Stillhouse Lake

by Rachel Caine

  "Cameras!" I blurt. I lunge away, to where I'd left the tablet plugged in to charge. The cameras are streaming to the device. I can see exactly what happened.

  But the tablet is gone. The cord is still there, dangling limp.

  I take the end of it, as if I can't believe it's not connected, and I look wordlessly at Kezia, as if she can somehow solve this for me. She's frowning. "You have cameras? Are they built into the security system?"

  "No," I say. "No, separate, there was a tablet--" I don't know what makes my brain jump from one idea to the next; it happens so fast it's a blur of thought, something about watching my kids to keeping them safe to safe, and then I realize what I've really forgotten.

  The safe room.

  I come bolt upright and charge around the kitchen bar toward the wall, while the other two look at me in baffled surprise.

  The safe room of this house, the one that the old, wealthy owners built in, is hidden behind a piece of hinged paneling in the corner of the kitchen area, near the breakfast table. I shove the table hard, nearly sending it crashing into Kezia as she approaches, and push frantically at the paneling. It's supposed to spring free, but it stays put. I have a strange out-of-body feeling, as if I've imagined the very existence of the room, as if reality has shifted around me into an insane funhouse version of my life and the safe room has vanished along with my children. I push again, again, again, and finally, the far corner springs up with a click. I grab it and yank it open. Beyond it is a heavy steel door, and a keypad inset beside it.

  There's blood smeared on the numbers. I stop breathing when I see that, but at the same time it means they're inside, they're okay. There's no other option.

  I type in the password, but my fingers are trembling hard, and I get it wrong. I take a breath and force myself to slow down. Six digits. I get it right this time, and the tone trills and a green light flashes. I turn the handle, and I'm shouting "Connor! Lanny!" even before the seal breaks.

  Inside, the panic room is wrecked. Bottled water is scattered across the floor, knocked from a shelf, and a box of emergency high-protein supplies has been knocked over and spilled packages across the floor. Some are crushed from a struggle.

  There's blood. Drops. Long strings that show motion. A small pool of it near the corner, under a yellow sign that reads CAUTION: ZOMBIES HERE. Connor's sign.

  There's still a crossbow broken on the floor. Also my son's, because he adores the guy who carries one on that zombie show. The phone, with its hard line, has been ripped out of the wall and thrown broken in the opposite direction.

  I keep looking at the blood. It's fresh. Fresh and red.

  My kids are not here.

  I am so certain that I stand there for a moment, staring without comprehending; they have to be here, nothing else makes sense. This is their sanctuary, their safe place. Their escape. No one could get to them here.

  But someone has. They were in here. They fought here. They bled here.

  And they're gone.

  I lunge forward to the only possible cover in the room, the small toilet closet. It's only got a frosted-glass door, and I can already see that nobody's in it, but I yank it open anyway and gag on my own terror when I see the clean, empty stall.

  I stand there, totally still, and the silence of the room soaks into me like cold. The absence of my children is an open wound, and the blood is so red, fresh, so bright it's blinding.

  Kezia puts her hand on my shoulder. The warmth of it feels shocking, radiating against my face. I've gotten very chilled, I realize. Shock. I'm shivering without really feeling it. "Come on," she tells me. "They're not here. Come on out."

  I don't want to. I feel that leaving this strange, chilly sanctuary is admitting something huge. Something I want to hide from, like a child pulling covers over my head.

  Irrationally, insanely, I suddenly want Mel. It horrifies me, but I want someone to turn to, someone who might share this feeling of emptiness. Maybe I don't want Mel. Maybe I want the idea of him. Someone who shares my grief, my fear, our children. I want his arms around me. I want Mel to tell me it'll be all right, even though that Mel is a lie, was always a lie. Even then.

  Kezia pulls me out. We leave the secret room open, and I sink down in one of the kitchen chairs--the one Lanny sat in at breakfast. Everything has a memory attached to it--the fingerprints on the wood of the table, the mostly empty salt shaker that I asked Connor to refill but he forgot.

  One of Lanny's skull-themed hair clips lies discarded on the floor under the chair, a single, silky strand still caught in the hinge. I pick it up and hold it loose in my hand, and when I lift it to my nose, I can smell the scent of her hair. It brings tears to my eyes.

  Sam's sitting next to me now, and his hand is lying limply close to mine. I don't know when he sat down; it's as if he's just appeared, like time jumped. Reality collapsing again. Everything feels distant now, but the warmth of his skin radiates into me like sunlight, even half an inch away.

  "Gwen," he says. After a short delay to process that yes, that's my name, I've taught myself to believe it's my name, I raise my head and meet his gaze. Something in it steadies me. Brings me an inch or two up from the darkness, into something that's at least faintly hopeful. "Gwen, we're going to find them, okay? We're going to find the kids. Do you have any idea--"

  He's interrupted by the ringing of my cell phone. I grab for it with frantic, clawing hands, slap it down on the table, and answer the call on speakerphone without even glancing at the caller ID. "Lanny? Connor?"

  I don't recognize the voice that answers. It's a man's voice, I think, but it's been run through a synth program to disguise it. "You think you got away with your crimes, you sick bitch? You can run but you can't hide, and when we get to you, you're going to wish your fucking husband had strung you up and skinned you alive!"

  It catches me off guard and knocks the breath out of me, and I can't move for a second, can't think. Sam sits back as if he's been physically punched. Kezia, leaning over, draws away. The venomous glee in the words, even with the processed flatness of the voice, is shocking.

  It feels like half an hour before I can find words, but it can't be more than a heartbeat, and then I scream, "Give me back my kids, you bastard!"

  There's silence on the other end of the phone. As if I've caught him out. As if I'm not following some kind of script. Then the synthesized voice says, any surprise stripped from the words by the algorithms that change it, "What the fuck?"

  "Are they all right? If you've hurt my kids, you son of a bitch, I will find you, I will rip you apart--" I'm standing up now, leaning over the phone on stiffened arms, and my voice is sharp enough to cut, loud enough to shatter.

  "I didn't--uh--fuck. Shit." The call disconnects with a crackle, and the calm musical beeps of the phone telling me it lost the signal. I sink down in the chair, grab the phone, and swipe to the caller ID. It was a blocked number, of course.

  "He didn't know," I say. "He didn't even know they were gone." I should have seen this coming; my address was out in the open. Someone who got close to me leaked it, took pictures. Mel must have distributed my number, too. I can expect a torrent of calls like this: death threats, rape threats, threats to kill my children and pets, torch my house, torture my parents. I've been through it before. There isn't much that shocks me anymore, in the Sicko Patrol world. I also know, as the police remind me every time I report it, that most of these sad, sick little men will never follow through on their vicious promises. Their enjoyment comes from psychological damage.

  The troll didn't hang up because he felt guilty for doing this to me. He was caught by surprise and was afraid of being swept up in a kidnapping investigation. The upside is, he won't call back.

  But there will be a thousand others in line behind him.

  Kezia interrupts my thoughts by taking the phone out of my hand. She says, "I'll answer for you until we decide how to handle this, okay?" And I nod, even if I know it's a ploy to grab my phone as evidence. S
am averts his gaze as if he's ashamed. I wonder if he left a few angry messages on my voice mail, back in the day. Sent me a few rage-filled e-mails from an anonymous account. He wouldn't have done the truly sociopathic ones; his would have been stuffed with pain and real loss and justified anger.

  I wish now that he'd put his name on them, that we'd been honest with each other, understood each other, seen each other from the beginning.

  It doesn't take long for the police to arrive. Things get busy. We're ushered outside as the police thoroughly check the house and start the process of investigation. Prester arrives with another, younger detective--apart from him, they all seem too young to have any experience--and shakes his head when he sees me standing there with Kezia and Sam. The fact that Sam's with us raises his eyebrows, and I see him recalculating things, revising all his earlier judgments and assumptions. I wonder if this puts me and Sam back in a box together as conspirators.

  If it does, that would have an ugly ring of authenticity to it. We do have a past, even if I hadn't known it. We do know each other. We do like each other now, on some level. It makes my head hurt, trying to think like Prester, but I have a notion that he's already seeing us in a very different light.

  "Tell me everything," Prester says.

  Once I start, I can't stop.

  12

  I don't want to leave the house, though I don't want to be here, either . . . It no longer feels like our safe space, our haven. It feels spoiled, cracked open like that house back in Wichita to reveal something ugly at its center. Not Mel's evil this time. The house is no longer a home because of the cold absence . . . the absence of the one thing that makes any kind of home for me.

  I sit outside on the porch with Prester, who quizzes me and Sam in great detail, with Kezia nearby to add her confirmations as needed. I imagine the timeline he's sketching out in his notebook. I wonder where the red star goes on it, the moment someone came into my home and ripped my heart out. He must also believe that I could have done it, but I no longer care about that. They have to be found.

  I have to believe they're okay--scared, but okay. That the blood is stage blood, or animal blood, put there to terrify me. That a ransom call will come. That anything, anything is true but what I instinctively, horribly believe.

  I give Prester the cell phone numbers for my kids, and he gives them to Kezia; she comes back half an hour later to say, "The phones are off and not pinging on GPS."

  "No surprise," he says. "Any TV-watching moron knows to ditch the damn phones these days." He shakes his head a little and closes his notebook. "I've got every cop in the county out looking, Ms. Proctor, but meanwhile, I need you to tell me what happened this morning after Officer Claremont ate breakfast with you."

  "I already told you."

  "Tell me again." His eyes are cool and remorseless, and I hate him with a clear, pointed fury in that moment, as if he's the one holding my children, hiding them from me. "Because I need to understand exactly how this happened. After seeing the officer off, what did you do?"

  "Locked the door. Reset alarms. Washed dishes. Got the call from Mel. Grabbed my shoulder holster, my gun from the safe, the box to put it in. My hoodie."

  "And did you knock on the kids' doors? Tell them where you were going?"

  "I told Lanny. I told her I'd be gone about an hour. Then I asked Kezia to keep an eye on the house."

  He nods, and I think, He's judging me for leaving them, but I left them in a locked, fortified house with a safe room, with clear plans for what to do if anything, anything went wrong. With a police car right in front. It was an hour! It had ended up being more, by twenty minutes, because I'd stopped off at Sam's, and someone had tried to kill him. An hour and twenty minutes. That's how long it took for my life to fall apart.

  "So you'd say about, what, half an hour between when Kezia left your house after breakfast, and when you went out to go up the hill?"

  "I saw her pass my house," Sam says without being asked. "Seems right. It was almost exactly an hour from the time she went up to the gun range to when she came down, and I invited her inside."

  Prester gives him a slitted look, and Sam holds up his hands and sits back. But he's right. "Half an hour at the very most before I left the house," I tell Prester. "And Sam sees me on the road then. Look, none of this matters. Talk to Kezia. She spoke with my daughter."

  "I'm not concerned with what she says right now. So. There's half an hour between when Officer Claremont last sees your kids and when you are next seen heading up to the gun range, alone. Does that sound right?"

  "You think in half an hour I somehow slaughtered my kids and spirited them away, and went for a run without a single speck of blood on me?"

  "I didn't say that."

  "You don't need to say it!" I sit forward, hands on my knees, and stare at him with all the intensity that I have. I know it has to be a lot, but Prester doesn't back off. "I. Would. Never. Hurt. My. Kids." My voice breaks on that word, and my eyes blur, but I don't let it stop me. "I am not Melvin Royal. I'm not even Gina Royal. I am the person I had to be to save my kids from the people who wanted to hurt them and still do. If you want suspects, I'll give you the files. Maybe you can do something useful with them for a change!" I'd love to be able to throw the files at him, the vile pictures, the reams of paper full of deadly, violent words designed to kill my hope and peace. "It's all in my office. And talk to Melvin. He knows something about this. He has to know!"

  "You think he's broken out of death row and somehow made his way all the way to Stillhouse Lake without a soul seeing him?"

  "No. I think that Melvin has people. For all I know, he might have had a partner after all. They tried to put that on me, but it wasn't me. Maybe his real partner--" I stop, because I sound like I'm losing it, even to my own ears. Melvin Royal hadn't had a partner. He hadn't needed one. He was the king of his particular little, horrible kingdom, and I can't imagine him sharing it with anyone else. But followers? Yes. He would love to have followers. He thought of himself as charismatic, as influential as a cult leader. If he couldn't torment me on his own, he'd love to have someone else act as his puppet.

  But Prester's already shaking his head. "Been checking out your ex," he tells me. "Man's on a real tight leash. No computer time at all. He gets a few books a month, some time with his lawyer, some letters but they all get checked ahead of time by prison officials. He gets some . . . I guess you could say fan mail from women, of the he's not bad, he's just misunderstood variety. One of them wants to marry him. He says he's thinking about it since--his words, not mine--his wife abandoned him."

  "Can you check--"

  "I already did," he heads me off. "Royal Wife Wannabe never left her home, which is in rural Alaska, of all places. She'd be almost as noticeable as Melvin if she made a move. Local cops say she's deranged but harmless about it. Kansas staties are already looking into the entire list of correspondents he has, and it's short."

  "They're not catching it all. I don't know how he's getting his letters to me out, but he's doing it somehow."

  "And we're looking into that. And the shooting at Mr. Cade's cabin. And the false officer down report. And the phone call you said you got. We've got a lot to sort right now, and we're doing it as fast as we can." He leans forward on his elbows. "I've got people looking into all your kids' friends, too. Couldn't find much in the way of social media--"

  "You know why!"

  "Yeah, I guess. But if you can think of anybody we need to talk to, you say it now. We need to get on every possible track, right now."

  What he's not saying, I realize, are the odds. The harsh truth is that if my kids are alive, they probably won't be for long, especially not if they've been taken by someone with a grudge against me, or against Mel. Probably even less time if they were taken by the Stillhouse Lake killer. I flash back to the blood, and I feel suffocated again by the possibility of failure.

  I'm still forgetting something. I can't grasp what it is. It's something I've seen
, something that didn't make any difference, and now I can't slow my mind down enough to find that nagging, whispering, elusive thing. It's about Connor. Something about Connor. I close my eyes and see him, just as he was this morning: my serious kid, quiet, self-contained, charmingly nerdy.

  Nerdy.

  I try to chase that thought, but I can't; it shatters as Prester says, "I'm going to need for you to come down to the station. Lots to do here, and you can't be in the way. Mr. Cade, I'd like you to join us, too. Need some more information about this shooting situation."

  I say something meaningless, an agreement of some kind, but I am not agreed. My mind is working fast, too fast, spinning out in a thousand different directions, and nothing makes sense anymore. But there is something I can do, I realize. Just one thing.

  I ask for my phone back, and I text Absalom to say, Someone has my kids. I don't know who. Please help.

  I hit "Send," not knowing if that is going out as a prayer into the darkness or a cry of despair. I can't be angry if he doesn't want to get involved; Absalom is a bottle thrown into the vast, dark ocean of the Internet, and the Internet, as I have good reason to know, is not a friendly place.

  No reply comes. I ask Prester to wait, which he does, impatiently, for a solid five minutes, and then he takes the phone away and seals it into an evidence bag.

  If it chimes again, I don't hear it, because it goes into a brown cardboard box, part of an inventory of evidence that will be taken back to Norton from the house. Not my home, not anymore. Just bricks and wood and steel, with a not-quite-finished deck. I regret not finishing it and sitting out there, at least one time, with Sam and the kids. Maybe I'd have one last happy memory of this place.

  Sam offers his hand to me, and I stare at it without much understanding until I realize that Prester's waiting by the sedan. It's time to go.

  I won't be back here, I think.

  One way or another, it's not home.

  The interrogation room at the police department is wearily familiar, even down to the chipped corner. I work at it with a fingernail restlessly, waiting. Sam's been taken to another room--separate interviews, of course--and Kezia left us to go put on her uniform and join the rest of the force out on patrol, tracking down my children. I don't put much faith in the police, even though Prester's given me calm, logical talk about roadblocks and local knowledge and hiring up some of the finest tracking dogs around to get the scent out of Connor's bedroom.