They reached the top again, slowly. Ike opened the door and half-pulled her out into the warm room.
Tears filled her eyes. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘please help me get back to town.’
The wood stove cast fiery shadows on the wall.
His gaze landed on a white bakery box on the table. ‘Do you like cake?’
‘Fuck cake. Get me out of here.’
‘Lucas doesn’t approve of swearing.’
‘I don’t care what Lucas approves of. I could have died down there. I can’t do this anymore.’
‘You’ve got to care. Besides, there’s a reason for it.’
She glanced around the kitchen, looking for any kind of weapon. A knife sat on an old-fashioned butcher block beside the counter.
‘A reason for not swearing?’ she asked.
Ike nodded, walked over, and slammed his meaty hand over the knife. ‘Don’t even think about it, Katherine.’ She didn’t bother denying her intention as Ike pulled out a battered wooden drawer and shoved the knife inside it. ‘Weasel – the guy I told you about – used to cuss to make us think he was our friend. He traced us on our phones too. Lucas caught him at it.’
‘What did he do to the guy?’
‘Nothing. Yet.’ He moved closer to the box. ‘You must be hungry.’
‘Food’s the last thing on my mind right now,’ she said.
‘You’ll settle down once you’re comfortable.’ He seemed to force himself away from the container and closer to her. ‘I’ll bring you some pizza later.’
She paused in front of the wood stove to warm her hands and to think. She knew enough now to lead Richard to this place. Her job was over, her promise to him fulfilled. Yet nothing about this situation felt finished. Besides, she could barely walk without her right foot exploding.
‘Cake’s fine,’ she said. ‘As long as we take it with us.’
His face lit. ‘Good idea.’ He grabbed the box. ‘They don’t need to meet you until tomorrow. My quarters aren’t that bad. You’ll see.’
‘I’m not staying in that thing.’
He stopped in the middle of the room, the cake box flimsy in his hands. ‘It’s the only place you can stay.’
‘I want to go back to the shelter.’ That’s what she needed – a place away from there where she could call Richard.
‘You can’t do that tonight. Fog’s already thick as pea soup.’ He slowed his speech and squinted out the window as if looking for someone who would not be returning. ‘We need to talk more.’
‘Ike,’ she said. ‘I do not want to spend the night in that treehouse. Can’t I just crash on that chair over there?’
‘That’d be great, except Lucas will see you if he happens to come in, and we don’t have permission for that yet.’ He set the cake on the kitchen counter. ‘We can meet with him tomorrow. He’ll have a test for you. Once you pass it, you’ll have your own bed – a nice one too. Not like the cots in the shelters.’
‘What kind of test?’ Kit played for time as she tried to figure the fastest way out of there. The angrier she got, the more her courage grew. ‘I’m not jumping through hoops for him or anyone else, and that includes you.’
‘You won’t be jumping or anything else through hoops on that ankle. Don’t worry, though. I already gave Lucas some boundaries.’
‘Boundaries?’
He patted her arm, and she fought the impulse to jerk away. ‘No one will hurt you or make you hurt anyone else.’
‘Oh, that’s comforting,’ she said.
‘Watch the attitude.’ He let go of her, and his cheeks darkened into red. ‘You were homeless like five minutes ago.’
She glanced over at the mannequin in its silver-studded mask. ‘At least I wasn’t trapped anywhere.’
‘You’re not trapped now, and you’ll be even better off tomorrow.’
‘Not tomorrow.’ She needed to reason with him, yet nothing in this kitchen, from the out-of-season Christmas tree to the candy-cigarette-smoking mannequin, held any semblance of reason or reality. ‘If I left right now, what would you do?’ she asked.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘You have free will, as we all do here, but it wouldn’t be a wise move for you.’
‘Why not?’ She started toward the door and tried to ignore the pain shooting into her foot. ‘Would you send the others after me?’
‘Nothing of the kind. I’m not an animal.’ He walked over to the door, opened it, and let the winter wind rush in. ‘You really want to go out into that in the middle of the night?’
His voice sounded deceptively kind, and she wondered whom he was trying to imitate.
‘I don’t want to stay in your treehouse either.’
He nodded and didn’t change his expression. ‘At least it has a heater.’
‘I’ve been cold before. I’ve been cold all day, Ike, while you kept me prisoner down there.’
‘What don’t you understand about security in this place?’ he said. ‘It was for your own protection.’
‘Protection from what?’
‘From whatever Lucas might have done if he’d found you before I talked to him.’
‘That just proves my point. I’m better off away from here.’ She limped back to the counter, picked up the cake, and handed it to him.’
He threw it against the wall. The smells of chocolate and vanilla filled the room. ‘So you really won’t stay here after all I did for you?’
‘After that?’ She gestured at the mess dripping to the floor.
‘So I lost my temper. I threw it at the wall, not at you. Come on.’
‘No, thanks,’ she said. ‘I’ll try it on my own.’
‘With a bum ankle? You know there are snakes out there.’
‘Yeah, a few of them were in the basement too,’ she said. Then she glanced at the cupboard where Weaver’s photo had been. The dart had moved to his throat. She moved closer and saw tiny pricks all over the paper.
‘That’s Doctor Weasel. The dart was in his head earlier.’
‘We move it around,’ he said. ‘Come on. Take your best shot.’
She turned her back on Weaver’s passive smile.
‘Was he horrible to you?’
‘The worst. He put some of the kids on drugs.’
She backed up to the counter, and her hands collided with the stacks of shotgun shells. Some of them clattered to the sink.
‘No problem,’ he said, and started scooping them up. ‘We play a game with them sometimes.’
Kit wasn’t even going to ask. She tried to think of some way to strike a bargain with him.
‘This Weasel guy.’ She turned and gestured at the photo again. ‘If he did bad things, we should report him.’ She was careful not to sound like a responsible adult.
‘He has our records,’ Ike said. ‘They’d look for us, and if they look hard enough, they’d figure out we all left our homes. Lucas’s grandfather owned this place. They’d find us.’
‘But if the Weasel broke the law, he’s the one who’d be in trouble.’
He stacked the shells carefully on the counter. ‘Want to learn a new way to play Jenga?’
‘You know what I want, Ike.’ Her heart still beat in bursts. She didn’t intend to stay here another minute.
He glanced down at the shells. ‘OK, then. I’ll walk you to the road.’
They stepped outside, and Kit caught her breath against the cold. Floodlights cast a metallic hue to the front yard.
‘You serious about this?’ Ike asked.
‘I am.’ Kit reached into her bag again.
His eyes shone silver in the moonlight. ‘It’s not there.’
‘What?’ She whirled around and caught his smile. ‘You didn’t take my phone. Please tell me you didn’t take my phone.’
Ike looked down at his spotless shoes and then up at her, the light hitting his uneven features.
‘I couldn’t risk anyone tracing you here,’ he said. ‘It’s better for all of us this way.’
‘You stole my phone?�
� The fear and claustrophobia took hold of her again. She felt helpless, lost, unable to speak.
‘I did what I had to do. You’ll have it soon enough.’
‘Now,’ she cried. ‘Give it back, Ike. Now.’
‘Can’t take the chance.’ He pointed at the fog, which moved like a living disembodied thing toward them. ‘You can’t possibly go out in that.’
‘You said you’d walk me to the road.’
‘And then what?’ He stood next to her, and the heat from his body felt as falsely protective as the wood stove. ‘I don’t want you to get hurt, Katherine. Stay tonight, and tomorrow I’ll try to help you.’
The fog looked dense, and the longer she stared into it, the more rational he sounded.
‘But you stole my phone.’ She felt the power drain from her voice.
‘Only temporarily.’ He glared at the white mist so thick she could not see where the front entrance started. ‘Believe me, we reject technology for a reason here.’
She thought about the hours trapped in the basement, her sprained ankle. She couldn’t go through that again. She turned and stared up at the treehouse as she had earlier that day. Like the trees in the back, it was hidden within a haze.
‘If I did agree to stay there,’ she said, ‘would you give me my phone?’
‘I’ll do everything I can,’ he said. Then he flashed her that crazy grin again. ‘Katherine, you’ll die if you try to find your way back to town tonight with one bum ankle. You’ll get run over, raped, or attacked by an animal, and I can’t let you do that.’
‘Give me my phone, and I’ll stay,’ she said.
‘You know very well what would happen if I did that. You’re upset, and this place would be crawling with cops as soon as I left you alone.’ He spoke slowly as if explaining something to a child. ‘You forget that I’m in charge, not you.’
‘Not as long as I can walk.’ She looked at the impenetrable path and back at the relative safety of Ike’s tree.
‘Spend the night, and I’ll consider returning your property tomorrow.’
‘Shit,’ she whispered.
‘I told you, Lucas prefers we don’t use that kind of language. At the place we met, it was encouraged only to make us feel part of the pack.’
Tears filled her eyes. ‘I can’t do this, Ike. I’ll feel like I’m still locked up in that basement.’ She shuddered.
‘I told you I’m sorry. I know it’s creepy down there.’
‘You don’t understand. I was locked up as a child. I can’t handle it.’
His head jerked toward her. ‘Where were you locked up?’
She dug for the memory and failed. ‘I don’t know.’
But she had been alone and terrified, hidden away from everyone and everything. Kit knew that now. Something had happened to her. She couldn’t remember what, but she knew it was connected to her fear of being locked in.
‘We all have demons in our past.’
She gestured back at the house. ‘You ought to know. Do you make a habit out of throwing cake at the wall?’
‘So I got carried away. I don’t do that often. Come on. It’s crazy to keep standing out here when you can be safe.’
‘That is such a joke.’ She wiped her eyes. ‘Nothing about this is safe for either one of us, but you don’t get it.’
‘Don’t act like I’m stupid,’ he said. ‘We’ll talk later, I promise. Tonight, though, you just get some rest. I’ll look out for you.’
He turned toward the path leading to his tree, and the thought of it softened Kit’s anger and fear. No. She couldn’t trust him.
‘You swear you won’t come up there while I’m asleep?’
‘I won’t allow anyone else to come up either.’
She wanted to bolt, and she almost did. But the night around them seemed to grow darker and colder by the moment.
‘You’re basically keeping me captive here. And yet you claim that you’re protecting me?’
‘Because I am,’ he said. ‘The bad stuff, I can’t help. Security measures. But the rest is me, and I won’t let you down.’
She almost believed him. Yet she was terrified. She couldn’t walk. She had no way to contact Richard. If she hid up in that house of Ike’s, when the sun rose and cleaned the sky, she would have a chance to get out of there.
Richard would have called the police. People had to be looking for her. That’s what she had to think about. Not what might happen if Lucas found her there. Not how frightened her mom must be. They had both spent more than twenty years without knowing the other’s identity, and now her mother worried if they spent more than a couple of days without speaking.
Although Kit had feared the claustrophobia that had terrified her most of the day, the little man-made treehouse was as comfortable as a structure built for children to play in could be. Although the space was tiny, it was as obsessively clean and neat as Ike.
A large sleeping bag covered the beige plush carpet, and a quiet heater glowed red in the small space. He actually had electricity up here. Kit looked around for anything she could use as a weapon. On one wall hung a web like a cargo net used on a sailboat. She dug into it and took out clean, perfectly folded socks, a bottle of men’s cologne, and some bamboo oil hairspray. Another net hung on the opposite wall. She pulled off the towels covering it, and yanked out a cellphone. Not hers. She hit the emergency button. Nothing. The phone was as dead as the night around her. Kit considered tossing it and then shoved in her bag anyway.
Other than revealing how meticulous Ike was, the treehouse offered her little more than a place to sleep. As if she could. She looked at the plushy sleeping bag and thought about it. Although Ike had taken her phone, he hadn’t found the pepper spray. She reached deep into her jacket. Maybe she could get some rest if she held on to it all night.
‘Katherine?’ Ike whispered. He must be on the ladder.
‘I thought you were going to leave me alone.’
‘I brought you something.’
‘Then put it inside,’ she said.
‘Goodnight.’
In through the front came a paper plate with a folded napkin and two pieces of pizza on it. Kit reached for it and saw that next to them lay a neatly cut piece of chocolate cake.
She waited until the creaks on the ladder steps disappeared, and then put her head down on the floor and sobbed.
FIFTEEN
Kit Doyle had crossed him, and John Paul was pissed, not at her, but at himself for expecting anything better than that from her. So she and Richard McCarthy, her ex or whatever he was, thought they could find where the runaway kids met up in Fowler. John Paul guessed McCarthy was behind that, in a hurry to find his niece even if it put Doyle in danger. She should have known better, and she owed him more than just a recorded message on his phone.
On Tuesday after work, he helped Jasper knock down the last of the pistachios from the trees in Jasper’s orchard, completing the harvest that had begun the month before. They’d have to hull the nuts tonight before the moisture trapped inside stained the shells.
John Paul felt more like his old self when there was even the slightest physical challenge involved. Not to mention a bottle of scotch as payment. Besides, he liked helping Jasper work alongside the laborers he hired to pick from the remaining trees on his ranch.
‘Don’t beat my daddy’s trees to death,’ Jasper shouted from the ladder that made him look like a man on stilts.
‘Sorry,’ John Paul yelled back up at him. ‘I was thinking of my ex-old lady.’
A lie, and they both laughed harder than they needed to, the way they used to when they were younger, and the laughter came from inside.
Jasper whistled and ran a hand through his thinning hair, mostly gray now, just a few blond tufts remaining. Apart from his appearance, he was the blackest white man John Paul had ever known. This was what John Paul had needed to clear all of the static out of his brain: just Jasper, him, the sweet, moist fall air, and the towel-covered brooms above their h
eads. Every time John Paul struck the limbs and let the nuts rain down on the tarp beneath him, he felt a little better.
‘I think that’s good enough,’ Jasper said. ‘What do you say we go to your place and get better acquainted with Mr Ballantine?’
‘Not yet.’ John Paul slammed his broom into the branches again.
‘Oh, come on, man. The trees will be here tomorrow.’
‘First, I want to ask you something.’
‘About that woman?’ Jasper never called Kit Doyle by name.
‘About the missing kids.’
‘Same thing.’ Jasper came down the ladder and faced him.
‘No big deal,’ John Paul told him. ‘I just wondered if you heard anything new about those runaways.’
‘Imagine that,’ Jasper said. ‘I was just about to ask you if there’s anything new on our old case.’
‘Doyle’s right about one thing,’ John Paul said. ‘We need to find the kids before we worry about anything else.’
Jasper wiped the sweat from his wide forehead and sighed as if to indicate he wanted to say much more. ‘What’s this we shit?’
‘All right, then. I want to find the missing kids.’
‘Because that Doyle woman does, and because she’s pulled you into this.’ Jasper looked up at the trees again, as if measuring how much work remained. ‘You already know what a troublemaker this chick is. And she’s media.’
‘These days,’ John Paul told him, ‘you could say the same about me.’
‘No, man. She’s media in the worst way. You didn’t choose the career. She did, and she lives for it. She’s not always too kind to law enforcement either, in case you haven’t noticed.’
‘She pissed me off too at first,’ John Paul told him. ‘But she needs help. Those kids, if they’re still alive, they need help too.’
‘I don’t even know what to say to that.’ Jasper glanced toward the truck and then glared at John Paul ‘You’re walking a dangerous line, my friend. This chick is not reliable, and in case you forgot, when the dust settles, the black man is always the one left holding the bag.’
‘No shit?’ John Paul shot the look back at him. ‘You’re telling me how it is for the black man?’
‘Ironic, ain’t it?’ Jasper ran his hand through his pale hair, turned his back, and headed for the truck.
Goodbye Forever Page 12
