Among Prey

by Alan Ryker

  She went online and searched previous issues of the paper, which gave descriptions of what the girls had been wearing when they were last seen. Amber found what she knew she’d find: they’d been wearing outfits just like the ones Bobby had given his dolls.

  And now the mud drawn on the clothing made horrible sense. The black and purple around the necks. Oh God, he’d practically been confessing to her. She imagined looking into his face as he left the store each time, feeling again that something was passing between them. Was it an expression of contrition, or a taunt? Did he want someone to catch him? His face, which was so inscrutable even in real life, expressed nothing to her, either in her memories or in the photos.

  The bodies of the girls hadn’t been found. Everyone hoped they were still alive. But if the tale Bobby was telling through his dolls was true, the community was about to be devastated.

  As the pieces of the puzzle twisted, turned, and placed themselves, an image coalesced. Then Amber remembered the photos Bobby had stolen from the wall on several occasions.

  Amber leapt up, grabbed her keys and headed out the door. She turned back and, with shaking hands, collected the photos of Bobby and put them into her purse before she left for LYLAS Dolls.

  * * *

  Bobby was a monster. Somehow, because of her bleeding heart, because of her fear of being prejudiced, because of her love of the underdog, she had missed what was so obvious: that Bobby Milton murdered little girls. Standing in front of the wall of photos, flipping through the digital camera, she knew this without a doubt. She had taken his round, empty face as innocent, when the blankness was really the emotionless visage of a sociopath.

  Amber found the photo preceding the space where one of Bobby’s photos had been on the wall, then found it on the camera. The next photo was of Veronica Gordon, who’d gone missing three weeks before. She matched another photo on the wall to one on the camera, then flipped one over and found a photo of little Madison, who’d disappeared a month ago. She found the third photo Bobby had snatched from the wall, and it was of another missing little girl. Amber didn’t know if he was trying to erase them more entirely from the world, if he was taking a trophy, or if anything at all logical was going on inside that round skull, but every photo he’d stolen had been of a missing girl. Maybe the entire situation was just an example of the one bad habit his nurse couldn’t break him of: taking whatever he wanted.

  That was the last bit of evidence she needed. Right there from the store, Amber called the police. When they arrived, she showed them the photos of Bobby, described Bobby’s strange ritual of marking the dolls, and showed them the images on the digital camera of the photos Bobby had snatched of the missing little girls. The police were tall and mustachioed and wore matching blank expressions that Amber interpreted as disbelief.

  Before they left, Nora arrived, looking frazzled and angry. As the police questioned her, she kept throwing Amber looks that said that everything was her fault.

  “We can’t have the store associated with this,” Nora told the police, who were unmoved and continued their questions.

  Then the manager of the entire strip mall stepped through the door of LYLAS Dolls. The police soon determined he knew nothing about the situation, and continued talking to Nora.

  “What’s going on?” Patrick asked Amber. Amber had always found Patrick vaguely creepy. He was exactly the sort of person she would expect to find managing a strip mall.

  “I think the man who’s been taking all those little girls has been shopping here.”

  “Oh my God. Who?”

  “Bobby Milton.”

  He squinted his eyes and smacked his lips in thought. Amber described Bobby to him, knowing that even if the name were forgettable, the man himself wasn’t.

  “Bobby Milton, son of George Milton?”

  “I don’t know. Who’s that?”

  “The owner of this entire strip mall.” Patrick didn’t shout, but the way he cut the sentence into single words and then cut each word into single syllables struck Amber like a shout. His lips disappeared and his eyes bulged. “What the fuck did you do?”

  Whereas he’d previously been on the periphery, Patrick inserted himself right into the conversation with the police, trying to convince them there was no need to go talk to the Miltons, and if they did, there was no need to bring up the store.

  The police disagreed. They gave assurance they wouldn’t reveal any names, but considering every piece of “evidence” being brought forth involved the store, it couldn’t go unmentioned.

  Amber sank into herself. This was too much. She found herself frozen in her own body, shoulders slumped, staring at the floor. Her hand twitched its rhythmic twitch against her bag. Her mind was no longer on the girls, or Bobby, or Carol. It only had space for a desire for pills and to pull a blanket over her head and not come back out for weeks. As her tunnel vision tightened, she considered trying to control her anxiety, but how? This was real. She was panicking because she had good reason to panic.

  She fell into a chair against the wall and gave herself over to the attack. If anyone noticed, no one cared.

  * * *

  Being a Christian establishment, LYLAS Dolls was closed on Sunday, which was good, because Amber didn’t think she could have managed the effort even to call in sick.

  A gap in her curtain let light into the room, right across her pillow and into her eyes. The day was bright and horrible. Because she had to get up to close the curtain anyway, Amber made her way to her living room couch with a blanket draped over her head and pinched shut at the neck. Curled into a ball, she watched cartoons on Nickelodeon, which she found oddly comforting for a woman her age.

  Her phone rang. She could hear it inside her purse. She didn’t go get it. But the ringing set her heart pounding, and the pounding wouldn’t slow. And her Xanax was in her bag. In fact, she thought she heard the phone buzzing against the pill bottle. A minute later, the voice mail chime sounded, sending a lightning bolt of adrenaline through her and sending her for the pills.

  She shook three into her hand and washed them down with the flat rum and Coke from the previous night, ignoring those weird little islands of foam the melted ice left behind. Then she snuck up on herself and turned the phone on without thinking about it.

  It had been work, and they had indeed left a message.

  She turned the phone to speaker and listened to it.

  “Amber, this is Nora. We need to talk as soon as possible. We’re going to have to let you go. Business is too slow. But you should qualify for unemployment. Get back to me soon.”

  Good. Amber was glad Nora didn’t leave it at “we need to talk.” Now that she knew she was fired, she wouldn’t have to talk to them. She knew why she was being “let go,” but she wouldn’t fight it. She was glad. She didn’t know if she would have been able to bring herself to return to work anyway. Amber would happily take a few months of unemployment. After that, who knew?

  She grabbed the newspaper from the coffee table, the one with the photos of the missing girls. She’d done the right thing. It was a fucked-up world, and sometimes, when you did the right thing, you were punished as much as the people who did the wrong things. But Bobby Milton wouldn’t hurt anyone else. That’s what mattered.

  The Xanax was kicking in. Amber could feel herself going numb, not physically, but emotionally. That was good. She tossed the paper aside, curled back up and watched cartoons.

  The Nurse

  Nursing wasn’t Carol’s calling. She hadn’t grown up with any particular desire to care for people. In fact, she had enjoyed working at the cardboard factory, making boxes and store displays and not having to give a shit. Working beside her sister, Julie, gabbing for eight hours, and then leaving her work behind her wasn’t a bad life.

  But then their mother got sick and didn’t have the money to get the type of care she needed. The constant kind. She ended up in a horrible nursing home, and though neither Carol nor Julie felt a huge amount of pi
ty for the bitter, old woman, they felt a responsibility they couldn’t shake.

  So they discussed the situation, even though it was pretty clear to Carol from the get-go who would be picking up the slack. Julie was a single mom. Carol loved her niece so much that she couldn’t even feel any anger. She didn’t have children. Didn’t have anyone except Julie and her little lady Lacee. So she started spending her nights at the local community college, and in two exhausting years she had her LPN.

  The irony of becoming a nurse to be able to pay someone else to take care of her mother was not lost on Carol.

  At the school’s placement fair, a number of potential employers courted Carol. She didn’t have the best grades in the class. They were solid, but she knew it was her bearing that attracted them. The same bearing that put off men, she laughed to think. Many of the young girls she’d studied with were tender, delicate little things. They wanted to help people. They were the types of girls who’d tear up at the sight of a cute puppy. She liked them. It was impossible not to like them. But she figured the industry would harden half of them and break the rest.

  Carol appeared to be built of some sort of wood, like the roots of one of those lone, twisted trees you see standing in the middle of some sun-blasted pasture. Physical work had hardened her. She had the handshake of a gorilla from years of folding corrugated cardboard. And the humor and tenderness within her only ever surfaced for Julie and Lacee. Most people wouldn’t have believed it existed in her at all, like believing a tender sapling still lived at the center of that gnarled tree.

  So they ate her up. But most of them just weren’t offering enough money. Yeah, they offered at least twice what she made at the cardboard factory, but that wasn’t enough. Until she sat down to talk to a man recruiting for a home care coordinating company.

  “Here’s the deal. I haven’t told a single one of your classmates about this job, because I don’t think any of them can handle it. Maybe Jim over there. He’s a big boy. But our client doesn’t want a big boy. They’ve got a big boy, and he gets along better with women. Finds them soothing.”

  The recruiter explained the situation. A very rich family had a mentally handicapped son returning to their home at age eighteen from the institution. He was put there because he nearly killed a boy who lived down the street when that boy played an impromptu game of keep-away. After years of treatment, the government determined the young man not to be a threat as long as he received the proper care. Luckily, his parents were wealthy enough to ensure the proper care. The young man was docile and introverted, and as long as someone could get past the fact that he was the size of two large men, caring for him would be the most lucrative babysitting job in the world.

  The parents didn’t want a revolving cast of nurses. That meant thirteen-hour days, at least five days a week. Carol could continue living in her home if that made sense to her, but the family would prefer it if their son’s nurse lived on-site, and would provide a complete suite of rooms, including a kitchen and bathroom.

  “Are you interested?”

  She was. He showed her the salary, and she could have fallen out of her seat. She had to stifle laughter. It was a huge sum, especially considering that if the situation was endurable, she wouldn’t have to pay rent or utilities. She could place her mother in a good home and still save enough to retire early.

  After Carol signed paperwork saying she wouldn’t speak about the family, and that she wouldn’t arrange a deal behind the placement coordinator’s back, they arranged an interview with the family.

  * * *

  As Carol drove up to the house in her old beater sedan, she saw the family did indeed have money. Yes they did. She’d actually heard of the Milton family, and she’d noticed the enormous house before.

  Not a house, an estate. It was probably called an estate.

  She buzzed at the front gate and was let through.

  Carol, the Miltons and the recruiter sat out beside the pool and sipped sodas. Bobby was indeed a big boy. The biggest boy Carol had ever seen. Pro-wrestler big. And not just pro-wrestler, but monster-big. Big enough to terrify the heels and the faces alike. If he’d had the mental capacity, Bobby would have been a shoe-in to work for Vince McMahon. He could have teamed up with the Undertaker.

  That thought actually warmed Carol a bit to Bobby. Before her dad died, they’d watched wrestling together. She didn’t pay too much attention anymore, but she always turned the TV on for it, even if she crocheted or read a magazine and only looked up when the crowd erupted.

  Bobby sat silently, staring at the concrete and occasionally sipping his Coke. He kept looking over to a handheld video game his parents apparently weren’t letting him play. Carol would have been interested to see him do it, since she couldn’t imagine him manipulating those tiny controls with those big mitts.

  Bobby’s parents, George and Sarah Milton, were boisterous, pleasant people in their late fifties. George hadn’t come up rich. He’d made some lucky real-estate decisions early on, and then gone on to make a lot of smart ones. Sarah had also been a successful businessperson. Right there, poolside, at their first meeting, George explained to Carol that he’d given up on finding a soul mate—and he actually said “soul mate”—before he met Sarah at a real-estate development conference in Orlando.

  “Every other woman I’d dated since I made my money had been a gold digger. And not just greedy, but empty-headed. They brought nothing to the table. My mother was a loud, funny, intelligent woman. I wasn’t interested in marrying a submissive trophy-wife half my age.”

  At that, Carol flicked her eyes over to Sarah. If the mention of her age had ever been insulting to her, it wasn’t anymore. She’d probably heard the story a thousand times, if George felt comfortable telling it to a potential employee they’d known for all of fifteen minutes. Then Sarah chimed in, and Carol understood it was a full routine.

  “Good thing that wasn’t what he was looking for, because he didn’t get it!”

  “No, sir! Sarah’s a firebrand. She was at that conference because she’d built a successful subcontracting business. Imagine that. A woman, the CEO of a subcontracting business setting straight a bunch of macho construction workers every day. I knew it right then that she was the one for me.”

  “I required some convincing,” Sarah said.

  George laughed. “She’s not joking! I had to beg her for a date. She thought she had guys like me figured out.”

  “So I was wrong once. Nobody bats a thousand.”

  They went on about themselves a bit longer. Every so often, their housekeeper would come out with cold sodas. Eventually, they got around to asking Carol about her situation. She could tell what sort of person these people wanted her to be. She could tell why the recruiter had thought she’d be a good fit. She watched him and the Miltons as she spoke, emphasizing the points that got the best reactions. They liked hearing about her work life. She knew it sounded authentic. They really liked hearing about her dedication to her mother, sister and niece. The Miltons looked like bobble-head dolls as she spoke of her responsibility to care for her mother, and her love for her niece and her understanding that her sister wasn’t able to help.

  With that, they began to talk about terms of employment. The Miltons described Bobby’s medical condition. Part of his fifth chromosome was missing, probably due to Sarah being almost forty when she conceived. Bobby couldn’t speak, despite understanding what was said to him if he were spoken to like a child.

  George and Sarah led Carol on a tour, while the recruiter stayed behind to start the paperwork. They walked as they talked. The Miltons showed her a kitchen big enough to feed an army and extravagant enough to host a cooking show. There was a huge white formal living room with a high ceiling arched over many couches, chairs and coffee tables, a concert grand piano, and a fireplace that could have been a room in its own right. This was in addition to a more casual family room and a large theater room.

  Carol began to lose track. She paid more atte
ntion to the Miltons themselves. Once they stood, she saw where Bobby had gotten some of his size. They were both over six feet tall, though George was slightly taller. And they were the sort of people who could have been shrunk down and still looked normal. Stocky, even. They were both broad-shouldered, though ample hips and a deep bosom feminized Sarah’s figure. With the right helmets, they could have been Vikings.

  They explained that Bobby’s genetic condition had caused him to never go through puberty, and that he wouldn’t be so tall if it weren’t for the brain tumors, one of which was on his pituitary gland. It had eventually been removed, along with another that was endangering his life. The tumors occurred most often during childhood, but he still had regular MRIs, which he endured stoically. Carol liked that the Miltons seemed proud of Bobby. She’d come into the situation expecting a rich family wanting to hide their embarrassment, but that wasn’t the case at all.

  Carol began paying attention again when they reached Bobby’s rooms on the second floor. He had his own sunny dayroom, with couches, a table, a big entertainment center, and lots of toys.

  “He loves those Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. I feel silly just saying the name,” George said. “We were afraid they were too violent for him, but he never acts up. His therapist says that if they make him happy, then let him watch them.”

  George grew silent for a moment, pressed his lips together, then glanced quickly at Carol. It was a shockingly bashful expression from such an extroverted man. “You heard about why Bobby was institutionalized?”

  “A bit.”

  “That neighbor boy would torment Bobby. Take his toys and run off with them. He wasn’t even supposed to be here; he’d climbed the wall. We’d taken such care with Bobby for so many years, and then that little bastard nearly gets him locked away for life.”