The room felt cold. “Yeah,” John said, “that would be something.” Try a smile. Might be Bruce just has one hell of a poker face and this thing really is some weird joke.
“Just think about it.” The same light played in Bruce’s eyes. “It’s a quick deal, in and out. It’s all outdoors — you can just chill in the car. But you get the scope of it, you get the feel. None of these books in here — these cop books — are gonna do that for you. And I’ve been doing this for a while, too, like I said. Doing it in Florida. I can tell you some stories while we make the drive.”
“Where?”
“Not far, man, not far.” He got more animated, excited. “You could just tell the wife and kids something — I dunno, you got an overnight writer’s conference or something. You come with me, we do the thing, and boom!” He clapped his hands, making John jump. “I’m telling you — you’d be off and running. And then when your book comes out, all your other books start selling like gangbusters. What do they call that — you know, the rising tide? And, listen . . . the experts encourage this shit. You’ve got to think outside the box. Ninety-seven percent of people just do the same shit over and over. They all end up working for the few who shatter the norms.”
There were two options, John figured. One, say yeah, sure, sounds great — and get Bruce out of the house. The kids were going to be getting off the bus soon, for one thing. Two, just confront it right now, say no thanks and get him out.
“Yeah but, man, it sounds like what you’re talking about makes me a party to something. I mean, that’s the bottom line. I couldn’t write about anything like that — not if it was illegal . . .”
“You fictionalize everything, man. You know how to do that. And then I’d be reading your book someday — man that would be fucking awesome.”
“I can’t lie to Jane. I mean, I just physically can’t.”
Bruce stared at John for a moment, something almost like pity in his face, then he shrugged. “All right, bro — well, whatever. You just keep going the way you’re going, man. I’m sure you’re a good stay-at-home dad and house-husband. Anyway, you know, it’s not like you’d have to worry about the legality, because nothing is going to happen. It’s just business as usual. Something I’ve done a thousand times. But it will fill your head full of real-life shit you can draw on for years. No more of this bullshit about psychological thrillers, women questioning their sanity or whatever.”
John stood up from his desk, feeling more than a little uneasy. It was too much — Bruce was insistent. Whatever had broken in his brain was bad. The guy needed help.
But calling him out on his insanity right here, right now — it wasn’t John’s place.
Bruce moved closer and clamped a hand on his shoulder. “Listen, man. I want you to know something. All that shit, from back in the day, you know — water under the bridge. I don’t hold any grudges, man. Life’s too short. I hope you don’t either.”
John searched Bruce’s gaze for as long as social comfort allowed. Was he crazy? Was this whole proposal just some long, strange goof? Or was there some latent narcissism in it? This idea of Bruce having him tag along as he went around to sell drugs or whatever else, talking about himself like he was some kind of celebrity. Like he was El Chapo. It was a fantasy Bruce harbored, to have some sort of scribe write his memoir, and he lacked the internal censorship to keep it to himself.
“I don’t hold any grudges either,” John said.
Bruce surprised him with a hug and gave him a few hearty pats on the back. Up close and personal, there were trace scents of alcohol.
“That’s my man,” Bruce said softly. Then he pulled back and gave a serious look that quickly fell apart. He stepped back and laughed, slapped his thigh. “You should see your face, man. You think I’m nuts!”
John just stood, unsure of how to respond. The relief, tentative at first, started to flood through. It was so powerful that for a moment he needed to sit down. Bruce was “out there,” he was a different sort of guy with no real external reference points to help him navigate relationships, but he wasn’t full-on psychotic. He just had a terrible sense of humor.
John smiled anyway. The pitch was over and Bruce pulled himself together. “Of course you’re right,” he said. “You’re absolutely right. It’s too much for you. If you were single, I’d say let’s do it, right? But, no, it would be too much. With all you got going on — nice little family here. Even if you’d be a millionaire by the time the whole thing was over.” He winked.
John cleared his throat again. “Yeah, sorry, Oprah.”
“Oh, Oprah, Dr. Phil — the whole bit. You see that woman on Dr. Phil who was kept in a storage container for a week? Man, that was crazy. That guy who took her — what a fucking thing.”
John pushed aside the grisly thoughts and moved toward the door. “All right, man, well . . .”
“Sorry — I’ve been taking up all of your time. You’ve probably got to get back to writing. What are you working on, anyway?”
John held the doorknob, feeling the weight of the question. “I got a few irons in the fire.”
“Uh-huh. Well, better hurry up with those.”
“Yeah.” John opened the door. “I know.”
And then he thought about it some more.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE / ALL HELL
Call everyone. Call 911. Get an ambulance here. Get Ridley. Call everyone.
While I’ve been trying to restore John to consciousness, shaking him, crying, holding him against my chest and gagging on the stench of human depravity, I managed to get my phone out, but it’s no use in here — the metal walls block the already poor signal.
He’s gaunt. His color is terrible, pale and sickly. He’s been in here for almost two weeks, living on nothing but water and whatever scant food he was left — I see a few granola bar wrappers and empty pretzel bags, bottles full of dark urine, corners holding excrement.
I’m choking on emotion when suddenly everything inside me falls dead quiet — except for one lone thought:
You did this.
And I see it all, projected on the walls of the shed as if on a movie screen: arguing with John, angry mouths and spit flying. Arguing over money, over Melody — her development and her needs and the fact she takes her piano lessons from my ex’s aunt. Fighting over his drinking, because I found the bottle when I was cleaning and he lied to me about it and I scream at him that I’m not going to go down this road again, not going to let another addict drain me of resources and patience and love, and I hit him, not expecting to, just hit him with the baseball bat beside the bed and it takes him just the right way, knocking him out.
I see an image of Bruce, firing a weapon into a darkened car, and then it changes to me, standing over John as he lies on the floor of our bedroom on the Sunday night after I came home from work, the start of a period of time for which I’ve since invented an alternate reality to explain things, an opportunist using whatever was around me: Bruce, an old friend showing up; Canada, because of John’s application to regain admissibility; drug dealers, because of something I probably read in the newspaper — all to cobble together a story that makes sense out of my own heinous act.
“Melody!”
My voice is swallowed by the shed and its contents. Probably for the best; I don’t want her in here anyway, seeing her father like this. I look at John and shake him some more and lightly slap his cheek. My tears fall on his sweaty face. If it were summer he’d be dead from the heat. But he’s perspiring because he’s alive. I didn’t kill him. I’ve never hurt anyone.
Easing his head back down I get up and start making my way back toward the mouth of the shed, shoving aside the toys and equipment. I trip and tumble forward and bang knees and elbows and get back to my feet, lurch toward the open door at the same time I’m staring at my phone and punching in 9-1-1.
Finally outside, gasping in the fresh air as the call connects, I look around for Melody and Russ. They were last down by the water and I shou
t their names as the dispatcher answers.
“911 — what’s your emergency?”
I give her my name and the address, tell her that my husband is in bad shape — malnourished, dehydrated — and I can’t rouse him. I hurriedly tell her we need police, too, that my husband was abducted and filed as a missing person. Though she assures me someone is on the way, I stumble toward the road to see if anyone else is around that might help.
The only sign of life is about a hundred yards away: a black SUV riding a cloud of dust and headed this way.
* * *
At first I wave my arms — it doesn’t even occur to me who this could be; I’m too overwhelmed by the need to help John — and then I let my arms drop.
Cooking and Insurance weren’t the only things written in John’s notebook.
Olympia.
As if a warning, from him to me.
I pull up Ridley’s contact. The call goes to voicemail. “Ridley it’s Jane Gable. She’s here. Olympia is at the lake house.”
I have no weapons, no guns. I fight the urge to run for the kids — they’re better off where they are. Keeping my eyes on the SUV, I shout in the direction of their voices. “Melody! Someone is here! Run up toward the Hayberrys’ and hide!”
I can’t be sure if she hears me, though their voices go quiet. The SUV hits the brakes and skids to a stop on the dirt road, sending out a plume of dust. There’s nowhere else to go, nothing else to do but stand my ground in the haze.
I see Olympia’s boots first as she steps out of the dark vehicle, then the gun pointing at me when she shuts the door. Her blonde hair has been drawn back into a tight ponytail — she’s in business-mode now, apparently. The whole thing — coming to me, acting like she owed me something — she has an agenda.
“Hi, Jane.”
With hindsight, it seems obvious: would Bruce Barnes enter Canada with a hundred and fifty thousand dollars’ worth of drugs on his person? What does that even look like?
Bruce may have spared John, but he’d always planned to come back, get the rest of the drugs and maybe the money that he’d stolen from Dixon. It was Rainey who was afraid John wouldn’t survive the wait.
“How is everything?” Olympia asks. She nears, boots crunching through the grit, everything loud and vivid to me, as if some primitive part of my brain knows these are the last few seconds of my life.
“John is alive,” I say quickly. “He’s in the shed behind me. I called the police — they’ll be here any second.”
Olympia glances at the phone, checks the area, looks back at me. She seems to understand that emergency response will be slowed by the narrow dirt roads and the distance from modern civilization. These camps and lake houses like mine hold a common purpose: to leave the rest of the world behind.
“You know what I’m here for,” she says.
“I don’t want to get in your way. I don’t care about any of that — money, none of it. I just want to get him to a hospital.”
She looks past me at the shed. “In there, huh?”
“Yes.”
Her eyes slide back. “And the kids?”
“Please . . .”
“You’ve seen my face.”
“I won’t say anything.”
“Your son has seen me, too.”
I strain to hear my kids, hoping Melody went to the neighbors’ place to hide, but my addled mind sees imagined headlines about Three Slain in Henderson Harbor. The crime scene photos show small red sneakers at the end of a seven-year-old boy’s legs as he lies dead on the beach.
I take a lurching step forward. “Don’t hurt them.”
“You’ve seen their faces, too,” she says, and the rear doors of the SUV swing open. A man gets out from each side, one brown-skinned and the other white, each holding a gun — only theirs are bigger.
She talks to them over her shoulder. “Try the toilet tank, under the sink. Basic places. And be quick — what’s the response time?”
“Just came over the scanner — first responder is six miles north. We got ten minutes.”
“Go on,” she says, and the men move toward the house.
Looking at me again, a mix of curiosity and sympathy in her eyes, Olympia asks, “Got an attic in this place? Crawl space?”
I nod, quickly. “Just outside the bathroom. Drawstring in the ceiling — stairs fold down. There’s just old photo albums up there, things like that.”
“Where else?” She wags the large pistol at the shed. “In there? With him?”
There’s moaning behind me — John regaining consciousness. I take a few steps back, holding out my arms, as if to protect him. “Let me look.”
“It would be in a black case marked C.R.D.,” she says. “Carl Robert Dixon.”
My phone vibrates in my grip. Ridley is calling back.
Olympia notices and holds out her hand, palm up. “Toss it.”
I do as she says and she snatches it out of the air, checks the screen. Then she drops it to the ground and smashes it under her boot heel, twisting her leg back and forth to grind it down. “Now get in there. Look. Black case.”
I’m about to, until I think ahead to Olympia closing me in with John while she finishes her search and goes after Melody and Russ. So I stop, look her in the face from five yards away. “You do it.”
She points the gun at my head. Her expression is slack. The kind eyes and smiles are long gone. There’s just the muscle-memory of a killer at work. “Jane, get in there and look for my property or I’m going to shoot and kill you.”
I don’t move a muscle.
“We don’t care about Carl Dixon. We don’t care about you or your family. We want our product back and we’ll get it with or without you.”
“What if he took it with him?”
“Even Barnes isn’t that stupid. You’re stalling. Get in there.”
Something smashes inside the house, momentarily distracting the both of us, followed by the pounding of footsteps. A few seconds later, the door swings open and one of the men comes out with a heavy-looking grocery bag, dripping wet. “In the toilet tank, just like you said.”
Olympia jerks her head at the SUV and the man gets in with the drugs. The other emerges from the house. He gives me a look and starts for the vehicle. If there’s something human in Olympia, it reappears for just an instant. Her head tilts slightly to the side and her arm stiffens as she re-aims at my chest. “Sorry, Jane.”
The sound of an approaching engine surprises us both. The way Hacksaw Road goes is by looping from two points that connect to the main road beyond. Olympia approached from the north, same way I came in, probably because she was tracking me. But I’d taken the scenic route through Sackets Harbor — the quicker way is to come from the south, the way the Jefferson County cop car comes barreling in, lights flashing, siren silent. I hope the ambulance isn’t far behind.
Olympia walks into the road with an easy gait, like she’s greeting a postal worker delivering her a package. The cop car hits the brakes. She takes aim and unloads a clip into its front windshield. The sound is deafening.
My last image of Olympia is her in shooter-stance, arm extended with the giant pistol in her hand. She disappears into the raised silt and then I’m running, sprinting across the lawn, vaulting the containment wall like a gymnast and hitting the rocky beach on its far side with both feet planted. My back seizes but doesn’t give out.
The kids are nowhere in sight. Melody must have heard me after all. I move up the beach toward the Hayberry place as more gunfire erupts from behind me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO / MARRIAGE
The Hayberry house is pretty. Years of sunshine have baked the cedar shakes charcoal and russet-brown with flares of pink. It has no basement and sits raised on cinderblocks. My children are hidden beneath.
I don’t know how long we stay there — maybe six, seven minutes. The shooting ended before I even climbed up from the beach, heard my son chirp, “Mom!” in his best whisper-but-not-really-a-whisper voice,
and then there were unintelligible shouts and the slamming of doors, the scrape of boots over dirt and gravel, more shouts, more doors and, finally, the wailing of an ambulance siren as it turned down Hacksaw Road.
While we hide, I explain to the kids what is happening as best I can. I tell them that their father is in the storage shed, alive but badly injured. As the voices and footsteps come closer and people call my name, my kids are at least prepared for what they are about to see.
Jefferson County deputies and New York State Troopers envelop the scene. An ambulance is parked in the dirt road by the metal shed. “Are you hurt, ma’am?” The paramedic reaches for us. “Are your children all right?”
After she looks us all over, a pickup truck with an orange light bar over the cab roars down the road, more vehicles behind it, and a state trooper is urging us toward his vehicle. But I need to see in the shed and I won’t let go of my children.
Much of the items in storage have been cleared out, leaving a view inside. Paramedics place an oxygen mask over John’s mouth and pick him up on a stretcher. They work their way out of the shed and Melody is crying.
I squeeze her tight but I’m all cried out.
Russ just watches. “That’s Dad?”
“Yes, honey.”
“He was in there?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Someone put him there.”
“The guy with the bullet hole?”
“Right.”
We step back to let them through and as the stretcher passes with John on it, he sees me and reaches out. I take his hand and he squeezes mine back. The kids are touching him. The paramedics and police are trying to keep us back but we’re crowding around, all moving as one unit toward the open doors of the ambulance.
“Russ,” I say, though I’m looking into John’s eyes. “You’re going to ride to the hospital in a police car, okay?”
“Okay.”
Melody grips me tighter. “Mom I’m coming with you and Dad.”
“I need you to stay with your brother. Make sure he’s all right.”
When He Vanished Page 25
