One Kick: A Novel

by Chelsea Cain

  “I can pick the lock,” Kick said, already eyeing the door’s medium-priced dead bolt, a Schlage five-pin by the look of it.

  “Was the flag here?” Bishop asked.

  “I don’t remember it,” Kick said.

  Bishop buttoned his blazer and grinned at her. “Flagpole in the yard. Grandkids’ names in the front walk. Navy emblem on the mailbox. What does that tell you?”

  Kick didn’t see what he was getting at. “The people who live here are old and patriotic?”

  “Exactly,” Bishop said. “So why don’t we try knocking first?” He brushed some lint from his shoulder, stepped up to the door, and knocked.

  They hadn’t even worked out their cover story. They were totally unprepared. But Kick didn’t have time to protest. The door opened and a grandfatherly man appeared with a neighborly yet cautious smile. His baseball cap announced that he was a U.S. Navy veteran.

  “Hello, sir,” Bishop said smoothly. “We’re investigating an abducted child, and it’s possible a man who may have information about the case used to live here about fourteen years ago. Do you mind if we come in?”

  Kick gave Bishop a sideways look. She hadn’t expected him to tell the truth.

  The man in the doorway regarded them with sharp eyes. He was in his mid-seventies, Kick guessed, and still broad shouldered and strong. His T-shirt and cutoffs were layered with the paint of a hundred projects.

  He adjusted his cap. “I expect you’d better come in,” he said, opening the door.

  Kick tried to hide her amazement. The guy was just going to let them in out of some sort of civic duty. He hadn’t even asked for identification. Old and patriotic.

  “After you,” Bishop said, giving her a push.

  She stepped inside.

  “Name’s Collingsworth,” the man said to Bishop. “I’ll help in any way I can.”

  Kick moved past him toward the living room. Her stomach tightened with anticipation. Since they’d pulled up to the house, her memories had gotten clearer, more detailed. She could see the brass gas fireplace in the living room wall and the built-in bookshelves where Klugman had kept the paperbacks that she wasn’t supposed to read. She remembered the brown shag carpet and how it smelled like cats, even though Klugman didn’t have a cat.

  But when she turned the corner, everything was wrong.

  It wasn’t how it was supposed to be. There was no gas fireplace, no brown carpet, no bookcases. The room wasn’t even the right shape.

  This was not the house she remembered.

  She turned back to Bishop. “This is wrong,” she said.

  “We’ve done a lot of work to the place,” Collingsworth said almost apologetically.

  Family photographs adorned the wall behind him. A picture of two little girls hung in a frame decorated with the words World’s Best Grandpa.

  “When did you buy it?” Bishop asked him.

  “Ten years ago this November,” Collingsworth said. “Bought it from the bank. A property management company owned it before then, but they went belly-up.”

  That fit the time frame.

  Kick continued into the kitchen, scrutinizing every molding. The counters were configured differently, and new shiny white appliances had been installed. She remembered an ancient refrigerator with a heavy door she needed help to open. She remembered wallpaper with pale pink and yellow flowers.

  She went to the kitchen window and looked out, but it was a different backyard. All she saw was an expanse of grass. “There’s no pool,” she called to Bishop.

  “First thing I did was fill that in,” Collingsworth said from behind her. “It was leaking. Would have cost five thousand dollars to repair. And Estelle worried about the grandkids. That was my wife, may she rest in peace.”

  “What about the basement?” Bishop asked.

  Kick spun around.

  Collingsworth gave a nod toward a closed door at the far corner of the kitchen.

  Kick’s heart was in her throat as they descended the basement stairs. Each step came back to her: the sound the wood made as it creaked under her feet, how the center of each step had a worn spot in the gray paint. The wood underneath the paint was polished from a thousand footfalls. It gleamed.

  “You know, it’s really unusual to find a basement in San Diego,” Collingsworth was saying to Bishop. “One of the reasons we bought the place. Estelle was from back east . . .”

  Kick cleared the stairs and stepped into the basement. She knew better than to let herself hope, but the stairs had seemed so familiar, she allowed herself a brief fantasy that this might be the place.

  But confronted with the new drywall, lighting, and carpet, she hesitated. Basement stairs were basement stairs. They all creaked. They all had worn paint. Now that she was in the basement, it was nothing like she remembered it. She had no reference point to get her bearings. She looked despairingly at Bishop.

  “Give it a minute,” Bishop said.

  Collingsworth’s white eyebrows drew together. “Say, you don’t think someone is buried down here?” he asked.

  Bishop didn’t answer. Something had caught his eye. He turned to Collingsworth. “You do a lot of this work yourself, Mr. Collingsworth?” he asked.

  Collingsworth glanced away sheepishly. “Yeah.”

  “So no permits, then,” Bishop said slowly.

  “I, uh . . .”

  “It’s okay,” Bishop said. He gave Collingsworth a reassuring smile. “We don’t work for the city.”

  Kick was looking around the basement, trying to figure out what Bishop was seeing.

  Then she spotted it. The other walls were drywall, but this one was paneled with knotty pine, like a rustic accent wall in some 1970s rec room. Kick moved toward it.

  “That’s not a load-bearing wall,” Bishop said to Collingsworth. “Was that here when you bought the place?”

  Kick knew the answer was no before Collingsworth even grumbled a response. The wall was out of place. The geometry didn’t fit.

  “You know what’s on the other side of it?” Bishop asked.

  “Dirt?” Collingsworth guessed. “It’s a half basement. Not uncommon around here. If you’re lucky enough to have a basement, you take what you can get.”

  Kick scanned the room again, trying to overlay her memories on top of the well-lit, well-scrubbed, finished space she was standing in. The concrete floor, the cobwebs, the old sheet Klugman had hung to act as a backdrop for filming. She had crossed that concrete floor to visit James. She had come down the stairs and walked straight across the basement. The pine wall was in the right place.

  “You have the house inspected before you bought it?” Bishop asked.

  “Bought it for a song,” Collingsworth said. “Didn’t need a loan.”

  Kick put her cheek to the wall and pressed her skin against the knotty pine until it felt like the wood grain was being imprinted on her flesh. Then she knocked—shave and a haircut—and listened for a mechanical click.

  “Exactly what do you two think is on the other side of that wall?” Collingsworth asked.

  “The cell the man who used to live here kept a child in,” Kick said.

  Collingsworth reddened and stepped back. Bishop sighed and shook his head.

  She didn’t care.

  She moved her face along the pineboards and then stopped and knocked again. She didn’t know if the room was still there, if the locking mechanism would even work after all these years, if she’d even hear the click through the knotty pine. But for the first time since they’d walked into that house, she was certain that this was the place. Her skin prickled. Her mouth felt hot. She moved her cheek and knocked again. She had to concentrate, to listen as hard as she could.

  Someone tapped her on the shoulder and she turned. Collingsworth stood behind her with a sledgehammer. Behind him, a utility roo
m door was open.

  “Step aside,” he said. He lifted the sledgehammer. “ I was a Seabee in the navy. I’ve got grandkids. If there’s some kind of cell back there, let’s find it.”

  Kick ducked out of the way and Collingsworth swung the sledgehammer at the center of the pine wall. Wood splintered and the hammer stuck in the wall for a minute before Collingsworth pulled it free. Muscles rippled underneath the loose skin of his arms. This time drywall dust filled the air and whole boards clattered to the carpet.

  Kick could taste the drywall dust grit in her mouth. She took a few steps back, covered her mouth with her hand, and closed her eyes.

  She heard Collingsworth whack the wall again, and there was another great thwack as more wood gave way, and Kick felt the dust in the air thicken.

  Collingsworth started coughing. Kick peeked an eye open. Collingsworth was covered with a fine white powder like he’d been rolled in flour. Splinters and chunks of drywall lay on the floor at his feet. He heaved the sledgehammer into the air again, but his lungs gave out before he could get it above his shoulder. He spit on the floor, set his mouth determinedly, tried again, and started wheezing. Kick was certain that he was going to have a heart attack. She wondered bleakly if they could be blamed for it.

  Bishop was already taking off his blazer. He laid it across the back of a recliner and approached Collingsworth with a polite smile. “May I?” he asked, indicating the sledgehammer. “I have always wanted to use one of these things.”

  Kick was breathing through her fingers. Dust was settling on Bishop’s gray shirt like snow.

  Collingsworth turned the sledgehammer over to him and stepped out of the cloud. Bishop swung it above his shoulder, held it like a batter staring down a pitch, grinned happily, and slammed it through the wall.

  A few minutes later Bishop, sweating and beaming like a kid, had smashed a four-foot-square hole into the wall. “That was fun,” he said. He lifted his T-shirt up and wiped some of the pulverized drywall off his face.

  Kick tried to peer through the opening, but it was too dark and the dust was too thick.

  “Is there a room?” she asked.

  “Oh, there’s a room,” Bishop said, and he picked up the hammer, held it forward with a straight arm, and extended it beyond the wall into the darkness, all the way to his armpit. Kick’s eyes stung from the grit in the air. More chunks of drywall and splinters of wood littered the carpet.

  “You need a flashlight?” Collingsworth asked Bishop.

  They both had white dust in their hair and on their eyelashes.

  “That’s exactly what I need,” Bishop said.

  Collingsworth tromped off to the utility room, leaving a trail of white footprints, and came back with an assortment of industrial flashlights and lanterns. “Earthquake country,” he said, by way of explanation, and he handed an LED camp lantern to Bishop.

  Bishop turned the lantern on and stretched it into the darkness.

  “Oh my God,” Kick whispered, feeling the hair on the back of her neck stand up. Bishop leaned in, moving the light around, but Kick stood ramrod straight, trying to absorb what she saw.

  A rotting mattress lay on the concrete floor surrounded by stacks of yellowing paperbacks and moldy posters curling from the walls; a seatless toilet sat in the corner, and pop cans were scattered across the floor, coated with dust. Beyond the effects of age, the room had been preserved exactly as it had been when James was kept in it.

  “Is it what you remember?” Bishop asked her.

  “It’s exactly how I remember it,” Kick said slowly. She felt dazed, like she was entering a dream. “I don’t think anyone’s been in this room since James.”

  “Hold this,” Bishop said, handing Kick the lantern. He pivoted away, already dialing someone on his phone.

  Collingsworth stepped forward, gazed solemnly into the room, and took off his cap.

  “It’s me,” Bishop said into the phone. “I need you to run a check on a name and address for me. Rental records. Tax records. Anything you can find.” He paused. “Klugman. . . . I don’t know how it’s spelled. You find out for me. . . . I don’t know the first name. He was at this address fourteen years ago.” He rattled off the address.

  The posters were so moldy that Kick couldn’t make out what they were; she couldn’t remember.

  “I’m going to take a look around,” Bishop said. He was wearing latex gloves now and took the lantern back from her, then stepped through the broken wall.

  “I’ll come with you,” Kick said quickly.

  “It’s a crime scene,” Bishop said, looking back at her through the hole, his face lit by the lantern. “Think back: we’ve been over this.”

  “His mother sold him,” Kick said. “He wasn’t abducted.” Bishop had already turned away from her and was moving toward a far corner, his body blocking her view of what the lantern was revealing. “Without a complaining victim, the statute of limitations on child sex abuse is ten years,” Kick continued. “You’d need James to wake up and file a police report, and that will never happen. Even if he does wake up, he would never agree to go through a trial—that would mean dealing with people. So, assuming you manage to someday find Klugman, which is highly unlikely, you’re better off prosecuting him for human trafficking. Or you could have the bastard put away for life for child pornography. Then you don’t need the room at all.” She didn’t want to testify, but she’d do it for James. “You just need me.”

  The lantern appeared again, and Bishop with it. “Congratulations on the law degree,” he said.

  “I have a special interest in this area,” Kick said.

  He extended a hand to help her step over the lower part of the wall. Kick ignored the gesture and clambered through the passage unaided. The floor on the other side was concrete. The air felt immediately colder. Everything smelled sour and dank. She lit a path with her flashlight and made her way past the mattress to the posters on the wall. Even up close, in direct light, she couldn’t make out the images. The bloom of mold had blotted out everything.

  “You know what they are?” Bishop asked, stepping beside her.

  The light of his lantern, combined with her flashlight, brightened the wall just enough that a sliver of stone was visible in the poster’s image. It was a castle—Kick could see its shape now—one of those old castles tourists visit in places like Bavaria.

  “They’re travel posters,” Kick said. How many hours had James spent, locked in this room, dreaming of faraway lands? “Places he wanted to go.”

  “What’s this?” Bishop asked. He moved his light to where the corner of the poster had curled off the wall, and Kick saw a piece of paper tucked there. Bishop reached for it with his latex-gloved hand and slid out a postcard.

  It had been protected somewhat from the entropy of the room, but when he held it in the light, they saw that the image on the front was largely consumed by mold. He flipped it over. The back was blank except for a logo: The Desert Rose Motel. Kick felt a jolt of recognition. She looked around for something she could use to clean the card.

  “Take off your shirt,” she said.

  “Excuse me?” Bishop said.

  “Your shirt’s already dirty,” Kick said. There was no way she was taking her shirt off. “Mine isn’t.”

  Bishop hesitated and then put the lantern on the floor and pulled his shirt over his head. “Now what?” he said.

  “Clean off the front of the card,” Kick said, picking up the lantern.

  Bishop placed the postcard against the wall and used his shirt to scrub at the mold. Kick turned her head as tiny spores rose into the air and floated in the light.

  “That’s the best I can do,” Bishop said.

  Kick inched closer to the card. The mold had smeared and formed a fine, streaky gray paste. But Kick could see a ghost of an image underneath. A fifties-style courtyard motel wit
h a pool, surrounded by desert. A neon sign in front read The Desert Rose Motel, Vacancy.

  She knew it. She’d been there.

  “This place,” she said. “We went there on a vacation. They let me play in the pool. Be outside. Linda met us there, but Mel and I were there for days, alone.” The Desert Rose pool—that’s where Mel had taught her how to do the back float. He’d mentioned it at the infirmary. “Yesterday,” she said. “I think he mentioned this vacation. He told me to remember it. I thought it was after San Diego. But it must have been before. I think this is where Mel met Klugman.”

  Bishop worked a finger under the moldy poster where they’d found the postcard and a moment later another square of paper came free from underneath and dropped into Bishop’s waiting hand. He wiped it with his shirt and then planted it on the wall in front of her. “Is this Klugman?” he asked.

  The photograph was surprisingly well preserved. James as she had first known him, a gawky nine-year-old, with a bad haircut and too-small clothes. In this picture he was grinning. A man had his arm around him. The man was turning his head away from the camera, his anonymity protected except for the side of his jaw, his ear, and his sideburn. They were standing side by side in the shallow end of a swimming pool. James, his bare chest sunken and skinny, looked puny next to Klugman’s hairy barrel shape. But he was outside, in the backyard pool. He had not always been kept in the dark.

  Kick looked away. “It’s him,” she said. She didn’t need to see his face; she recognized his shape, his torso and limbs, his square head.

  Bishop pocketed the postcard and the picture and they looked around some more, carefully peeling the poster off the walls, but they didn’t find any more hidden clues. Kick leafed through James’s sci-fi paperbacks. Bishop went through the pockets of a small pile of rotting clothes. They flipped the mattress over.

  That’s where the little figure was, so small that when Kick first saw it in her flashlight beam, she thought it was an old screw. It was only when she picked it up that she saw it was a little man made of wire, a twin to the talisman she wore on her finger. James had probably found the wire scraps in his room or pilfered them from the basement.