The hotel staff remembered her at first glance, and appeared both apologetic and relieved when they informed her that Larry Arnold wasn’t scheduled to work that day.
Liz had dashed inside from the parking lot and her heart was beating fast enough to interrupt speech. “I don’t suppose—would it be possible—can you give me his phone number?”
The woman behind the front desk traded looks with the man. “Larry doesn’t really talk to strangers.” She rolled her eyes, then seemed to remember why Liz was asking, and quickly looked away.
“I can call him,” the male employee offered. He tapped a few keys on his computer. “No harm in trying. What do you want me to say?”
“Ask him—” Liz was attempting to catch her breath while wondering what it was about Larry Arnold that Grayson and the hotel staff all seemed to know. She supposed that she too had sensed something off about the man. “Please ask if he’d be willing to meet with me.”
She registered the fact that the phone had been answered, and that this appeared to surprise the desk clerk. Also that Larry Arnold seemed to be agreeing to her request.
Starbucks, she mouthed to the clerk. As she started to run again, she called over her shoulder, “The one in the next mall over.”
If Liz thought honestly about their lives, Paul had been preparing his family for something radical for years, getting them used to living without luxury or even the normal accoutrements of modern life—a constant stream of TV and Internet and video games—plus eating in a way that didn’t depend on the factory system, while the rest of the world went merrily along, driving and flying and buying, all things whose imminent crash Paul constantly predicted.
Only why had he taken the children without bringing her? It made no sense.
The parking lot radiated heat more intense than any Liz had felt yet. The asphalt had softened, giving way beneath her shoes, and making it feel as if the very surface of the earth was unsteady. Liz had to separate her shirt from her skin, like pulling off plaster.
On the rare occasions when she’d had cause to leave the Adirondacks, it always struck her how homogeneous the rest of the world appeared to be. Here she was in western New York, and aside from the thick, wet air, she might as well have been in California. In any strip mall she could eat the same featureless Italian or Chinese, buy the same item of clothing, solve the same first-world emergency, such as replacing a cell phone or repairing a chipped nail.
The coffee in Starbucks smelled the same too, although the refrigerated chill as Liz pulled open the door felt wonderful. The iced version of whatever she ordered would do nothing for her racing nerves, so Liz decided to force down a bite to eat as well. It occurred to her how easy life was outside of Paul’s reach. No scouting options for a healthier alternative, or asking what kind of oil was used for frying. What was the point of asking? It was always a bad kind. It could’ve been a Joni Mitchell song. Give me back my butter, lard, and suet. Assuming they came from a grass-fed, grass-finished animal, of course. All of the fats that scientists claimed were bad for you had turned out to be far more healthy than factory-bred canola or the toxic mélange that became vegetable oil.
Liz took a table looking out on the parking lot. Heat shimmered over the baking black expanse.
She recognized Larry Arnold as soon as he got out of his car, a midsize sedan Liz knew she wouldn’t be able to describe five seconds after seeing it. The sight of the bellhop’s wan face and sparse mustache still brought on a queasy pang. She half rose in her seat, then forced herself to sit back down until Larry Arnold entered the shop. He crossed to the table she occupied, hands fussing with something invisible on his slacks.
Liz stood up. “Thanks for meeting me. Can I buy you a coffee?”
“No, no,” the bellhop said. He paused. “Or maybe you should. Or I can buy myself one. I always worry that the staff will feel taken advantage of by people who don’t order anything. So many people do that these days. Plug their computers in, and peck, peck, peck, but never spend a penny. I suppose corporate is aware of this, of course. Figures it into their bottom line.”
“Right,” Liz said. She took a step toward the counter. “How do you take it?”
“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” Larry Arnold said. “Are you sure? There are so many choices. You can’t just know how you take your coffee anymore, light, two sugars. The sizes are strange and there are all those syrups and toppings …”
“Sounds like a latte would do,” Liz interrupted. She decided not to get into the complexities of iced versus hot.
She handed Larry his drink, warding off a meandering stream of thanks with one raised hand. Fear and stress had lent her a dreadful efficiency.
“The police said you saw my husband leave the hotel with our children.”
Larry was rubbing that spot on his slacks. He looked up when Liz went silent, as if surprised she had finished speaking so quickly.
“Yes, I did,” he replied. “I know I should’ve spoken up sooner. But I didn’t understand how the children could be missing with your husband standing right there. It’s like something on TV. Only on TV, the person who sees something—that’s me—says so right away. But look what that leads to. Someone says something back. And then you have to—”
“It’s all right,” Liz said, in as soothing a tone as she could muster. She needed Larry calm and focused, but the man seemed likely to short out at any moment. “You did the right thing in the end. Can you just—can you tell me what happened?”
Larry didn’t meet her eyes. “I was coming off my shift. The night shift isn’t easy, but it lets me watch all my shows. I hear they have something that solves this problem now—you can watch when the show isn’t even on …”
The man gave no sign of stopping, let alone proffering the information she needed. Liz understood the hotel staff’s compunctions. She wondered how questioning could possibly have gone for the police.
“My husband,” she prompted.
Larry looked up, lip puckered so that his wispy mustache drew down. “Oh yes,” he said. “I thought it was strange because children aren’t usually up so late. I don’t have any children of my own—I was never even married—not because I wouldn’t have liked to be, but because I never met anyone. Not that I didn’t meet anyone, of course, just not the right—”
Liz’s exhalation of breath must’ve been louder than she intended.
“But that’s another story,” Larry said with apparent effort. “What I meant to say is that it jumped out at me how sleepy those children looked and I also wondered why they were being taken outside through the side exit. Instead of through the automatic doors in front, I mean. I would’ve used the front ones myself, except that I was coming back from my last cigarette break and they don’t like guests to see us smoking near the entrance.”
His pause didn’t give Liz time to interject.
“I know how unhealthy cigarettes are for you, but I don’t have many bad habits. Well, sitting too close to the television and—”
Liz was starting to feel a little desperate. The coffee sizzled in her veins and she had the urge to grab Larry’s thin arms and give them a shake. She might’ve done it, except that she suspected the act would only provide him more to chatter about.
She settled for speaking over him. “Mr. Arnold! Can you tell me anything else you saw? After my husband walked the kids out. Did you follow them to the parking lot?”
He stared at her blankly for enough time that his silence registered as alien.
“I might have,” Larry said. “I might’ve done that, but only to ask if they needed any help. That’s what I figured, you see. That they’d forgotten something in the car and were going out to get it. Maybe the man didn’t want to leave the children alone in the room. Who knows what can happen these days, right?”
Oh yes, Liz thought with more than a shard of hysteria. Anything can happen these days.
“And it certainly would be my job to help them with their things, assuming they
wanted help. That’s what a customer associate does, you know, among other tasks, but you never want to be intrusive, people get annoyed—”
Again, Liz spoke loudly, trying to come up with a question that would corral the man, get him to stay on point. “But you didn’t? Ask them if they needed help?”
“No,” he said. “I assumed that was what the other person was there for.”
Charges ignited all over Liz’s body. She looked down at her skin. “Other person? Do you mean a woman?” Thinking, You pathetic cliché. An affair? That’s what this is all about? And then, Who the hell do you have caring for my kids?
But Larry was shaking his head, and when he spoke, the information she needed came out before his slipstream of associated thoughts.
“No, not a woman. A man.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Larry Arnold’s description of the man was too generic to mean anything. Tall, dark-haired. She wondered if the police had done anything with it despite knowing this could all be chalked up to a domestic dispute.
The two words were a hiss in her mind. Domestic dispute. How meaningless—utterly lacking in descriptive power—they were compared to the disaster that had befallen her.
It registered vaguely that Larry was talking again, and had been for some time.
“… better be getting home.”
Liz blinked away a scrim of tears. “Yes. Thank you. I’m sorry I disturbed you on your day off.”
“I’m lucky to have a house to go to. That hasn’t always been the case. I used to be homeless, you see. As they say, we’re only one paycheck away from—”
Perhaps he noted her tears for he seemed to forcibly wind himself down, wrapping his arms around his body and giving a shake of his head. “That doesn’t matter right now. But I hope you get back to your house soon, too.”
Liz looked up sharply, and Larry flinched. “Sometimes I say the wrong thing. My doctor says I talk too much because I’m afraid of saying the wrong thing. If I stuff all the words in there, he says, then at least some of them will be right—”
Liz rose abruptly from her seat, and the bellhop took a step back.
“I’m sorry,” he said, voice rising. “My doctor says if I say I’m sorry, then nobody should take offense—”
Liz forced her voice down. “No, no, it’s fine. I appreciate everything you’ve done.”
He paused, his back to the counter. A few people looked up from their drinks and their Wi-Fi. Liz thought about how Larry Arnold merged topics, the silkworm threads of words he wove.
He was going home, he hoped she got back to her own house.
“Mr. Arnold?” she said suddenly. “Did you hear anything the children or those men said as they were walking out to the car?”
He was trying to meet her gaze.
“About where they were going maybe?”
He began shaking his head, slowly back and forth, and Liz let her head fall. “No,” she said. “Okay. Thank you.”
“They weren’t talking.” The direct reply came with obvious effort. “I’ve never heard any group of people be so quiet in my life.”
Liz didn’t respond.
“It was too quiet,” the bellhop added. “I had to say something. I told them to have a nice trip. I love going on trips myself. I once went to—” He let out a ragged breath, cutting himself off. “And then the little girl did say something.”
Liz kept herself from moving too fast, approaching him with urgency.
“She said she was going to be glad to see trees again.”
In the bellhop’s words, Liz found her daughter, and what she said indicated that Paul and the children were headed back to Wedeskyull. Where Paul lived, worked, made his life.
Trees were Ally’s deepest association to home, the thing she loved best. For fruit-picking, climbing, and growing shade-loving plants. Ally had missed the trees as soon as they’d left.
It at least gave Liz a place to start.
Each passing mile was a relief, and Liz realized how much she also needed the Adirondacks, in all their towering glory and hidden pockets of land. The children, too; Ally wanted her trees. Please let Paul have understood that, and worked it into his thinking.
It occurred to Liz to call the police as she drove. Not Grayson, or anyone on the Junction Bridge force, who couldn’t do anything anyway. But if this was a domestic dispute, then didn’t Liz’s hometown police force have jurisdiction? Shouldn’t they at least be made aware of the trouble brewing within their mountain walls?
“Chief Lurcquer.”
“Tim,” Liz said. “It’s Liz Daniels.” After a moment she added, “Liz Burke.”
The silence over the line went on longer than any official pause. Liz took the phone away from her ear, checking to see if the call had dropped.
Finally the chief spoke. “Liz. It’s been a while.”
She was blinking through tears again, the road blurring before her. Tim Lurcquer had never been an emotional guy—did any boys in high school have feelings?—but his voice brought her back to a different time, when she could rely on other people to take care of her, and also when there wasn’t all that much to lose.
“Is everything all right?”
“No,” Liz said. “It’s not.”
She pulled onto the sloping shoulder so that she didn’t lose control of the car.
She reentered the road after finally reaching a break in her story, the jagged place she’d come to that had made her decide to return to Wedeskyull.
Tim’s voice became brisk and businesslike. He asked if she was using a headset once the engine noise gave away the fact that she was driving. Then he said, “Nothing really seems to add up here, does it?”
“No,” Liz said. Then she actually laughed. “I would say not.”
“Cops tend to be masters of understatement.”
Liz sniffed in raggedly, laughter evaporating. “I think that cart might’ve preceded the horse. You were understated long before you became a policeman.”
Years disappeared between them, like the implosion of a building.
“Maybe I was,” Tim said. “So your husband … what? Meets an old buddy from his hometown and …”
Tim trailed off at about the same point Liz’s conjectures had. An old friend that Liz had never heard about? And why would Paul have left with him, much less taken the children with them?
“Seems a strange thing for two guys to do.” Tim hesitated. “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but could your husband be gay?”
Another of the increasingly far-fetched scenarios Liz had already come up with, although she had immediately dismissed the possibility. Of all the things Liz was doubting—whether Paul ever really loved her, what kind of world he intended to live in—the charge between them wasn’t in question. Paul was an amorous man who demanded ardor in return.
It seemed odd to hear Tim raise the possibility; he had never been the most worldly of guys. Then again, Liz supposed she wouldn’t want to be judged by her teenage self either.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Partially because if he were, I doubt he would’ve felt the need to hide it, or do something this extreme. He probably would’ve expected me to … adjust … and we’d all be acting like one big blended family by now.”
“Okay,” Tim said. “What’s the other part?”
“What?”
“You said Paul’s assumption of tolerance was partially the reason. What’s the rest?”
The road changed, swinging left into a cradle of low, huddled mountains. She was in the foothills now, and even though they made something inside her relax and give way, the words she was about to say imposed a totally different state. Liz felt suddenly chilled, and she let down the window so the air outside could warm her.
“The rest is that I went out to that farm, Tim. My father-in-law’s place. And I saw things. It’s not just business as usual there, Paul’s boyhood home. It’s—”
Sinister was the word that leapt to her lips, though she imme
diately quashed it as melodramatic and overblown. She didn’t want to be that type of woman, scared of spiders and going out alone at night. But she could still feel the unnatural give of that earth beneath her feet, the cold, steely walls of the bunker.
She reached into her pocket and touched the folds of Matthew’s note.
“There are things left unsaid there,” Liz said at last. “Reasons for Paul’s long absence—and for his coming back now—that no one would tell me.”
“I see,” Tim said, and she realized how useless what she was saying would be to any kind of investigation. “But you said your …” He cleared his throat. “… family isn’t there.”
She glanced at the clock on the dash, aware of how much time Tim was spending with her. “I can only imagine they went home. That’s where I’m going to start.”
“Seems a good bet.” His agreement brought on a renewed flush of hope. Then Tim added, “I can think of one or two things to try on my end.”
“Really? Like what?” Liz asked quickly.
“I don’t want to get your hopes up. This is a strange situation, and anything I do is going to be after-hours, old friend to old friend.”
“Thank you,” Liz said. “I really appreciate that.”
“Let me take down some information. And then give me a day, maybe two.”
“Okay,” Liz said. She rooted around for words. “Just you? I mean, we—you—couldn’t get help from the FBI?”
“The feds step in if a kidnapping crosses state lines. But fortunately, there’s no suggestion that’s what you’ve got.”
Liz was silent.
“Do you hear what I’m saying?” Tim said, his voice gruff. “Focus on that. You’ve got some time on your hands. I think it’ll go down easier if you remember that hard as this is, your children are with someone who loves them.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
A clogging sense of dread began to build in Liz the closer she got to home. After her children, it was the worst thing Paul could rob her of: her love of Wedeskyull. But as the road wound into the mountains, they seemed for the first time to present a barrier, six million acres of hiding spaces. Tree-studded walls enclosed her car, bearing down.
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