Most of the girls were swept off to school, and Kat cherished the relative quiet brought by the days. She sat in the family room, watching Ms Wilder through the kitchen doorway, shifting to keep her in sight as she moved to the stove or the little letter desk to pay her bills. Finally Ms Wilder looked over at her and said, ‘Honey, you’d better find something to do afore your eyeballs fall out,’ and Kat had skulked over to the bay window, plopped herself down, and stared at the road, reparsing her father’s last words to her, searching out hidden meanings and nuance.
You’ll think I won’t know how great you turned out.
There were so many gaps and spaces, and it was too late to ask him to fill them in.
You need to be tough. Your life is at stake. No one can know anything about you.
She was Katherine Smith from San Diego – they’d been there a few times for SeaWorld and Legoland, and she could describe the smell of the mist coming off the ocean. But so far no one had asked, not even Ms Wilder.
I will come back for you.
Nothing uncertain about that. Was there?
Staring at the occasional passing car, she strained her mind but couldn’t remember if her father had said anything about when he’d come back. Two weeks? Two years? When she was a teenager?
Kerry Ann, the three-year-old, was tattooing Kat’s knee with a drumstick. Kat brought the drumstick over to a broken xylophone and tried to play her the Orphan Annie song she’d practiced a lifetime ago with her piano teacher, but she couldn’t get it right, and besides, Kerry Ann was distracted chasing the cat.
When everyone got home from school, Kat tried to disappear into the walls. She sat at the bay window as the girls stormed around with their backpacks and hair bunchies and rambling stories. Her scalp itched from the chemical treatment; she had been pleasantly surprised that no one had made fun of her when Ms Wilder had combed the gunk through her hair on the first night. They’d all been there before.
Janine took note of Kat staring at the street and halted. She was pretty in a bug-eyed sort of way.
‘Don’t waste your time,’ she said.
‘He’s coming,’ Kat said. ‘He swore it to me.’
Janine pushed out her bottom lip with her tongue and applied a bright swath of lipstick. ‘You’ll learn,’ she said, and pranced over to join the cluster of girls at the pickle jar.
Their conversation washed over her, but she barely heard.
‘Maybe it’s a monarch.’
‘Ms Wilder says it’s the wrong season.’
‘Oh, ’cuz Ms Wilder knows everything?’
‘She knows more than you.’
‘There are lots of kinds of butterflies. Besides, monarchs are too Halloweeny. I hope it’s yellow instead of orange and black.’
‘Just as long as it’s not a ugly moth.’
It was as if Kat were underwater, the voices warped and distant. She pressed her nose to the glass. There was just her and the street and a caught-in-her-throat prayer that her father would show up with a stolen car and a smile.
During dinner Kat did everything not to cry. She chewed and swallowed, forcing food through the stricture of her throat. She tried not to meet anyone’s gaze, because she knew if she did, she’d break and start crying and then that’s who she’d be forever after: Katherine Smith, the Girl Who Cried at Dinner. So she directed her gaze at the twig and the cocoon. As the girls rose to clear – her job was silverware – she saw it pulse once.
That secret got her through after-dinner chores and teeth brushing. When she prepared for bed, she saw that one of the girls had stepped on her pillow with dirty feet. A dark smudge right in the middle. She padded down the hall. Ms Wilder was in the family room with the older girls, watching a Hannah Montana rerun – Jackson pouring cereal from the box into his mouth, half of it making it in.
‘Sorry to be trouble,’ Kat said, ‘but can I have . . .? My pillowcase is dirty. Can I have another one?’
A few of the girls tittered, and Kat’s face grew hot.
Ms Wilder said, ‘Honey, what we got is what we got.’
They turned their focus back to the TV. Kat stood there feeling stupid.
Ms Wilder said, ‘Something else?’
‘I . . . Do I get to go to school?’
Ms Wilder said, ‘We’re working on that.’
‘I wouldn’t complain if I was you,’ Janine offered. ‘Not about school.’
As Kat passed the kitchen, she peered in at the cocoon and saw a seam where it had cracked. She went back to bed with her heart pounding and flipped the pillow over so it was clean side up.
Lying there, she stared up at the bunks towering on either side of her. The younger girls were all asleep – Emilia even snored some – but Kat couldn’t so much as close her eyes. Sometime later she heard the TV zap off with a crackle, and there were footsteps and creaks and doors closing, and then there was nothing but the hum of the radiator.
Kat lay as long as she could and then slipped out and tiptoed into the kitchen. The cocoon was laid open, curled on the twig like a dead leaf, but she couldn’t see the butterfly anywhere. Slowly, it dawned on her that it wasn’t a butterfly at all, that what she’d mistaken for a fat bulge on the twig was really a newborn moth.
It was brown and fuzzy and very ordinary.
She thought about the pet lizard she’d wanted to keep and forgotten in the truck and how her dad had brought it in at night and how it had slid stiffly around in the jar. Before she’d really considered it, she had the pickle jar under her arm and was creeping out into the backyard, the night snaking up her sleeves and pajama legs and raising goose bumps. Pulled tight to the fence was a parked cop car, which made her feel safer even though there was no one inside. At the back of the lot, beyond the play structures, rose a line of thinning trees, and Kat couldn’t help but think about how much lusher the ones were that lined her own backyard.
She remembered her father’s words – I will come back for you – but she couldn’t remember his expression when he’d said it, and she realized that soon she might not remember his face at all. And then the words might blur, too – what he’d said and what she thought she remembered – and it hit her with horror that one day, one day she’d really become Katherine Smith of San Diego.
He’s coming, she told herself. He swore it.
She looked down at the pickle jar, her little secret that no one else had seen, the girls’ sneers returning: Just as long as it’s not a ugly moth.
It had spread its wings against the glass, and even here across the road from the streetlights she could see the tiny patterns, beige against chestnut, like a masterfully inlaid floor.
She thought about the disappointment and cackling that would ensue once the girls discovered that their butterfly was a common moth, and she ran her thumb across the sharp spots on the lid where breathing holes had been gouged with a screwdriver or a knife.
You’ll learn.
With a savage twist, she removed the lid and held the jar aloft. The moth hesitated there on the side of the glass, and then it flicked once and cleared the mouth of the jar. She watched it jerk its way around the nearest tree trunk, rising, rising, and finally losing itself against the pitchblack sky.
No more than twenty feet away, among the trunks of the trees, an orange dot flared to life.
She froze, zeroing in on the point of light, suddenly aware of the silence, her isolation, the charcoal air that had blanketed the shadows at the edge of the yard. The faintest crackle of burning paper rose above the evening hum.
A cigarette.
Now gone.
Suddenly sweating, one uneasy foot half set down on dirt, she squinted at the grainy air beneath the dip of the branch, unable to discern much in the gathered darkness by the trunk. Whoever was there, she had come right up on him. Her breathing had gone all jerky.
The ember burned back to life, illuminating a sliver of face – edge of chin, cheek, temple. And a uniform collar. A police uniform. The man went with the
cop car. She didn’t recognize his face and didn’t know what he was doing there in the dark.
No one can know anything about you.
The cherry died, the face vanishing back into the deep dusk.
Kat took a quick step toward the house, her sandal catching on a bulge in the asphalt. ‘Oh.’ She laughed nervously, trying for casual. ‘I didn’t see you for a long time.’
A voice came at her from the darkness, calm and low. ‘Longer than you think.’
The words froze her.
‘It’s okay, sweetie. I’m a cop. I patrol this area. Make sure everyone’s safe. You’re new here, right? What’s your name?’
She forced her mouth to work. ‘Katherine Smith.’ She managed a polite smile and took a step back, and then another.
‘Now, smile pretty.’ A camera flash blinded her.
She turned and broke for the house, breath firing her lungs. Something in the act of running stoked the terror, and she sprinted blindly, with abandon, her ankles throbbing, her chest burning. The trail up to her lawn, fifty yards away, might as well have been a mile. When she reached the rear door, she stopped, panting, and finally risked a look back. The yard was still.
An instant later the cop car roared to life at the curb. It pulled out, its headlights strafing the fence and casting a swath of broken light across the now-empty space between the tree trunks.
Chapter 56
First there was sensation. His head pulsing, filled with so much blood it seemed it might explode. Dust on his tongue. A slab of cushioned plastic shoved to his face, mashing his features to one side. A scent of decay, drawn into his mouth with each rasping inhale.
Then sound, strained as if through a filter. Water sloshing. Shuffling boots. William’s voice – ‘I got the technique down. I been rewatching that C-SPAN Senate inquiry. Why? What do you prefer?’
And then Dodge. ‘Fingers.’
‘Knuckle by knuckle, like Sharky’s Machine? No, we should give this a try. I mean, military-perfected, right?’
None of this seemed to be related to Mike; it was as though he were listening to an old-time radio show, fictitious characters discussing fictitious outcomes. He forced his eyelids to part. The movement, however minuscule, sent daggers of pain back through his head. But finally: sight. It was like being reborn, acquiring one sense at a time.
The room rotated on its axis for a while, and slowly it dawned on Mike that he was lying supine on a downward slant, his face turned to one side. It took a few minutes longer for his eyes to adjust to the dimness and sharpen the focus on the whitish blob five feet away, staring at him. It was Hank’s face, paled to an ashen white. His lips were bruised and mottled, puckered out as if for a last kiss.
His daughter’s name roared into his head: Kat. I have to scrub the memory of her location from my brain so no matter what they do to me, I’ve got nothing to tell them.
When he shifted, fire roared through his chest and arms. His bound hands were a knot in the small of his back and his head screamed. He twisted his wrists and noted through his mind-numbed stupor that the restraints rubbing against his raw skin felt like cloth. He appeared to be at a forty-five-degree angle, his knees visible above. His thighs burned, and his calves and feet were installed into a contraption of some sort. Gradually, he recognized that he was hooked into an incline sit-up bench.
The voices continued, a calm rumble. Dodge and William were behind him?
With great effort he rolled his head, the dark ceiling scanning by, and faced the other direction. He was in a big concrete box of a cellar, the only light thrown through the open door at the top of a splintering wooden staircase. Standing between Mike and the stairs, visible only as a slice of shoulder, cheek, forehead, was Dodge. Mike blinked a few more times, the cellar coming clearer, William resolving from the darkness at the big man’s side. They were huddled, conferring. Mike’s gaze pulled to a square of burlap spread on the concrete floor, various tools laid out like devices on a medical tray. Beyond the burlap was a large, old-fashioned dunking-for-apples wooden tub. The water filling it to the brim looked black and forbidding.
Dust trembled in the column of light thrown from the open door above.
‘Oh, you’re up.’ William came toward him, making lurching progress, an empty plastic milk jug floating in each hand.
Mike turned his head away, the only movement he could muster, bringing him again face-to-face with Hank. His sprawled body lay at an odd angle to his neck, a plastic drop cloth already cocooning his lower half. One foot protruded, the worn black dress sock incongruous here, in this context. The line of flaking white skin showing at Hank’s ankle underscored the awful tableau, the frailty of this life, of any life, which, despite all the sweat and work and best-laid plans, could end in a windowless cellar, half rolled in a strip of plastic sheeting.
Beside the body was another drop cloth, which Mike realized had been reserved for him.
When he turned back, Dodge loomed above him, winding a piece of terry cloth the size of a gym towel around his hand. His shirt was unbuttoned, curled back from a wife-beater worn to near transparency. William crouched, letting out a little pained moan, and began to fill the gallon jugs with water from the tub. The bubbles gave off a faint, comic-book repeat: glug glug glug.
‘Okay,’ Mike said, still trying to grasp what was happening. ‘All right.’
William stood, a bottle dripping in either hand. Staring up at the faces overhead – Dodge’s drawn back, glinting eyes set in the wide skull, and William, stooped to favor his left side, all wisps of facial hair and bunched lips – Mike felt something break open inside him and spill heat.
‘I heard about you years ago,’ William said, ‘from my Uncle Len. You were the one who got away. The Job. But Boss Man, he woulda let it lie. Finding you. He stopped looking. Stopped caring. Figured whatever life you’d made, you’d never put it all together. But then your buddy Two-Hawks kicked the hornet’s nest, found out about your name on that genealogy report. Boss Man caught wind, and guess what? You were back on the table.’
He neared. ‘These are glossies of Ted Rogers, the guy who did the stealing for Two-Hawks.’ He produced some photographs from a back pocket and held them for Mike to see. The soft pink skin of a middle-aged man in various forced contortions. William fanned through several taken within these same cellar walls before Mike turned his head and gagged. William leaned over him, breathing down. ‘My uncle worked on your dad some. What yer daddy went through? Made this’ – a shake of the photos – ‘look like a tickle. You know what? Why’m I talking so much when I can just show you.’
Horror came on like a toothed blade, sawing its way through the shock.
‘Okay now,’ William said gently, and Dodge let the small towel flutter down over Mike’s face.
Mike jerked in an instinctive breath, the towel adhering to his mouth. He sensed William lean in close, and the cloth grew wet and heavy. Water moved up his nose, a slow trickle at first, and then soaked through the terry, sealing out oxygen. The effect was instant, comprehensive. Mike jerked and screeched, shaking his head, but the towel clung to his face like a film. His lungs and throat spasmed uselessly. Just when he thought he might go out, the towel peeled back and he found himself gasping and gagging, Dodge staring down at him, the towel dripping onto the floor.
Mike’s shoulders cracked in their sockets, and he realized he’d pulled himself up to a sitting position. Also that he was screaming. He twisted off the backboard, one leg tangling in the pads, the bench rocking up on two legs and settling with the clop of horse hooves on cobblestone. He hit the floor with his shoulder and lay there, exhausted, pain blurring his vision.
Dodge leaned down and lifted Mike as easily as a grocery bag. He laid him back on the bench, manipulating his legs and torso with stern efficiency, totally absorbed in his task. He might have been threading a needle or tying his shoes. When Dodge moved Mike’s feet through the leg pads, Mike bucked, trying to get upright again, but Dodge placed a thum
b on his chest and flattened him down onto the decline backboard. Blood rushed to Mike’s head. His chest heaved against the pressure.
Dodge finished with Mike’s feet and eased his thumb off. Mike gasped for air, his ribs aching.
‘You got information you don’t want to tell us, right?’ William said. ‘So we need to extract it from you. It’s not gonna be easy – on you or us. It’s just something we gotta get through together.’
Mike made some garbled noise.
William’s eyes trembled back and forth, as if his gaze were wavering, though it was not. ‘Where’s Katherine?’
Mike said, ‘I don’t know where she—’
William went to a knee over the tub, grimacing. Glug glug glug – the sound of round two.
It was over now, Mike knew. He was going to die. He just had to figure out how to get them to kill him before his stamina gave out. He pictured Kat where he’d left her, sitting on that little bench in the foster home, her untied shoelaces scraping the ground. Please, Daddy?
William said, ‘We know you wanted to put her somewhere safe. Somewhere hidden. But Boss Man needs her, see, you and her out of the picture.’
‘Shep got your address from Graham,’ Mike said. ‘If I don’t check in with him, he’ll call the cops and head up here.’
William shook his head with disappointment. He nodded slightly, and the terry cloth slapped back over Mike’s head. Mike’s panicked inhalation dimpled the cloth into his mouth, up his nostrils, and then the slow bleed of water invaded his face, drowning him into contorted silence. His thighs burned against the pads, but when he tried to shove himself upright, the steady pressure of Dodge’s thumb smoothed him back down. There was fire and agony, the cloth suctioned to him like a sea creature, leaking a calm stream of water into him, shoving his own breath back down his throat.
You're Next Page 36
