Mike thumbed the safety catch on the .45, tucked the gun in the back of his waistband, and went to find the girl. He knew she couldn’t be far: The cabin was no more than a thousand square feet all told, twelve hundred square at the most. Downstairs there was the main room, a small farmhouse kitchen, one bedroom, and a mud porch in back. A varnished pine staircase led up to the loft, which had been divvied up into a pair of smaller bedrooms.
Mike followed a hunch up the creaking staircase and knew he’d guessed correctly. The door to the bedroom at the top of the stairs stood open, but the door to the second bedroom, across the landing, was closed.
On the floor near the second bedroom he saw the cordless DeWalt drill Hal kept in the boat shed with the rest of his away-from-home tools. On approach, Mike understood why the shed door had been standing open when he’d arrived:
Darryl had removed the latch and the padlock from the shed, brought the whole thing inside, and reinstalled it here, on the second bedroom door. Mike looked down and saw little piles of fresh sawdust from the drill holes in the door frame. No light showed through the crack at the bottom of the door.
He tapped the door softly with a knuckle and said, “Juliet?”
Nothing.
He tapped louder and said, “Juliet, my name is Mike. I’m a friend. Are you okay?”
Again, not a sound in reply. He pressed one ear against the door, plugged the other with a finger. He couldn’t hear anything apart from his own pulse, the sound of the television, and Darryl snoring away downstairs.
He imagined the Benson girl in there, cowering at his voice, holding her breath. Quiet as a mouse.
Or maybe she was sleeping, just like Darryl.
Or maybe there was some other reason she was quiet.
Mike didn’t want to overthink it. He stooped down and grabbed up the drill, still outfitted with the driver bit Darryl had used. To the closed door he said, “Juliet. I’m coming in to help you. Don’t be scared, okay?”
With that he went to work, zipping out the screws with six long pulls of the drill trigger. He caught the screws one at a time in his palm, caught the assembly as it fell from the door frame. He set the drill and the hardware down on the floor, then stood and listened again. Still nothing. The snoring downstairs went on undisturbed.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m coming in now. It’s me, Mike. Don’t be scared.”
He pulled the door open slowly and stepped inside the darkened room. The moon shone in through the sash window, casting the room in lambent shapes and shadows. Mike reached in, found the light switch, and flipped it on.
For the next several moments he stood there, eyes adjusting to the sudden change in light, trying to make sense out of what he was seeing.
Then, without thinking about it, he said aloud to the empty room, “You’re fucking kidding me.”
18
Mike Barlowe had never been the smartest kid in class. He’d never been the dumbest, but he’d never been the smartest. He’d graduated high school somewhere in the back third of the pack, and instead of going to college or trade school, he’d gone to war.
But you didn’t need a degree in anything to be able to see how things had happened here. The tiny loft bedroom looked like a crime scene: wall-to-wall upheaval, smeared all over with signs of violence. Then, once the initial visual shock subsided, what first looked like grim chaos assembled itself into relatively simple order.
Either way, the room was empty.
He hadn’t tied her up, Darryl. A mark in the gentleman’s column there. Mike saw that he’d left her a big plastic water bottle on the nightstand to drink from, a galvanized bait bucket in the corner to pee in. All a girl needed.
To keep her leashed yet able to use the makeshift facilities if need arose, Darryl had tethered her to the bed by the ankle on eight feet of heavy-duty fish stringer—yet another item he’d have found in the canoe shed, along with the drill and the bait bucket.
Mike knew all of this because he could see the evidence Juliet Benson had left behind: the abandoned bindings; the bloody footprints zigzagging the bare wood floor; the bed shoved up against the wall beneath the open window; the sheet knotted securely to a spindle in the bed’s foot rail, trailing over the windowsill, disappearing from view.
He barely knew what the Benson girl looked like, apart from the photo they’d shown on the news, yet he could imagine her clearly in his mind: her predicament, her solution, the evident results. Standing there, surveying the state of the room, he might as well have been reviewing security-camera footage of her escape. He could see it all in his mind, every step of the way.
Certainly she would have been able to hear the television downstairs, even through the padlocked door. Which meant that at some point she’d have been able to hear the snoring begin, the same way Mike could hear it now.
Mike wondered how long she’d waited before working up her courage. He imagined her testing, calling out for attention first, just to be sure no attention would be paid. Of course Darryl hadn’t heard her, any more than he’d heard Mike honking the Power Wagon outside. And when no amount of hollering caused the snoring to stop—when at last she’d managed to satisfy herself that the coast was as clear as it was liable to get anytime soon—she’d gone to work.
The fish stringer was made of tough yellow nylon cord, with a steel ring on one end and a six-inch gill needle—about the diameter of a number-two pencil—on the other.
Darryl had secured one end of the cord to the girl and the other end to the bed, using a number of plastic zip ties. These Mike recognized from his own toolbox at home, left over from three months he’d spent doing installs for the cable company last spring.
The zip ties were a handy way to bundle up coaxial line. They were tough enough to batten a loose muffler on a 1992 two-door Buick Skylark indefinitely. They were good for all kinds of little jobs, really. Now that Mike thought of it, the zip ties were almost no different from the flex cuffs they’d used on captured Iraqi insurgents, once upon a time.
Mike had never seen anyone slip out of a pair of properly cinched flex cuffs, but Darryl had taken steps to ensure that Juliet Benson wouldn’t be the first. He’d used half a dozen of the things to lash the steel ring to her ankle.
On the other end of the cord, Darryl had used several more ties to splint the stringer needle tightly alongside another spindle in the foot rail. He’d wound the stringer cord tightly around the spindle, top to bottom, crimping off the cord with one last tie at the end.
Had it been Mike’s job to do, he might have fastened the cord to the iron bed frame instead of to the wooden foot rail, but that could have been hindsight on his part.
The practical fact was that this was a sturdy old bed, handmade from solid oak. Not like the new crap you could get for a price at the Furniture Barn. Kicking out one of these spindles with bare feet would have been a tall order for most anybody without a black belt in something, and Juliet Benson’s spindle had been reinforced with 10-gauge steel and five-hundred-pound nylon. Bottom line: You wouldn’t have expected her to be going anywhere.
But the girl was smart.
Smart enough to shove the mattress off the bed, lift the box spring, and find exactly what she needed: a spare floorboard someone had thought to saw down and use as a bed slat.
For Juliet Benson’s purposes, a four-foot pry bar.
The slat now lay on the floor over by the night table, discarded near a parcel of thick dust where the bed had been. Looking at the bed in its new spot under the window, Mike could see the ragged wood splinters still caught in the ruined spindle holes, top and bottom, where she’d managed to pry out her binding post.
She’d taken the spindle with her to the cedar chest in the near corner, where she could sit down. Mike imagined her there, fixed in concentration, working the coils of stringer cord loose enough to expose the steel tip of the gill needle. It wouldn’t have been easy. She would have had to stay patient. Very patient.
But she’d gotten th
e job done. And now she’d made herself a new tool: a sort of improvised awl mounted on a ramming handle.
Crouching next to the cedar chest, examining the abandoned spindle like some primitive artifact, Mike decided that it was about as well suited an implement as she could have come up with under the circumstances.
Then again, this was where the blood started. And Mike could see how that must have happened too.
The zip ties wouldn’t have surrendered easily, and she’d had five or six of them to go through. He saw her pushing against the restraints with the steel prong until her arms shook. He saw her slip and gouge herself, saw the tip of the gill needle digging furrows in her skin. He saw her stifle an outcry as the furrows welled up with blood. He saw her sitting there on the cedar chest with her fists clenched, biting back tears. Or at least he imagined it that way.
Then he imagined her pulling herself together, starting again. Working on each band one at a time.
How many times had she slipped before she was through?
It didn’t matter. The stringer, the bed spindle, and the severed zip ties now lay in a pile on the floor where she’d dropped them, a tangle of rope and sprung manacles. The bloody smears and bare heel prints charted her movements from there.
The window wasn’t actually open, Mike discovered. Darryl had fixed that for good measure. Mike could see the fresh screws toenailed into the bottom corners of the window, fastening the sash to the frame.
He also saw flakes of broken glass still caught in the bed quilt, now discarded in a pile on the floor. Mike imagined that she’d used the quilt as protection, or a sound baffle, or both.
Leaning out through the vacant opening into the cool, tangy night air, he could see wicked-looking shards of broken windowpane glinting amid the jagged rock below, just beyond the dangling end of the sheet.
She climbed down into that, he thought. Barefoot. She wouldn’t have had any other choice.
Mike went downstairs. As he crossed the room, the programming on television cut away to a commercial for Buck Morningside Bail Bonds. Familiar as they were this time of night, Mike had to shake his head at the stroke of timing.
Sometimes it seemed like the universe had a sarcastic sense of humor. Sometimes it seemed like the universe could be kind of an asshole.
He went over to the couch, nudged Darryl with the side of his foot, and said, “Dude. Wake up.”
He might as well have been talking to Buck Morningside on the tube. Mike stepped around the coffee table and turned off the television so he could hear himself think. He came back and kicked Darryl in the leg. It was like kicking a side of beef. Mike kicked harder the second time. He raised his voice and said, “Wake up, man.”
Darryl was as stubborn asleep as he was awake.
Screw this, Mike thought. He went upstairs, grabbed the bait bucket from the bedroom, brought it down with him. His knee had protested these stairs before, but Mike hardly felt it now. He took the bucket outside, filled it full of water from the hose bib around the side of the cabin. Two gallons, icy cold.
He brought the full bucket inside, said, “Rise and shine,” and dumped the whole thing in Darryl’s lap.
For a split second nothing happened.
Then, in curious slow motion, Darryl erupted into consciousness as though rising up from a great depth. He issued a strangled bellow, seemed almost to levitate from the cushions momentarily, and fell back, hands shooting out to either side like buttresses.
It was like watching a science experiment. Darryl didn’t even know who he was for a few seconds. He was soaked to the skin. For just those few seconds, the guy looked so confused and pathetic—shaking his head, blinking his eyes, croaking like a frog—that if circumstances had been different, the whole display might have been comical.
Then, all at once, Darryl’s eyes sprang wide. His right hand began to scrabble around the sofa cushion beside him as if suddenly possessed of its own frenzied agenda.
Mike stepped forward into Darryl’s field of vision. He pulled the .45 out of his waistband, held it upside down by the trigger guard between two fingers, and said, “Is this what you’re looking for?”
At last Darryl found him with his eyes. His face registered nothing at first. Then came recognition, then renewed confusion, all in a span of two or three blinks. He coughed and said, “Mike?”
“No, Saint Peter,” Mike said. He dropped the empty bucket to the floor with a hollow clang. “You died and went to heaven. I guess some paperwork got screwed up.”
Darryl rubbed his eyes, sat up a little straighter on the couch. He coughed again, fully present now. Or at least fully awake. He spread his hands, looked himself over and said, “I believe it, you crazy fucker.” He pinched his sodden T-shirt away from his chest. “I think you stopped my heart for a couple seconds.”
“Yeah, sure,” Mike said. “I’m the crazy fucker.”
Casually, Darryl glanced at the gun in Mike’s hand. Clearly no threat, but definitely his gun. And definitely not in the spot where he’d left it.
He looked at Mike. After a minute, he said, “And I was having the best dream too.”
He was still drunk, Mike realized. A person might not have known it if they didn’t know Darryl, but Mike knew Darryl. Hell, the guy had put away enough cheap whiskey in the last twenty-four hours to kill a teetotaler, and that wasn’t even counting all the beer. Who knew what else? Of course he was still drunk.
“If I have to be awake for this horseshit,” Mike told him, “then so do you.”
Darryl blinked. Yawned. Said, “How’d you get all the way up here without a car, anyway?”
“I adapted and overcame.”
“Oh,” Darryl said.
“I’m not the only one either.”
“Yeah?”
“Why don’t you go upstairs and check on your new friend?” Mike glanced toward the loft. “I think she left a message for you.”
Darryl craned his neck, following Mike’s eyes up to the landing.
The moment he saw the padlocked door standing open, his spined stiffened. Almost before Mike realized he’d moved, Darryl was off the couch, across the room, taking the pine stairs up two a time.
Maybe he wasn’t so drunk after all.
Mike tucked the gun back into his waistband, left Darryl up there with his discoveries, and went outside.
Eventually, Darryl came down to the lakeshore and joined him at the end of the narrow, weathered dock. “Okay, I admit it,” he said, his approaching footfalls vibrating through the planks ahead of his voice. “I did not see that coming.”
Mike didn’t say anything. He just kept sweeping the far shoreline with the three-million-candlepower spotlight he’d grabbed from the shed. From the dock, the beam was powerful enough to brighten the reeds and standing grass along the tree line like a roving circle of daylight.
“Girl’s tougher than she looks,” Darryl mused. He sounded more fascinated than upset. “Seemed like a real princess too. Guess you can’t make assumptions.”
I guess not, Mike thought. Using the spotlight, he’d been able to follow her trail from the broken glass under the bedroom window, like tracking a wounded deer. Based on the quality of the blood sign, she hadn’t come through the glass unscathed.
He’d already formulated a pretty good idea of how Juliet Benson had completed the next phase of her escape. Now the spotlight beam confirmed his theory. Across the lake, he caught a flash of metal tucked away in the trees. Mike brought the spotlight back and identified the sudden shine for what it was: the hull of a canoe stashed in a stand of sumac.
The girl was tough, all right. And still being smart. Mike felt like he understood her strategy instinctively.
The lake was roughly peanut-shaped, narrow in the middle, rounded on either end. The blood trail told him that after climbing out the window and making it to solid ground, she hadn’t dared reenter the cabin to look for her car keys.
But to take the lane out of here on foot, she would have had to
walk around the far end of the peanut, still barefoot, on rough cold driveway rock most of the way. And there were stretches along the south embankment—lake on one side, steep downhill drop on the other—where she’d have had nowhere to bail out if her captor happened to wake up and come after her.
Paddling straight across the water, on the other hand, cut her distance by more than half, saved at least a bit of wear and tear on her injured feet, and took her directly into the cover of the timber.
It would be slow going in the trees. Plenty of hidden rocks, holes, pinecones, broken branches, and thorny brambles waiting for her. But if she was careful and stayed patient, stuck to soft ground and pine straw as much as she could, and kept the rock lane in sight on her left, then she could make it all the way to the lake road—possibly even the state highway—without ever setting foot out in the open.
Mike was starting to admire the girl. Besides leaving a bottle of perfectly good drinking water behind, he found little fault in her thinking.
Still, a fifteen-foot aluminum canoe was a heavy, awkward thing. Hard to handle out of the water all alone. She could have dragged it across the rocks, but if she’d wanted to avoid making an unholy racket, she would have had to carry it over the ground for at least a hundred feet. Out of the shed, across the lane. At least to where she could push or drag it on the dewy grass the rest of the way. All the way to the sandy launch beside the dock.
All the time scared. Bleeding. And not quite the princess Darryl had taken her for. She might have been born with some money, but she hadn’t been born soft, this girl.
Definitely tough enough in Mike’s book.
He let up on the spotlight’s trigger. The beam faded and then extinguished, draping the opposite bank in darkness again. Water lapped at the pilings under their feet. Mike stood at the edge of the dock, looking out over the inky, moon-dappled surface of the lake, and tried to think.
How long had she been gone?
Had he passed her on his way in without even knowing it?
Lake Country Page 12