by Carrie Laben
Anyway, so they were.
After a little while—it felt like a month, maybe, but who could say—it turned out that Grandfather’s third death was going to occasion some paperwork after all. Mom had brazened and pushed her way through the lack of a death certificate, sure, but the old bastard (that’s what Abby heard Mom call him once, just after hanging up the telephone, but at this point it didn’t surprise her or even make her giggle anymore) had had a legal last will and testament on file with his attorney and it left all of his money and property to Martha in an elaborate trust that Mom couldn’t touch. Even though in the end an attorney that Grandfather could push and bluff was an attorney that Mom could push and bluff too, Martha had to sign some papers which meant that she and Abby both had to sit in a dark office where the carpet smelled vaguely smokey and the walls were lined with books that had cloth bindings and gold stamped titles—not as fun as a V. C. Andrews paperback but not really important like Grandfather’s books either.
It was all horribly dull and took forever, so while they sat Abby watched Mom work on the lawyer. Mom wasn’t better than Grandfather in the sense that she was stronger when she pushed, though she was just about as strong. She was better because instead of yelling and huffing like Grandfather did she smiled and flattered while she pushed. This seemed to make the lawyer’s brain softer, and sometimes she barely had to poke him at all brain-wise.
Abby wondered why Grandfather had never done that and then she tried to imagine him complimenting this red-faced bald man—complimenting anyone really, or laughing at any joke he hadn’t made himself—and then she did giggle, but mostly on the inside.
Once it was over, Abby expected Mom to quit the Erie County Home job but she didn’t. She took as many hours as she could and sometimes was at the Home, wasn’t back at their home, until after the girls’ bedtime. When she was gone Abby still kept the curtains closed and the mirrors covered—it made her more comfortable—but she uncovered them when Mom got home, because Mom insisted they didn’t need to do that, there was nothing left to be afraid of.
“Maybe she really meant it, about not being too good to work,” Martha said when Abby mentioned it as they boiled pasta together on a school night around eight. Between them they hadn’t quite figured out how to stop between crunchy and mushy yet, but they were getting closer.
“No way,” Abby said. “If it was about that she could do something more interesting, cooler.” She wasn’t sure what but she was sure there must be cooler things than a job that meant you smelled like mothballs and piss when you came home. People were on TV, they went to offices, they wore suits and bright-red dresses.
For that matter, just working hard didn’t make anyone different from Grandfather. What Grandfather had done had been work, a lot of work, a lot of star charts and a lot of digging and a lot of running away when things got sketchy, too, in the early days. Just because he’d enjoyed it didn’t mean he hadn’t nearly killed himself doing it.
In retrospect, of course, Abby had wondered for a time if Mom had discovered the secret of using other peoples’ minds like a battery too, and not been able to tap into it as effectively for some reason. But there was no evidence of that. Mom came home from work tired out, not stronger. She often hit snooze two or three times before getting out of bed in the morning, and lingered in the shower until there wasn’t enough hot water left for Abby and Martha before school. She hated her job just like any good American, but she clung to it anyway just like any good American.
The best Abby could ever figure out afterward was that deep down, Mom really honestly kind of wanted to be normal. And that was the weirdest thought of all.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
They’d been sitting at the police station, sans police officer, for twenty minutes. Martha hadn’t said anything sarcastic about Abby ‘taking care of it’ yet. Martha was just sobbing messily and hyperventilating. She’d tapered off a few times only to start again, but now it seemed like she was getting control of herself for real. All that was… not good, exactly, but at least reassuring in Abby’s book, because it meant that not every single thing in the world had suddenly stopped working the way it was supposed to, even though small-town boys and small-town cops definitely had.
It wasn’t that this cop was so set on doing her job right, although there was a current of that deep down under the walnut shell where her actual personality was lurking. She hadn’t searched the truck or seen the skull, although for all Abby knew she might be doing that right now. She hadn’t mentioned their rights. She’d locked them up in the same room—not a holding cell but an interrogation room with a window and a table—and left them alone together, and she hadn’t cuffed them or demanded their ID or searched them for weapons with more than a desultory pat. (The pat-down was when Martha had started crying and breathing like a soap opera widow, which worried Abby a lot in a there-was-someone-she-might-have-to-go-back-and-find-at-Wende-and-kill-later kind of way.) She hadn’t even taken Abby’s phone.
There wasn’t much chance that Ryan’s tale of car and dog theft—she should have known bringing the damn dog was a mistake, she’d gotten soft—would have made the news yet. It was strictly police-blotter-in-a-tiny-weekly-paper fare. But she looked anyway; if this was, somehow, nothing more than what it seemed, and if by chance there was some chatter out there on it out there already, it might help her put together the story that would get them out of this despite the cop’s bizarre recalcitrance. It was a forlorn hope and she knew it, but she wasn’t just going to sit here and listen to Martha snuffle. She had tried to comfort her sister a couple of times but that only led to fresh gushes of “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done it in the first place, I should have just stayed home,” which Abby could tell were only half-aimed at the here and now.
It turned out that there were headlines from Daines, West Virginia, all right, all over CNN and Yahoo! and Fox, with a hashtag on Twitter and a page on Facebook where people could check in. All of this had nothing to do with a stolen truck and a missing dog. There was, in fact, no goddamn way in hell that anyone in Daines was worrying about one truck and one dog right now.
A freight train with a full payload of crude-oil tankers had rolled through downtown Daines about an hour or ninety minutes after they’d left Ryan and the concrete duck behind. Not unusual, except that this train hadn’t braked or steered. The runaway had jumped the tracks at the first small bend, right at Main Street, not far from the fifteen kinds of jam and the four kinds of sausage; from the early reporting it looked like that was all gone now, along with everything else for half a mile around. Which would be, by Abby’s reckoning, basically all of poor old Daines. Blurry bystander videos of an unrecognizable mass of flames topped articles that were being updated by the minute. There was wild speculation about the engineer, since a dead man’s switch should have stopped the train if he’d fallen ill or forgotten to set the brakes while he stepped out for a piss, but it didn’t look like there would be any identifiable fragments of him left to ask.
She wondered if showing the CNN story to Martha would distract her, maybe even cheer her up—look, we got lucky! But before she could decide whether to put that thought into action or not the cop returned. Ryan was behind her, wearing an anger on his face that looked all wrong against his thoughts, like play-acting. And next to him was #findCaiden, his hair still greasy, cheeks thinner now—more so than a few days on the road would accommodate—but unmistakable. And wearing the same Cannibal Corpse T-shirt he’d had on in the picture for that matter.
Martha jumped to her feet, driven to move towards Ryan and away from the cop at the same time. Instead she stood still and, through a last sob, said, “It’s okay. We have Buddy. He’s still in the truck!” And Abby felt a surge of protectiveness—both because Martha, even scared, had tried to come up with a strategy and because that was all she’d managed to think of.
“The dog? I took him to Animal Control,” the cop said. The decision hadn’t been hers but the wo
rds were spoken with deliberate maliciousness that was all her own. Martha gasped. Ryan smiled. The smile was the last piece of evidence that Abby needed that that wasn’t really Ryan, any more than #findCaiden was really a high school junior from Alden whose relatives were worried sick because he was the youngest kid in the family and he’d never spent the night away from his parents before.
“Come with us,” the cop said. You couldn’t not see #findCaiden pushing her, not if you had that kind of eyes. Were they so stupid they didn’t know that? Never, not if they were smart enough to be here. So they were confident that it wouldn’t matter now. That was a little worrisome.
But people did overestimate themselves, all the time. Grandfather had. Mom had in the end too. Abby stood up and, with her left hand just behind her and out of their sight, gestured to Martha to stay close.
“Come on,” Ryan said harshly, in a much more gravelly voice than he’d had this morning. Maybe a person might think he’d inhaled a lot of smoke.
Abby followed the three of them into the darkened corridor with Martha close on her heels. The window to the interrogation room they’d just left made itself a mirror as the cop lingered to turn out the light. Abby spotted the coil of a tentacle, the moist slit of a mouth. The gang’s all here, she thought, but she was only pretending to herself that she wasn’t afraid. But for whatever reason, the thing didn’t slip into the real world and grab them yet.
Things didn’t settle quite all the way down even after Mom had had the trust dissolved. It seemed like they had for another few months, although the lawyer blabbed all over town and a few kids tried teasing Martha about being rich for a while. It didn’t take long for even the dimmest of them to realize that that wasn’t something you could make fun of a person for, not when Mom started sending Abby and Martha both to school with brand-new clothes and real haircuts not done in someone’s aunt’s bathroom, or even at Fantastic Sam’s, but at a salon over in Lancaster. Nicole made a few passes at calling them ‘stuck-up’ but she actually seemed a little broken-hearted about it, underneath, and Abby could have outright started dancing when she realized that.
At first Abby was irritated by all the shopping and primping and whatnot, strangers’ hands in her hair and Mom deciding what her new favorite colors were. But it didn’t take long to learn how to do it right and the way it drew peoples’ eyes in was amazing. And once you had their eyes you could tap into their brains easily enough. Going to school was something she’d started to look forward to. Even her grades went up. Martha’s did too, although not as much, just from not being harassed nonstop any more. This in turn made Mom all the more pleased with them. It was an upward spiral, ever upward.
It was in that spirit that she took the pop-eyed young man staring through the playground fence at her—and, if she was being honest, at Martha too—as just so much more fodder. But when she reached out to draw from him, despite his hungry eyes, she hit a wall.
“Gross,” Nicole said, noticing the man. “Looks like you’ve got a boyfriend.”
“Never seen him before,” Abby answered, and tossed her head, letting her smooth, conditioned hair fly around her shoulders. “I can’t help it that I’m magnetic.” Magnetic seemed like a better word than pretty, especially since the word boyfriend had curdled her amusement a little bit.
One of the teachers on playground monitor duty—the same one Abby and Martha had had for kindergarten, no longer quite so young and eager but still not a local by a long shot and thus still trying to do her job—saw the man and went over to the fence. After a second two other teachers, Mrs. Grant and Mr. Berman from the other fifth-grade room, realized that the man was a stranger and went to back her play. Abby never saw the man turn, but he must have run to be out of sight by the time she looked back.
She’d almost forgotten about the man by Wednesday, Mom’s next working-late night. She remembered in a hurry, though, when something tapped the southern window in the living room, the one that looked out onto the front porch. She pretended it wasn’t real the first time, but the second, about thirty seconds later, Martha said “what’s that?” and Abby couldn’t pretend anymore. It sounded like branches, light and stiff, but there were no trees with branches that could reach that window.
If she wanted to know what it was she would have to turn out the lights and open the curtains and look out into the dark and let whatever was out there look in at her too. There was nothing she wanted to do less. Except, maybe, hanging around in here not knowing what it was or what it was doing out there. She wasn’t quite sure. As the tapping came again she glanced at Martha, who was staring at the window, frozen in place with the same conflicting urges.
They couldn’t both stay frozen. Abby took three big steps to the light switch and threw the room into darkness, then darted back across the room before whatever was out there could realize what happened. For good measure she flicked on the porch light by the door too, and jerked the curtain open with her other hand. As fast as she was she only just saw the young man’s back as he leapt from the porch and ran west into the dark towards the tree line.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
#findCaiden let up on the cop once they were out in the sunny parking lot and the thing couldn’t scare her into balking, but the shell stayed up around her mind and there was no chance Abby could turn her; any probing for a crack would be spotted immediately. Abby had searched and searched in Grandfather’s notebooks and his ancient tomes for every useful trick and weapon, for years, but she’d never seen mention of shields like this let alone instructions on how to put them up or knock them down again. Apparently she wasn’t the only member of the family who’d come up with new techniques along the way.
So the cop, of her own accord, herded them toward a transport van. Ryan had slipped behind them and #findCaiden to one side. Abby spotted the truck on the other side of the parking lot and let her mind wander in the direction of making a break for it, though she knew that it would never work. So they were going with a kidnapper to a third location, and no one would know and therefore no one would get excited about it and give her strength.
She glanced back at Martha, who was following close just like Abby had told her. She seemed amazingly calm, considering. So at least they had that going for them—not panicking. Abby hoped that would do them any good at all.
They loaded into the van, the cop driving and #findCaiden in the passenger seat and Abby and Martha on the middle bench and Ryan behind them. They weren’t far from the door but there wasn’t a handle on the inside. Ryan took out a handgun and aimed it at the back of Martha’s head. “I can see what you’re thinking,” he rasped quietly.
Abby turned her thoughts inward to more abstract questions than the door. If she wasn’t thinking about anything concrete, he could watch all he liked. These guys—not #findCaiden and Ryan but whoever was inside their bodies now—didn’t have Grandfather’s skull, at least not with them, and they didn’t have the books, either. So what were they after?
“Where to, Enoch?” #findCaiden said over his shoulder to Ryan. Ryan—Enoch now, apparently—shut his eyes, cocked his head and then rocked it back and forth until it seemed to stabilize of its own accord. Opening his eyes again, he said, “East. And a little north.”
The cop nodded and rolled up back onto the highway on-ramp. A sign above said Slanesville, 31 miles, Martinsburg, 78 miles. They could be anywhere. They could end up anywhere. This was why you never went with a criminal to a third location.
She didn’t want to pull out her phone now—if they saw it, they might take it from her. So how was she going to figure this out?
Well, there was always the oldest, simplest journalistic technique of all.
“Where are we headed?” she asked, trying to sound younger than herself and less confident, but at the same time not really scared. Let them think she was too dumb to fully realize the trouble she and Martha were in.
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Enoch said, but #findCaiden laughed a high school kid’s
laugh. “Shepherdstown, missy. We’re going straight to Shepherdstown and you’re going to stay there a good long time.” The cop’s mind twitched a bit under the shell at the word “missy”.
“Briggs!”
“Be calm, Enoch. It’s not going to matter a bit, and don’t you want someone to know how clever we are?”
They can’t be that stupid, Abby thought. Enoch agreed, apparently, because he moved the muzzle of the gun to cover the back of Briggs’ head instead. “Shut up, Briggs, or you’re moving out of that bag of meat prematurely and you can just fight it out with one of these bitches until we get there.”
“Calm yourself, nephew. We killed fifty people back there; I have energy to fight a dozen hard-water Waites from here to the Pacific if need be.”
“Braggart.” Enoch didn’t move the pistol. “You’ve gloated to me about your cleverness five thousand times since we left Providence, is that not enough for you?”
“Killjoy,” Briggs said.
Abby knew she’d heard of Shepherdstown before, and quickly remembered why. Grandfather had considered a spot between there and Sharpsburg, Maryland, along the Potomac River as one of a handful of potential places, before he’d settled on Minnesota for his summer base. He’d passed on fifty acres there, at half the price of the Minnesota land. Shepherdstown was weak, he’d said in his journals, weak and unreliable. So either they didn’t know about Minnesota or they didn’t think they could make it there. She was hoping for the former. Because they were getting out of this, and they were getting to Minnesota. She was not giving up her body, cancer and disappointment and fugitive status and all, to the third and fourth removed collateral cousins Grandfather had left behind in Rhode Island.
“Hard-water Waites?” She kept up the ingénue voice and leaned forward a little bit, out of the line of Enoch’s terrible muzzle control.