by Rachel Ford
So I sighed and stood up. I stretched and let the last few seconds wind down on the clock, until it hit 8:30 on the mark. Then I clocked out and headed home.
To a place without Jade.
* * *
We ate dinner – cold, salty raviolis from a can. We heard the two sets of feet again, and voices. Shannon’s and Jimmy’s, and another woman’s and another man’s. There was a high scream, too, like a baby.
A cranky baby, who had just woken up. Who maybe could sense some of his parents’ tension. Who had no idea what was going on, but knew that something wasn’t right.
The baby screamed and the people talked for a while. Then the baby and the people’s voices faded away. The footsteps retreated. All I could hear was the sounds of our plastic silverware against the cans, and the far away, muffled voice of the screaming infant.
I waited until the kids finished their meal. Then, we pulled the bedspread off the bed, and took the blanket that had been underneath it. I laid it out for them, and they huddled up on it.
“I’m going to work some more. You guys try to get some sleep, okay?”
“I can help,” Maisie offered.
“You already did, Mais. Right now, I need you to sleep. Keep your strength up, okay?”
They didn’t argue, so I got to work. The going was slow and warm. Despite the later hour, the room only seemed to be getting hotter. The air in the closet felt close and damp.
I kept at it for a long time. Or, it felt like a long time, anyway: hours. A veritable eternity. I suspected the reality was a lot shorter than the feeling: maybe just a few minutes. Maybe half an hour.
Either way, I was dripping with sweat and my arms burned from the slow, repetitive motions by time I had cleared away the plaster.
The laths broke away easily enough. The wood was old and dry and brittle. I used the pipe to push through one of them. It snapped with a loud sound. Or, at least, it sounded loud in the absolute stillness.
I stopped and listened. I heard the slow, steady breaths of the sleeping kids, undisturbed by my work. I heard no sounds from below.
I switched to hands now – carefully, gingerly testing each area before I grabbed on it or pulled. But hands helped to dampen the sound of snapping boards.
In no time at all, I’d cleared the laths. Now, I felt through to the other side of the wall. It was the same type of thing as what I’d already gotten through, but in reverse. I felt laths, one after the other, with little bits of plaster that had oozed in in the thin spaces between them.
I knocked on the wood, gently and quietly.
A moment later, someone on the other side knocked in return. They were still there, then. Still awake.
So I got to work a second time. The going was slower and harder now. Now, the thin wood didn’t split so easily, because it had a rocklike coating on the side, strengthening it. Bolstering it.
Tapping and gentle pressure didn’t help. In the end, I concluded that the only thing that would work was blunt force. Either I’d need to drive the pipe through the wall with enough force to splinter wood and plaster, or I’d need to use something else.
I thought about my earlier reservations, about noise and nails. My hands would probably work. But what if they caught on something along the way? What if some ancient nail or tack tore my skin?
In the end, I settled on my feet. I wouldn’t be kicking, so the noise factor would be less of an issue. I’d use the strength of my legs to push my feet through the wall from the other side. It didn’t have to be a huge production: just big enough to communicate through. Maybe big enough to pass items if we needed to.
I settled close to the wall, with my knees drawn up toward my chest. I wriggled my feet through the hole on my side. And I started to push, and push, and push.
At first, nothing happened at all. Then, I felt the laths start to give. They bent outward, away from me. I could hear plaster cracking and crumbling beyond. But it didn’t give.
I relaxed the pressure, and started again, harder and faster this time. A few of the laths groaned against the nail that held them in place. They didn’t give.
I tried again, and again, over and over. And then, almost without warning, the wall gave under me. Half a dozen laths splintered and pulled away from the studs. Sound and light seeped into the closet.
It took me a while to extricate myself from the mess of jagged wood and crumbling plaster. But I managed to get out with nothing more than a few minor abrasions and a cut to show for it. I was definitely going to need a tetanus shot when all was said and done, but hopefully nothing worse would come of it.
In the meantime, I had other things to occupy my attention. Like the people – and the light – in the room next door.
The people were Cody, Paige and Avery Carter. Avery was fourteen months old and sleeping peacefully at the moment. His parents were wide awake and very excited.
“Oh my God,” Paige said, “you have no idea how good it is to see another friendly face.”
And we could see each other, because unlike our room, where the lightbulbs had been removed, the Carters had light. They were both young, in their early twenties, and both tired and stressed.
“Avery wouldn’t stop crying,” Cody explained. “He doesn’t like the dark. So they put the bulbs back.”
“They threatened to shoot him,” Paige said. “They’re awful people. Horrible.”
“How long have you guys been here?” I asked.
“Since this morning,” she said.
“They kidnapped us on Monday, though,” he said.
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “We bumped into them in a rest stop in Illinois. We got to talking. They said they were on their way through to visit Shannon and Jimmy’s parents, in Milwaukee. We told them we were going camping. We said, you know, ‘oh, what a coincidence, we’re practically going to be next door to each other.’
“They seemed really nice. Especially Shannon. She was so friendly. She said she and Joey were getting married next year. He was coming up to meet her folks. They wanted to have kids, you know? We just fell to talking so easily.”
“They played us,” Cody said. “They pumped us for information. Found out where we were going and when. Found out how long we had the site for. Then we went our separate ways.
“Except, when we got back into the truck, there was another guy in the back, right by Avery’s car seat. He had a gun.”
“Tyler,” Paige said. “He was with them. He made us get back onto the freeway. Then we pulled off onto some exit a little ways later, a country road. We pulled over and waited. They were right behind us. They had the whole thing planned.”
“They took Paige and Avery in their vehicle, with Joey and Jimmy. Shannon got in with me and Tyler.”
“They had another guy with them,” Paige said. “A prisoner, handcuffed in the back.”
“A redheaded guy?” I asked.
She nodded. “Yeah. They called him Matthew.”
“He disappeared the other day. They were bringing him out here, but we haven’t seen him since.”
“We thought you were him,” Paige said.
“He must be in another room,” Cody said. “Maybe on the other side of the hall.”
I decided to withhold the fact that he was dead, for the moment anyway. “So how did you guys end up here?” I asked instead. “Did they take you all the way from Illinois?”
“They made us rent cars,” Paige said. “The SUV’s they’re driving now. They made me rent one, and Cody rent the other, one at a time. We had to go alone and leave Avery each time. They – they said they’d kill him, if we didn’t do everything exactly like they said.”
“And they would have,” Cody said. “Especially Jimmy. He’s nuts. He’s got a look, you know? Like he just wants an excuse.”
“But why the campsite?”
“They’re meeting someone, tomorrow. Joey’s boss.”
“Joey’s boss? I thought he was the boss.”
>
Cody shook his head. “He’s not. I heard him talking to somebody, a guy they call Chief.” Now, he paused and glanced back at Paige. She nodded. He drew in a long breath.
“Listen, buddy,” he said, “I don’t know how much you know about these guys. But they are not nice guys. They were going to kill us and dump us somewhere.”
“All of us,” Paige said. “Even Avery.”
“But Chief, whoever the hell he is, he said they couldn’t. He said they’d go from Robin Hood to Capone.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. I have no idea. But that’s what he said. He said he’d shoot Joey himself if he shot us. So here we are. Not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because someone’s going to kill them if they kill us. That’s it.”
Chapter Fourteen
I asked them for the full story, from the beginning. It took a minute to convince them to come around. They wanted to focus on escape.
Which I appreciated. But the more intel we had, the better our escape plans would be. That’s what I told them, because it was true; and because I figured it would persuade them.
It did. They repeated what they’d already told me about meeting Joey and his crew. They’d bumped into them at a rest stop in Illinois. It had seemed like a coincidence at the time, but in retrospect of course it wasn’t anything of the kind.
Joey had picked them out as a mark, and he’d sent Shannon in as point person. She’d connected with Paige, woman to woman. She’d talked about Avery, and about her and Joey’s engagement and plans to start a family of their own.
Presumably, it was all bullshit – all engineered to appeal to a happy young couple, just starting their own family. But whatever: real or not, it did the trick. The Carters opened up and told them all about their two-week getaway in the woods of Wisconsin, with Lake Michigan not twenty minutes away.
While Shannon pumped them for information, either Joey or Jimmy snagged Paige’s pair of keys. “Cody still had his. I wasn’t driving. I just had them clipped to the diaper bag. Spares, you know?”
With the second set of keys, Tyler got into position. He sprang the trap on them like they’d told me, and forced them to a rendezvous on a quiet country road, far from witnesses.
Then, Joey separated the couple. Shannon and Tyler rode in the truck with Cody. “He doesn’t talk much. I don’t think he’s as nuts as her and Jimmy. He seemed a little freaked out by her sometimes.”
His wife scoffed at the idea, like he was defending one of their captors. “What good is that, if he takes orders from her?”
She’d been in the crew’s original vehicle, crammed into the back with Avery and Matthew. “We got the impression it was stolen,” Cody said. “They were awfully keen to dump it.”
“Which is why they made us rent vehicles,” she said.
She rented one vehicle. He rented the other. They used separate cards and rented from different companies. They both requested large SUV’s. Joey and his gang had it all planned out.
And they kept the baby and the other spouse, each time. Before Cody went in to pick up his vehicle, they showed him Paige and Avery in the back of the stolen SUV, a gun trained on them.
“Joey told me ‘Don’t be a hero. Heroes get people killed.’ And I believed him. So I didn’t do anything. I just got the keys and met them, like they said.”
They hadn’t needed the show with the gun to keep Paige in line. They’d just taken Avery, and that had been enough. “I could barely stop from crying,” she admitted. “But I knew they’d hurt him. So I washed my face with cold water, and just – just did it.”
Then Joey had got the call from his boss, Chief. “They’ve got some kind of job coming up,” Cody said. “In Milwaukee, I think. Joey was supposed to find a place for them to lie low.”
“That’s why he targeted us,” she said. “They were going to kill us and dump us and the stolen car.”
“Only Chief said he couldn’t. Said if Joey killed a family with a baby, he would personally kill him himself.” Cody shook his head. “He didn’t think I heard. I was pretending to be asleep. But I heard.”
“So then the plan changed again. They decided to keep us alive. He’d go to the campsite like he planned. Only, we’d be there with him this time. They kept us in the RV. Us, and the other guy, Matthew.”
“But it was cramped, with all of us in there. They had to take turns sleeping, because there just wasn’t room. And Avery cried a lot.”
“He’s not colicky or anything like that,” she said, with a quickness that denoted the importance she placed on my understanding that her baby wasn’t difficult. “He’s always been a good sleeper. But – well, he can tell something’s wrong.”
I nodded and said, “They’re smart like that.” I had no idea if it was true or not. I’d never had a kid of my own, and I doubted I ever would.
But it was the right thing to say. She nodded. “He’s a smart boy. Smartest baby I’ve ever met.”
I brought them back on track with, “So what happened then?”
Which turned the conversation back to Matthew. “They kept him tied up. They knew we wouldn’t try anything, but he was a different story. He wanted to get away. He tried to talk us into helping him. You know, trying to get the key to the cuffs.”
“I said ‘no way,’” Cody said. “Not while they’ve got a gun on my wife and son.”
Paige nodded. “They already wanted to kill us. We would have been signing our death warrants.”
“So he decided to try it on his own,” Cody said. “He waited until Jimmy was coming in, opening the door. Matthew jumped up and charged him.”
“He almost got out,” Paige said. “He knocked Jimmy out the door.”
“He would have got away, except Tyler was by the door too. He shoved Matthew back inside.”
“They started gagging him after that, because he was yelling when he got out. No one came, probably because there were a bunch of kids making noise that night. But they were real scared about it. So they gagged him and tied his legs too.”
The near escape proved the impetus for taking the Miller place. “They decided it was too risky, and too crowded too. They needed a place where they could keep a better eye on all of us, without so many people around.”
Joey did the scouting, leaving Jimmy, Shannon, and Tyler behind.
“He doesn’t like Avery’s crying,” Paige said. “I think he just wanted to get away, to be honest.”
“He found this place a few nights ago. They stationed Tyler and Jimmy there, to watch the Millers and get the rooms ready. I guess, boarding up the windows and stuff.
“Then, when it was done, they waited until it was dark, and got Matthew into one of the SUV’s. We haven’t seen him since.”
“He’s got to be in one of these rooms,” Paige said.
I let them finish their story before telling them that he wasn’t. That he was dead in a tarp, maybe in the swamp, maybe in a back field or a deep ditch somewhere.
The plan had been to move them Wednesday night, but my confrontation with Aaron Tesch put a screeching halt to that. “There was some kind of fight,” Paige said. “There were cops all over the place.”
“They were real scared that night too,” Cody said. “They kept telling me they’d kill Avery if I did anything stupid. That they’d put a bullet through his face, and then into Paige’s stomach.”
“We just laid low, and then the cops left. We all stayed in the RV that night. All of us but Tyler. He was with the Millers, I guess.”
They’d been moved here this morning, and shepherded upstairs to their current situation. Originally, they’d had no lights either. But baby Avery had screamed bloody murder, until eventually they relented, and screwed two bulbs back into the light fixture.
“And then the next thing we know, we hear them outside in the hall with someone else. We figured it was Matthew.”
At which point, I told them what we’d found – the young man in the tarp, w
ith a bullet through his head.
Cody sat back. Paige shook her head. “No. No, he’s not dead.”
“It fits the timeline,” I said. “You said they took him away to bring him here, right?”
“Yeah, but not to kill him.”
“Plans change. And that might have been what they told him, but you don’t know that that was the plan. Not really. It might have been to keep him complacent. Or to keep you complacent.”
“No,” she said again. “No. I don’t believe it.”
“I should have helped him,” Cody said. “He might be alive if I helped him.”
“But we wouldn’t,” she said, glancing up sharply. “We’d probably all be dead, Avery too. Jesus, Cody: you want them to shoot Avery?”
“Of course not,” he said. “Of course not. Only…I can’t believe they actually killed him. They said they weren’t going to. Chief – he told them not to kill anyone.”
“It’s not your fault,” she said.
“They weren’t supposed to kill him.”
“Well,” I said, “I guess they missed the memo. Because he’s dead. And unless we want to wind up dead too, we’d better think of a plan that doesn’t involve sitting on our asses and hoping for the best.”
* * *
Deputy Austin Wagner, 10:11 PM
Jade wasn’t there when I got home. I knew she wouldn’t be. I hadn’t heard from her since she left. But there’d been some part of me that hoped anyway.
But she wasn’t there. So I rummaged through the fridge for something to eat. I had a half gallon of milk that was past its expiration, some wilted salad mix that Jade had been planning to do something with, and an uncooked steak that had been sitting there for five days.
I wasn’t much for salad in the best of times, and this looked as pathetic as I felt. It went into the garbage. The steak had turned a pale gray color since I bought it, so it followed the wilted lettuce. I popped the cap on the milk and sniffed it. It smelled alright.
So I grabbed the milk and moved to the freezer. She had some frozen meals in there: things with weird sauces and lots of vegetables. I had a frozen pizza.