“I threw up.”
Mary turned to her, raising an eyebrow. “I beg your pardon?”
For an instant her hands clenched into fists, the nails digging into her palms, Elizabeth wondering what kind of idiot still said I beg your pardon? these days. Mary Boyle, that’s who, and while Elizabeth had heard her say it countless times before—mostly during class when a student mumbled an answer to a question—the fact that this woman would say those four words now, to her face, while her child was someplace unsafe ...
“I vomited. I’ve been sick all morning. Something I ate for breakfast, I think.”
“You know,” Mary Boyle said, turning toward her desk to start tidying up the scattered papers, “food sickness usually isn’t the very last thing you ate. Most people think that it is, but ... Ms. Walter? Ms. Walter, where are you going?”
Elizabeth, her bag hanging off her shoulder, headed straight for the door. She had to pause as a few more students straggled into the classroom, each of them smiling at her and waving and saying, “Hi, Ms. Walter,” but she ignored them all and then was through the door, her pace increasing with each step.
How many seconds had passed, turning into minutes, how many of those minutes had expired so far? Cain had only given her five, no more, and she had wasted them on Mary Boyle.
“Sarah?” said a voice behind her, what sounded like Eileen’s, but Elizabeth kept walking, headed for the nearest exit, deciding she wasn’t going to check out first with the office, why should she? Yes, normally she would, but this wasn’t a normal day, far from it, and besides—thinking this as she pushed through the exit door, took in a deep breath of the crisp fall air—a half hour ago she had been Sarah Walter, a teacher’s assistant, but now she was Elizabeth Piccioni, a person she thought she would never be again.
Her phone began vibrating as she reached the parking lot. She hesitated, then started running, her sneakers slapping against the macadam as she rushed for where her car was parked.
But the phone would vibrate only four times before going to voicemail—she knew this for a fact—and she couldn’t let that happen, not to Cain, who had promised extreme violence against her son in the event she failed to comply with his instructions.
On its third vibration she pulled the phone from her bag and placed it to her ear, nearly shouting, “Yes, I’m here.”
“Are you in your car yet?”
She suddenly stopped running, not wanting the sound of her footsteps or her ragged breathing to give away the fact that she had not yet made it to her car.
“Yes,” she said, as calmly and coolly as possible.
“I don’t believe you.”
She closed her eyes, started forward, walking as quietly as she could. “But I am.”
“Then beep the horn.”
Her eyes snapped open and her head twisted back and forth on her neck. Vehicles surrounded her but none were unlocked—at least none that she knew of—and none had their windows down.
Elizabeth said, “But won’t that draw attention to me?”
“What do you care if attention is drawn to you?”
“I just left school without permission. Honking my horn in the parking lot might not be the wisest decision.”
“Are you seriously questioning me?”
She turned to the closest car, a blue Saturn, and tried the door. Locked.
“No,” she said. “But I—”
“Beep the goddamn horn or else I’ll kill your son right now.”
She hurried to the next car, an aging Buick, and tried the door knowing it wouldn’t open. It did. She leaned in and pressed down on the center of the steering wheel, convinced for an instant that the car’s horn was broken—that it wouldn’t even give off a pathetic little toot—but there it sounded, just as strong as she had hoped, breaking the fragile silence of the day.
“There,” she said. “Happy?”
Cain didn’t answer for the longest time, and she worried that she had somehow lost him, and that in losing him she had lost Matthew. Then he said, “The elementary school, you have fifteen minutes to get there,” and clicked off.
She stood for a moment, still leaning into the Buick, noticing for the first time that Mardi Gras beads hung from the rearview mirror. She didn’t want to move, didn’t want to break whatever little luck she had managed to grasp. Because not only had she beeped the horn when Cain requested it, but she had inadvertently proved that he wasn’t close by watching her. Keeping tabs on her all the same, yes, but he couldn’t see her.
Which, she quickly realized, wasn’t necessarily a good thing.
Because if Cain wasn’t close, that meant Matthew wasn’t close either, which meant the two of them could be anywhere.
Elizabeth sprinted for her car.
CHAPTER 4
CAIN HAD GIVEN her fifteen minutes to make it to the elementary school, but Elizabeth managed to make it in ten.
Only pausing through stop signs, making every traffic light except one, she was doing nearly fifty in a thirty-five zone when she came around the bend of the development that led to the school and saw the fire trucks, ambulances, police cars.
The sudden salvo of so many flashing lights caused her heart to skip. She pressed down on the brakes so hard the tires screeched as her Corolla came to a halt. A horn blared behind her and a car swerved past her, its driver shouting at her in frustration.
She glanced in the rearview mirror, conscious now that she wasn’t alone in the world, especially on this street. There was a car farther back coming her way and she hit the gas again, pulling over to the curb.
Her hands shaking, her heart pounding, she turned off the car and got out and hurried toward the large group of mostly children fanned out on the soccer field. Teachers were circulating among the students, and there were a handful of police officers and firemen talking to each other and into radios.
Elizabeth came up to the closest teacher—a young man named Mr. Daniels—and said, her voice a little too rushed, “What happened?”
He stood with his arms crossed, hugging a clipboard. He glanced at her, glanced away, then glanced back when he recognized her as a school parent. He looked past her, as if what he had to say was completely confidential, before whispering, “Bomb threat.”
The school itself stood maybe two hundred yards away, all that brick and mortar and glass much too close in the event a bomb really did detonate. There was nothing here to protect the children, nothing at all, but Elizabeth reasoned that there wasn’t a safe place to take them, not here in the middle of this neighborhood, not to shield over five hundred children from an explosion.
“I’m looking for my son.”
The young teacher uncrossed his arms, looked down at his clipboard. “What’s your son’s—”
She was moving before he could finish the question, having spotted Joyce Gibbons, her son’s teacher. Weaving in and out of children, some sobbing, some laughing, she noticed that Joyce was talking with Mrs. Ross, the assistant principal. Mrs. Ross holding the standard school-issue radio in her hand, a big black bulky thing, saying something to Joyce as she pointed across the field toward a row of newly developed houses.
They must have heard her coming, or sensed her, or maybe Mr. Daniels had a radio of his own and warned them of her arrival, because they turned simultaneously, their bodies shifting to greet her.
She said, breathless, “Where’s Matthew?”
The teacher and assistant principal glanced at each other for a moment, long enough for a look of exhaustion to pass between them, Elizabeth no doubt the first in a very long line of parents who would be arriving with demands to see their child.
Then Mrs. Gibbons, a plastic smile on her face, said, “He’s here.”
Relief flooded her at once, her eyes closing, her shoulders lifting as she took in a large gulp of air and released it. She wanted to drop to the ground, scream her frustrations and happiness into the grass, but she managed to stay on her feet, a smile creeping on her face, as she
said, “Where is he then? I need to see him.”
Mrs. Gibbons lifted her clipboard, began shuffling papers, Elizabeth noticing from where she stood it was a list of the entire elementary school. Beside each name was a perfectly formed checkmark in blue ink, the pen of which rested in the crook of Mrs. Gibbons’s right ear.
As Joyce Gibbons flipped through the attendance, her posture changed. A slight scowl formed on her face. She glanced up at Mrs. Ross, glanced back at the clipboard, then said to the assistant principal, “Maybe he’s with Clark?”
The relief that had so quickly flooded her now dissipated, leaving her dry and hollow, and before Mrs. Ross put the radio to her mouth and asked Clark (the school’s principal) if Matthew Walter was included in his group, Elizabeth knew why Cain had given her the extra time to make it here. He’d wanted her to see the fire trucks and ambulances and police cars, have another panic attack as her imagination threw its worst at her. Then, just as he had planned, she had dived into the sea of students, searching for her son, maybe finding a teacher who would tell her that her son was fine, safe, here with the rest of the students, and that the blessed relief she’d felt for only an instant would pour into her until, when she asked for her son, demanded he be brought to her, she would receive the answer he had known she would, the one that Mrs. Ross, having listened to the radio, now looked at her with just a glance that told her the whole truth:
Her son was missing.
CHAPTER 5
THE PHONE IN her pocket vibrated just as she made it back to the car. Tears in her eyes, her body shaking again, she whipped the phone out and didn’t even bother looking at the display screen before she answered.
“Goddamn it, what have you done with my son?”
“Elizabeth?”
The voice wasn’t robotic, was quite far from that dark demented thing calling itself Cain.
“Hello?” said the voice, the voice that belonged to Todd, and hearing his voice now Elizabeth realized this wasn’t some terrible dream, a silly notion she had just put in front of her mind because trying to make sense of the truth was just too much to take.
She glanced back over her shoulder at the cluster of teachers and police officers that had quickly formed, a few of them watching her. She opened the car door, got inside, started the engine. Cain had said no police—of course he would say that—and the last thing she needed right now was to speak with a cop.
“Hi, Todd,” she said as she pulled away from the curb. She wiped at her eyes. “How are you?”
“Sarah, are you okay?”
“Me? Yeah, I’m fine.”
“You don’t sound fine. In fact, the first thing you did was yell at me. Said something about Matthew?”
She drove past the fire trucks and ambulances and police cars, their bright lights still flashing, for some reason convinced now that one of the cops would hop in his ride and chase after her.
“What?” she said, forcing a smile, hoping he would hear it in her voice. “Are you serious?”
“Sarah.”
“Shouldn’t you be teaching or giving a test or sitting behind a desk reading a book?”
Todd was a substitute at the high school and middle school. That’s how they had met, always running into each other in the hallways, always smiling and nodding hello, until one day Todd stopped and struck up their first of many conversations. Now they’d been seeing each other (dating wasn’t quite what it was, not really) for almost six months. She had been leery of bringing him around the apartment, not wanting Matthew to get too attached to him in case it fell through.
He said, “This is a prep period. I’m standing in an empty classroom, talking on my cell phone, because they’re saying ...”
She came to a stop sign. Stared across the street at the line of houses. Thought about the families inside, all the families in the neighborhood who would never be in a position like the one she was now in.
Todd cleared his throat. “They’re saying you hit Chad Cooper.”
She wiped at her eyes again, wanting to laugh out loud at the absurdity of the statement.
“Sarah?”
Before she could respond the phone beeped. She pulled it away, saw on the display screen she had an incoming call. The number wasn’t listed, unlike Todd’s, but that was okay—she knew exactly who was calling.
“Todd, I have to go.”
“They said you left the school, too. Are you okay? Did you”—he cleared his throat again—“hear about the bomb threat at Matthew’s school?”
The phone beeped again in her ear.
“Todd, really, I have to go.”
“But what’s going on? Are you okay?”
“Yes, I’m fine. Look, I’m driving now and need to get off the phone. I’ll call you later.”
She disconnected before he could say anything else, switched over to Cain.
“Your son wasn’t there, was he?”
Despite the poor timing, Todd’s call had helped calm her down. She was still shaking, tears were still in her eyes, but her heart rate had slowed.
She said, as calmly as she could, “What do you want?”
“I want you to drive to a certain location. Do you think you can do that?”
“Will my son be there?”
The robotic voice seemed to sneer. “You’d probably hope not.”
“Where?”
“Take a left.”
She tensed at once, realizing he was nearby watching her. Or had something nearby that he could watch her with. Or ... well, she couldn’t guess what, but it was clear now he knew her location.
Without speaking she made the left through the intersection.
“Good,” Cain said. “Now keep going for the next five blocks. When you come to that intersection, take a right.”
A minute later she had made the right and said, “Now what?”
“See the blue house on the left?”
Her voice was barely a croak: “Yes.”
“That’s where I want you to go next. Park along the street, then enter through the back door. It’s open.”
Cain clicked off but she barely noticed. Her car was still drifting forward, hardly even a crawl, and she barely noticed that either. Her entire focus was fixated on that blue one-story house with the rose bushes in the front yard, a house she had found herself checking out within the last couple weeks, just like any other parent of small children would, because, suddenly, this house had become tainted in ways nobody wanted to imagine.
Once sweet and happy grandparents had lived there—at least Elizabeth liked to think so—but now it had been corrupted by the child molester Reginald Moore.
CHAPTER 6
ELIZABETH DIDN’T REMEMBER exactly how she had first heard about Reginald Moore. It wasn’t like word of a convicted sex offender moving into town had been broadcast on the evening news, or even mentioned in the newspaper, but within days it seemed everyone in town knew about him. She’d overheard teachers—much like Chad Cooper—whispering their outrage that a man like him was allowed to live not only among everyone else, but within miles of the elementary school. Of course, there were those who said that he had paid his debt to society (how many years in prison, she didn’t exactly know) and that he was now a changed man and everyone should give him a second chance.
The man hadn’t been as much of a threat to Elizabeth as he had been to Chad Cooper and others who shared his same viewpoint. Sure, she wouldn’t want to live next door to Reginald Moore, not with Matthew still so young, and even if Matthew were older—in middle school, or even high school—she probably would still have had reservations. Even if they shared the same block she might have felt nervous, and as she opened her car’s trunk and extracted the tire iron, she wondered what distance would dispel such worries.
The day was still cool, the metallic sky still clear, and the shade of the elm trees caused a chill to race down her back as she purposefully strode up the driveway. Besides a few birds chirping in the trees, the neighborhood was quie
t.
Was Matthew really in this house? Was Cain—the owner of that awful robotic voice—Reginald Moore?
She knew on some internal level the answer to both questions was no. Reginald Moore had been convicted and sentenced for molesting children—and even the details of that were sketchy—but he couldn’t orchestrate something like this. And besides, what would be the point? This was all too elaborate, all too complex for a man who preferred children over adults.
The cement back porch was empty. She climbed the two steps and walked to the door. There wasn’t even a mat in front of the door to wipe off dirty shoes.
The door was already open, just slightly. For some reason she had assumed when Cain said it would be open he meant unlocked, but no, here it was, already open and waiting for her to enter.
She hesitated, working this out in her head, trying to figure out who Cain could be and why he was doing this. Obviously he knew about her past—this was evident from his very first words, calling her by her old name—but what was it about her past that would cause him to go to such lengths?
Though she expected Cain to call, tell her to quit messing around and enter the house, the phone in her pocket remained still and silent.
She waited another moment and then stepped forward, pushing the door open. Here was the kitchen, pots and pans stacked on the counters, cardboard boxes dotting the floor. Reginald Moore had moved in only two weeks ago and still hadn’t completely unpacked all of his things.
The floor was linoleum—one of those old ugly square brown patterns—and she walked cautiously, not wanting her footsteps to make a sound in the silent house.
Staring up at her on the floor, only a few feet away, was a large photograph. She took another step forward, her legs starting to lose strength, as she recognized the child captured there.
Matthew.
She bent, meaning to pick the photograph up, but decided it best not to touch it. Still, her body began to shake again as she stared down at the picture of her son, taken from a distance. It was black and white and showed Matthew on the playground at school. Other children were around him, boys and girls alike, but it was clear the focus of the photograph was on him.
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