Blood Stained

by CJ Lyons

  At the noise of the lock clicking, the girl in the hallway sprinted out of sight.

  "That will teach him." The man marched down the hall. The woman looked at the cellar door for a long moment. She reached out her hand. Adam thought she might set Darrin free, but she clicked off the lights and followed the man upstairs to bed.

  Adam waited until the house went quiet. The back door had a simple spring lock that was no match for his knife. He quietly tiptoed across the kitchen, moving by memory, not daring to use his flashlight, until he bumped into the basement door. He eased the latch, muffling the squeak with his hands, then opened the door.

  There was one feeble bulb lighting the space at the bottom of the steps. Directly below it, still in his wet pajamas, was Darrin curled up in a ball. He didn't even look up when Adam came down the steps. The washing machine churned away in the corner and beside it a dryer stood waiting. Unlike the empty, uncluttered kitchen, the space down here was filled with boxes and plastic garbage bags and wooden crates haphazardly jumbled around the floor like someone just kicked them down the steps in any direction. It was too dark to see what was inside any of containers but something smelled bad. Like a small animal had crawled down here to die.

  "You okay, Darrin?" Adam crouched down beside the boy and gently touched him on the shoulder.

  Darrin tensed but didn't open his eyes. Instead he lay there, holding his breath, waiting for something very bad to happen. How often had Adam lay like that in the group home in Cleveland? Waiting for Rick the Prick to tiptoe into his room, into his bed?

  Adam shivered. It was okay. Rick the Prick was never going to touch him again. In fact, once he found Dad and told him, Rick the Prick was going to be missing his dick, real quick.

  "I'm not going to hurt you," Adam whispered. "I'm here to help."

  Another long moment passed.

  Darrin opened his eyes. "Help?"

  "Sure. That's what brothers do. They help each other."

  "I don't have a brother. All I have is a sister."

  "Wrong. You have a lot of brothers. More sisters, too."

  Darrin sat up, squinching his face in confusion. "No. I don't."

  "Well, we're half-brothers. Hi, I'm Adam." Adam thrust out his hand. Darrin shook it. He stood and Darrin did as well.

  "Is this a dream?"

  "Nope. It's all real. But you have to promise not to tell anyone I was here. Can you do that?"

  Darrin's face wrinkled even tighter. Then he nodded.

  "Good. Then I can stay and help you." Adam looked around the grim space. Darrin hadn't moved from the small circle of light. "You're afraid of the dark, aren't you?"

  "Just down here," Darrin admitted. "At night."

  "Yeah. I know what you mean. This place creeps me out." Adam went to the dryer. It held a load of freshly washed clothing. He pulled it out. Lots of women's stuff. But then he came to a flannel shirt. Probably the sister’s, not Daffy Duck's. Way too big for Darrin, but it was nice and warm. "Here. Put this on and let's throw those wet PJs in the wash."

  Darrin turned his back and quickly changed, then shyly handed Adam his soiled pajamas.

  "It's okay. Nothing to be ashamed of."

  "Dad says I'm a fag because I still wet the bed." Darrin shuffled one bare foot against the rough-hewn cement floor. "He says I'm stupid and my brain is messed up, that's why I never learned how not to."

  "You know he's not your real dad, right?"

  Darrin nodded, looked over his shoulder towards the stairs. "Yeah. I'm not supposed to talk about my real dad."

  "Why not?"

  "My mom says he was a bad man. He was killed."

  Typical fish. Too stupid to know how lucky she was. She could've ended up like Adam's mom. Dead.

  "What if your dad—your real dad—wasn't killed? What if he was on his way here right now to come and get you and take you away? Would you want to go?"

  Darrin looked even more frightened. Adam understood that. Hard not to be scared when there was a whole wide world out there and you were stuck in a place like this. But then Darrin nodded. Slowly. Up. Down. Up. Down. "Where?" The single word emerged like a peep from a baby bird.

  "Anywhere. Everywhere. You name the place."

  "Disney World? We were supposed to go last year but Dad got busy."

  "Sure. Disney World."

  Darrin looked down again. "I guess. Maybe."

  "Good." Adam was half afraid to say anything, but even if the kid talked, who would believe him? "You keep wishing, keep thinking about going to Disney. Keep an eye out for me. And I'll keep an eye out for you."

  "But…why? Why are you here? Why are you helping me?" The poor kid sounded empty as if he didn't know the meaning of the word hope. Because nobody ever taught it to him.

  Adam crouched down to look Darrin in the eye. He planted both palms on Darrin's shoulders, centering all his attention on the little boy. "Because, Darrin. We're family. And you don't need to worry about Mr. Daffy Duck or wetting the bed or any of that stuff anymore. It's no big deal. Like our dad, our real dad, always says, 'There's always another sunrise waiting around the corner.' Sounds good, don't it?"

  "Yeah." Darrin didn't seem totally convinced.

  "You just remember. Family first, last, and always. That's our motto." Adam pulled him into a hug. "And you're my family. Never forget that."

  Darrin crumbled in his arms, tears wetting Adam's jacket. Adam didn't care. Not at all. Darrin was family.

  Chapter 6

  Lucy let Nick hold her until he fell asleep. He didn't press her about New Hope but she knew he was hurt by her silence.

  She couldn't help it. All she saw every time she thought about the case that built her career was the image of a ten-year-old crying out as he lunged into the blackness, almost moving too fast for Lucy to stop him from following his mother into the abyss.

  No kid should have to see that. And it was her fault. Her fault Marion Caine died. Her fault the killer took her with him. Her fault Adam had been there to see it all.

  Now it was coming back to haunt her.

  As soon as Nick began making the tiny raspy noises he insisted weren't snoring, she slipped out of bed and walked barefoot downstairs, avoiding the creaky one four steps down. Light spilled out from the kitchen. There, feet propped up on a chair, sat Jenna Galloway, the team's newest addition.

  Lucy paused in the doorway, not sure she liked how at home Jenna made herself. The same way the postal inspector had waltzed into their office—Lucy's office—and acted as if she'd been there forever. Jenna was young. Late twenties. Thin but not skinny, and had dark red hair, a shade that made men look twice and women envious. She seemed competent, which was what mattered most to Lucy. Able to carry her weight and not put any of her team at risk.

  She was withholding judgment on any more than that. Like Jenna's undercover capabilities, for instance.

  "Did you need something?" Jenna asked without looking up from her laptop. She typed with one hand and drank a cup of coffee with the other.

  "Thought you were replacing Taylor outside."

  "In an hour. He's enjoying some quiet time in the car."

  Didn't sound like Taylor. He was more ADHD than Megan's fellow middle-schoolers. "Quiet time?"

  Jenna nodded, her coffee mug joining in on the motion. She still didn't look up from her typing. "Actually alone time might be a better word for it. Phone sex with his girlfriend."

  Lucy felt a blood vessel at her temple begin to dance. "While on a protective detail? On my family?"

  "Hey, it keeps him awake. Not like he's not looking at the street while she's whispering in his ear."

  Lucy straightened, ready to step outside until she realized two things. First, she was wearing an old t-shirt and flannel robe and nothing else. And second, Jenna was pulling her leg. Maybe there was hope for the mailman—mailwoman–after all. "Good one."

  "Almost had you, didn't I?" Jenna glanced up, a smile crinkling the button nose that matched her creamy ski
n and ponytail. Jeez, could she be any more all-American girl if she tried? No way in hell she could pass for anything but a sorority girl slumming if she was out on the street undercover.

  "Almost." Lucy moved to the refrigerator. She hadn't eaten more than a few bites at dinner and now her stomach rumbled. She grabbed a slice of pizza and poured herself a glass of milk. As she joined Jenna at the table, she saw that the postal inspector had a Pennsylvania map laid out. "What's this for?"

  "My trip to New Hope in the morning. I don't trust my GPS." She'd used a pink highlighter to trace her route from Pittsburgh to a small town on the New Jersey border.

  Lucy hid her smile with a gulp of milk. Should she tell her? Keeping silent would be the best way to keep Jenna out of her hair while Lucy went to New Hope—the right New Hope.

  No. Jenna was part of her team, like it or not. "You might want to re-think that route."

  "Why?"

  "It's the wrong New Hope."

  "No, it's not. There's only one New Hope, PA listed in the zip code directory."

  "Sorry, Zippy, but our New Hope is unincorporated. It's under the zip code for Alexandria. And it's smack dab in the center of the state. Here." Lucy pointed to a spot.

  Jenna bent over to scrutinize the map. "There's nothing there. I mean literally nothing. Except for one squiggly little road, State Route 4004."

  "Where are you from, Jenna?"

  "L.A." She turned her attention from the map to her computer. "Wait. I found it on Google Earth. Wow, there are some houses there."

  "And an elementary school and some farms, churches, a few shops, a hardware, a grocery store. Believe it or not, folks living in even smaller towns drive into New Hope to do their shopping."

  Jenna looked up. "Too small for a police force?"

  "Covered by a county sheriff. He and seven deputies cover eight hundred seventy-five square miles."

  "That's spread pretty thin. Perfect place for a serial killer to hide."

  "Not to mention the limestone caves riddling the mountains. Entrances scattered all over." Lucy pulled the laptop closer. She hadn't tried this before, but given the publicity the New Hope case had gotten, it was a good bet photos had been uploaded to the web. A few keystrokes later she had a selection of images for Jenna.

  "That's the padlocked entrance to the cave on Stolfultz's dairy farm. In the old days, their family actually used the front caverns to store their milk and cheese. If you keep going the cavern connects to another system that comes out here."

  She clicked on a picture, revealing a nondescript pre-fab hanger. The kind used to store farm equipment or hay bales. Easy to erect, easy to overlook. Except this hanger backed onto an opening into the side of the mountain.

  Jenna enlarged the picture, then clicked through to the others, revealing the inside of the hanger with the blue minivan and the cave entrance, taken from just beyond the crime scene tape.

  The next image was lit with a flash that made the cave walls look like burnished copper. The light sparked off steel chains bolted into the stone, giving them a festive glow. An overturned five-gallon bucket could be seen on the rough rock of the cave floor. Along with a smear that looked black but Lucy knew was actually blood. Her blood.

  She wrapped her arms around her belly, her pizza forgotten.

  Another picture showed the ledge above the chasm where Adam's mother and the New Hope Killer plunged to their deaths. The bodies were never recovered, presumed washed into unknown parts by the underground river the chasm opened into. One more showed the collection of MREs, water bottles, night vision goggles and cameras, along with the knives, stun guns, and other instruments of torture the killer used. Lucy wondered who leaked that one. They removed all that as evidence long before any civilian entered the scene.

  The next picture was the famous one. The one every newspaper carried. A bit blurry, taken as it was by a cell phone without time to focus, but that only made it more evocative. A skinny boy, face crumpled in grief, supporting Lucy, helping her from the cavern. Her service weapon dangled from one hand, the other gathered to her side, trying to staunch the bleeding.

  Jenna made a small noise deep in her throat. Lucy reached past her and clicked the window shut. The postal inspector had replaced the official desktop background with a picture of a young girl riding a horse, jumping a high fence, bright red ponytail streaming from below her helmet. She looked wild and ecstatic and fearless.

  "How the hell did you become a mailman?" Lucy blurted out.

  Jenna didn't answer. Instead she traced the horse's face with her finger. In the picture she looked around Megan's age—and just as defiant. "Long story. Lets just say it wasn't the path I expected."

  Lucy nodded at that. Somehow seeing that picture of the younger Jenna, she started to like the postal inspector. Enough to trust her. A little, at least. "You hooked into NCIC?"

  The National Crime Information Center was the clearinghouse for all law enforcement, local, state and federal. Jenna nodded, clicked a few keys. "Sure. What do you need?"

  "Run a name for me. Adam Caine. Age—"

  "I've got his DOB from the New Hope file. Why him?"

  "He sent the letter."

  "No shit. He's the kid in the photo, the one whose mom was killed?"

  "Yes. Last I knew he and his dad still lived in New Hope."

  "Not according to this." Jenna tapped her fingernail against the computer screen. French manicure, of course. Probably had her toes done as well. The last time Lucy had time for a pedicure was two years ago, an anniversary treat from Nick. "Picked up for vagrancy and attempted theft in Cleveland. Put into a group home when they couldn't find any family. Ran away eight months ago. Has a warrant on him. Assault and battery on a counselor."

  So Adam was a fugitive. Damn. She'd wished better for him after what he'd been through. "Run his dad, Clinton Caine. He was a truck driver."

  The computer did its business. "Nothing. He's clean." Jenna tried another database. "No address listed except a PO Box in Altoona, PA 16601. Want me to dig deeper?"

  Four years ago Adam clung to his dad, they seemed so close. She'd only met the man once, but she still remembered the awkward way Clint tried to comfort his son, ignoring the tears streaming down his own face after Lucy told him what had happened to his wife.

  Why would Adam run away from his dad? And what did he want from Lucy?

  Something was off here. Something that made Lucy's gut instincts do a creepy-crawly dance down her nerve endings.

  "Yeah. Start digging. Find Clinton Caine."

  Jenna continued typing as Lucy stared at her cold food, one hand massaging the scar on her belly. The wound had been minor, but sometimes it still burned like frostbite. Four years and not finished healing.

  Just like Adam Caine.

  <><><>

  Adam felt pretty good when he left Darrin's. They finished Darrin's laundry while Adam told the kid stories about all the wonderful places Dad had taken him. Then they snuck upstairs, re-made Darrin's bed, and the kid finally fell asleep. As Adam left, he locked the door to the cellar again. Let the fish figure that one out.

  He thought about going home to his cave to sleep, but decided to check on Sally first. She and her mom lived in the trailer court just outside of town, not too far out of his way. Besides, he liked Sally. She was the youngest of all his brothers and sisters, hadn't even been born when he and Dad left New Hope. Dad said he wasn't having any more kids, making her the last of the Caines.

  As he walked, he found himself whistling an old tune. Something about the moon and stars. A silly song that made him feel light. He couldn't remember hearing a song in his head for such a long time. Couldn't remember feeling anything but fear and anger. Now a new feeling crept in. He was almost afraid to name it; it made him feel dizzy just thinking about it. But talking to Darrin, promising him all the wonderful adventures they'd have when Dad came to get them, had sparked something bigger than fear or anger.

  Hope. It felt good, but it also
was a little scary—like holding a sharp knife when your fingers were numb with cold. You know you could just as easily cut yourself.

  But he hadn't. He'd used the knife to open a door and save Darrin. Just like Dad would've wanted him to. Just like a big brother should.

  He arrived at the trailer park and approached Sally's singlewide from the woods behind it. He peeked through the window in the door and saw light flickering like someone watching TV in the dark.

  Sally's mom lay across the couch, her shirt open, naked beneath it. A man with dark hair wearing jeans and no shirt lay across her, his face between her breasts. Both passed out. Below the woman's hand a glass pipe had burned a hole in the lime green shag carpet. There were a bunch of holes near it as well.

  Adam wrinkled his nose against the sharp stench of cat piss. Crank. Smelled like they were making it as well as smoking it.

  He knew about methamphetamine. In Cleveland he'd seen how a binge of meth could lead to a deep crash, folks sleeping for days.

  Who was taking care of Sally? She'd only just turned four.

  The master bedroom was at the end of the trailer. He couldn't see anyone through the window there except a rumpled bed and clothing thrown everywhere like someone had gone through a frenzy and emptied every drawer and closet. He walked around to the front of the trailer, keeping his footsteps silent despite the gravel coated with frost.

  And then he saw her. Sally sat on the cement block steps leading up to the trailer's front door, her knees drawn to her chest, arms hugging them to her body. She wore a pink nightgown, a pink fleece bathrobe, and pink fuzzy fake fur slippers.

  "Sally," he said.

  She didn't respond at first. Her eyes were open but not focused. He shook her gently. She was freezing. Her face was white, lips dusky, teeth chattering.

  Adam sat down beside her. The cold from the cement blocks burned through his jeans. He took off his jacket, then his sweatshirt and bundled Sally inside them both before gathering her onto his lap. A bedraggled stuffed cat that once was white fell from her arms. She'd been hugging it tight to her body as if more worried about it getting cold than herself.