by Daniel Pyle
On the other side of the car, he dropped the handles and took a second to stretch his shoulders. His left bicep burned, but a few quick flexes brought the pain down to a tolerable level. He reached for the back door and tried the handle. It didn’t budge. He yanked on it harder but with no more success. It had rusted shut.
Oh well. The window was gone. Tiny triangles of broken glass poked up from between the cracked rubber weather strips like monstrous teeth from between dead lips. He looked back at the body, telling himself this would be the last time he would ever have to lift it. He allowed himself a thirty-second breather before reaching into the wheelbarrow.
The bedding stunk. He supposed the stench wasn’t any worse now than it had ever been, but somehow, as he lifted the body to the empty window frame, it seemed to have taken on a whole new odor. Dave/Hank poked one end of the roll through the window and shoved. It was like trying to push a socked foot into a shoe that was already laced. He groaned and leaned on the bundle, pushed on it from different angles and punched at the protruding mounds, some of which were probably body parts.
The body finally popped into the car. Dave/Hank heard rattling bones and rasping cloth, but he didn’t look inside at the damage he’d done. His business here was done forever. The car had its full load—it could finish its trip to Hell.
Dave/Hank thought about bringing back the wheelbarrow but decided to leave it be. He didn’t want to have to mess with dragging it all the way back to the house, wrenching it over fallen trees and through prickling bushes. If he needed it that badly, he could always come back, but he didn’t think he would. The wheelbarrow and its stolen tire had served their purpose.
Hank Abbott rubbed his hands together, blew out a long exhalation, and walked away from the station wagon, looking at nothing but the path ahead.
THIRTY-TWO
Libby sat on Trevor’s bed. She had one of his action figures, a cartoony looking guy with red skin, pressed between her hands. Mike had stayed in the living room by the phone, but she’d wanted to get up and stretch her legs. She’d ended up here, looking through Trevor’s things, thinking about him and crying.
She twisted the action figure around and found a hole on his back probably meant to connect with some accessory, maybe a jet pack or an extra set of bendable arms. She wasn’t sure, couldn’t remember buying this particular toy. Mike had probably gotten this one for their son on one of their weekends together.
Not for the first time, Libby thought about how strange it was that Trevor’s life contained portions to which she was not privy. He spent whole days away from her, doing things she didn’t know about (though he often told her of the days’ events in extreme detail), having conversations she wasn’t a part of. She supposed it was the same when he went to school. Him with his little friends, talking about comic books and superheroes, television shows and movies. But it wasn’t the same. The time Trevor spent in this house, away from her, was the result of her and Mike’s failed marriage. It was her fault. Every kid went to school, but not every kid’s parents split up. She dropped the toy onto the X-Men pillow beside her and rubbed her face.
No more police had arrived, no knocks on the door, no check-up calls, which she took to mean no progress. If they’d found Trevor somewhere in the woods, they’d have brought him directly home. Surely. She tried to imagine where Trevor was but quickly shut off her imagination when the images took a nasty turn. It was better to sit here and play with his toys, to try not to think about what was happening to him, to wait.
She plucked the action figure from the pillow and flew him lazily through the air. When the phone rang, she dropped the toy on the mattress, and looked toward the living room. Part of her didn’t believe it, thought it must be her mind playing a trick on her. Another part recognized the sound as reality but didn’t want to know what news the phone call might bring. What if they’d found Trevor’s body? What if the kidnapper wanted a million dollars they didn’t have?
She hopped off Trevor’s bed. Although she felt like she’d hesitated forever, she entered the living room before the phone could ring a third time.
At the mall, Mike had wanted to blame Libby for losing Trevor, had wanted to scream at her, but now it was his fault. He’d done what he could, but it hadn’t been enough. He’d failed. Trevor was gone because of his inadequacy as a father.
He leaned back on the couch and wiped a tear from his cheek.
He wondered about Trevor and the other boy, if they were safe, if they were still alive. He didn’t want to think those kinds of thoughts but couldn’t help it. Libby had always been good at controlling her thoughts, but he had not. His mind went where it wanted—he simply tagged along. Sometimes he chalked it up to artistic tendencies, but right now he cursed his overdeveloped imagination.
He looked toward the hallway. He didn’t know for sure, but he thought Libby had probably gone to Trevor’s bedroom. They could have sat together and talked, had another cup of tea, but once they’d exhausted their conversation about Trevor, things had gotten a little awkward. Mike hadn’t wanted their conversation to get too deep, too emotional, because he thought it might make her uncomfortable, but you could only go so long on small talk, especially on a night like tonight, when already mundane topics like weather and work seemed all the more unimportant.
He thought about the kidnapper. Why would he take Trevor? He’d asked himself the question a hundred times, and he still had no answers. Had he gotten the wrong kid—meant to get some rich, spoiled brat and taken Mike’s precious Trevor instead? Maybe, although Mike couldn’t imagine anyone coming into this house and thinking they were rich or even well off. It could have been a random act of violence, but that didn’t make sense either. Nothing about the kidnapper had seemed random. He’d come into the house purposefully, come straight to the bedroom and gone after Trevor with only a single attempt to wound Mike. If he’d been after meaningless violence, Mike would have been the more accessible target. Besides, if it had been for the money, they’d have gotten a phone call, and if it had been pure aggression, the guy would have killed both Mike and Trevor on the spot, not taken the boy with him. Something else was going on here, something he didn’t understand.
From the table beside the couch, the phone rang. He’d put it on the charger after the cops left.
He looked at the phone but didn’t move to answer it. What if Deputy Willis had called to tell him they’d found Trevor’s body stuffed into a drainage ditch or spread across the highway? He didn’t know how he would handle that, if he could handle it. Surely, if he heard such a thing, his heart would simply stop beating and he’d drift off to wherever it was dead people went, to wherever Trevor had gone.
He reached for the phone and held it in his hand, not pressing the talk button, watching the fluttering light and trying to hope.
Libby came into the room looking worried and ten years older than normal. She opened her mouth to say something, but before she could, Mike punched the talk button and pressed the receiver to his ear.
“Yes?” he said. “Hello.”
THIRTY-THREE
It had taken Trevor a long time to move across the crawlspace above the ceiling. The yellow stuff (or at least what he hoped was the yellow stuff, what he dared not let himself think might be the cobwebs of giant vampire spiders) kept getting on his face and in his hair and itching him. The ceiling joists sometimes bowed and tilted at crazy angles. He almost slipped a couple of times, and although he didn’t know if he was heavy enough to break through sections of ceiling that didn’t have water damage, he didn’t want to test it.
He crawled in the dark until he thought he’d gotten to the other side of the house, where, if he remembered right and hadn’t gotten himself all turned around, the kitchen was. Once there, he waited, listening for sounds from beneath, for some sign that he’d been caught and that the crazy man was waiting for him to show himself.
The only sounds he heard were his heartbeat and sometimes a creaking board from behind
him, which was scary because it sounded like a monster chasing after him but also okay because he knew it was really just the house settling. Houses settled down and made funny sounds sometimes. His daddy had told him all about it.
After repositioning himself so he was straddling one of the boards, his feet splayed and resting on the joists to either side, Trevor felt for the lump inside his chest pocket. Good, he thought, still there.
Holding tight to the board beneath his bottom, he lifted one of his feet and tapped it against the ceiling between the joists, moving by feel alone, everything black blurs on blacker blurs. He’d expected the ceiling to be hard, like rock, but to his surprise, it cracked and gave way easily. Trevor kicked a little harder, and his foot went right through.
The yellow stuff tickled his exposed leg just above his sock, and he heard something clap against the floor in the room below. He pulled his foot out of the hole he’d made and tried to look through it.
He saw nothing below. The hole was gray, lighter than everything else up here, and he saw it all right, but he had no idea which room lay below. If it was a room at all. Maybe he’d kicked his way into a closet or a dead space between rooms. Or maybe Trevor had gotten all mixed up and come back to where he’d started, maybe he was staring down into the windowless room and Zach was just below, staring up, wondering how he could be so unlucky, how he could have gotten stuck with a doofus like Trevor.
No. That didn’t make any sense. There were lights on in the windowless room. Unless Zach had turned the lights off—and Trevor couldn’t think of any reason why he might do such a stupid thing—this was someplace different.
He kicked again, and the gray hole widened. Another chunk of ceiling smacked against the floor below.
Still, no sounds came from the house other than those he was making himself, no cries of Hey, what do you think you’re doing up there? and no blasting guns trying to turn him into Trevor jelly. He wondered if the crazy man had left, or if maybe he wasn’t very good at hearing. He guessed if he hadn’t gotten caught yet, he probably wouldn’t, so he poked his foot through the ceiling again and kicked his leg back and forth until he thought he’d made a hole big enough to fit through. Bits of ceiling rained against the ground, and Trevor felt the dust—and of course the yellow stuff—on his bare leg.
He leaned over and squinted through the darkness.
The kitchen.
A dark and shadowy kitchen, but a kitchen for sure. The half-full package of bread on the counter beside the sink proved that. The refrigerator was right beneath him. Or almost right beneath. Close enough he thought he could swing through the hole and onto the top with only a teensy chance of falling to his death. He held a hand over the phone and leaned closer to the hole.
The refrigerator hummed. On top of that sound was the chirping of crickets, though Trevor didn’t know if he was hearing them through an open door or window, or simply through the roof. He wriggled even closer to the hole and positioned himself for a swing onto the fridge.
His arms wobbled, tired—he supposed all of him was tired, but his arms especially. He poked his tongue from the corner of his mouth and went for the fridge anyway. If he fell, at least he could say he tried.
He swung from the space above the ceiling like a monkey from a tree, his body starting off all squeezed together but ending up fully stretched. His toes slid across the top of the fridge, and he let go of the joist. The escape, the chance for a phone call, his life—although it all could have ended right there, Trevor wound up doubled over on the top of the fridge with one arm dangling over the side and his legs folded against a pair of cabinet doors.
He scrambled for a better position and ended up sitting atop the fridge with both legs flung over the front and across the freezer door. The kitchen was dark, but not as dark as it had been in the crawlspace, and his eyes sucked up what little light there was.
The pile of powdery, broken ceiling lay on the floor just beneath him, although in the dark it could have been a pile of sawdust or snow or boogers and Trevor wouldn’t have known the difference. Once the crazy man saw that pile, he would know what happened. There was no way to hide it now, no way for Trevor to fix the ceiling, although he thought his daddy could have done it.
No, the only thing to do now was get outside and make his phone call. And fast.
The fridge was pushed against a wall on one side; there was a countertop on the other. Trevor backed off on the countertop side and slid down the refrigerator until his shoes connected with something solid. He sat down again, flipped around, and this time backed onto the floor beside the pile of ceiling. The phone bounced in his shirt, smacked against his chest. When he moved out of the kitchen, the shirt swayed in front of him, the weight pulling it down in front so that his collar rubbed uncomfortably against the back of his neck. He plucked out the phone and squeezed it between his fingers. His shirt shifted back into place, and the bad feeling on his neck eased.
It had been warm above the ceiling, but it felt better down here, not cold but cool, comfortable. Trevor realized they must be pretty high in the mountains still, like at Daddy’s house. It was summer, after all, and should have been hot. At Mommy’s house, it was hot all through the night—at least, it was hot outside where there wasn’t any air conditioning. Trevor didn’t mind the cold, actually liked it a little. It made him think of snow, fires in the living room, and Christmas.
Last year, Daddy had come back home for Christmas, had brought a bag full of presents and stayed the whole day. Trevor wondered if he would do the same thing again this year, or if he would have to have two Christmases at his two different houses with two trees and two Christmas dinners.
If I make it to Christmas at all.
He walked through the dining room, staying close to the wall so he wouldn’t accidentally bump into the table or the chairs and make a loud noise. He concentrated on Zach’s mommy’s red phone the way he did a new toy, thinking he couldn’t wait to get it open and see what it did.
When he got to the back door, he half expected it to be locked like the bedroom, or to find bars on the windows, or for the knob to be electrified, a reverse booby trap that kept the good guys in instead of the bad guys out, but there was none of that. The knob twisted in his hand, and the door swung open.
Trevor hurried out of the house, flipping open the phone as he moved. Once he’d made it a few long steps away and stood near the front bumper of the bad man’s truck, he stopped and squinted down at the keypad. Zach had turned off the phone before handing it over—otherwise the numbers would have been lit up, and Trevor could have seen them fine. He found the power button and held it until the phone beeped. The welcome screen flashed, and the cellular began searching for service. Trevor pulled the antenna all the way out, not knowing if it mattered.
The screen read: Searching…
Trevor watched and waited.
Still Searching…
When the screen changed and Trevor saw the first little bar in the corner, he almost cheered. But then the bar disappeared, and Trevor frowned. The searching started again.
Trevor looked at the truck and then at the phone. Not bothering to shut it, he stuffed the cell into his shirt pocket and hopped onto the truck’s bumper. He scrambled up the windshield onto the top of the cab, pulled the phone out again, and waited.
Searching…
One bar.
No bars.
Searching…
In another corner of the phone’s small screen, the picture of the battery went from half full to only filled a little. Trevor groaned.
Come on, he thought, please.
The single bar did not return.
Trevor finally closed the phone and crawled off the truck.
Higher ground, Zach had said. Trevor looked around the property, saw nothing but trees and shadows. Which way was higher ground? Most of the land appeared to slope down. It was the kind of yard where you wouldn’t want to play catch, where a ball could roll away for a long time if it happen
ed to go sailing over your head.
He supposed he could have climbed a tree, squirreled his way up to the very top and tried the phone again, but what if he fell? What if he cracked his head open and his brains fell out and he died? Or what if he was okay but he landed on his pocket and the phone snapped in half? He couldn’t risk that. Zach was counting on him. Trevor was counting on himself.
He looked around again and decided he really only had one choice. The trees directly behind the house seemed level with where he stood now, which meant at least they weren’t downhill. Whether the ground got higher beyond the trees or not, Trevor couldn’t tell. For all he knew, there might be a cliff or a gully, a river or a lake. He might walk through the trees and end up slipping into a mudslide and zooming over the edge of a waterfall like something from an action movie. Who knew?
Trevor shrugged his shoulders a little and started for the woods.
He walked with the phone open and held out in front of him, watching the screen for a bar and using the itsy bit of light coming from the thing to help guide his way, pressing the Back button every once in a while to keep the light from shutting off. It was dark inside the trees, almost darker than it had been in the crawlspace above the ceiling. When things clung to his face here, he couldn’t pretend it was the yellow stuff, could only brush it out of his face and hair as quickly as possible and go on.
He did seem to be climbing a little, though more slowly than he’d have liked. Crickets squawked, and owls hooted. Trevor listened for a howling coyote, the growl of a bear or a mountain lion, but if there were things more dangerous than crickets and owls in these woods, they stayed quiet.