After finishing on the toilet, she checked out the double sink vanity. A big mirror, shaped like half a moon, had been affixed to the wall. Her reflection in the glass was murky, as if she were as insubstantial as a ghost that might fade into the shadows at any moment.
Vaguely troubled by the sight, she looked away and got on her knees. She opened the cherry wood cabinet doors. In the dimness inside, she noticed a faint glimmer.
She squinted, leaned in closer.
It was a length of drainage pipe, curved at one end like a candy cane, about six inches long and an inch in diameter.
She carefully dug it out. She hefted it in her hands, pleased by its weight.
If she swung it at someone and connected, it could do serious damage.
Returning to the bedroom, she concealed the pipe underneath the mattress, near the baseboard.
Like her rage, she would save it for an opportune time.
Getting to her feet again, she crossed to the bedroom door. Someone had hung the door so that the hinges and the lock were on the outside of the room. She turned the brass knob. As she anticipated, it was locked.
Next, she went to the closest window. Two strips of thick wood covered it widthwise, fastened in place by nails driven into the surrounding wall.
She gripped the edges of the bottom slat, braced one foot against the wall, and tugged with all her might. Her arms trembled from the effort, but there was no give in the wood at all. She might as have been trying to pry loose an iron bar.
She gave up and looked between the boards.
A big backyard of smooth, reddish-brown dirt led to a perimeter marked by tall maples and pines. In the dense shadows among the trees, about twenty yards away from the property line, she glimpsed railroad tracks. They curved through the trees and wound out of sight.
Chewing her lip, she stared at those tracks.
She turned around and looked at the bedroom as if through a fresh pair of eyes. She noted the hardwood flooring. The crown molding. The marble gas-log fireplace. The tray ceiling.
Why did she have the feeling that she had been there before?
24
They were back.
That morning, in his single-wide trailer situated high on a tree-dotted shelf of land above the banks of Dog Lake, Ed stood at a bedroom window with a pair of binoculars and observed the white van returning to the same home it had visited last night. Those same two men had climbed out, but he hadn’t been able to see what they were doing because they pulled the van into the garage, out of sight.
It troubled him.
He had wiped clean a spot on the grime-filmed glass to facilitate his surveillance. The window was cracked open-he’d never had air-conditioning-and the dingy curtains, stirred by a cool breeze, rippled around his hunched shoulders. At least a dozen members of his family crowded around his legs, licking, chuffing, sniffing, snorting, whining, and moaning, all in a bid for his attention.
Normally, he spent his days playing with the dogs, petting them, feeding them, talking to them. That morning, however, he was oblivious to his canine family, riveted by the mystery unfolding across the lake.
He had been keeping a close watch since last night, when he’d returned home after finding his black Lab and the two young strays. He’d dragged a kitchen chair with a wobbly leg to the window and had fallen asleep staring across the dark water, a puppy curled in his lap. He figured the van had departed sometime after he dozed off, because that morning, it had come back.
In the grayish light of dawn, he’d read the words painted in big blue letters on the side panel: LB’S HEATING amp; COOLING.
It was, he was sure, the same van from the night before. What kind of heating company visited a house in the middle of the night?
For many years, he had strictly limited his interactions with people. He had not held a job since returning from the war, and for his wounded leg, he received a disabled veteran’s check each month that covered his modest expenses. He paid his few bills through the mail, visiting the local post office every few months to purchase a new supply of stamps, speaking as little as possible to the clerks. He consumed only canned goods and carbonated beverages that he purchased from the supermarket where he cashed his benefit check, stocking up on such a huge amount of items during his visits that he shopped only a few times a year; the dogs, full-fledged members of his family, ate the same foods as he did. He never entertained company, and warned away all visitors with a NO TRESPASSING sign posted at the end of the long dirt driveway. People would not appreciate his important rescue work, and might summon Them to take away his family and sentence the beloved souls to the gas chambers.
Likewise, he didn’t own a television set, computer, telephone, microwave, or radio. He didn’t have electricity. Electricity and electronic devices were vehicles by which They could invade your mind, jam your mental frequencies, and make you one of Them.
You had to be cautious. You never knew who might be one of Them. That was Their power; outwardly, They looked like everyone else. But of course They were not.
They were unquestionably vile creatures who appeared to be human, and They were intent on world domination. They were the ones who captured innocent animals and gassed them to death; They were the ones who raped the land to erect awful homes; They were the ones polluting the air and spreading litter. They were everywhere, and the only way to ensure that you did not become one of Them was to reduce your risk of exposure.
His only interest, other than his dogs and avoiding possible interaction with Them, was his collection of phone books. He usually found them lying atop someone’s trash, or sitting forgotten in plastic bags in driveways. He had accumulated tall stacks of the guides dating back over twenty years. Since he lacked phone service, he had no pressing need to call anyone listed in the directories. He kept the books on hand just in case, in some dire, unimaginable emergency, he should ever need to locate a phone and place a call.
In spite of his isolation from society, Ed knew there was something unusual about a heating and cooling company visiting a house late at night. It made no sense to him.
But if the employees of the heating company were actually working for Them, he shouldn’t expect to understand it, as the things They did in secret were as alien as the dark side of the moon.
Although he hadn’t seen anything happen since the van had disappeared around the house, he kept watching. He didn’t want to miss a thing.
But he wondered if he should get closer, to look inside. The idea terrified him, but it would not go away.
What if They were bringing dogs inside that terrible place? What if They were torturing the innocent creatures? Butchering them?
Eating them?
A hundred horrifying scenarios revolved around his mind like some morbid carousel, and he couldn’t make them stop.
But there was one way to check it out.
Placing the binoculars on the window sill, he grabbed his cane from where it leaned against the wall and waded through the wriggling knot of dogs. He left the bedroom, the dogs flanking him, the warped floor creaking underneath his heavy footsteps and their clicking paws.
Outside in the shadowed hallway, more dogs of various breeds greeted him with barks, wagging tails, shining eyes, and damp noses. They pressed close to him, sniffing his fingers, and he gently nudged them away with his cane.
“Ed’s busy this morning, guys,” he said. “Let Ed work. Ed thinks this is important.”
Phone books were piled head-high along one wood-paneled wall, from one end of the hall to another. He had a system for organizing them: he always placed the newest directories near the front room.
Repeatedly muttering “LB’s Heating and Cooling,” under his breath, he lumbered to the stack where he expected to find the most recent book. He blew off the dust, picked it up, and cracked it open. Squinting to read the tiny type in the dim light, he flipped through the crisp pages.
There was no listing for LB’s Heating and Cooling in the Yellow P
ages.
The white business pages, as well, turned up nothing.
Shaking his head, he moaned. “No, no.”
What could this mean? How could the company not be listed anywhere in the phone book? Everything was supposed to be in the phone book.
He checked through other directories, for previous years, with the same troubling result.
He’d always believed that They masqueraded under the guise of ordinary people, ordinary companies. But perhaps this was proof that They had gotten bolder in their deceit and no longer felt the need to keep up appearances.
Cold bands of fear constricted his chest.
For the first time, he wished he had a telephone. He would call the police and report this.
But, he realized with dismay, They could have infiltrated the police department, too.
There was no one to whom he could turn, no one he could risk trusting with this vital information.
Around him, many of the dogs’ ears had perked up, and their tails went pole-rigid. They sensed his anxiety.
Perhaps they sensed the danger, too.
He shuffled back to the bedroom window and looked at the house again through the binoculars.
What was going on in there? Were dogs being maimed? Killed?
He shuddered.
Or could it be something worse than he imagined?
Since no one else could be trusted, he would have to take a closer look himself.
25
Jada lay on a narrow mattress in a shadowed bedroom that had big boards on the window, a dusty floor, and a musty smell in the air. Curled up in a ball, she sucked her thumb. She had been sucking her thumb ever since Giant had cut away the tape around her wrists and taken off the blindfold.
She could not remember the last time she had sucked her thumb. Mom and Daddy hated for her to do it and chastised her that big girls didn’t do such things, but right then, having her thumb in her mouth to suckle made her feel a little bit better.
Still, she could barely stop shaking. Where was this place? Where had Mom gone? Why hadn’t Daddy come yet?
Why had Mr. Leon, who Daddy had said used to be his best friend back in Detroit-his homeboy-tied them up and taken them away from home? Was Mr. Leon mad at Daddy over something? Was that why he was doing this to them?
She wished Mom and Daddy would come and take her away from there.
Most of all, she wished they would take her away from the big man. She didn’t know the big man’s name, so she had decided to call him Giant.
Silent as a rock, Giant sat in a chair on the other side of the room, in front of the door. The chair looked too tiny to support him, and it reminded her of when Daddy had tried to ride her bicycle. His knees had bumped against his chest, and she had laughed at him.
The memory made her want to smile, but she was afraid to smile, because Giant kept staring at her with those weird flat-coin eyes of his, and she didn’t want him to think she was smiling at him.
If he believed she was smiling at him, he might take that as an invitation to come close to her, and the thought of him near her frightened her to death. When he had taken the tape off her wrists and eyes, his fingers had softly brushed against her skin, for only a second. His touch was damp and cold, like the scales of a dead fish, and he had an excited look in his eyes, as if touching her was the most thrilling thing in the world to him.
It creeped her out so badly she’d thought she was going to faint.
She didn’t want to look at him at all, but she was afraid to turn her head completely away from him, too. Without her speech processor, if he moved, she wouldn’t hear him move, and the idea of him sneaking up on her made her queasy.
So she remained curled in a ball, sucking her thumb and watching him out of the corner of her eye.
To make things worse, she had to pee. On the other side of the room, there was a bathroom, but she didn’t want to go in there. There was a hole in the door where the knob was supposed to be, and she could imagine Giant putting his flat eye to it and watching her as she sat on the toilet.
No way. She would have to hold it a little while longer and hope that, soon, he left her in there alone. There was another door near where she lay on the mattress, but she was pretty sure that it was just a closet, like in her own bedroom.
To keep her mind off peeing and her fears of Giant, she thought about their upcoming family vacation to Disney World. She couldn’t wait. It would be their second time going, and while the last time she had been excited about seeing Cinderella Castle-she was seven then, still a dumb little kid-this time she was most looking forward to the Future World pavilions at Epcot. Science was her favorite subject in school, and she was thinking that she might become a scientist or a doctor when she grew up, so of course, she had to check out all the technology stuff-
In the edge of her eye, she saw Giant get up and start shuffling toward her. His plodding footsteps made the floor quake.
She snatched her thumb out of her mouth, bolted upright, and scooted against the wall, pulling in her legs close to her body and wrapping her arms tightly around her knees.
Please, don’t hurt me, mister, she said. Or, that was what she thought she said. Her throat was so tight she couldn’t be sure the words got out clearly.
He advanced toward her with slow, heavy steps, lips parted.
Her back pressed against the wall, she shook so badly she felt as if she might crumble into a million pieces. There was an awful, gritty taste in her mouth that made her want to gag.
Please don’t hurt me, she said again. Her head still hurt from when Giant had pushed her in her bedroom at home, and she would never forget what he had done to Mickey.
Giant halted before he reached the mattress. He stooped to the floor.
She squeezed her legs against her chest, her feet cold in her furry slippers. What was Giant doing?
She wasn’t sure, but this close, that chocolate-sour odor of his made her want to retch.
As he stared at her, his lips moved slowly. He was speaking to her.
What was he saying? She tried to read his lips.
Want. . a. . Something. Try as she might, she couldn’t read lips.
I don’t understand, she said. She pointed at her ears. I can’t hear you. I’m deaf, mister.
His shiny brow furrowed. She wasn’t sure he understood what she had told him.
His lips moved again. She thought he said, You have it.
Have what?
He dug inside the front chest pocket of his overalls. He fished out a candy bar. A Snickers.
Giant had the biggest hands she’d ever seen in her life, but she could tell that it was the king-size Snickers, too.
Her stomach churned. Snickers bars were one of her favorite sweet treats ever, right up there with Grandma Rose’s double-chocolate cake.
As delicately as if he were putting a candle on a birthday cake, Giant placed the candy at the edge of the mattress. Slowly, watching her all the while, he got up and backed away to his chair.
He was giving the candy to her.
Her parents had taught her never to take candy from strangers, but she suddenly became aware of how hungry she was. She hadn’t eaten her normal breakfast of cereal, fruit, and milk. She hadn’t eaten anything since dinner last night. She was famished.
She stared at the candy bar. It hadn’t been opened. It was totally wrapped up, like when you bought it brand new at the grocery store.
Mom’s voice replayed in her mind: Jada, baby, never, ever take anything from a stranger, okay, honey? Never talk to strangers, never take candy from strangers. It’s not safe.
She had never in her whole life disobeyed that rule. But her mouth was literally watering.
What if she was kept in this terrible room for a long time? What if this candy was the only food she ever got there? Would Mom and Daddy want her to starve to death instead of eating a piece of brand-new candy?
But what if it had been poisoned? Grandma Rose had once spoken about th
at when she and Mom had been talking about why kids shouldn’t be allowed to go trick or treating on Halloween. Uh-huh, folks these days are too crazy, she had said, they put poison in the candy, razor blades in the apples.
As she was trying to make a decision, her raging hunger abruptly made the choice for her; she snatched the Snickers off the floor and tore open the package with her teeth. She bit off a big chunk, and though the chocolate was warm from being kept in Giant’s pocket, it was sweet and delicious, the best thing she’d ever tasted in her life.
She ate the whole thing, and licked her fingers clean, too. When she had finally finished, she glanced across the room at Giant.
He was smiling at her.
26
Around a quarter past noon, Corey pulled into the parking lot of his bank.
After a long bout of deep, agonizing thought, he had resolved to move forward with Todd’s idea of paying Leon a smaller ransom. It was the least repulsive choice from a menu of ugly options.
With going to the cops out of the question, and being unable to pay Leon the outrageous amount he demanded, Corey was willing to chance that giving him fifty thousand in cash, tempting him to take the money and get the hell out of Dodge, might just work. Besides the fact that Leon had never pulled off a big score and would consider fifty grand a major jackpot, Leon was the kind of guy who liked to get the maximum return on a minimum amount of effort, which was why he’d become a criminal in the first place, instead of a law-abiding citizen who worked legitimately for the things he wanted. A briefcase full of more money than Leon had ever seen in his life, for relatively little work on his part, might bring a swift end to this nightmare.
Stubborn logic, however, argued that he might be taking a foolish risk that could place Simone and Jada in greater jeopardy than ever.
But he didn’t know what else to do-and the worst choice was to do nothing at all.
The sun had recently broken through the clouds, and in his anxious state of mind, he interpreted the sun’s emergence as a positive sign. God was smiling on him in approval of his plan of action-that was what he wanted to believe, anyway. Although he’d never been particularly religious, that day he was alert for signs of Providence and was frequently murmuring desperate prayers under his breath.
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