The Answers Are In The Forest

by Katie Kaleski

  “I’m trying to protect you.”

  “From who? How can I believe you? This house. Who does it belong to?”

  “It belongs to me,” he said as we came up out of the basement. “I rent it out, but when I bought it, I knew who it belonged to.”

  “So you could work with them?”

  Mr. Pullman sighed, shaking his head. “When I was ten, I saw someone take my sister.”

  “Oh. What year was that?”

  “1978.” His face had started to turn red, and a bit of a sweat built on his forehead.

  The one we were missing. “It fits the pattern.”

  “You caught on, but let’s just keep moving.”

  “You’re protecting us from the killer?” I asked, tightening my grip on Rusck’s ankles while mine throbbed with every step we took. “If you didn’t hit Rusck with a bat, who did?”

  “Somebody who’s probably coming back at any minute.”

  We carried Rusck out the front door and to the driveway, where Mr. Pullman had his truck parked. My mind whirled, trying to come up with a plan, something—anything. How could I trust him? We walked around to the back of the truck. Mr. Pullman held Rusck with one arm and pulled the tailgate down with the other.

  “Why can’t we put him in the cab?”

  “You’re getting in here too.”

  “The hell I am.”

  “I’m going to hide you both under the tarp, and we’re going to go find your friend.”

  He slid the top of Rusck’s body in, and together we shoved him all the way into the back. “Now get in.”

  “Not until I get a clear answer.”

  “You’re going to get you and your friends all killed, stupid girl,” he said with his head darting around, his hand on the back of his pants. “My sister was never found, but I knew I’d never forget the face of the man who took her, and when I went to pick up my prom date, her dad answered the door. The very man who took my sister. He didn’t recognize me, and I kept my composure. The next day, I went and gave the police a tip, but it led nowhere. The house went up for sale a while ago, and I bought it, knowing it held some sort of clue.”

  “And how the heck does my mom end up back in this house?”

  “The Realtor I bought from said a woman called asking about it. Wanted to know if anybody lived in their childhood home. She thinks I’m just some guy she went to prom with.”

  “And this whole time you’ve been trying to catch her dad.”

  “Bingo, but…”

  “But what?”

  “Holy hell,” Mr. Pullman said as a car that looked like my mom’s raced down the street in our direction. “Get in the truck,” he demanded.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The car was only a house down and veered to the side of the road with a shotgun out the window. I dropped to the ground as the shotgun fired. It caught Mr. Pullman in the shoulder, causing him to stumble back. The car stopped in front of my house. I was right about it being my mom’s car. She got out and left the engine running, taking long strides toward me with a shotgun at her side. What the hell? Mr. Pullman had fallen to his knees, gripping his bleeding shoulders.

  “You can’t stop me,” my mom hissed, pointing the barrel of the shotgun at Mr. Pullman’s head. Her bloodshot eyes bugged out of her head, and her lips twitched.

  “I’m not letting you kill your own daughter. No other children,” Mr. Pullman said.

  My mind had to stop a moment, rewind, and replay what he just said. Um, my mother planned on killing me?

  “Gabby, get in my car,” my mom said.

  My legs wouldn’t move.

  “Where’s the boy? I know he’s with you.” She looked from Mr. Pullman over to me. I didn’t say anything. She eased her finger to curl around the trigger of the shotgun.

  “In the bed of the truck,” he told her.

  My mom pointed her gun at me and walked over and peered into the truck. In the distance, I could hear sirens.

  “You can’t save them. None of them,” my mom said. “Chester, get that boy out of the truck and put him in my trunk.”

  Mr. Pullman shakily got to his feet and ambled over to the truck.

  “Now,” she shouted. “Gabby, help him.”

  I nodded, and Mr. Pullman and I pulled Rusck out of the truck. As my mom popped her trunk, Rusck started to blink his eyes open. Unfortunately, she noticed Rusck stirring.

  “Seriously,” she said, taking a large stride toward us. “Lay him down.” We both obeyed, and my mom brought the butt of her shotgun down on the side of Rusck’s head. “Now throw him in the trunk.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” I yelled. My heart ached and my chest tightened, and I didn’t recognize this woman, my mother. She was never very warm and loving toward us, but this was a whole new level.

  She smiled, showing all her teeth. “There’s nothing wrong with me. It’s the rest of the world that has a problem.”

  “You’re psychotic.”

  “Get him in the trunk!” she screeched.

  Mr. Pullman and I did as she demanded, and afterward, my mom stepped in close to me and slapped me across the face. My face stung and tears welled up in my eyes. “Move,” she said, the venom in her voice palpable.

  I listened to her and started for the car door, thinking of poor Rusck, who I just threw in the trunk. With my hand on the door handle, I turned slightly to look back at the trunk just in time to see my mom lift her shotgun to Mr. Pullman’s face and pull the trigger. I let out a gut-wrenching scream as blood sprayed the street, driveway, and car. It splattered all over my mom’s face, and she nodded, wiping some of the blood off with the back of her hand. Mr. Pullman didn’t collapse to the ground right away. It was as if his body needed a few seconds to register what had happened. When he finally did drop, she pointed the shotgun at me, but I couldn’t move. I had never seen anything so horrible or disturbing in my whole life, and the act was committed by my own mother.

  “If you don’t get in the car, you will end up like Chester and that rabbit in your locker, and it will be sooner than later.”

  At a loss for words, I climbed into the car and clicked on my seatbelt, which really made no sense since, according to my mother, I was going to be dead shortly, anyway. My mom got in, slamming the door, holding the shotgun in one hand and the steering wheel in the other. She took off down the street and turned the corner just as the cops showed up. My head pounded as I tried to understand everything that had happened. All along, it was my mother. Her father, the grandpa I had never met, was a serial killer, and maybe she was too. But why did my mother feel she had to kill my friends and me? I licked my lips and forced myself to speak.

  “I get that you’re going to kill me and all, but I need some explanation as to why,” I said, already knowing the answer was probably as simple as her being a psychotic sociopath.

  My mom snorted out a laugh and glanced over at me. “You’re always a smartass, aren’t you?”

  “I just want to know what’s going on. So you never talked about your dad because he’s a serial killer?”

  “Was. He’s dead now. I killed him last year.” My mom drove us over a couple of streets and down to a dirt road that was barely visible due to all the overgrown grass. It led into another section of the forest.

  “Jesus fucking Christ.” I put my hand on my chest, my heart pounding against my palm.

  “Watch your mouth, young lady.”

  I laughed. What else was there to do? “You killed your dad because…?”

  “He assumed I forgot. I confronted him about twenty years ago.”

  “Forgot what?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer me and kept talking. “I begged to kill that Kevin kid. He was surprised I welcomed his tradition.”

  “What the hell kind of tradition is that?”

  “Gabby, so innocent. Somebody took someone special from my father, and he never got over it, so he began a tradition to do the same to others. Every ten years. But he wouldn’t bu
dge from that date and wouldn’t let me help him. So last year, I wanted to show him.”

  “Timothy.”

  “That damn other kid ruined it for me. I invited my dad to the house. Chester didn’t have any occupants in it at the time, and your grandpa showed up, dragging this kid behind him, said the kid wanted to use the phone. I already had Timothy down there.”

  “Your dad killed Timothy?”

  “Oh, no. He didn’t approve. I tied the older kid up too. After my dad roughed up the older kid, I lured him out back and cut his throat.”

  “You’re not getting away with this. If you kill me, Gerald will find you and kill you.”

  “He wouldn’t have the guts.”

  We drove down the road under the canopy of skeleton trees, toward my impending death. The same fate the others had unfortunately already met. My palms sweated, and my body shook, and my heart raced faster as we went deeper into the woods. I didn’t know they were so large. The road turned into some dead debris with old tire marks the car could follow. The car bumped along.

  After a while, we slowed down, and the trees grew thicker. If someone wasn’t really paying attention, they would have easily missed the small wooden shack behind the dense trees. My mom stopped the car and looked over at me. Without her having to say a word, I got out. If I was going to run, it would’ve been the time, but where would I go? And she had a shotgun and Rusck in the trunk, so like an obedient captive, I followed her to the shack. It had no windows, just a door made of plywood. My mom nudged the door open with her gun and stepped aside so I could enter. The shack was pretty much empty besides a rusty bucket and some old apple cores. There was also what looked like a closet in the corner, and the place smelled like rotten lunch meat.

  I glanced over at my mom to see what was next because we just stood there in an empty shack. She walked to the corner and pulled open what I assumed was the closet door. Inside, it was piled with shovels and rakes. My heart sank a bit because I had a feeling what the shovels were for. She started taking the shovels out and seemed pretty preoccupied with it, so I started slowly walking backward. Maybe she wouldn’t see me sneak out. Perhaps I could at least somehow free Rusck, but then the floorboards creaked, making her spin around.

  “Don’t you even dare move,” she said with a shovel in one hand and her shotgun in the other.

  I remained where I was as she finished removing the tools from the closet. She placed down her shotgun and started removing the floorboards of the closet. I tried to take a step forward, but as soon as I did, my mom’s hand flew to her gun. She then stood, wiping dust off her hands. With her shotgun tucked under her arm, she pointed at the now exposed hole.

  “Get in.”

  “What, what, what…” I stuttered as my stomach did flip-flops, making me want to vomit.

  “Just shut up and get in.”

  I tried so hard to come up with something. Maybe if I somehow attacked her. My mom lifted her weapon and curled her finger around the trigger, and for a brief moment, I considered attacking her but knew it wouldn’t end well, so with some hope of somehow getting out of the situation alive, I walked toward the hole. The hole was almost the size of the closet floor, about two feet by two feet. A wooden ladder led down, and I was supposing that was my next task, climbing down. I rolled my eyes in her direction, and she nodded, so I climbed down rung by rung into total darkness.

  My mom climbed down after me and reached down to the floor. She came back up with a flashlight and shined it on where she wanted me to go. It was a barred cage door with a large padlock on it. She pulled out her keys, unlocked it, and shoved me inside. She locked it after me and climbed back up the ladder with the flashlight, leaving me in total darkness. While I couldn’t see anything, I definitely smelled something. If it was possible, it smelled worse than the rabbits in my basement, death twofold. I pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth, trying to hold down the vomit that threatened to come up. At that moment, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to cry, scream, or just lie down and give up.

  Suddenly, there was a small beam of light. For a quick moment, I thought perhaps I already died and, well, you know, the whole going toward the light thing.

  “Who’s there?” a small, quivery voice asked.

  “Um,” was all I could muster for an answer. Did the rabbits somehow find me?

  “Are you with her?” the voice from the dark asked.

  It took a second before I answered. I knew that voice. “Olive?”

  “Did she tell you who I was?”

  “No, it’s me, Gabby.”

  “Are you messing with me?”

  “No,” I said softly, following her small beam of light. When I got near, she aimed it in my face.

  “Gabby, what’s going on?”

  I sat down next to Olive, dirt beneath us. “I’m still putting it together. Tell me how you got here. Sarah called me earlier and said you were missing.”

  “I was just coming home from school, and as soon as I got out of my car, somebody ran up behind me and shoved a rag or something in my face, and when I woke up, I was down here in the dark. Why am I down here, Gabby? Why? Is this some kind of demented prank, because if it is, I don’t like it one bit.”

  “Unfortunately not. It’s much more than that. Can I borrow your light?”

  “Sure, if you tell me what you know.”

  I sighed, a great big, heavy one. “Well, it was my mom who took you.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Turns out she is beyond unstable, and her dad was some sort of serial killer, and she’s carrying on the business or something.” I stopped talking, shocked at what came out of my mouth, shocked at the fact that it was true.

  “No…”

  “Yes. Now, may I borrow your little light?”

  “Yeah, here,” Olive said, pressing her keychain that the light was attached to into my palm. “Did she take me so she can kill me?”

  “More than likely. But, hey, she’s planning on killing me too.” I thought Olive might’ve been too shocked to respond. I stood with the light, not sure exactly what I was looking for, maybe just to get a feel of the hole we were trapped in. I shined it around us first, seeing a glimpse of Olive, her face smudged with dirt and her bottom lip trembling. Behind her, the hole seemed to stretch for about ten more feet. Besides Olive and me, the only thing that filled the space looked like lumps in the dirt—long, slightly narrow lumps. “This must be where they buried them.”

  “Buried who?” Olive asked with a quaver in her voice.

  “The kids my mom’s dad murdered, and the one she killed. Possibly her dad too.” But I wanted confirmation, to make sure somebody was buried down there, so I got on my hands and knees and started digging. I probably dug a good couple of feet before I hit something, wrapping my fingers around the hard object in the earth, someone’s bone. I didn’t take it out of the ground, not wanting to disturb whoever it was down there. In total, I crawled around and found seven graves, one for each kid. My mom must’ve buried her dad somewhere else. “We have to get out of here.”

  I could hear Olive trying to form words, but all she was able to get out was a low, guttural sound.

  “We’re going to have to work together. Can we do this?”

  “I don’t…I-I-I…”

  “I know it’s scary, but if we somehow rush her, there are two against one.”

  “But, but, but…”

  “Okay, Olive, remember what I told you about what Rusck and I discovered and just now about my mom. She’s carrying on the tradition, making it her own. She’s going to kill you, me, and Rusck. No matter what, we’re dead, so might as well give it a try, right?”

  “But I don’t want to die.”

  I crawled over to Olive and placed my hands on her shoulders. “That’s why we have to at least try to get out of here, okay?’

  Olive nodded. “No dying?”

  “We’ll try our best not to. So, okay, earlier, I broke into Mr. Pullman’s house. He was my landlord w
ho was has been investigating my mom’s dad for years, but she killed him earlier today. But anyway, I used my lock pick set to get in, and I happen to still have it in my pocket.”

  I walked over to the barred door and got out my picks. A padlock would be quick and easy. It was the rest of getting away that was going to be the challenge.

  Olive followed me over and shined the tiny stream of light on the padlock I already gripped in my hand. I had the lock popped and was about to push the door open when I heard noises upstairs. Thinking it best to escape after my mom left, I waited to open the door, but then I heard a voice, and it wasn’t hers.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “Gabby” I heard Rusck call from above.

  I thrust open the door and called out, “Rusck, we’re down here.”

  “Gabby,” he called again.

  “Rusck,” I yelled as loud as I could, making my way up the ladder. Olive was close behind. When I climbed to the top and started pushing up on the floorboards, the shovels and all the other junk clattered to the ground. Rusck’s footsteps ran toward us, the closet door opened, and he began chucking the shovels and stuff out.

  Before long, we saw light and Rusck’s face. He reached out a hand, and I grabbed it, climbing out of the hole. Rusck and I helped pull Olive out together.

  As soon as Olive got out, I threw my arms around Rusck and hugged him as tight as I could. “I’m so sorry,” I mumbled into his shoulder.

  “Why? You didn’t do anything.”

  “I accused you of such awful things.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Let’s go.”

  “How’d you get out of the trunk?”

  “Emergency latch. Escaping was almost too easy.”

  “Are you okay? Where’s my mom?”

  “I’m still living, and I didn’t see your mom.” He looked over at Olive. “What about you, Olive? You okay?”

  Olive meekly nodded in response.

  “We have to hurry. I’m sure my mom’s around here somewhere. She might be setting us up,” I said, grasping Rusck’s bicep.