Seek and Hide: A Novel (Haven Seekers)

by Amanda G. Stevens

  Sam’s fingers drummed the table. “Here’s what I can do for you—names, addresses, and dates for the warrants. Sometimes they’re not acted on right away, maybe wait a few days, if we think we can get more evidence by waiting. But usually, it’s within twenty-four hours.”

  Marcus nodded. His copied sheets would be current for only so long. The Constabulary probably identified new suspects every day.

  “Obviously, I know you have Weston,” Sam said. “Who else?”

  Marcus shook his head. “I warn them. Or move them. I don’t keep them.”

  “Why her?”

  “She had nowhere else.”

  “And how’ve you been finding the others?”

  “A list.”

  “From?”

  Marcus shook his head. No reason to tell the whole story.

  Sam’s scowl only lasted a moment. “And you move them where?”

  Marcus’s voice lowered. “Ohio. Sometimes.”

  “You know? How’d you find out?”

  “What?”

  “Oh … You were just using common sense, then.” He waved off any interruption before Marcus could say a word. “There’s quite the covert fight waging in Ohio right now, almost across the entire state. Of course, media’s hushing the story. People here might get inspired, try to emulate them.”

  A server with dyed-red hair strode up to their table and set a bottle of beer in front of Sam. Marcus drew in a deep breath and let it out as she turned to him.

  “Hi there, what’ll it be?”

  Shot of whiskey, fire down the throat, warmth spreading all the way to the fingers—“Nothing, thanks.”

  She nodded and disappeared, and Sam took a long sip of beer. Marcus should’ve asked for coffee, but no. Coffee was separate from this place.

  “What do you mean, covert fight?”

  “Essentially what you’re doing, but they’ve got a small army working on it. And they’re not the only state making waves. Michigan’s kind of disappointing in comparison. We’ve got wind of a little network up in the Thumb, but most of our state is resistance-free.”

  Constabularies did communicate. They knew what other states were dealing with. Maybe the federal government was feeding them information, planning to coordinate them. Marcus leaned against the vinyl seat and shifted to avoid the sore spot on his back. He’d let Sam finish before questioning him.

  “Anyway, as far as Ohio goes, you didn’t know how good your thinking was. Hold off on that awhile, though. There’s a theory Weston’s no longer … missing anything, which would be a good time to run. The state line’s crawling right now.”

  Definitely no homeless shelter, then. The danger collided with a sort of relief.

  “Now, as for the rest of our suspects. How much can you remember at one time?” Sam said.

  Did he mean names? Addresses? “Numbers stick in my head pretty good.”

  “That’s a plus.” Sam stretched his legs under the table until his black loafers peeked out on Marcus’s side, ankles crossed. “Your guest really messed things up for them, with the media attention. Some of the higher-ups are in a frenzy to publicly throw her behind bars.”

  “Well, what’ve you got?” This meeting had to give him more than a promise of future information.

  Sam tapped his temple with one long finger. “Eidetic memory, also known as photographic.”

  He was serious?

  “I’ve got three for now.”

  Three addresses. Good. Marcus opened his wallet. What could he—there, the receipt for the diapers and formula. Sam leaned back and stretched his right arm. His fingers tapped a silent beat on the table edge.

  “Pen,” Marcus said.

  Sam lifted a pen from the pocket of his beige polo shirt and sat forward to hand it over. Marcus scribbled down each street address Sam recited. To the first, he added one to each digit of the house number. To the second, he would add two, and to the third, he’d subtract one. Not much challenge as a code, but better than writing the exact numbers. The street names left him lost, though. No way to mask those.

  Sam’s dark eyes tracked the pen until it hesitated before writing Elm. “Disguise it in another word.”

  Right. Mel? Lem?

  “Lemming, elementary, melody …” Sam shrugged. “You’ll remember it later. You just need a clue for which numbers go with which street.”

  “Sure,” Marcus said. He wrote Lemming. But there was no hiding the next one, Whitetail. Anyway … “That one’s on my list.”

  Sam tilted his head. “Who’s your source?”

  Marcus gazed back at him and didn’t blink.

  “This is what I’m talking about when I use the word stupidity. You’re going to have to accept your allies.”

  Lee knew this guy. Marcus’s thumb clicked the retractable pen back in, out, in. Okay. Fine. “Jason Mayweather. I’m a contractor. I did some repair work for him. And I searched his office.”

  “Mayweather?” Sam leaned forward and glanced at the door as if planning his escape. “You’re nuts.”

  Marcus shrugged.

  “I’m telling you, if he’d found you, he would’ve put a bullet in your head and five minutes later wondered how he was going to explain your corpse.”

  “He wasn’t home. What’s the last address?”

  Sam gave it to him, and his brain blanked. Travis Court. No memory trick for that one.

  “Varsity,” Sam said. “All the letters, plus one.”

  Heck. “Do you play Scrabble with Lee?”

  Sam chuckled, a rumble even deeper than his speaking voice. “I have, occasionally. She says we’re evenly matched.”

  “I’m no good at it.” He couldn’t find the point to it, either.

  “At least you admit it.”

  “No choice.” Marcus’s mouth tugged upward. “She stopped asking me to play about seven years ago.”

  That brought on a flash of smile, but then Sam’s gray-flecked eyebrows tugged toward each other. His eyes held Marcus’s for several moments of slow finger tapping. Maybe the beat of his fingers betrayed the speed of his thoughts.

  “She can take care of herself, I know, but she’s kind of been … under my wing, for a lot of years.”

  “Okay,” Marcus said.

  “She said she’s known you a long time, that you’re trustworthy. Seems you’re good for her. She needs a friend in it for the long haul.”

  Friend. As if Marcus had never proposed to her, as if he didn’t wait for the day she was ready. As if he could simply transfer his love to somebody else if that day never came. Of course, Lee wouldn’t have told Sam any of that.

  Sam’s fingers had stopped drumming. “You asked me why I’m doing this.”

  As a favor to Lee, of course, because she’d gotten it into her head that Marcus needed an ally.

  “We need some shelters,” Sam said, “immediately available. We’ll need other contacts, too, hopefully some way to alter identities. I’ll work on that, I know some people. Who can you bring into this?”

  Marcus shook his head. “Nobody.”

  “That’s not going to work.”

  One ally. That was Lee’s deal. Sam had no right to change the terms. “I’m not going to put anybody else in danger.”

  “You just answered why I’m here.”

  What?

  Sam’s hands flattened again and pressed the red tabletop as if to brace himself, though he didn’t stand up. “Someone has to broaden your vision, man. If I’m going to join this thing, I want it to do something, to mean something.”

  Marcus’s work did mean something—to Aubrey, to the people on Jason’s list. He was doing the best he could.

  Sam shook his head. “You honestly think you can keep on with this, alone? You try to bite off more than you can chew and you’ll gag on it. And when
you get yourself arrested, who’s in danger then?”

  “I wouldn’t talk.”

  “Everyone talks. Everyone’s got a breaking point. They’ll get you to yours.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Solution? You don’t get arrested.” Sam’s deep whisper volleyed the words without pause. “Which means you approach this thing realistically. You get Lee sent to re-education and I swear I will kill you. They target a person’s vulnerabilities, and I’m not talking only about the darkness phobia. I’m telling you, if they can find out about it, they’ll exploit everything that’s ever happened to her—”

  The rape. Marcus’s gut clenched.

  “—the rape,” Sam said. “And the abortion.”

  The …

  Sam’s cheekbones seemed to sharpen along with his attention. “What? You thought I didn’t know?”

  Marcus tried to swallow without choking. The … abortion?

  Sam’s fingers perched in a frozen curve. “Wait … didn’t you know?”

  “There was no— She was never … there wasn’t a baby.”

  “There was.”

  “No.” Lee couldn’t have children. She’d told him she couldn’t.

  “I don’t know why she’d tell you about one and not the other, but I know she was pregnant. Why do you think she went to Kirk? You knew him, didn’t you? You know what he did for a living.”

  She’d been sick. After. She’d told him. Kirk helped her. An OB-GYN could help a woman with something like that. It didn’t mean there’d been a baby. There couldn’t have been a baby. If there had, Lee would be a mother today. Lee would have an eleven-year-old child.

  “It never even entered my head,” Sam said. “That you wouldn’t know.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “I’m not, Marcus. I met her when she was barely nineteen, only a year after.”

  “Lee wouldn’t.”

  “She didn’t want an abortion. Her father took her to Kirk’s clinic, and when she refused to sign the paperwork, Kirk told him it was Lee’s decision. It was almost a month later she showed up again, alone, and …”

  Marcus balled Sam’s shirt in his fist and pulled his lanky form up and half over the table. “And what?”

  “Her father didn’t give her a choice.”

  Marcus shoved him. Back over the table, against the seat, head barely missing the wall. Sam regained his balance. His gaze shot around the bar. Pinned Marcus. Ordered him to sit back down.

  No.

  “You have any more attention grabbers up your sleeve?”

  Shut up.

  “Don’t you breathe a word to her, Marcus. I guess I should have thought you might not know. Kirk’s the one that told me.”

  His senses attacked. He smelled whiskey. Tasted whiskey. He had to get outside. Maybe he could breathe another scent out there.

  “Are you hearing me?” Sam said.

  Marcus’s legs carried him toward the door. Out. Get out. Sam tailed him but didn’t touch him. Which was good. Right now one finger on Marcus’s shoulder would put Sam in the hospital. His body exploded into the night air and kept going. Walk. Walk. The cloud of his breath billowed and dissipated. Snowflakes drifted around him, fat and contented. His hand swiped the air once and tore through their path. They died as water on his palm and fingers.

  “Marcus.” Sam stalked into his line of sight and stood in his way. “Please. Don’t tell her.”

  Don’t hit him. He didn’t do this, not any of this. He didn’t steal from Lee or rip her apart. He didn’t kill her baby.

  “I’ll be in touch, and you’re going to hear me out. There’s too much at stake for you to keep playing Lone Ranger.” Sam turned and faded into the snow.

  38

  Marcus walked. Headlights passed on his left. Slush hid the white line of the road’s shoulder. The weather seeped through his jacket and shoes. The cut in his back started to throb. He walked. Lee. Lee, hurt. By a monster with a tattooed wrist. By a black hood over her head. By another monster that called himself her father and paid more monsters to hold her down and scrape her baby from inside her while she fought them, because she did fight, because she was Lee. And a baby, not just hurt but murdered, born in a bloody pulp and thrown away.

  God was here. Marcus hunched over and braced his head on his arms. No. Get away from me.

  He had to tell Lee. She could stop hiding it from him. He could help her, somehow. Not with his words, but maybe with hers, if she could talk about it and know he would listen. His body straightened and turned around, put the traffic on his right instead. His strides lengthened. His hands curled against the cold. He shoved them into his pockets.

  His truck sat waiting. Marcus got inside and started the engine. The neon lights from the bar window reflected on his windshield’s layer of snow. No. He wasn’t thirsty. He was going to see Lee.

  The tiny paper squares in his pocket filtered through his resolve. Homes with endangered people inside, watching TV right now, or sleeping. Lee would be awake when he finished with them. He’d collect the right words to say to her as he drove to each house.

  On the way to Elm Drive, the thirst hit him. Hard. He didn’t need a drink, and he didn’t want one, but part of his brain whispered otherwise. He wouldn’t listen, that’s all.

  Not a light, not even a flickering TV, shone from inside the Elm house. Marcus skulked nearer. The snowflakes hadn’t yet buried the dark points of grass, but he’d still leave footprints. He crept so close to the house that his jacket scraped brick. His path would be invisible from the street.

  The garage was empty. The doorbell’s tone reverberated on the other side of the door, then faded to silence. Marcus turned away from his sigh that hung in the frosty air.

  He coasted his truck through the neighborhood and found a different route out than he’d taken in. When Travis Court gave him another empty house, he punched the steering wheel once.

  Not once. He struck it again, smooth and shiny and solid enough to take the blow. No, don’t feel it. One more house. Then Lee. He needed words.

  He drove past Whitetail the first time, turned around and corrected the beginning of a skid. He’d had to notch the windshield wipers up twice since leaving the bar.

  How to get up to the house? His footprints now would be like spills of dark paint on white carpet. Well, if he had to advertise, then he would. Down the sidewalk, up the driveway. Nobody suspicious would walk there. If the snow kept falling at this rate, his prints would fade to white soon anyway.

  No doorbell. Marcus lifted the old knocker instead. Something hardly deserving the title of dog yapped and collided with the door. It opened half a minute later, and a woman in her thirties squinted at Marcus and wrapped her robe closer with a shiver.

  “Can I help you?”

  When he couldn’t answer, the woman began to inch the door closed. He forced his voice to work. “Hide.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Marcus’s hand gripped the edge of the door and stopped its progress. “There’s a warrant. They’ll come soon.”

  In one blink, wide astonishment replaced the squint. “I don’t know what you could possibly be talking about.”

  “Yeah. You do.” Behind her, several feet up the hallway, stood a boy with a military cut, probably around eleven. Marcus’s knuckles turned white against the blue door. “They’ll take you. And him. Whether they’ve got evidence or not.”

  “Are you threatening my son?”

  “I’m warning—both of you. You’ve got to hide.”

  She stopped pushing at the door. “Who are you?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “It does to me.”

  Marcus shrugged. His feet shifted, but he couldn’t leave. “Do you have someplace?”

  “To hide? Yes, we do.”

  He waited.

>   “But I think I’ll keep the location to myself.”

  Really, that was sensible. He nodded and turned.

  “Sir?”

  Maybe she was a waitress, because nobody called him that. He turned back and suppressed a shiver.

  “Thank you for what you risked tonight.”

  Marcus nodded again and left the porch, trying to step where he already had. He reached his truck a few houses away and headed toward Lee.

  How would he say it? The drive gave him about fifteen minutes to assemble his words. He thought he had them lined up the best way possible until he knocked on her door. He waited for her to open it, and the words in his head became like drops of water in a cupped hand, pouring between the fingers no matter how hard you squeezed them together.

  Lee opened the door, and alarm for him leaped into her eyes. Her hair was damp from a shower. The navy hoodie swallowed her. Marcus lost the rest of his words.

  “Marcus.” She stepped aside and closed the door behind him. “What’s wrong?”

  Everything monsters had done to her. He had to be careful, get a grip, before he forgot himself and pulled her into his arms.

  “Are you injured?”

  “No.”

  Her eyes scanned him up and down, pausing at his hair. “You’re quite wet.”

  “Just snow.”

  “Are you thirsty?”

  “No.” Yes. But that wasn’t important. “I’ve got to talk to you.”

  “All right.” She motioned him further inside. “Remove your shoes and jacket. They’re only trapping the cold around you.”

  “No, Lee, wait. I’ve got to say this.”

  She turned back to look up at him. Concern nested between her eyebrows.

  “I know.”

  Now the eyebrows arched, asking if he thought she could read his mind.

  “About … about … the baby.”