by K. M. Fawkes
Lee didn’t acknowledge the hand she had placed on his arm. He had only stepped back and looked up at the cabin. “I think I’m going to build a fold out for the attic,” he said into the hopeful silence that his wife had left for him. “That way, if a person needed to, they could open it up and have a very defensible position. Garcia mentioned it last time I talked to him. It makes a hell of a lot of sense, I don’t know why I haven’t ever thought of it before.”
Brenda blinked back tears as she turned away from her husband, but she smiled as soon as she saw that Brad had been watching her from the doorway of the cabin. “Hey, sweetie. Do you want to go exploring in the woods?” she asked, making sure that she sounded cheerful. “We’re only up here for a week, so we’d better get to it!”
Brad pushed himself to his feet. He had to get out of the past. If Sammy or Anna had left him a clue, he would find the damn thing. Come hell or high water.
Chapter 2
A methodical search was probably the best way to go. Since he had walked through the kitchen already, he decided to start on the other end of the house. He no longer felt as though he was intruding.
In fact, he made sure to intrude as much as possible. He wasn’t sure where they would have left a follow-up, but surely they would have known that the initials and date alone weren’t enough to go on. Remington followed him down the hall, whining softly. He could feel Brad’s renewed energy and was most likely aware that part of it was panic that he wouldn’t find anything to help him out.
“No,” Brad said as he pushed open one of the two bedroom doors. “I haven’t lost my mind, buddy. At least not yet.”
The room was clearly Anna’s and he glanced around in interest. He remembered her telling him about the soldiers who’d arrived in Island Falls. They hadn’t seemed to have stuck around for long. Nothing in her house had really been touched and the neighborhood was still intact. Maybe they’d taken the ones they wanted with them and left the rest to their own devices. He wasn’t sure that he would stick around a town that the military knew about.
In fact, he was pretty sure that he would have followed the family member that had been taken to see if there was any chance that he could keep them safe. Maybe that was what had happened. Or maybe there was a shallow grave somewhere filled with everyone who hadn’t proven useful. He shook away the memory of the mass grave at the retirement center and pulled open the curtains that covered Anna’s bedroom window so that he could see more clearly.
The bed was smaller than he had thought that it was, which said a lot about the ways that Anna had changed since Sammy came along. The narrow width and short length wouldn’t have been inviting to any man. She hadn’t been exaggerating when she’d said that that part of her life had been over.
The sheets and comforter were crumpled, but they looked as though they hadn’t been slept in for a long time. It did make him wonder though. Had they even spent one night in Island Falls after they’d worked so hard to get here? Maybe, for safety in numbers, they’d all slept in the living room, hence why Sammy carved into the floor there, but he didn’t really see why they would pass up the chance to sleep in actual beds.
Brad knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he would love to wake up in his own bed again. Either the one in the cabin or the one above his vet shop would do. Both of those places were gone now. The vet shop was probably ransacked in the rubble of what remained of Bangor and the cabin was no more than a pile of ash in the woods.
Whatever Brad would have done, Anna definitely hadn’t taken the chance to sleep in her small bed. He could see a layer of gray dust in the crumpled folds of the down comforter, and on the white sheets as well. She hadn’t been one for color, apparently.
With the narrow double bed, white bed linens, and lack of knickknacks, the room looked almost monastic to Brad. It was strange. The kitchen had had pretty little decorative touches and there was framed artwork along the living room walls. Why hadn’t those tendencies carried over to her bedroom?
He pushed open the closet door and saw a few pairs of jeans and some T-shirts hanging at the back. She hadn’t had many clothes either. He thought that he remembered her saying that she had worn a uniform back when she worked at the diner and when he glanced to his left, he saw it hanging there. It was simple; a polo-style shirt with the restaurant's blue-and-gold logo embroidered on the left side, and a pair of black slacks.
He rummaged through the closet thoroughly, then searched the shoeboxes in the corner behind the door. To his disappointment, they contained nothing in the way of clues. One box contained the kind of shoes you had to wear in a restaurant; ugly, black, no-slip sneakers to keep a person from skidding along over any spilled water or grease. There was a pair of plain black gardening boots in another box, their soles slightly dirty. In the last one, the one at the very bottom of the stack, there was a pair of stilettos.
He couldn’t resist pulling one out of the box, mainly because he was so surprised by finding them. The high, pointed heel looked damn near lethal to Brad and even he recognized the value implied by the blood-red sole of the shoes. There was absolutely nothing in Anna’s closet that would go with shoes like that, but he couldn’t help but smile at the fact that she had kept them. Not all of the good-time girl, the girl who’d danced, smoked, and partied all night was gone.
When he glanced up, he saw a box sitting on the top shelf. It looked like a sewing basket, but he knew for a fact that Anna didn’t sew. Standing on his tiptoes, Brad reached up and pulled it down. It was heavier than he had anticipated and he set it on the bed before he opened it.
Dust motes rose and floated through the air from his disturbance of the sheets. He tugged the lid off of the box and caused another flurry of dust as he dropped that down onto the bed as well. The box was filled with pictures, invitations, business cards to clubs with phone numbers scrawled across their backs, small empty liquor bottles, and general clutter. Apparently the red-bottomed shoes weren’t the only memento of her old life that Anna had kept, after all.
Brad sat down on the edge of her bed and sifted through the contents of the box. When she had been young, she’d been so thin that he couldn’t help but wince. She looked fragile, breakable. Her collarbones stood out sharply in the strapless dresses she’d seemed to favor back then.
In almost every picture there was a man. He wasn’t usually the same one, but her poses with them were pretty similar. She sat in their laps, hung off their arms, or pressed her lips to theirs while keeping her eyes on the camera. Their green was unmistakable, but the look in them…God. Brad could almost feel the misery as her gaze seemed to leap off of the photo paper and into him.
In that moment, he found himself profoundly happy that Sammy had come along. He didn’t think that the Anna in the pictures would still have been around if not for her son.
As he flipped through the photographs, one stood out to him. Scrawled across the back of it were the words “Drew Jenkins”—the man Brad knew, from his and Anna’s late-night conversations, to be Sammy’s dad.
Brad scrutinized the picture. Drew had been a big guy, muscular and broad-shouldered. He had towered over Anna and in the picture, he’d caught her neck in the crook of his arm. She was smiling, but her hands were clenched into fists by her sides. She looked so small next to him and he looked like she was nothing more than another piece of property to show off.
Drew’s eyes were dark, like Sammy’s. Brad had never seen that cold glint in the boy’s eyes, though. He planned to help Anna do everything possible not to.
After a moment’s debate, he slid a few pictures into an envelope that had originally contained an invitation to the birthday party and pocketed it. Clearly, Anna had either forgotten that the box was there, or she had ignored it for a very long time, but Brad thought there was no harm in giving her the chance to hold onto a few mementos if she did still want them. He wouldn’t push it further than that.
As he slid the bedroom door shut once more, Brad realized that the space
s Anna had decorated had all been spaces that she had shared with Sammy. Perhaps she hadn’t been able to justify the expense of decorating a room that her son wouldn’t enjoy. It was about as far from the extravagant party girl as it was possible to be.
There was a small room to his right and he opened the door to it. The bathroom greeted him. It didn’t take long to ascertain that there were no clues here. In fact, like Anna’s bedroom, it was a little sparse. Other than the typical sink, toilet, and tub-and-shower combo, the only other thing in the room was a built-in medicine cabinet.
When he opened it, he discovered that all it housed were a few extra toiletries and Anna’s makeup. The tub was dusty, but it wasn’t dirty. Provided that he could find a way to heat some water, the prospect of a bath looked good once he was done searching.
He closed the bathroom door behind him and opened the next and last one along the hall. It had to be Sammy’s bedroom and it was his best hope for finding something to lead him toward them.
Sammy’s room was the same size as Anna’s, but it was significantly more packed. Toys were scattered around, giving the impression that the boy had just stepped out for a moment. Apparently, he had collected cars obsessively. There were plenty of small ones to trip over on the floor and several imperfectly pieced-together model cars on his bookshelf and nightstand.
The bright red Mustang on the nightstand must have been a favorite of Sammy’s. The boy’s fingerprints had marred the paint—he had clearly been so eager to play with it that he had taken it for a test drive before it was fully dry. With so many computer-based and interactive toys, it was a little odd to see things like this in a child’s bedroom now.
Brad put the Mustang down again and began to look through the toys on the floor. If the clue had been Sammy’s idea it made the most sense for the follow-up to be in this room, and he didn’t want to leave any stone unturned. The little metal cars were cold in Brad’s hands and Remington snuffled at them curiously, pushing a dark blue Jeep across the floor with his nose and giving an excited bark.
Brad grinned, allowing the dog to continue until he tried to lap one up on his tongue. He pushed Remy’s head away and the dog lay down, looking at him reproachfully. There didn’t seem to be a clue among the cars so Brad stood, going methodically through the drawers of the white pressboard nightstand beside Sammy’s bed.
There was a strange mixture of odds and ends, but that wasn’t unusual for the boy he knew. There was an old bird’s nest hidden in the bottom drawer of the nightstand. There were three egg shells in it. One of them was a chicken’s egg, so Brad assumed the shells and the nest had been collected separately. He also assumed that Anna’s hadn’t known it was there. She hadn’t been thrilled about most of the animal paraphernalia Brad and Sammy had brought in over the course of the summer in the cabin.
Once he was sure that the nightstand didn’t contain anything helpful, Brad turned his attention to the dresser. Sammy’s room didn’t have a closet, so each drawer was pretty full. Why hadn’t Anna packed any of the clothes to take with them when they’d left again? Surely whatever was here was in better shape than what Sammy was currently wearing.
When Brad began to shake out each item of clothing to check it though, he thought that he understood. None of it would fit the boy now. Sammy had grown a lot over the few months they’d spent together.
He folded the clothes as he returned them to the drawers. It was a pointless action, but it was soothing. He had always enjoyed bringing order to chaos.
There was a lot more chaos in Sammy’s room than there had ever been in Brad’s, that was for sure. Prior to the divorce, Lee hadn’t been any more inclined to buy his son toys than he had been to treat his wife to dinner. Brad had usually had a stack of books in his room, but they tended to be from the library and so couldn’t stick around for long. The only thing he had really had at home was his bike.
Brad pushed the last dresser drawer closed and sighed. There were no further clues here either. If Sammy had set out to torture him, he couldn’t have done a better job than this. To know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they’d been in the same place within the last month and not know where they had gone from here was galling.
He closed the door to Sammy’s room and walked back into the living room. Absurdly close to tears, Brad sank back down to the floor where he had found the initials. Then he dropped his head down onto his knees and took a deep breath. It didn’t seem to help.
Remington’s head landed in his lap and he placed one hand on the dog’s warm, soft head as he swallowed hard. With nowhere else to look, he was now forced to deal with the thought he had been trying to keep at bay for the last few hours. Was this it? Was this the way that it would end for them? Was he going to chase crumbs forever? Would he be doomed to a life of always hoping to find them around the next corner? The agony of that could drive a person crazy. Hope was motivational, but it was dangerous if it remained unfulfilled for too long.
He wished for a moment that he could walk away from it all. He pictured leaving them in the past, but he couldn’t do it. Everything in him rebelled at the idea of simply leaving them to their fates. They had been the closest thing to a family he’d had since he lost his mother and he owed them more than this.
He needed to make a choice. He needed to either hit the road or bed down here for the night. As much as the house frustrated him, he was leaning toward the latter. A long, aimless drive wasn’t good under any circumstances, and there was no point in starting one after dark. Who knew how many clues he might miss if he traveled by nothing but the illumination of the headlights?
It would probably be a good idea to walk around the street and see if he could at least ascertain which direction they’d gone in, and even if they didn’t manage to find anything, Remington could use the exercise. Brad had to acknowledge that, in addition to the bath he was still hoping to take, he could use a night’s sleep in an actual bed to straighten out the kinks in his spine.
As he rubbed his shoulder and tipped his head back, trying to crack it, he was forced to acknowledge that he was getting too old to be sleeping in vehicle seats. His neck was killing him, too.
He tilted his head to one side, pressing the side of his head toward his shoulder gingerly when his bones refused to pop. The last thing he needed was to pull a muscle, but the stretch felt good so he kept it up, sighing with relief. That was when he saw it.
A chip in the floorboard where Sammy had carved their initials. It was small, but it was clearly deliberate, just enough for a person to hook one finger underneath and lift up. Brad was picking it up before he was even aware of moving, his heart hammering in his chest.
The paper was crumpled, as if it had been stuffed under the board in a hurry. The handwriting was jagged, further confirming that line of thought. The writing wasn’t Sammy’s, though. It was Anna’s.
Brad,
I can’t tell you how sorry I am. We…I…never should have left you. We’re going to come back to the cabin. I hope that you’re still willing to have us. For good this time.
I’m so sorry.
Anna
Brad’s hands began to shake, making the crumpled paper rattle in the still air. She was going back to him! She hadn’t wanted to stay away after all! A laugh of triumph burst out and he gripped the paper tightly in pure gratitude.
Then, as if he had touched a live wire, his body jerked upright. Jesus. Anna was going to go back to the cabin. That meant that she and the kids were headed right back into the arms of the cult they’d run from. The cult that had taken everything from Brad.
He began to pace the floor and Remington followed him move for move. The best-case scenario that he could think of would be that they would manage to avoid the Family somehow. But even if they did, they’d come back to nothing. How long could Anna and the kids really avoid catching the attention of those nutjobs if they were stuck out in the open the way that he knew they would be? Even if they managed to find and unearth the cellar door, th
e three of them couldn’t live on what was down there forever and they were sure to be noticed in their coming and going. There had been a lot of food down there, but he had no idea how much of it might have gotten ruined in the fire. Also, if they wanted to cook anything, they’d basically be sending smoke signals to the Family.
Worst-case scenario, they’d be picked up the minute they set foot in that corner of Maine. Sammy and Martha were young enough to be considered moldable by the group. They probably wouldn’t be harmed…at least, not physically. The Family might preach a lot of spiritual bullshit, but they also wanted able-bodied workers that would do what they wanted without question. Who fit that bill better than children? He felt sick at the idea of them being indoctrinated and branded, but there was a faint sliver of hope in the logic that, if needed as workers, they would still be alive.
Then there was Anna to think about… Anna had defied the Family before, when they’d come looking for Martha. Would the skills she had learned during her time at the cabin be enough to make her indispensable? As much as he wanted to believe otherwise, Brad doubted it. The Family had seemed awfully self-sufficient when he had visited their cabin.
His train of thought derailed when he turned more suddenly than the dog had anticipated and stepped on the dog. “Shit,” he snapped when Remington yelped—more in surprise than pain, as Brad had managed to catch himself before the dog had to bear the brunt of his full weight.
Remington gave him a reproachful look as Brad knelt to examine the paw he had accidentally stepped on.
“You’re fine,” he said after a second. “And it wouldn’t have happened if you would let a man pace in peace.”
