It wouldn’t hold, but at least there was now a barrier between his skin and the cold, and soon enough his body temperature would heat the plastic. It wouldn’t be like wearing hiking boots and dry wool socks (and he would never, ever take those two things for granted again), but it might keep his toes from frostbite.
This small find gave him a boost, and though the light had already begun to fade and flurries started swirling onto his bare head, his feet felt marginally warmer, he had a direction to follow, and he was no longer afraid.
He’d faced someone who meant to kill him, and he outwitted him. He found his bearings in the woods. He would find his way home.
The plastic bags around his feet squeaked as he walked, the vines cut into his skin, and he was thirsty again. He swept more snow into his mouth and kept walking.
Everyone always wanted him to be someone else. His father found him lacking. Kids laughed at him, teased him, called him oddball, weirdo, freak, asked him when he was going to bring his semiautomatic to school and shoot everyone. His mother cried in her room when she thought he’d gone to sleep, looked at him with eyes full of worry even as her mouth smiled. What did they want from him? Who did they want him to be?
More importantly, and this question occurred to him for the first time now as he hiked alone in the growing dark, what did he want? He’d never specifically asked himself. He knew for certain that he had, at one time, wanted his father back. He had wanted it so fiercely that he could not remember having any other thought or desire for months after his father left. After he understood his father was not returning, he didn’t want anything, made himself not want anything, because wanting things he couldn’t have was so painful he didn’t think he could survive it.
This year, he’d thought he wanted a friend. Hence the list, and Jordan, and then Hopper and the pills and syringes and beer and porn and now this freezing, hateful day. He didn’t care for any of it. The porn was interesting and had snagged itself into his memory to rise at inconvenient moments throughout his days. But he didn’t need Jordan or Hopper for porn. He didn’t need another person to talk to. He didn’t need to share his thoughts. He didn’t need someone to make him laugh. He didn’t need a buddy, a friend, a soul mate.
With every step, he felt a hardness settle around him, a stiff shell that straightened his shoulders and lengthened his spine. He felt taller, stronger. His jaw set and his mouth thinned. If he walked out of this forest alive and with all his limbs and extremities whole and unharmed, he wouldn’t need anyone ever again.
CHAPTER
48
“THE FIRE TRUCK is coming,” said Holly. She had dashed all the way to the road to get a signal, then ran back, and her voice was ragged, huffing as she stepped out from beneath the pine canopy.
Laney placed a tentative foot on the front steps, put her weight on the charred wood. They held.
“You shouldn’t go in,” Holly said, somewhere just behind her. “They said they’ll be here soon.”
Laney shook her head, her teeth clenched so tight she couldn’t have spoken if she wanted to. She was at the top of the steps now, and the heat from the house was savage, its burnt exhalations bitter, oily, with an underwhiff of fitzing electricity.
“Laney, don’t,” Holly said, reached for Laney’s shoulder. Laney shook her off. “This whole thing looks ready to collapse. Just wait, won’t you?”
Laney toed open the door, and the house breathed an acrid smoke in her face. Something crashed within its depths. Something hissed. Something shifted under her feet, the floor rickety.
From inside the house, a scream, and she flinched, then rushed through the door. Light from the broken windows and partially collapsed roof illuminated a crushed, blackened living room. Paradoxically, there was a wood-burning stove against one wall, cold and silent, nothing but a lump of gray ash visible through the gaping wrought-iron door.
Another scream, high-pitched and desolate. Laney bolted toward the sound, which was coming from under the caved-in ceiling to the right of the living room. Where a hallway once connected the front room to the back, plaster and drywall spewed coils of gray smoke, barred the way. The house creaked above her and that scream came again, scraping at her brain and reverberating in her guts.
“Alfie?” she yelled. “Alfie, are you here?”
A beam directly above her head popped, and a chunk of charred drywall fell to her feet. She squinted up into darkness, dust showering her face, grit in her eyes. Another piece of the ceiling plummeted, and the floor buckled under her.
Holly screamed from the doorway, and Laney’s instincts took over, propelled her legs toward the exit. But what if Alfie was trapped somewhere in the hot ruins? She grunted and halted just outside the door.
Coward. She was nothing but a coward. A sob snarling in her throat, she stumbled back inside. A fresh gust of wind must have rekindled some of the fire and a portion of the roof blazed again, black and red, yellow and gray, spiraling and snapping toward that leaden sky.
The high-pitched keening came again, but now she recognized it was the wind driving through the smokestack. With the roof half-gone, the metal stack shook and rattled and bent, producing the sound she had mistaken for screaming. She holstered her gun and flicked on her flashlight, then climbed over the dust-covered rubble in the hallway and saw a doorway a few feet in.
Debris almost completely barricaded the opening, but she forced her way through by alternately shoving it to the side and stepping over it, then tripped halfway down a flight of cement steps. The steps themselves had remained whole but were covered in ash and bits and pieces of the house. Picking up her flashlight from where it fell, she scampered on her butt feetfirst, hands on the walls, until she found herself in a basement, dark, dank, smoky. The flashlight illuminated a plaid couch, an overturned chair, a lamp lying on its side.
And then, Alfie’s jacket. She lunged for it as if it would run from her, grabbed it, held it to the light. It was his, she knew it was. She searched through the pockets and removed lint, a torn candy wrapper, a smooth gob of bubblegum. The inner pocket produced a folded and worn scrap of paper, and when she flattened it out, hands trembling, she saw Alfie’s class schedule—his name clearly visible in the corner.
She pressed the paper to her cheek, as if trying to absorb whatever Alfie-ness had infused it during its residence in his pocket. She’d been right. This woman who owned the house, this Jane Hopper, was related to Owen. She had visited him in prison. And she had given him permission, explicitly or implicitly, to use her house when he got out.
The building creaked above her, and a distant crash reached her ears. She barely noticed, instead directing her light at every wall, the ceiling, the corners. Hopper had brought her son here. Had kept him against his will—she knew it was against his will; there was no other possibility at all.
Her light fell on the bucket her boy had been forced to use. Her fastidious child who liked everything just so. She cursed and touched the couch where he had slept. Itchy, filthy.
Another crash, closer. A footstep. Someone grabbed her arm, and Laney, years of training taking over, drew her gun, twisted her torso and elbowed the person in the chest, finishing with a follow-through of gun to chin. Too late to stop, she saw it was Holly, but the gun slipped upward, walloping her friend’s jaw and cheek with a sickening crack.
Holly’s eyes teared with surprise and pain. She pinwheeled her arms and stumbled backward toward the steps, one foot crashing through the frail wood of the upended chair and the rest of her falling awkwardly onto the stairway, her head smacking against the cement.
Laney gasped and crouched by her friend’s twisted foot. Holly’s eyes were pinched shut, her mouth already swollen and bleeding, her face blotchy. She mumbled something that sounded like, “Fuck, that hurts,” and moaned in pain.
Holstering her gun again, Laney broke apart the rest of the chair. She carefully extracted Holly’s foot, then scooted so she could cradle her friend’s head and torso and dre
w her down onto the floor. Holly grunted, growing pale and clammy as Laney shifted her. Her foot remained slack and angled weird.
“I’m sorry,” Laney said. “I’m sorry.”
“She’s got a gun!” someone yelled behind her. “Raise your hands where I can see them!” he roared, and she did, shouting, “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot, I’m a cop.”
Then hands were on her, picking her up, rushing her out of the basement and out of the grumbling house.
They slammed her to the ground and handcuffed her, and someone removed the gun. An icy drizzle had started while she was inside and now soaked her hair and neck. “My son is in the house, he’s in the house,” she kept saying, even though she didn’t know this for sure, but it was imperative they go in and look.
“She said she’s on the job,” someone said.
“Are you a cop?” a voice next to her asked.
She turned her head as far as she could, her cheek cold against the frozen mud, and said, “Retired. My ID is in my wallet. Inside jacket pocket.”
A young cop helped her to her feet, still keeping the cuffs around her wrists, and rooted inside her jacket until he found her wallet.
They had brought Holly out and laid her on the ground. A fireman prodded her ankle gently with blue-gloved hands. He said, “Ma’am, the ambulance is almost here. Are you doing okay?”
Her pretty, delicate face was distorted, abraded along her chin and cheek, but she nodded politely anyway. She then said, “Motherfucker fucking fuck that’s fucking painful.”
Two firemen waited at the doorway, watching the gray hose between them snaking and moving inside the house.
Young cop placed his hands on his hips. “Is this your residence?” he asked Laney, and when she shook her head, he said, “What happened here?”
And so Laney gave them her name, and Holly’s name, and Alfie’s name, and Hopper’s, and Jane Hopper’s. She told them about her reasoning for driving two hours out of her way to visit a house she’d never been to, belonging to a woman she’d never met. And then she told them about her own search of the house and Holly’s startling her, and her getting all cornered-cop-lashing-out on her friend. She felt close to crying by then. She’d been right, but too late. What if she had driven up the day before? Two days before?
Four firemen tumbled out of the house, grime roiling off their shoulders.
“House is empty,” one of them yelled out. “We don’t see anybody.”
Laney took a step toward them. “Are you sure? Are you sure there’s nobody under the rubble?”
The firemen paused, one of them removing his helmet. Soot streaked his cheeks and forehead. “Ma’am, are you confident your son is inside?”
She wasn’t, of course. She was confident of nothing. She shook her head.
“We searched every part of the first floor and basement. We found signs of recent occupancy, but the building appears empty right now. The second floor is gone.” The fireman looked back at the structure. “When was the last time you saw your son?”
“Five days ago,” Laney said.
The six firemen stared at her in confusion.
The fireman leaning over Holly said something into a radio, then pressed her hand. “The ambulance is at the driveway entrance now.”
Between the drizzling rain and the tanker truck pumping water onto the house, the fire had gone out, and the building sat blackened and hollowed in the gathering dark.
A second, older cop had called Ed Boswell and checked her story, then removed Laney’s handcuffs just as Holly was being hoisted into the ambulance.
“I’m so sorry, Holly,” Laney said, touching her friend’s hand.
Holly said something, but it was hard to understand through her thickened, bruised lips.
“I’ll call Oliver. I’ll tell him which hospital you’re in,” Laney said to Holly’s feet as the paramedic closed the door. “I’ll come visit you!” she said louder. But how could she? She had tracked Alfie this far. She had to keep looking for him.
The cops and firemen had gone back into the house, treating it as a crime scene for the time being.
It was early evening and dark when she collapsed into her car, so tired her hands and feet shook. Her need to find her son, to touch him, to know he was alive and okay, was so overwhelming it drowned her. She had no thoughts, no wants; her hunger and thirst and weariness were nothing next to this primal need to hold her child in her arms.
She put her forehead down on the steering wheel and closed her eyes. “Alfie,” she whispered. “Be okay. Just be okay. Just be okay.”
CHAPTER
49
SOMETHING INSIDE ALFIE’S head disconnected. He saw the harsh, icy beauty around him—the frozen trees, stark and bare, the heaps of white on pine boughs, the black boulders and the mottled iron-gray sky. His body seemed removed from his senses, hands red and numb, a hollow belly, legs like pistons he couldn’t feel.
At some point in the day he heard sirens and figured someone had discovered the house. He wondered how Hopper was doing. Surely he didn’t die in the fire. If Alfie had been able to escape, Hopper would have as well. He’d been singed and hurt, but he was okay enough to pursue Alfie through the hallway. Certainly he was okay enough to save himself.
Alfie angled his steps toward the sirens and within a half hour was in view of the narrow, two-lane road, but stayed in the woods. Trudging slowly through the brambles, over the undergrowth, he was reluctant to be seen. What if Hopper didn’t make it? Would that make Alfie a murderer? A manslaughterer? His mother occasionally explained her past cases to him, when a crime drama on television brought one to mind, for example. Murder in the first was when you really meant it and planned it; murder in the second was when feelings got the best of you and you just lost your mind for a minute and killed someone. Then there were degrees of manslaughter—voluntary, involuntary, vehicular. And let’s not forget self-defense. That would definitely fit his situation if it came to a trial.
Alfie packed another handful of snow into his mouth, the coldness sobering, freshening. More to the point, how did he feel about what he’d done to Hopper? He couldn’t tell. Just like he couldn’t feel his feet or his hands. Just like he knew he should be ravenous, but he wasn’t. He felt nothing. Tired, sure. Unwilling to be seen. He felt that. But guilty? Sorry? Anxious? He probed his mind, examined his body’s reaction to his thoughts. Nothing. Blank.
Maybe he was still in shock. But then again, he rarely felt the things he knew people expected him to feel. And when he did feel them, he felt them so strongly the emotions nearly destroyed him.
He stumbled, his foot snagging on a nest of roots, and fell, scraping his palms. It was dark now, much too dark to keep walking through the woods. He could still see the road about forty feet to his right, and he made for it, stepping carefully over the brush and rocks and vines.
It was amazing how easy walking on the road was once he stepped on it. Nothing blocking his way, the surface smooth and even. He straightened, lifted his face to the sky. The moon had risen, full and warmly yellow, like a bowl of French-vanilla ice cream. Alfie sat down on the tarmac and slipped off his knotted, sopping, filthy socks. They were no use anymore. He retied the plastic bags even though they were barely more than raggedy strips by now, and continued walking.
He heard a car and hesitated. Should he face it and hold up his thumb, the way he’d seen people do in movies? Should he blend in with the shadows and wait it out? He was far from home still. Hours, if his memory was accurate about how long it took to drive up this way. In the end, just before the car crested the ridge behind him, he stepped partially in its way and held up both hands.
The driver swerved around him, the man’s face clearly panicked, leaning on the horn as he flew past. He kept driving down the road a bit, then slowed, stopped. Backed up. Stared at Alfie.
Alfie continued holding both hands up, as if he were at gunpoint, waited for the man to roll down his window.
“What’re you
doing there, son?” the man asked. He was small and gray, with a woolen cap pulled snug over a neatly rounded head. He wore a beige-plaid scarf and a blue puffy coat.
“Sir, I’m lost,” said Alfie. He’d try to stick to the truth as much as reasonable while avoiding confessing anything that might get him in trouble with the police.
The man leaned further out of his window and peered to the left of Alfie. Then to the right.
“Are you alone?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
The man looked down. “Well, what in the world happened to your shoes?” he asked.
“They got caught in a snowdrift,” Alfie answered after a moment’s hesitation. He’d have to lie after all. He must. “I got lost,” he said again. “I was with my troop and I got separated.”
The man’s features relaxed. “Well come on. Get in.” He sat back and closed his window, clicked the latch so Alfie knew he could get inside.
The car smelled warm and homey and indescribably delicious. Alfie strapped himself in and turned toward the amazing smell. A large pizza box rested on the back seat. The man saw him look and put the car in gear.
“Where do you live, anyway?”
“Down in Sylvan,” Alfie said. His feet, next to the heat vents, began to hurt, pins and needles for now. He was aware of his own smell in this close space—smoke and sweat and something greasy.
“Where’s that? Is that around here?”
Alfie shook his head. “It’s down in Rockland County,” he said.
The man sighed. “And where’s your troop camping? I can take you to the campground.”
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