He leaned against the door frame, his head against the darkly stained trim, weary. His gaze caught the middle distance. “This is all Dodge’s baby,” he said. “He’s the one who knows. The man with the plan.”
“Dodge is a first-class moron. And you’ve always thought so. Do the right thing, Cade,” I pleaded. “If you love us, find a way to get us out of here.”
His phone rang, and he scrambled to answer it. “Yes,” he said as he hurried out of the room, skipping down the stairs toward Dodge. “This is Cade Olmstead.”
I sat down hard on the mattress and turned TJ around in my lap so his face pressed against my chest. He gnawed his fist, still so hungry, and submitted to my desperate cuddling with placid ease. I breathed shallowly, straining to hear his father’s words from far away. When I failed, I rested my cheek against his small downy head and, with dense, choking sobs, cried.
* * *
“There’s no reason for me to do that if you’re not going to let him get to the hospital anyway,” Cade was saying into his phone. I had strapped TJ against my hip in the baby sling and cautiously ventured downstairs. Despite all of Dodge’s warnings, an hour had passed and nothing had happened yet; it seemed harder to believe we were in imminent danger of a SWAT team invasion. “You’re not following what I’m saying here. He’s got surgery at eight a.m. My wife’s not involved in this. She just wants to take him down to the hospital in Laconia and get it done.”
He saw me standing at the door of the pantry and waved me away, but I only moved a single step back. The last of my loyalty to him had melted away with his confession, and even in the midst of far greater concerns I seethed from the insult of it. From the corner between the cellar door and the kitchen, Dodge stood watching the local news on the living-room television, using the remote to switch between channels. Of course our house was the central image on every station, either a straight-on shot from the road or an aerial from the helicopter I had been hearing overhead. The memory of my mother’s plane on the red desert floor unfolded itself in my mind, and a shudder flickered down my spine as I wrapped a protective arm around TJ. Our story wasn’t going to end the way hers had. It couldn’t. I was here and aware, moving about that house on the screen, and I wouldn’t let that happen.
“Well, just move your damned vans for half a second,” Cade said. “Or have somebody take her down there, even. When you say ‘I’m sorry, that’s not possible,’ you know how that sounds to me? Because it’s really the only thing I want to talk to you about.”
There was a long silence, and then Cade rolled his eyes. “Fine, never mind, then,” he said, his voice taking on a sarcastic, bitchy edge. “Then how about you call me back when you actually want to negotiate instead of just try to fuck with me? Because that’s not going to go real well.”
He clicked off the phone. “Did you really just hang up on them?” I asked. “You can’t do that. You have to talk. TJ and I need to leave.”
“They’ll let you leave. They just won’t let him get his surgery.”
“Well, fine, then. Just let us walk out and we’ll worry about that later.”
Cade laughed as if I’d made a joke. “Yeah, right. Then what incentive would they have not to break down the door and take me with them? We’re a family. Nobody’s leaving. If he can’t get the surgery there’s no point anyway.”
I looked incredulously at Cade, then at Dodge, who had eased himself down onto the sofa with one arm behind his head and his gun resting on his belly like a bag of chips, eyes still fixed on the TV. “You can’t hold us hostage, Cade.”
“I’m not holding you hostage. We’re married. We’re sticking together, that’s all. Like always.”
He raised his eyebrows in an imploring way, a puppy-dog look, but distraction shifted his gaze to the television. His phone buzzed again, but rested ignored against his hip as he watched the live helicopter shots. Its incessant vibration stirred a memory of one of our first nights together, when he kissed me with escalating passion against a shadowed stadium wall after a football game, his BlackBerry vibrating against my thigh the entire time. Once upon a time I had wished the damn thing would go silent just for a little while. Now I desperately hoped he would answer it.
“I’m getting impatient with all their back-and-forth chitter-chattering,” Dodge said in response to the sound. “Shit or get off the pot, that’s what I say. One of us ought to go out there and stir something up. Give ’em some real incentive.”
“Shut up, Dodge,” Cade said, but he sounded listless this time. From the cellar, I heard Candy’s syrupy voice speaking, smooth and level. Drew was moaning. I cast a long, measuring look on Cade, then bolted across the living room to the door.
“Stop her!” Dodge barked, but he was already up and grabbing at me, his arm folding across my chest as I scrambled with the locks. TJ howled and gripped at my shirt. As Dodge dragged me backward I felt a small cold impact at the back of my head: his gun. I braced one arm around TJ and clawed at Dodge’s arm with the other, twisting and struggling, too overwhelmed by purpose to feel afraid. The arm only tightened, and TJ squalled with fury.
“Sweet Jesus,” Cade said. Dodge’s balance swerved, and the feeling of the hard steel went away. Cade’s voice ramped up louder, tense as the springs of a trap. “Christ, let her go already.”
“Take her back upstairs.”
He released me roughly, and I pulled TJ against my chest to try to calm him. He screamed to the end of the air in his lungs, his round face inflamed with rage. “Give me the baby,” said Cade. His voice was conciliatory.
“Not on your life.”
“C’mon, Jill. Let me talk to them some more before you go running out there and get you and TJ shot up. It isn’t going to be much longer.”
I looked past him to Dodge, who met my gaze with a pointed glare. He slid his gun back into his shoulder holster, slowly. Cade prodded my waist, and I tramped back up the stairs.
Back in the attic room, Candy’s boys were still riveted on the laptop screen. The devil’s third eye, Dodge always called it. I took it back from Matthew and tried to set up the network connection again, but it wouldn’t work. “Damn it,” I muttered.
“Aunt Jilly said a bad word,” intoned Mark.
I set the laptop back in their eager hands and gnawed my nails, gazing out the window at the trucks that seemed to have doubled in number. The broken thunder of the news helicopter vibrated the glass. My hands shook, and the memory of Dodge’s gun planted behind my ear loomed so large in
my mind that all my strategic thoughts of escape seemed to have shriveled. That was the goal, I supposed—to intimidate me into obedience, to keep me quiet and scared. As I sat against the wall and pulled TJ against me to nurse, I pictured Dave standing in a hospital corridor, watching the clock, and I felt the anger inside me rise to a boil. They were destroying my plan to escape. All this time I had held out for TJ’s sake, and now they were making all those miserable weeks pointless. Now perhaps I would be charged as an accessory, because I had known things I should have reported, tried and failed to hedge my bets about Cade’s conscience and his sanity. At the very least the coming weeks would be a mess of lawyers, two-way mirrors—possibly even foster care for our son. I could lose my child. He would become motherless, just like me, but it would be so much worse for him. He would be shucked into a system whose goal was merely to keep him alive.
That’s unproductive thinking, Jill. I heard the shadow of my mother’s voice behind the thought. Calm down. Remember, don’t quit five minutes before the miracle happens.
“Aunt Jilly, I’m hungry,” said John.
“Let me see if Grandma’s got any snacks up here,” I replied, doubtful. TJ had fallen asleep at my breast, and I eased him back into the sling before rising awkwardly from the floor. There would be nothing in the craft room, but perhaps there was some food squirreled away on the shelves on the landing. I closed the craft-room door behind me to soften the laptop’s hearty chime of “Yankee Doodle”
and began rifling through the clutter on the bookshelf. Three stories down there was enough food to feed all of Frasier for a year, but nobody had thought to hand up so much as a box of graham crackers before they confined us to the attic. Sixty thousand dollars, I remembered Cade saying as I looked over the basement in wonder. He had mocked his family then, so sure he was nothing like any of them.
The bookshelf search turned up nothing, and I wasn’t eager to return to tell John he would have to go hungry. My back aching from TJ’s weight, I walked with a gentle sway to my gait to keep him asleep, back and forth in front of the attic fan. Then, as I approached it once again, my eye caught a movement just beyond its slats. I stopped and peered through the mesh and past the slats. Two men in black SWAT gear were moving around behind a truck that blocked the driveway. My heart pounded, and TJ, as if sensing my surge of adrenaline, raised his eyebrows high above his closed eyes and stirred. I rushed to the craft closet and pulled out a torn length of white sheet to drape from the window. But as I unsnapped the grimy closures and braced my hands against the sash, another motion caught my gaze. The window below mine opened and the lean black silhouette of an automatic rifle appeared, then Dodge, easing his upper body out the window to sight in.
I glanced at the closed door of the craft room, then at the closet still wide open beside it. In a few efficient movements I grabbed Matthew’s rifle from the closet, reloaded it and took aim through the venting slats for the fan. The pop of the gun cut the air; I felt the flail of TJ’s arm against my back, and then Dodge slumped half out the window. The rifle fell from his hands and clattered against the porch roof. Blood bloomed on the back of his head, long streaks of it unfurling like a lily.
Someone screamed. A man. I guessed it was Cade.
I shoved the gun back into Leela’s closet and buried it beneath the bolts of cloth. “What the fuck!” I heard him shouting from the second floor. “What the fuck!”
I slipped back into the workroom and locked the door behind me with the old key that jutted from the lock. Matthew stared at me as I hurried in. He asked, “Did Uncle Cade go and shoot himself?”
“Maybe.”
“That’s what happens. My dad says so. That’s what happens when you don’t know your target.”
I nodded and peeked out the shade.
“Uncle Cade’s sort of stupid with guns.”
“He sure is.”
Cade’s howling had turned into a wail. After a few moments a long shrill sound from Candy rose up, as well. I heard the sound of the attic door being thrown open, and my heart thumped in my ears, a double thud that resonated like being underwater. I felt as though I could feel all four chambers pumping, each distinct. TJ, sensing my anxiety, pulled up his legs inside the sling and twisted against my side. But he did not awaken.
“The hell you didn’t!” Cade shouted, and without a reply from Candy I had to assume he was talking on the phone. “Then why the fuck is my brother-in-law hanging dead out my window?”
Candy began to sob in a messy, noisy way, punctuated with fresh wails. “All right, all right,” Cade said. “All of them, yeah. Take ’em all.”
Relief flooded through me. I wrapped my arms around TJ and stood just inside the attic door, prepared to rush out as soon as Cade opened it. But when he did, he blocked my exit with his arm. “Not you. Candy’s boys.”
All the relief I had felt turned abruptly to dread. The boys ducked beneath his arm and raced down the stairs like water down a drain. I tried to push past, but he shifted to stand in my path. His face was pale, eyes frantic. “Stay there, Jill.”
“What? Why?”
“It’s not safe for you to go out. They shot Dodge. Candy wants her boys, fine, but you’re not going anywhere. Not as long as they’ve got a sniper on us.”
So that was what he believed. I had no problem playing along. “But they’re not going to shoot us. It’s safer for everybody if TJ and I go, too. Why would you want your son to stay here if there’s a sniper on the roof? Just let us go, Cade. If they see you’re willing to be reasonable, they’re less likely to rush in on you.”
“And there’s less to stop them from shooting me if they do.” I looked at him in dismay, and he combed both hands back through his hair. “Sorry, Jill, but that’s where it’s at right now. You know I’m out of cigarettes? Fine frickin’ time for that to happen.”
Just leave anyway, I thought. Shove past him and run. But I looked at the gun on his hip and thought better of it. I didn’t think he would hurt me or TJ, but I had never thought he would hold Drew Fielder hostage, either. “If I go, maybe I can negotiate for you better than anybody else can,” I suggested. “I’ve got more sympathy for you.”
He glanced toward me. I kept my expression neutral, but in the effort to do so I realized I wasn’t lying. More than anger, I felt pity for him. He could have been something wonderful, but here he was, whiling down the minutes that would end in him losing everything. Prison was going to be ugly for Cade. He was too good-looking and too easily cowed by another man’s will.
His phone buzzed. He looked at it, then handed it to me and sat on the floor, leaning back against the craft closet. I stared at the phone and then at him, and asked, “What am I supposed to do, answer it?”
“Yeah. I’m tired.”
I turned it on. “This is Jill.”
“Jill!”
The sound of Dave’s voice bewildered me. I hurried into the workroom and turned away from Cade. I couldn’t utter a response. Dave’s voice came on again. “Is that you, really? I thought I was going to talk to Cade. Are you doing all right?”
Glancing back at Cade, I gauged his reaction, but he only stared at the wall in a passive way. “I don’t understand,” I replied carefully.
“They’ve had me talking to him for a couple hours now,” Dave explained. “I got your email and then I saw the news, and so I called the police. They said sometimes it helps if someone with a connection to the family tries to help broker a truce, so they put me on. I’m trying to get you out of there. Is the baby all right? Are you?”
“We’re both here. We’re not hurt. Cade’s trying to process whatever just happened.”
“Yeah. They say they need him to be clear on the fact that they don’t know what the situation is with Dodge Powell, and they’re investigating it, but they don’t believe it was one of their men. They say they’re not in a position to retrieve the body. Do you know the condition of the hostage?”
“I’m not sure. I’ve been up in the attic all this time.” At this Cade scowled at me. “What Cade wants…is to talk to a lawyer who will put together a good case for him.”
“Am I on speaker? Can he hear me?”
“No.”
“Good. What Cade really wants is for everybody to go home and forget this ever happened. In the end the choices are going to be that either he comes out or the SWAT team comes in. It’s a lot better for everyone, especially him, if he picks the first one. Tell me what it’s going to take to make that happen.”
I thought about the things Cade wanted. Not one of them sounded like anything that anyone could provide any longer. “I don’t know, Dave,” I replied. “If I did I’d tell you. He’s just tired.”
“Is that why he had you take the call? He’s still armed, though, right?”
“Yeah.” I looked at Cade again. “He could use some cigarettes. I think that’s what he wants.”
Cade gave me a listless thumbs-up.
Dave snorted with irritation. “Duly noted. Put him on the phone.”
I handed it to Cade, who clicked it off. Draping his arms loosely over his bent knees, he gazed up at the small round window, looking thoughtful and faraway. My stomach tightened with the fear that he was putting together how Dodge might have been shot just below that window. His back pressed against the door of the closet where the rifle still lay hidden.
He said, “Lay him down.”
“You mean TJ?”
“Yeah. He’s asleep anyway.”
I looked around the room as though seeking out a place to set him, but I was buying time, trying to discern Cade’s purpose. “I can’t,” I told him. “He’ll wake up if I take him off my back.”
Cade got up from the floor and, with gentle hands, braced TJ in the sling. I fumbled at the closure and loosened it enough that Cade could lift him. When he opened the closet door with his free hand, I caught my breath. But he pulled out a crocheted blanket from the shelf below the fabric bolts, shook it open and dropped it on the floor where he had just been sitting. Onto its folds he laid TJ, who didn’t stir. Then he stepped into the workroom, where I still stood, and closed the door so softly that the click of its latch made barely any sound.
“C’mere, Jill,” he said.
I didn’t move, but he came to me. He kissed me, working my shirt down over my shoulders as he unbuttoned it, letting his head drop to kiss my shoulder, my collarbone. I felt the warmth of his breath, the tip of his tongue, but as if from a great distance.
“You’re the most beautiful woman in the world,” he said, rasping a whisper. “I love you. And I love our son.”
His phone vibrated against the front of my thigh. He lifted me with one arm and set me on the worktable, then eased me onto my back. The worn wood pressed against the back of my skull and my tailbone, but that felt distant, too. From my neck to my thigh he ran his hands down my body, touching me as a blind man touches the face of a loved one, as if yearning to burn it into his memory. Give him whatever he wants, I thought. He doesn’t care about getting out of here alive. You do.
His voice rose in frustration. “C’mon, Jill. Don’t be cold to me. I don’t want to feel like I’m raping you or something.”
My laugh was short and sharp. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to relax. Do you?”
He shrugged. His expression was entirely benign. He slapped his phone onto the table, then his gun, before unbuckling his jeans and letting them slide down. “Clear your mind,” he suggested.
I diverted my gaze to the space above his shoulder. Leela’s barn stars, each painted in a cheerful variation of the Stars and Stripes, marched across the wall just below where the roof vaulted. Here and there yellow bows stiffened by wire and starch curled beneath them, like fossils recalling a battering wind. I remembered, all at once, Elias singing “Two Highways” in quiet harmony, watching out the window as we flew past the deep woods, the last of his cigarette smoldering between two fingers. A terrible ache for him opened in me out of the clear blue. My eyes burned inside and a sob choked into my throat, but I held both at bay. Cade tugged down my shorts by the waistband, and I closed my eyes, but it only made my mind’s image of Elias grow sharper and more true.
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