Mountain Madness

by Daniel Pyle

  She unplugged the drain with her toes and waited for all but the last few inches of water to disappear before sitting up and blowing out her candles.

  Thoughts of Trevor popped into her mind. She thought about his dirty shorts and underwear and the embarrassment in his voice when he’d told them he’d messed himself. Then she remembered the carousel, the classical music, the way they’d all ridden together, smiling and laughing. At least their trip to the mall had ended well.

  She wondered what her son was up to now, probably playing a board game with Mike or watching TV, maybe sitting in front of an open comic book and studying the pictures. Trevor always studied the comic books, never simply glanced at them. After closing the back cover of any particular issue, he could tell you everything about any character in any frame, right down to the details of their costume. He almost seemed to have a photographic memory, though he’d never shown such ability in any other aspect of his life.

  Libby frowned. She’d been looking forward to a night by herself, but now she found herself missing Trevor and, to a lesser extent, Mike. It would have been nice to spend a little time together as a family, even if they weren’t exactly a family anymore.

  She’d left the towel by the sink while washing the Marshall slime off her face. Now, in order to get to it, she had to traipse across the floor, leaving wet footprints behind her, her still-sore breasts bouncing. She dried herself off at the sink and then wiped at the floor, getting most of the moisture and leaving the rest to evaporate or seep into the grout or whatever it was water eventually did.

  She thought she’d call Trevor before he went to sleep, tell him goodnight and blow him a kiss through the mouthpiece. Sometimes, when he was home, she snuck into his room to watch him sleep, tucked him in tight and kissed him on the top of his head before crawling into bed herself. She couldn’t do that tonight, but at least she could hear his voice and tell him she loved him.

  She wrapped her towel around her body and tied it in a knot near her armpit. She hadn’t looked for the bruise, had purposefully looked everywhere except her chest, and now she wondered how long she could pretend the mark wasn’t there. Tonight at least, she hoped, please God don’t let me dream about that pervert and his wandering hands or about that throbbing mound in his pants. She could have gone the rest of her life without remembering the feel of his stubble on her cheek, but she was afraid both Marshall and his rough face would haunt her dreams for weeks to come. Or months. Hell, she might have nightmares about tonight for the rest of her life.

  Bastard. She could only imagine how she’d feel if he’d actually gotten what he came for.

  She remembered the daisies, still in their vase in the kitchen. At least she would get some satisfaction when she stomped on the things until they were nothing but green goo running in the indentations of the linoleum.

  She took her book with her to the bedroom but left the candles and the remaining beers. She might come back later for another drink, and she might not.

  The CD had just restarted itself. Libby walked to the stereo and shut it off before plucking the phone from its base and dialing Mike’s number.

  The phone rang five times before someone picked up.

  “Pullman residence,” said an unfamiliar voice.

  Libby frowned. If the stranger on the other end had answered with only hello, she might have thought she’d dialed the wrong number. But he’d said Pullman.

  What’s going on?

  “Who is this?” she asked, not able to keep a certain amount of sharpness out of her voice.

  The man who responded sounded something like John Wayne, or the way Libby thought John Wayne was supposed to sound—she’d never actually seen one of his movies. “May I ask who’s calling?”

  “Where’s my son?” Libby said loudly, ignoring the question. “And my husband? What’s going on there?”

  The word husband only barely registered. She hadn’t meant to say it.

  “Miss,” the voice said, “please identify yourself.”

  “Why don’t you identify yourself?” Libby said, not in the mood for another strange man trying to take control of the situation.

  “Ma’am,” the stranger said, “I’m afraid—”

  Libby cut him off. “Give me Mike right now.” Her first thought was that both Mike and Trevor had been in a car accident. She’d hated that pickup of Mike’s since the day he bought it. It was untrustworthy, dangerous. If her website business had been any more lucrative, she’d have bought Mike a new vehicle herself and torched that truck until there was nothing left but a foul stench in the air and a mound of ashes on the ground.

  Although she hadn’t actually expected it, Mike’s voice came onto the line. “Lib?”

  “Mike. What’s going on?”

  “I was about to call you. You need to come up here,” he said.

  “Why? What’s happening?” A tear splashed against her wrist, and she realized she’d been crying.

  “It’s Trevor,” he said, and before he could go on, Libby dropped the phone and began pawing through her closet. She loosened the towel and let it drop to the floor, then stepped into a pair of panties and some jeans. She pulled on the first blouse she found.

  Trevor, she thought, wondering how much anguish a parent could possibly endure in any given day. She slipped on a pair of running shoes, skipped the socks. From the bed, she heard a squeaky voice. She hurried over and picked up the receiver.

  “I’ll be there in thirty minutes,” she said, knowing it was a forty-five minute drive. She hung up without waiting for a response and then ran.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  A DEPUTY STOOD in the kitchen, peering at the broken glass like a mystic studying tea leaves, as if he thought he might divine some clue from the shape of the mess alone.

  A man in jeans and a t-shirt, who might have been a cop or a doctor or a lumberjack for all Mike knew, swabbed the knife wound in Mike’s hip. “You’re very lucky, Mr. Pullman,” he said in an almost nonexistent accent that might have been British or Irish. “Something like this could have been much more serious.”

  It’s just a booboo, Mike expected him to say, No big deal. Let’s get you a Big Bird band-aid.

  Mike sat on the couch with his pants around his ankles, his underwear pulled just beneath his thatch of pubic hair but still covering his penis and testicles. Barely. He looked at the third man across the room, the quiet, bearded deputy with the inch-long scar just beneath his eye who had answered the phone when Libby called. “Listen,” he said, “isn’t there something else we can be doing? I mean, that asshole’s got my son. We’re not gonna find him sitting around my living room playing doctor.”

  The man hovering over Mike’s lap huffed.

  Rather than answer Mike’s question, the bearded deputy, Willis, asked one of his own. “This man you say took your son, did he have a dog with him?”

  Mike shook his head, though not in answer to the question. “First of all, I don’t say he took my son, he did take him. They’re gone, and getting farther away every second. Did he have a dog? How the hell should I know? What kind of question is that? He had a knife and he had a foot the size of Texas. How’s that? Maybe if you get a sketch artist up here we can figure out what kind of sneakers he was wearing.”

  The bearded man stared through the living room window and never turned to Mike. “We think he might have had a dog,” he said to the window, “and if you would answer my questions, we’d be that much closer to finding your boy.” He seemed focused on something outside.

  Mike sighed and rubbed his face while the man on his knees before him continued his ministrations.

  “Okay,” he said after a minute. “I think I might have heard some barking, but I never saw a dog. I’m not even a hundred percent sure about the barking. With all the stabbing and kicks to the head, I might have been out of it a little.” Mike saw the deputy’s face reflected in the window, looking transparent, ghostly. The lawman smiled.

  “Of course, Mr. Pullman
.”

  “What’s the deal with the dog?” Mike asked. “How does that help us?”

  Willis finally turned away from the window and came across the room. “Do you know a Bethany Winston?”

  “Beth—” Mike started and then nodded. “Yeah, I guess. She lives just down that way.” He gestured with his head. “Why? Did something happen?”

  Willis sat down on the edge of the coffee table, his holstered gun tapping against the tabletop and the leather of his utility belt creaking. “Bethany Winston was attacked earlier tonight,” he said simply and crossed his arms over his chest. “Guy stole her dog and cut her up a little.”

  “Cut…my God,” Mike said. “Is she okay?”

  “Will be,” Willis said. “She said the guy had a boy with him; little boy about her age.”

  The second deputy came in from the kitchen, looking unsatisfied, thumbs tucked into his belt and chewing at his bottom lip.

  Mike said, “Yes, that’s what I’m telling you. Skinny kid, maybe eleven years old. He attacked the guy in my bedroom. I don’t think he was exactly here voluntarily.”

  “No,” said the deputy.

  The doctor, if he was one, poked at Mike, who hissed. “Easy,” he said. He turned back to Willis. “So what? You’re saying there’s two kidnapped kids?”

  The lip-chewing deputy, whose name Mike had already forgotten, opened his mouth to say something, but Willis held up a hand to him. “I’m not saying anything,” Willis said to Mike, “but that’s one possibility.”

  Mike didn’t want to ask about the other possibilities—he could figure those out for himself—but he did say, “Isn’t there something else we could be doing right now? If he’s out there, if my son is with that lunatic and there’s another boy with him, shouldn’t we be doing something?”

  “Trust me,” the deputy said, “we’re doing everything we can.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  LIBBY RACED THE Honda down Mike’s driveway; it kicked up gravel and slid across the loose rocks for almost two feet after she finally applied the brakes. The car skidded to a stop beside and slightly behind a Ford Explorer emblazoned with the county name and the sheriff’s department’s emblem. Just one cruiser, no ambulances or fire trucks or any of that, but one was enough to mean something had happened.

  Libby slipped the car into park, pulled the keys from the ignition, and threw open her door so quickly she felt like she’d done all three things simultaneously. Halfway to the house, she noticed she’d left her headlights on and didn’t bother to go back. She had to get into the house, had to know what had happened to her baby.

  Her hair had dried funnily on the trip up, and it blew unevenly around her head, most of it on her left side and the top, only a few strands on the right and across her face. There was still beer on her breath, though the adrenaline pumping through her body seemed to have cancelled out the alcohol’s effect. She smelled the lingering bath salts on her skin and in her hair, but another smell hid just beneath, the smell of sweat and panic.

  On the porch, she didn’t bother knocking or ringing the doorbell but simply let herself in through the front door as if it were her own house and she had every right to do so—which in her mind, she did, given the circumstances.

  First she noticed the uniform: brown pants, khaki shirt, tie and hat to match the trousers, utility belt with holstered gun. The guy was Indiana Jones without the leather jacket or whip. At least outfit-wise he was. His face was bearded and scarred and a little pudgy.

  “Ms. Pullman?”

  Libby nodded and hurried into the room. Mike sat on the sofa beside a second deputy who held a pad of paper and a pen. The two of them looked up at her, and then Mike stood.

  His face was puffed and bruised, especially around his chin. He looked like he’d been in a barroom brawl.

  “What is it?” Libby asked him. “Where’s Trevor? What happened to your face?”

  Mike looked like he wanted to hug her, but she hoped he wouldn’t. She’d had enough undesired physical attention today. Right now, she needed facts, not hugs.

  Mike stayed at the couch, maybe seeing something in her eyes or her stance that told him to keep his distance. He said, “He, uh…Trevor’s—”

  “Your son has been abducted,” the bearded deputy said from behind her.

  Libby turned to him. “What do you mean? Like by aliens?” It was a stupid question, and she hadn’t meant to ask it. She was barely thinking.

  The deputy smiled just a little, though he obviously tried not to, and said, “No, not by aliens. Your son has been kidnapped.” He added, “By a man.”

  Libby stared at him. Somehow, she hadn’t expected this. She’d thought Trevor had been the victim of some kind of accident, a fire, a brain aneurysm, maybe a bad fall. She’d never considered kidnapping.

  “What man?” she said and turned to Mike. “Who was it? Why would somebody take Trevor?”

  Mike shook his head. “I don’t know who it was or why he did it. He had another boy too, and a dog. You know Beth Winston?”

  Libby shook her head.

  “Well, she’s the neighbor girl downhill a ways. Apparently this same guy attacked her and stole her dog.”

  “What? He…why would he do that? Who’s the other boy?” she asked the room in general.

  The smaller deputy on the couch said, “We’re not sure yet. From what the Winston girl and your hu…ex-husband have told us, we suspect he might have been another kidnap.”

  Libby moved to the coffee table and plopped down on the edge of it, her hair flapping against her neck. “I can’t believe this.”

  “Ms. Pullman,” said the bearded deputy whose name tag Libby had not yet bothered to read, “I know this is all a little much, but I have a couple of questions to ask you.”

  “Me?” Libby looked at his name tag now. It read L. Willis. “What kinds of questions?”

  Rather than answer, Willis said, “Have you been seeing anyone recently, Ms. Pullman?”

  Libby gawked at him. “Have I…no, I haven’t. What’s that matter?”

  “No one?” Willis asked. “No regular boyfriend?”

  Libby thought of Marshall, who was most definitely not a regular boyfriend, who had started as a pity date and turned out to be a lecher. “No,” she told Willis. “There hasn’t been anyone since—” She trailed off and didn’t look at Mike.

  “I see,” said Willis. “I only ask because sometimes, when there are divorced parents involved, a kidnapped child turns up with one of the two of them.”

  “You think I have him?” Libby leaned to get up from the coffee table, but Mike put a steadying hand on her shoulder.

  “Hold on a second,” he said. “I told you who took him. It was this guy with the boy.”

  Willis ignored Mike. To Libby, he said, “You never mentioned something to, say, a friend? Maybe that you wished you saw more of your boy? Or that you didn’t like him being up here.”

  Libby didn’t appreciate the way he’d said the word friend, wasn’t sure what, if anything, he was implying. “No.” She looked at the other deputy, who was writing on his pad again. “No, I never said anything like that.” Her fists clenched, and she forced her fingers to loosen.

  “You don’t wish you saw more of your boy?” Willis asked.

  “Well, of course I do. You’re twisting this all around. I love Trevor, but Mike is a good daddy to him, and I’d never try to take him away from here.”

  Willis nodded. “Okay.” He turned to Mike, his attitude changing so suddenly he seemed to be a different person. He said, “We’ve got additional units heading up right now. They’ll search the woods around your property and between here and the Winston’s place. But I have to be honest with you both. Until this guy calls, there’s not a lot more we can do.”

  “Calls?” Mike said. “What do you mean? Why would he call?”

  “Ransom,” said Willis. “We should assume he might call wanting money.”

  “We don’t have any money,” Li
bby said.

  “And even if we did,” Mike added, “I don’t think he wants it. If he wanted a ransom, he wouldn’t have tried to kill me.”

  “What?” Libby spun toward him.

  Mike said, “I…got stabbed.”

  Libby stared.

  “It’s nothing bad,” he said quickly. “Doctor fixed me up right here, didn’t have to take me to the hospital or anything, just told me to watch it for infection.”

  Libby’s head suddenly overflowed with questions. The first one to spill out was, “What doctor?”

  “He’s gone,” Mike answered, and Libby could tell from the tone of his voice that he’d explain it all to her later, that they had more important things to discuss now.

  “Well, then, you’re right,” said Libby. “He doesn’t want money.”

  “We don’t know that,” Willis added. “And if this isn’t a ransom situation, we’re going to have a tougher time finding Trevor. We’ll do what we can, of course. Prints, blood work, all that, and we’ll get you down to the station tomorrow to look through some mug shots,” he said to Mike. “Of course, this could end up in the hands of the state police, or with the feds if we find out Trevor’s out of the state. Things could still get a lot messier. Best thing we can do right now is wait and see what happens.”

  “That’s it?” Libby looked from man to man to man, saving Deputy Willis for last. “Can’t we bring in the dogs? Something like that?”

  “The sheriff’s department doesn’t have any dogs. By the time we could coordinate with the police to get some up here, it’d be too late. It’s probably too late already. Our guy didn’t go far on foot, probably had transportation waiting somewhere nearby. I’d guess he was already on the road by the time you got to your phone,” he said and looked at Mike. “To get a search party up here would take hours and be more expensive than it was worth. We’d barely be getting here ourselves if we hadn’t already been practically next door.”

  “That’s reassuring,” said Libby.

  Willis said, “That’s just the truth. We’ve got a lot of area to cover up here and not a lot of deputies to cover it. It’s better for everyone if we keep things realistic. But I promise you I will personally do everything in my power to make sure we bring your son back. Okay?”