by Shannon Kirk
Laura does not watch the keys’ silent arc in the air because she keeps her head and left hand directed to a phantom coyote in the left-side bushes. She intensifies the bloodcurdling scream while still stumbling forward. And just when Gretchen and Jerry seem about ready to look at Laura and not left, Laura amps the distraction by free-falling toward the boiling pot of water on the campfire, grasps the lip, and pulls the pot down. She torques her body as much as she can away from the flood of boiling water and crashes into the folding table, whereupon brown house puzzle pieces explode around her. The table buckles and flattens to the ground, and boiling water splashes her legs. The searing pain must be unimaginable.
For a sweet second, everyone is still and silent.
But nobody is looking to the pine trees behind, where Mag sneaks a peek through her binoculars. Five feet above Gretchen’s head, thank luck of all lucks, that damn ring of keys hangs like a glorious Christmas ornament on a pine bough. Laura will have to keep screaming and pointing left or at her legs until the bough stops bouncing from the keys’ landed weight. And her screaming is authentic, because her busted legs are now scorched in splashes of boiling water.
Lying in dirt with open wounds, Laura could die of sepsis. Considering this fate, Mag is in conflict, for she hates to see suffering. And yet, Laura deserves death for what she’s done. She deserves Mag’s hatred and her revenge, all of which is in conflict with a sliver of respect Mag’s feeling for how Laura’s pulled off this challenge—how far she’s willing to go to save Lucy, a pact playing out not by verbal agreement, but by Laura’s actions tonight. There’s no helping Laura, no moving into the valley off the boulder and showing herself as a savior against the Sabins. Mag must remain a ghost in the trees, ensure there is no question about the keys, and then be off, for she has more work to do tonight.
Puzzle pieces stick to the hot water on Laura’s legs. More pile on her hands in the dirt.
Gretchen grabs a sharp switch, appearing to prepare to beat Laura.
Laura aches her arm out to point to the pine bough above Gretchen’s head.
“You should be careful with your shiny objects, Gretchen. There’s a raven’s nest up in the cliff. Don’t you know they like shiny objects? They steal them. You’re lucky this time. Seems like the raven was playing with you and passed them back to you.”
It’s more like a New Zealand Caledonian crow, Corvus moneduloides, endemic to the islands of New Caledonia, would do this, not a common New England raven, Corvus corax. But what difference do scientific facts make to this dumb bird demon child? She doesn’t know. And frankly, a common raven might have done this, maybe. Who cares?
Did Gretchen buy this story?
Gretchen stalls. Looks up to the tree.
“Daddy, a raven is playing with me!”
Laura Ingrace, I swear to God, if you fail your next challenge, which I’ll deliver tonight, if you, by God, fail to help me save my brilliant bird, an infinity more brilliant than this useless dingbat shit bird of a girl, I will outlive eternity and haunt you forever. But good job tonight. I still don’t forgive you. I’ll never forgive you and you’ll pay. But good job.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
LUCY
I’m giving up on this first screw. I’ve been at it a whole hour. I wore down the damn screw grooves too much, and now she won’t turn at all. And also, I realize I didn’t sleep last night or today, and my eyeballs feel like they’re filled with those metal threads in one of those magnet Wooly Willy games. I need to nap if I’m going to survive and work the inside of this trap. Just a quick nap on one of the creepy gray mats. Then I’ll be more careful and more forceful in working the second screw. Just need to rest my eyes and fingers.
CHAPTER FORTY
MOTHER
With the molds of the Sabins’ house keys in her squares of blue modeling clay, Mag notes the trail she’s spied this train of captors and captives take in and out three times: in last night, out this dawn when she whoo’d to Laura, and in again tonight. She listened, too, when Jerry had said, “The weather is going to be good all week, so we’ve got to do night shift every night, before the colder weather hits upon us. We’re already past Columbus Day.”
And so, knowing this is the week’s pattern, believing Lucy is okay from the weird Skype call she’d demanded when she trekked back and sat upon her camper’s roof all day like a perched loon, and presuming there are no trip wires or alarms on this trail they take back toward the Sabin house, Mag treks on the trail with her key molds tucked in her back pockets.
Somewhere at the start of the switchback portion of the trail, and nearer the flatter top of forest, high above the gorge, there is a bend in the trail, a winding around a grove of trees, something similar to a bend in the ground course below the treetop platforms at the Triple C. She and Laura used to call this spot Heaven’s Knot. And like Triple C’s Heaven’s Knot, this Sabin property Heaven’s Knot allows for a person in the bend to be hidden from whoever might be in a train of people ahead and behind her—not for long, maybe four seconds, but hidden long enough. Mag takes note, thinking on the next, and final, challenge she must leave for Laura.
She continues on. Along the way, as she gains closer to the house, her night-vision goggles expose locations off the trail where there are, indeed, several trip wires and also inner electrical fences—short spaces between trees, more like gates, enough to zap anybody who was unaware and had breached the outer ring of fencing. She notes the trip wires leading up into the trees, such that one wrong step and a person would be whisked in a net—hidden by ground leaves—up and up. She wonders how many animals have tripped these traps. And she presumes in this area closer to the Sabins’ brick house, with the short electrical gates between trees and the hidden trip-wire nets, the animals have adapted. She presumes nature has learned not to cross into this part of the forest. This also means that the trip nets must require more weight than a squirrel or mouse or rabbit or other woodland creature.
In her mind, she is mapping the locations of the obstacles in this ground and treetop course.
Once she has the Sabin brick home in her sights, she notes a piece of plywood over a hole and an open padlock, lopped to the side. She lifts the wood, looks inside, and sees stones set in the earth as a ladder down. With her headlamp on, she sees what appear to be underground dirt halls.
Later, she tells herself. Given the location of this underground access, directly at the end of the trail, and given the open padlock on the exterior, she wonders if this is where Laura and Earl are kept during the day. The direction of halls appears to run to the side of the Sabins’ brick house and then, she presumes, down and under the blueberry and holly hill that leads to the back side of the shed that sits opposite the rental ranch and where Mag’s camper is parked.
She stands and, from her spot closer to the edge of the forest, looks down at the plywood cover and then to the back of the Sabins’ brick house. With her night-vision goggles, she notes within the forest to her right a separate trail, one leading to something else entirely, possibly a house in the woods about 250 or 300 yards in. Hard to tell with all the trees in between. She can’t identify the house’s color at night, but it must be dark: brown or black.
She removes her backpack and sets her goggles inside. She drops to belly-crawl into the strip of lawn behind the Sabin house; again, she drags her black backpack. She’s in all black and presumes she need only stay as low as the animals, slither on the earth as a shadow demon. Since no lights trip on, she believes she’s good to go. She continues through the Sabins’ backyard, a black mamba in the grass, until she reaches the side by the excavator.
Slithering this way leads her to think of the time she sneaked up on Laura when they were fourteen. Laura was holding a bow and arrow and pointing toward the back side of a staff cabin—Cord’s, to be exact. The night before, Mag had won their secret treetop challenge to do the course backward, with no harnesses, the one in which Laura tried to down her by shaking the sky bridge.
And because Mag won, Laura told her to meet her at this spot in the field the next morning. Mag looked to the cabin, and there was Cord, then a new camp employee, a recent marine retiree. Cord was beyond his cabin, walking toward a far tree; tied to that tree was an English sheepdog: Lemon. Laura let go an arrow, sending it to stab square into the back side of Cord’s cabin—a place he’d obviously planned on spending much time in residence, given the table and chairs he’d set up there. Behind the blade was a note, which was now pinned to the back of Cord’s house.
It was shocking to find Laura skillfully handle a bow and arrow, mind-blowing to find her point an arrow at Cord’s cabin. Nuts that she’d left Lemon for Cord.
“Holy cow, what are you doing, Laura? You can shoot? Why are you shooting at Cord’s cabin? Hello?” Mag asked.
Back then, Laura lowered her bow, looked into Mag’s big violet eyes, which in this moment of amazement and the sun shining on her, Mag actually felt. She felt her violet eyes ablaze in a purple glow.
“Hello? Laura? Holy shit, holy shit. You can actually shoot? You meant to shoot Marianne all those years ago. I knew it. Holy shit.”
“I did not mean to shoot Marianne. I would never shoot to hurt someone. I just, whatever. I just wanted to shoot the Emily Dickinson statue in the ass, for fun. For respect. A joke. Friggin’ Marianne got in the way, like always.”
Mag lent a solemn “wow” of awe. “Why do you pretend to suck at archery? Why do you pretend to be a clod?”
“I just want to be left alone to track birds. Really, nothing more. Nobody wants me in group activities anyway.”
“Then why do you insist on night challenges with me? Makes no sense.”
Laura stared at Mag, shook her head. “Someone like you would never understand, Mag. You have everything. You’re everything. You’d never let me into your tribe all natural, without me forcing the issue. So whatever. We have a secret game, us. Can’t you just play our game?”
“What’s on the note?”
Laura shrugged.
“Come on. I won last night. You called me to meet here. So what’s on the note?”
“It says, ‘Hey Guy, Can’t care for Blue anymore. He’s yours. —A Traveling Man.’”
“Hmm.” Mag lowered the glow she felt in her violet eyes. “So Lemon is Blue now?”
“Yep.”
Mag stared into Laura’s eyes, looked over at Cord, who was petting Lemon, now Blue, and twisted to stand shoulder to shoulder with Laura, them both watching, obscured to Cord. Girls on a hill, watching a man below, like witch twins observing, assessing. Judging.
“Well,” Mag said, “I agree that Lemon deserves living at the Triple C instead of with your horrible mother, who doesn’t deserve him. This is our secret now.”
“Good,” Laura said.
“You still owe me answers on how you did what you did to the lemon trees and who helped you with that and bringing Lemon here and why. Wasn’t anyone in the house? Not your maid, grandfather, father, driver, nanny?”
“Nope.”
“Who and why?”
“You need to win more challenges first.”
“Fine.”
Now, twenty-one years later, Mag belly-crawls down the Sabins’ driveway. Relieved this worked, she takes a second to bend and breathe behind her camper.
Once settled, she stands, straps on her backpack, grabs the bike in the lean-to, puts on her headlamp, and pedals down the dirt drive. As soon as she hits the country road, she takes out her iPhone from her side-zip pants pocket and dials.
“Mag?” He answers on the first ring even though it’s midnight.
“Nathan, get your brother and meet me at his store. He’s a locksmith, right?”
“Mag? Are you here? I thought I saw that your camper was gone from Dyson’s. What’s going on?”
“Just meet me at your brother’s shop with your brother, ASAP. Please. I’ll explain. And don’t tell anyone. I have key molds and need duplicates, ASAP.”
Mag is hopeful Nathan and his brother understand the importance of keeping a tight lid until she can set some precautions in place tonight and during the day tomorrow. She can’t have psychos freaking out and tripping their cult finale and burning her daughter. She doesn’t trust anyone but herself to get this right. If Nathan can follow through and hold his word for one more night, she may indeed continue along the path of whatever relationship they tried to start weeks ago. He did honor her request to leave her be with Lucy for the past eight weeks, to allow them solitude to heal and bond.
But she can’t wander in thought on romance bullshit now. She has work to do before the train of captors and captives returns at dawn.
She’s slithered back onto and around the Sabin property and has jumped to standing within the forest on the trail that leads to the plywood cover and then to the serpentine trail. With backpack on, she climbs an oak she previously detected without any traps. The oak happens to have a long, long limb that leads to a maple with a long, long limb.
This is so dangerous, what she’s about to do. It was never like this on the Triple C tree course, with all her safety clips and harnesses. At age thirty-five, Mag pulls on all her years of experience, all the way from age six up to even this last summer in counseling resort guests through the Triple C course. Her steps across the tree limb are fast and sure, because it is always best to move fast and not pause on a sky bridge. Below Mag on the forest floor are those inner electrical gates and big-game, springed net traps. Mag needs to stay high in the trees in order to reach a few of the net-trap cables because she needs to do a few things with the cable cutter, pliers, cordless drill, rope, and bolts she gathered at Nathan’s brother’s hardware store. A couple of the nets aren’t located quite right for Mag.
After her renovation work on this crazy obstacle maze, Mag treks to the plywood cover that leads to stone steps into the earth. She drops her lit flashlight to the bottom and descends. Once secure underground, she stands and flashes her lights to find dirt halls, weaving to the side of the Sabin house and then beyond, webbing under the blueberry and holly hill.
As she walks, Mag reads names, numerous names, etched in rocks sticking out of dirt walls, which appear to have been hand-dug decades ago. Here and there on the floor are lit battery candles. She passes dug-out rooms, one with a hole drilled deep into the earth and a pile of leaves beside the hole. At the bottom of the hole is an underground stream. The room smells of human waste. This must be the captives’ bathroom. Only a fetus could fit down the hole, so there’s no escape.
Mag passes numerous dug-out rooms—many to explore, and none have an exit.
In awe, Mag pauses, flashing her flashlight around, shining on dug rooms and engraved names, nearly knocked senseless to find herself in a catacomb prison.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
LUCY
I don’t know how long I was asleep. It feels like it might be three in the morning, but I could be way off. Gretchen never turns off the blinding, torture halogens, and there are no windows, so I have no clue. I want to start working on the second screw, but what if it’s dawn? Or almost dawn? What if Gretchen’s about to look down at me from the ceiling camera like she’s some evil angel?
Now that I have a plan on how to deal with the door, I need to make sure Gretchen’s comfortable leaving me alone again tonight. And the only way to do that is suck it up and attempt to put a skeleton back together. I’m thinking progress will keep the bitch away and feeling comfy in her sick game. Here we go.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
MOTHER
It was easy for Mag to explore and map the catacombs. Eight connected halls, twenty dug-out “rooms” (really eight-by-eight-foot cubbies). At the stunted end, directly beneath the low, long shed, was a covered hole in the roof. Mag examined evidence here: a feather earring mixed among shards and slivers and the full mouth of a glass vase and corpses of wildflowers. The debris, scattered on the greatly disturbed dirt floor, below the covered hole in the roof, created a collage wit
h an unmistakable story: someone holding a vase of flowers had fallen through that hole. Mag, having hunted and tracked for years, surmised this was where Laura had fallen in, how she was taken. Racing back out of the warren through the other end, the trail end with the stone steps, slithering back down the hill, and breaking into the shed opposite the rental ranch, sure enough, after moving a heavy metal tool bench, Mag gained access to the hole into the stunted end of the catacombs. She was careful not to land on the shards of glass and dead wildflowers when she dropped in.
Next, back in the catacombs, Mag found a dug-out room with two wood pallets covered in piles of matted leaves. A place for captives to sleep. A bottle of pills with a warning showing Xs on eyes, presumably to induce daytime sleeping, sat between the pallets.
Following obvious footsteps on the catacomb floors, Mag returned to find that same bathroom with the hole to an underground stream, and across from that, another dug-out room with heavy foot traffic. She followed the foot traffic. Within this compact space was a protruding underground boulder that looked like a giant gray nose. Inspecting further, Mag poked her hands and then head around the nose’s sides, and sure enough, shining her flashlight into a back crevice, Mag found a captive’s calendar.
On a flat space within the crevice was a makeshift calendar of rows of pebbles. It appeared that someone had been creating this pebble calendar for months, far longer than Laura was in captivity. Which meant, tying things with things Earl said last night, Earl had been a captive for months before Laura. So this whole calendar was his idea, and that meant, Mag presumed, Earl could be trusted.