by TA Moore
Two squad cars arrived while Cloister was getting Bourneville out. Javi waved one of the deputies over.
“Take over at the gate.” He pointed toward the cluster of bodies blocking the road. “I don’t think the country needs to know what the Prom King of Plenty thinks about this case.”
The woman nodded briskly. “I’ll get on that, Agent Merlo.”
While she did that, Cloister and Javi ducked through the gauntlet of the press. Javi fended off questions with the brisk reminder that he’d only just arrived and they’d know more as soon as he did.
Matt had already unlocked the padlocks and dragged the gates back as they approached. He let them duck through and then locked up again.
“Mr. Reed sent one of the ATVs down for you,” he said. He pointed over to a red buggy parked at the side of the road. He faltered as the math of one buggy with two seats settled in. “You could drive up yourself? It’s easy enough….”
“I’ll walk.” Cloister gave the buggy a jaded look. “It won’t take me long.”
A bone-rattling ride later and a spring intimately acquainted with his ass, Javi thought Cloister had probably made the right decision.
“Have the media been causing problems?” Javi asked.
Matt shrugged with his mouth and shoulders. He freed one hand to scratch at the welt on his neck. “Not for me. They don’t care much what I think,” he muttered. “Had a couple of things happen up here. Never had so many show up before.”
“Children tug the heartstrings,” Javi said.
Matt snorted. “Not met some of the ones up here,” he muttered. “Spoiled brats. No idea how lucky they are.”
“Like Drew?” Javi asked, suspicion tweaking at the back of his brain. The sheriff’s department had run background checks on all the Retreat’s staff. Nothing had come up that raised suspicion, and they’d all had alibis of varying strength.
Matt pulled up in front of the Retreat’s main office. He turned the engine off and gave Javi an abashed look.
“No, he was just a kid. The little ones are okay,” he said. “It’s the older ones, like Billy. He was always going behind his parents’ back, picking on the other kids, getting in people’s way. They come up here and act like we’re servants, here to run around for them.”
Javi delayed getting out of the ATV. “Did the staff have a lot of problems with Billy?”
“Not before.” Matt pulled the key out, fiddled with it, and twisted his fingers around the metal ring. “This year he just came up with a bad attitude. I caught him smokin’ out in the forest. Told him he could start a fire. He told me to mind my own business.”
“Teenagers,” Javi said lightly. “They grow out of it.”
“If someone shows them the way,” Matt said. “Let me know if you need a ride back down, Agent Merlo.”
It was difficult to scramble out of a buggy with any elegance. Javi extricated himself and fastidiously dusted his trousers down. He made a mental note to review Matt’s background check, just in case, but it was probably just service burnout. If Javi had to work with children all day, every day, he’d sound bitter too.
Javi thanked Matt for the ride, and when he turned around, he saw Reed jogging across the courtyard toward him.
Finally. Tranquil had made himself scarce since the night Drew disappeared. The ex-hippy mouthed all the right sympathetic platitudes to the department when they called, but stopped short of actually coming in for an interview. Javi assumed he was trying to dodge a lawsuit. With two missing children and a body in the morgue, he wondered bleakly if Reed had been afraid of something else.
“Special Agent Merlo,” Reed said as he reached him. He stopped and smoothed his graying hair back from his face. He was wearing jeans and a plain white shirt instead of his hippy costume of linen and approachable wrinkles, and his mask of affability had worn thin. His mouth was tight and his eyes hard as stones. “This is untenable. My business is disrupted, and the press is implying this is somehow my fault—”
“Is it?” Javi asked.
Reed stopped. Calculation made him narrow his eyes as he tried to measure just how serious Javi was.
“Of course not,” he said. “I’ve always tried to make the Retreat safe for my guests. It’s part of the ethos we’ve always had here. Since I opened my home to—”
“Then, when we find these missing children, your reputation will be cleared, won’t it?” Javi asked. He wasn’t in the mood, but for the sake of smoothing out the interaction, he added some honey. “The FBI will certainly make it clear how grateful we are for your help.”
Quid pro quo was something Reed understood. He smoothed his shirt down again and put his salesman face back on.
“Of course,” he said. “You’re right. I’m sorry. It’s just been such a shock that this happened here. The Hartleys are in my office, Agent Merlo, if you want to come with me?”
Javi hesitated and glanced back at the road. He would have preferred to let Cloister take point with talking to the Hartleys, use that sincerity of his to undercut the family’s resentment. There was no sign of him, though.
Apparently he was telling the truth when he said he had a problem with authority. Javi would have to deal with that. He swallowed to work the dry mix of frustration and lust out of his mouth and nodded to Reed.
“Of course.”
Chapter Sixteen
FOR ONCE it wasn’t Bourneville who found the missing boy. Cloister would give her the credit, though.
He hunched down, tilted his head to the side, and looked under the cabin. The thick stilts driven into the rocky hill to hold up the porch created a shaded slice of pseudobasement. The rocks had slid down the hill, leaving a bed of fine dirt. It smelled of beer and teenage sweat. It was just the sort of place two boys would turn into a den away from their parents, and the last place a parent convinced a predator had snatched their son—or convinced their son was a predator—would look for a missing child.
Billy Hartley was hunched as far back into the space as he could get, sneakered feet wedged against one of the struts.
“I’m not leaving,” he said when he saw Cloister. His voice cracked with defiance. “You can’t make me. They can’t make me.”
He was wrong about that. Cloister supposed he should try diplomacy first, even though the strategic application of force would be easier.
“We know you didn’t hurt your brother,” he said. “If you come out….”
Billy curled his lip in a sneer. “I already knew that,” he said. “They’re the ones you should be telling.”
“Your parents?”
The sneer stayed. Billy hunched down farther, shoved his hands into the pockets of his hoodie, and folded them across his chest.
“They want to send me to some sort of special therapist,” he said. “They think I did something to Drew and that I have to go and get fixed before I start burying little kids in the backyard. But they’re the ones that want to leave. Just leave him behind and go back home.”
Billy’s voice wobbled and cracked with a sour mix of adrenaline and fear. He didn’t look much like Cloister had at that age—not even if someone stretched Billy out a few inches and packed on a few pounds of resentment muscle—but the hurt and antipathy had a sharp and unwelcome familiarity.
The sun was beating down on the back of Cloister’s neck, stinging the prickle rash from where he’d clipped his hair short, and the backs of his thighs ached.
“What good will staying here do?” he asked.
Billy looked up, his dark eyes red rimmed and puffy. He swiped his sleeve over his face and gave Cloister a glare that challenged him to notice the tears.
“You said you’d bring him home,” he said.
“I said I’d try,” Cloister said. “I haven’t given up. You?”
“I’m not the one trying to leave.”
“Come on out, kid,” Cloister tried. “Your parents are worried sick.”
It would have worked on a little kid. They looked at Cloi
ster and saw someone trustworthy. Cloister didn’t know what Billy saw, but apparently it merited another sneer and a snarled “Fuck off.” So much for kids and teenagers being basically the same thing.
Cloister pushed himself up, brushed the sand off his hands, and looked up. On the cabin’s narrow porch, Bourneville looked down with pricked ears and head-tilted interest. Her tail swished over the wood and stirred up a small cloud of dust. Her ears tilted forward, and their tufted tips trembled.
He snapped his fingers—the crack of callus on callus was loud in the still air—and pointed under the cabin. “Bourneville, bring.”
She scrambled over the edge of the wood, squeezed her lean frame between the slats, and leaped down. Long black fur floated as the wind caught it, and for a second, she looked elegant. Then she hit the ground hard, her clawed toes dug ruts into the dirt, and she went scrambling into the dark, restricted space.
Billy started to swear before the dog even reached him. He kicked up divots of dirt as he worked his way farther back into the space. That only worked as long as there was space to go back into, though. His back hit the wall, and Bourneville latched on to the leg of his jeans. She dragged him back out, and the reinforced denim cuff held as it caught between her teeth. Billy spat out curses and grabbed at the struts. His knuckles showed white as he tried to hang on, but that was just another game of tug-of-war for Bourneville. Her head went down, and the heavy muscles in her shoulders bunched under the thick ruff of fur.
It was a short war. Billy’s fingers slipped, a yelp escaped him as he probably picked up a few splinters, and she triumphantly hauled him out at Cloister’s feet. Sobbing in frustration and probably grief, Billy pulled his leg back and aimed his sneaker at Bourneville’s head.
“Don’t kick my dog,” Cloister warned him and caught his foot. The rubber sole smacked against the palm of his hand. A terse whistle between his teeth called Bourneville off, and she let Billy’s leg drop as she backed up to behind Cloister. “She won’t like it. Neither will I.”
He let Billy have his foot back and nudged Bourneville with his knee. “Good girl,” he praised her and dug his fingers into her ruff approvingly.
Sprawled on the ground, Billy glared up at him. Frustrated, resentful tears dripped down into Billy’s ears, cutting trails through the dirt on his face. He scrubbed them away on his shoulder and scrambled up onto his knees.
“If my grandad were still here, he’d have found Drew by now,” he said, his voice breaking. “He wouldn’t have wasted time blaming me.”
Cloister held his hand out and waited. After a second, Billy grabbed it, and Cloister hauled him to his feet. He staggered, caught his balance, and pulled away. He clenched his hands into fists, and his knuckles poked bony divots against his skin.
“Why can’t you just leave me alone?” Billy asked bitterly. “What do you want from me?”
He was angry. That was obvious. Under that, though, was guilt. Javi had seen it and thought it was because of what Billy had done. Cloister had too, at first. Now, though, he thought it was because of what he hadn’t done, or what he thought he hadn’t done.
“Whatever it is that you don’t want to tell us.”
The defiance in Billy’s eyes flickered, and he looked away. His shoulders, sharp and too broad as he waited for the next growth spurt, hunched up under his hoodie. “Don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“Yeah, you do,” Cloister said. He reached back and shoved his hands into the back pockets of his jeans. The denim was rough against his fingers. A breath pulled at his chest and pressed against his ribs. “I did.”
That got Billy to look up from the ground and search Cloister’s face suspiciously for something. “Huh?”
Cloister looked around. He squinted against the glare and nodded toward the path he’d taken uphill. “C’mon,” he said, starting back that way.
As usual Bourneville padded along in his shadow. After a second so did Billy—more from a lack of anything better to do, Cloister suspected, than any real desire to know Cloister’s story. That was okay. The lack of questions gave Cloister time to work out how to say what he needed. In the end it was easy. The story wasn’t that involved. It wasn’t even that unusual. It was just his.
“When I was younger than you, my brother went missing too.”
“Younger brother?”
“Older,” Cloister said. “Not by much, but he never let me forget it.”
“What happened to him?”
“Don’t know,” Cloister said. “Probably never will.”
It took a second, but eventually Billy grunted. Not quite sorry, but at least acknowledging that his wasn’t the only family shitty things had happened to. That didn’t remind Cloister of himself at all. He’d been a miserable bastard.
They reached the hill behind the campground—a scrub of trees growing raggedly in the stripped-back dirt. It was steeper than it looked. Cloister had skidded down it earlier. Momentum was the only thing that kept him from sliding on his ass. Now he kicked his toes in, dug out short-lived, crumbling footholds, and went up with even less grace.
Bourneville lunged past him, back legs kicking the dirt, and showed him her furry ass as she scrambled to the top of the hill. She flopped down to wait and stuck her head over to watch him intently with pricked ears and a lolling grin. Some of the dog handlers Cloister had worked with warned against giving your dog too much credit, like assigning the dog brain with human intelligence or motives. Cloister didn’t care. He could tell when he was being laughed at.
He gave Bourneville the finger—it made him feel better, whether she got it or not—and grabbed a low-hanging tree branch to pull himself over a loose patch of dirt. The bark dug into his palm as the branch bent and pulled away from the trunk as it took his weight.
“My mom never believed that, though.” He glanced around at Billy. “She figured I knew something, had seen something, and I was lying.”
“Why?”
Cloister let go of the branch and scrubbed his sap-sticky palm absently against his thigh. “I don’t know. Because at least if I were lying, there was something she could do? There was an answer out there if she could just get it out of me.” He shrugged and hesitated for a second. It was harder to talk about than he expected. The story of his brother’s disappearance had been told so many times—by Cloister and to Cloister—that it didn’t really hurt anymore. There was just the memory of when it had. Like a hole where a tooth had been.
His mother wasn’t someone he talked about. Not really. Not often. When he was a kid, he figured he’d grow up, get out, and get over it. He’d done the first two, but he thought the fact that his mother hated him would sting until the day they tossed the dirt on top of him. He’d never been able to do anything to help her, but maybe he could help Lara Hartley.
“I guess because, at least if I were lying, she still had some control,” he said. “If she could make me talk, then we could find him. If I’m telling the truth, if there’s nothing I can tell her, then what else can she do? Me lying is all she has.”
Bourneville got up as Cloister reached him, and Cloister let her lick him and then turned and grabbed a handful of Billy’s hoodie to steady him up the last few feet. He put him back on his feet and then gripped his shoulder and felt the bones and wiry muscle under his fingers. Billy looked up at him, chewing at his chapped lower lip with sharp teeth, and his eyes were desperate for Cloister to not say what he was going to say.
“You do know something, and you need to tell us what it is,” Cloister told him. “There was nothing I could do to help my mom. You can, and you have to.”
Billy sagged. He looked a lot older than thirteen. Adult fear gave his features an adult cast. He sniffed and wiped his nose on the back of his hand.
“She’s gonna hate me,” he said.
“She’ll be angry at you,” Cloister told him and squeezed his shoulder gently. “Maybe she’ll be angry at you for a real long time. She won’t hate you.”
<
br /> A sigh, another sniff, and then Billy nodded. “Okay,” he almost mouthed, his voice was so low. “Okay, but I don’t even know if it’ll help.”
Cloister didn’t lie often. Dogs and the bereaved didn’t understand the idea of a white lie, or best efforts, or optimism. They just saw that you’d promised something and then not given it to them.
“It will,” he said, and he hoped it was true.
The search party, a shrunken version of the one that was still looking for Drew, was just about to head out when Cloister dragged Billy back into the Retreat. When Lara saw her son, her face lit up with relief that spread down from her eyes to the corners of her lips. It took her three long steps to remember that she thought he might be a murderer. Her face closed over and turned cold, and her outstretched hands trembled and then dropped back to her side.
“Where was he?” she asked and swallowed hard. It was obvious she half expected the answer to be something horrible, something incriminating.
“He just lost track of time,” Cloister said. He nudged Billy forward a step. “He’s all right now.”
A half-hearted mutter of relief spread through the crowd of searchers. The fact that Billy was—had been—a suspect obviously wasn’t a secret anymore. One of the women stepped forward to put an arm around Lara. Her “you must be so relieved” wasn’t any more convincing than Lara’s delayed agreement.
“Of course,” she said.
Three men pushed their way through the crowd. Ken ignored his son and went straight to his wife and tried to pull her into his arms. She shoved at him impatiently and thumped the heels of her hands against his chest as she tried to keep him at arm’s length. When that didn’t work, she hissed something angry enough to make the woman trying to comfort her go round mouthed and round eyed—scandalized, delighted, and guilty all at once. It made Ken back up. He dropped his empty arms to his side as though he didn’t know what else to do with them.