by Harlan Coben
Maybe. Probably. Either way, he texted Hester to give it a try.
Naomi’s desktop computer had been left running. He moved the mouse, afraid that there might be a password blocking access. There wasn’t. He brought up her web browser. Naomi’s email information—name and password—had been saved for easy access. She was NaomiFlavuh, which seemed sweet and a little sad. He clicked and got in right away. He almost rubbed his hands together, hoping that he had hit the mother lode. He hadn’t. The emails couldn’t have been more innocuous—class assignments, college recruitment spams, coupons and offers from the Gap and Target and retailers unknown to Wilde with names like Forever 21 and PacSun. Kids today, he knew from his interactions with Matthew, text or use some sort of parent-proof app. They don’t email.
He stopped for a moment and listened. Nothing. No one coming up the stairs. He moved the mouse’s cursor up to the top and hit the history button. He hoped that Naomi hadn’t cleared her cache recently.
She hadn’t.
There were searches on eBay for stuffed animals. There were links to forums and Reddits that talked about collecting stuffed animals. Wilde glanced behind him at the bed. The stuffed animals had been laid out with some care. Several animals stared back at him. He thought about that for a second, about this girl who had been bullied all her life, how she must have rushed home after school, fleeing the taunts and abuse, maybe leaping high onto her bed, escaping into this lonely, self-created menagerie.
The thought flooded him with a surprising rage.
People had bullied this girl her whole life. If someone did more to her, if someone went the extra mile or forced her to do something desperate…
He bottled it and turned back to the task at hand. He still had the mask on his face. If by some chance Bernard Pine were to come upstairs or spot him—unlikely, really—Wilde would blow past him and run away. There would be nothing to identify him. His height and build—six feet, one eighty-five—would give them nothing.
Whoa. Pay dirt.
Naomi had been researching her classmates. There were six, maybe seven of them, but two names stuck out right away. One was Matthew’s. The other was Crash Maynard’s. The searches on Matthew—as well as his other classmates—were surface and quick. Did this mean anything? Or did teens Google each other all the time? You meet someone, you search online about them. Of course, Naomi had known these kids forever. She had grown up with them, gone to school with them, been a victim of their taunts and blows.
So why now?
He skimmed down through the rest of her Google searches. Nothing much stood out, except for an odd two-word search followed by an odd three-word search:
challenge game
challenge game missing
He focused on the added word: Missing.
He clicked through the links. As he started reading, his heart sank. He was midway through the pages when he heard a noise that startled him.
Footsteps.
Not close. Not coming up toward him. That was what was odd. There was only one person in the house. The father. Bernard Pine. He was in the kitchen. But these steps weren’t coming from the kitchen. In fact, now that he thought about it, he had not heard a sound coming from downstairs the entire time he had been up here.
The footsteps were faint. They were coming from inside the house, but…
Wilde closed down the browser and slipped across the room and into the corridor. He looked down the stairs. The footsteps were louder. Wilde could hear a voice now. Sounded like Bernard Pine. Who was he talking to? Wilde couldn’t make out the words. He crept closer to the top of the stairs so he could hear better.
The door beneath the stairs flew open.
The basement door.
Wilde jumped back. The voice was clear now, easy to understand.
“It was on the goddamn news! That woman was here too. What do you mean, who? That lawyer from TV, the one who did the report.”
Bernard Pine closed the basement door behind him.
“The cops just came. Yes, the chief, Carmichael, he knocked on the door. They’re probably still…” Wilde had his back pressed against the wall, but he risked a look. Bernard Pine had his mobile phone in one hand. With the other, he pushed aside a curtain and looked out into his front yard.
“I don’t see them right now, no. But I can’t…I mean, Carmichael might be right down the block, watching. There were news vans here too.…We are probably being watched.”
We? Wilde thought.
Unless Pine considered himself royalty, “we” meant more than one person. Except that Wilde had cased the house. He had only spotted one person. Bernard Pine. If someone else was here, there was only one place that person could be.
The basement.
“Yeah, Larry, I know you told me not to do this, but I didn’t think I had a choice. I don’t want to get caught. That’s the big thing now.”
Pine hurried up toward the stairwell where Wilde stood on the landing. He was hustling now, jumping the steps two at a time. Relying on reflexes, Wilde dove back into Naomi’s bedroom and rolled toward a corner. Pine passed him on the landing without glancing into his daughter’s room.
The basement, Wilde thought.
He didn’t wait long. The moment Pine was past the door and in his own bedroom, Wilde came out. Moving on the balls of his feet—not the toes, the toes made noise—he padded down the steps. He spun to his right and came to the basement door. He tried the knob. It turned.
He opened the basement door silently, stepped inside, closed it behind him.
There was a faint light below him. Wilde had two choices here. Choice One: Tiptoe down the steps and sneak slowly toward whatever was to be found. Choice Two: Go for it.
Wilde went for Choice Two.
He took off his mask and strolled down the cellar stairs. He didn’t disguise it. He didn’t hurry nor did he dawdle. When Wilde arrived at the bottom, he turned toward the light.
Naomi opened her mouth.
“Don’t scream,” Wilde said to her. “I’m here to help you.”
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
The basement had been finished on the cheap. The walls were faux wood made of some kind of vinyl, stuck up on the concrete with adhesive. The sofa was a hand-me-down convertible that was right now open into a queen-sized bed.
It was blanketed with stuffed animals.
Naomi Pine sat on the sofa’s armrest, her shoulders slumped, her eyes down, so that her hair hung in front of her face like a beaded curtain. She wasn’t skinny, which in today’s world was to say she was probably overweight, but Wilde didn’t really know. She was neither pretty nor ugly, and while her looks should be irrelevant, they weren’t, not in the real world and especially not in the teen world. So he looked at her, at her whole being, and it stirred his heart. In truth, if he could be totally objective and maybe it was the history of the situation talking, Naomi Pine looked, above all else, like an easy target. That was indeed the vibe. Some people look smart or dumb or strong or cruel or weak or brave or whatever. Naomi looked like she was always in mid-cringe, as though she were asking the world not to hit her, and that just made the world sneer in her face.
“I know you,” Naomi said. “You’re the boy from the woods.”
Not exactly accurate. Or maybe it was.
“Your name is Wilde, right?”
“Yes.”
“You’re our boogie man, you know.”
Wilde said nothing.
“Like, parents tell little kids not to go in the woods because the Wild Man will grab them and eat them or something. And like, when kids tell ghost stories or try to scare each other, you’re kinda the star of the show.”
“Terrific,” Wilde said. “Are you scared of me?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I’m drawn to outcasts,” she said.
He tried to smile. “Me too.”
“You ever read To Kill a Mockingbird?” she asked him.
�
�Yes.”
“You’re like our Boo Radley.”
“I guess that would make you Scout.”
“Yeah, right,” Naomi said with a roll of her eyes, and his heart felt it again.
“Who is Larry? I heard your dad on the phone.”
“He’s my uncle. He lives in Chicago.” Naomi lowered her head. “Are you going to tell?”
“No.”
“So you’ll just leave?”
“If you want.” Wilde moved closer to her and made his tone as gentle as he could. “The Challenge,” he said.
Naomi looked up at him. “How do you know about that?”
He’d seen it on her computer, but he’d also remembered reading about it a few years back. The article had called it the 48-Hour-Challenge, though it was later dismissed as an urban legend. It was an online game of sorts, albeit a fairly awful one. Teens would vanish on purpose so that their parents would panic and think that their child had been kidnapped or worse. The longer you “disappeared,” the more points you’d accumulate.
“It doesn’t matter,” Wilde said. “You were playing it, right?”
“I still don’t understand. Why are you here?”
“I was looking for you.”
“Why?”
“Someone was worried.”
“Who?”
He hesitated. Then he figured, why not. “Matthew Crimstein.”
She may have smiled. “Figures.”
“Figures why?”
“He probably blames himself. Tell him he shouldn’t.”
“Okay.”
“He just wants to fit in too.”
Wilde could hear movement from upstairs. Her dad no doubt. “What happened, Naomi?”
“You ever read self-help books?”
“No.”
“I do. All the time. My life…” She stopped, blinked back tears, shook her head. “Anyway, they always talk about making small changes. The self-help books. I tried that. It doesn’t work. Everyone still hates me. You know what that’s like? Every day to feel your whole insides twist up because you’re scared to go to school?”
“No,” Wilde said. “But it must suck.”
She liked that answer. “It does. Big time. But I don’t want you to feel sorry for me, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Promise?”
He crossed his heart with his right hand.
“Anyway,” Naomi said, “I decided to go for it.”
“Go for what?”
“Change.” Her face lit up. “Total change. One big move, one big thing, so I could erase my past as a loser and start again. Do you get that?”
He said nothing.
“So yeah, I took the challenge. I disappeared. At first, I hid in the woods.” She managed a smile. “I wasn’t scared of you at all.”
He smiled back.
“I lasted two days.”
“Was it rough?”
“No, I liked it actually. Out there. On my own. You get that, right?”
“I do.”
“Heck, you probably get it better than anyone,” she said. “It was like an escape, a reprieve. But my dad, look, he’s not the most on the ball. What I am, okay, I mean, me being a loser—”
“You’re not a loser.”
Naomi shot him a look that told him he was patronizing her and she was disappointed by it. He held up his hands as though to say, My bad.
“Anyway, it’s not his fault. All this. But he doesn’t make it better either, you know what I mean?”
“I think so.”
“So I was gone two days, and he started texting. He was going to go to the police, which is part of the game, right. Also…I was worried he’d start drinking too much. Whatever, anyway, I didn’t want that. So I came home, even though I knew forty-eight hours wouldn’t be enough. Then I told my dad what I was doing.”
Wilde heard the footsteps now. He didn’t turn, didn’t worry. “And your dad decided to help?”
“He got it right away. He thinks I’m a loser too.” Naomi held up her hand. “Don’t say it.”
“Okay.”
“I just wanted to, you know, fit in. Impress them.”
“By them, you mean Crash Maynard?”
“Crash, Kyle, Sutton, all of them.”
Wilde wanted to launch into a little speech about how you shouldn’t want to impress bullies or how trying to fit in was always the wrong move, that you should stay true to yourself and stick to your principles and stand up to the abuse—but he was sure that Naomi had heard it all before and he would again sound patronizing. Naomi knew all the angles here better than he ever could. She’d lived them every day. He hadn’t. She hoped that this move—the Challenge—would make her “cooler,” and who knows, maybe she was right. Maybe Crash and his cohorts would be impressed when she came back. Maybe it would change everything for her.
Who the hell was he to tell her it wouldn’t work?
“My dad had the idea. I could just hide down here. He’d just pretend to be worried.”
“But then the cops showed up for real.”
“Right. We didn’t count on that. And he can’t tell the truth. Imagine if that gets out—what he’d done, what I’d done. I mean, I’d get demolished in school. So he’s freaking out right about now.”
The basement door opened. From the top of the stairs, Bernard Pine called down. “Naomi?”
“It’s okay, Dad.”
“Who are you talking to, honey?”
Naomi’s smile was bright now. “A friend.”
Wilde nodded. He wanted to ask whether there was anything he could do, but he already knew the answer. He headed toward the basement stairs. Bernard Pine’s eyes widened when he came into view.
“Who the—?”
“I was just leaving,” Wilde said.
“How did you…?”
Naomi said, “It’s okay, Dad.”
Wilde walked up the stairs. As he passed Bernard Pine, he stuck out his hand. Pine took it. Wilde handed him a card. No name, just a phone number.
“If I can help,” Wilde said.
Pine glanced toward the windows. “The police might see you.…”
But Wilde shook his head and started toward the back door. He had his mask in his hand now. “They won’t.”
One minute later, Wilde was back in the woods.
* * *
As Wilde headed back toward Laila’s, he called Hester.
“Naomi is fine.”
He explained.
When he finished, Hester shouted, “Are you shitting me?”
“This is good news,” he said. “She’s safe.”
“Oh, great, fine, she’s safe, la-di-dah. But in case you missed it, I just went live on air saying a teenage girl went missing. Now you tell me she’s hiding in her own basement. I’m going to look like a fool.”
“Ah,” Wilde said.
“Ah?”
“That’s all I got. Ah.”
“And all I got is my reputation. Well, that and my good looks.”
“It’ll be okay, Hester.”
She sighed. “Yeah, I know. You going back to the house?”
“Yes.”
“So you’ll tell Matthew?”
“I’ll tell him enough of it.”
“And then you’ll go to bed with Laila?”
He didn’t reply.
“Sorry,” she said.
“Get some sleep, Hester.”
“You too, Wilde.”
* * *
The next day, Naomi was back in school. She hoped no one would ask too many questions. But they did. Soon her story collapsed, and the truth—that she had “cheated” in the game of Challenge—came to light.
If school life had been hell for Naomi before, this latest revelation raised that hell to the tenth power.
A week later, Naomi Pine disappeared again.
Everyone assumed that she’d run away.
Four days after that, a severed finger was found.
PART TWO
CHAPTER
TWELVE
One Week Later
A car pulled into his hidden road.
Wilde knew that because he’d laid down a rubber hose alarm, the kind you see every day at gas stations across this country, at the entranceway. Old school but more effective in this setting—animals set off motion detectors. They’d trip every hour with false alarms. Only something heavier, like cars, triggered the hose alarm.
He had just been staring at the small screen at the time, more specifically at an email from one of those ancestry sites with a subject that trumpeted, “WE HAVE YOUR DNA RESULTS RIGHT HERE!” when the notification about the intruder popped up. Wilde had been debating whether to click the link or let sleeping dogs lie, just as he’d debated whether to take the test at all, whether to begin this journey down a probably dark path in the first place. Submitting his DNA under a pseudonym, he’d concluded, was safe enough. He didn’t have to look at the results. He could just let them sit there behind that link.
There were those who would wonder why Wilde had waited so long, why he hadn’t already taken this obvious step. With companies like 23andMe and Ancestry.com advertising nonstop about how they’d helped reunite hundreds if not thousands of long-lost relatives, wouldn’t it be natural for Wilde to send in his own swab and perhaps learn his own origin story? The extemporaneous, unthought-out answer was yes, of course—but when he took more time with it, when he contemplated the full ramifications, Wilde wasn’t so sure.
Should Wilde, a man who enjoyed living off the grid, a man who really couldn’t connect to most people, open the door to meeting strangers who could claim him as blood and thrust themselves into his life?
Did he want that?
What possible good could come from learning about his past?
The rubber hose alarm triggered the rest of Wilde’s more state-of-the-art system. Most times, especially a few years back, if a car pulled onto the road, it was by mistake. A wrong turn. Wilde had, in fact, set up a clearing right past the road’s entrance so as to make it easy for a car to realize its error, K-turn, and head back out. Now though, with the overgrowth of vegetation in full effect, the turnoff wasn’t really visible from the main road, so those accidental visitors were far rarer.