The Vanishing Season

by Joanna Schaffhausen

  Her head swam and the floor felt like it was sucking her under. How long had he been watching her? “So you found me,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “But why involve the rest of them? What about Bea and Shannon and Mark? What did they have to do with any of this?”

  He shrugged. “Why not them? Seriously. What did they really have going for them, anyway? Bea was fucking some weirdo instead of paying attention to her studies. Shannon was a loser drunk, and Mark just moped around over his dead son. They weren’t living lives that mattered to anyone.”

  “That isn’t your decision to make,” she said, more hotly than she intended.

  Brady went cold again. “Yes,” he replied, “it absolutely is.” He waved the gun at her. “Let’s go.”

  “Go where?” she asked without moving an inch.

  “You want to know where Reed is, I’ll show you. I’ll show you everything.”

  She considered her options. Brady clearly didn’t want to shoot her where she stood; this wasn’t his endgame. If she resisted, she might throw him off and gain a psychological edge.

  He tapped his foot impatiently. “You better hurry. Reed doesn’t have much time.”

  So she shuffled Speed Bump off her feet and moved slowly to the door, woefully underdressed for her doom in flip-flops and jean cut-offs. It was, she realized as she looked down at her T-shirt, almost the same as the clothes she had worn fourteen years ago when she’d encountered Francis Coben. Bump trotted along after them to the front door, whining and wagging pitifully. “Easy,” she told him, not wanting him to be afraid.

  Bump replied with a series of short barks. “Shut up,” Brady hissed at him. “Shut up or I will shut you up!”

  “Leave him alone,” Ellie said, even as Bump began barking louder.

  Brady tossed the keys out onto the porch. “You’re driving,” he said over Bump’s raucous complaints. “Let’s go.”

  Ellery went outside and bent over, fumbling in the semidarkness to pick up the keys. Her own harsh breathing rasped in her ears and her thoughts raced as she tried to make sense of this new reality.

  Behind her, Brady cast a deep shadow. “Get the fuck back in there,” she heard him say, followed by a thump and then Bump’s painful whimpering. She stood up but did not turn around. She heard the door creak, saw the light in front of her disappearing as if in slow motion as Brady moved to close the front door. She held her breath, waiting for the snick of the lock, for his next command, but instead a gunshot split the night like thunder. She convulsed at the sound, believing herself to be hit, but Brady shoved her roughly forward to the steps and the searing pain did not arrive. “Move it!”

  She stumbled forward, realizing then that he’d fired inside the house, at the dog, and bile rose up in her throat. She went weak at the knees and Brady jabbed the gun between her shoulder blades. “Get in,” he said as they reached his car. Pain and horror combined to scald her eyes with tears. Blindly, she climbed behind the wheel of his hatchback and started the engine. Brady was looking around frantically to see if anyone had heard the shot. “Go, go,” he urged her. “What’re you waiting for?

  She wiped at her face. “Go where?”

  “Go out to the road and head north. Don’t try anything stupid, okay? Not if you want to see Reed again in this lifetime.”

  She backed the car up and started slowly down her long driveway, loath to leave Bump behind. Maybe a news van would be parked at the end, someone she could signal for help, someone who maybe had heard the gunshot. But when she reached Burning Tree Road, her heart sank when she saw no traffic in either direction. The reporters were all with Sam Parker and the search teams; they’d moved on to a different part of the story.

  “You didn’t have to shoot him, you know,” she murmured as she drove down the silent street.

  Brady was staring out the windshield and did not answer.

  “He loved you,” she said, unable to keep the emotion from her voice. “He loved you.”

  Brady glanced at her with something that almost looked like curiosity. “He didn’t love me,” he said after a moment. “He didn’t even know me.” His gaze returned to the road, as if he was still searching for their destiny. “Now drive.”

  She drove. The tiny engine on his hybrid car made almost no noise as they ghosted out of town, away from civilization and down the long, empty roads filled on either side with thick cornstalks or dark empty pastures. In one field, she saw the distant, bobbing flashlights of the search team as they fanned out in the tall grass looking for Julia Parker’s body. She observed Brady in her peripheral vision to see if he had noticed the crew, and his attention was riveted. “Look at them all,” he murmured with awe. “This whole town is crawling with cops right now, and it’s all because of me.”

  “Because they want to stop you.”

  His gaze didn’t move from the far-off dancing lights. “Yeah, but they won’t,” he said, so matter-of-fact that it gave her a chill in the warm summer night. “Not until it’s over.”

  She thought of leaning on the horn, of driving straight into the field at them to get their attention. Brady might well shoot her but the manhunt would be on. He couldn’t outrun all of them.

  “Don’t even think about it,” he told her, reading her thoughts. “You’ll end up dead, and then what would happen to Reed?”

  She clutched the wheel tighter. “How do I know he’s even still alive?”

  Brady’s smile was thin in the dim light. “I guess you’ll just have to trust me. Make a right up here.”

  She did as he ordered her and watched in the rearview mirror as the lights from the search team grew smaller and smaller in the distance, until they winked out for good. He directed her to an edge of town she hadn’t even known existed, out beyond the McGregor farmland and past the silent cornfields to a dirt road not unlike her own. The house that appeared out of the mist at the end of it was at once both unfamiliar and straight out of her nightmares. The headlights on the car illuminated the front of the house, with its rickety steps and shingled overhang. But it was the dark metal weather vane on the roof, forged in the shape of a human hand and spinning lazily in the spotlight of the moon, that made her jam on the brakes and stare aghast at what he had done.

  The hand with its index finger pointed to show the direction of the wind bobbed and settled on east. Coben’s house had featured a weather vane just like it. In fact, the whole property seemed to be fashioned after Coben’s old farmhouse, from the wood-post fence to the rocking chair on the porch. “Do you like it?” Brady asked. “I did it all myself.”

  “They tore down that old farm,” she said, wide-eyed at her memory come to life. It was the only thing that had let her sleep at night after she came home, the knowledge that Coben’s closets had been obliterated by a wrecking ball.

  “I know. I had to work from memory, from what they showed on TV. No one thought to keep any pictures.” He waved the gun at her midsection. “Get out.”

  Somehow she forced herself to get out of the car, but she couldn’t look at the house. Time had slowed. Her ears rang with the force of all the screams she kept inside, while overhead the stars seemed to spark without cadence. She would almost rather he kill her than make her go inside the farmhouse. “What do you even want from me?” she asked, her voice raw and strained. “Why are you doing this?”

  “You know.”

  “No, I don’t. I don’t know! This doesn’t make sense to me at all.”

  “You were there, Abigail, the same as I was. I saw him take you. I saw you go down in his arms like a rag doll. You were dead—I saw you were!—but then suddenly on TV there you were alive again. You were supposed to be dead!”

  He flung the hard words like an angry accusation. Like she had cheated him somehow. “You’re sick,” she told him. “You need help.”

  Even as she said it, she didn’t believe it was true; he was beyond help. He didn’t seem to hear her anyway. He appeared caught up in the memory of her abduction, his e
yes hazy. “It’s an amazing thing, watching the life go out of someone. One minute they’re here and then the next they’re gone for good.”

  “Where is Reed?” She looked around at the desolate yard, which was steeped in shadow and smelled sickly sweet due to the decaying sunburned grass.

  “I’ll show you,” Brady said, nudging her toward the front porch. The steps groaned under her weight. She could practically feel Brady’s breath on her neck. He reached around her with one hand and shoved open the unlocked door. “Go on, then.” He pushed her forward and she staggered over the threshold into a dark room.

  “Reed?” she called out into the blackness.

  Brady kicked her hard in the back of her knee, sending her sprawling to the floor. “Shut up,” he ordered as he loomed over her. “I’m the one who talks now.”

  She crawled as far away from him as she dared and got to her feet again. He flicked on the switch for the light, and she gasped to find herself standing next to a huge black-and-white portrait of Francis Coben. The room was otherwise bare—no furniture at all, just a scuffed wooden floor and some faded red gingham curtains left over from a happier time. The paint had peeled in several places, and water damage leaked in from the roofline. The ash-coated fireplace hadn’t been touched in years. “You live here?” she asked him.

  “No, this is where I work. Upstairs now.” He directed her to another rickety wooden staircase that had a loose railing and a broken tread. She climbed slowly, weighted down by the dread in her stomach, and halfway up, she smelled it: the unmistakable scent of death. It had crawled up inside her during her days in the closet, so deep in her pores she didn’t think she would ever get free. She halted and squeezed her eyes shut.

  “I said move.” He jabbed her with the gun again, and somehow she forced her trembling legs up to the top of the stairs. “Thataway.”

  The stench got stronger as they went to a room at the back of the house, where he turned on another light, this one just a pair of naked bulbs up against the ceiling. Ellie saw bloodstains on the floor and a bucket and hacksaw in the corner, and she realized the downstairs walls had not been damaged by water. He had turned the whole house into an abattoir.

  There were two doors at the back of the room. Closets. “Please,” she said, “don’t do this.”

  “Your hero, Agent Markham, he’s behind one of those two doors. Probably not in the best shape, but he’s alive. Did you read his book?” Brady waited, apparently sincerely interested in her answer. She shook her head. “Too bad. It was pretty good. He wrote about how he would never know what you and the other girls went through in Coben’s closet. Sounded like regret to me.” He shook his head and eyed the doors. “You know now, though, don’t you, FBI man?” he hollered at the closets. There was silence on the other side.

  “Let him go,” Ellie said. “He’s got nothing to do with this.”

  “He has everything to do with this! If it wasn’t for him, you’d be dead by now. Let’s see if you can return the favor, hmm?” He pointed with the gun at one closet, then the other. “Which should it be? Door number one or door number two?”

  “Let him go,” Ellie repeated.

  “Choose.”

  “I’m not choosing. Just please let him go. This is between you and me, right? The rest of them don’t mean anything. I’m the one you really want.” Her heart pounded in her ears and her mouth had gone completely dry. The gun seemed to sway in his hands.

  “It’s a hell of a story he wrote,” Brady said, sighting the closets in turn once more. “Who’s going to write this story, do you think? Who’s going to make us all famous this time?” He looked over at her, his face in an open sneer. “Pick a door, Abigail.”

  “No.” The word had barely left her mouth when Brady opened fire, pumping six shots through the door on the right. Ellie screamed and put up her hands to shield herself from the noise and horror. The scent of gunpowder filled the air and Brady wiped his nose on his sleeve. Ellie’s ears were ringing and her arms shaking as she made herself look at the battered door with the holes in it.

  “Let’s show the lady what she’s won,” Brady hollered as he took a couple of old keys from his pocket. He tossed one to Ellie. “Open it.”

  “I … I can’t.” Her hands were too unsteady. The key clattered to the floor.

  “I said open it!”

  She choked back a sob and stumbled to the closet. She considered turning and rushing for the gun, seeing as how he was going to kill her anyway. She fumbled twice before she could get the key into the lock. The knob stuck and she had to lean into it to open the door, which came free with a sudden cracking noise. “Oh, God,” Ellie breathed as her stomach turned over. Inside, Julia Parker’s body lay propped up against the back, her hands gone and her torso now littered with bullet holes. She had been dead for some time.

  “Guess he must be in the other one,” Brady said casually from behind her. Rage overcame reason. She took several quick steps toward him, forcing him to back up.

  “Ah, ah,” he said, pointing the gun at her chest. “Don’t you want to see what’s behind door number two?”

  “You’re a monster.”

  “I am only what you made me.”

  “Screw you,” she spat at him. “This isn’t on me. I’m not the one kidnapping people and butchering them. For what? For fun? To make you famous? You think it’ll be fun bunking next to Coben on death row?”

  “Coben,” he repeated, spreading his arms and waving her gun about the room. “Coben couldn’t get the job done. His time is up, don’t you see? No one will mention his name anymore without also talking about me.”

  “Yes,” she said scornfully. “What a sad, lonely little loser you are. Couldn’t even make up his own crimes. He had to fake someone else’s.”

  “There is nothing fake about me!” Brady roared. In a flash, he raised the gun and Ellie barely had time to shout before he had fired seven shots through the other closet door.

  “No!” Ellie shouted, her eyes blurring with tears. “No, no, no!” She whirled on Brady but he was ready for her this time, with her own gun pointed right between her eyes.

  “Ask yourself,” he said, breathing hard, sweat dripping down his cheek. “How many more bullets do I have? How many to make sure you’re really gone this time, hmm? I can stand here and watch the light go out from behind your pretty eyes.”

  Ellie lunged at him, claws out, and roared a furious, fiery scream fourteen years in the making. His eyes went wide with shock. She screamed so hard it brought the roof down, or so it seemed, with a crash and a cloud of plaster. She drew up short as Brady went down inside the dust cloud as the ceiling caved in, only it wasn’t the shower of paste and mortar that trapped him—it was Reed. He dropped like a paratrooper out of the sky and tackled Brady to the floor, the two of them wrestling around and grappling over the gun. Ellie circled until she saw her opportunity, and she stomped hard on Brady’s hand, forcing him to release the gun and sending it skidding across the room toward the bucket and saw.

  Brady yelped in pain, and his distress was enough to gain Reed the upper hand as he pinned the other man’s hands behind his back. “Get the rope,” he said, red faced and breathless.

  Ellie had the gun trained on both of them, her arms still shaking.

  “The rope!” Reed repeated, and Ellie saw there was a length of bloody rope lying near the bucket. She threw it to Reed, who bound Brady’s hands. He stood up and Ellie vaguely noticed his face was streaked with dried blood. On the floor, Brady glared up at her, furious and impotent.

  Dimly, Ellie could see Reed’s mouth moving, but his words made no sense to her. The static inside her head was a radio with the volume turned way up. Her arms ached, but they felt locked in place and she had not lowered the gun. She had it pointed toward the floor now, right at Brady’s head.

  “Ellery? Ellie. Put down the gun and call for backup.”

  Brady might have laughed. The sound was a rattle, blood trickling out of his injured
mouth. “She’s not going to shoot me. We’re the same, her and me. We go together or not at all.”

  “Shut up,” Reed said, bringing his foot down hard on the back of Brady’s leg. “Ellie, put the gun down.”

  She shook her head, unable to comply. She saw Brady’s face swim in and out of focus on the other side of the gun barrel. It wavered as she trembled.

  “You can. Do it now.”

  Do it. Her heart surged in her throat, adrenaline like electricity in her veins.

  “Forever!” Brady yelled from the floor. “You and me, Abigail. Screw Coben—you belong to me now!”

  He seemed to rise up as he said it, his body levitating from the floor, and her finger clamped down on the trigger. Noise exploded into the room. Brady slumped on the floor.

  “No!” Reed’s shout of horror bounced off the empty walls and disappeared with the reverberations from her shot.

  When she could see again, she staggered forward and slowly lowered her shaking arms. Reed stood frozen somewhere to the side in her peripheral vision and she did not look at him because she did not want to see his face. Her chest heaved and her cheeks burned red hot. In front of her on the floor, Brady was still and silent at last, blood leaking out from the side of his head. “One,” she whispered brokenly as the gun slipped from her fingers to the floor. “There was one bullet left.” Then she covered her face with both hands and wept.

  Epilogue

  Reed sat with his bandaged hands resting on the table in the interrogation room of the Woodbury Police Department. The doctors at the hospital had removed one hundred and eleven splinters in all, plus sewed up a good two-inch gash on his left palm. Coben would love me now, he thought ironically as he admired his ravaged hands. Across from him, Puss McGreevy switched off the recorder and put down his pen. “It’s just you and me in here now, Reed. You may as well give it to me straight.”