Steel Breeze

by Douglas Wynne

  Desmond trotted to the edge of the woods, scanning them for the half-concealed trail. It was back in the direction of the sandbox, but for a child who had to walk all the way around the fence rather than going over it, there were other paths he would come to first. And they might all look the same to him.

  “Lucas!” he called.

  No reply came from the woods. He walked up the first trail he came to, listening to the wind in the trees, the noise of the playground fading with every step. His stomach revolted against the idea that he was moving away from the playground, away from the zone in which he and Lucas had last been together.

  The paths here at the edge of the woods were chaotic and neglected, blocked by fallen trees and choked with brambles. Heavy rain in the preceding weeks had left the ground swollen, spongy, and muddy. In places, the water had pooled into miniature ponds the length of a man, impossible to cross without boots or a willingness to get soaked. Desmond knew that these would have stopped Lucas from going forward in several places, and he was able to rule out certain paths. He saw no children’s sneaker prints, but the grass was so thick and the mud so wet that he couldn’t be sure the ground would have held an impression. The water was too shallow for drowning, he thought. Or at least, too shallow to conceal a body. He’d heard that a child could drown in mere inches of water. He couldn’t believe he was having to consider such things and tried to remind himself that he was wired with an active imagination, a predisposition for chasing remote possibilities to vivid and devastating, yet unlikely conclusions.

  As he neared the place where he had taken Lucas before, he came to a wooden plank that had been dragged across the path to make a bridge over one of the larger puddles. The wood was mud stained with child-sized sneaker treads. He couldn’t be sure, but they could have been Lucas’s. He ran across the board and searched the ground on the far side for more prints but found none.

  His mind reeling, he turned, and there: a patch of dark blue about thirty feet up the trail, not the color of sky but a shade of fabric. Walking toward it, he could make out voices, low and conversational, one higher in pitch—Lucas’s voice.

  “Lucas!” he shouted and broke into a run.

  As he approached the clearing, the blue swatch turned out to be a hoodie sweatshirt, actually more a shade of indigo, over black jeans, hood up. The person wearing it was shorter than Desmond, maybe five foot six or thereabout, back turned to him. The figure’s hands were tucked into the pockets of the hoodie—a non-threatening pose, and yet something about the posture was iron straight, rooted to the ground and coiled to spring.

  Lucas stood beside the stranger, their bodies not touching, looking at something on the ground. At the sound of his name, he turned toward Desmond, and his face lit up with a smile. “Daddy!” he cried. “Look, Daddy, a duckie!”

  Desmond followed his son’s pointing finger to a black puddle and saw a mallard bobbing on the glassy water. When he looked at Lucas again, the figure in the hoodie was gone.

  How the hell was that even possible? The guy had been right there a second ago. Desmond swept Lucas up in his arms and held him tight to his heaving chest, spinning slowly on his heels and searching the woods. There—a flash of indigo between the trees, deeper in the forest, already twenty yards distant. With as much alpha dog as he could inject into his voice, Desmond hollered, “Hey! Wait! Come back here.” But the figure only ran faster and vanished behind the branches.

  Desmond set Lucas on the ground, squatted to his level, and examined him. Aside from the shy, concerned look that Desmond recognized as the face Lucas wore when trying to read if he was angry, he saw no signs of harm or distress. “Are you okay?” Desmond asked.

  Lucas bobbed his head. “Did you see the duckie?”

  “Yeah, buddy. But who was that man, and why did you go with him?”

  Lucas shrugged.

  “Did he tell you his name?”

  “No, Daddy.”

  “Lucas, why did you go with someone you don’t know?”

  “I went to get acorns for my dump, and he asked me if I wanted to see a duckie.”

  “Listen to me. That’s not okay. You can’t just leave the playground and go with someone you don’t know. Remember?”

  “But you said it’s okay to talk to grownups at the playground. Right, Daddy? You said it’s okay.”

  It was true that every time some friendly mother tried to strike up a conversation with Lucas in a place like this, every time Lucas was being shy and silent, Desmond told him that it was okay to say hello, to answer a question about his name or age. And fuck if it didn’t defy logic to tell a kid that it was okay to talk to strangers sometimes, but not others.

  “That’s only if I’m with you. No talking to strangers when I’m not with you, and definitely no following them. Understand?”

  Lucas turned his eyes down toward the mud at his feet.

  “Do you understand?”

  Lucas nodded. When he looked up, he found his delight again, and brightening, he said, “Do you see the duckie?”

  “Yeah, buddy, I see it. Come on. Let’s go home.”

  They were approaching the parking lot hand in hand, passing the bench where the old Asian man still sat alone, passing the deserted sandbox, when Lucas broke free of Desmond’s grasp and veered off to the side. Desmond turned to yell that they were going home now, that they were finished playing and he was losing his patience, when he saw what had caused the diversion. “Don’t forget dump, Daddy!” Lucas yelled, and Desmond could practically see the exclamation point in the air. For a four-year-old boy, if a thing is worth saying, it’s worth exclaiming, and if a place is worth going to, it’s worth running to.

  Lucas climbed over the sandbox wall, picked up the plastic truck, and threw it out of the box, freeing his hands for the climb back out. When the truck hit the ground, it rolled and something fell out of the dumper bucket. Desmond let out a short yelp at the sight—a naked Barbie doll, scratched and dirty from long neglect… headless.

  Desmond felt his muscles go limp. He dropped his laptop bag to the ground beside the plastic abomination. He spun around looking for the indigo hoodie, but there was no sign of Lucas’s trail guide unless he had ditched the sweatshirt. Black jeans on a fit young man? Couldn’t find that either. Lucas picked up the truck, but ignored the broken doll. He looked up at his father with concern.

  “Let’s go,” Desmond said. “Let’s get out of here.” He picked up the laptop and got a good look at the doll. For a second he considered taking it with him. It could be evidence. But evidence of what? There had been no crime committed here, and the doll didn’t look as if it had been purchased and damaged for the express purpose of fucking with him. Parents donated old toys to the sandbox all the time, and kids surely lost things here as well. The doll looked dirty enough, old enough, to have been buried under the sand for at least a year, unearthed today by chance.

  He resisted the urge to reach out and pick the thing up, and he tried to tell himself that this was rationality winning out, that he was avoiding the doll for Lucas’s benefit, to sidestep the questions that his interest in it would raise. But he knew the real reason he didn’t pick it up was the sickening fear that it triggered in the bottom of his belly.

  Chapter 2

  It was the dishes that haunted him in the months following Sandy’s death. Dirty dishes. What a stupid thing to be arguing about before going to bed in cold silence. What a small thing to get defensive about. He should have just owned it and said okay. But no, he’d had to go and get all self-righteous about how he couldn’t believe she was giving him shit for leaving dirty dishes in his study when the only reason he was eating in there in the first place was to grade papers while she was watching TV, even though he was the one who still had to read bedtime stories to Lucas at the end of a long day and couldn’t she just do the damned dishes herself? It was a shitty final exchange to have had with the woman he loved just hours before finding her decapitated in the back yard.

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nbsp; The day after the scare at the playground Desmond woke before Lucas and, plodding groggy-eyed into the living room, caught sight of the little plate of crumbs left over from Lucas’s grilled cheese dinner. How had he missed that? Well, he had been a bit distracted while they’d watched the Dumbo DVD for the umpteenth time. Lucas had a thing for his mother’s Disney collection, and a few favorite titles were kept in steady rotation. Dumbo was the current favorite, even though Lucas always wanted to skip the thunderstorm scene because it scared him.

  “Stay with me, Daddy. Watch this with me,” Lucas would implore, and Desmond would focus his eyes on the big-eared elephant while letting his mind play with the novel in progress—a notepad tucked into the couch cushion. But last night his mind hadn’t been on the book, it had been on the man in the indigo hoodie and the headless Barbie.

  He heard the coffee maker go into its gurgle-and-sputter stage and decided not to wait for it to beep. He pulled the pot out and poured his first cup while the machine dripped all over itself. Time to get some work done before Lucas woke up. Time to shift his mind to that other world, that imaginary world where his wife had a different name and could still be saved from the monster.

  He had lost his teaching job a few months after Sandy’s death for experimenting with the efficacy of alcohol as a pain-numbing, memory-erasing agent. He knew now that the firing had pained Principal Rosenbaum. The man had barely been able to do it, but Desmond had given him no other choice. The kids came first. Now, almost a year later, the drinking was behind him. But he hadn’t done the program, and maybe that was a little dangerous. He hadn’t found God instead of the program, either. In fact, that was his whole problem with the program: you had to surrender to a higher power. And Desmond still spent many a sleepless night ruminating on just what kind of power a higher power might have if He didn’t use it to prevent a loving mother from getting cut down by a crazy man.

  The drinking had stopped because of Lucas. Desmond couldn’t bear the thought of losing him to Sandy’s parents. Phil and Karen Parsons had made no secret of the fact that they thought Desmond was a sorry piece of shit for getting himself fired with a young child to raise. And he didn’t disagree with them on that score; he just wasn’t going to lose Lucas over it. So he’d cleaned up his act and started writing again, and the book, when it emerged, did the rest. It took care of him better than the booze ever could. He knew he would have to find work again soon—royalties from his last book were down to a trickle now, and the advance for the current one would only carry them so far—but for now, writing was keeping him sane, and keeping them both fed.

  Without a second income, they’d had to move to an apartment near the beach, and that wasn’t so nice, but it wasn’t exactly squalid either. Desmond knew he couldn’t have lived in the old house anymore anyway. Too many memories. The apartment felt a little bit like a vacation, and the book felt even more like one, but he knew damned well that he wasn’t on vacation from supporting Lucas, and that meant making the word quota every morning. Two-thousand words per day allayed his fears of failing as a provider.

  On the morning after the playground incident he didn’t get any words down. He sat at his desk and flipped open his laptop with the Orpheus file still running. Words were waiting for him on the page, but they were not his own. Three lines of unfamiliar text blazed up at him, separated by a line break from the unfinished sentence he’d started writing at the playground.

  Floating on dark water

  The solitary drake dives

  And seizes the worm

  Desmond stared at the words. Whatever meaning they held eluded him. But the meaning of the little poem didn’t matter, not yet anyway. What mattered was that it could be there at all, on his screen, in his home. And when the force of that meaning struck him, he stood up abruptly, knocking his chair over behind him and staggering back from the laptop as if he had opened it to discover a giant spider on the keyboard.

  He looked around the room. The apartment was a split-level and his desk was in a corner of the living room on the ground floor. There were two windows, both facing the sand-drifted street in front of the building. He went to the windows and checked the latches. Both were still locked from the inside. The front door was also still locked, the chain still fastened.

  He walked fast and light-footed to the kitchenette. There was a small window over the sink—too small for entry—and a couple of steps that led down to a little laundry alcove through which the back alley was accessible via the only other door to the outside.

  It was unlocked.

  Desmond ran up the stairs to Lucas’s bedroom.

  Lucas was tangled in the blankets, still sleeping. Desmond stood in the doorway catching his breath, waiting for his heart to slow down. He rested his elbow against the doorframe and whimpered into his forearm. Stepping lightly again, as if he hadn’t just made all the noise of a wild boar crashing through the brush, he moved to the closet door where a poster announcing A DAY WITH THOMAS THE TRAIN covered a door that had been coated with white paint so many times that it could no longer be fully closed. He took a deep breath and threw the door open with a long step backward, half expecting a blade to arc out at him from the darkness, but the closet held only Lucas’s clothes and puzzles.

  Lucas stirred in the bed. He looked like a different boy when he was sleeping, his face somehow older. Desmond thought about the backdoor downstairs in the laundry alcove. Had he left it unlocked last night? He didn’t think so, but could he rule that out with one-hundred-percent certainty? Yes, he thought he could. The locks on this place were kind of a joke, but he knew he used them vigilantly. He might have been a bit of a space case about that sort of thing before Sandy’s death, wandering around half in a creative trance while taking out the trash at the old house, forgetting to lock a door, but not anymore. Not after the murder. Right, Des?

  He went back downstairs to the laundry room and opened the door to the alley. The frame showed no signs of tampering, and it dawned on him that he shouldn’t be touching the knob, that it should be dusted for fingerprints. There didn’t appear to be any damage to the keyhole either, but he’d never examined it up close before, so he couldn’t say if all of the scratches around the slot had been there already.

  Fingerprinting. If he called Fournier about this they would probably want to check his laptop for prints too. And that would mean letting them look at the file. Desmond didn’t care for that idea at all. He needed to think this through before he made any calls.

  Desmond returned to his desk and glared at the text on the screen, stroking his beard. He had hovered over the machine from this standing position untold times over the years, pondering plot problems. Well, here was a good one. The lid on the computer hadn’t been opened since yesterday on the park bench when he’d noticed that Lucas was missing. The unfinished sentence above the haiku was the one he’d been working on then. It was a haiku, wasn’t it? He counted the syllables—eighteen. As a high school teacher, he had taught his students the seventeen-syllable (five-seven-five) form, but he also knew that that was just an English convention for a Japanese technique that didn’t exactly correlate. Still, this was a haiku. Someone had invaded his personal computer, possibly even his home, and had left him a message somehow related to Sandy’s murder.

  He thought back to the playground. He’d kept the laptop with him the entire time. There had been no opportunity for someone to type the lines there. And after the playground, when Lucas was hungry and they stopped for pizza, the computer had been locked in the car the entire time. Upon returning home, he had set it down on the desk.

  He read the poem again, and this time, knowing that Lucas was safe in his bed upstairs, he could focus on the words. He was pretty sure he knew what was being described, at least on the surface level, and he felt a deep unease crawling into his gut. Not wanting to touch the keyboard, he went to the coat rack by the front door and dug his smartphone out of his jacket pocket. He pulled up Google and typed: drake.

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sp; There were four meanings: The Elizabethan explorer, Francis Drake; some singer he was unfamiliar with; the term for a male duck; and a more obscure use—a name sometimes used to refer to a dragon. He vaguely recalled some reference Tolkien had made to “the fire drake.”

  A duck. A solitary duck, just like the one they had seen yesterday.

  A dragon, like you might find decorating a kimono, or a samurai sword.

  Desmond closed the browser window on his phone and typed in a number from memory.

  Half an hour later Desmond sat at his kitchen table across from Detective Chuck Fournier. The laptop sat between them, along with two cups of coffee and an open metal case that housed a horsehair brush, a jar of dusting powder, clear tape, and blank cards. Fournier had checked both the computer and the door for prints. He had found only Desmond’s on the computer and the outer doorknob, but had picked up another set from one of the windowpanes inside the door. It seemed likely that these would belong to the previous tenant or the landlord. If someone had indeed broken into the apartment to type the enigmatic haiku, then the intruder had worn gloves while handling the laptop and likely would have had them on the whole time. Fournier said he would run the prints through AFIS anyway.