All That Remains (A Missing and Exploited Suspense Novel Book 1)

by Hannah Holborn

  She’s almost out the door when Gabriel reappears. In one hand, he clutches a black velvet painting of four dogs playing poker; in the other, he holds Radar by his leash. Chase realizes she’s so freaked out she might have left without her dog. She has to pull herself together or things will go horribly wrong. “I can’t take a bus,” Gabriel says.

  “Why the hell not?”

  “It’s the first place Willard will look. He said.”

  “Shit, shit, shit.” Chase considers the frail little boy who will only slow her down. He obviously can’t read her mind. If he could, the look in his big blue eyes would not be one of absolute trust. “Come on,” she says. “We run first. Then we think.”

  «54»

  Night has fallen when Willard wakes with a jerk. He jumps up from the kitchen table with a terrible truth churning in his brain that sends him trotting as fast as his stitches will allow down to the basement. As he fears, the only boy he finds is The Blue Boy lying flat on the floor. He treads his way through shards of porcelain and concrete dust to lift the edge of the blanket purchased for Terrance. As Willard rubs it against his cheek, its softness doesn’t provide any comfort. Instead, he succumbs to a flash of rage. Despite all of the nice things Willard did for him, the faker has ruined everything.

  Willard doesn’t understand why the police aren’t here already, smashing in his door with guns drawn, but he’s certain they’re on their way. He gets busy, listening for sirens, while he empties the cell’s contents into bags and boxes. Every step is an agony as he carries these upstairs one at a time to set by the side-door. Next, he prepares a solution of bleach and water. Wearing gardening gloves retrieved from the shed, he returns downstairs. With the help of a mop he wipes every inch of the room, including the ceiling.

  When the cell is empty and sanitized, he turns off the lights throughout the house before making his way outside in the dark to load the Buick so full it rides low on its shocks. He fills the trunk with his paintings of the traitor. When the police come to arrest Willard, they won’t find evidence of his mistake. Every scrap of the faker is gone from the house, right down to the once-happy memories. And it will all soon be ash as well as his grandfather’s Buick on the outskirts of town. Then all Willard will have to do is survive the walk back home.

  The only parts of the boy Willard can’t bring himself to destroy are the wings and halo. He’ll deliver those to the burial place where they can rest forever in a waterproof bag next to some bones that once belonged to a neighbor’s yappy toy poodle. Because, as much as he hates him now, for a few months the boy made Willard feel like a good big brother.

  «55»

  “God, kids need expensive crap,” Chase says when she returns to the van after a quick stop for snacks and supplies. Gabriel takes the heavy plastic bag she hands him and sets it on his lap. “Go on. Dig in,” she says, and Gabriel obeys by pulling out Superman sunglasses with a dangling price tag that says $18.95. “They have UV protection. By the way you squint I guessed you could use some relief while adapting to the sun after your stint in isolation.” Chase flips down the passenger side visor, which has a mirror hidden underneath. “Check them out. Cool right?”

  They are cool. Gabriel also likes the sunscreen lotion, chocolate bar and stack of comic books she bought for him. Chase opens a bottle of children’s Tylenol and makes him take two for a headache with a sip of orange pop. “Thank you,” he says, remembering his manners.

  “I figured you’ll give me a break from talking if you have something to read. Jughead Jones should be right up your alley,” Chase says. “He has a dog and spends most of his time shoveling down large quantities of greasy food.”

  “I won’t eat so much anymore,” Gabriel says.

  Chase looks mad as she pulls onto the busy street. She drives fast, holding the steering wheel tight with both hands and staring straight ahead. “God, kid,” she says when they stop at a red light. “Learn how to take a joke.”

  ¤

  Gabriel licks the finger he dipped in the melted chocolate oozing out of a wrapper on the hot dashboard then settles back against the seat to look out the window. They’re traveling through a forest with waterfalls and mountains with snow at the top. Purple and white flowers he’d like to stop and pick bloom along a riverbank. Two eagles soar high in circles without flapping their wings.

  To pass the time, they’re playing fun road-trip games Chase learned when she hitched rides all the way across the country at seventeen. Gabriel won Road Kill by spotting a dead crow and something Chase said was a possum, North America’s only marsupial. He also won What If? Chase won License Plate Decoder.

  Now they’re playing Tomato. One person asks questions and the other person has to answer tomato every time without laughing.

  “Have you ever peed in a pool?” Chase asks Gabriel. She speeds up enough to pass a big truck pulling a silver trailer that’s shaped like a bullet. A little girl in the truck’s backseat flattens her nose against the window’s glass and waves.

  “Tomato.”

  “If you were stuck on a desert island, who would you want with you?”

  “Tomato!” Because Gabriel laughs, he loses his turn.

  “What’s your scariest nightmare?” he asks Chase.

  “Tomato,” she says in a scary voice.

  “If you had to eat only one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be?”

  Chase groans. “Tomato.”

  “Who is your favorite person in the van?” Gabriel asks.

  Chase turns her head like she’s shoulder checking, even though they’ve passed the truck and trailer and are alone on the road. Then, instead of tomato, she says Radar, ending the game.

  «56»

  It’s early morning and the old woman’s asleep on her lounge chair with the television blasting when Willard enters the room. He’s kept an eye on her house since he silenced her poodle and he knows no one ever comes to visit on weekdays. He also knows her car still has a current insurance sticker on its plates because she drives down Balmoral Street once a week.

  It’s an easy thing to tie the woman’s puffy ankles to the legs of the chair. She sleeps through three commercials, much louder than the daytime soap opera that’s on. When Willard starts on her hands, however, it’s another story. Squeaking and squealing, she tries to bat Willard away. He has no choice but to tape her head until only her eyes, nose and tufts of white hair show. Even so, the whole woman is a noise factory, with rumbles and farts coming from her innards, and irritating noises coming from her sealed mouth.

  Willard should take the car and go. He hasn’t been inside a neighbor’s house since childhood, however, and allows himself the treat of a look around. It’s easy to tell which room the old woman uses for sleep. Like her, it smells of pee. There are nightgowns and thick brown nylons in a drawer of a dresser. A green glass Christmas candle holds strong perfume. An old silver brush has trim of lace and pearls and a black and white photograph of a pretty child on the back. He resists the urge to brush his hair, which the woman mussed up with her swats: that would be leaving evidence.

  A second bedroom belonged to a man. Willard can tell by the red and black bedspread, a picture of a dog pointing its paw at a dead duck and broken-down pair of leather sandals. Every square inch of a dresser top is covered by more of the glass perfume bottles. There’s a blue ship, a lantern, a hound dog pipe, and a pistol, which he pretends to shoot at the old woman before wiping off his prints with a hankie.

  Willard puts on the dead man’s comfy housecoat over his clothes before returning to the living room where the woman rumbles and grunts. She’s seen his face and knows who he is, so even though Willard would rather leave her to die naturally out of respect for her age, he knows what he must do. It takes an effort to choose from among the many embroidered pillows on her sofa and chairs. He settles on a little girl in a frilled nightgown, standing on tiptoes to kiss a man in a high back chair. Good Night Pa, it says.

  The woman isn’t as ready
to meet her maker as Willard anticipates, and she puts up a struggle. “I have to do this for my brother,” Willard explains. She must understand because eventually she relaxes enough to die.

  Willard finds the car keys in a glass bowl on the kitchen counter. He picks up a red glass bell from the widow’s ledge and gives it a shake. Then he takes a plate of blueberry muffins to eat on the way.

  No one passes on the street as he loads the trunks with the cans of gas that will get him far away before he needs to fill up. The Ford Tempo, once it’s coaxed to start, runs like a dream.

  «57»

  Chase sits in a dark corner of the Wild Turkey Pub on the outskirts of Gold River, holding a Scarlett O’Hara cocktail. She’s having a much-needed fun break in a setting perfect for intoxication. Even the taxidermy bear, woodchuck, and mallard heads have glazed eyes. She fiddles with the cocktail ring she put on for the occasion, before slipping it off. She’s here to gain oblivion, not draw attention.

  She raises her glass to the stunned woodchuck. Try as she might to create a party atmosphere in her head, she’s stuck in a bad place. She can’t shake the guilt that she’s left a fragile little kid holed up in the van out in the pub’s parking lot.

  She slumps in her chair when the harried waitress ignores her signal for another drink. Gabriel’s easy company and she’s starting to like having him around a bit too much. Not a good development considering how fast his needs are eating up her resources. They’re far enough away from Trenton to make a bus station farewell a reasonable option, so why is she passing up every opportunity?

  The shit hits the fan tomorrow, Chase decides. Gabriel might freak out when he realizes he’s on his own, but he’ll pull himself together eventually. Then he’ll make the last short leg of his journey home via a perfectly safe Greyhound bus. The kid’s eight for Christ’s sake, one full year older than Chase was when her mother sent her with a stranger to live with an evil grandmother.

  Chase will leave Gabriel with more money than her wallet can spare, and the Greyhound bus schedule with the times for Fenny circled in red. It’s more than anyone has ever done for her.

  ¤

  Gabriel’s wrapped up against the cold in a quilt in the back of the van when Chase returns pleasantly hammered. His stack of Jughead comics look untouched as do the snacks the human vacuum cleaner somehow resisted. Even the battery-powered lantern she provided for reading is turned off.

  She’s spent enough time with the kid to have an inkling of how his brain works. She suspects the lantern’s off and food uneaten because Gabriel was busy listening to vehicles coming and going from the Wild Turkey’s parking lot, convinced the all-powerful Willard will know to look for him here.

  Chase said to sit on the horn if he needed her, but the kid took safety one step further. He’s ready to take a slice out of Willard with her serrated bread knife.

  “Whoa, tiger,” Chase says.

  Gabriel slips his weapon under the mattress of the fold-down bed, not ready to give it up.

  Chase crawls inside, missing a step and banging her shins in the attempt. She collapses onto the air mattress serving as her bed. There’s silence except for a drunken woman berating an equally drunken man in the parking lot. “That knife can’t keep you safe,” she says.

  “Why not?”

  “Aside from the fact it’s the wrong kind of blade and an attacker probably won’t stand still long enough for you to saw off a limb, you don’t have the strength to use a weapon. Your arms are as skinny as chopsticks.”

  Chase pulls a blanket up to her chin. She lies still, prepared to outwait the room spins she knows from long practice will settle down. The trip’s been too long and too tense and she’s angry about her messed-up life. Some anger is leveled at Creepy Crawley, with a smidgen, if she’s honest, reserved for Gabriel. But most of all she’s angry with herself. She should know better than to care about someone this much.

  ¤

  When Chase wakes the van is full of punishing morning light. She swallows down the warm dregs of an orange soda, although it’s not the cure she needs. If they were still parked outside the pub, she’d go back to sleep and not get up until the off-sales opened. But they’re a good twenty-minute drive from alcoholic relief. Despite being unfit to walk let alone drive the night before, she woke around 4:00 a.m. and steered the van to a wilderness park on the edge of the town.

  She tosses back her dog fur-infested bedding, leaving the mess where it falls. Gabe’s fold-down mattress is back in the upright position, his quilt neatly folded, and his comic books stacked in a perfect cube. Chase tries not to ruminate on how he developed the knack for making small spaces tidy.

  He’s an early riser and no wonder. Sleep can’t be much of a tonic for someone who experiences night terrors. Chase should be used to them by now, but his cries still freak her out.

  She drapes a sweater over her shoulders to ward off the morning chill. Parting the curtains, she sees the child seated on top of a picnic table with his back to the van. As usual, his arms are wrapped protectively across his chest, and she suspects from his resistance to returning home it’s a habit developed long before he was abducted.

  Chase can see a bit of Radar’s front end on the ground near the boy’s feet. A lake laps the shore twenty feet or so from their camping spot. At the far end, where the water fades to gray, a blue mountain glows at its peak as though the sun has lit the top on fire. As Chase opens the van door, the zinging sound of a released line reaches her, an angler out on the water fly-fishing.

  “Good morning,” she says. Gabe takes his time before he turns to acknowledge her. “It’s baked beans for breakfast,” she says, “cold out of the can.” She hands him an opened can and a spoon, then sits beside the boy on the picnic table. The sun hasn’t reached the glade they’re in yet and the cool air smells sweet.

  Gabe hunches over his food. “Radar likes it here,” he says. The old dog looks up and thumps his tail in the dirt at the mention of his name.

  Chase lights up her first cigarette of the day. She takes a deep puff, in need of the mental clarity nicotine provides. She’s a heel for what she’s about to do, but there aren’t any better options. At least there’s bus service back to town every two hours, the other campers seem like decent sorts, and it’s a nice place to wait. She keeps her voice sweet. “There’s a trail that goes right down to the lake. We can spare an hour or so, if you want to explore.”

  Gabriel’s answer is so long in coming she almost forgets she made the suggestion. “Will you and Radar come too?” he asks.

  “I’m too lazy and he’s too arthritic.”

  Gabriel bends down to touch the dog. “I want to stay with you,” he says.

  “What? And miss out on such a great opportunity to play?”

  “If I go,” Gabriel says, “you’ll leave.”

  “Now what makes you think I’d do such a thing?”

  Gabriel sets down his can. “You said so in your sleep.”

  «58»

  The Fenny Times distracts Harvey from logistics planning for a dredging operation in the Gabriel Wheeler case. The paper is from yesterday, yet it shocks him anew to see the date, time and place of Ben Kiknicky’s funeral in black and white. It’s today, 11:00 a.m. at Hollerback Funeral Home, a five-hour drive from Fenny. Instead of waiting until her return home, Romy jumped the gun on Ben’s funeral.

  Losing family members has made Harvey familiar with that particular rite of passage. He knows well the boardrooms where the bereaved are led through a sheath of government census papers, and offered tea served in mix-and-match china as the shockingly high cost of death is delivered in a quote. He knows about lobbies with shelves of overpriced cremation urns. Knows the subdued, soothing tone employed by the staff. Knows the way finality becomes more final with each word spoken, each decision made, each soft handshake and murmured word. Knows no one should face such hell alone.

  Romy will have received a day pass from the hospital. Setting aside his work for a m
oment, he Googles the venue. There’s an image of the sanctuary and he imagines Romy mourning Ben in the small auditorium with its purple velvet curtains, folding chairs, and white lectern. He imagines stories shared and tears shed. He imagines Romy, with her one good breast and devastated face weeping over each word spoken.

  He imagines she finds it unforgivable that Ben’s good friend, Harvey Sam, isn’t there to hold her.

  ¤

  The Starlight Lounge isn’t Harvey’s normal choice for a non-alcoholic lunch. Still he succumbs to the sign out front advertising a chili-cheeseburger, salad and fries for $7.95 and steers his Tahoe into the parking lot before his head can override his hungry stomach.

  The place is busy for a Wednesday afternoon. A song Harvey recognizes is playing on a jukebox, “Break Each Other’s Hearts Again.” He takes a booth in the least occupied part of the pub. He people watches, to keep his eyes from lingering on the beer and wine menu while the waitress hauls her heavily tattooed body and order pad his way.

  The Fenny tourist bureau is gunning for national recognition as the Elvis impersonator capital of the western seaboard; the latest offering sits at a table with two exhausted ladies of the night having a late breakfast before bed. This Elvis is shorter than most. He’s rounder too, more suited to impersonate the Michelin Man than the King. Celine Wheeler’s Elvis is a tall, brusque man who is using the boy’s disappearance as an opportunity to promote his show. Harvey has trouble respecting the breed at the best of times, which this isn’t.