by Rachel Ford
“No.”
“She talked to them, though,” Maisie said.
“What did she say?”
They were both silent for a long moment. Then, they spoke at once. “I don’t remember exactly,” she said.
“Something like ‘not again,’” Daniel said.
“‘Not another family,’ Maisie said. “That’s what it was: ‘not another family.’”
“Really? What did they say?”
“They told her to shut up, or she’d be joining us upstairs.”
‘Another family.’ Not good. “What else did they say? Did they say anything when they took you? Did Mrs. Miller say anything else? Why don’t you start at the beginning: tell me everything that happened, and everything they said, okay?”
So they did. There wasn’t much to tell that I hadn’t already guessed, or they hadn’t already told. But there was one thing – one giant, glaring hole in my half-formed plan.
They’d been walking back from the bathrooms when an SUV pulled up. Joey jumped out with a gun and warned them that he’d shoot me if they didn’t get into the vehicle.
It had been a bluff, obviously, since they hadn’t sent Jimmy for me yet. But the kids didn’t know that, so they’d complied.
Which is where I learned the piece I’d missed so far: there was a fourth guy. Or, rather, a fourth henchman; a woman. She’d been driving the kidnap vehicle.
“Shannon,” Daniel said. “That’s her name.”
“Shit,” I said. A fourth person complicated matters.
It made sense from a logistics point of view. I should have anticipated it. How else would they have been able to pull off two, near simultaneous kidnappings, all while holding the Millers hostage?
They needed someone to drive each of the kidnap vehicles. And they needed someone to hold a gun on the kids. They didn’t need a second guy with Jimmy, because by then they’d already snatched the kids. They knew I would play ball.
But they needed someone armed to take Maisie and Daniel; they needed someone to hold a gun on them, to make sure they didn’t try to run. And they needed a getaway driver, while the other guy was handling the kidnapping.
Four people, not three. Another person I had to take out or avoid if we were going to get out of here. And maybe more than one. Maybe there was a fifth or even a sixth bad guy wherever Shannon was.
Not good.
The rest of the story followed my own pretty closely. They’d been hurried out of the park, down Jay Road, and to the farmhouse. Shannon and Joey marched them inside where they met the Millers. Then, a quarter of an hour or so later, I showed up.
“And they didn’t say anything about what they’re doing here?”
“No.”
I nodded in the dark. Just a reflex as I walked myself through the problem. Four kidnappers, minimum. Not the first time they’d done this. Not the first time they’d done this while holding the Millers hostage, even.
I frowned, remembering the pickup in the yard with the RV and the Indiana plates. Not another family.
Did the RV belong to this other family, the one Mrs. Miller mentioned? If so – why? Why take a family and a RV? Did they know Joey and gang? Had they stumbled on their identity the same way the kids had?
And maybe more pressingly, what had happened to them? So far, I’d been operating under the assumption that these guys didn’t mean to kill us. It seemed to make sense. If they meant to kill us, why keep us alive at all?
This wasn’t a city, or some kind of community that’d have rules about discharging guns inside the village limits. We were in the middle of nowhere, with fields and forest and swamp all around. In Wisconsin, for God’s sake. No one would think twice if they heard a few gunshots.
So killing us now would be the smart play, if that’s what they intended.
Then again, they’d already taken one family. And I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of them: just a lonely RV hidden by the shed. So what had happened to them?
I thought about the guy in the tarp: young and rugged looking. Maybe the kind of guy who would figure a camping trip was the perfect family getaway. Probably the kind of guy who would try to defend his family, if kidnappers took them.
“Alright,” I said. “Let’s get comfortable, and I’ll think of a way to get us out of here, okay?”
Without all of us ending up in tarps of our own.
Chapter Eleven
Deputy Austin Wagner, 1:48 PM
I stopped at a gas station and refueled and grabbed a cup of coffee. Mostly, I was there for the coffee. The tank would have waited until tomorrow. But the coffee was necessary.
I still hadn’t heard from Jade, and I hadn’t got much sleep since she’d packed her bags. I’d thought about sending her a message. I remembered her saying not to, and I didn’t really know what to say anyway.
I’m sorry someone dumped and then retrieved a dead body. I’ll try to arrange my homicide cases on a more convenient schedule in future.
What exactly did she expect?
Granted, I could have texted. But it honestly hadn’t crossed my mind. I was working, for God’s sake. Busy. She knew where I was. She knew I wouldn’t be there if I didn’t have to.
At least, I thought she did. But now she was gone, and I was alone. So maybe she hadn’t. Maybe I’d thought wrong.
Too late now.
I sipped my coffee and scowled. It tasted like it had been sitting in the pot for hours. It should be a crime to ask for money for something that tasted that bad.
But I needed the caffeine, even if it did taste like ass. So I kept taking sips as I brought up google on my laptop. I typed in the name Matthew Callaghan and hit enter.
The screen redrew with a number of thumbnails and articles. I saw small pictures of a young, redheaded guy next to headlines about an armored truck hijacking.
I brought up the first article, and the screen redrew again. This time, I was on a local, Boston area news channel’s site, with its logo and navigation bar at the top. Then came a headline.
And then came a picture of a smiling guy who looked like he walked straight out of the sketch of Owen Day’s mysterious dead guy. There were differences, of course. The guy in the picture had a scar on his chin, and a broader face than the guy in the sketch. He had a big, cheery smile that reached his eyes. The look of a guy who was really happy with life. Not an easy thing for a sketch of a corpse to recreate.
But I had no doubt, looking at Matthew Callaghan’s picture, that this was who Owen Day had been describing to our sketch artist. No doubt at all.
Which meant – what? Armed robbers from Massachusetts were hiding out in Sheboygan, Wisconsin? Or they’d passed through, dumping their victim’s body?
I chewed on that for a minute while I drank my coffee – which was so burnt it practically required chewing too.
Then I pulled out my phone, and dialed Owen Day’s number. At this point, I was speculating. I was jumping to conclusions based on my interpretation of a sketch detailing what someone else saw.
That was no way to do it. Not when I had the witness right here, just a call away.
I could show him the picture of Matthew Callaghan. I could ask him if this was the guy he’d seen. If it was, I’d call Travers. If it wasn’t, well, I wouldn’t get the FBI unnecessarily involved in Sheboygan’s business.
The phone rang, and rang, and rang. Finally, I reached a voicemail box. A greeting, if it could be called that, played. Mr. Day’s voice invited me to leave a message in a tone so uninterested that it seemed more of a challenge than a real invitation.
Somehow, it matched what I knew of the guy. He’d never struck me as Mr. Sociable. I shook my head and waited for the beep. “Mr. Day, this is Deputy Wagner. I need to speak to you about the incident on Jay Road. If you can give me a call at your earliest convenience, I would appreciate it.”
I left my number and hung up. He’d be on the trails or in the lake, I knew, either not looking at his phone or out of reception altogether. But
he’d been pretty conscientious so far. I figured I’d hear back from him before the end of my shift.
And then I’d know what to do.
* * *
We’d huddled together in a dusty corner of the room. Maisie repeated that she was scared. Daniel said nothing. But he was shaking. So for the better part of the first half hour, I didn’t do much thinking. I just held them close and talked low.
We were going to get out of this. I’d take care of them, no matter what. I promised them that, and I meant it.
Daniel stopped shaking. The tension in Maisie’s shoulders started to relax. “I should have picked somewhere else,” she said. “Not here.”
“The place isn’t the problem,” I said. “You couldn’t know these guys would be here.”
“Are you going to kill them, Uncle Owen?” Daniel asked.
“Uh…hopefully it doesn’t come to that.”
“You killed people in the army, didn’t you?”
“When I had to, yes.”
“You should kill them.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. It wasn’t even that he was wrong – these guys had killed at least two people, the first armored truck driver and the guy in the tarp. Maybe they’d killed a whole family. But whether someone deserved to die or not wasn’t exactly the kind of thing I wanted Daniel worrying about.
“You should have them arrested,” Maisie said. “So they can go to prison.”
“If I can, I will,” I said. “But our main priority is going to be getting out of here.”
We fell into silence, which lasted several minutes. At least, it seemed like several minutes. I didn’t have any way to actually measure the passage of time. The room remained its dark, silent self.
Then, Daniel shifted. “What’s that?”
I sat up straight. “What?”
“I heard it too,” Maisie said. “A knocking.”
I hadn’t, but I strained my ears. Maybe someone had shown up at the front door. Maybe we could figure out a way to signal to them that we were in trouble.
Then, I heard it: a soft, muffled sound. Not from the front door, but closer than that. Much closer. It lasted for about five seconds. Then, it was gone.
Maisie scrambled to her feet. “There it is again.”
“I hear it,” I said. “It’s coming from the closet.”
“It’s probably a mouse,” Daniel said.
Maisie whimpered.
He might have been right. It could have been some kind of rodent bumping something off a shelf. But for Maisie’s benefit, I said, “Mice can’t knock.”
“Then what is it?”
“I don’t know. But I’m going to find out.”
I got up and made my way to the closet door a second time, by feel as before. I opened the door just as the knocking resumed a third time: another five seconds of steady tapping. No mouse. That was for damned sure.
This was a deliberate series of knocks against the far closet wall: three short, staccato taps, then three longer, duller sounds, and the starting sequence all over again.
Morse code. Three dots, three dashes, three dots again. SOS.
I pushed past the dusty old garments and headed to the end wall of the six-foot space. I tapped out the same sequence.
Dot dot dot. Dash dash dash. Dot dot dot. SOS.
The response was immediate this time: a repeated SOS.
“There’s someone here,” I said to the kids. “Someone besides us.”
I thought of the layout of the upstairs as we’d reached the landing: a hall, six rooms. This would be the room adjacent to ours, probably the wall of another closet in a matching twelve by twelve room, each closet about three feet deep and six feet wide.
Another captive. Maybe whoever had survived from the family Mrs. Miller mentioned, the first captives.
The kids crowded behind me, peppering me with questions – questions I couldn’t answer.
“Who is it?”
“Will they help us?”
“I don’t know yet,” I said. “Give me a minute.”
Then I tapped out the number three:
Dot dot dot dash dash.
For a long fifteen seconds, nothing happened.
“What’s going on?” Maisie whispered.
I repeated the signal, and again nothing happened, for eight long seconds. I knew, because I counted them off.
Then, the tapping started again.
Dot dot dot dash dot.
The signal for verified. Message understood.
I nodded in the dark. Whoever this was, they understood more than SOS. But maybe not well. Maybe they’d had to think about it, long and hard. Maybe that’s why there’d been the delay.
So I tapped out U?
Dot dot dash. Dot dot dash dash dot dot.
A few seconds later, I got my reply: three.
“What are they saying?” Daniel asked.
“That there’s three of them,” I said. “Or else, they’re just repeating what I said. I’m not a hundred percent sure.”
Then, I hushed them as the tapping started again.
Dash dot dot dot. Dash dot dot dot.
I translated as they tapped. “B…b.”
The tapping ceased. I frowned. “BB?” I said again. “What does that mean?”
“Baby,” Maisie said.
“Baby?” I repeated. “How?”
“It just does. People use it all the time. You know, online?”
I didn’t know, but I figured she knew what she was talking about. Kids seemed to have their own internet language nowadays. So I turned my mind to what it meant in context. “Okay. So…shit. They’ve got a baby?”
“I guess they must.”
I tapped out “U OK?” I was inventing an abbreviated language of mine.
They tapped out, “4 now.”
We spent the next half hour or so communicating through the wall, one letter at a time, slowly and painfully. My mystery correspondent asked me to repeat or rephrase myself more than once. They had to restart words and drop letters. They abbreviated words and used letter combinations that made no sense to me. The kids recognized them and translated accordingly.
The abbreviations might have been for brevity’s sake. But the restarts and errors confirmed my theory that they weren’t proficient at Morse code. It was probably something they’d learned years ago, maybe for a school project. Maybe as part of some kind of hobby.
Enough for them to get by now, but not well.
Still, I got to know a little about them. There were three people in the next room: two adults and a baby. Joey and his crew had kidnapped them and were holding them for unknown reasons.
They confirmed that Joey had three people working with him, for a total of four: three men and one woman. Joey, Jimmy, Shannon, and the guy with the hair.
These basics took almost all of the half hour. This in turn convinced me that there had to be a better way to communicate.
Like, face to face.
The house was old, that was obvious. It was probably as old as the barn, and maybe even older. The walls were papered over, and the glimpse of the paper I’d got indicated that it was ancient. Which meant the walls underneath were at least as old – but probably older.
Plaster walls, then. Plaster walls in an old farmhouse. Horsehair plaster, with lats behind it. Dense and relatively soundproof, but at this point, ancient and crumbly. Something that I could maybe get through, with a little effort and a good tool – a tool that could puncture the wallpaper and the solid surface behind.
It took another fifteen minutes to convey this idea, in part because of the drawn-out process of communication itself, and in part because my counterpart on the other side of the wall was worried about being detected.
Someone would hear us. The guy with the hair would come back – and this time, maybe he wouldn’t just threaten to use it.
Eventually, though, the promise of friendly human contact brought them around. That, and my repeated assurances that I’
d be quiet.
The first hurdle gone, I turned my mind to the second: the tool. It’d be easy enough to put a hole in the wall with my heel. But not so easy to do it without attracting attention.
Those old plaster walls were better at dampening sounds than drywall, but not even they could hide everything. Someone would probably hear me. And then we were right back to guys with guns coming in search of the source of the commotion.
But even if no one heard – even if I did put a hole through the wall, and it didn’t attract half the household’s attention – I needed more than just a hole on my side. I needed to get through to the other side, and I needed a space big enough for us to communicate. Maybe even big enough for us to crawl through.
Which meant I needed to pull the plaster away from the laths behind it, and pull the laths out from between the studs.
One of my many foster homes growing up had been an old farmhouse in the center of Kennington – one of the buildings the ever-expanding city subsumed decades earlier. A relic of what had once been a family farm outside the city limits.
It had been a relic in more ways than one. It had barely been fit for human habitation. The upper walls were made of that same horsehair plaster. Not smooth and carefully constructed like these walls, but lumpy and bulging in places, like someone had slapped it together as quickly as possible, with an eye to function rather than form. Probably because they had. Probably because they had eight kids ready to move into the rooms, and they needed them done as soon as possible.
But in the intervening decades since the original farmer and his eight kids, lots of other families and lots of other kids had lived in that house. And some of them had put holes through the plaster, sometimes with toys, sometimes with fists. Sometimes with another kid’s head.
I knew, because I’d made one of those holes. I’d just turned thirteen at the time. My foster parents had two kids of their own: boys a year apart, both a few years older than me.
We didn’t get on, mostly because they didn’t like me, and I had no interest in convincing them to like me. I was content to live and let live. They weren’t, which meant a summer of escalating harassment that culminated in an all-out brawl in my bedroom. It ended when I put the older kid’s head through the wall, and the younger one ran away.