Reclamation

by Gregory L. Beam

  Reclamation

  By Gregory L. Beam

  Copyright © 2017 Gregory L. Beam

  All rights reserved.

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE: Yoga Night

  CHAPTER TWO: The Ties That Bind

  CHAPTER THREE: Declaration

  CHAPTER FOUR: The Kids Are All Right

  CHAPTER FIVE: Naughty Boy

  CHAPTER SIX: The Long Way Home

  CHAPTER SEVEN: The Whole Story

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Equilibrium

  CHAPTER NINE: Dispatch

  CHAPTER TEN: House Call

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: Transmission

  CHAPTER TWELVE: Black Out

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: A Shot in the Dark

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: The Weight

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: On the Road

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Sound the Alarm!

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Probable Cause

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Home

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: Shots Fired

  CHAPTER TWENTY: Fault Lines

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Kim McKean, Joline Beam, and Eric Poulin, along with Jackson Burch and everyone else on social media who provided me with information on everything from plumbing to handguns.

  CHAPTER ONE: Yoga Night

  September 18, 2016.

  7:08 p.m.

  The shackle slams into the body of the lock. John gives the lock a tug, then casts his eyes up and down the front door of the barn.

  “Are we ready?” Val says, tapping her foot impatiently.

  “I think I’m gonna call the security company,” John says, his hand still cradling the lock, “get an estimate on an alarm system for the studio.”

  Val cocks her head. “That wouldn’t be very yoga, now would it?”

  “How ‘yoga’ do you think it’ll be—” John gestures to the barn “—when we walk in one morning to find a bunch of junkies passed out on the blankets, using the extra mats for pillows? Or those punks who litter the side of the road with their Keystone Light cans, what if a gaggle of them got in here?”

  Val squints. “A gaggle?”

  “We spent fifty grand renovating the space,” John says, “I figure it makes sense to protect it.” Then, in response to an extravagant eye roll from Val, he adds, “Are you still upset about what happened in there?”

  “I’m not upset about anything,” Val declares, batting her rolled up yoga mat against her shoulder. “I just know that Dan could have taken the adjustment. He’s an excellent student, very flexible.”

  John closes his eyes, exhaling slowly as he bends down to collect his mat from the ground. “Meyers & Roth is one of the top law firms in Central Maine,” he says. “They have a reputation for ruthless litigation—they actually avoid settling. You really want to give Dan Meyers a strained IT band? A torn meniscus?”

  “Oh, for the love of—he’s a grown man, John. I wasn’t going to break him!”

  “You sent Melissa Duggins limping out of here last Sunday, and she’s a three-time triathlete.”

  “You know, honey, I never thought it would be possible, but you’ve grown even more cautious in your twilight years.” She raises a finger to her chin. “Is that the word I’m looking for—cautious—or is it ‘paranoid’?”

  “The studio isn’t even licensed,” John says, “in case you’d forgotten.”

  “And in case you’d forgotten, I am the certified yoga teacher in the family. I think I know what my students’ bodies are capable of.”

  John turns up his palms like scales. “Five years of medical school... versus 300 hours of yoga teacher training… mmmmm...”

  Val’s eyes narrow. “Are you really going to lord it over me with that?”

  A brief silence. Then simultaneously, as if cued by the same internal stage manager, their combative expressions dissolve.

  “We should order dinner,” John says, slinging an arm over Val’s shoulder. “It’s getting late.” He pulls up the number for the restaurant as they start down the gravel path toward the house, leaning into each other like young lovers as they stroll past the water fountain, the rock garden, the gazebo. The air is cool, and the crickets sing as night descends upon their home in the Bluffs of Great Falls, Maine.

  A flood lamp snaps on as they approach the side entrance to the house. Val puts the key in the lock. The door swings open, and she reaches into the darkness to key in the code on the security panel.

  “That’s strange,” says John, gazing into the unlit mudroom, “I could have sworn I left a light on in here.”

  Val grins. “Senior moment.”

  “Honey, I’m serious.” He puts a hand on her wrist. “I left the overhead light on when I came out to the barn. I’m sure of it. Maybe we should—”

  “Sweetie… the door was locked. The system was armed. No one could have gotten in. Now can we please go inside? I’m starving.”

  John takes a deep breath and nods. “I guess I have grown a bit wary,” he says, then smiles, flicks on the light, and follows Val into the house.

  Rich: Where’s the agent? I lost visual. Do you see him, frogger12?

  Elliot: He went down the back hallway when they came in the house.

  Rich: Roger. Any word on the other agent?

  Marcus: He’s on his way. Says he got a flat. Where the hell is Jay, though?

  Rich: Excuse me, frogger11?

  Marcus: Sorry. Where the hell is frogger10? I thought I heard him talking to someone.

  Elliot: Let’s hope not.

  Rich: Frogger10? Are you there? … The marks are in place, frogger10. If you don’t respond in—

  Jay: I’m here. Sorry.

  Elliot: Good of you to join us.

  Rich: Might I ask where you—

  Jay: Just securing the door. Make sure there’s no interruptions.

  Rich: Don’t leave your post unannounced again, frogger10, you got that?

  Jay: I got it.

  Rich: Roger. You’re supposed to say ‘roger.’

  Jay: Fine. ‘Roger.’

  Rich: All right, boys, it’s time to rock ‘n roll. You ready, frogger12?

  Elliot: Ready.

  Rich: Frogger11?

  Marcus: Ready, brah.

  Rich: Frogger10?

  Jay: I’m ready.

  Rich: Here we go…

  Val watches her husband climb the stairs, then goes into the kitchen to set the table. John will still be in the shower when their delivery arrives from The End Zone Bar & Grill—just as she’s planned it. They always order delivery on Yoga Night, and Val tries her best to pick up the bill, the handling of gratuities being a long-standing disagreement between her and John.

  Yoga in the Barn had been a hit from the beginning. The Sunday classes attracted a slew of the Bluffs’ well-heeled inhabitants to sweat it out with neighbors they would otherwise encounter only when trotting their purebred poodles and King Charles spaniels past one another’s well-manicured lawns. After a brief trial period, they’d started charging a couple hundred bucks for each cycle of classes. The fees were ostensibly meant to encourage regular attendance (and to keep out any unsavory elements), but the truth is, the idea of giving away her services for free rankled Val something awful—even if they needed the extra money about as much as she needed a third elbow.

  You just don’t do that, a voice inside her protested.

  Another thing you don’t do is tip over 15%. Excessive gratuities “fatten the arteries of commerce,” her father used to say. Big Nat Muldoon (who in his later years knew something about fattened arteries) was tightfisted when it came to tipping. He would always be the one paying the bill, of course, impressing his chums and colleagues with his largesse, while tacking on a pittance for the help.

  Val’s husband, however, has ne
ver shared her father’s view on the matter. Knowing that John is liable to add on 20, 25, even 30 percent, indifferent to the quality of the service, Val is quick to snatch up the bill when she can and mete out a more reasonable dispensation. It’s excess, sheer excess, those outlandish tips. A kid bikes over a grilled veggie sandwich and walks away five bucks richer?

  Not on her watch.

  She grins as the water comes on upstairs. She’s been running this trick for months now, suggesting that he take the first shower so that she can handle the bill, and John hasn’t yet caught wise.

  She opens the fridge and reaches for the bottle of chardonnay they opened last night, a silky Napa Valley vintage, still half-full. Lightly oaked and mellow, it should go perfectly with her black bean burger. And as for John’s wings… well, he can have a beer if he likes.

  John does a double take when he looks in the mirror. There are jowls beginning to form at his jaw. Val was right: he is getting old. And fat. Last time he checked, he was up to 170—healthy BMI for a man his height, but five pounds heavier than he’d been in med school (and with half the muscle tone). Maybe The End Zone wasn’t the best idea for dinner.

  They usually order from Filter, an upscale fusion restaurant by the river, or one of the Indian or Somali places that’s recently sprung up in town. But John is in the mood for wings, and The End Zone Bar & Grill is the best bet on that account. There’s nothing fancy about the way The End Zone does them up, and that’s just how John likes it.

  His reflection disappears behind the steam from the shower, and with it any misgivings about his figure. A dozen wings won’t kill him. He can almost taste their tangy-hot goodness as he lets his yoga trunks drop to the floor.

  Wings are the one fault line in John’s obsessively healthy lifestyle, a vice he adopted during his brief stint on the lacrosse team his freshman year at Swarthmore. Some weekends, he and his teammates would go slumming in the working class neighborhoods outside of Philadelphia. They’d find a dive bar and watch whatever game was on, swilling Bud Light and devouring pounds of fatty chicken flesh drenched in Buffalo sauce, leaving mountains of flayed bones in their wake.

  One time, at a place by the Navy Yard in South Philly, a first-string attacker named Nick Rush got into it with a factory worker, and the scene got ugly fast. It was the only real fight John had ever been a part of, aside from small scuffles on the field. He did his best to de-escalate the situation and managed to escape with only a couple of bruises. Not all of the combatants were so lucky. Two of his teammates had to go to the hospital, and a friend of the factory worker ended up with a broken jaw. The whole team was reprimanded, and a lawsuit was filed by the man with the cracked mandible.

  “Fucking parasites,” said Nick Rush. “They smell rich-kid blood, and they come swarming.” He shook his head, sneering, seeming to forget that he was the one who had instigated the whole thing.

  The incident left a bad taste in John’s mouth, and he quit the team. The sublimated violence of sport, enacted in the civil confines of a playing field, is one thing; the brutality of men attacking one another with the sole aim of doing harm is quite another, especially for an aspiring doctor.

  Nevertheless, his brief tenure with the team left him with a taste for wings, and the veggie burgers and sweet potato fries at The End Zone are decent enough that Val doesn’t object to ordering from the place every now and then.

  John draws back the shower curtain and steps into the tub. The steaming water assaults his ankles. He reaches down and turns the cold-water nob clockwise. No need to scald himself just yet. Leave that to the wings.

  It’s dark outside when the delivery guy shows up, but the water is still running upstairs. Excellent. The bill comes out to $33.28. Val hands the young man two twenties and asks for three bucks in return. He’s come a long way, she figures—he deserves a little extra. He thanks her mildly as he gives her the change, eyes peeled to the doormat beneath the brim of his cap, then takes off down the footpath toward the driveway.

  Val shakes her head. Would it really be too much to take off the hat when greeting a customer? It’s a wonder the kid gets any tips at all.

  She closes the door and goes into the kitchen, setting the warm paper bag on the large island in the center of the room. She sets out two plates, arranges the cutlery on a pair of chambray-fringed napkins, and grabs the bottle of chardonnay from the fridge.

  As she pulls the stopper from the bottle, she looks up. There’s a figure standing in the hallway. For a moment, she doesn’t do or say anything. Her mind is a perfect blank. She cannot process what she is looking at—like the natives of Hispaniola who failed to see the European ships on the horizon—the image is so out-of-joint with the unquestioned security of her domestic existence.

  But there it is: the figure of a man, hulking and vaguely eggplant-shaped, wearing cobalt-blue coveralls and a black ski mask, a hunting rifle in his hands.

  Her body reacts to what’s happening while her mind is still blinkering. Blood surges through her ascending aorta. Her fingers shake and grow slick with sweat. The bottle slides out of her hand and strikes the top of the kitchen island with a jangling crack, pitching hard to its side, spilling the straw-colored fluid out in low waves as it rolls over the granite surface.

  “Val?” calls John from upstairs. The man in the hallway looks off in the direction of the sound.

  Now! cries a voice in Val’s head, piercing the eerie quiet that has stolen over her. The panic alarm. Get to the panic alarm.

  She lunges to her left and scoots around the kitchen island, heading for the breadbox in the corner of the room.

  The man looks at Val, but instead of going straight for her, he lurches toward the breadbox as well, heading her off.

  She leaps forward, reaching for the breadbox, her hips and one thigh rising up onto the countertop. One hand slides back the lid, the other searches inside for the little grey button that will send a distress call to the police.

  But the man is there. He slings a meaty arm around her waist, yanking her away from the counter before her hand finds the button.

  “HEEEEElllppp!” she screams.

  “Val?!” John’s voice again.

  Her eyes scan the countertop, searching for her phone. It’s sitting by the sink, out of reach. She screams again.

  “Shhhhh…” says the intruder, his dry lips brushing her left ear.

  The wine bottle has rolled across the kitchen island. It settles in front of Val. She reaches out, grasps the neck of the bottle, and gives a roundhouse swing over her left shoulder.

  The bottle glances off of the man’s head. He groans but holds her tight. She swings again, and this time it connects.

  The glass shatters. The man tosses Val to the floor in front of the entrance to the hallway. His hand goes to his face as he positions himself between Val and the panic button.

  John appears in the wide, open archway on the far side of the room. He is naked and dripping with water, a towel in one hand, his phone in the other. The masked man, blinking away the blood streaming over his eyelids, holds up the rifle and aims it at John.

  “Stay where you are!” the man says. “Throw the phone in the sink!”

  John looks at the man and then at Val, who is beginning to clamber into the hallway on her hands and knees.

  “Don’t you move either, lady!” says the masked man. “You go down that hallway, I shoot him.”

  Val stops and looks plaintively at her husband, trying to speak to him with her eyes: she can make it up the back stairs and press the panic button in the master bedroom before the man catches her. She knows she can.

  John slowly shakes his head. He tosses his phone across the counter. It plops into the sink.

  Val shudders. If she’d only listened to John, heard him out as they were entering the house… If only he would listen to her now and let her make a run for it—they’d at least have a fighting chance…

  She sighs and sits back on her heels, splinters of glass from th
e bottle cutting into her knees, the lemongrass aroma of the chardonnay wafting up around her.

  CHAPTER TWO: The Ties That Bind

  8:12 p.m.

  Could this really be her little girl’s room? Val hasn’t spent more than five minutes here in the past few years, since privacy became a priority in Clara’s adolescent world. In her mind, Val still carries images of princess figurines lining the shelves and flower prints sprouting out from the side of Clara’s toy vanity. Now it’s all graffiti art in rough-edged frames, rustic trinkets arrayed on vintage shelves and dressers, posters of bands and singers Val has never heard of (Lana Del Rey, Frank Ocean, and something that calls itself Vampire Weekend).

  She sighs, her voice and the warmth of her breath disappearing into the hand towel taped into her mouth. She shifts her weight and feels the high-grade plastic zip ties cutting into her wrists and ankles, the layers of duct-tape binding her chest and arms to the back of the wooden chair.

  She inhales deeply through her nose. The rose-scented air cools her nostrils. The room doesn’t smell like a little girl’s room either. It has the alluring aroma of a young woman, the unsubtle Bath & Body Works bouquet that sends adolescent boys into raging hormonal fits. And it’s clear to Val that Clara isn’t her little girl anymore. If she ever was.

  Early in their marriage, John and Val suspected they might have trouble producing their own children. Val went off the pill during John’s second year in med school, and although they weren’t specifically trying to get pregnant, they weren’t doing much to prevent it.

  To their surprise, nothing happened. She was never late—not even once.

  When John began his residency at the Maine Medical Center in Portland, they stepped up their efforts, making love daily—two or three times when Val was ovulating. They made love until John said it was going to kill him. Then they made love some more.

  No luck.

  Despite being married to one, Val was skeptical of doctors, so they kept it up unassisted for two more fruitless years—Val now entering her thirties—before consulting a fertility expert. A battery of tests didn’t turn up anything specific, and the expert addressed the situation with a just-one-of-those-things blitheness that Val found almost nauseating. When two rounds of intrauterine insemination and one attempt at in vitro had all failed, they decided to adopt, aware of the irony that among the hundreds of children whose births John would witness over the years, none would be his own.