by Willow Rose
I shrug. “It’s getting late. Maybe we should get back to the house and see if anyone has heard anything.”
Chloe nods and we walk back to our car and get in. I start the engine and look out into the darkness in front of me.
“The only thing I don’t get is why would he take Salter?” I say. “You didn’t find any pictures of him on the computer, did you?”
She shakes her head and I drive into the street.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” I mumble under my breath, as we drive back and I wonder about my son. “It makes no sense at all.”
Chapter Ninety-Three
April 2016
He runs the brush carefully through her black hair. Her head is resting in his lap. He likes to pretend her eyes are looking at him, but they’re not. They’re staring lifelessly into the ceiling.
He has bought her a new dress. A brown dress very similar to the one his mother was wearing the last time he saw her, when she stood in the doorway of their small home in Saigon forty years ago and told him to go, to take his sister, to just leave town and not come back before it had all calmed down.
He never saw her again.
Danh draws in a deep breath and puts the brush on the table next to him. He caresses the woman’s pale face gently, while humming the song his mother used to sing for him when he couldn’t sleep.
“Now we can be together again. Finally, dear mother, we’re together again. You, me, Bao, and Long,” he mumbles, while touching her lips and running a finger up the curve of her nose.
Danh’s other brothers all made it out of Saigon and Vietnam. Two of them live in Japan, one in Spain, two in Sweden, and one in Germany. Danh is the only one who ended up in the U.S. He hasn’t seen them since they left Vietnam. Only written them letters and they have written back. It took many years for him to find out what happened to all of them, and it wasn’t until a few years ago that he knew of the fate of his mother. That she was taken by the soldiers who came to town because she refused to tell them where her sons were. In prison, she was tortured, and finally killed. Danh never knew what happened to his dad, and still hopes he’ll one day know.
He places his hands under the woman’s armpits and pulls her up. He places her in the chair at the dinner table, her hands on each side of the plate like she is about to pick up the silverware. Danh then walks to the other side of the table and sits down across from her. He forces a smile.
“Now, let’s eat.”
Danh picks up the box of Cheerios and pours some in his bowl, then pours milk on it and starts to eat. It was all he ate on the American aircraft carrier after they picked him up while drifting around in the ocean. They told him they found him on top of his brother’s body and that he refused to let go of him. They had to take the both of them onboard their carrier. Danh was introduced to cereal by the soldiers and that was his favorite food ever since. After his retirement he never ate anything else.
When they reached land, they helped him take his brother with him to the United States. They had the body embalmed in Thailand so it wouldn’t decompose during the long journey. Danh was supposed to have him buried once he arrived there, but instead he kept him in the small condo that was given to him. He bought a casket for him with a lid of glass and kept him in there for years. He didn’t want him to leave him, ever again.
Danh pours himself a glass of orange juice and lifts it to salute Bao, sitting next to him at the table.
“To family,” he says.
No one else lifts their glass. Danh looks at them. He sighs and puts down his own glass. “I know,” he says. “I know. We’re not complete. Long isn’t here. I am sorry. We’ve been playing hide and go seek.”
Danh laughs out loud and leans back in his chair. “I haven’t had this much fun in years,” he says. Then his face freezes. He slams his fist into the table with a loud noise.
“You’re right. There is a time to play and a time to eat. I will find her. She needs to be with her family.”
Danh pushes his chair out from the table.
“If you’ll excuse me, I’ll go get her.”
Chapter Ninety-Four
April 2016
Boxer steps on the gas pedal as he drives through downtown. A couple crossing the road jumps for their lives as Boxer’s van barely misses them.
“Freaking tourists,” he grumbles.
Boxer is sweating, his hands are moist and feel slippery on the wheel.
“You’ll get us both killed if you continue like this,” his brother says.
Boxer turns his head and looks at him in the passenger seat. “You again? What do you care? I thought you were already dead. Remember the bomb?”
“Vividly,” his brother says, as he pulls out a bottle of vodka and starts to gulp it down. “I also remember you not shooting the kid when you were told to.”
“So you’re saying I killed you, is that it?” Boxer growls and takes a turn so sharp the wheels screech. He almost hits the wall of the Chinese place, Yen Yen on the corner of A1A and Minutemen.
His brother shrugs and keeps drinking. “You said it; I didn’t.”
Boxer screams and turns the wheel to avoid a street light. “I hate you. Do you know that? I hate you! So what if I killed you? Maybe I wanted to kill you. Have you ever thought about that? With all the gambling and the drinking. It was always my mess to clean up. You always came to me and I had to fix everything. You ruined my life! Do you even realize that? You ruined everything. Mother couldn’t cope with it; she couldn’t take it, and so I had to. Still, she was heartbroken when you died. And she blamed it all on me. Why couldn’t you save him, Joe? Why didn’t you protect him? I told you to protect him when you left. I told you to watch over him.”
His brother laughs.
“Why the heck is that so funny?”
Boxer is screaming when he speaks. His eyes are filled with the anger and tears gathered from years of frustration. He doesn’t look at the road in front of him, only at his brother. His drinking brother who destroyed everything while alive and still does even though he is dead.
“Get out of my life!” he yells, his mouth frothing in anger.
He doesn’t see the man in the street until it’s too late. He turns the wheel hard and misses the man, but the van spins out of control and crashes into a wall.
At first he is confused and doesn’t know where he is. He has bumped his head. It hurts. There is smoke everywhere and flames erupt at the front of the van. Boxer sobs and looks at the seat next to him.
It’s empty.
“Peter?”
He looks everywhere inside the car for his brother, but he’s not there anymore. Boxer doesn’t understand where he is, since he is always there. Always right there next to him, ready to torment him, but now it is quiet. So quiet.
The flames are getting bigger now and he knows he has to leave fast. Boxer jumps out of the van and walks backwards away from the car while flames eat it. Peter is still nowhere to be seen.
Is he really gone?
Boxer looks at the van as it is quickly devoured, then hears sirens in the distance. He throws a glance at the road ahead of him, then looks back at the car, just as the first fire truck turns the corner at the Chinese place. Next, Boxer turns on his heel and starts to run.
Chapter Ninety-Five
April 2016
“He’s not here.”
Joey is the first to announce it to me as I storm in the front door. He can tell by the look on my face that I have been hoping that Salter has returned while Chloe and I were gone. But, of course, he hasn’t. They would have called me if he had. I just somehow had hoped that maybe he had.
“I know,” I say, my shoulders slumped.
“All police cars on patrol and all firefighters are looking for him,” Joey says, as he grabs me by the shoulders and hugs me. “We will find him.”
Sandra pours me a cup of coffee and I take a small sip. She sits down in front of me. Ever since the accident, it has been difficult for her
to smile properly, and I appreciate her effort in trying to do so now, to try and comfort me.
“How are you holding up?” she asks.
I stare into her eyes. They are still gorgeous. No one can ever take that away from her. The rest is just packaging, if you ask me.
“I don’t know. I feel like panicking, but what’s the use?”
Sandra nods. She is holding her coffee between her hands. “Did you find anything at that guy’s house?”
I nod. “Hair. We found a lock of hair that I think must belong to Paige Stover. She has that type of hair that…”
I pause and look at Sandra without really seeing her. Thoughts and images are flickering through my mind. “Wait a minute,” I say and get up.
“What?” Chloe asks and approaches me, a soda in one hand, and banana cake in the other. The sight of the cake makes my stomach turn in worry, but I shake it. I can’t let myself be overwhelmed with emotions. Not now. Not when my son needs me more than ever.
“The hair,” I say. “All of their hair.”
“What are you talking about?” Chloe asks, mouth filled with cake.
“Why haven’t we seen that?” I grab my laptop and open the article about Kim and Casey Taylor. “Look at them.”
“Just get to the point, will you?” Chloe asks.
“They’re all Asian. All of the kidnapped women and their children have Asian features. They all have the same long black hair and eyes. Tara is only half Asian, but she still has the characteristics.”
“So, what does that mean?” Chloe asks. “I mean, besides the fact that this guy who calls himself Dr. Seuss is into Asian girls? Lots of men are.”
I shrug. “I don’t know. But it must mean something, right?”
Chloe bites her lip. I can tell she really wants to make me happy, make me think this will lead somewhere. “Sure. We just don’t know what.”
I sit down again, and then open my computer. I Google Dr. Seuss, then Asian girls. Shouldn’t have done that, since it mainly brings up a lot of porn sites. I go back to Dr. Seuss again. I open Wikipedia and read through his story, thinking maybe there is a reason this guy calls himself that. Maybe there is something in his story about Asian girls or maybe just something else that made this guy choose that name, like Boxer chose his because he shared name with a famous boxer.
Shared a name?
“I think I’ve got it,” I say and stare at the screen.
Chloe approaches me. “Got what?”
I grab my phone next to me, rush into my dad’s room, and grab his gun to put in my purse.
When I return, I walk past Chloe, reach for the door handle on the front door, and look at her.
“I know who Dr. Seuss is. Let’s go.”
Chapter Ninety-Six
April 2016
She can hear him on the stairs. She and Tara are sitting in the room upstairs by the fireplace, sharing a bowl of Cheerios that Paige brought back with her, when Paige hears it.
“He’s coming,” she says.
Tara shakes her head. “He can’t be. He never comes up here at night. He stays down there with…”
Tara grows silent. “I call them the zombies. There used to be more. Now my mom…my mom is one of them. He places them around that table and then he has dinner with them. When I came here, there was a little girl there too. And another woman. But now they’re gone. Now he sits there with my mom.”
“Do you think he wants to do the same to us?” Paige asks, remembering seeing the woman he was with in the library downstairs.
Tara doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t have to. Paige knows that’s what she is afraid of.
“He did it to the other girl,” she says with a low voice. “I saw her. She was already stiff and had dead eyes when I saw her the first time.”
Paige swallows hard. She listens carefully, but can’t hear the steps anymore. Maybe it was just all in her head. Living in constant fear of him starting to count again has made her jumpy and nervous.
Then the sound is back. She gasps and looks at Tara, who has heard it too. Her eyes are big and wide.
“You heard that?” Paige whispers.
Tara nods. “But…I haven’t heard him count. He always starts the game by counting so I can hide.”
“Ready or not…” they hear him say all of a sudden. The voice sounds like it is very close to the door.
Paige gasps and looks at Tara, who sits frozen.
“Here I COME!”
As the handle turns, Tara springs for the chimney. Paige is on her tail. Tara is fast. She climbs up and makes room for Paige to get in as well. Heart throbbing in her chest, Paige climbs up the rocky walls inside the chimney, her slippery hands failing to get a good grip. She is whimpering and struggling to keep quiet. She stays still to not make a sound and hears footsteps across the wooden floors, the bowl of cereal being turned over, then more steps, and suddenly a hand grabs her leg.
“Found you!”
Paige screams as she feels the fingers surround her ankle and start to pull. Paige holds on to the rocks, but her fingers slip, and soon she is pulled downwards, her face scratching against the walls of the chimney. She tries to get a new grip and to protect herself with her hands, but she can’t hold onto anything, and soon her face is smashed into the bottom of the fireplace and she screams in pain.
Whimpering and crying, she is pulled across the wooden floors and into the carpeted hallway. She is screaming for him to leave her alone and trying to kick herself free, but his grip is too strong. She tries to grab ahold of doors or the rails on the stairs. Between screaming and crying, she can hear him singing. She recognizes the song from the movie she always used to watch with her mom, The Lorax. Paige has always hated this song. And hearing it coming out of this creepy man’s mouth scares her more than anything.
“How ba-a-a-ad can I be?
I'm just doing what comes naturally,
How ba-a-a-ad can I be?
How bad can I possibly be?”
He keeps singing as he walks down the stairs, banging her head on every step. Paige screams in pain and pleads with him to stop, but he completely ignores her and keeps singing:
“Well there's a principle of nature, principle of nature
That almost every creature knows,
Called survival of the fittest—survival of the fittest.”
At the end of the stairs, he turns and drags her towards the library. Paige sees it approaching, the door left open, and soon she is pulled inside and placed on the floor. She screams as she sees what looks mostly like two zombies sitting at a dinner table. The man lets go of her foot, and walks to the door to close it, while still singing:
“And check it; this is how it goes,
The animal that wins gotta scratch and fight and claw and bite and punch,
And the animal that doesn't, well the animal that doesn't winds up someone else's la-la-la-la-lunch—munch, munch, munch, munch, munch.”
Paige tries to crawl her way towards the door, but it is slammed shut right in front of her. The man is standing above her. He grabs her by the arms and pulls her back across the floor, kicking and screaming. He leaves her there, grabs a cord, and puts it tight around her throat, still while singing:
“I'm just saying,
How ba-a-a-ad can I be?”
Chapter Ninety-Seven
April 2016
“He misses them.”
I am driving down A1A towards downtown while explaining everything to Chloe. “It was actually your mom who said it to me.”
“My mom? I’m not quite following you here.”
“She looked at me and said to me that he misses them. And it was when thinking about that that I realized how it was all connected.”
“Could you please explain it to me, then? ‘Cause I don’t get anything right now,” she says.
“Dr. Seuss. His real name was Theodor Seuss Geisel. It was while reading his wiki page that it hit me. His real name was Theodor. Theodor G.”
&nb
sp; Chloe turns her head and looks at me. “Are you insane? The football player? The founder of Pull ‘N Pork? That Theodor G? The man is a hero around here.”
“Yes. I know. But it totally makes sense. I remember reading about him a few years ago in an interview where he talked about his mother and how he had recently discovered what happened to her after he fled Saigon back in ’75. Theodor and his siblings all fled the country, but he lost his brother and sister during a pirate attack on the boat they were fleeing on. He never knew what happened to his parents until a few years ago, when he learned his mother had been killed in prison. That’s why he’s kidnapping girls and their mothers, because he misses them.”
“Why doesn’t he kidnap fathers and brothers then?” Chloe asks.
“Most of his brothers survived and still live all around the world; his father he never knew what happened to. But his sister and mother died, and now he’s finding girls and mothers who look like them.”
“That’s crazy. He still lost one brother,” she says, rolling her eyes. “He should be missing him too.”
“I don’t know the details, but I think we’re on to something here,” I say. “It fits with the fact that it was about two years ago that the first disappearance took place. The first Asian woman and her daughter. And then there is the name. Theodor G. It’s not his real name; I remember reading that he changed it many years ago to separate himself from his past.”
“This is insane, Mary. Let’s go back home. You’re going to embarrass yourself and me in front of the whole town if you accuse him of this.”
I take a sharp turn onto Minutemen, ignoring Chloe. “He might have Salter as well. Maybe he had Boxer kidnap Salter to act like the brother or something. I have this hunch and I have got to follow it.”
As we drive onto Minutemen, we see a small fire being put out by a fire truck. A couple of police cars are there too. They have blocked one side of the road. We drive past it slowly.