One Kick

by Chelsea Cain

  “His mother sold him,” Kick said. “He wasn’t abducted.” Bishop had already turned away from her and was moving toward a far corner, his body blocking her view of what the lantern was revealing. “Without a complaining victim, the statute of limitations on child sex abuse is ten years,” Kick continued. “You’d need James to wake up and file a police report, and that will never happen. Even if he does wake up, he would never agree to go through a trial—that would mean dealing with people. So, assuming you manage to someday find Klugman, which is highly unlikely, you’re better off prosecuting him for human trafficking. Or you could have the bastard put away for life for child pornography. Then you don’t need the room at all.” She didn’t want to testify, but she’d do it for James. “You just need me.”

  The lantern appeared again, and Bishop with it. “Congratulations on the law degree,” he said.

  “I have a special interest in this area,” Kick said.

  He extended a hand to help her step over the lower part of the wall. Kick ignored the gesture and clambered through the passage unaided. The floor on the other side was concrete. The air felt immediately colder. Everything smelled sour and dank. She lit a path with her flashlight and made her way past the mattress to the posters on the wall. Even up close, in direct light, she couldn’t make out the images. The bloom of mold had blotted out everything.

  “You know what they are?” Bishop asked, stepping beside her.

  The light of his lantern, combined with her flashlight, brightened the wall just enough that a sliver of stone crenellation was visible in the poster’s image. It was a castle—Kick could see its shape now—one of those old castles tourists visit in places like Bavaria.

  “They’re travel posters,” Kick said. How many hours had James spent, locked in this room, dreaming of faraway lands? “Places he wanted to go.”

  “What’s this?” Bishop asked. He moved his light to where the corner of the poster had curled off the wall, and Kick saw a piece of paper tucked there. Bishop reached for it with his latex-gloved hand and slid out a postcard.

  It had been protected somewhat from the entropy of the room, but when he held it in the light, they saw that the image on the front was largely consumed by mold. He flipped it over. The back was blank except for a logo: The Desert Rose Motel. Kick felt a jolt of recognition. She looked around for something she could use to clean the card.

  “Take off your shirt,” she said.

  “Excuse me?” Bishop said.

  “Your shirt’s already dirty,” Kick said. There was no way she was taking her shirt off. “Mine isn’t.”

  Bishop hesitated and then put the lantern on the floor and pulled his shirt over his head. “Now what?” he said.

  “Clean off the front of the card,” Kick said, picking up the lantern.

  Bishop placed the postcard against the wall and used his shirt to scrub at the mold. Kick turned her head as tiny spores rose into the air and floated in the light.

  “That’s the best I can do,” Bishop said.

  Kick inched closer to the card. The mold had smeared and formed a fine, streaky gray paste. But Kick could see a ghost of an image underneath. A fifties-style courtyard motel with a pool, surrounded by desert. A neon sign in front read The Desert Rose Motel, Vacancy.

  She knew it. She’d been there.

  “This place,” she said. “We went there on a vacation. They let me play in the pool. Be outside. Linda met us there, but Mel and I were there for days, alone.” The Desert Rose pool—that’s where Mel had taught her how to do the back float. He’d mentioned it at the infirmary. “Yesterday,” she said. “I think he mentioned this vacation. He told me to remember it. I thought it was after San Diego. But it must have been before. I think this is where Mel met Klugman.”

  Bishop worked a finger under the moldy poster where they’d found the postcard and a moment later another square of paper came free from underneath and dropped into Bishop’s waiting hand. He wiped it with his shirt and then planted it on the wall in front of her. “Is this Klugman?” he asked.

  The photograph was surprisingly well preserved. James as she had first known him, a gawky nine-year-old, with a bad haircut and too-small clothes. In this picture he was grinning. A man had his arm around him. The man was turning his head away from the camera, his anonymity protected except for the side of his jaw, his ear, and his sideburn. They were standing side by side in the shallow end of a swimming pool. James, his bare chest sunken and skinny, looked puny next to Klugman’s hairy barrel shape. But he was outside, in the backyard pool. He had not always been kept in the dark.

  Kick looked away. “It’s him,” she said. She didn’t need to see his face; she recognized his shape, his torso and limbs, his square head.

  Bishop pocketed the postcard and the picture and they looked around some more, carefully peeling the posters off the walls, but they didn’t find any more hidden clues. Kick leafed through James’s sci-fi paperbacks. Bishop went through the pockets of a small pile of rotting clothes. They flipped the mattress over.

  That’s where the little figure was, so small that when Kick first saw it in her flashlight beam, she thought it was an old screw. It was only when she picked it up that she saw it was a little man made of wire, a twin to the talisman she wore on her finger. James had probably found the wire scraps in his room or pilfered them from the basement.

  “What is it?” Bishop asked.

  “A toy,” Kick said. She couldn’t take it with her. It would be like stealing something from a grave. She set the little man back down in the dust.

  When they climbed back through the wall, Collingsworth was waiting for them, his cap still in his hands. “I didn’t know it was there,” he said shakily. “All this time, I didn’t know.” He was still covered with debris. Drywall stuck to his eyelashes.

  Bishop glanced at Kick. “The boy who lived in there,” he said to Collingsworth. “He got away.”

  It wasn’t exactly a lie, it just wasn’t the whole truth. Bishop sold it, though. Collingsworth looked relieved.

  Bishop used his shirt to clean the sweat off his chest and the drywall dust off his arms and head, and then he tossed it over his shoulder through the hole they’d smashed in the wall. “Thanks for your time, Mr. Collingsworth,” he said, shrugging his blazer on over his bare torso.

  Collingsworth looked confused. His eyes went to the dungeon on the other side of his rec room.

  “What do you want me to do with all that?” he asked.

  Bishop produced a checkbook from the blazer pocket and scribbled something out on it. “Gut it,” he said. He tore the check out and handed it to Collingsworth, who looked agog at the amount. “Put in a playroom for your grandkids.”

  Collingsworth gave Kick a questioning look.

  “Spare no expense,” she said.

  “Besides, look on the bright side,” Bishop added, clapping Collingsworth on the back. “You just doubled the square footage of your basement.”

  30

  IT TURNED OUT THAT the Desert Rose’s neon sign was the most glamorous thing about it. The sun had not quite set when Kick and Bishop pulled up and parked. The foothills were distant humps on the horizon, and the setting sun had turned the sky deep periwinkle. The motel was fifteen miles from the nearest town and surrounded on all sides by the empty desert. When they parked the car and got out, Kick could have sworn she heard a coyote howling. It was eighty-nine degrees in the shade.

  She followed Bishop into the lobby. A counter stretched across one side, and a mud-colored Naugahyde sectional formed a seating area at the lobby’s center. A set of glass doors on one wall led to the pool; glass doors on the opposite wall led to a restaurant, which was, according to the handwritten sign on the door, Open Most Mornings. The lobby floor was ceramic tile. Kick remembered slipping on it once when she had wet feet from the pool. Other than that, nothing else about the lobby struck her as particularly familiar.

  The only motel staff appeared to be the clerk minding
the check-in counter. She was engrossed in a celebrity magazine, a position that effectively displayed the cleavage her V-neck T-shirt exposed. Her thick, dark hair was blown out into soft shoulder-length waves and her caramel-colored skin was flawless. She looked up from the magazine with glazed eyes, but when they landed on Bishop, they instantly brightened. She batted her false eyelashes. “Can I help you?” she asked.

  Bishop grinned. Kick could practically hear the blood rushing to his crotch. He slid her a sideways glance as if to say, I got this.

  Kick hung back a few feet as he swaggered up and slid the photograph of James and Klugman on the counter in front of the clerk. The clerk leaned forward, arching her back a little, so that her T-shirt drew tighter in the right places. Bishop’s eyes moved over her breasts with an appreciative smile.

  Kick wondered if she should wait in the car.

  “Have you seen this man before?” Bishop asked. His voice sounded different, like he was auditioning to host a late-night radio show.

  The clerk looked up from the photograph. “He’s not as cute as you are,” she said.

  “No, he’s not,” Bishop agreed.

  The clerk blushed, and Bishop shifted his weight forward so that his forearms and elbows were on the counter.

  “I’m going for a walk,” Kick announced.

  “Wait,” Bishop said. He put his palm on the counter and slid the magazine toward Kick. “Take something to read,” he said. He tapped the magazine with his finger, drawing Kick’s attention to it.

  She did a double take.

  Her own image was splashed across the cover; she was crouched in horse pose at the park next to her mother and Monster. A bright yellow headline announced the cover story: Ten Years of Freedom! Kidnap Mom, Paula Lannigan, Exclusive!

  Kick flipped the magazine over and drew it toward her.

  “That’s mine,” the clerk protested.

  Bishop stepped between them, and Kick saw his fingers brush the clerk’s bare arm.

  “What’s your name?” he asked her.

  “Carla,” she said, her eyes back on him.

  “I’m John,” he said.

  Kick backed away with the magazine, toward the sliding glass door.

  She noticed how Bishop leaned his head toward the clerk’s, repositioning the photograph on the counter so that the clerk was entirely in his orbit. “Do you recognize him, Carla?” he asked.

  “I can only see his ear,” the clerk said.

  “Does his ear look familiar?” he asked, and Kick wondered if the clerk could hear the flicker of impatience in his voice.

  Apparently she couldn’t. “Do you work out?” the clerk asked. “I work out. I’m only doing this job for the summer. I’m an actress. In LA. What do you do?”

  Kick neared the door.

  “I’m a casting agent,” Bishop said without missing a beat.

  The clerk giggled uncertainly. One of Kick’s palms was on the glass, the other on the plastic door handle. The door was sticky, and Kick jiggled it, trying to get it to glide along its track.

  “Are a lot of the staff here seasonal?” Bishop asked.

  Kick glanced back at him. He was entirely focused on the clerk, his fingertips on her forearm. Screw it. Kick muscled the door open, stepped through it, and slammed it behind her. Ten percent of the moisture in her body immediately evaporated in the desert air. Her lips instantly felt chapped. The warm, dry heat made her skin buzz, like the faint electrical current created when you put a tongue to a battery.

  And a weird thing happened: Kick relaxed. Maybe it was the pool. It was lit from below and glowed in the twilight like an aquamarine jewel. Even Kick, who hadn’t liked pools since she was a kid, found herself drawn to it.

  The courtyard itself was nothing special. The two-story concrete-block motel surrounded it on three sides and the kidney-shaped pool was at its center. The pool was empty, the courtyard abandoned. Most of the motel room windows were shuttered and dark. A child’s pink foam pool noodle floated discarded in the shallow end.

  Kick sank down into a white plastic lounge chair, tossed the magazine aside, and took off her mother’s flip-flops. The concrete under her feet was warm. She used her phone to scan the latest updates in James’s medical file and then sat watching the changing surface of the water, how the slightest breeze created ripples that changed how the blue light moved.

  It was this blue light that drew Kick’s attention back to the magazine. It winked across the cover, reflecting off a pale face in a corner box. Kick reached for the magazine and squinted at it. She had been too distracted by her own image to notice it before—featured in the top right corner was a photograph of Adam Rice. The New Face of Missing Children? the copy asked.

  Kick opened the magazine, paging past the images her mother had sold, and the quotes that her mother had given, and the ads for her mother’s book, until she found the half-page story about Adam. It was all a rehashing of what Kick knew. Even the photographs were recycled from other articles. The main image was the one that Kick had clipped and put up on her bedroom wall: Adam’s mother at the press conference, clutching her son’s stuffed elephant. The article had one new quote, from the utility worker who had seen Adam playing in the yard before his abduction. “I noticed him because of the monkey,” the utility worker was quoted as saying. “It looked loved, like a stuffed animal my kid’s got.”

  A white butterfly alit on the surface of the pool and immediately started to drown.

  Kick rolled the magazine up and stuck it in her purse, then unzipped the interior pocket and extracted the envelope from the Trident Medical Group. She unfolded it and stared at it dumbly; it was so official-looking, with its medical seal and the American flag stamp. Kick’s name and her mother’s address were visible through the plastic window. It hadn’t been a mix-up. She had given them her mother’s address on purpose because James always went through Kick’s mail, and she knew that if he had intercepted the letter, he would never have given it to her.

  Kick slowly extracted the typed letter from inside. The pool reflected off the white paper, rippling it with aqua light.

  Seeing the report in black-and-white made it real somehow.

  She didn’t like to swim. She didn’t even like baths. She didn’t like being in the water. It was one of her triggers.

  She didn’t know why.

  This place . . . she barely remembered it. But she remembered the pool. Even as a kid she had appreciated its color, that perfect Caribbean blue.

  She heard the sound of plastic scraping against concrete, looked up to see Bishop dragging a deck chair parallel to hers, and quickly folded the letter from Trident back into her purse. He sat down, tossed the plastic Target bag with her overnight things on the ground at her feet, and then dangled a room key over her lap.

  She took the key. Not a key card, she noticed. A real key. It was attached to a shiny red plastic key chain that had the number 18 stamped on it.

  “They have a lot of seasonal employees,” Bishop said. The key chain on his room key was stamped with a 6. “But Carla says that a few of the restaurant staff have been here almost twenty years. We’ll show them the photograph in the morning.”

  “Carla?” Kick said, looking at him sideways.

  “I think she likes me,” Bishop said.

  Kick scanned the surface of the pool. She couldn’t see the butterfly anymore. “Are we spending the night here so you can have sex with a motel clerk?” she asked. “Not that I care,” she added quickly. “I’m just wondering, so when I’m eaten alive by bedbugs I’ll know at least it’s in service to a larger goal.”

  “We’re staying because it’s late,” Bishop said, “and all the longtime staff will be here in the morning.” He stood up, scratched the back of his neck, and looked away. “And so I can have sex with the motel clerk.”

  “Good night,” Kick said, settling back into her deck chair.

  “Good night,” Bishop said.

  She felt him start to step away, a sh
ift in the light where his shadow had been.

  “Bishop?” she called. She was staring straight ahead, at the pool. She couldn’t see Bishop, but she knew he was still there. “You know how Mel said that Klugman spent the money he got for James on a new car?” she asked. “I remember that day. I remember looking for James. I found Mel and Klugman in the garage with the car. They told me that James was gone. And you know what I did?” It was the first time she’d ever said it out loud. “I went swimming.” The knot in her throat felt like a hand around her neck. James wasn’t allowed in the pool, so when they played, they had to play inside. With James not there, she could do what she wanted. She had played in Klugman’s pool all afternoon, happy that he was gone.

  “You were a kid; you didn’t understand what it meant.”

  Kick sat forward, distracted. The edge of the motel pool was ringed with ceramic tiles. She had remembered it wrong. The two pools, Klugman’s and the Desert Rose’s, had merged in her memory. “I was wrong about the photograph,” she said. “I thought it was taken in Klugman’s backyard.” She lifted her finger, the one with the wire talisman, and pointed at the shallow end of the Desert Rose Motel pool, where the lip was checkerboarded with black and white tiles. “It was here,” Kick said.

  31

  “THE KEY TO DOING a back float is to relax,” her father said. Beth leaned back into his hand and let his palm support her at the surface of the water. The sky was the same color as the pool, and her body burned with excitement at Mel’s attention. “Just stay clam and relaxed,” her father said. “And do what I tell you.”

  They weren’t alone in the pool; there were other grown-ups: the big man in the black swimsuit with the pale legs and the arrow tattoos, and his wife, who didn’t like to be splashed, sat on the edge with their legs in the water. The pool cleaner, who always said hello to her, was using a pool skimmer to scoop up the dead palm fronds.

  Her father’s voice always made her calm, and she knew that if she just did what he said, he would keep her safe. “Very slowly, tip your head back until your ears are underwater,” he said, guiding her forehead back with his hand. “Good. Now lift your chin.” It was scary. The water seemed so close to her eyes. “More. Point it up toward the sky.” She lifted it a bit more. She could feel her whole body becoming more buoyant. The water was at her mid-cheek. “Keep your head centered,” he said, “arms a few inches from your sides. Keep your palms up. Now arch your upper back just a few inches.” He moved his hand along her spine. “Lift your chest just a bit out of the water.” He moved a hand and held it just above her belly. “Now lift your stomach until it touches my hand,” he said. She pushed her belly out until it met his palm. “You’re such a good girl, Beth. Now bend your knees and open your legs slightly.” She did what she was told, and he withdrew his hands and stepped away, and for a moment she was terrified, all by herself, in water above her head. Then the thrill of her achievement hit her and she squealed with delight. She was floating. “Listen to your body,” her father called from the edge of the pool. “You’re doing it.”