Dancer's Rain

by Doug Sutherland

  Emily wasn’t there.

  Adrienne swore to herself, whirling around and hurrying downstairs. Maybe Emily had come in and just fallen asleep on the couch. Adrienne hurried into the living room and saw that hadn’t happened—the couch was the way she’d left it the night before, a bunched up blanket and a pillow against one armrest, her half empty wine glass on the coffee table.

  She searched for the phone handset and finally found it tangled up in the blanket. She checked for messages, checked the call log—nothing—then hurried back upstairs and did the same with her cell phone, getting the same result.

  Emily was headstrong and independent—but she’d always been paradoxically careful about checking in with Adrienne, not necessarily telling her the truth about where she was or what she was doing but at least letting her know that she was all right, that she didn’t have to worry about an accident or something. It was a strangely considerate facet of her personality, perhaps a result of the abandonment they’d both felt when Emily’s father had left.

  Adrienne sat down on her bed and tried to control her breathing, tried not to jump to any conclusions. She tried to remember their last conversation, whether Emily had mentioned plans to stay over with a friend. She couldn’t think of anything, and it occurred to her that she hadn’t seen her own daughter since the morning before, when she’d been getting ready for work and Emily had been on her way to school. She searched her memory, trying to think if anything had seemed different, if Emily had been upset. No—she hadn’t been, and there hadn’t been an argument. She’d been cranky and slow to get moving, maybe, but in the morning she usually was anyway.

  She hadn’t seen her own daughter in twenty-four hours. That may not have represented a crisis for the parents of some girls Emily’s age, but it did for Adrienne. It went against everything they’d established in their relationship, and she knew that something was wrong.

  Adrienne had deliberately put up a wall between Frank Stallings and anything to do with her own family life. Now she picked up the phone and breached it.

  Frank arrived only a few minutes later, half expecting Emily herself to open the door amid profuse apologies from her mother. Didn’t happen. When he knocked on the door Adrienne opened it almost immediately, as if she’d been standing there waiting for him. Maybe she had.

  Frank had dealt with worried parents before and he knew he was in a minefield. It was too easy to sound unconcerned, uncaring. It was almost impossible not to, given that kids in that age range had a habit of going MIA and then turning up in a friend’s house with a friend the parents didn’t even know they had, or on an unauthorized road trip with their boyfriend or girlfriend.

  The only problem with that, he thought but didn’t say, was that the margin for error was razor thin. For every few thousand kids who’d simply gone AWOL and would return, there was always the one who got into serious, genuine trouble. For those exceptions the first hours were the most critical, and Frank thought but didn’t say that some of those invaluable hours had already passed.

  The first thing he suggested was that Adrienne call Emily’s school and ask them to notify her if she turned up for class—it was very possible, even probable, that Emily had just spent the night at a friend’s house and she’d arrive at school the next day as a matter of routine.

  Adrienne called her own school as well, to let them know she wouldn’t be coming in. From what Frank could tell that call wasn’t received very well, but Adrienne didn’t mention anything on the phone about the situation with Emily, just said that she was sick. Frank wondered at that, at how carefully Adrienne rationed out information, but he didn’t say anything. There were other things to worry about.

  Frank remembered his own reaction the first time he’d seen Emily, and he knew it was the same in virtually every man who saw her. It was the kind of reaction that inspired recklessness, as it had with the two knuckle—draggers that had come up to her in the driveway. Adrienne brought that up as soon as she met him at the door.

  “Listen,” he told her, “I’m going to check on them. I don’t think it’s likely, but I’m going to check. Adrienne, ninety-nine per cent of the time in these cases whoever’s missing just comes home.”

  Adrienne flared.

  “She’s not a case – she’s my daughter!”

  “I’m sorry—you know what I’m trying to say. While we’re at it, has anything else happened I should know about? Boyfriends, arguments?”

  Adrienne told him about the night that she found Emily outside the house in the Camaro.

  Great, Frank thought. You couldn’t throw a rock in this town without hitting some greaseball kid in an old Camaro or Firebird. For a moment he thought she might be talking about Langdon. Langdon would be another matter entirely.

  “Did you get a look at him?”

  “Just for a minute—before he swore at me and pulled out.”

  “Big, small? Long hair ...?

  “He was in the car but he looked small, skinny—long hair. He looked like he was twenty-one or twenty-two.”

  Not Langdon, then.

  “The last time you saw her—was she upset? Had you had a fight or an argument of some kind?”

  “We had a real...” Adrienne hesitated, embarrassed. Frank waited for it, “...we had a real fight about it that night, but that was it. She was fine the last time I saw her.”

  Something about the phrase kicked off in Adrienne’s head and the beginnings of tears glistened in her eyes. Frank instinctively reached out to her but she abruptly turned away from him. He let her have a moment. She turned back to him before the moment was over. Her icy self-possession had returned.

  “Frank, we’re wasting time.”

  “No, we’re not. We’re not wasting time here at all. We’re doing what we should be doing—thinking about where she could be, where she could have decided to go.”

  He thought of something, something that should have occurred to him in the first place.

  “Would she have gone back?” he struggled to think of the place where they were from, gave up, “Gone back to see her dad or her friends?”

  She looked at him, perhaps scornful that he’d taken so long to think of it. She shook her head.

  “I already thought of that,” she frowned, “I called. He hasn’t heard from her.”

  “Okay—look, the best thing you can do right now is let me get started on this. I want you to sit tight and let me know the minute she calls or walks in the door. Because that’s what’s going to happen.”

  That’s exactly what usually did happen. Maybe not on the parent or loved one’s schedule, but it would happen nonetheless.

  “You think I’m just going to sit here and wait?” she was incredulous, “I’m not going to sit here and do nothing!”

  “I’m not asking you to do nothing. I want you to sit down, go through your daughter’s computer, her address books, whatever, and make a list of her friends or anyone she might have contacted. If she decided to leave—maybe she had a destination in mind.”

  “She never said a word about leaving.”

  “Exactly—and she probably hasn’t left at all. She’s probably off somewhere with some friends or something, but at least this way you can eliminate the possibility. We can narrow things down.”

  The fight went out of her.

  “I can do that. I should’ve thought of that already.”

  “Look, a parent gets in a situation like this, it’s hard to think clearly. I understand.”

  She just stared at him.

  “Are you a parent?”

  Frank shook his head.

  “Then you don’t understand,” she looked at him sharply, “Are you just trying to get me out of the way?”

  “No, I’m not. You know your daughter, you know her friends and acquaintances, you know what her interests are,” she sniffed scornfully at this but Frank plowed ahead anyway, “you can make connections we can’t and you can make them a lot faster than we can. You’ve got my cell number,
right? If you find anything or think of anything you call me and I’ll check it out. That’s a lot better than just going out and driving around looking for her.”

  That was his best shot, and they both knew it. For a moment Frank thought of comforting her, putting his arms around her. Then he dismissed it. Better to get out while he had her convinced and she had a mission.

  Emily had passed panic a long time ago. She bounced and rolled in the back of the van, banging alternately against the wheel well and then onto hard metal—it felt like a tire jack. She was blindfolded and gagging, a filthy rag jammed in her mouth, and in the nightmarish reality she found herself in she wasn’t even sure she was conscious. Her arms were pinioned behind her and her ankles were bound together, her legs cramping. Her insides felt torn and pummeled at the same time. She wanted to pass out, make the nightmare go away, and knew if she did she’d be lost forever.

  The man behind the wheel cursed himself for his weakness. He’d just made his life even more complicated than it already was. She’d proven herself to be a worthless little slut, right in front of his eyes, and still he’d taken her and risked everything in the process. What he’d seen in the cottage had destroyed many of the illusions about her that had fascinated him in the first place—but they’d been replaced with others, new ones, and they were powerful. She had stirred something in him that all the others hadn’t. He could not remember ever being frightened before, but he was frightened now. He was losing control, watching himself do everything wrong but powerless to do anything about it. He’d turned his back on all the techniques he’d carefully codified over the years, everything that had kept him free and alive, and he’d let his compulsions put him squarely into completely uncharted territory.

  He could feel his instinct for self-preservation struggling back to the surface and now here he was, taking her to the only place he could think of that might divert attention away from him and save him from eventual discovery.

  Temporarily he’d be nailing himself down to a fixed location, a place where he could be found. The van hit a bump and lurched. He heard her muffled cry and looked over his shoulder. He’d wrapped her in old blankets, not good enough to pass any kind of scrutiny if he was stopped. It was early, though, and it was easy to stay on backcountry roads to get to where he was going. He tried to settle himself down with that thought, but he kept thinking back to that shiver of impact up his forearms when the edge of the ax had bitten into that kid’s head. Something different for him, a feeling of combat—no, be honest, not combat, but at least a feeling of risk. A full—grown male instead of a girl or woman, someone who could have struck back at him if he’d been given the opportunity.

  All in all, not a bad sensation, something new. Bigger game, something more in keeping with his true self, not the one he presented to the world.

  He had two names. He called himself Striker. On one level he acknowledged it was melodramatic, even grandiose, but he liked the sound of it, thought Striker should have been his name in the first place. It fit his true nature. When he was Striker the world changed.

  It took a long time to believe in Striker and what he could do. Fantasy was one thing, applying the fantasy to the real world was something else. He wasn’t stupid, knew about fantasy lives and their pitfalls. His fantasy life was different. He knew that to completely subsume his own identity into that of Striker would only lead to disaster. The key to survival was to acknowledge and tolerate his weaker self so that Striker could live. That weaker self was the key to Striker’s survival, and in the course of realizing it he’d saved himself as well. Now there was a reason for his weaker self to exist, and once he’d come to terms with that much of his self-hatred dissolved.

  Thoughts of his other life brought him back to his ‘real’ life, the one that had shielded Striker all these years.

  His life as Terry Wellner.

  Now, bouncing along in the van, he realized the huge risk he was taking. His passion for the girl had led him into a tangle of mistakes layered on mistakes. He’d left the office early yesterday, with every intention of showing up again the next morning, no inkling of what would happen only hours later. He knew he would shadow the girl but he had thought of it as scouting, as reconnaissance, and hadn’t considered the possibility that circumstances and impulse would put him in the situation where he was now.

  The van hit another bump and he felt the girl’s weight shift again in the back, a dull impact as she rolled again and hit the untrimmed metal of the van’s interior. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he could hear her crying. The sound annoyed and excited him, all at the same time.

  22

  Langdon jammed the last of the sodden bundles into the trunk and finally allowed himself to throw up. He’d been grimly choking it back all the way through that fucking awful hacking and sawing, somehow keeping it together until the last bundle was inside the trunk. Blood was seeping out the sides of most of them, but he decided against wrapping them up further using anything from the cottage—bad enough using the tarps and the tent. He knew they’d been in the shed when he’d taken ownership of the cottage four years ago, and maybe couldn’t be traced. Fuck it.

  There was only one place he had in mind for this—far enough away that it couldn’t be linked to the cottage or to himself, and close enough that he could walk back in time to clean the place up.

  It took him the best part of fifteen minutes to get there, the dodgy part being when he had to drive back up and along the main road for a mile and a half before he could drop back down to the old dirt road running along the shoreline. He made it without passing anybody—a minor miracle, even out here—and he breathed a huge, relieved sigh when he swung the Camaro right and down the steep incline that led to another dirt road running along the shore.

  He fought the urge to floor it, to get this over with. The road was terrible, much worse than the one that dead-ended in front of his place, fit only for four wheel drives and ATVs. The old Camaro wasn’t designed for this, especially with around a hundred and fifty pounds wedged in the back, even if it was in pieces. He heard—actually felt—a thump when one of the bundles dislodged and rolled off into the side of the trunk.

  He gritted his teeth when he saw the incline veering up and along the shoreline. The road was steep and dotted with half buried boulders and rocks ready to tear out the car’s undersides. Could be worse, he thought. If it had been raining and muddy he never would have made it. The automatic didn’t help. He took it easy, feeling the road beneath him, and coaxed the piece of junk up the hill, expecting any time to hear the grating noise of the gas tank or the exhaust or the transmission dragging against rock. If the car gave out on him now he was fucked. Unconsciously he leaned forward in the seat, hunched over the wheel, willing it the last few yards up and onto the clearing that overlooked the deepest pool in the river. The car suddenly found traction and shot up onto the clearing and he barely got it stopped before it went over the edge.

  There wasn’t much room to maneuver, but he finally got the car reefed around the way he wanted, backed up as far against the trees as it would go, the nose aimed out over the water. He put the transmission in Park and left the engine running, then got out and walked to the edge. Not really high enough to be called a cliff, maybe thirty feet, but it fell away, the overhang jutting out over a clean vertical drop into at least fifty feet of water. No one he knew of had ever actually measured the depth, but that was what the folklore said. He squinted, looking for the bottom, and couldn’t see it—that was good, the way he remembered it. He scanned the breadth of the river, looking for any signs of boaters, although it was late in the year for that kind of activity. Nothing.

  His only other alternative had been to burn the car out, but that wasn’t ideal either. The smoke would be too close to home, for one thing, and it might attract someone before he had the chance to get all the way back to his place.

  No matter what, he thought, there’s no foolproof way to do this. All he could do now was stay with
the program, hope no passing hunters noticed it, that the water was as deep as he thought, and that the river iced over early this year. He walked back to the car and went over it again. He wasn’t kidding himself that it wouldn’t be found sooner or later. It was a question of when, not if.

  He leaned in the open window on the driver’s side, shut the car down and pulled the keys out of the ignition, going around to the trunk. He took a deep breath and opened it, trying to think of what he saw inside as just nondescript bundles instead of the constituent parts of a human being. He stifled the urge to retch again—nothing left in his stomach anyway—forcing himself to check one more time for any telltale signs he might have left behind.

  Nothing, at least nothing that he could see, and he couldn’t look any more. He slammed the trunk shut. His work gloves left bloody smears on the metal.

  He went back to the driver’s seat and held his breath as he turned the key in the ignition. It started—barely—and only then he noticed that the gas tank was nearly empty. He’d been lucky to make it this far. Cheap bastard, he thought. He wasn’t sure how to do this, but knew that he had no intention of starting the process in the driver’s seat. In spite of the gas situation he left the car running and jogged back to the tree line. He picked up a large rock along the way and after some searching in the trees broke a long branch off a scarred, fallen birch. He could feel seconds ticking off in his head, imagine the trickle of gas running dry in the lines, thought he could hear the stumble of the engine as it gasped for fuel. He hurried back, leaning the rock against the gas pedal, the engine note swelling in volume.

  Stop fucking around, he told himself. It would work or it wouldn’t. The shifter was mounted on the center console and as he stretched through the window for it he realized he might not pull back out of the window in time. The rock was still leaning precariously on the gas pedal. The engine note was loud, ragged. It sounded as if the car could sputter itself out of gas any minute. He pulled back out of the window and opened the door wide, leaning in and getting his hand on the gear lever. Still risky, and he’d never have a chance to goose the gas pedal with the stick if the rock slipped.