by Harlan Coben
“What the hell are you doing here?” Erik shouted.
“Same thing as you, I guess.”
Erik came closer. “Claire may buy your story about why you drove Aimee here but . . .”
“But what, Erik?”
He didn’t reply right away. He was still in the tailored shirt and trousers, but the look wasn’t as crisp. “I just want to find her,” he said.
Myron said nothing, letting him talk his way down.
“Claire thinks you can help. She says you’re good at stuff like this.”
“I am.”
“You’re like Claire’s knight in shining armor,” he said with more than a trace of bitterness. “I don’t know why you two didn’t end up together.”
“I do,” Myron said. “Because we don’t love each other that way. In fact, in all the time I’ve known Claire, you’re the only man she ever really loved.”
Erik shifted his feet, pretending the words didn’t matter, not quite pulling it off. “When I made the turn, you were getting out of your car. What were you going to do?”
“I was going to try to retrace Aimee’s footsteps. See if I can figure out where she really went.”
“What do you mean, ‘really went’?”
“There was a reason she picked this spot. She used this house as a diversion. It wasn’t her real destination.”
“You think she ran away, don’t you?”
“I don’t think it was a random abduction or anything like that,” Myron said. “She led me to this specific spot. The question is, why?”
Erik nodded. His eyes were wet. “You mind if I tag along?”
He did, but Myron shrugged and started toward the house. The occupants might wake up and call the police. Myron was willing to risk that. He opened the gate. This was where Aimee had gone in. He made the same turn she made, went behind the house. There was a sliding glass door. Erik stayed silent behind him.
Myron tried the glass door. Locked. He ducked down and ran his fingers along the bottom. Some kind of crud had accumulated. Same with the door frame going up.
The door had not been opened in a while.
Erik whispered, “What?”
Myron signaled him to keep quiet. The curtains were pulled closed. Myron stayed low and cupped his hands around his eyes. He looked into the room. He couldn’t see much, but it looked like a standard family den. It was not a teen’s bedroom. He moved toward the back door. That led to a kitchen.
Again no teen bedroom.
Of course Aimee might have misspoken. She might have meant that she went through a back door to get to Stacy’s room, not that the bedroom was right there. But heck, Stacy didn’t even live here. So either way, Aimee had clearly lied. This other stuff—the fact that the door hadn’t been opened and didn’t lead to a bedroom. That was just the icing.
So where had she gone?
He got on all fours and took out his penlight. He shined it on the ground. Nothing. He hoped for footprints, but there hadn’t been much rain lately. He put his cheek flat on the grass, tried to look not so much for prints as any sort of ground indentation. More nothing.
Erik started looking too. He didn’t have a penlight. There was almost no other illumination back here. But he looked anyway and Myron didn’t stop him.
A few seconds later Myron stood. He kept the penlight low. The backyard was half an acre, maybe more. There was a pool with a whole other fence surrounding it. This gate was six feet high and kept locked. It would be hard, though not impossible, to scale. But Myron doubted Aimee had come here for a swim.
The backyard disappeared into woods. Myron followed the property line into the trees. The nice wooden picket fence ran around the side property lot, but once you got into the wooded area, the barrier became wire mesh. It was cheaper and less aesthetic, but back here, mixed in with branches and thicket, what did it matter?
Myron was pretty sure what he would find now.
It was not unlike the Horowitz-Seiden border near his own home. He put his hand on top of the fence and kept moving through the brush. Erik followed. Myron wore Nikes. Erik had on tasseled loafers without socks.
Myron’s hand dipped down near an overgrown pine bush.
Bingo, this was the spot. The fence had caved in here. He shined the penlight. From the rusted-out look of it, the post had buckled years ago. Myron pulled down on the mesh a little and stepped over. Erik did likewise.
The cut-through was easier to find. It ran no more than five, six yards. It had probably been a longer path years ago, but with the value of land, only the thinnest clump of brush was now used for privacy. If your land could be made usable, you made sure that it was.
He and Erik ended up between two backyards on another cul-de-sac.
“You think Aimee went this way?”
Myron nodded. “I do.”
“So what now?”
“We find out who lives on this street. We try to see if there’s a connection to Aimee.”
“I’ll call the police,” Erik said.
“You can try that. They might care, they might not. If someone she knows lives here, it might just further back up the theory that she’s a runaway.”
“I’ll try anyway.”
Myron nodded. If he were in Erik’s shoes, he would do that too. They moved through the yard and stood on the cul-de-sac. Myron studied the homes as if they might give him answers.
“Myron?”
He looked at Erik.
“I think Aimee ran away,” he said. “And I think it’s my fault.”
There were tears on his cheek.
“She’s changed. Claire and I, we’ve both seen that. Something happened with Randy. I really like that boy. He was so good with her. I tried to talk to her about it. But she wouldn’t tell me. I . . . this is going to sound so stupid. I thought maybe Randy had tried to pressure her. You know. Sexually.”
Myron nodded.
“But what decade do I think we’re living in? They’d been together two years already.”
“So you don’t think that was it?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know.” He went silent.
“You said it was your fault.”
Erik nodded.
“When I drove Aimee here,” Myron said, “she begged me not to say anything to you and Claire. She said that things weren’t good with you two.”
“I started spying on her,” Erik said.
That wasn’t a direct answer to the question, but Myron let it go. Erik was working up to something. Myron would need to give him room.
“But Aimee . . . she’s a teenage girl. Remember those years? You learn how to hide things. So she was careful. I guess that she was more practiced than I was. It’s not that I didn’t trust her. But it’s part of a parent’s job to keep tabs on their children. It doesn’t do much good because they know it.”
They stood in the dark, staring at the houses.
“But what you don’t realize is that even while you’re spying on them, maybe every once in a while, they turn the tables on you. Maybe they suspect something’s wrong and they want to help. And maybe the child ends up keeping tabs on the parent.”
“Aimee spied on you?”
He nodded.
“What did she find, Erik?”
“That I’m having an affair.”
Erik almost collapsed with relief when he said it. Myron felt blank for a second, totally empty. Then he thought about Claire, about how she was in high school, about the way she’d nervously pluck her bottom lip in the back of Mr. Lampf’s English class. A surge of anger coursed through him.
“Does Claire know?”
“I don’t know. If she does, she’s never said anything.”
“This affair. Is it serious?”
“Yes.”
“How did Aimee find out?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know for sure that she did.”
“Aimee never said anything to you?”
> “No. But . . . like I said. There were changes. I would go to kiss her cheek and she’d pull back. Almost involuntarily. Like I repulsed her.”
“That might be normal teenage stuff.”
Erik hung his head, shook it.
“So when you were spying on her, trying to check her e-mails, besides wanting to know what she was up to . . .”
“I wanted to see if she knew, yes.”
Again Myron flashed to Claire, this time to her face on her wedding day, starting a new life with this guy, smiling like Esperanza had on Saturday, no doubts about Erik even though Myron had never warmed to him.
As if reading his mind, Erik said, “You’ve never been married. You don’t know.”
Myron wanted to punch him in the nose. “You say so.”
“It doesn’t just happen all at once,” he said.
“Uh-huh.”
“It just starts to slip away. All of it. It happens to everyone. You grow apart. You care but in a different way. You’re about your job, your family, your house. You’re about everything but the two of you. And then one day you wake up and you want that feeling back. Forget the sex. That’s not really it. You want the passion. And you know you’re never going to get it from the woman you love.”
“Erik?”
“What?”
“I really don’t want to hear this.”
He nodded. “You’re the only one I’ve told.”
“Yeah, well, I must live under a lucky star then.”
“I just wanted . . . I mean, I just needed . . .”
Myron held up a hand. “You and Claire are none of my business. I’m here to find Aimee, not play marriage counselor. But let me just make something clear because I want you to know exactly where I stand: If you hurt Claire, I’ll . . .”
He stopped. Stupid to go that far.
“You’ll what?”
“Nothing.”
Erik almost smiled. “Still her knight in shining armor, eh, Myron?”
Man, Myron really wanted to punch him in the nose. He turned away instead, turned toward a yellow house with two cars in the driveway. And that was when he saw it.
Myron froze.
“What?” Erik said.
He quickly averted his gaze. “I need your help.”
Erik was all over that. “Name it.”
Myron started walking back toward the path, cursing himself. He was still rusty. He should have never let that show. The last thing he needed was Erik going off half-cocked. He needed to hash it out without Erik.
“Are you good with a computer?”
Erik frowned. “I guess so.”
“I need you to go online. I need you to put all the addresses on this street into a search engine. We need a list of who lives here. I need you to go home right away and do that for me.”
“But shouldn’t we do something now?” Erik asked.
“Like what?”
“Knock on doors.”
“And say what? Do what?”
“Maybe someone is holding her hostage right here, right on this very block.”
“Very, very doubtful. And even so, knocking on doors will probably get them to panic. And once we knock on one door at this hour, that person will call the police. The neighbors will be warned. Listen to me, Erik. We need to figure out what’s what first. This could all be a dead end. Aimee might not have taken that path.”
“You said you thought she did.”
“Thought. That doesn’t mean much. Plus maybe she walked five blocks after that. We can’t just stumble around. If you want to help, go home. Look those addresses up. Get me some names.”
They were through the path now. They moved past the gate and walked back to their cars.
“What are you going to do?” Erik asked.
“I have a few other leads I want to follow up on.”
Erik wanted to ask more, but Myron’s tone and body language cut him off. “I’ll call you as soon as I’ve finished the search,” Erik said.
They both got in their cars. Myron watched Erik drive off. Then he picked up the cell phone and hit Win’s speed dial.
“Articulate.”
“I need you to break into a house.”
“Goody. Please explain.”
“I found a path where I dropped Aimee off. It leads to another cul-de-sac.”
“Ah. Do we have a thought then about where she ended up?”
“Sixteen Fernlake Court.”
“You sound fairly certain.”
“There’s a car in the driveway. On the back windshield is a sticker. It’s for teacher parking at Livingston High School.”
“On my way.”
CHAPTER 26
Myron and Win met up three blocks away near an elementary school. A parked car here would be less conspicuous. Win was dressed in black, including a black skull cap that hid his blond locks.
“I didn’t see an alarm system,” Myron said.
Win nodded. Alarms were minor nuisances anyway, not deal breakers. “I’ll be back in thirty minutes.”
He was. On the dot.
“The girl isn’t inside the house. Two teachers live there. His name is Harry Davis. He teaches English at Livingston High School. His wife is Lois. She teaches at a middle school in Glen Rock. They have two daughters, college age, judging by the pictures and the fact that they weren’t home.”
“This can’t be a coincidence.”
“I put a GPS tracker on both cars. Davis also has a well-worn briefcase, stuffed with term papers and lesson plans. I put one on that too. You go home, get some sleep. I’ll let you know when he wakes up and starts to move. I’ll follow. And then we’ll be on him.”
Myron crawled into bed. He figured sleep would never come to him. But it did. He slept deep until he heard a metallic click coming from downstairs.
His father had been a light sleeper. In his youth, Myron would wake up at night and try to walk past his parents’ room without stirring Dad. He had never made it. His father did not wake up slowly either. He woke with a start, like someone had poured ice water down his drawstring bottoms.
So that was how it was when he heard the click. He shot up in the bed. The gun was on the night table. He grabbed it. His cell phone was there too. He hit Win’s speed dial, the line that rang for Win to mute and eavesdrop.
Myron sat very still and listened.
The front door opened.
Whoever it was, they were trying to keep quiet. Myron crept to the wall next to his bedroom door. He waited, listened some more. The intruder had gone through the front door. That was odd. The lock was old. It could be picked. But to be that silent about it—just one quick click—it meant whoever it was, or whoever they were, they were good.
He waited.
Footsteps.
They were light. Myron pressed his back against the wall. The gun tightened in his hand. His leg ached from the bite. His head pounded. He tried to swim through it, tried to focus.
He calculated the best place to stand. Pressed against the wall next to the door, where he was now—that was good for listening, but it wouldn’t be ideal, despite what you see in the movies, if someone entered his room. In the first place, if the guy was good, he’d be looking for that. In the second place, if there were more than one of them, jumping someone from behind the door would be the worst place to be. You’re forced to attack right away and thus expose your location. You might nail the first guy, but the second one would lay you to waste.
Myron padded toward the bathroom door. He stood behind it, kept low, the door almost closed. He had a perfect angle. He could see the intruder enter. He could shoot or call out—and if he did shoot, he’d still be in a good position if someone else either charged in or retreated.
The footsteps stopped outside his bedroom door.
He waited. His breath rang in his ears. Win was good at this, the patience part. That had never been Myron’s forte. But he calmed himself. He kept his breathing deep. His eyes stayed on the open doorway.
<
br /> He saw a shadow.
Myron aimed his gun at the middle of it. Win might go for the head, but Myron zeroed in on the center of the chest, the most forgiving target.
When the intruder stepped through the doorway and into a bit of light, Myron nearly gasped out loud. He stepped out from the behind the door, still holding the gun.
“Well, well,” the intruder said. “After seven years, is that a gun in your hand or are you just happy to see me?”
Myron did not move.
Seven years. After seven years. And within seconds, it was like those seven years had never happened.
Jessica Culver, his former soul mate, was back.
CHAPTER 27
They were downstairs in the kitchen.
Jessica opened up the refrigerator. “No Yoo-hoo?”
Myron shook his head. Chocolate Yoo-hoo had been his favorite beverage. When they lived together, he’d always had plenty on hand.
“You don’t drink it anymore?”
“Not much.”
“I guess one of us should note that everything changes.”
“How did you get in?” he asked.
“You still keep the key in the gutter. Just like your father did. We used it once. Do you remember?”
He did. They’d sneaked down to the basement, giggling. They’d made love.
Jessica smiled at him. The years showed, he guessed. There were more lines around the eyes. Her hair was shorter and more stylized. But the effect was still the same.
She was knock-you-to-your-knees beautiful.
Jessica said, “You’re staring.”
He said nothing.
“Good to know I still have it.”
“Yeah, that Stone Norman is a lucky man.”
“Right,” she said. “I figured you’d see that.”
Myron said nothing.
“You’d like him,” she said.
“Oh, I bet.”
“Everyone does. He has lots of friends.”
“Do they call him Stoner?”
“Only his old frat buddies.”
“I should have guessed.”