The phone rang, once again sending shock waves through everybody in the house. Mary answered it, her voice smooth, but hushed by pain and suspense. "Neary residence."
It was the local police. They'd just gotten the FBI bulletin and Chief Lacy was coming over.
"They've been cruising around hunting for Billy all day," Walt said. "Now they'll shift tactics. They'll start going through their files looking at possible perps. A town this size, the likelihood is they won't find any candidates. But we'll be knocking on a few doors in Des Moines and Davenport, you can be sure."
Mark went to the front window. "He stood under that tree. He went up the driveway, along the side of the garage, into the backyard. And then he came in."
"The storm door was never locked, I take it."
"I don't remember." To himself Mark said, It's my fault.
Walt came over to him. "I know what you're thinking. If you'd done this, if you'd done that. Forget it. The guy wanted Billy. He was going to get him no matter what."
"Why my son, Walt?" Mary had taken on the hollow expression that warned Walter Toddcaster of an impending explosion.
Despite her deteriorating emotional state, he continued on. He had a job to do, and it was suddenly damn urgent. "There isn't anything in your background—anybody who hates you— either of you?"
Mark shook his head. Mary looked at him. "My husband has strong political ideals."
"What kind of politics?"
"I'm pretty far left," Mark said. "I've lost a couple of jobs because of it."
Walt Toddcaster's only politics was that of the policeman: vote for the guy who protects the police budget and hates crooks. That probably made him conservative. He'd never thought much about it. "What jobs?"
"I'm a history teacher. Most recently I got canned over the flag-burning issue."
"You think people should be allowed to burn flags?"
"Essentially, yes. But does that make my son a target for kidnapping?"
"It might." Mark bowed his head. Walter realized how harsh his statement sounded, but he did not like the kind of causes he suspected this man supported. Neary was the sort of misguided soul who wanted to put the cops behind bars and let the criminals run the streets. "You make a public stink? Get in the papers, maybe?"
"I'm just a high school teacher. Stories about me don't show up in the paper. When I get fired, nobody notices."
"Now, Mark, that's not quite true. The ACLU—"
"Got me reinstated with back pay. And so they changed the master plan and eliminated the position altogether."
"None of this got in the papers?"
"Not a word."
"We don't know why a given perpetrator picks a given kid. There've been studies, but most of them conclude it's just random. He picked a boy he found attractive. Your boy."
Sally, who had been flipping endlessly through the channels on TV, turned back to KKNX and put the set on mute. "I'm going out for Kentucky Fried Chicken," she said. "I'll bring back a bucket."
A moment after she went out the front door Mary leapt up and ran after her. "Sally! Sally, no!" She grabbed her daughter, clung to her. "Don't go out there!"
"We have to eat, Mother! You didn't touch the sandwiches I made."
"They're still here—"
"I threw them out. They got dry. Momma, I'm not gonna have anything happen to me walking two blocks. It's still light out."
Mary strode across the porch. "I'll go," she said as she headed for the garage. "Walt can move his car."
"Mom, there's no need!"
Mary did not answer. Walt hurried out and pulled his car to the front of the house. He watched Mary back down the drive, turn into the street and drive slowly off. She really ought to be using her headlights. If he'd been out on patrol, he would have given her a warning for no lights after sunset.
Mark and Sally were standing together on the porch as Walt returned to the house. He hated this part, watching the family suffer. Some of them disintegrated, others did not. It was largely a matter of luck.
"Maybe they'll get it on the seven o'clock news," Sally said.
They were still watching when Mary returned. Walt and Sally ate.
"Twelve-year-old William Neary, son of popular Stevensville High School teacher Mark Neary, disappeared from his home early this morning. Police are saying that he was abducted by a stranger who entered the house while the family was sleeping. Full details at ten."
Mark felt his face grow hot. He was hardly popular. The kids barely knew him, he was so new here.
The next moment the phone rang. It was Tom Benton, Stevensville principal. "Mark, Jesus Christ—"
What did he say? "He's gone, Tom." It was so hard to talk about it. To say that, to say "He's gone," it was like heaping coals on your own head.
"You take all the time you need, Mark. Forget that makeup class you were going to do. I don't want to see you."
The instant Mark put down the phone it rang again. This time it was one of Billy's friends, Jerry Edwards. Jerry's voice was hushed. The Edwards family had already been questioned both by Mark and by Walt Toddcaster. "Mr. Neary, we just heard it on TV. Billy—"
The boy's father came on. "If there's anything we can do, buddy. Any damn thing."
As Mark put down the phone the doorbell rang. Sally followed him to the door. A man in a camouflage jacket stood there. For a brief, hopeful moment Mark thought, they all thought—
"Look, we never met. I live two doors down. I want you to know, if there's anything I can do to help—"
"Thank you," Mark said. "But the police are doing all they can."
Walt came to the door. "Wait a minute. There's lots your neighbors can do to help." He pushed his way in front of the family. "Come on in, Mr.—"
"Gerrard. Mike Gerrard. I manage the Walmart over at the mall."
"The Nearys are going to have a poster printed with Billy's picture on it. You could put some up where you work. And they need people to cover the phone when they can't do it themselves." He took Mike Gerrard aside. "They need friends, Mr. Gerrard."
"Hell, yes," Gerrard said. He looked to Mark like somebody from another planet, huge and strong, with tiny, quick eyes. And Mark thought, 'What if he's the man who took my boy.' He forced himself to dismiss the thought.
The sudden outburst of concern was making it all so terribly real. Mark felt physically weighted down, as if somebody had loaded his shoulders with chains. He smiled though, gamely trying to keep going. He had to keep going. Billy needed him. He needed Dad's strength and intelligence and bravery, the things he'd always believed in.
Mark felt like a scrap of nothing.
The phone rang again. This time it was one of Mary's friends. "Keep the calls brief," Walt said.
Mark had just hung up when a car stopped out front. Two men got out, young men wearing neat suits. The family knew at once that the FBI had arrived. The men hurried up to the porch, passing through the little knot of neighbors that was gathering on the sidewalk.
The porch was shadowy and Mark turned on the light. The young men introduced themselves. They came into the house. Realizing that his presence was no longer needed, Mike Gerrard went out to the sidewalk and began conferring in an intense undertone with other neighbors who had gathered there.
The two young men were full of crisp confidence. But they wanted to be taken down the same road that Walt had traveled, the painful road through every corner of Billy's young life.
There were forms to fill out and work to be done. A truck appeared, containing a laboratory team from Des Moines. Suddenly the house was full of people, pictures were being made, fingerprints being taken, steps and couches and every inch of Billy's room vacuumed.
One of the FBI agents, a redhead named Franklin Young, showed Sally and Mark a form. "This is the National Crime Information Center Missing Person Report," he said. "We're going to fill it out together, then it's going to be faxed to Washington."
Young filled out part of the form himself. "I'm
going to list Billy as believed endangered in the message key. That doesn't mean we know something you don't. It's policy for any stranger abduction of a juvenile. Also, it'll give the case highest priority."
Once again Mary and Mark addressed themselves to the details of their son's life. As she worked Mary felt a kind of fury building in her. She had a brief, bloody fantasy of seeing the kidnapper's head explode.
Under "Miscellaneous Information" they wrote a description of the kidnapping, the fact that Billy had waked Mark up with the story about the man in the front yard, the detail of the oiled storm door, the missing clothing and bike. The agents were careful and patient; they left nothing out.
When the form was finally completed, Franklin Young took it out to his car. As he drove off to fax it to the National Crime Information Center, one of the police lab workers began fingerprinting the Nearys so that any prints left by a stranger in their house could be identified.
To Mary all this activity made it seem as if the world's bindings had come loose. She could not move, could not think anymore, could not fill out forms, talk, explain, thank, hope.
When the phone rang again Mary very carefully took a throw pillow from the couch and pressed it against her face. She screamed, then, and screamed again. She felt Mark's hand touching her arm, clasping it, heard his voice as if from a long, long distance. "Mary! Mary, for God's sake!"
She went on screaming, louder and louder. She did not try to stop, did not even want to. She thought she might scream on forever.
10.
Billy knew he was in bed, which was fine, but there was this humming sound. Then he was a balloon full of warm air, and the humming was making him vibrate. He was a red balloon, sailing through a clear sky, sailing slowly higher and higher—
What was that humming, and that jostling? Once in a while, the bed would definitely jostle.
Light flickered behind his eyes. Everything was all warm and soft. But it wasn't nice, not at all. He felt like something very old and very dead had been poured down his throat. Had he come down with the flu during the night? No, the doctor had said—
The doctor?
My house burned down and I'm in the hospital!
He tried to get up but it didn't work, and he remembered why. A long, long time ago he'd waked up, and he'd discovered that he was held down by straps.
So why do they tie you up in the hospital? Only one reason, you're so bad off they don't want you to move.
He decided to take a quick inventory of himself, using Dad's self-examination technique for when you got hurt and there was nobody around. "Your attention is like the beam of a flashlight, Billy, and you can move it through your body. You point it at your left foot, then your right. Left hand, right hand. Legs, arms, torso, head."
He felt like he was in one piece, but there was this fuzziness that was strange, and he was definitely sick. What was that, "something, something and palely loitering," from the Shelley poem—or was it Keats? Kelley and Sheets.
He should have won poetry reading at the Speech Fair. Instead, What's-her-name Pugh had won with "My Last Duchess." His poem was "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." The beautiful lady without mercy. Yeah. Every beautiful lady he knew was like that. Amanda wanted football, not poetry. "La Belle Dame . . ." Alone and palely loitering.
And humming. The humming went on and on, rising and falling, and with it that slight jostling. Off in the distance, somebody was playing opera. The humming twisted and turned, merging with the music.
Why in the world was he strapped to his bed? Surely not even a children's ward did that. Maybe—
"Am I still in the ambulance?"
Distantly a voice: "Yes, son. Go to sleep."
Still in the ambulance . . . but then where was it going? Stevensville Central Hospital was on Route 19, wasn't it? Yes. That wasn't but a few minutes from the house. He wasn't sure how long he'd been in this ambulance, but it was certainly longer than five or ten minutes.
He felt a tiny, cold hand on his cheek. Very tiny, very cold. He shuddered and the feeling left him. No hand. At least, not a real one.
Maybe this was all a great big nightmare.
Billy's voice was so melodic, it made Barton's heart ache just to hear it. But its presence was alarming. He mustn't wake up this soon—especially not in the middle of Denver.
Barton himself had been awake for over twenty hours. Along with the highway, the hours swept away behind him in a quivering, hypnotic line. It was now six-thirty in the evening, and he had been driving for fourteen hours and thirty minutes. He had pushed hard, knowing that a confrontation with the boy was inevitable, and that it was going to happen on the road.
He had it all planned, a tender, painful moment. "Billy," he would say, "I will be more to you than your mother and father ever could be. You need me but you don't know it now. You will come to love me as I love you, with a very special love."
The one thing he believed in totally was his love. Nothing so pure, so noble, could be wrong.
Billy would panic and flutter against the straps, and he would cry. Barton would hold him, maybe kiss his cheek, there was nothing inappropriate about that, speak sweetly to him: "We will have a beautiful life together, you will come to love me as I love you . . ." Those words, so incredible, said to his perfect beauty: I love you.
A man before beauty, his head bowed, fighting the urgency to kneel, to adore that which God has made in the image of His faultless self.
"I give you my heart and soul, Billy."
He listened to the hissing of the tires. He whispered, "I give you my soul."
The scanner burped, a trooper calling in position from somewhere in the mountains. It sounded again, a trouble report on the Denver police frequency.
He heard police talking. Then the humming grew and changed, became a whining and got higher. Was that the siren? No, there was no siren. This ambulance didn't have a siren.
A fire . . . there'd been a fire . . . and he was hurt.
The bread maker! It had been responsible for the fire! He knew it, the thing ran so hot! They never should have bought it.
He flew to full wakefulness. "What happened to my mom and dad?"
"Your parents are fine, son! Everybody's just fine. You suffered a little smoke inhalation, that's all."
God help him, he was driving down a crowded freeway in the middle of one of the biggest cities in the United States and Billy was waking up. This was supposed to happen later, back in the mountains where there were plenty of side roads and nothing but the wind to hear his screams. There Barton could reach out to him, could communicate, soothe and offer himself as father, friend and slave.
Here all he could do was clench the steering wheel and hope the child stayed reasonable.
* * *
Billy took experimental breaths, in and out, in and out. There was nothing wrong with his lungs. He felt sick, not hurt. So why in the world had he spent hours in this ambulance? What was going on here?
"Let me go home! I'm fine!" He had to go to the bathroom at once. "I have to use the John. I have to right now!"
Billy was going to realize any second what was happening. Then he would start screaming and struggling, and oh dear God, hadn't he loosened the straps to make sure Billy could breathe? Hadn't he? Yes .. . back in Ogallala . . . loosened the strap around the chest because the child's breathing seemed labored.
He might get free!
Barton began maneuvering through the traffic, taking a few risks. This was getting dreadfully ugly. A few more miles and it would have been different. Even out of the boy's pain Barton could create love, he knew he could. But not now, not under these impossible conditions.
He loathed traffic!
Why didn't the driver say anything except just "go to sleep, go to sleep"? Why didn't he explain? And what about that doctor? Hadn't there been a doctor back here with him, who'd given him a shot . . .
Late last night somebody got him out of his bed, he remembered that. Yes, they put a rag over
his face, he thought it was Sally giving him a hard time. Then he got all numb . . . then there was this humming.
Again he tried to get up. It made sense for an ambulance bed to have straps, but not the little ones that held down his wrists and ankles. They weren't just meant to keep him from falling out of bed, not only that. He was really strapped in this thing.
"Let me up!"
Still no answer. It would help a lot if he could see something. He took a deep breath and blew, trying to get the cover off his face. Earlier he'd tried it, he remembered. But the effort was vague, like a barely recalled nightmare. Hadn't he struggled and fought and almost gotten out? Maybe, or maybe he'd just dreamed it.
No, his wrist still hurt where he'd pulled it out of the strap. So that part was real.
What were these straps all about, anyway?
"Will somebody tell me what's going on here!"
Oh, God. He s fully conscious and he's starting to understand and I am just passing the Arvada exit.
At least the towers of the city were now behind him and the traffic was a little thinner. Could people hear somebody screaming from inside a van? If they drove alongside with their windows open, maybe so. He hadn't counted on this and now he wasn't sure of anything except that he was dog-dead tired and beginning to simply give out just when he needed every bit of what was strongest and best in him.
Maybe he had to take action, and maybe it was going to be not the best thing for Billy. Maybe he had to hit him with a real drug. For an extreme emergency there was some two-percent solution. Not a lot, but enough to send Billy flying for a few hours.
Morphine wasn't like those other drugs; morphine worked. Billy would go as high as a kite.
No. Fathers did not give morphine to their sons.
But there was no time to think about it now.
Billy raised his chest as high as it would go, struggling against the straps. He pushed until he couldn't breathe, and pushed still harder—until at last he stopped, gasping, his head pounding with the first real headache he had ever felt in his life.
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