“You said you woke up in a bed—”
“Yes. I was in a room for three nights, maybe more. It had a bed and a chair. My room was attached to a little bathroom with a toilet and sink, no shower. The windows were shuttered. I couldn’t tell where I was. The first day, there was food, but I was scared to eat it. Later, when I was sleeping, someone put a bottle of orange juice in the room. But they must have put something in it, because I slept so hard.”
“You sent Rory a text message on Monday. A line from the book Martin in Space.”
She shakes her head, confused. “I didn’t send a text.”
“It said, Don’t worry, Friend. All is well.”
She shakes her head again. “No, it wasn’t me.” Her brow furrows as the realization dawns on her. “The book was in my backpack when they took me.”
I think of Leonard Blake scrolling through Caroline’s phone, reading the texts between her and Rory. Maybe there were messages about the book. Did Leonard Blake sit in that big house by the fire, reading her book while she was locked in the bedroom? Did he keep reading until he found the perfect line? What kind of monster are we dealing with here?
“Do you remember being taken outside?”
“Yes, I refused to eat, and I was screaming, banging on the bedroom door. I was going crazy, being in there alone. I must have been screaming for hours when the door burst open and a man came in. This huge man. He wore a stocking over his head, you know? Like in movies? He blindfolded me, grabbed me by the arms, and dragged me through the house. He said if I had just kept my mouth shut, I could have stayed in the room. ‘Like being in a nice hotel,’ he said, ‘room service and everything.’ But now I had made him mad. ‘I don’t like screaming,’ he said. ‘That really is the last straw, darling.’ His voice was so calm and cruel. I was terrified.”
She dips her hand in the water of the tub behind her. “That’s when he dragged me outside and down the hill. He threw me in the shed and put the chain around my ankle.” She shudders. “And the collar. Then he locked me in. And I was so mad at myself, you know? Because before I had a bed, and now I was locked in a shed, like an animal. At some point, he put food under the door on a tray. It was disgusting, beans on soggy bread, but I was so hungry.”
“Was it the same man, or someone else?”
“It was him. He had this smell, a really strong smell of peppermint and Dove soap. Obviously, he thought cleanliness was important, for himself at least, so I tried to appeal to that. I told him I needed to get out to bathe, but he said that was a privilege I would have to earn. Then he left.
“That food must have been drugged too, because I tried to stay awake, but I couldn’t. When I woke up there was no light coming in through the cracks. And my head felt strange. It felt so light. I reached up and touched my head and realized my hair was gone. At first I was so furious that he had taken my hair, but when I thought about it, I was relieved. I kept thinking about Gray Stafford. Gray Stafford was bald, like me. Gray Stafford came home.”
“Did you ever see or hear anyone else?”
“No. Only him.” She swirls her hand in the water. She looks so tired, so sad. “I don’t want to talk anymore.”
“Okay. If you need anything, just shout.” I shut the door behind me.
A picture of Leonard Blake is beginning to form. He’s cold, calculated, patient: the way he carried out the abduction and the scene on the boat with Gray—the plastic bag and fire extinguisher, the insistence on leaving no hairs or fibers behind. In some ways, he considers the crime to be an intellectual game: the fact that he read the book from Caroline’s backpack, sent the mysterious text. He can even be thoughtful—the room with the comfortable bed. But when angry, he flies off the handle. He is in complete control—until he isn’t.
I find Rory at his desk, freshly showered, wet haired, clad in jeans and Fred’s old Mets T-shirt.
“How are you feeling?”
He doesn’t respond. He’s fighting back tears. I go over to him and wrap my arms around his shoulders. His skin is still warm from the shower. “You smell like chocolate cake,” I say.
“It’s this shampoo I found in Grandpa’s cabinet.”
Rory’s face is filled with sadness. He has aged years in one day. I release him. “You were amazing today, sweetheart. Really amazing.”
“Okay,” he says, and that’s it.
“When you’re ready to talk about it—”
“No. I’m just glad Caroline is safe.” He looks up at me. “She is safe, right?”
“Yes, thanks to you.”
His voice stops me as I step into the hallway. “Mom?”
“Yeah?”
“The guy in the other stall, was he okay?”
After what Rory went through today, what he saw, there’s no pretense of protecting any sort of lingering childhood innocence. The world is a bizarre, often ugly place. He’s seen that now. “It’s complicated. He didn’t want to be rescued. Some people are drawn to strange things. There are whole hidden worlds, anywhere you go, just below the surface.” The explanation sounds clinical, inadequate, yet my answer, for the moment, satisfies him.
“I’m nervous. About what to say to Caroline.”
“You don’t have to say anything. Just be there for her.”
Rory’s hands are balled into fists, and the sadness on his face transforms into rage. “Whoever did this, I want to kill him.”
Maybe I should tell him violence isn’t the answer. Some parents, in this situation, would even talk about forgiveness. But I don’t know that I believe either of those things. Rory and I walked through a door together today. It’s a door I’ve walked through many times, but in the past I always shut it behind me, walling Rory off from the harsh realities of that world.
Today, I led him right through. I don’t know if he can ever forgive me, but I do know one thing: he cannot unsee what he has seen. He cannot go back to who he was before.
54
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.”
—Shirley Jackson
True or false?
The business card I picked up from the dirt at the compound is faded but legible. The front of the card is embossed with the words: “Your Home for Pony Play.” Nothing else. On the back, a long string of numbers, letters, periods, and slashes—probably for the dark web.
I message Malia, knowing that each favor I ask of her leads me one step closer to Iceland, one step closer to Red Vine. Malia is the only one I trust with something like this. She knows a good contact at Amazon Web Services who facilitates her traffic in the slipstream in a way that doesn’t rouse attention.
It’s after 2:00 a.m. in DC, but it doesn’t surprise me when Malia responds seconds later. Interest is heating up around here. Ready yet for the Northern Lights? Will check your address tomorrow—looks like a TOR address, with the password embedded.
I do some searches on the Russian River property. It’s registered to a generic trust that leads back to a San Francisco lawyer who handles multiple trusts. The property was purchased thirteen years ago for a small fraction of what it’s worth now. The place doesn’t even exist on Google Maps.
After an hour of failed internet searches, I go upstairs to check on Rory and Caroline. They’re in the movie room, asleep on opposite sides of the sectional, the television still on. The color has come back to Caroline’s face, and her breathing is steady. I sit down next to her on the couch, zoning out. I want to sleep, but I can’t sleep. There is still so much to do.
Caroline starts mumbling in her sleep, kicking.
I place my hand on her shoulders. “Caroline, you’re safe now.” She keeps kicking, her face a mask of fear. “Tu es hors de danger maintenant,” I say more loudly.
Her eyes open, her arms go to her face to protect herself. “You’re safe,” I repeat. “Yo
u’re here with me and Rory.”
She’s panicked at first, but then her eyes find mine and she relaxes. The terror fades. “I don’t want anyone at school to know. Please don’t tell anyone.”
She grabs my hand, her jagged fingernails digging into my palm. I wait for her to say something else, but she doesn’t. Her breathing becomes more regular, her eyelids droop, and she is asleep again.
55
When fitted with a tiny blindfold, Moorish geckos are still able to precisely match their surroundings, but when their skin is covered, their chemical camouflage reaction fails. What can humans learn from the Moorish gecko about camouflage vs. concealment?
At 7:55 a.m. on Monday, Rory wanders into the kitchen fully dressed, half-asleep, backpack slung over his shoulders. I slide bacon out of the pan onto a paper towel.
“You shouldn’t go to school today,” I say, dropping two slices of bread into the toaster. “Stay home. Rest. Surely you don’t care about the test anymore?”
“If I don’t go, people will get suspicious. It’s better to just act like everything is normal. What if someone realizes Caroline is with us?”
He has a point. Nothing’s going to happen to him, the star student. Missing the test would draw attention. And maybe, today, he just needs to get away. When I checked on the kids earlier this morning, they were both still asleep in the movie room, but Caroline had moved down the couch toward Rory, and their feet were touching.
I bring the bacon and toast to the table. “How is she?”
“I didn’t want to wake her up.” He slathers butter and jam onto his toast, grinning. “She snores as loud as Dad.”
After polishing off his breakfast, Rory wipes his hands on a napkin and looks at me. “Yesterday—” he says, but he doesn’t finish the thought.
I reach over to touch his arm. He pulls away. We sit in silence for several minutes until a car honks in the driveway.
“Who’s that?” I ask, pulling the curtain aside.
“I got a ride with Bradley. I didn’t think you should leave Caroline alone.”
“Seriously, you do not have to go. We can make it a movie day. Sci-fi marathon. We’ll start with Close Encounters.”
Rory shakes his head. “Kobayashi said they’re depending on me. If we act normal, no one will notice. And Caroline can sleep. She doesn’t want anyone at school to know. She doesn’t want people to look at her the way they look at Gray.”
He makes sense. But I wonder too if there’s a part of him that doesn’t want to spend the day with her, because he doesn’t know what to say, how to act.
“She’s fragile right now, Rory, but you’re not going to break her. You saved her. Did I tell you how proud I am of you? Dad would be proud of you too.”
“Yeah, but he’d be really freaking pissed at you for taking me with you.”
“True.”
The car honks again. Rory stands and slings his backpack over his shoulder. I follow him to the foyer. An enormous black Escalade is parked in our driveway. Bradley’s mom, Anita, pokes her head out the window and waves. I watch Rory get into the car, a sense of unease washing over me. He’s fifteen, he’s strong, he’s smart. Yesterday, he proved he is courageous and incredibly capable. And he’s a star student, not the kind of kid who goes missing in this town. Still, I don’t want to let him out of my sight.
As I walk back inside, Mister Fancy slips out of the bushes and slides past my legs into the house. Upstairs, Caroline is still sound asleep. The room is chilly, so I pull another blanket over her.
A few minutes later, a message arrives from Malia.
I hope this guy isn’t a friend of ours. From what I can tell, his true name is Wallace Russell Anderson—goes by Rusty. The Leonard Blake identity is an alias. Born in Cheyenne, Wyoming, 51, parents deceased, one sister, a doctor in Colorado Springs. Married once, divorced fourteen years ago, no kids. Regional rodeo star in the late 1980s. Misdemeanors for weed in 1991 and 1993. Domestic in Mountain View in 1995. Complainant: Jean Bismark, his wife at the time. Claims to have gone to Princeton, though no record of him there. He did three semesters at Santa Rosa Junior College. Several registered companies. In addition to the land you mentioned, he owns property in Siskiyou County. Owns five licensed firearms, three cars (F150, Merc, vintage Land Cruiser), purchased a boat in Petaluma five months ago. Donated to McCain-Palin, Romney-Ryan, and Trump-Pence, then shifted gears to donate to Michael Bloomberg. Also the Sonoma County Sheriff and the Guerneville fire department.
I scroll through the attached photos—DMV records, a few tags on random Facebook profiles, a grainy newspaper article about a Wyoming rodeo. Mixed in with the photographs of authentic horse farms and horse shows, there’s some mild counterculture stuff, friends in leather and BDSM, lots of tattoos. Malia also sent a dozen photos from a biometric search, but most appear to be false matches.
Below the photos, Malia wrote,
Now for the dark web. He runs a thing called Redwoods Pony Play. You learn something new every day. Have you heard of this? It’s a subculture of people who like to pretend they’re horses. For a price, a very high one, he invites them to his ranch with their “trainers.” I’ll spare you the photographs—can’t unsee those.
Anyway, the pony play isn’t what concerns me. His address comes back to a hangout an agent was monitoring for a cyber case. Rusty offers a whole range of questionable services. He’s expensive. It’s a K&R thing, unclear if it’s real or consensual. Kidnap fantasies are big business. Went down the rabbit hole. I’m so square. I’ve got to get out more often. I thought it was fake, until I found his dark web address in a 2703d order related to a midlevel OC case.
Outside, I hear Kyle’s cruiser pull into the driveway. I shut and lock the door behind him, lead him into the kitchen. “Caroline’s here,” I say.
Over coffee, I quietly tell him a pared-down story of how we found her. I leave out some parts, like Ivy, Sunshine, the part about Rory being with me. I trust Kyle, but I don’t entirely know him.
Kyle listens intently, not saying a word. When I’m finished, he shakes his head. “That poor girl. How is she?”
“Too soon to tell.”
“Jesus, this isn’t what I signed up for.”
“When you sign up for this job, Kyle, you sign up for anything. By the way, your hunch about the Lamey twins and their allergy to black walnut trees?”
“Yeah?”
“There were black walnut trees on the property.”
“So they are all linked, all three cases. Gray and the Lamey twins were kept at this property too?”
“Looks that way.”
“But why?”
“It’s about the Wonder Test.”
He shakes his head, uncomprehending. “What?”
“Somebody has a stake in these kids not bringing down the test scores.”
“Who?”
“I’m still trying to work that out.”
“So, what are you not telling me?”
“A lot,” I admit. “Not a word of this to Chief Jepson or anyone at the GPD.”
“What are you saying?”
“I couldn’t understand why Jepson didn’t seem to care about the Stafford case, so I ran some checks. Turns out he controls a trust that owns a home on Vista Lane.”
Kyle frowns. “He told me he lived in South City.”
“He does. But he also owns this place.”
“Damn, that must be worth a fortune.”
“He paid five point seven million dollars, all cash, nine months ago.”
“Maybe he got an inheritance?” Kyle offers, but he doesn’t sound convinced.
“Listen, you can’t tell anyone that Caroline is here. Anyone.”
“You actually think I can’t trust my own department?”
“Connect the dots, Kyle. They got nowhere on the Lamey or Stafford cases
. When you became too curious, the chief kept distracting you with busywork. He makes a hundred and forty-five thousand per year, his wife is unemployed and drives a Tesla, two kids in college, and he came up with almost six million in cash just a few months after Gray went missing.”
“Okay. It looks bad. Worse than bad. But I guarantee you the chief didn’t mastermind anything. However he got involved in this, if he’s involved, he’s not the one pulling the strings. He doesn’t have a mind for complexity.”
56
If moss usually grows on the north side of the tree, which side does it grow on when you are at the exact North Pole?
Caroline spends the morning upstairs, watching TV. I do some more digging, make some phone calls. I order Blue Line pizza for lunch. She eats heartily but doesn’t say much, staring out the window. As we’re clearing the dishes from the table, she begins talking.
“When I was trapped in that shed, do you know what I thought about? I thought about Gray Stafford. He was so strong before he disappeared. He was loud and fun, so alive. And later, the saddest thing was, the boy I knew before was gone. Like he had been—”
I remember the word Caroline used when she first told me about Gray, that day in the car. “Erased?” I offer.
“Yes. Erased. And in the shed, I kept thinking, ‘I will not let this man erase me.’”
After school, Rory bounds up the stairs to join Caroline in the movie room. I can hear them talking quietly to each other. I even hear a moment of laughter. How much of this transition back to the normal world is real, how much of it is a brave act?
I walk down to the mailbox. Most of the mail is still for my dad—fishing catalogs, car magazines. The stack of envelopes makes me feel a little closer to him, as though he might show up any minute.
As I’m closing the mailbox, I see Glen Park running up the block toward me. He’s moving fast, as always, wearing a University of Arkansas shirt and some expensive Hoka One One shoes. No headphones today. As he passes, I mumble, “Hello, Glen,” more to myself than anyone. He’s going so fast that I feel a breeze as he passes me.
The Wonder Test Page 25
