Cold Heart

by Chandler McGrew

  He glanced at his watch. “Nine-thirty.”

  “Why'd you let me sleep so late?”

  “It's Saturday. Besides, after last night I thought you needed your rest.”

  She took the coffee that he offered and dropped into a chair. “I slept like a log. But I woke up with nothing on.”

  “You don't remember anything?”

  “Remember what? Did we have a wild night?”

  “You had the worst nightmare you've ever had.”

  “Really?”

  He set his coffee cup beside the griddle. “I had to put you in the shower to wake you up. That's why you were sleeping nude.”

  “You're kidding.”

  “I'm not kidding. It was awful. I couldn't get through to you. You just kept staring into space and screaming.”

  “Screaming?” She couldn't believe it. She was tired. As though the deep sleep she had gotten had done her body no good. But she didn't remember waking in the night. And she certainly didn't remember a shower.

  “You kept shouting for her to let him go.”

  Neither of them questioned who the him was. Neither of them needed to mention that today was the first anniversary of Zach's disappearance.

  “I can't believe I didn't wake up in the shower.”

  “You sort of woke up, after a while. You talked to me, but it was like you were speaking through a wall. I carried you back to bed and you finally went to sleep again.”

  “That was it?”

  “You woke me a couple of times and I thought you were going to do it again. I talked to you and you went back to sleep. But you were stiff as a board all night.”

  “I'm sorry.”

  “There's nothing to be sorry about. I wish I could have done something.”

  “You did something by being there.”

  He slid a plate of bacon and eggs in front of her and she picked at it.

  “Maybe you should call Tara,” he said.

  “No.” Tara was the last person she wanted to call. Tara understood why Audrey chose not to see her anymore. Being around Tara or speaking to her reminded Audrey of just how much besides Zach she had lost.

  “Then call Doctor Burton.”

  “I don't need a doctor.”

  “You need something.”

  “What about you?”

  “I'm okay.” He carried the griddle to the sink and stood staring out into the backyard.

  “I'm getting better,” she whispered. And she believed that. She hadn't been weeping every day, standing in the front window staring out across the lawn. She hadn't awakened in the middle of the night to go tuck Zach in in what? Six months?

  She could see Richard working his way up to saying something and she knew what it would be. She just didn't know how he would phrase it this time.

  “I don't want another baby,” she said.

  His neck reddened.

  “You can't replace my son,” she said softly.

  Richard turned slowly to face her. “Audrey, having another child doesn't mean we're replacing Zach.”

  “Then what the hell does it mean?”

  She shoveled bits of egg around on the plate, staring at the pattern in the yolk. The fork felt strange in her hand. Soft. Her entire body felt weird.

  What was that?

  A panic attack?

  She willed her breathing to slow, concentrating on her pulse.

  Richard sat down in the chair next to her. “I loved Zach just as much as you did.”

  She glanced up and saw that he had already realized his mistake.

  Her voice was a heavy stone, poised to crush both of them. “I still love him.”

  “So do I, Audrey.”

  “Then why didn't you say so?”

  “I only meant that we have to go on living.”

  “I'm living. You're living.”

  “No, we're not. We're just frozen in time. Waiting. Audrey, we've done all we could do.”

  “He's out there, somewhere,” she whispered, barely able to breathe. “He needs me and I can't find him. Someone took my son.”

  “Our son.”

  “I want him back.”

  “I want him back, too, Aud. But we have to face the fact that we may never get Zach back. There hasn't been one call. No one saw him taken. He could be anywhere.”

  She dropped the fork onto her plate. The handle was bent.

  “Why didn't they call?” she asked. “Why didn't we get a ransom note?”

  “You know why, Aud. The police told you why. Zach wasn't kidnaped for ransom.”

  “No!”

  “Honey, calm down.”

  She stared out through the open back door. “The bastard stole my son right here. From our home.” That burned. The fact that Zach had been taken from a place where he should have been safer than anywhere else in the world. When both she and Richard were home. It inflamed her guilt and her rage. But it also angered her that Richard was right. They had done everything there was to be done.

  They had contacted the Oxford County Sheriff's Department immediately. The police and game wardens searched the area with dogs for days. She and Richard had run through the woods with the searchers, shouting Zach's name, searching for him beneath every deadfall pine, in every dry gully. The woods surrounding the house were deep Maine forest and the farm to market roads spiderwebbed the mountains.

  The sheriff sent out a File 6 Missing Persons Report by teletype to all law enforcement agencies, including the NCIC, the National Crime Information Center. Audrey and Richard had placed ads in local newspapers, paid for spots on radio stations, put professionally printed posters in stores and gas stations. They had even spent most of their savings hiring a private investigator out of Boston.

  All in vain.

  There were no clues.

  Zach had wandered into the front yard to play while Audrey worked in her back garden and ten minutes later he was gone.

  One year ago today.

  How dare Richard think of another child?

  “He's alive,” she said.

  Richard didn't respond.

  “He's alive,” she repeated.

  Audrey stood now, staring out the back door into her garden.

  She hadn't set foot in the backyard since the day of Zach's disappearance. Her perennials had survived but they were coming back wild and uncultivated and the areas that would normally be planted already with young annuals were filling with spring weeds. She hated seeing it like that.

  Audrey's garden was an extension of herself. Tara had explained the rudiments to her, bought horticulture books for her to study—until Audrey outgrew her teacher and began to instruct Tara. Audrey found solace and rebirth in the nurturing of plants. She had transferred a lot of those feelings to her love for Richard and Zach. But there was something different about her love for gardening. When her hands were immersed in the soil her mind emptied and all her training took over. For that brief period of time all that existed for her was the tiny ecosystem that she had created.

  The garden called to her now. She longed to smell the rich soil. To feel her fingers working through the damp earth. To hear the sound of crickets and birds.

  But when she rested her hand on the doorknob, it felt frigid to the touch. Hostile. As though her garden dreaded her return as much as she feared returning to it.

  So what do I do?

  Spend the rest of my life inside this house?

  Until I'm pacing from room to room in an old housecoat like some hag out of Dickens?

  Until I turn into a bodiless spirit, living on memories and rage?

  Still the door would not open.

  An odd tingling tickled the very back of her mind.

  Why should I be afraid of my own garden?

  But it wasn't just her garden she feared.

  It was the door itself.

  It wasn't the place.

  But the passing into the place.

  It was that irretrievable step from the past year into this new one.
<
br />   A year without Zach.

  Last year Zach had been with her.

  This year he wouldn't be.

  She glanced around the kitchen. Sunlight glinted on the blue countertops and white vinyl floor. The dishes were washed and stacked. The laundry was dried and put away. The house was spotless. There was nothing more to be done inside. No more living to be accomplished. If she remained in the house it would not be to live but to die.

  She clamped down hard on the knob and opened the door. Without hesitating on the stoop, she strode out into the backyard.

  The day was warm and golden. The air was redolent with balsam fir and lilacs, just beginning to flower. A pair of robins performed a mating dance on the lawn near her storage shed. One of those perfect spring days that made Maine winters bearable.

  One year ago she had been right here. Down on her knees in the dirt. A sudden inexplicable sense of doom had overcome her and she had risen to her feet and raced to the front of the house, calling Zach's name.

  On the grass at the edge of the lawn, where the ground dipped into the roadside drainage ditch, lay Zach's baseball bat. His baseball was never recovered.

  She opened her shed and discovered her tool bucket just inside the door. Carrying it to the center of her garden, she slipped on her kneepads and knelt. The familiar position and the smell of damp earth revitalized her. But at the same time the familiar scent threatened her determination. She took out her garden claw and scratched at the weeds that were making inroads into her carefully planted perennials.

  She stared at the tines of the claw as they traced finger patterns in the dark soil, as though the tool were guided by someone else's hand. Suddenly her determination to break free of her mental prison was shattered by fear and grief.

  What am I doing here?

  How could I possibly come back to this place?

  She bore down on the tool, burying it deeply, jerking it along. The rasping sound grated on her ears.

  I'm here because I have to be.

  Because if I wander aimlessly through the house for one more minute, I'll go mad.

  Because if I don't come out here and do this then Zach's kidnaper wins.

  Because then the son of a bitch takes both my son and my life.

  Wasn't that what Richard was trying to do as well? Beat Zach's kidnaper? Beat him by burying himself in his work every day? Beat him by having another child?

  Audrey couldn't bear that thought.

  Even if another baby wasn't a betrayal of Zach, how could she possibly consider having another child? How would she ever keep him safe?

  One year today.

  She remembered Zach cavorting around her that day. He was more full of life than any six-year-old should be. Shouting and tumbling. Grass stains on his T-shirt. Sunlight glinting in his eyes. The yard barely contained his exuberance. She and Zach were impossibly close, even for a mother and son. She always sensed when he needed her. When he awakened in the night. With each passing day their closeness had grown and evolved until Zach had often finished her sentences for her.

  The vision of another child flashed through her mind.

  She blinked.

  The image was gone as quickly as it appeared but its shadow hung just behind her eyes. It was a picture of herself at the age of nine or ten. Bright blue eyes and a cockeyed smile. She was holding a small doll in her hands as though in offering.

  Suddenly, like a knife, jagged pain slashed through her abdomen. Lightning struck, blazing outward in fingers of golden fire.

  She clutched at her belly. Her teeth chattered. Her hands shook where they grasped her light cotton blouse. She struggled to get to her feet, then decided against it, digging her kneepads into the soft loam of her garden instead.

  The agony was volcanic. Intense. It electrified every nerve ending in her body. Sparked her synapses like strands of flickering lights on a Christmas tree. The pain flowed over and through her. Minutes later, when it finally drained away, she was weak as a kitten. She clutched her arms tightly about her, like a long distance runner fighting a cramp.

  The day seemed dimmer, out of focus.

  What the hell was that?

  Never in her life had she experienced such pain. Not even during childbirth. And the pain had struck so suddenly, out of the blue.

  What in the world could have caused it?

  Just as she began to relax from the first attack, another wall of flame crashed down upon her. Pain raged through her like an out-of-control fever. The agony was a chemical explosion that erupted inside her body and burned its way out through her skin.

  She glanced frantically at the unplanted earth, wondering if she should lie down and hope for the terrible seizures to pass.

  Dare she do that?

  No.

  Maybe something was horribly wrong inside. Maybe she was bleeding internally or something had ruptured.

  She needed help.

  She remembered the birthing techniques she had learned years before. She took short, shallow breaths and tried to relax.

  After an eternity, the second attack passed. She struggled to her feet and stumbled across the lawn toward the door, praying to get inside before another blast of pain struck.

  She was halfway up the back stoop when the agony lashed her yet again. Worse than the first two. Much worse.

  Her fingernails clawed the wood banister. The muscles in her arms tightened into steel bands. She doubled over. Her cheek rested on the splintery stair rail, one foot on the landing, one on the top step. She eyed the door, only two paces away.

  Her body shook so violently she was afraid she might collapse in a heap of boneless jelly. But as the pain eased once more, she staggered into the house.

  She dragged a kitchen chair over to the wall phone, not wanting to be caught standing when the next attack struck. She knew more were coming.

  She grabbed the phone and pressed the autodial button for Richard's office. He answered on the third ring.

  “Help me. Oh, God, it hurts so bad” was all she managed before the next wave of pain thundered over her and left her moaning into the receiver. She heard Richard, as though from a great distance. Telling her that he was on his way. That he was calling the hospital.

  The phone crashed to the floor.

  The pain rose inside her. It swelled like a molten rush of lava. Burned its way through her, singed her body, torched her soul.

  As the wave crested, she drifted far away, deep down inside herself. Reality dissolved into thin echoes of sound and sunlight and the surflike pounding of her heart. She thought she heard, for just an instant, a child's voice.

  And the sound of a child's feet, pattering along.

  She opened her eyes but she was alone.

  She didn't know if she had been delirious for minutes or hours. But the sun hadn't moved and neither Richard nor the paramedics had arrived. And the pain didn't seem to have lessened all that much.

  What was that voice she'd heard?

  She closed her eyes and clasped both hands again across her belly. She drew her knees up to her chest, her feet rested on the edge of the chair.

  Pattering feet again.

  The voice.

  And then darkness.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  COLD HEART

  A Bantam Book

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2002 by Chandler McGrew

  Map copyright © 2002 by Hadel Studio.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address: Bantam Books.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-48084-2

  Ban
tam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

  v3.0