Scare Me

by Richard Parker

  Nissa seemed mortified to have been left out of the loop. “Business?”

  “Urgent family business.”

  Tam couldn’t sleep. He listened to the circulation in his ear scratching at the pillow. Across the narrow passage between his room and the kitchen he could hear his mother and father at the sink and the muffled impacts of plates and cutlery as they put them away.

  Nine storeys below nighttime kick-started like his father’s bike. Taxi motors buzzed, horns beeped and he could hear the low murmur of adults and occasional words he recognised bubbling up like his mother talking in her sleep. There were yells and screams, but none of them sounded anything like what he’d heard today at the grille. These were mixed with laughter and chatter – voices that were supposed to be heard.

  If he didn’t get to sleep in the next hour he knew he’d be lying awake listening for Songsuda. He hadn’t seen his older sister since his fifth birthday. It had been almost a year ago. His mother and father had told him she’d gone to live with his aunt and uncle in Kampung Keladi. He’d seen her once after when he was making deliveries with his father. Tam had pointed her out to him. She’d stood under an umbrella with a man he didn’t recognise, but he knew it was his sister. His father had scarcely glanced in her direction, told Tam he was mistaken and ridden on.

  On the night of his fifth birthday she’d come to visit with a present for him. She’d looked strange, suddenly older. His father had dragged her out of the block and he’d heard her screaming to be let back in. She’d returned the following evening, but he hadn’t even been allowed to go to the window to see her. He remembered how they’d all sat in the kitchen like statues and the way his mother blinked every time Songsuda screamed up at the window. That night his father had said she’d been given enough chances, told Tam she was lazy and didn’t want to work honestly.

  Tam remembered when she’d worked at their father’s hotplate in the night market in Batu Ferringhi. He used to sit at her feet, watching her painted toenails, while she chatted and served the customers with his mother and father. Yum pla dook foo and moo satay for 25 baht each. He made himself sick on Catfish, red pork and dragon hair sweets.

  He missed being at the market. He hoped if his father decided to let Songsuda in they could go back to the way it used to be. He knew it wouldn’t happen. He dreamt of her out there and had as many nightmares about what had happened to her. His father had pointed out the bad, nighttime men as they drove round. Those were the men that cast a net over Songsuda when he closed his eyes.

  His father had explained it to him, but it still didn’t make any sense. Why couldn’t they let her back in? He often woke because he thought he’d heard her down in the street.

  If he heard her again he’d let her back in whatever his father told him.

  He listened to the rhythm of the inside of his body and sank his head deeper into the pillow to try and dampen the throbbing in his ear. Tam thought about what had happened to him that afternoon as he’d stood by the grille. He knew what he’d heard. Would he be a statue again?

  “I’ve landed.” Will clasped the mobile to his ear as he walked unsteadily along the familiar, polished concourse of Orlando International. The air smelt overpoweringly of sun lotion. He’d cleared passport control and been fingerprinted. In a golf store he’d quickly purchased a pair of black and white chequered leather gloves. Jetlag lurked beneath the sickening prospect of what lay ahead. He remembered being in the same airport under happier circumstances. How old had Libby been on that holiday?

  “Have you seen the site?” The tremor in Carla’s voice told him she already had.

  “Yes.” All around him families and vacationers in pastel colours excitedly made a beeline for car hire.

  “Those people in the house...” He could discern her lips parting to articulate a reaction. “As if the first photograph of Libby wasn’t enough.” Her eventual response was inflected with contempt.

  “They’re giving us a clear message so we don’t go to the police.”

  “Try to get hold of a firearm.”

  “This is obviously a sick game for whoever has Libby. They’re not going to harm me.” Yet.

  “You need to be able to protect yourself.”

  “I don’t have time.” He looked down at his feet against the shiny, champagne floor. “I have to get there before the police.”

  “What if this is all a trap?”

  It had already occurred to Will. But if it was, why be so intricate? “If they can photograph our home they could certainly have saved themselves a lot of trouble.”

  “Then why are they making you do this?”

  “I don’t know, but we’ve no choice but to follow their instructions.” He didn’t want to debate the inevitability of what he had to do any longer. “What’s the situation there?”

  “Nissa knows something’s up. I’ve got her pulling files on the Eastern Seaboard ops. There’s a lot of Ingram territory to cover in Southeast Asia, a mountain of data to go through. I don’t know what I’m looking for, but there may be something here...” Carla sounded suddenly distant. She was obviously still processing the new images on the site.

  “I project managed every phase. There was no friction in the territory during the whole op. Their kidnap could be completely unrelated. Just be sure not to let anything slip. And make sure security only allow senior staff up to that level.” He felt like he was issuing his own demands now.

  “I’m not worried about me, Will,” she said. “The address on the site is only about fourteen kilometres from the airport. I’ve already booked you a car. It’ll have Sat Nav.” Like him she was trying to concentrate on the logistics of what they were doing and not why they were doing it.

  Will nodded absently.

  “If I don’t hear from you ten minutes after you’ve arrived…”

  “Do nothing. I’ll call you as quickly as I can, but we can’t even entertain calling the police until Libby is safe.” He thought of the image of her dumped on the mattress. Carla would have it stitched to her mind as well.

  “There must be more I can do here.” She sounded like the wait would be unendurable.

  “Think about everyone who knew Libby and Luke’s movements; try to remember anyone suspicious, any strangers who’ve been in our home in the last couple of months.” He knew she desperately needed to be occupied.

  “OK. Call me when you get there.” Her last word disintegrated as she rang off.

  Carla had checked Will in online so he skipped the crowd at the rental booth and picked the nearest blue Volvo S40 from the rows of luxury cars, SUVs and outlanders in the covered lot. The valet sensed his impatience and cut his happy vacation patter short before handing over the keys.

  Will slung his bag and laptop into the back seat, punched the zip code into the Sat Nav and took the car out of neutral. He accelerated to the exit, but had to join a long line of vehicles waiting to leave. He regarded the red dot of his destination and felt a current of panic. As he waited, he felt like he was sealed in the vacuum of his worst possible nightmare.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Will usually relished driving in the States. It always presented a challenge to his usual road reflexes, but now it was the last thing his overtaxed nerves needed. He almost missed the north exit sign and had to swerve suddenly into the middle lane for SR-528. The signs changed from airport brown to the regular green and he settled into the lunchtime pace of the busy freeway into downtown Orlando.

  He looked at his watch. It was still on UK time – 5.55pm. The skeleton staff at Ingram would soon be heading for home leaving Carla there alone. He still couldn’t help feeling leaving her was a mistake.

  Watching the Sat Nav and trying to monitor the lanes distracted him from further speculation. He headed towards International Drive and Interstate 4. The cloudless blue skies and unfiltered sunshine had him squinting his eyes as he attempted to negotiate the traffic.

  As he settled into the rhythm of the road, gift malls, minia
ture golf courses and steak houses started to pop up either side of the freeway. Their neon looked dull in the daylight. It was a place waiting to come alive, waiting to put on its show. His kneecaps trembled as he worked the pedals and took a long sweeping right to the 528 heading west.

  He calculated Libby to have been twelve years old the one and only time they’d been to Orlando. They’d done the Disney thing. He remembered how she’d gone missing from the line for “It’s A Small World” and how he and Carla had frantically hunted for her, a dead heat between panic and nausea throughout every long second. That time had felt like hours, but it had been only minutes before they’d found her chatting to a gang of boys.

  Boys had a mystique for Libby and she’d always been disproportionately grateful for any attention she got from them. He’d known she was going to be a handful long before her teenage years, dreaded what would happen when she was out of his sight. He wasn’t one of those parents who was blinded by the idea of their own child’s perfection, hadn’t forgotten what he’d been like as a kid.

  They’d at least been able to monitor the procession of male playmates that came to the house, but he couldn’t remember at which point they became boyfriends. He was away from home so often during that time that he’d been stunned to have Carla show him the condom wrapper she’d found in her wastebasket. She’d been barely fifteen, but Carla hadn’t been fazed by it, just relieved that Libby was being sensible.

  A chunk of her childhood had whipped by without him registering it. A number of boyfriends followed, of all shapes and sizes, but Will had been waiting for her to get it out of her system before finding the right guy. He still wasn’t sure Luke Chandler was. But the pregnancy had suddenly made him more than the occasional visitor to their home the others had been.

  Libby had jokingly started to call Will Granddad. He hadn’t even considered the implications of that. She was still emotionally immature and it was his fault. He knew he’d indulged her to compensate for his absence.

  Libby only believed she was independent; at eight she’d announced she was leaving home to live in the tree house. Before her first night, however, a wild boar had escaped from Joe Sloman’s neighbouring farmland and chased her though the grounds. She’d run terrified into the kitchen where they’d been waiting for her and comforted her as they’d comforted her each time things ended disastrously with her boyfriends. It made him feel powerless, like she was always going to be a victim of her own bad choices. He’d allowed her to make her biggest one by saying “Yes” to her trip away with Luke.

  He halted at the toll. Tinny radio, body odour and hostility poured out of the window of the booth as he paid with a twenty-dollar bill. The obese male attendant blinked at him as he handed him his change, regarding him as if he had no business there.

  Tam looked down into the street, one storey from ground level. He knew how noisy it would be to drop the metal ladder from the end of the fire escape and didn’t want anybody behind the shuttered window beside him or in the bottom apartment to hear. He waited for a break in the conveyor belt of people below and then slid through the gap in the handrail. He hung down from it so his feet were as near the ground as possible and then dropped onto the paving.

  His light frame easily withstood the impact. Tam rose from his crouching position and a large group of tourists obliviously swept past him, reeking of the perfume and aftershave they sold in the market.

  He’d been on the streets at nighttime before, but he’d never walked around this late without his father. His mother had tucked him in and he’d pretended to be asleep. He prayed nobody else would come into his room until morning.

  Tam didn’t know the name of the street where the grille was, but knew his way to the night market and from there he was sure he’d be able to find it using the landmarks he’d memorised from his father’s delivery round. Everything looked so different at night, though. Everything felt different. It was exciting, but at the same time he knew it was dangerous.

  He left the commotion of the main street and took the short cut through the narrow passageway he used to get to the school van stop. It was pitch black and somebody passed him coming the other way. He turned to watch them take shape as they emerged into the orange glare of the street – a broad man in a silk shirt. He paused to light a cigarette and looked back down the passage in Tam’s direction.

  Tam turned and trotted quietly towards the other end, his shoulder scraping the wall as he kept to one side in the hope that he’d slip by anyone else he ran into. He needed a cigarette now; he wanted to suck on the filter of one of his father’s discarded smokes and watch the glow die as he took the last vapours into his lungs.

  Suddenly he was tempted to go back, climb up the fire escape and into the warmth of his bed. But in front of him was a needle of light and, as his scurrying feet widened it, he wondered if Songsuda might be somewhere beyond.

  He told himself she couldn’t be the girl behind the grille, that the scream he’d heard could have been anyone, but as he reached the end of the passage and let go of the breath he’d held clenched in his lungs, a larger part of him hoped she was there waiting patiently for him to rescue her.

  Taxi horns jabbed their warnings at him as he zigzagged through the slowly rolling traffic and joined the throng of people on foot.

  1815 North Street was off Highway 193. A restaurant that had a giant lobster on its roof squatted like a sinister landmark, the extended claw pointing in the direction the Sat Nav told Will to go. The road narrowed as he left the traffic. He passed tall, yellow hedges that revealed brief glimpses of the palatial properties behind them as he rolled by their closed, electric gates. He slowed at mailbox 1801 and then crawled, counting the gates, but finding 1815 much sooner than he anticipated.

  The vacation villa lay at the end of a curved pathway demarcated by potted, spherical bay trees. He switched off the engine and got out of the car, noticing the dry heat for the first time. He stood at the gates, peering through the ornate leaves of black metal, but not wanting to touch them. His feet settled on the coarse gravel and the only sound was the buzz of an aeroplane overhead. Everything beyond the gates was still.

  Will could still recall the starched feel of his dead father’s sepia skin, as he lay motionless on top of the bed in the hospice. He’d fleetingly touched the back of his hand before the orderlies had taken him away on the trolley. It was the only time he’d witnessed death. Never death like this though. He knew the repugnance of the images hadn’t even begun to prepare him for seeing it in reality.

  He pulled his mobile out of his pocket; grateful he could speak to Carla. “I’m here. I’m outside,” he said emotionlessly as soon as she picked up. He knew she’d be tracking him on the GPS and would be expecting his call. “Although I don’t know how I’m going to get in.”

  “Ten minutes. Ten minutes and then I’m calling the police.” She was nervous.

  “I might need longer.”

  “Ten minutes.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  The gate was set into an arch in the hedge. The hedge had been recently trimmed, leaving a small gap above the top prongs. Bar trying to scale or hack through the shrubbery, there was no other way in to the front. He wondered if there was a road or lane running behind the property, but it already felt like he’d been deliberating too long. He squinted at both ends of the street – no traffic or pedestrians. Will pulled on the chequered gloves.

  The image of Libby on the website launched him at the gates and he found himself clinging below the prongs. He knew if he fell back he wouldn’t be able to achieve the same take-off so curled his fingers painfully tighter as they took the weight of his body. The muscles in his sides fluttered from the exertion. He tautened his wrists, bent his elbows and dragged himself higher.

  His frame shuddered as he took all of the weight into the crook of his arm and got his foot across the top of the gate. The prongs had gold-tipped leaves that were higher in the middle so he swung his leg over the lower end and s
hifted across to follow it. The points scraped his stomach as he dragged himself over to the other side.

  He was just about to let himself drop to the pathway when something above him caught his eye. The aeroplane had written the words JESUS LOVES YOU against the blue sky.

  A shower of leaves accompanied him as he landed hard on the balls of his feet and the impact reverberated harshly through his gut. Something had been pulled or, worse, ruptured, but he ignored the pain and turned towards the house.

  He could hear wind chimes tinkling and the low rumble of traffic. But as he made his way up the path the sound tailed away – the tall hedges virtually soundproofed the pathway. He rounded the corner and the house with its mosaic-paned front door, familiar now from the website, came into view.

  Will swiftly climbed four dirty, white marble steps and was in front of the door, not knowing whether to ring the brass bell set into the stone panel beside it. He rang it anyway.

  He wanted the door to open; wanted whomever it was that had summoned him to greet him, for whatever purpose. But his instructions were implicit and he knew nobody inside would unlock it and release him from his task. After half a minute of waiting he peered through the coloured glass, seeing a red-and-green distortion of the hallway. It was empty, wooden-tiled. Several closed doors led off it, and a low seating area was to its right.

  He went back onto the gravel, his feet broadcasting his presence as he made his way across the front of the house and round the side. He could hear the low hum of a generator and smell charcoal smoke. A double garage was at the end of a second driveway, a blue Chevrolet and silver Oldsmobile parked in its shaded interior.

  He reached a green, wooden side gate with a heart shape cut out at its centre. He peered through and saw the turquoise water of a swimming pool. He pushed on the gate and its large spring squawked at him. The expansive decked area beyond it presented a conventional image of a vacationing family’s occupations. Some fluffy blue towels were stacked on a table alongside an array of lotion bottles and an iPod dock.