The Boy from the Woods

by Harlan Coben

  It had been. When it was discovered that Naomi was just playing a prank, there had been plenty of online ridicule. Hester’s enemies—everyone on social media had enemies—reveled in her error. When two days later she commented on a controversial election court decision in California, a dozen Twitter Nuts (that’s what Hester called them) pounced with a fury: “Wait, isn’t she the one who thought a kid’s prank was a national emergency?” This was the way now for both sides—and yes, she even hated the phrase “both sides”—now: Discredit any legitimate argument with something, no matter how long ago or obscure, the person got wrong in the past. As if only perfection deserved your consideration.

  “She ran off again,” Oren said.

  “Naomi?”

  “Yes. Her father came to see me. He insists it’s more than that.”

  “What will you do?”

  “What can I do? I put it on the radio so if my guys see her, they’ll call it. But the signs seem pretty clear that she’s a runaway.”

  “I imagine she’s been under a lot of stress.”

  “Yes. That’s my concern too.”

  Hester still had questions about the whole Naomi mess—notably, why did Matthew insist she get involved?—but once the ending came, Matthew shut down and shrugged it off as a vague worry about a classmate.

  “So what brings you here?” she asked.

  “Seems enough time has passed.”

  “Pardon?”

  “You said not to call too soon. It would make me look desperate.”

  “So I did.”

  “And being a little old school, I thought I would ask you out the old-fashioned way.”

  “Oh.”

  “In person.”

  “Oh.”

  “Because no one has a rotary phone anymore.”

  “Oh.”

  He smiled again. “This is going well.”

  “Should I say ‘Oh’ again?”

  “No, I think I got the gist. Would you like to have dinner with me sometime?”

  “I should probably fake indifference. Say something about checking my busy schedule.”

  Oren said, “Oh.”

  “Yes, Oren. I would like to have dinner with you very much.”

  “How’s tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow is good.”

  “Seven?”

  “I’ll make a reservation,” she said.

  “Will I need to wear a tie?”

  “No.”

  “Good.”

  “Good.”

  Silence.

  He stepped forward as though he might hug her, then thought better of it. He gave an awkward half wave and said, “Bye then.”

  She watched him walk past her and out the door.

  Yep, Hester thought, holding back the urge to leap up and click her heels. Giant Yum.

  CHAPTER

  FOURTEEN

  Rusty Eggers turned the television off with a little too much drama and tossed the remote onto the white couch.

  “It’s just a silly nuisance suit.”

  Gavin Chambers nodded. They’d been watching Hester Crimstein’s interview with Saul Strauss from Rusty’s sleek, chrome-n-white penthouse. The penthouse of this particular high-rise was made up of floor-to-ceiling windows offering the most breathtaking views of the Manhattan skyline imaginable—mostly because the penthouse was in Hoboken, New Jersey, not Manhattan, and so it faced the city rather than stood amongst it. New Yorkers on the Hudson River have the okay view of New Jersey—New Jerseyans on that same Hudson River have the jaw-dropping view of New York City. Right now, at night, with the lights of the buildings twinkling off the Hudson, the river looked like diamonds strewn out on black velvet.

  “A judge will toss it out before it gets anywhere,” Rusty continued. He spoke with great confidence. Rusty always spoke with great confidence.

  “I’m sure you’re right,” Gavin Chambers said.

  “I thought Hester Crimstein was good in that interview,” Rusty said.

  “She was.”

  “Fair. Called Strauss out on his bullshit.”

  “Yes.”

  “But he won’t go away easily, will he?”

  “Saul Strauss?” Gavin Chambers shook his head. “He will not.”

  “You know him, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You served together.”

  They had. In the Marines. A lifetime ago. Gavin had always admired Saul Strauss. Saul was tough and scrappy and brave—and yet wrong about pretty much everything.

  “How long has it been since you saw him?”

  “A long time.”

  “Still,” Rusty said. “There must be a bond. From your time overseas.”

  Gavin didn’t reply.

  “Do you think you can talk to him?”

  “Talk to him?”

  “Get him to back off.”

  Saul Strauss used to be what Gavin would consider committed and passionate in a namby-pamby, Kumbaya-like, eco-green, granola-y, unrealistic sort of way, but more and more, the Sauls of the world had raised their rhetoric to the dangerously hysterical, especially when it came to Rusty Eggers.

  “Not a chance,” Gavin said.

  “So Strauss is a true hater?”

  Gavin Chambers and Saul Strauss both came from politically mixed marriages—conservative fathers, liberal mothers. Gavin had taken after his old man while Saul became a proper mama’s boy. There had been a time when they could talk and debate in a spirited way. Gavin would say that Saul was naïve and a bleeding heart. Saul would say that Gavin was overly analytical and Darwinian. Those relative niceties now seemed a long time ago.

  “He’s become a zealot,” Gavin said.

  “I figured that,” Rusty said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “In some ways, we are the same, your friend Saul and I. We both believe that the current system is rigged. We both believe that the system has failed the American people. We both believe the only way to fix it is to first upend it.”

  Rusty Eggers stared out at the view. He was a New Jersey boy through and through—born poor in the Ironbound district of Newark to a Ukrainian father and a Jamaican mother, attended all-male St. Benedict’s Prep on Martin Luther King Boulevard in the heart of the city, earned an academic full ride to Princeton University—all of which was why he stayed in his home state rather than moving across that river. He loved the view, of course. Trains and ferries could get him into midtown or Wall Street in less than half an hour. New Jersey was also a big part of Rusty’s rep—The Three S’s, he liked to say—a sliver of Springsteen, a sliver of Sinatra, a sliver of the Sopranos. Rusty came across as gruff yet lovable, urban yet safe, a big teddy bear of a man with a shock of rust-colored (ergo the nickname) hair. He was light skinned enough to pass as white, yet black enough so that the racists could get behind him to prove that they weren’t really racists.

  Rusty Eggers was also, Gavin Chambers knew, brilliant. The only child in a close-knit family, Rusty had double-majored in philosophy and political science at Princeton. He’d made his first fortune by creating a board game that mixed personal opinions and trivia called PolitiGuess. Life seemed to be going swimmingly for Rusty until a tractor trailer, driven by a man who’d popped too many amphetamines to keep on a ridiculous delivery schedule, crashed through the divider on the New Jersey Turnpike and slammed head-on into a car carrying the Eggers family. Rusty’s mother and father both died instantly. Rusty was seriously injured and spent two months in a hospital bed. As the family driver on that particular night, even though it was not in any way his fault, Rusty suffered survivor’s guilt. He became unmoored. He sunk into a painkiller addiction and then diagnosable depression. It was bad for a while.

  Fast-forward through three terrible years.

  Though some claim that he never fully recovered from this dark period, Rusty Eggers, sporting a limp he carried to this day, eventually rose from the ashes like a phoenix with the help of his old friends Dash and Delia Maynard. Rusty would claim, as so
many had before him, that he’d pulled himself up by the bootstraps, but in truth, it had been the Maynards who gave him the boots and tugged on those straps with all their might. With Dash’s help, Rusty Eggers became television’s most trusted self-help guru. Two years ago, he’d ridden that fame and goodwill to a landslide victory to become a United States senator as, in his own words, the “Complete Independent.”

  Rusty’s motto: Parties Are for Weekends, Not Politics.

  Now, like every political upstart from Obama to Trump, Rusty Eggers had foregone waiting his turn and was aiming for the highest office in the land with early success.

  With his back to Gavin, still staring out the window, Rusty asked, “How are they faring?”

  He was talking about the Maynards. “They’re fine. A little stressed perhaps.”

  “I’m sure your presence helps with that.”

  Rusty’s apartment’s décor was fittingly spare, nothing gold or marble, just whites and minimalism. The view was the thing, those floor-to-ceiling windows.

  “I appreciate you doing this for me, Gavin.”

  “I’m billing for it.”

  “Yes, but I know you don’t go into the field anymore.”

  “I do,” Gavin said. “But rarely. Senator?”

  Rusty frowned. “We’ve known each other too long for you to start calling me that.”

  “I’d prefer it.”

  “As you please, Colonel,” Rusty replied with a small smile.

  “You know besides running my securities firm, I’m an attorney.”

  “I do.”

  “I don’t do much practicing,” Gavin continued, “but I passed the bar so that anything you or any client tells me is covered under attorney-client privilege.”

  “I trust you anyway. You know that.”

  “Still, you have that protection too—that legal protection. I wanted you to know that. I’m your trusted friend, yes, but legally I can’t reveal anything you tell me.”

  Rusty Eggers turned with a smile on his face. “You know I want you in my cabinet.”

  “This isn’t about that.”

  “National security advisor. Maybe secretary of defense.”

  Didn’t matter how much he tried not to get excited by this notion—retired colonel Gavin Chambers, ex-Marine, was still human. The idea of serving in a cabinet made him heady. “I appreciate your confidence in me.”

  “It’s deserved.”

  “Senator? Let me help you.”

  “You are.”

  “The thing is, I’ve heard the rumors—”

  “They are just that,” Rusty said. “Rumors.”

  “Then why am I guarding the Maynards?”

  Rusty turned to him. “Are you familiar with the horseshoe theory of politics?”

  “What about it?”

  “Most people think, politically speaking, that the right and the left are on a linear continuum—meaning that the right is on one side of the line, and the left is obviously on the other. That they are polar opposites. Far apart from one another. But the horseshoe theory says that the line is, well, shaped more like a horseshoe—that once you start going to the far right and the far left, that the line curves inward so that the two extremes are far closer to one another than they are to the center. Some go as far as to say it’s more like a circle—that the line bends so much that far left and far right are virtually indistinguishable—tyranny in one form or another.”

  “Senator?”

  “Yes?”

  “I studied political science too.”

  “Then you’ll understand what I’m trying to do.” Rusty came closer, wincing as he limped. The shattered leg from that terrible night too often tightened up. “Most Americans are in the middle relatively speaking. Most are somewhat left or right of that center. Those people don’t interest me. They are pragmatic. They change their minds. Voters always think the president has to appeal to those folks—the center. Half the country more or less is right, half is left, so you need to grab the middle. That’s not what I’m doing.”

  “I don’t see what that has to do with the Maynards,” Gavin said.

  “I am the next evolution of our outrage-fueled, social-media-obsessed political culture. The final evolution, if you will. The end of the status quo.”

  Rusty had the fire in his eyes, the smile rocking. There was no one else in the room and yet Gavin could hear the cheers of millions.

  “My point is, if my enemies think my close friends Dash and Delia have something, anything, on me, they’ll stop at nothing, including hurting them, to get it.”

  “So you’re doing this just to protect close friends?”

  “You find that hard to believe?”

  Gavin made a face and put the tip of his index finger near the tip of his thumb to indicate a wee bit. Rusty laughed. It was an explosive laugh. Such charm in that laugh. So disarming. “I’ve known Delia since our days at Princeton. Did you know that?”

  Gavin did, of course. He knew the entire legend. Rusty had dated Delia during their junior year. They broke up while working a summer internship on Capitol Hill for the Democrats, where Delia then fell for and married another summer intern from that Capitol Hill class, a budding documentary filmmaker named Dash Maynard. That, oddly enough, was how Rusty and Dash met—in DC, doing summer internships for the Dems.

  That was where it all started.

  “The Maynards know more about me than anyone,” Rusty said.

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, nothing dire. It’s not like they have any serious dirt on me. But Dash taped everything back in the day. Everything. Backstage. Private gatherings. There are no smoking guns, but, I mean, in all that material, there must be moments my enemies could use, don’t you think? A moment when I was rude to a guest or snappy with an employee or maybe I put my hand on a woman’s elbow, whatever.”

  “And specifically?”

  “Nothing comes to mind.”

  Gavin didn’t believe him.

  “Just keep an eye on them for a few more weeks. Then this will all be over.”

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  When Bernard Pine unlocked his front door, Wilde didn’t wait for permission. He headed straight for the staircase.

  “Hold up, where do you think you’re going?”

  Wilde didn’t reply. He started up the steps. Bernard Pine fell in behind him. That was fine. Wilde entered Naomi’s bedroom and flicked on the lights.

  “What are you looking for?” Pine asked.

  “You want my help, right?”

  “Yes.”

  Wilde stared at Naomi’s bed, at all the stuffed animals on it. “Does Naomi have a favorite?”

  “A favorite what?”

  “Stuffed animal.”

  “How would I know?”

  Wilde opened the closet and checked the shelf.

  “Her backpack,” he said to Pine.

  “What?”

  “When I was here last time—”

  “Wait, when the hell were you in my daughter’s bedroom?”

  Did Wilde want to go into it? Judging by the look of bafflement and perhaps even hostility sneaking onto Pine’s face, he probably had to. “The day you and I met.”

  “But I saw you in the basement.”

  “And before that, I was in the bedroom.”

  “With my daughter?”

  “What? No. Alone. You know that. She was in the basement.”

  Pine shook his head, as though trying to clear it. “I don’t understand. How did you get in her bedroom?”

  “That’s not really important right now. What is important is that Naomi’s backpack is missing.”

  Wilde pointed to the shelf. Pine followed the gesture, saw the empty shelf, and shrugged. “It’s probably at her school. In her locker. I saw her take it lots of times. Every day, in fact.”

  “What color backpack?”

  “Black, I think. Maybe dark blue.”

  “I’m talking about the pink one she k
ept on this shelf.”

  Again Pine looked baffled. “How would you know…you looked in her closet?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Wilde tried to keep the impatience out of his tone. “Because I was looking for her. Like now.”

  “I don’t know anything about a pink backpack.”

  Wilde gave the closet a more thorough look. The pink Fjällräven Kånken backpack he’d seen on that shelf was definitely gone. He also checked the hangers. Last time he’d been in this room, all the hangers had been taken. He counted four empty ones now. Three more hangers lay scattered on the floor, as though she’d ripped the clothes off those hangers quickly.

  Obvious conclusion: She packed clothes into that pink backpack.

  Wilde shifted his gaze back to the bed and the stuffed animals. He closed his eyes for a second, tried to recall what the bed looked like last time he was here, hoping that he’d be able to tell if any were missing. But it was pointless. If one or more of them were missing, it might confirm the fact that Naomi intentionally ran. But did he need that extra proof?

  “She ran away,” Wilde said to him.

  “You can’t know that.”

  “Mr. Pine?”

  “I’d prefer it if you called me Bernie.”

  “What aren’t you telling me, Bernie?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “You know more than you’re saying.”

  He started rubbing his chin. Wilde tried to read him. Nothing was coming through clearly. Was he a loving albeit distracted father? Or was there something more? There was definitely a quality in the man he didn’t trust. Was Bernard Pine a danger or was Wilde just being his usual cynical self?

  Then: “Naomi sent me this text yesterday.”

  Pine handed Wilde his phone. The message was two short sentences:

  Don’t worry. I’m safe.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Pine said.

  Not much question about it now. Backpack and clothes gone. No signs or hints of any abduction. No ransom or demands or anything like that. Now throw in the other factors—the heightened bullying, her past history of running off, the failed Challenge game.

  The conclusion was obvious.

  “There’s something else you should know,” Pine said.