1990
A flash of color broke in on her dream and startled her awake.
I knew I shouldn’t have had that second Vodka Collins, Bonnie thought.
Hard alcohol always made her jumpy, restless. She rolled onto her side, shut her eyes, felt a faint mountain breeze coming through the cracked window.
But then she heard what sounded like a man clearing his throat, and she knew it was this sound, and not her dream, that had woken her. The noise hadn’t come from the man lying beside her, who wasn’t so much asleep as passed out, but from somewhere farther off in the room. She sat up, reached for the lamp on her nightstand.
“Don’t bother,” the intruder said. “This will be over real quick.”
Bonnie’s first instinct was to pull the covers up around her neck. She looked toward the voice and squinted. A large silhouette emerged from the darkness. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought the man was smiling. Maybe this was a joke. Another prank being played by one of the patrons from the bar.
“I don’t know you are, but this isn’t funny,” Bonnie said. “In fact, it’s criminal. If you’re still here by the time I switch this light on, I will press charges.”
Her own words sounded strange to her, like she’d borrowed the phrasing from her schoolmarm mother. Maybe, she thought, that’s how people cope with terror: by channeling someone else.
“He don’t wake easy,” the intruder said, gesturing to the other side of the bed with what Bonnie now saw was a long-barreled revolver. “Must be all that Jack D,” he added.
So he had been watching them at the bar. Another local who didn’t want an Orange County developer—especially a female developer—scooping up property on their mountain. She would just have to show them that she was here to stay, that she hadn’t bought Camp Nelson Lodge on a whim: she’d fallen in love with the place. She sat up straighter, reached for the light. The porcelain base of the lamp seemed to explode before she heard the shot. She screamed, slammed her back flat against the wall.
The man beside her stirred, then came fully awake. He threw the covers back, swung his legs out of bed, and stumbled forward, still drunk. A second shot and he staggered, grabbed the dresser, brought it down on top of him.
The room went silent just long enough for Bonnie to realize she was going to die. Somehow the setting felt all wrong. Or rather the setting was right, but the timing was wrong. She was supposed to finish raising her kids here. Grow old here. Spend her waning years sharing the backwoods with her grandchildren.
She tried to call for help but couldn’t find the air inside her. The man raised his gun. Bonnie shut her eyes.
It was over.