by Ed Markham
Pausing, he thought about pulling off his shirt to wrap around his hands. Then he had a better idea. Returning to the main room, he picked up one of the couch cushions and unzipped its cover. After pulling out the padding inside, he ran back to the bathroom and went to work with his hands tucked inside the thick cushion casing.
The insulation packed into the coal chute came away in huge grit-and-dirt-covered clumps. Carson coughed as he worked, and he could feel the cold on his forearms and face as he worked his way up the length of the chute. At one point, he had to brace his feet against the insides of the still-standing wall panels in order to hoist himself up. With his head and shoulders inside the chute, he pulled away the insulation, discarding it on the floor of the bathroom before frantically reaching for more. Every handful released a fresh blast of cold air.
He was breathing hard now, and his face, hair, and arms were almost black with grime. He squirmed farther up the coal slide, and spread his knees against its sides to keep from slipping out. He imagined pulling away a last clump and seeing a shard of blue sky. But in his excitement he forgot to hold himself steady.
As he thrust his arms up and grabbed another bunch of the insolation, his knees lost their purchase on the side of the chute. He slipped down it in a rush and his left foot struck the rim of the toilet. He felt a sharp pain shoot through his ankle as he tumbled onto his side. Filthy insulation had followed him out of the chute, and it piled onto his legs.
Breathing heavily, he coughed and sat up. Black waste was still trickling out of the opening in the wall, and he realized his last handful had freed whatever insulation remained at the top of the channel. He looked up into the chute, and could see a thin crack of gray light. He stood quickly, ignoring the pain in his left ankle. By sticking his head into the hole, he could make out the rotting wooden boards that covered the top of the opening.
I’ll have to break through them somehow, he thought. Then he heard a voice, and his heart stopped.
“Are you pooping in there,” Josh called from the main basement room. “Hurry up. I’ve got food.”
Carson turned away from the chute toward the open doorway to the bathroom, his mouth hanging open with horror. He let out a small groan.
He thought simultaneously about trying to wiggle up the chute or reaching to close the door to the bathroom, and his mind stumbled over his options. Then it was too late. Josh was there, standing in the doorway with his stupid blue sweater and khakis and Phillies baseball cap, his face open in a bloom of surprise.
“Wha—” the other boy started to say, his eyes wide as he looked from Carson to the mess of old insulation on the ground.
Carson thrust a finger up to his mouth and shout-whispered, “Shhh!” He knew he had no options. He had to let the other boy in on his discovery. “I found a way out!” he said, pointing up at the coal chute.
Josh was gaping, his eyes saturated with a mixture of shock and fear. For a second, Carson had the feeling the boy wanted to lunge for him. But then Josh nodded and his expression grew calm. “Show me,” he said.
Carson nodded and waved him forward. Speaking in a hurried whisper, he pointed at the chute and said, “I felt a draft coming from behind this wall, so I used the pipe from the air hockey table to pull out this loose wall piece, and then I found this trap door. I pulled out all this stuff, and I can see wood boards at the top blocking the way outside. We can get out of here!”
“You’re pretty smart,” Josh said as he peered over Carson’s shoulder at the chute opening.
Carson poked his head up the chute. Arching his neck so he could take another look at the crack of light and the wood planks, he said, “If you let me stand on your shoulders, I could try to push away the wood that’s blocking the tunnel.”
When he pulled his head out of the chute, Josh was standing right next to him.
“What do you think?” Carson asked him. He looked up hopefully at the larger boy. But when he saw Josh’s face, all of his excitement drained away.
Josh was smiling and nodding, but there was something Carson didn’t like about the other boy’s smile. It didn’t look right. It looked weird, he thought. It looked different.
In fact, Josh’s whole face looked different. His eyes weren’t darting nervously from side-to-side like they normally did, and he wasn’t fidgeting or playing with his sweater cuffs.
Still smiling, Josh reached up with one hand and lifted off his Phillies baseball cap. Beneath it, Carson was shocked to see the boy’s hairline started well back from his forehead.
“What do I think?” Josh asked. And then his voice changed; it dropped an octave and lost its boyish, screech-y nervousness. In this new voice—the grown-up’s voice—Josh said, “I think you’re a smart kid. Smarter than all the others.”
Horrified, Carson started to cower, but Josh shot out a hand and grabbed him by the collar of his sweatshirt. Carson tried to push the hand away, but he succeeded only in rolling up the sleeve of Josh’s baggy sweater, revealing a sinewy, vein-lined forearm matted with blonde hair.
The person who held him wasn’t wearing sunglasses or a bandana around his neck. But as Carson stared up into Josh’s eyes, he recognized the face of the man in the woods.
Chapter 65
DAVID CUT THE steering wheel, and his Lincoln’s tires screamed as the car half-turned and half-slid in a semi-circular arc. They slid through a gap in the concrete median and he pressed the pedal into the floor. They roared forward, headed north on I-476 back toward Allentown.
“Whoa!” Martin shouted, grasping the center armrest with one hand and the roof of the car with the other. “What the hell—”
“Lynn got the DNA results back on the first body,” David said, cutting him off. “They belong to Phil Ganther.”
“What?” Martin was still trying to brace himself. He mumbled to himself for a moment, trying to catch up. “So who the hell were we just talking with?”
“Who do you think?” David turned the wheel right and then left, arrowing his way past several vehicles.
“Ian?” Martin said.
“It has to be.” He took the exit ramp for the Lehigh Valley Thruway at nearly seventy miles an hour. Sliding onto the shoulder of the road, he passed two semi-trailer trucks and then shifted back onto the road, pushing the speedometer up to ninety-five.
Looking at the clock in his car’s dashboard, he estimated they’d left Ganther’s house twenty minutes earlier. He handed Martin his cell phone and said, “Call 911 and request backup.”
Martin made the call. As he spoke to the local emergency dispatcher, David thought of the missing boy, Carson Affeldt. He also thought of his threat to return to Phil Ganther’s home with a search warrant.
His hands tightened around the steering wheel. He knew the boy was likely hidden somewhere at Ganther’s, and was possibly already dead. If he wasn’t, he would be soon. Now that David had let Ian know they were looking for him and would be back with a search team, Ganther wouldn’t wait.
David imagined him raising a .45-caliber pistol to the boy’s back and pulling the trigger.
He took an exit off the Lehigh Valley Thruway and headed north, speeding into the less-populated countryside at a hundred miles an hour. The snowflakes had fattened and were falling more swiftly now, parting to make way for his speeding car.
As they approached the turn that would take them to Ganther’s driveway, Martin got off his son’s phone and said, “Ten to fifteen minutes.”
“We can’t wait,” David said. He jammed the break and winced when he heard the tires screech. He wondered if Ganther could hear the noise—if it would spook him into swifter action.
He slowed as he neared the foot of Ganther’s driveway, and stopped near the dirt entrance. He realized there was no safe way for him and his father to approach, but he decided they had no choice. They had to take a chance.
They both climbed out of the car, and David quickly ran to the trunk to retrieve his bulletproof vest. He tossed it to his fath
er.
“Do you have another?” Martin asked.
“No.”
Martin threw the vest back to him. “Put it on, David. Don’t argue with me. You’ll understand one day.”
He took one look at his father’s face and knew there was no point in objecting. “Cover me while I make the approach,” he said. “We’ll check in back for a rear entrance. Don’t shoot me.”
Martin grinned as he pulled his Smith & Wesson from his hip holster. David withdrew his own Sig Sauer P226.
Father and son put fifteen yards of space between each other and started to make their way through the overgrown grass toward the front of Ganther’s house.
Chapter 66
CARSON COULDN’T SPEAK. His tongue and jaw felt as though they’d turned to concrete, although he could hear himself whimpering.
“Josh,” he tried to say a few times. But the name died on his stunned tongue and tumbled out as “Jah.”
He couldn’t take his eyes off the man standing before him, the man clutching his shirt collar with his strong fist and forearm. What he was seeing was impossible. It wasn’t real. This person was Josh, but he also wasn’t Josh. He was a boy, but he was a man. His face seemed to change from young to old depending on the light striking it, which shifted as he dragged Carson out of the bathroom and into the main room of the basement.
The man smacked Carson hard across the face with an open hand, further stunning him. “No, not Josh,” he said, looking into Carson’s face. “But you were fooled, weren’t you? Don’t lie. I know you were.”
The man’s voice was deeper than Josh’s had been, though still much softer and lighter than the voices of most of the men Carson knew—his teachers and coaches, and his father.
Carson didn’t know how to respond. He felt as though his stomach had been torn out. He could feel screams and sobs clogging his throat, fighting each other to escape.
The man struck Carson twice more, the blows forcing tears from the boy’s eyes. Carson could taste blood in his mouth from a split lip, and he started to whimper. Then the man reached behind his back and withdrew a pistol.
Carson stared at it dumbstruck, his curiosity momentarily overwhelming his fear. He’d seen so many on television and in movies, but never in reality. It was like looking at a dead body or a naked woman—things he knew existed but that he’d never actually seen. He couldn’t believe how black and solid the gun looked, and how identical it was to the guns he’d seen in the hands of the policemen and action heroes populating his favorite films.
The man saw Carson staring at the gun, and he twisted the boy and pushed him toward the basement stairs, never letting go of his shirt collar. He was talking, but now he seemed to be conversing with himself more than with Carson.
“We had so much fun that first day,” he said.
Carson couldn’t see the man’s face, but he could hear a smile softening his voice.
“We were just a couple of kids, playing video games and air hockey together—watching movies and joking like any friends would.” The man paused. “Maybe not best friends. Not yet. But new friends, anyway. And that’s just what we were—brand new friends.”
They were walking toward the stairs, approaching the air hockey table with its loose scoreboard.
Carson’s mind struggled to understand his situation, but fear was making it difficult for him to think clearly. He couldn’t accept that the man from the woods was the same person who’d been coming down to play video games and share meals and watch movies with him for the past three days.
He’s some kind of psycho, some nutcase, Carson’s mind shouted at itself. He’s not Josh. He’s not a kid. His mind fumbled with this reality. A part of him was still holding onto the seed of an idea that “Josh” had planted in his head a few days earlier. “I think he lets them go,” Josh had said. “But he keeps me because he likes me.”
Carson’s brain had clung to that fiction—the idea that he would be released—like he was gripping a sapling on the edge of a high cliff. And now, as his mind reeled from the shock of Josh’s new identity, he still believed the man would let him go. He had hated life in the basement and had been desperate to escape. But he’d never considered any other eventuality apart from freedom.
Now, as the man shoved him toward the basement stairs, still talking even though Carson was too shocked and terrified to care about what he was saying, Carson’s mind called up something he’d seen on television—a fragment of a crime investigation drama. The episode had focused on the disappearance of a young boy, and one of the show’s detective characters had explained to his new partner that abducted children don’t turn up alive, not after more than a day or two. As he’d watched that show, Carson hadn’t considered himself a child, though he’d worried about the children on the program. But now the television show snapped into focus for him, and he understood the gravity of his situation.
He’s going to fucking kill you, Carson told himself as he stepped onto the basement stairs, the man still right behind him with his strong hand wrapped around his shirt collar. You need to get out of here because this psycho IS GOING TO KILL YOU.
As this warning sounded in his head, Carson looked up and saw that the basement door was standing partly open. Before he had time to consider his plan—or to feel too frightened to act—he kicked backwards as hard as he could. He felt his heel bury itself somewhere in his captor’s midsection, and he heard all the air explode out of the man in a pained groan.
“Ooomph,” the man said. And as he said it, Carson felt the hand release his shirt collar.
He didn’t pause to look back or think. He wrapped a hand around the bannister, pulled with all his strength, and launched himself up the staircase.
Whether at home or at school, he’d always bolted up stairs three at a time. It was a game he played with himself—a game he might have called “How fast can I climb stairs?” if he’d ever given it much thought. He hadn’t. But it was as though he’d spent his entire young life training for this moment, and the training paid off.
He reached the top of the stairs in a flash. Grabbing the edge of the door, he slammed it shut and smashed his hand on top of the electronic keypad. He heard the metal locks slide into place. At the same moment, he heard the man’s body smashing into the back of the door.
He felt a brief wave of relief when the door didn’t open, followed immediately by the memory of the second keypad on the other side of the door. He grasped the top of the exterior keypad and ripped down, pulling it off the wall and leaving a trail of shorn wires.
He stepped back, panting with fear. His adrenaline was pumping so thickly through his veins that he thought his heart might explode. He heard the man trying to shoulder the door open. Then he heard two bangs that he didn’t immediately recognize for what they were: gunshots.
And then there was silence.
Chapter 67
FATHER AND SON made their way through the tall grass, maintaining the fifteen-yard gap between them in case Ganther began shooting from a window.
David pointed for Martin to approach the left side of the house, and he saw his father nod.
As Martin crouched lower and moved to his left, David shuffled quickly across the gravel driveway and into the tall grass on its opposite side. Mirroring his father’s movements, he approached the right side of the house.
They passed out of view of each other as the structure loomed between them. David pressed himself against the house’s wood siding, careful to keep himself out of sight of the windows that hovered a few feet above his head. He had to step quickly around a bulky air conditioning unit attached to the house, and as he did he saw that the home’s side windows, like those in front, were blocked by thick blankets.
When he reached the back of the house, David saw his father crouching against the far corner of the structure, his gun clutched in both of his hands and pointed at the sky.
Martin shook his head and pointed at the side of the house and at the ground to let Davi
d know there was no side or cellar entrance. The place also had no back door. David saw another row of windows that were blanketed over like all the rest. There was no way to know who or what was inside.
He bit his lip and offered his father a shrug and a head shake. “It’s a crapshoot,” his gesture said. He held up a hand and thumbed back toward the front of the house.
As Martin nodded, they both heard it; two gunshots from somewhere deep inside the house.
The first shot stopped David’s heart, and the second sent him sprinting back toward the front yard.
Martin ran down the length of his side of the house and turned the corner in time to see his son preparing to throw himself into the front door.
“David, wait!” he shouted.
But it was too late. As he lowered his shoulder, David called to his father, “Cover the exterior.”
Martin heard the door jam splinter and, at the same time, watched as his son disappeared into the house.
Chapter 68
DAVID HEARD A shout as he fell onto the carpeted floor of the front room. He rose quickly to one knee and turned toward the source of the voice, lifting his weapon in the same direction.
His eyes found the terrified face of the frightened boy a millisecond before a knife stab of pain forced them closed. The pistol suddenly felt as though it weighed a hundred pounds in his hand. He couldn’t lift it, and he realized he’d dislocated his shoulder when he broke through the front door.
He forced his eyes open and saw the boy crouching, his face contorted with fear. He could see that it was Carson Affeldt, and he felt a wave of relief that the boy wasn’t dead. Immediately, the relief was replaced by concern.
“Where is he?” David said, the pain turning his voice into an angry growl.