Down the Rabbit Hole

by Peter Abrahams

  It was cold in Kate’s house, but Ingrid was sweating. She was also shaking a bit, lying there under the bed. The house was silent now. Did that mean it was safe to come out? Ingrid didn’t know. She stayed right where she was for a long time. Nothing changed. The silence went on and on.

  Ingrid crawled out from under the bed, making no noise at all. She tied the red Pumas together, slung them around her neck. With her hand over the flashlight lens, she had a quick look around the room. Under the reddish light that escaped between her fingers she saw the stack of playbills still standing on the bedside table. Dial M for Murder was no longer on top. Ingrid leafed through: In fact, the Dial M for Murder playbill was gone.

  Ingrid stepped around the chalked outline, crouched under the yellow tape, started downstairs, hand still covering the lens. Almost at the bottom, she heard a car pulling up. Then came a sound she was familiar with from Cops, Stacy’s favorite show: the crackle of a police radio. Ingrid hurtled down the last few steps, swung around the stair post into the long corridor. A powerful searchlight from outside was shining through the parlor window.

  Ingrid raced down the corridor, into the kitchen, to the back door, broken glass crunching under her feet. She yanked the door open. At the same moment, she heard the front door opening at the far end of the corridor. A man called out: “Hey!”

  Ingrid sprang out the door, ran across the alley and into the woods, faster than she’d ever run in her life. A searchlight beam cut through the night, just missing her.

  The man called out: “Stop! Police!”

  But Ingrid didn’t stop, couldn’t stop. The searchlight beam angled through the trees, momentarily revealing a path ahead. Ingrid took it. The right path? The right direction? She didn’t know. She just kept running. And she could run.

  “Stop! Police!”

  The searchlight went out. From behind came the sound of heavy charging footsteps, ripping through underbrush, coming closer and closer. How was he doing that if he wasn’t even using his searchlight? Ingrid realized her flashlight was still on, bobbing along like a lure. She snapped it off.

  A tremendous crash not far behind her, followed by a cry of pain. A brief silence, except for her own panting breath, and then a police radio crackled through the woods. Ingrid kept going, slower now without the flashlight, but she left the crackling sound behind. No one came after her, no one who made noise or aimed a light. Soon her eyes adjusted to the darkness, and the path began to shine again like polished coal. She ran.

  Ingrid could run. Running ran in the family. She ran until she could run no more, which must have been a long time. Shouldn’t she have reached the big rock by now? Ingrid peered into the darkness, saw no sign of that looming shadow. She listened, heard nothing but a dog howling, somewhere up ahead.

  Ingrid kept going, walking now and starting to feel a chill, her sweat cooling. Where was the big rock? The path suddenly split in two, two polished black tracks, forming a Y. Ingrid didn’t remember any Y. Left or right? Right seemed best for no reason she could explain. Why hadn’t she taken up the hobby of learning Echo Falls years ago?

  Play to win, she told herself.

  This path to the right had lots of twists and turns, twists and turns she didn’t remember. The sound of the howling dog grew louder and louder, very near, then stopped abruptly. Ingrid stopped too. She took the risk of switching on her flashlight. There on the path, not ten yards away, stood a big dog, its eyes yellow and opaque.

  “Good dog,” she said.

  The dog growled.

  Okay. This was probably the wrong path anyway. Her best bet would be returning to the Y intersection, trying the left-hand path. Ingrid started back. She heard the dog taking off after her.

  Ingrid whipped around, aimed the flash in the dog’s face. The dog froze, one forepaw poised in the air, like one of those well-trained pointers. But this was not a well-trained pointer. Close up, this dog, collarless, turned out to be kind of fat and dumb-looking, with floppy ears and droopy eyes. Ingrid held out her hand. The dog wagged its tail and came forward. She patted its head. It pressed its head against her hand. Simple as that. They were pals.

  “Where’s out?” Ingrid said.

  The dog ran in a little circle, stopped by the nearest tree, and lifted his leg.

  “You’re a big help,” Ingrid said.

  She backtracked to the Y intersection, took the left fork this time, the dog trotting along beside her. The left fork led down a long hill and then came to a three-way split, one path going left, one right, one straight ahead. Where was the rock? The previous left fork must have been a mistake. If so, shouldn’t she take the right-hand path now, as a correction? Ingrid took the right-hand path, the logical choice, the choice Sherlock Holmes would have made. She tried to think of any similar situations Holmes had been in and remembered none.

  The right-hand path went up a rise, got narrow and almost disappeared, then came out at an opening in the woods. Ingrid found herself on the top of a hill. Down below flowed the river, silvery black. The river? Didn’t that mean she’d gone in the exact wrong direction? The river was on the other side of the woods from her house, miles and miles away, so far she’d never even considered walking to it. And the falls: She could hear them, not too distant, making a sound like people going shhhh. That would mean…yes: Topping a hill on the opposite bank stood Prescott Hall, the old mansion that housed the Prescott Players, all its tall leaded windows dark. Curiouser and curiouser. Prescott Hall was nowhere near 99 Maple Lane. Griddie, deep down the rabbit hole.

  The sky wasn’t quite so nightlike by the time Ingrid finally found the big rock. She was so cold, so tired by then that she hadn’t noticed the coming of day, and was even slow to recognize the significance of the fact that she could read RED RAIDERS RULE without a flashlight, the only way she could read it now in any case, the battery having gone dead.

  “Good boy,” she said, although the dog had done nothing to help, leading her down false trails every time she’d decided to trust his animal instincts. Ingrid took the right-hand path by the rock, this right-hand path the correct one for sure, and headed for home.

  Day was breaking beyond any doubt when Ingrid stepped out of the woods and into her own backyard, a gray dawn with thick clouds covering the whole sky. Ninety-nine Maple Lane was quiet. Ingrid crossed the yard, slid open the door to the basement.

  “Go home, boy,” she said, very quietly.

  The dog wagged his tail but didn’t go anywhere.

  “Go.”

  Ingrid went inside, closed the door. She hurried into the basement bathroom, looked at herself in the mirror.

  Oh my God. Filthy, scratched, blue lipped; and what was that in her hair? A clump of rice in congealed plum sauce? How had that happened?

  Ingrid cleaned herself up, not well but quickly, and went into the laundry room. Her yellow pajamas with the red strawberries were folded on the drier. She threw all her clothes into the washer, except for the shoes she’d been wearing and the red Pumas, which she left on the floor, and put on the pajamas. As for the red Pumas—she didn’t love them anymore.

  Now to get upstairs and into bed. Ingrid went up, into the mudroom, almost there. Then she heard someone coming down the hall from the master bedroom. Could she reach the stairs to the second floor? Not in time.

  Ingrid slipped into the kitchen instead, sat at the table in the breakfast nook, took a banana from the fruit bowl. Mom came in, wearing her quilted blue housecoat, eyes puffy, hair all over the place. One small part of Ingrid, maybe getting smaller, was telling her to fly across the kitchen, fling her arms around her mother and say, “Oh, Mom.”

  “Ingrid!” Nothing in Mom’s tone was saying “hug me.” “You’re up early.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Ingrid noncommittally, peeling the banana. And anyway, wasn’t it all over now?

  Mom gave her a long, suspicious look.

  “Did you wear the appliance?” she said.

  nine

  TWENTY M
INUTES LATER, Mom had gone out for Sunday bagels and lox and Ingrid was in her own blessed bed, Mister Happy tucked in beside her. Seconds after that she was asleep. Stormy seas rose all around her, but she was snug in her sturdy boat—dry, warm, safe.

  “Hey.”

  Ingrid opened her eyes, the lids almost glued together with eye crust. Ty was at her door.

  “Phone,” he said, and tossed it to her.

  She missed. The phone bounced on the bed, hit the wall. She grabbed it.

  “Hello?”

  “Ingrid? Jill Monteiro.” Ingrid sat up; Jill Monteiro was director of the Prescott Players. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “Oh, no,” said Ingrid. “Not me.”

  “We’ll be auditioning for Alice in Wonderland Tuesday at five,” Jill said. “Hope you can make it. There’re all kinds of good parts.”

  “Like Alice?” Ingrid said, unable to stop herself.

  Jill laughed. She had a great laugh, surprisingly deep and wicked; she’d used it once in a real Hollywood movie called Tongue and Groove, all about home-renovating hijinks with Will Smith and Eugene Levy. Straight to video, but JILL MONTEIRO was on the box, tiny but there.

  Alice: a plum role. Ingrid had a copy of the book on her shelf. She took it into the bathroom, poured a huge hot bubble bath, got in, and started leafing through the pages. The trick was going to be keeping Alice from sounding like a geek. Ingrid practiced saying “he’s perfectly idiotic,” “the stupidest tea party I ever was at in all my life,” “mustard isn’t a bird,” and “you’re nothing but a pack of cards,” trying to inject at least a bit of cool. Acting was all about cool; she’d learned that at the movies.

  When Ingrid went downstairs, she found everyone in the TV room, Dad and Ty watching football, Mom going through some listing sheets.

  “I found your cleats,” Mom said.

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t you want to know where?”

  “Okay.”

  “In the laundry room.”

  “Oh.”

  “Try to keep track of your things, Ingrid. I put the cleats over there by the—” Mom paused, looked out the slider. “There’s a strange dog in the yard,” she said.

  They all looked. A strange dog—with floppy ears and droopy eyes, coat a kind of tweedy brown—but not strange to Ingrid. He stood right outside the slider, peering in, tail wagging as if he’d spotted someone, although the only thing in his line of sight was the StairMaster.

  Dad and Ty turned back to the TV.

  “Did you see that hit?” Dad said.

  Mom got up, went to the slider.

  “Go on, go home,” Mom said. The dog wagged his tail, still looking off in the wrong direction. “He’s not wearing a collar. Anyone seen this dog before?”

  No one answered, Dad and Ty probably too into the game to have even heard, Ingrid because, well, because where would she start?

  Mom took her cell phone out of her pocket, called the shelter, described the dog. That was Mom, organized, quick, on task. No such dogs reported missing in Echo Falls, and the shelter didn’t do pickups on weekends.

  “He’s kind of cute,” Mom said. Ingrid saw where this might be going, tried to head it off.

  “He’s the dumbest dog on the planet,” she said.

  Mom looked surprised. “What makes you say that?”

  Uh-oh. Those feelers of Mom’s: almost impossible to outthink them. “Just look at him,” she said. It was true. He was the kind of dog that in a cartoon would harrumph a lot and play second fiddle.

  “I think he’s cute,” Mom said. She opened the slider.

  The dog came right in as if totally familiar with the place, trotted past Mom, and stood in front of Ingrid, mouth open and tongue hanging out.

  “He likes you,” Mom said. “Give him a pat.”

  Ingrid gave him a pat. He did that head-pressing thing, shoving his head against her hand.

  “Mark,” said Mom. “Look how the dog likes Ingrid.”

  Dad didn’t hear: Football put males in a trance, maybe a handy fact to keep in mind.

  “You know what I’m thinking, Ingrid?” Mom said.

  Ingrid knew, but she said, “What?”

  “If no one claims him, maybe we should at least give him a temp—”

  Mom’s phone rang. She listened for a moment, hung up. “We’ll talk about it later. I’ve got to go show Blueberry Crescent.”

  “What’s the price on that?” Dad said, eyes on the screen.

  “They’re asking three thirty,” Mom said.

  Mom left. A few minutes after that, Dad got up and said, “Maybe I’ll go into the office for a while.”

  “What about the game?” Ty said.

  “It’s getting out of hand,” Dad said.

  “Seventeen-ten’s not out of hand,” Ty said.

  “I’ll tell that to Tim Ferrand when my report’s not ready,” Dad said. He left too.

  Ingrid sat on the couch near Ty. The dog followed, stood at her feet; didn’t sit, just stood there. On the screen a player in green and gold knocked down a pass and did a funny hip-hop dance.

  “You should try that,” Ingrid said.

  “Are you nuts? I’d be off the team.”

  “I meant after you made a great play.”

  “When’s that going to happen?”

  Ty had never asked her a question like that, like he was leaning on her or something. “You’re just a freshman,” Ingrid said. “The only one on the varsity.”

  “Not for long,” Ty said.

  “That can’t be true,” Ingrid said. “You’re so fast.”

  Ty snorted.

  “How were you supposed to know about that stupid flea-flicker?” Ingrid said; unless he’d listened to her, but too late to bring that up.

  And maybe she should have kept her mouth shut completely, because Ty turned on her, his face going bright red. “What the hell do you know?”

  That annoyed her, especially after all she’d done to try to warn him, annoyed her enough to change her mind about keeping her mouth shut. “I’d know enough not to fall for it twice,” Ingrid said.

  What happened next was so fast, Ingrid didn’t understand at first, didn’t even feel the pain. Ty sprang across the couch and hit her. Maybe he was aiming for her arm or shoulder; his fist did graze her shoulder, but where it landed was on her right eye. Ingrid fell sideways, hand going up to her eye, hardly aware of Ty bolting out of the room, kicking something, yelling, “I hate football.”

  Now she felt the pain. Not enough pain to make her cry, but she was crying anyway. Nothing like this had ever happened. Ty’s speech could be rough sometimes, and when they were much younger he’d gone through a stage of shutting her in the broom closet when Mom and Dad were out, but he’d never actually hit her, and she’d have thought they’d outgrown the possibility by now.

  Ingrid felt the dog pressing his head against her leg. She stopped crying, gave him a pat. He pressed harder.

  “You’re pretty strong for a fat guy,” she said, brushing tears away on the back of her sleeve.

  He wagged his tail, a scraggly thing with burrs in it. A TV commentator said, “That’s what they call lowering the boom.” Ingrid got up and switched him off. She heard water running in the pipes: Ty taking a shower, or washing his face. She didn’t want to be in the house. Confiding in Ty: She’d actually considered that?

  “Come on, boy,” Ingrid said. She got her jacket from upstairs and opened the slider.

  He came out and shook himself the way dogs do when they’re wet, which he wasn’t, of course. “Know any tricks?” she said.

  He pressed his head against her leg.

  “That’s not a trick.”

  Ingrid picked up a twig. At the mere sight of a picked-up twig, Flanders would have been springing up and down and barking his head off. This dog didn’t seem to notice. He was looking at nothing in particular.

  “Here’s a stick,” Ingrid said, waving it before his eyes. She flicked it backhand
about ten feet away, right in front of him. “Go get it. Get the stick.”

  His mouth opened and his tongue appeared. He gazed off into the middle distance. That was it.

  “Come on,” Ingrid said. She walked over to the twig, picked it up. He stood beside her, watching. Watching her do the retrieving, you could almost think, like he was the one doing the training. You could almost think that, but not if you looked at his dumb face, which reminded her of Nigel Bruce, who’d played Dr. Watson to Basil Rathbone’s Holmes. Ingrid had all the videos.

  “Smell the stick,” Ingrid said, holding it close to his nose. He averted it slightly, a strangely delicate movement, like an aristocrat who’d been offered a pastrami sandwich.

  “Go get it,” Ingrid said, throwing it again. She pointed.

  This time the dog ambled off in the general direction of the twig. He came quite close, actually stepping over it, before making a sharp turn and heading into the woods.

  “Hey!”

  He kept going, past the oak with the split trunk where she and Ty had built a tree house, now in disrepair, around a bend and out of sight.

  “Hey. Come back here.”

  Ingrid ran after him, not her fastest, no way she could run her fastest, still sore all over from the night in the woods. And the woods were the last place she wanted to be right now.

  “Dog!” She didn’t even know his name. “Come here.”

  Ingrid tore along the path, back in the damn woods. Up ahead she caught sight of him squatting, the lower half of him all urgent and straining, his head in the clouds.

  “Stay.”

  But he didn’t stay. As soon as he was done, he took off again, trotting in his clumsy way, like that beer-belly guy who jogged past their house every Sunday.