by Lisa Unger
He sat there for a long time, his thoughts dull and heavy, then chaotic. The man and the boy had both lost consciousness. Maybe they were dead. He was supposed to kill them and then hide their bodies. He knew a place where they wouldn’t be found. But he didn’t, couldn’t. Not again. He wouldn’t tell Poppa. Finley stayed with him.
When the sun got very low, he got up and followed Poppa and the girl.
*
And then Finley was back on the trail, finding herself on the ground. It was nearly dark, and Jones sat beside her as if he were waiting for a bus, untroubled. He was still shining his flashlight up into the sky. Why did he keep doing that? What did he think he was going to see up there?
“I thought you said you weren’t like your grandmother,” he said as she started to stir.
“What happened?” she asked. God, her head. It was pounding. Is this what it felt like? Is this what happened to her grandmother every time?
“You went boneless, kid,” Jones said. “You just—went down.”
There was a rock digging into her back. Jones had rolled up his own jacket and put it under her head. She struggled to sit. He took a mini-bottle of water out of his pocket. Had he had it all along? A big Boy Scout, always prepared. She cracked it open and drank a few sips.
“So what did you see?” he asked. She told him everything.
“The man and the girl went up that way,” she said, pointing north. “There was no vehicle. They were on foot.”
Jones stayed quiet, frowning.
“Someone else—a boy, I think—was supposed to come back and kill the brother and the father,” she said. “But he didn’t do it. They weren’t supposed to survive.”
Jones seemed to take that in, offered a slight nod. “I wondered about that. Why they had been left alive. Why didn’t he kill them?”
“He didn’t want to,” Finley said. “He said—he thought? Felt?—that he didn’t ‘want to hunt like Poppa.’ ”
The experience was already slipping a little, like a dream. Had she inhabited him? She wouldn’t have been able to explain it to anyone except someone else like her. And even then, there were no words to explain it. Either you understood or you didn’t.
“They couldn’t have gone on foot,” said Jones, with a shake of his head. “The search team went as far north as they could go into the woods. There was nothing up there.”
“They did,” said Finley. She was certain, though she couldn’t say why. Jones looked in that direction, as if he was considering.
“There’s something wrong with the kid,” said Finley. “He’s impaired—or something.”
Jones didn’t say anything, but he was watching her now, waiting for her to say more.
“What did they look like?”
It was fading fast. “I didn’t see the young man,” said Finley. “I was in him, seeing through his eyes.”
She described the old man, tall and thin but with a wiry strength. His face wasn’t clear, covered with white hair. He wore a hat that obscured part of his face.
“And what about the father and the little boy?” he asked when she was done. “The Gleasons?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “The faces were … fuzzy or something, hard to take in.”
Finley struggled for their features, something she could hold on to, but she couldn’t bring them to the surface of her consciousness. She just kept hearing the little girl, seeing her struggle to get free.
“She fought,” said Finley. “That’s why the man didn’t come back and kill the others himself. She fought him every step of the way.”
NINE
A man came in the morning. A stranger. At first, Penny wasn’t even sure what she was hearing, a loud crunching, the hum of something. Then she realized it was a car on the long drive. Penny felt a deep startle, a jolt of fear, as she stood at the pump. Then she ran to her hidden room next to the barn, as she’d been taught to do, and closed the door, watching through the gap.
The car pulled up slowly and came to a stop. A man sat at the wheel, staring down at something, then looked up and around him. She gasped as he got out of the car. It wasn’t her daddy, but he looked kind of like her daddy did—tall and strong, with clean clothes and shiny hair. He wasn’t dirty and wrinkled with a big gap in his teeth, and dirt under his nails, like Poppa.
He was more like the people she used to see in the world before. He had nice shoes and strong shoulders, shoulders you could ride on. And arms that hugged and never hurt. She knew she wasn’t ever supposed to show herself, to talk to anyone. If she did, Poppa said he would leave this place and find her mommy and daddy and kill them both. She knew he could do it. She’d seen him do things that she tried to forget as soon as she saw.
Even so, there was a voice in her head.
Show yourself to him, the voice said. Her feet moved, leaned toward the door.
Poppa came out on the porch, his filthy overalls hanging, his baseball cap askew. He had a face full of white stubble and cheekbones that jutted like cliffs and eyes that sunk like dark canyons into his head, and she knew he smelled rank when you got up close—sweat and cigarettes.
“Hey, there,” the clean man said. He lifted a hand, gave a nervous smile. “Sorry to trouble you. But I’m lost.”
“Where you headed?” asked Poppa. He could be so nice to people, even to Penny. He gave her Baby, the rag doll with the missing button eye that she slept with every night. Sometimes he rested his big hand on top of her head, like her daddy used to. They fed her, gave her clothes. They weren’t always bad.
“I’m looking for a town called The Hollows,” the clean man said.
“Yeah,” said Poppa with a squint and an understanding bob of his head. He stayed rooted on the porch. “You took a wrong turn back at the river. You need to shoot left instead of right, then it’s about twenty miles north.”
“The creek?” said the man squinting. “At the bottom of the hill?”
She moved quickly. There was a door in her room that led to the barn, one that couldn’t be seen from the outside. It was where they hid her when she first came here and the people were searching. She could hear them, but she stayed quiet, Poppa’s threats that he’d kill her, kill them, kill her family keeping her bound and gagged. Now, she pushed out that door. Bobo had showed her how. She walked softly, stood at the tall doors that led outside. Hurry. Now.
“You don’t have one of those computers?” Poppa said. His voice had taken on a darker tone. “With the directions?”
The clean man had a beautiful black car, a BMW, which she knew because her mommy always sighed when she saw one. My dream car, she’d say.
The man laughed a little, held up the device in his hand. “My phone died. We’re lost without technology these days, aren’t we? Literally.”
Poppa didn’t say anything. He didn’t like computers. It was the first thing he did; smash her iPod Touch.
“Well,” said the man, turning back toward the car. “Thanks—and sorry again to trouble you.”
Penny pushed the door and it emitted that long creak, just as she knew it would. She moved into the light even though she didn’t want to. The man saw her, his polite smile fading a little, brow wrinkling.
“Hey there,” he said. “Hey, little one.”
She didn’t say anything, just stared at him. She didn’t have a voice anymore, could hardly get any words out, as if they’d all dried up, blown away like leaves. He took a step toward her, the sun dappling golden through the trees. If only she could say: Help me! Take me home! She took a step closer, the words were right there.
But then a cartoon spray of red blew out of the clean man’s right ear. And his face went from worried to peaceful and blank as if he’d fallen asleep while standing before her. Then he slowly dropped to his knees. He wobbled there a moment, rocking, and fell to his side in a soft heap of himself. Penny’s throat closed up as she turned toward the porch and saw Poppa standing there with his hunting rifle, still aimed. Penny couldn’t breath
e, a strange rasping sound in her throat.
“Look what you did,” said Poppa. He lowered the gun and glared at her accusingly, as if she held the gun in her hand. “Look.”
Penny found sound—a deep wail, a thunderous scream from the ground beneath her that traveled up her legs and into her gullet. It exploded from her, scaring the birds from the trees, making the animals in the barn restless and afraid. She screamed and screamed and couldn’t stop, even when Poppa took the belt to her right there on the ground in front of the barn. The lashes were sharp and hot against her back and her thighs, a nasty, searing pain that only made her scream louder until everything went a blessed black.
Later when she came to, in the same place on the ground, Bobo was standing over her. The clean man and the beautiful car were gone, except for a long red stain on the ground where the clean man had fallen that was as big as Penny and still wet. She felt nothing, just an icy numbness.
“Come on,” Bobo said. “Get up.”
He had a chipped tooth and a slow way of talking. She struggled to stand and stumbled after him. Inside, he stripped off her shirt and ran it under the water from the faucet. He used it to dab away at her back, which burned like fire. But she didn’t scream or cry out from the pain. She used up most all the sound she had left. All that remained was a weak whimper.
Then he took off his sweatshirt and put it on her. It was way too big. He helped her into her cot and covered her with the blanket.
“Try to be good now,” he said. “They’re getting tired of you.”
They sky was growing dark outside and the air cool. Then he stood over her, watching; she tried to ignore him. She was always tense around Bobo; she never knew when he was going to be nice or be mean. Sometimes he was both. But tonight he just let her be, stood there a while like he was trying to think of something else to say.
“That’s going to be trouble—what happened today.”
Then he walked off. She didn’t sleep, just lay there thinking, listening as the whispering in the trees grew louder. They were trying to tell her something, but she didn’t know what. Finally, she got up from her bed and walked toward the window. She stood listening, the black space between the trees like a doorway she might walk through.
TEN
Merri and Wolf were not B and B people. Well, Wolf wasn’t. Mr. Adventure. He’d rather sleep in a tent in the woods, go to the bathroom in a chemical toilet, than socialize at breakfast with other travelers over fluffy flapjacks and fresh coffee. Merri always thought there was something nice about the whole enterprise, though. The quaint rooms in beautiful homes, a couple cooking in the kitchen, serving guests, telling stories, giving advice. There was a connectedness, a sincere friendliness to it that Merri found comforting. Kindness, courtesy, true warmth—it was disappearing all around, wasn’t it? Especially in the city. In elevators, on the trains, on the street, people didn’t even lift their eyes from the screens in front of them anymore. The world had become such a crowded, frenetic, and terribly lonely place.
She could have chosen the Hampton Suites off the highway that led up to The Hollows. It would have afforded her a certain amount of distance, some anonymity. Instead she chose Miss Lovely’s Bed & Breakfast, a charming little guesthouse off the main square. She pulled into the small, gravelly parking lot as she’d been instructed over the phone, shouldered her small tote, and walked toward the entrance.
“How long are you going to stay up there?” Jackson had wanted to know at breakfast that morning.
“I don’t know,” she’d answered. “Until …”
What could she say? Until she found Abbey. Or something that told her that she’d never find Abbey. “I’ll come home on Thursday nights to spend the weekends with you.”
He nodded, pushed his glasses up his nose. “Maybe we could come up on the weekends and help.”
Jackson, unlike Wolf, wanted Merri to go to The Hollows. He’d go with her if they’d let him. As much as he wanted Merri to stay, he wanted someone to be up there looking. Families don’t give up on each other, he’d said when they first came back to the city. We can’t just leave her. His words, the shattering of his voice, had stayed with her.
“We’ll see,” she’d said this morning, ruffling his bangs.
They wanted him to go back to life. Maybe it was unfair, unrealistic to expect him to do that. But it was even less fair to allow him to think that there was anything he could do for Abbey.
“Dad said you loaded the New York Times app onto your phone,” Merri said after she forced down a few bites of granola.
Jackson didn’t look up from his bowl, clinking his spoon against the edge.
“We talked about this with the doctor,” she said.
He nodded. “Bad things happen in the world every day,” he said in bored monotone, the tired repetition of a phrase he’d been forced to memorize but didn’t believe. “Good things happen every day, too. There are no patterns.”
Since the day in the woods when a strange man shot him and his father, then took his sister, Jackson had been obsessed with the news. They’d catch him on his computer with ten windows open, shuffling back and forth between CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Hollows Gazette, BBC. Murders, abductions, terrorist attacks, mall and school shootings. He had developed the idea that by monitoring world events, he could make sure that their family didn’t fall victim to any more tragedies.
“The worst thing can happen to any of us any day,” their family therapist had told Jackson. “We can’t control how events unfold, even through constant vigilance. Watching and waiting will only serve to rob us of the joy of the normal, good days.”
But Jackson had an idea in his head that he couldn’t get out. He claimed that he knew something bad was going to happen that day in the woods. He knew because when the news had been on in the morning, there had been a story about two missing children who had never been found. And he’d had a feeling.
“It makes me feel better,” he’d said, rinsing his bowl in the sink and putting it in the dishwasher. “To know what’s happening.”
“I don’t think it makes you feel better,” said Merri.
In fact, it kept him up at night. It fed his idea that the world was a terrible and unsafe place, which was why he wouldn’t leave the house without one of them, couldn’t be alone in the apartment. It was lucky that Wolf’s parents were so present in their lives; otherwise things would be really hard. Harder.
“It does,” he said, solemn, certain.
She didn’t know what to say. She didn’t want to argue right before she was going to leave. So she decided to drop it, walked around to the other side of the island to rinse her own bowl and put it in the dishwasher.
“Mom,” he said, careful, tentative. “I saw something online last night.”
This was the other thing. He thought that by scanning all the various local and international news sites that he might find something that would lead them to Abbey. It was compulsive behavior, not pathological exactly. He didn’t have OCD, per se, according to their doctor. More like a mild case of PTSD. But both Merri and Wolf were against medication for him if they could help it. Nobody knew better than she did what a rabbit hole that was.
“Jackson.”
“Just listen,” he said. He had that kind of nervous energy that he got these days. He grabbed onto the hand she was reaching toward him. “Somebody else went missing up there.”
She shouldn’t ask, shouldn’t encourage him. But if another child had gone missing … “Who?”
“A real estate developer,” he said. He already had his phone out of his pocket, was holding it up to Merri. “He’s been missing a couple of days.”
She looked at the article, squinting and holding it away from her because she wasn’t wearing her glasses. A man in his late forties had left his office in Manhattan for a meeting in The Hollows for which he never turned up. There was a photo—smiling, clean cut, bespectacled.
She handed the phone ba
ck to her son. “It doesn’t mean anything, sweetie.”
They stood eye-to-eye, which was the weirdest thing. Jackson, her baby, would probably be taller than she was in a few months.
“It gave me a feeling,” he said. “It made me think about Abbey.”
“Sweetie.”
“She’s alive, Mom.” He took his glasses off and a big tear fell down his cheek. She reached up to wipe it away, feeling a dump of anxiety.
“If she is,” said Merri. “I’ll find her. I swear it, Jackson. I swear.”
It was irresponsible to make promises like that. She couldn’t help it; she wanted it so badly to be true. She took him into her arms and let him cling, trying not to cling back.
*
Now, Merri walked up the porch steps at the B and B and into the foyer, where a pretty young woman sat at a desk. Strawberry blond hair pulled back into a high ponytail, freckles, a youthful sweetness—just the kind of girl Wolf would like. He liked them young and bubbly, the opposite of his uptight middle-aged wife. She pushed in a door and a little bell rang.
“Miss Lovely?” Merri asked.
The girl smiled warm and bright, getting up from her seat and walking over with outstretched hand. “I’m her daughter Peggy. Mrs. Gleason?”
“Yes,” said Merri. “Call me Merri.”
Her hand was warm, her energy so welcoming. No, she was too smart, too genuine for Wolf. She wouldn’t fit the bill as a fling. He liked his side dishes (as Merri came to think of them) a little empty, that way he could fill them up with himself.
“My mom’s in the kitchen,” said Peggy. “She wanted you to have something fresh for afternoon tea.”
Merri could smell something baking, the scent of cinnamon wafting on the air. There was a vibe to the place, the girl, the aromas that relaxed Merri in a way that she hadn’t experienced in a long time. The place wrapped itself around her like a blanket.
