by Rachel Caine
“Going where?” Connor asks. I ignore him.
“To the range. It closes at eight,” Javier says. “I’ll go in for closing, get everything done for the day, make sure everybody’s cleared the building. Then I’ll come back for you, Lanny. Kez can stay here with you, Connor.”
“Wait, you’re going to the range? Why can’t I at least go along?” my brother asks, just as I knew he would.
“Because you’re a kid,” I tell him. “So, no. You can’t go.”
But Javier is watching him, and he says, “Do you want to?”
Connor shrugs. He keeps reading.
“Is that a yes?”
“Sure,” he says. But I see the flush darkening the skin at the edges of his jaw, around his ears. Not quite a blush, but close. It’s not in my brother’s nature to show it, but he’s excited about getting out of here, too. Maybe even about the guns, though he’s always told me he doesn’t like them.
I check the clock and groan. We still have hours to kill. I look over the games and finally plug Assassin’s Creed into the game console and hip-scoot my brother out of the way. He gets up and goes to his room and shuts the door. Fine. Good. Though I’d kind of expected him to offer to play. He likes this game. That’s why I picked it.
“Jerk,” I say under my breath, starting it in single-player mode. Then I pause it, get up, and open his bedroom door without knocking, because I know that will piss him off.
His back is to me, and for a second I think I’ve walked in on him doing something way personal, but then I realize he’s on his phone. “Are you calling Mom?” I ask him.
“No.” There’s a look in his eyes that surprises me.
“Who were you calling?”
“Nobody,” he says.
“Because if you’re calling Mom—”
“I’m not calling anybody!”
“Then—”
He explodes. It shocks me, because I know Connor has a temper, but it usually takes a long, long fuse to make it go off, and this is out of nowhere, and he’s shouting. “Just get out, okay? Stop pretending to be Mom, you’re not good at it!”
I back up, and he lunges forward and slams the door in my face. I have to jump back a few inches, or I’d have gotten it right in the nose. “Jesus!” I yell back and hit the door with the side of my fist. “Throw a tantrum, why don’t you, you brat!”
He doesn’t respond. I don’t expect him to. I glare at the door for a few seconds, then turn. Javier’s looking at me. “What?” I snap.
“Do you think it’s okay when he barges into your room when the door is shut?” he asks.
“Hell, no.”
“Then don’t do it to him. I know your mom taught you better.”
If he was even a little bit less nice I’d tell him to shut up, but I don’t. I flop back on the couch, pick up the game controls, and start up. I’m not as good at this as my brother is, but I don’t suck. For a while, I get pulled into the game world, and I’m glad for that, glad to leave everything behind and feel the walls around me fade out.
But it all comes back when Javier suddenly is right there, turning off the TV. “Hey!” I protest, because I was right in midjump, and now I’m going to lose a life, but he puts a finger to his lips, and his dark eyes are very fierce, and I shut up. Fast.
I hear something. Tires on gravel. Javier goes to the window and eases back the curtain. I can’t tell for a second if it’s okay or not, and then he eases his gun out of its holster and says, “Get your brother and stay out of sight. No noise. Go now.”
“What is it?” I keep it to a whisper. My pulse is pounding, and I feel hot all over. Then cold. “Is it him?”
“I don’t think so,” he says. “But I still need you out of sight. Go.”
I look around. We haven’t left anything that would give us away in plain sight. I rush to Connor’s room knock softly before I open the door. “Connor, come on, we have to—”
I don’t finish, because although the book is lying tented upside down on his bed to mark his spot, he isn’t there. I bend and look under the bed. Nothing. I check the small closet.
Then I feel a breeze on the back of my neck, and I look over and see that the window by the bed is open. The curtains are slowly moving from the wind.
Holy crap, no, you didn’t.
There’s no time to tell Javier, because I hear Boot’s deep-chested barking outside. I sweep the curtain back and look out, but I don’t see my brother anywhere. There’s a small wooden crate under the window, perfect for climbing down on quietly. Where the hell are you? The old barn is the only thing in view, and I hesitate for only a second before I throw a leg out the window, duck, and step down onto the crate. It creaks a little, but it holds. I ease the window shut. Boot’s low-throated growls and barks cover whatever noise I make, and now I hear Javier whistling him back to the porch. I step off the crate and run as quietly as I can across the open ground toward the barn.
Connor isn’t in here, either.
The barn is full of tools and the usual junk that accumulates in rural areas—old parts, mostly—and if there ever was a loft, it’s long gone. There’s no place to hide in here.
It’s too late to try to get back into the house, so I go back into the shadows and try not to think about the spiders that live in here. Or snakes looking for places to curl up for warmth. I crouch down and listen. I don’t have a gun, but I grab a hay fork and hold on to it with both hands. If I have to fight, I will. I listen for the crack of a gunshot, or sounds of a fight. I don’t hear anything but male voices. They’re calm, I guess. It goes on awhile, and finally I hear an engine start up and the crunch of tires as the car turns around and leaves. I wait until I can’t hear it anymore, then stand up and brace myself with the pitchfork, because my knees are shaking.
I go outside and look around, but I don’t see any sign of my brother at all. I climb back in his window and peek out the door. Javier’s just closing the front and locking it. Boot’s inside, off the chain, and he saunters over and looks up at me.
“Who was it?” I ask Javier. My mouth is dry, and it hurts to swallow.
“Detective Prester,” he says. “He says he was checking in on my health, seeing how I’d cut back my hours at the range. He smells a rat, though—”
I interrupt him in a rush. “Connor’s missing!”
“What do you mean, missing?”
“He’s not in his room. And he’s not anywhere outside. I looked.”
“How about the closets? The barn?”
“He isn’t in—”
“Lanny, just check the closets!”
I open my door and look in all the places my brother might be able to hide, but there’s nothing. I back out and am in time to see Javier yank back a gel mat that covers part of the kitchen floor—we stand on it every day, to wash dishes—and beneath it, there’s a ring inset in the wood. I blink, because I had no idea that thing was even there. He hasn’t mentioned it. I suppose he was saving it for emergencies.
When he heaves it open, I see that there’s a set of wooden steps leading down into darkness, and a light hanging down with a pull cord. Javier yanks the cord as he plunges down the steps. Boot scrambles at the edge and barks, but he doesn’t follow. Javier’s only gone for a moment, and then he switches the light off and slams the trap shut as he exits. Kicks the gel mat over top of the door. “He’s not down there. Did he say anything to you? Anything about where he’d go?”
“No,” I say. “I mean, he likes to go out in the yard sometimes, but . . .”
He’s gone before I can say anything else, and Boot scrabbles claws on the wood floor and takes off after him. I feel sick now. Shaky. I look again in my brother’s room. In my room. I check absolutely everywhere.
He isn’t here.
And when Javier comes back, looking grim, I realize the worst has happened.
My brother really is missing.
Calm down, I tell myself sternly. He’s just off pouting. He’s mad at me. He’s gone
off to punish me.
Would he, though? He knows the rules, and he knows Dad is out there loose. He knows Mom is too far away for us to find, so why would he try to run away to her? He has to be just angry and stupid. Maybe he’s gone into Norton. I don’t know.
I absolutely can’t tell Mom I’ve lost him. When I find him, I’m going to hug him, and then I’m going to punch him so hard he’ll never forget it. Then I’ll hug him again. I want to tell Javier, Please don’t tell Mom, but I can’t. He feels responsible, too.
I go out on the porch. Boot’s chain lays there in a long, piled coil. I stand next to it and look around. Javier’s come all the way around the house by now, with Boot pacing at his side. He looks out over the fence at the woods around us, and I know what he’s thinking: Which way? I have no idea.
“Can Boot find him?” I ask.
“Maybe. He’s tracked game before. Maybe he can track Connor.”
I go back inside to Connor’s closet, and I come back with a particularly smelly T-shirt from the laundry pile. I hand it to Javier, who shows it to Boot. He sniffs it enthusiastically, then looks as us as if he has no idea what we want. I crouch down and say, “Find him.”
I don’t speak dog, and Boot just licks his chops and cocks his head at me. I take the T-shirt and shove it in his face again. He waddles backward and gives me a warning growl. “Please,” I tell him. “Please.”
He sits down and sneezes. Javier curses quietly in Spanish—he probably thinks I don’t know what he’s saying—but he reaches down and pets the dog, and says, “Sorry, boy, not your fault.”
Boot still looks confused, but suddenly, his ears perk up. It’s like he makes up his mind. He backs up, barks once, and takes a single muscular leap that clears the fence with at least six inches to spare. Javier’s mouth drops open.
“Did you know he could jump the fence like that?” I ask.
“No. Damn.”
Javier opens the gate and goes out to the gravel drive, where Boot is industriously sniffing the gravel, nose shoving aside rocks and blowing bits of dust. He circles around the entire drive, then takes off at a dead run down the road. Javier runs after him, and I fall in, gain, and pull even. I silently have to thank my mom for dragging me on all those jogging sessions around Stillhouse Lake. The gravel’s not that easy to run on, but we don’t slow down until Boot does, about halfway from the cabin to the main road. The gravel peters off to mud here, mostly dried. Boot does a figure-eight pattern, snuffling, and then comes back to a spot and sits down. Looks at us with a little bit of pity. Stupid humans.
I’m the one who spots the footprints at the side of the mud right by the trees. I recognize the tread. They’re Keds, and that’s what Connor was wearing.
I sprint off into the forest and hardly hear Javier’s yell for me to Wait, Lanny, because I’m scared. I’m so scared that he’s gone, or worse, that something happened to my brother and he’s wandered back in here and collapsed, or . . .
I see Connor’s face first. He’s looking back toward the cabin, and the afternoon light through the trees falls right on him, and he looks sad and pensive and maybe a little bit guilty. He’s just standing there.
Then he turns and looks at me, and says, “Lanny—”
I’m not listening. I’m skidding to a halt in front of him, grabbing him by the shoulders, and shaking him like I want to shake the idiot out of him. It’s only then that I realize that Connor is crying. Crying.
I stop shaking him, and I gather him in my arms. Even though I’ve always been bigger than he is, I think he’s never felt so small and fragile before.
He just collapses, and I go with him, and we’re both on our knees, holding each other. Rocking back and forth and not saying a word. I don’t know if either of us really can talk. Something’s very wrong here, and I don’t know what it is. I’m afraid to know.
Connor holds out his phone to me. His hands are shaking. Mom always makes sure she disables the Internet features and enables parental controls before she gives them to us, but I’m not super surprised to find he’s hacked his way around that—he must have, because there’s a video playing on the screen. Right as I take the device from him, it ends. “What is this?” I hear Javier arrive behind me, and Boot’s there, whining and wedging himself in under Connor’s arm to lick my brother’s face. I swallow and sit back. Connor’s arms go around the dog instead, as if he needs something to hold on to. “Connor? Do you want me to watch it?”
He nods silently. I hit “Play.”
And when I see what’s on it, the world changes. Forever.
14
GWEN
When we land in Wichita, it’s late afternoon, and the sun’s already sinking low. It’s cold, with the icy bite of snow in the air, though the sky’s still clear. I remember this kind of weather, how it meant to lay in a good supply of wood for the fire, and salt for the steps, and make sure the winter tires were good to go. Stepping off that Rivard Luxe jet, I feel like I’m hallucinating, stepping into the wrong decade of my life. The smell of this place makes me dizzy.
My phone buzzes. I’ve had it off for the flight, and it’s just connected to the new roaming network. I check it, and see a text that says 911.
It’s from Lanny.
I also have a voice mail from Javier, but I don’t bother to listen. I stop right on the tarmac, two steps off the plane, and dial my daughter’s number. I feel sick, and I get a surge of false relief when I hear her say, “Hello?”
“Sweetie, what’s wrong?” I ask. I hear nothing. “Are you there? Honey? Hello?”
“You bitch,” she says, and then she hangs up on me. Just like that. I think we’ve been disconnected, and then I start thinking worse things. She didn’t sound like herself. She sounded cold. Angry. Different. And she’s never called me that. Never.
Sam slows down as he descends the steps, because he’s seen the look on my face. We lack the closeness we had before we went up that elevator in the Ivory Tower, but he can’t seem to help being concerned. “What is it?” he asks. “The kids?”
I dial again. Lanny picks up but doesn’t say anything. I hear noise, as if the phone’s being handed off, and then Javier’s voice says, “Gwen?”
“Oh, thank God, is everything okay there? I got a text and Lanny—”
“Yeah, look. You need to get back here.” Javier doesn’t sound right, either. I have a sickening idea that he’s got a gun to his head, that they’ve all been taken prisoner, that Melvin Royal is leaning over and listening to every word we’re saying. Is that possible? Yes. Horribly possible.
“Javier, if you’re under duress, just say my name one time.”
“I’m not,” he says. It sounds clipped and angry, but not anxious. “Your kids need some answers. I need some answers. All right? When can you be here?”
“I don’t understand. What happened? God, tell me, is everyone all right?”
“Yes,” he says. I don’t know whether or not to believe him. “Get back here.”
“I—” I have no idea what’s going on. “I will. Tomorrow by noon. I’m nowhere close, it’ll take me some time.” I wonder if Rivard will mind if I hijack his plane on the way back.
“Okay,” he says. He sounds different, most certainly, from the man I left in charge of my kids. As if something’s happened to change his mind about everything.
“Tomorrow,” I promise, and he hangs up without a goodbye. Sam’s standing by me now, frowning. I look up at him as I put the phone away. “Something’s wrong. I need to get back to Javier’s tomorrow.”
“Are the kids all right?”
“I . . . hope so. I don’t think they were being forced to call, nothing like that.” I think hard about calling Connor, seeing if he’d be more willing to talk to me, but I don’t. Something, some gut-level instinct, tells me that isn’t a good idea. Just get this done, and you can get back to them. Stop overthinking.
The crew of the plane has seen us off with professional smiles, but they don’t waste any
time. As we’re speaking, the stairway is pulled up behind us, the hatch shut, and now the plane is revving up to taxi off toward a hangar. Sam and I head for the small terminal. We go straight through, and I feel a strong sense, again, of déjà vu. I remember being here, picking up my mother on a flight in to visit her grandkids when they were little. That was before everything changed and life became a surreal, never-ending nightmare.
The carpet in the terminal is still exactly the same.
There’s a taxi rank—more or less, if one taxi constitutes a rank—and Sam gets there, leans in, and gives directions I don’t hear. I pile in with him in the back of the car, and it takes off with a jerk of acceleration. The cab driver isn’t chatty. That’s a good thing.
Sam passes me the file that he’d taken from the manila folder on board. I hadn’t asked then what was in it, because I didn’t want to push him. I still don’t, but I have to ask.
“Home or office first?” I ask. It’s almost five o’clock; depending on work hours, Suffolk could be at either place, or en route.
“We’re trying the office first. I like surprising people there. They’re not as likely to try to kill you in front of the boss.” Sam’s dry sense of humor is forced. I feel like I’m in free fall. I try not to look out the windows as we drive, because everything we pass has a memory attached to it of my old life. The park where I used to take the kids. The store where I bought my favorite dress.
The restaurant where Melvin took me to dinner for our last anniversary.
My mouth feels dry, and my throat clicks when I try to swallow. I wish now I’d guzzled more water on the plane. Sam and I haven’t talked about it, but it isn’t too likely that this Suffolk will put up much of a fight; he doesn’t seem the type. I just want to do whatever Rivard wants and stop anyone else from ever seeing that video; I don’t know if I can trust Rivard to keep his promise to buy it and keep it from spreading, but it’s the only option I have. It doesn’t matter that it’s faked. What matters is that it feels real, even to me, as if I’ve repressed the memory. People like to say that cameras don’t lie, but they can.