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Drawn

Page 25

by James Hankins


  “You’re dead, bitch,” he said in a wet, ruined voice, the likes of which Alice had heard before only in nightmares.

  They had to get away from there. She turned back to the boy, who had stripped the tape from his ankles and was pulling the last bits from his mouth. When his lips were free, he said, “My backpack?”

  “What?”

  “My backpack.”

  “Forget it,” Alice said.

  “No.”

  Alice shook her head angrily and pointed at the house. The boy jumped from the trunk and sprinted to the house. He leaped up the stairs, darted through the front door, grabbed the backpack from the hallway floor, and raced back toward her.

  The man had rolled onto his back.

  The boy had almost reached her.

  She should run.

  No, she should finish off the driver.

  But she couldn’t do that. She wasn’t a killer.

  She’d seen this movie a hundred times. The terrified coed has the chance to deliver the coup de grâce but instead chooses to run, only to be pursued relentlessly for another harrowing half hour until either she or her attacker is finally dead.

  She should hit him again with the tire iron. And then again and again until there was no chance he could follow them.

  “Kill him,” the boy said as he skidded to a stop beside her, the backpack slung over his shoulder.

  She turned back toward the man and wasn’t really sure whether or not she was going to do it as she raised the tire iron above her head with both hands…but it was too late. The man was already pushing to his feet. Her chance to end this quickly was gone. She’d never get a clean blow to his skull now, much less half a dozen. She had time for one more shot, though, and given the guy’s size, she thought they’d need it. So she took one last swing and brought the tire iron down, aiming it for the man’s head but landing it solidly on his shoulder. The tool slipped from her grip and the man grunted savagely as he fell, tumbling toward her. He hit the ground and rolled into her lower leg and she cried out as her ankle shrieked in pain. She thought it might have snapped. The man groped blindly with muscular arms and big, meaty hands as Alice pulled her leg from beneath him and hopped back a step on one leg. She knew that if he got ahold of her, it would be over. He’d hang on, drag her to the ground, and snap her neck. She tried to run.

  “Come on,” she called to the boy as she turned, limping, ignoring the pain, heading up the driveway toward her car. She was able to put a little weight on her ankle, which probably wasn’t broken, but was at least sprained badly enough to cause agony with each step. She turned her head to see if the kid was following and saw in horror that he’d run in the other direction, into the woods. Maybe he chose that way because it was downhill and he’d be able to move faster. Or maybe he’d just panicked.

  “Damn it,” she said.

  She should just leave the kid, just hobble up to her car and drive back to New York and try to forget all of this. But of course she couldn’t do that. She couldn’t leave the boy out here alone with that monster. So she cut left off the driveway and followed him through the woods as quickly as her injured ankle would allow, the leaves crunching loudly beneath her feet. She stole a glance over her shoulder and saw the big man leaning against the trunk of his car. He was looking at her. His face was in shadow so she couldn’t see his eyes, but she thought that was probably a good thing.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  BOONE RESTED HIS head against the cool window of the car and felt the miles rumbling gently past. He hadn’t felt the onset of a panic attack for a while now. He was as relaxed as he’d been outside of his apartment in six years. Nathan was good, quiet company. They could travel miles in amiable silence seemingly without either feeling uncomfortable. In fact, Boone started to wonder whether they might have passed too many such miles.

  “Nathan?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Didn’t you say a while back that a rest stop was coming up soon?”

  “I might have.”

  “We must have passed it by now, then, right? Or is it still coming up?”

  Nathan said nothing for a moment.

  “Well, I been thinking about that, Boone,” he said. “I’m not sure I should just dump you at a rest stop. You’ve had a tough time of it already tonight. I’m thinking instead, if you don’t mind, I’m thinking maybe you could come spend the night at my house—it’s not far from here—and maybe in the morning I’ll drive you all the way up to the state park myself.”

  “I couldn’t ask you to do that.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ve got a very important meeting scheduled for the morning with some international clients about a hostile takeover of a multinational corporation, billions of dollars at stake, but I can blow that off. Other than that, I’ve got nothing else on my calendar for the day. What do you say?”

  Boone laughed, but said, “I don’t know, Nathan.”

  “You really have to get up to that park in the middle of the night?”

  The fact was, Boone simply didn’t know. His ghost hadn’t been pushing him lately. Maybe it trusted Boone’s judgment now. Maybe whatever mission it had sent him on could wait until morning. The ghost certainly hadn’t shown much urgency this evening. Besides, if Nathan dropped Boone at a rest stop, Boone would still have to find a way up to the park, which he figured was another hour’s drive, at least. And he had no money to pay for a taxi. He’d have to hitch a ride again, and the first time he’d done that tonight hadn’t worked out so well for him.

  “Any chance you could wait till morning?” Nathan asked.

  Boone thought about it a moment longer. The ghost seemed to have taken the night off; maybe it wouldn’t mind if Boone did the same. He certainly could use it. As Nathan had said, it had been a tough night.

  “Are you sure it won’t put you out too much?” he asked finally.

  “I’m sure.”

  “What about…?”

  “What?”

  “Well, what about…your son. Didn’t you say you thought you might be meeting him or something tonight?”

  Again, Nathan said nothing for a few seconds.

  “That may still happen,” Nathan replied. “And if it does, I’d love for you to meet him, too.” Nathan looked over at Boone. “You remind me a little of him, actually. I think you’d like each other.”

  Boone considered a moment longer. “Okay, Nathan. I’ll stay at your house tonight. I appreciate it. You’re a good man.”

  “I don’t know about that, but I usually try.”

  NATHAN FELT A bit guilty deceiving Boone about his motives for wanting him to come back to the house. He was passing himself off as Mr. Nice Guy, but in fact he was using Boone—whom Nathan was growing to like—though he had no idea what he was using him for. This was Jeremy’s idea. But if there was even the slightest chance that Boone could help Nathan find his son, then Nathan was going to do all he could to keep Boone around long enough to do just that. And if it came to it, he’d just come right out and tell the man about his dreams, as crazy as they sounded, and hope that Boone would show some compassion and humor a desperate old man, at least for a little while. And in that while, maybe they’d find Jeremy.

  Where will I find you, though, son? And what shape will you be in?

  In the four years since Jeremy disappeared, Nathan had refused to believe that his son was dead. He knew it was possible, he just wouldn’t believe it was so, not without seeing a body. Until then, his son was out there somewhere, alive.

  But now, Nathan forced himself to consider the possibility that Jeremy wasn’t alive after all. Maybe he had been, for a while, but something must have happened to cause Nathan to start receiving Jeremy’s dream messages. Nathan had wanted to believe that, at worst, Jeremy was in some sort of trouble, that these messages were his call for help. Try as he might, though, Nathan couldn’t deny that the messages might have started because, rather than being in trouble, Jeremy was actually dead. Maybe he was alive fo
r four years but had recently gotten lost in the woods or slipped into a gorge or drowned in a river and he’d died, and his spirit was reaching out to Nathan to look for him, to find him, to bring his body home so he could rest in peace. Nathan wanted with all his heart for this not to be so, but he had to admit that it was a possibility.

  They rode through twisting roads for another mile before they rounded a gentle curve and Nathan saw the end of his driveway. He pulled into the drive and drove down to the house. He eased to a stop and looked through the windshield at the house he’d built for his family. He hadn’t been here in years. For a moment, he was swamped by a tidal wave of memories—the house in different seasons, Jeremy spinning on a tire swing while Maggie and Nathan watched from the porch, or the three of them hunting for worms in the soft soil, or raking leaves into piles just the right size for leaping into, or tossing snowballs at each other on the snowy lawn. He’d missed this place. But it felt wrong for him to be here without his family. It felt like a sacrilege.

  “Why are we stopped?” Boone asked.

  “We’re here.”

  Boone seemed to sense Nathan’s mood because he asked, “You okay, Nathan?”

  After a moment, Nathan said, “Sure I am. Let’s get inside.”

  Nathan got out of the car and waited for Boone. When he was still waiting several seconds later, Nathan opened his door again and leaned into the car.

  “You coming?”

  Boone’s eyes were squeezed tight. His hands were up on his cheeks again but he didn’t seem to be praying this time.

  “Boone? You okay?”

  Boone nodded. “Yeah…yeah, I’m okay. I just need a second. But yeah, I think I’m okay.”

  Nathan closed the door and stared up at the house and waited. Finally, Boone’s door opened and he stepped out of the car. He paused, almost expectantly, his shoulders a little hunched, like he thought a giant hawk was going to swoop down and carry him away. After a moment, he straightened up. He looked mildly surprised.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I think I’m actually okay.”

  Nathan nodded. “Good. This way, then. Hope you don’t mind me asking, but are you okay to walk by yourself and all? You know, with your eyes and everything?”

  “Yeah, I can see well enough to get around. Thanks, though.”

  “Well, follow me, then.”

  Nathan led him to the stairs up to the porch. The last time he’d seen his front door was in a nightmare as the man-monster pounded on it, trying to get inside to get to Jeremy. As he climbed the stairs, Nathan looked at the front windows, hoping against hope that he’d see Jeremy inside, looking back at him. But the windows were dark.

  Nathan unlocked the front door with a key and pushed it open. He first noticed a musty odor, but immediately smelled the scents underlying that, the familiar smells of this home away from home. You could have kidnapped him in Connecticut, blindfolded him, driven him here, and deposited him in this living room still blindfolded, and he’d have known right away where he was. The smell of the place brought with it another wave of memories. He smiled as he let them wash over him. Boone interrupted his reverie too soon.

  “Okay if I turn on a light?” he asked.

  “No point in trying,” Nathan said. “I didn’t tell the electric company to turn the power back on. I don’t come up here often anymore, so I don’t bother keeping the electric running in between visits.”

  “Forgot, huh?”

  “Yeah, I forgot,” Nathan lied, because it was a lot easier than telling the truth in this circumstance, that he’d picked up and left Connecticut at the last minute because Jeremy’s dream message told him to come here. “It’s a bitch getting old. I have a generator in case of emergency, but I don’t know that we need to fire that noisy thing up, do we? We can make do with candles and flashlights tonight, don’t you think?”

  “Hey, I can barely see anyway. Don’t worry about me.”

  “There’s a couch over there,” Nathan said. “Why don’t you have a seat while I get us some light.”

  Nathan watched Boone make his way to the couch, ready to call out if it looked like he was about to bang a shin on the coffee table, but as Boone said, he seemed to get around okay.

  Nathan went into the kitchen, opened the utility drawer beside the fridge, and took out a silver flashlight. He flicked the switch but the batteries were dead. He rummaged around, found the box of matches he knew would be there, then opened another drawer and removed four fat, cylindrical candles. He remembered Maggie buying them, excited because they smelled like spices and pine.

  “The house will smell like Christmas any time we want it to,” she’d said.

  He smiled to himself as he lit the first candle and placed it on the kitchen counter. He took the others into the living room. He placed one on the coffee table in front of Boone and lit it.

  “Thanks,” Boone said.

  Nathan lit another candle and placed it on a table on the far side of the living room, then lit the fourth and carried it toward the hallway.

  “I’m just going to look in the bedrooms for a flashlight that works. The one in the kitchen was dead. Be right back.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  As Nathan walked through the house, he couldn’t help but feel its emptiness, despite Boone’s presence. The house that used to echo with laughter now echoed only his footsteps. As Nathan moved through the hall and rooms, he looked for any sign that Jeremy had been there since his disappearance. He found none. Dust frosted every surface. Everything was where he always kept it. Nathan was certain that no one had been there since he had locked the place up four years ago—which he had come to think was for good.

  He stopped in the first bedroom. It had been Jeremy’s. A twin bed against the far wall, a dresser in the corner. Hanging from hooks on the wall were an old bow and a quiver of arrows Jeremy liked to target-shoot with. The boy couldn’t hit water if he shot from a boat in the middle of the lake, but he loved trying and he never gave up. Nathan loved that about him. Perhaps he still never gave up, which was why he was reaching out to Nathan even now.

  Nathan backed out of Jeremy’s room, passed the lone bathroom in the house, walked by a grandmother clock that used to fill the house with its ticking but that hadn’t been wound in years, and reached the last remaining room, the one he’d shared with Maggie. He stood for a moment in the doorway, looking at the bed, the one Maggie had carefully made every morning, tucking in the corners of the sheets, smoothing out the bedspread. Nathan crossed to the bed and hesitated before sitting down. He’d never once spent the night here without Maggie. After she died, he drove up here, locked the place up, and left. And he never came back…until tonight. He lifted a picture frame from the nightstand and held his candle close enough for him to see it in the warm light. A moment caught forever—Maggie and Nathan smiling and standing knee-deep in the lake, holding little Jeremy by his hands, suspending him between them. Nathan remembered that day three decades ago. They were lowering Jeremy into the water while he squealed with delight, then they’d lift him out, only to dunk him again up to his armpits, over and over and he never stopped laughing. They only ceased because their arms grew tired. Nathan couldn’t for the life of him remember who took the picture, but whoever it was had captured the essence of his family in one press of a button.

  Nathan smiled ruefully as he replaced the picture. He opened the drawer of the nightstand looking for a flashlight. Something slid inside the drawer. Nathan’s hand reached in and came out holding Maggie’s eyeglasses. They still had the little rope on them, attached to each earpiece. Jeremy had made it for her, braiding strands of colorful string, and it hung around Maggie’s neck for over twenty years. It broke a dozen times over the years, but she’d always fixed it.

  A tear landed on Nathan’s arm. He put the glasses back where they belonged, closed the drawer, and opened the other drawer. Inside he found another flashlight with dead batteries.

  He returned to the living room and, for a
split second, his heart leaped to see a young man looking so much like his beloved son sitting in the living room, as if Jeremy had finally come home and dropped onto the couch like he would have done four years ago. But it was only Boone. He was sitting, holding a picture frame very close to his face. He had his head cocked awkwardly, like he was trying to look at the photo from the side of his eyes.

  “Couldn’t find a working flashlight,” Nathan said, “so it’s just candles for tonight.”

  “Fine with me,” Boone said as he put the picture frame back on the end table.

  “Not sure if you could see, but that’s my son, Jeremy, in the picture, in Afghanistan, with some of his buddies.”

  “I wasn’t trying to be nosy,” Boone said. “Just passing time until you came back.”

  “No need to apologize.” Nathan picked the picture up off the table and sat on the couch beside Boone. He looked at his son, leaning against a Humvee with two soldiers on either side of him. They were wearing their brown-and-tan camo utility uniforms, mugging for the camera. Each of Jeremy’s buddies had signed the photo, above their heads. Nathan recognized one of the men to Jeremy’s right. It was Jeff Simmons, whom Nathan had visited earlier in the day. The sandy-haired man to Jeremy’s far left also looked familiar, though Nathan couldn’t place him.

  “Simon Wood,” he mumbled, reading the signature.

  “What’s that?”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  “Was that a name?”

  “Yeah,” Nathan said. “One of the soldiers in this picture. Simon Wood.”

  “Hmm.” Nathan looked over at Boone. He was frowning. “I think maybe I knew him.”

  “Simon Wood?”

  “Light-colored hair. Let’s see…is there a tattoo of something, an eagle maybe, on one of his arms?”

  Nathan looked at the picture. “That’s him,” Nathan said. “How do you know him?”

 

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