The Red Hunter

by Lisa Unger

  Whatever he caught his foot on (probably his other foot, or the too-long frayed bottom of his jeans), he went flying into Raven. The flashlight and the phone sailing up ahead of him. Crack. Crack. The light went out. A wash of darkness, the light from the opening above and behind them shone like a beacon in the distance.

  “Oh, shit,” said Troy. He was heavy, lying on top of her. “My glasses.”

  “Ugh,” she said, rolling out from under him.

  “Sorry. You okay?”

  “Yeah. Are you?”

  “I hurt my knee.” She could just make him out. He rubbed it gingerly. She sighed; he was such a baby.

  Raven got on all fours, feeling around on the grit of the ground, and found the flashlight first, finally feeling the cold cylinder beneath her fingers. She pressed the button, a couple of times. Nothing. Then it flickered to life. She shone it on him, on the ground behind them. There wasn’t anything to trip on. He shrugged as though his clumsiness were a long acknowledged factor in all endeavors. Which it was.

  His glasses were a little bent when she found them, but the lenses were intact. He slipped them on. She found the phone next. It was cracked, the screen just a spiderweb of thick white lines. She handed it to him, and he bent his head over it as if it were an injured pet. He cradled it, prodded it with his thumb. It didn’t come on when he pressed the center button, once, twice, three times.

  “It’s dead,” he said, bereft.

  “Okay, look,” she said. “Just stay here.”

  She took the light and went ahead, moving quickly, crouching low. It couldn’t be far, she figured, trying to visualize the distance between the house and the barn. Shouting distance. She looked back at Troy, who was still sitting on the ground, trying to resuscitate his phone.

  The tunnel got smaller; she dropped down to her hands and knees and crawled. Her mother would kill her, absolutely lose her mind if she knew what Raven was doing, a thought that scared her and excited her, goaded her forward.

  “Raven,” called Troy.

  “I’m okay,” she called back.

  It was a few more feet when the beam light fell on something. A blob, an amorphous dark form on the ground. She moved faster, came up close to it. She reached out a hand and felt it, rough beneath her fingers.

  It was a bag. A big canvas bag.

  thirty-four

  “See,” said Rhett. “You do love me, little brother.”

  “You fucker,” said Josh. He spit a mouthful of blood onto the floor.

  Rolling painfully onto his side, he moved over to Claudia. Blood ran like a river from her nose and over her mouth. He used his shirt to wipe it away, her eyelids fluttering. A big bulb of regret lodged in his throat. He ached all over from his struggle with Rhett.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered. Why didn’t he let her hit him? What kind of an idiot was he?

  Her pulse was steady, her breathing shallow. Josh took off his jacket and rolled it up, placing it under her head. He should have just let her kill him with that hammer. But it had always been that way with Rhett and Josh. They’d beat the crap out of each other, but God help the outsider that tried to hurt either one of them.

  “Why didn’t you just let me handle this?” said Rhett.

  But it wouldn’t have mattered. He knew the night that Rhett walked back through the front door that bad things were going to happen and that Josh would be a part of it. It was just like Lee said. Having certain people in your life was just like keeping a bottle of booze hidden in the house. It was only a matter of time before you twisted off the top and started to drink for whatever reason you’d given yourself. Now that the forty he’d drank in the car had burned off, that guy was gone. And Josh was sick, weak from fighting with Rhett, crippled by regret. Seven years sober. All gone.

  “Just open the goddamn door and let’s get out of here,” said Josh.

  “Where’s that girl?”

  “She must be out,” said Josh, hoping that he was right. He hadn’t seen her when he came in.

  Rhett held the key up.

  “This is it, brother,” he said. He always had a flare for the dramatic. “We’ve waited for the payout all these years. And now we’re here.”

  “Just open it and let’s go,” said Josh.

  Rhett frowned at him, disappointed in Josh’s lack of enthusiasm, apparently having forgotten that they were trying to kill each other just a few minutes earlier, that he’d punched Josh so hard in the face that he’d knocked him unconscious. His whole face throbbed, his right eye swelling shut.

  Claudia stirred, issuing a distressed whimper. “Raven,” she whispered.

  “Shh,” said Josh.

  He listened as Rhett struggled with the lock. Then there was silence. “There’s something jammed in here. Got it.” A moment passed, then, “Shit.”

  “What?” said Josh.

  “It’s empty,” said Rhett. “And the door’s too small. I can’t get in.”

  “Empty?” said Josh. “There’s nothing there?”

  Maybe part of Josh had believed it could be there. Otherwise, why did he feel this crushing wave of disappointment? Maybe that’s why he’d come here ahead of his brother, even though he told himself he was just trying to keep anyone else from getting hurt. That night, what they did, it stayed with him, poisoned his whole life. It came up in his dreams, hit him every time the table saw hit that high panicked note it sometimes hit. It was why he’d spent so many nights drunk, why he never left for college, why he hid in his old man’s shop fixing up tables pretty housewives found at flea markets.

  We can’t outrun our sins. His old man had been right about that and about so many things.

  Maybe on some level, Josh had been hoping for a payday, too.

  He moved in next to Rhett and peered into the darkness. The opening was about the size of a microwave oven. He was narrower through the shoulders than his brother, about thirty pounds lighter. He pushed his way in.

  The deep black seemed to shift and move. Was there a hint of light? Did he hear something, a shuffling, a voice? If this was a tunnel, then that meant that there was an opening somewhere else. There was a high-pitched note. The rumble of a deeper voice. Holy shit.

  “I think there’s someone in there,” he said, incredulous. Who? The old man? That slut Missy?

  “What?” said Rhett. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  With effort Josh got himself through the opening and started to crawl. He heard Rhett thunder up the stairs.

  thirty-five

  I parked by the bridge and approached the property from behind. The same place I went to meet Seth that night, where I waited with Catcher. I left the Suburban in a little turnaround that was tucked back in the trees. No one would see the truck until they’d passed it, figure it was left by hunters or fishermen looking to pull some trout out of the river.

  I was a teenager the last time I stepped on that bridge. Ten years later, I didn’t feel like I’d come very far. I was still stuck in that night in so many ways.

  They’d hate me, Paul had said, for how I’ve failed you.

  He hadn’t failed me. He’d taken me in, took care of me with as much love as any parent. He’d helped with homework, found help when things got beyond him. He paid for my education.

  “How?” I’d asked him when I first started to understand the size of the expense. I didn’t know how much he had saved or what kind of pension he had. But I didn’t think it was much, not enough to cover tuition at NYU and still live. “How are you affording this?”

  It was a Sunday; I discovered the bill from the university sitting on top of a stack of others. Prior to that, I hadn’t even thought about it. In my house, it wasn’t if I went to college, it was where. There was no talk about how it would get paid for. I would strive to get into the best possible school and, somehow, it would get managed. My parents didn’t talk about money.

  “Your mother had some money saved,” he said that day. “When you graduate, whatever is left will go to y
ou. That’s what she wanted.”

  “How much?”

  He went into the bedroom and came back with an envelope, a statement that had been opened and stuffed back in the envelope with my name on it. He’d scrawled a user name and password in blue ink.

  “She wanted you to go to college,” he said. “She worried that if you knew there was money, you wouldn’t go to school.”

  I lifted the statement out and stared at the numbers. The balance, the large withdrawals that coincided with tuition payments, money I had needed for books, room and board, more than $60,000 a year. There was a little more than $300,000 still.

  “You’ll need another hundred fifty or more to finish school,” he said. “But the rest is yours. Don’t get your head turned. It’s a head start. It’s not as much money as it seems.”

  There was something wrenching my stomach.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Where did she get this money?”

  My parents did not have money. They didn’t talk about it, but I knew we weren’t rich. My mother clipped coupons, searched online for bargains. We got our books from the library, bought what was on sale, not the latest styles. The answer to almost everything I wanted was no or maybe later. And I knew that it hurt her to say no; she wanted me to have everything I wanted, what the other girls had.

  “It was an inheritance from her grandmother,” he said. “She added to it when she could. You know how she was. Frugal. Then there was the death benefit, pension, life insurance, and the sale of your parents’ stuff.”

  It didn’t ring true.

  “She told you about it?” I asked.

  He nodded, but his face looked gray, his expression strained. It was a look he got when he talked about my parents. Grief, anger, something else I couldn’t name.

  “I was your legal guardian should anything happen to them,” he said. “That was always known. We talked about you, your future, what she—what they—wanted for you.”

  “But I don’t understand,” I said. “I thought there was debt. That my dad was in trouble.”

  He blinked at me. “Who told you that?”

  “I heard you and Boz talking, a long time ago,” I said. “That’s why they thought—” I couldn’t finish.

  That my dad was a dirty cop, that he robbed drug dealers and stole their money, that they came looking, that he let them kill my mother, torture me, kill him rather than say where it was hidden. I still couldn’t put my lips around those words in front of him, even though I had been talking to Mike. Even though I had grown strong enough, brave enough to ask questions, to look for answers.

  “It’s not true,” he said. “What they thought. There’s no evidence. Your dad—he was a good man. He wasn’t good with money. But he was a good man.”

  “If they were in trouble,” I said. “Why didn’t she use this money to pay the bills?”

  “Because,” he said. “It was money she’d saved for you. She didn’t want to compromise your future because of their mistakes.”

  “She told you that?”

  He nodded, looked down at a hand he had laid down flat on the table.

  “So you knew about the money, but my dad didn’t?”

  He didn’t answer, didn’t look at me. Then, “Your mother confided in me sometimes. Your dad wasn’t always easy, and your mother and I were friends. But I didn’t know about the debt until after they were gone. If I had, I’d have helped them.”

  I folded up the statement.

  “That money is in an education trust,” he said. “So, again, it can only be used for those costs until you graduate. Then it belongs to you.”

  “I’ll give it to you,” I said. “When I graduate.”

  “You will not,” he said, turning those icy eyes on me. He reached for my hand, and I laced my fingers through his.

  “You deserve it,” I told him. “How much have you spent on me?”

  He bowed his head, and when he looked at me again, his eyes glistened.

  “Every second you have been in my life is a blessing, Zoey,” he told me. Color came up his neck. “You’re the very best of both of them. Every time I look at you, I see her beauty, his goodness, her warmth, his strength. I’m the one who owes you.”

  We sat like that a minute; I didn’t say anything, and I knew he didn’t need me to. My love for him was well known, and I’ve never been good with words. But I knew that my mother didn’t have money like that. She’d alluded to an account, a little money tucked away for the future. But that wasn’t a little money, not to people like my parents. Where had it come from? Since my name was on the account, it was easy enough to find out that the balance of the account was about $8,000 the month before my mother died. Slowly, about a year later, deposits started to show up—$1,000 here, $5,000 a month later—until just under $400,000 had accrued. Then the withdrawals started for school and nothing new came in.

  That was the kind of thing that they’d look for, the police, anyone monitoring a cold case that involved money. Unless no one was looking. Unless the people who were supposed to be looking, as Seth suggested, were intentionally looking the other way.

  • • •

  I STOOD AT THE EDGE of the trees in the shadows. I didn’t have a plan, not really. I figured I’d knock on the door and see what happened.

  “Is that why you left your car by the side of the road and walked nearly a mile through the woods?” asked my dad. He was following behind me. Didion was nowhere to be seen, thankfully.

  It was always better to approach on foot, quietly, when walking into a situation full of unknowns. If I were big and strong, maybe I’d be more direct on my approach. But since I’m small, surprise is one of my few advantages. Not that I was expecting a fight. I just wanted some time in that basement, to go through anything left by my parents. I figured I’d knock on the door, introduce myself, and ask permission. But I’d definitely set something into motion, and I was still aching all over from the bruising I’d taken last night. I couldn’t be sure who else was watching the house. That key, the one Mr. Rodriquez had given me, the one I’d been jumped for last night, it opened something. And I had a feeling, whatever it was, was in that house. If they had the key, they weren’t going to waste any time.

  “What did you hide in the basement that night, Dad?” I asked.

  But when I turned around, he was gone, never one to answer the hard questions.

  Maybe I felt it when I came through the trees, like Catcher did that night. The door to the barn was gone. The door to the house stood wide open, as well. The blue Toyota that I recognized as belonging to Josh Beckham was parked in the drive. There was a pulse to the air, something not quite right. I waited, a watcher in the woods, listening to the air. There was the wind. The call of some faraway bird. The scrabble of blowing leaves. My own breath.

  A dark form appeared in the door to the house, paused there, breathless, then broke into a run across the yard toward the barn. I waited a moment, then followed, fast and quiet.

  thirty-six

  When the phone rang in the night, Chad Drake was always fully awake before his hand even touched it. It had happened so many times that Heather usually did little more than stir and turn over. For a smallish town, they were a busy department. And adjacent towns had smaller forces, so when something big happened, he usually got a call. He didn’t recognize the number on the caller ID.

  “Drake.”

  “Can you meet me?”

  “What’s up?” he said, surprised. He looked at the clock; it was after 1:00 a.m.

  “I need you to come out.”

  “Okay,” he said, sitting up. The floor beneath his feet was cold as he pulled on his jeans, the sweatshirt hanging over the chair. If it was the job, he’d have quickly showered, gotten fully dressed. Instead, he grabbed his sneakers, socks, heading out into the hallway so Heather wouldn’t pick up on the fact that there was something different about this call.

  “I’m at the rest stop between exit 90 and 93 on Route 80 in Le
esburg.” Paul sounded level, normal—which in and of itself was odd for a late-night call like this.

  “What happened?” That rest stop was an hour from the house at least.

  “Just come.”

  “Come to the house.”

  Chad could hear the sound of cars on asphalt, the distant wail of a horn, a car door slam, voices.

  “Just meet me.”

  He hung up then, and Chad moved quietly downstairs, glancing at Zoey’s dark room. He had the urge to look in on her but kept down the stairs. Catcher looked mildly interested in where he might be going, but the dog was used to it, too. If Heather left, he sat and whined at the door. Chad could come and go, no one the worse for wear.

  The drive was long. Chad wanted to call Paul from his cell phone. But since his brother was at a rest stop, had clearly called from a phone that was not his own, Chad thought better of it. The highway stretched long and empty, sleep tugging behind his eyes. He used to wake up for a call and be up all night sometimes. It never bothered him until recently. He was getting old.

  At first Chad didn’t see him. The old black beater—what was it? A rattling old Ford Taurus—seemed one with the shadows. Chad pulled up beside it, aware that Paul had chosen this spot because it couldn’t be seen from the road. Chad got out of the car and slid in beside his brother.

  “What’s up, man?” he said, laying a hand on Paul’s arm. “What’s going on?”

  Paul looked tired, older—there were dark circles under his eyes, deep wrinkles around his mouth filled with shadows.

  “It’s done,” said Paul.

  The words worked their way in, and his stomach filled with a toxic blend of dread and excitement.

  “What are you talking about?” Chad asked. But he knew.

  “It’s in the trunk,” said Paul. He wasn’t smiling. Shouldn’t he be smiling?

  Chad got out of the car and walked around back to pop the trunk. There was a big blue canvas bag there. He pulled open the metal zipper, and it was loud in the quiet night. Paul came to stand behind him.