Something collided with the cupboard, as if he were kicking it.
Kick. Kick.
KICK!
I froze in terror.
The latch on the cupboard doors rattled. He was opening it.
Oh God!
I braced against the walls of the cupboard, knowing that this would be my last chance. If I could leap at him, using my body as a battering ram, I could stun him. After all, I had nothing to lose.
The cupboard doors were pulled open, and I sprung out. It was lucky that I didn’t have the momentum for the planned attack, otherwise I would have struck my mom.
Kneeling above me was Eileen, blood spattered across her nightdress, a pair of scissors clutched in her hand.
“Scout!” she cried, and pulled the duct tape from around my mouth.
That breath of air was as vital as my first breath from the womb. I drew in the oxygen with all my strength, every fibre of my body straining for that elixir. Eileen had given me the gift of life once again.
I rolled onto my front.
“Cut the ties!” I shouted, raising my bruised arms up towards her.
In the corner of the library, I could see a dark shape. It was the sprawled body of Mr Missouri, legs at an unnatural angle. His head was bent sideways, and a black wound gaped on the alabaster of his neck. Spreading towards me, across the vinyl floor, was a pool of blood.
Eileen had plunged the scissors into his neck, severing the artery.
With one snip, my arms were free.
I rolled away from the red flood and took the scissors from Eileen. I hacked away at my bonds, cutting frantically at the tape. Glue stuck to me, as I hurled the hateful strips into the corners of the library.
The scissors that freed me were the same I had used to open my parcel from Mike. Yellow plastic handles and small blades. Craftwork scissors, worth a couple of dollars. Sometimes that’s all it takes to save a life.
Eileen must’ve picked them up on her way to rescue me.
I turned to her, my heart brimming with feelings that only a child can know. I dropped the scissors and hugged Eileen to me.
“Oh Mom! Mom!” I cried, and the tears would not stop.
I hugged her, and hugged her again. Though she was as immobile as a lump of marble between my arms, at that moment I loved her more than I had ever loved anyone. I pressed her chest to mine and drank in the talcum smell of her neck. Her skin had that softness of an older person, and I sunk my face into its pillow.
“Mom!” I repeated, again and again, sobbing with relief.
She had found me. After all these years of losing me, and not knowing that I was gone, my mom had come after me.
She had tracked me.
I thought that she had lost the knack. But it turned out that she had merely forgotten that she had it.
Ordinarily Eileen sleeps like the dead, knocked out by medication. But Mr Missouri’s tune must have woken her. It was a nightmare from the past that she could not escape. She was drawn on, as if by the Pied Piper.
“Straighten up, Missouri, straighten up…”
She must have followed the tune with her tracking sense, following its trail through the slush left in the wake of the TV trucks and onto the driveway of Pete and Iris’s house. Her bare feet had latched onto the trail of a moving vehicle – something which I had only mastered after much practice.
Before she left the house, Eileen had armed herself with the only thing at hand – a pair of scissors. The blades were just three inches long. But Eileen wielded them in revenge for Robert Tumey from 1985, and to silence the tune in her head. In her hands, those short blades were more than capable of the job.
Mr Missouri’s blood had sprayed over the book stacks. The rest had leaked out with the final beat of his rotten heart.
My mom was my hero.
I gave her one final kiss and drew back, knowing how much she hated to be hugged, and knowing how violently she reacted when I called her Mom.
Expect nothing, I told myself.
Eileen’s face held no expression. Those wires had been cut a long time ago. But she did not recoil as she usually did. Instead her eyes searched my face, as if trying to recall something that was long misplaced. Her lips worked, soundlessly reaching for a word that had only just been on the tip of her tongue.
And then her hands came up to my face. Her fingers were trembling, and they fluttered like butterfly wings on my cheek.
When the smile came, it was lopsided.
“My little Scout,” she said.
Then she leant forward. And just as we did all those years ago, we rubbed noses like the Inuit.
“My little Scout.”
MARCH
Chapter 42
Spring rain washed away the remainder of the snow. Vermillion Creek was swollen with the melt, cascading through the rapids where once it had been a trickle.
After the rainclouds cleared, Mike drove us to the city. This was a private mission, and not even Molly would know about it unless it was a success. We didn’t speak much on the ride, because it seemed that we had spent every minute since Christmas talking to each other. Loving Mike had healed me of the trauma of that night. I am not sure that I would have survived if it had not been for him.
The weird thing is that we were now brother and sister. Molly had become my guardian, a position she would hold for another year. I still lived at 10987 Brighton Avenue with Eileen, but for legal matters Molly was my parent. Which made what Mike and I were doing incestuous.
“Do you think we should stop?” I asked him one night.
“Do you want me to?”
I shook my head and pulled him to me. Of course I didn’t want him to stop. He was the best brother a girl could ever wish for.
*
The men were shooting hoops, as before. Windows were open all over the Janet J Lansdale project, and heavy beats were competing for supremacy. The playground was crammed with children, though I could not see the two young boys who had accosted me a few months before. Maybe they had graduated from the sandbox and were now playing a far deadlier game?
I hoped not.
Just to be certain that I could pick up Marcus’s trail, I started where it had all began.
This time I had Moyheddin’s wheels to help. It being a Saturday, and there being no work at Mr Dinkel’s, Moy had reluctantly leant me his new bike. He cosseted it as if it were a jewel. Each night it was cleaned and oiled, and I swear that if he could have taken the bike to bed he would have snuggled up and fallen asleep against it.
Eighteen gears powered me on the way. Marcus had left a trail that still sang after all this time. I cycled along the sidewalk, dodging a scattering of weekend office workers. I cycled past the public library, to which the killer had made deliveries each week. I cycled on to the municipal lot where he had parked his bookmobile.
Eileen had vanquished a killer who had evaded capture for thirty years. DNA betrayed him in the end. Samples were taken from the crime scenes and his house – they matched him with the missing children. Treacherous guanine and cytosine, as unique as a fingerprint, had pointed to his guilt. He had taken Robert Tumey, and Daniel Taber, and young Marcus.
Mike met me at the entrance to the lot.
Garbage trucks were resting until Monday, and amongst them was the new bookmobile. A subscription had been raised to replace the vehicle. They asked whether I might wish to christen the new travelling library, but I politely declined. I was no longer so keen on books.
“Can you see the trail?” asked Mike.
“I can smell it,” I replied.
The sunshine made it bearable. As long as I kept moving, and felt the caress of warm air on my skin, I could endure the memory of Marcus’s ordeal.
The bike knew which way to go, and presently the city gave way to the prairie. Mike kept pace behind in
the Prius. There wasn’t an exact moment when the city ended, but I soon found myself cycling along a cracked rural road, with only telegraph poles as waymarkers.
By the time the city was nothing but a blur of smog behind me, I was not sure that my legs could turn another revolution. I didn’t so much dismount from the bike, as fall off it onto the kerb. Mike helped me to my feet and poured me into the cool interior of the Prius.
He cracked open an energy drink. I drank it too fast, gorging on the sugar and caffeine. Some of it splattered down my top. I wiped the sticky residue from my chin, no longer embarrassed at my lack of co-ordination. This was who I was, and if Mike was going to love me he would have to love what I was:
A klutz.
*
Not every story can have a happy ending. Eileen had not been the same since Christmas. She hardly spoke anymore, as if the nightmare had pushed her further into her shell.
There would be no more Inuit kisses.
That moment of reprieve on the floor of the mobile library would be the last time she acknowledged that I was her daughter. It was the final burst of light before the sun dipped beneath the horizon. For Eileen, there would be only darkness.
She would never be able to share my future. Just a couple of days before, I had received an email from the University of Chicago, offering me a place the following September.
I’d be majoring in Neuroscience. My dream come true. When I told Mike, he leapt so high his fist hit the ceiling.
“Way to go!” he shouted.
But nothing was as simple as a game of soccer. As an official soccer girlfriend, I’d researched the game. I discovered that one of the pleasures of kicking a ball around for ninety minutes was that at the end there was usually a winner. If not, it was decided by penalty shoot-out. Not so in my life.
I had both won and lost.
According to the email, I had until midnight Central Standard Time on May 1st to make a decision whether to accept the college place. I had just five weeks to decide whether to leave my mom.
No time at all.
*
Mike kissed a tear on my cheek.
“Are you sad?” he asked.
“I’m happy,” I said. We sat in the Prius as I finished the last of the energy drink. “I’m really happy. I want to go to college. It’s what my mom did, you know? Poetry was her thing. And Russian novels.”
“Not your style?”
“Mike, I’m not going near another library. It’s Kindle for me, or nothing. Even the smell of books takes me back there. Let’s not talk about it. It’s still weeks away.”
I kissed him back – on the mouth. I had become a lot more confident in doing this, I can tell you.
“You taste like Pirate Brew,” he said.
He tasted it again, just to make sure that he liked it. We sat like that for a while in the front seat of the car, until the sunshine faded. A dark cloud had risen from the north.
“Looks like rain,” he said.
“We’ve got to finish this, Mike. For his family’s sake. I’m rested now.”
“There’s no point getting wet. We could pick up the trail later,” he said. “There’s a Tex-Mex further on. We could refuel, and then come back to the exact same spot after the rain has passed. We have GPS – we have the technology!”
Item: ‘Teenage boys and their stomachs’.
I must never forget that this is their second most important organ. Mike needed feeding at regular intervals or he would probably turn into a green monster.
“Okay, we’ll have lunch,” I said, and watched Mike sprint to collect the bike.
All around, life was poking through the soil. Spring flowers had unfurled by the roadside, taking what nourishment they could from the weak sunshine. The world had awoken, fragile from its sleep but thrumming with the hope of what was to come.
Mike jumped onto the bike and rode in a wide circle, standing on the pedals and yelping for joy. He raced it back to the car, skidding to a halt by the tailgate.
He was seventeen going on seven.
When he opened the hatch, something more than warm air rushed in:
Terror flooded into the car and engulfed me.
I had been cycling along a trail left by a terrified little boy. He had felt the same cracks in the road that had jolted the thin tyres of my bike. He had been buried alive in the cupboard at the back of the bookmobile. While cycling the route of his abduction, though surrounded by acres of open prairie, I’d felt trapped by invisible wooden walls.
That feeling overwhelmed me again.
When the tailgate opened I felt a ghostly pressure squeeze my arms into my sides. My legs were paralysed, cramped not by the footwell but by the locked door of the cupboard.
I was reading Marcus’s trail, even though I was in a car!
The tailgate slammed shut, but still the alien emotions overwhelmed me. Mike slid in next to me and closed the door.
“Let’s do it!” he said, no doubt thinking of tamales with green salsa. Then he noticed me sitting rigid in the seat, staring at the asphalt ribbon ahead of us.
“Scout?” he asked. “You okay?”
“You know the Faraday cage thing?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I think Faraday’s gonna have to get a new cage. I can see the trail, Mike. Sitting here, from inside the car – I can still feel Marcus’s trail.”
“With the door shut?”
“Makes no difference.”
I turned and looked behind me, seeing the trail stretching backwards in time, like a tragedy unfolding in reverse. My talent had never been so strong. And then I turned towards the front again and gazed through the windshield.
The boy’s journey left its mark on the blacktop. I sensed fear. Each ridge on the country road was a spike in the boy’s anxiety, a landmark for me to follow.
“Marcus came this way,” I said. “I can sense his trail, clear as day.”
“Shall we follow it?” Mike said, his hunger forgotten.
“I don’t know where it’ll lead,” I replied.
Mike slid the Prius into ‘drive’, and we crept forward. Speed made no difference – the trail was as strong as if I were running barefoot. I nodded to Mike, and he stepped on the gas.
It was like I was riding a rail – smooth and steady.
As surely as the day when I ran out into the rain without my trainers, my life had changed again. My talent had brought me trouble and it had brought me love. At times I’d felt cursed. It had nearly got me killed, though in the end it had rid the world of a monster. Now my ability had blossomed into something new and a little terrifying.
There were other missing children out there. As my powers grew, I could not ignore their pleas for help. I was a freak, that was for sure, but as we passed along Marcus’s trail I felt my body tremble with the potential of what I might do.
Neither I nor Mike knew where this journey would end. Or the journey after that.
All I knew was that, eventually, if you try hard enough, you will find what you are looking for.
Notes
* * *
1 That’s not its real name, but I’m not so keen on a lawsuit.
2It’s 25.
3 She must have made that name up, right?
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