration of their parents, the shock of Jenna Lancing, and shoved it all into an insensate alcove she’d been conditioning in the back of her mind.   This was the hardest part—walking into a warm peaceful home after thirty-five hours in hell.   It was unbearable to Vi that such disparities could exist and she wondered, Which is the illusion?
     
    Her husband was standing in the foyer in his briefs when she stepped inside.   The aroma of newly ground coffee beans engulfed her and as the front door closed Max came forward, arms opening for an embrace.   But Vi put her hand on his chest and shook her head.
    “It’s

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