by Rachel Ford
“Okay,” I said. “We’re going to have to work quickly. If we open a second hole, there’s a good chance they’ll see it when they come up with dinner. Which means we have to be out of here by dinnertime.”
“Good,” Maisie said.
“I want to go home,” Daniel said.
We moved four feet down from the first hole – far enough for the short end of a bed, or a dresser, to finish, but far enough away from the corner that we wouldn’t bump into an end table or nightstand. In theory, anyway.
I started working on the wall. I closed the closet door after I grabbed the pipe. We figured that was for the best: no point inviting interference from the other room. But it did mean we had no light, not even the dim glow we’d been used to lately.
So the kids took up lookout duties. Less looking, since we were in the dark, and more listening. But they stayed by the door, ears pressed up next to it while they listened for creaks on the steps.
After maybe twenty minutes, they heard a noise. Not from the staircase, but from the closet.
“Cody’s coming,” Daniel whispered.
And he did, a minute later. The closet door opened. A sliver of light filtered into the room, followed by a whisper. “Owen?”
“Yeah?”
“All clear?”
“Yeah.”
He joined us in the main part of the room, taking a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the light. Then, he asked, “You’re working again?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“You should have called me. I can help.”
“I think we’ll be okay,” I said.
He said nothing. I went on working. The kids went on listening. He went on standing there.
Finally, he said, “I’m sorry. I know I fucked up.”
“Language,” Daniel told him.
“Right. Sorry. I know I messed up. I guess I started panicking.”
“Panicking gets people killed,” I said.
“I know. It won’t happen again.”
I stopped work and turned to face him. He was little more than a dark shape, a sentient shadow. “I get it. You’re worried. You’re scared. You got a wife and a kid. I do get it. But you need to understand, Cody. I will do whatever it takes to protect my family. From anyone who puts them in harm’s way.”
He thought about that for a long moment, turning it over and taking my meaning. He nodded: just a quick bob of a shadowy shape in the dark. “I know. I’m sorry, man. It won’t happen again.”
“Okay. Then you might as well get to work. We’ve got one shot at this. We need it done before dinnertime, because we need to be gone by dinnertime. Gone, or ready to act.”
“Ready to act how?”
“Let’s make the hole first,” I said. “Then we’ll worry about that.”
“We should have a plan.”
“I do.”
“You’re not going to tell me?”
“I will. But, not now. Not until we’re ready to go.”
He didn’t say anything to that. He didn’t like it, but I didn’t care. If I was going to trust him again, he was going to have to earn it this time.
We worked in silence for a long stretch, the same work that we’d done before: scraping and brushing, and pulling away chunks, and feeling around gingerly. Like archaeologists, digging up some old fossil. In the dark. With men with guns ready to shoot us nearby.
Eventually, we got down to the laths. Here, we had to employ more caution than before. Cody had them on alert downstairs. So the going was slow. We paused at every crack, every time the old wood groaned or splintered.
The kids confirmed we were in the clear: no noise on the staircase. We moved to the next board, and the process started all over again.
Eventually, we had a man-sized hole. Not huge, but large enough for the largest of us to crawl out. Large enough to pass a baby back and forth, and a diaper bag. Large enough for the kids to get through safely.
Then came the moment of truth. We started working on the other side, pushing against the laths. The point of the process where, last time, some unknown bit of furniture braced the wall and shut us down.
I pressed my heels against the central part of the wall, in the middle of our work. I pushed, slowly increasing the pressure. The laths bowed outward, bending and bending. And then, they started to snap.
Cody laughed with relief, with the thrill of victory. A wild sound. An ancient sound. Something predating modern man, maybe predating man at all. The sound of a trapped animal freeing itself from its snare. The mad euphoria of freedom.
“We’re not there yet,” I cautioned him.
“But we will be,” he said.
“Only if we’re smart.”
He stopped laughing, and he got ahold of himself. He waited until I finished, pushing through as many of the laths as I could without catching myself on broken pieces.
Then we crammed into the space together, working at a frantic pace, as quietly as we could. We pushed wood aside, and plaster. We located nails and warned each other to avoid them. Light started to flood in from the other side.
Not the bright light of windows with blinds rolled up, but the dimmer light of a room with curtains drawn. Curtains, but not boards. Not plywood.
Which meant they hadn’t prepped this room to be a cell. Maybe, they hadn’t even bothered to lock it, because they hadn’t anticipated using it.
The kids kept watch. Paige wanted an update. Maisie provided it. Nothing concrete. Just, “They’ve got a second hole started.”
“How much longer? Avery’s going to have to eat again soon.”
“Not much longer,” she said.
At which point, Paige wanted specifics. “Cody? Cody, what’s going on?” Her voice was loud. Too loud.
“I’d better go talk to her,” he decided.
“Good idea,” I said.
I went on working. Maisie joined me, pulling laths aside and dumping chunks of plaster into the other room. Then Daniel joined me, sweeping up debris and filling a dresser drawer with it.
Cody crawled back into the room, with Paige and Avery and the diaper bag. She was excited. “Oh my God, is that daylight?”
“We’re almost out, honey,” he said.
“Oh my God, let me see.”
“Not yet.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s dangerous still. There’s nails in the wood.”
“Oh.”
It took an additional fifteen minutes before we cleared the hole. They were a long fifteen minutes, stretched by our anticipation and Paige’s. But then it was done.
Paige wanted to go directly into the other room, to open a curtain, she said. “It’s been over a day since Avery’s seen the sun.”
I stood in front of the hole. Now seemed to be the right time to talk plans, and what would – and wouldn’t – happen once we got into the next room.
Because the last thing I wanted to deal with was Paige bolting down the stairs with her child in tow, just to get shot when she reached the first floor.
“We need to have a plan,” I said. “And ground rules.”
Cody nodded. Paige said, “What are you doing? Let us go by. We can talk in there, can’t we?”
“No. We need to talk first.”
“Why?”
I ignored the question. “That door is probably going to be unlocked.”
“Good. Then we can get out.”
“No,” I said again. “Not without a plan.”
Paige started to say again that baby Avery needed sunlight. Cody touched her arm, and said, “Let’s hear him out, babe.”
“There’s probably a few hours left before dinnertime, right?”
Paige nodded. Cody nodded. The kids nodded.
“So first thing we do is we do an inventory of the upstairs rooms. Quietly, as few people moving around as possible. We don’t want anyone hearing footsteps anywhere they’re not supposed to be.”
“We can take our shoes off,” Cody suggested. “
Socks will be quieter than soles.”
I nodded. “Good. Cody, you and I will check out the rooms. Paige, can you watch the kids?”
“We’ll be fine,” Maisie said.
“We can come with you,” Daniel said.
“No. I need you to stay with Paige. Make sure she and Avery are okay. And she’ll make sure you’re okay.”
I glanced her way, and she nodded in confirmation.
“Then what?” Cody said.
“We look for anything we can use as a weapon.”
“A weapon?” Paige asked. “I thought we were going to try to sneak out?”
“There’s no sneaking on those stairs,” I said. “Not possible.”
“He’s right,” Cody said. “We can hear everyone coming up or going down. They’ll be able to hear us too.”
“So we’re stuck anyway?” she asked, a hint of panic returning to her tone.
“No,” I said. “No, we find weapons first. We look for some way out, or some way to signal to one of the neighbors.”
“And if there isn’t one?” Cody asked.
“Then we use our weapons.”
“They’ll kill us,” Paige said.
I shook my head. “No, they won’t. They’ll be coming up here with dinner in two, maybe three or four hours. Two guys, or a man and a woman, like before. Cody will take one. I’ll take the other.”
“Take them?” Cody repeated. “You mean, kill them?”
“Incapacitate them,” I said, for the benefit of the kids. Then, for Cody’s use, I added, “Using whatever means necessary.”
He nodded, a quick bob of his head in the dimness.
“Then what?” Paige asked. “They’ll still hear us coming down the stairs. They’ll still kill us.”
“Not if we do it right upstairs. Say we take out Tyler and Jimmy. We take their guns. We head downstairs. Joey and Shannon hear exactly what they expect: two sets of feet marching down the stairs. They don’t figure it out until it’s too late.”
“You mean, you’re going to shoot them? Shannon and Joey?” She sounded a little mortified.
“You got a better idea?”
She glanced from me to her husband. He shrugged. “Can you do it?” she asked him.
“Sure. It’s like shooting a deer, right?”
“Pretty much,” I said. “Except the deer didn’t try to kill you.”
“But they’re not deer,” Paige said. “They’re people.”
“Who want to kill you.”
“It’s self-defense,” Cody said.
“Will the cops see it that way?” she asked.
“How else would they see it?”
She said nothing. Cody said nothing. The kids said nothing. So I said, “Alright, I’ll go first. Scope the room out. If it’s clear, you guys follow. One at a time, quietly.”
The room was clear, like I knew it would be. I hadn’t anticipated any problems on that front. But I couldn’t tell Paige I was going first because I didn’t trust her or her husband. I couldn’t tell Cody I was going first because his wife looked about one stubbed toe away from a complete breakdown, and he’d already shown himself to be less than reliable.
So I did a quick perimeter check of the room for appearance’s sake. It was a slightly larger mirror of the Carter’s room: a rectangle rather than a square, with the same kind of layout and furniture.
Then I headed to the door and tried the handle. Slowly, quietly.
It turned. The door opened, and I found myself staring into the familiar hall, one door down from our room. It was quiet and empty, as I expected it would be.
There was a door roughly across from me, and two doors down the way: the bathroom on our side, and presumably another bedroom on the Carter’s side of the hall.
And in the ceiling a few paces down from the landing was the trapdoor Cody had mentioned before, the one that led up to the attic or half story, or whatever it was.
I shut the door and signaled for everyone else to follow. Paige came first. She knelt at the hole and waited for Cody to pass through baby Avery. Then Maisie and Daniel followed, with Cody and the diaper bag taking up the rear.
Paige went for the curtains straightaway. Which presented a problem. The way I figured it, we were in the rear of the house, facing onto the garage and side yard.
Joey and his crew didn’t strike me as outdoorsy types, and they would need to lay low. At least one of them, maybe more, were known to the FBI; and if the kids could ID him, so could a neighbor. So I doubted they’d be outside soaking up the sun and rural atmosphere.
But maybe they had business outside. Maybe Joey would send one of his goons to fetch something out of one of the SUV’s, or the RV, or the Carter’s pickup. Maybe he’d send one of them to the shed or the garage for tools, in preparation for whatever they were planning.
And maybe they’d notice the drapes open, when they’d been shut before.
“Careful,” I said. “We need to make sure there’s no one in the yard first.”
“What?”
I sidled up to the window beside her and pulled the corner of the drape open a fraction of an inch. I peered out.
I saw the yard as I remembered it from yesterday, though from an overhead angle. There were the vehicles: the rented SUV’s, and the hijacked truck and RV with Indiana plates. There was too tall grass, and overgrown fields. There were no people.
I opened it a little more, to widen my field of view, with the same result. “Okay,” I said. “All clear.”
She pulled the curtains wide open, and light flooded into the room. Avery squirmed and fussed. She consoled him. “It’s okay. Shh, shh. You’re okay, sweetheart.”
“God, that’s a good sight,” Cody said.
Maisie and Daniel pressed in against the glass.
I took in the yard, and the field, and the seemingly endless swaths of land all around. There were neighbors. I knew that. I’d seen them on the way in. But I couldn’t see them from my vantage. The Miller place might as well have been on Mars, as far away from any other human being as it seemed at the moment.
“We could try opening the windows,” Cody suggested in a minute. “We could use bedsheets and make a kind of rope ladder. Get out that way.”
“And then what?” I asked.
“Well, we’d run.”
“Where?”
“To one of the neighbor houses.”
“That’s at least a mile,” I said. “Probably closer to two.”
He glanced me over, then the kids, then Paige. “That should be doable.”
“With guys with guns following us? Guns, and trucks and SUV’s?”
“Well, we’d try to get around them.”
“Obviously. But if we don’t? If Avery starts crying?”
“They’d hear us,” Paige said.
“And they’ll start shooting. You know what happened to Callaghan.”
Cody nodded at that, and so did Paige. Both went white and quiet.
“We need to even the odds,” I said. “We need to make sure they can’t chase us.”
He nodded again, slowly, uncertainly it seemed to me.
“We’ll have the element of surprise,” I said. “They’re expecting us to be complacent. Good little captives, like we have been so far. The worst they think we’ve done is made noise when we had to use the bathroom, right? They’ve been up and down without incident, three times now. More, when you figure their trips for you. They won’t be expecting trouble.”
“I’ve never killed anyone,” he said simply.
“But you’ve hunted, right?”
He nodded.
“It’s like that. Only easier, because these guys will kill your baby. A buck won’t. When the time comes, just think about that. Think about Avery. You’ll know what to do.”
Chapter Nineteen
Deputy Austin Wagner, 9:10 AM
I dialed Owen Day’s number after my conversation with Travers. He didn’t pick up, and I didn’t leave a message.
&nb
sp; I’d called enough. Either he was choosing to ignore me, or he’d jumped into the lake with his phone in his pocket, or left it on the roof of his car and drove off, or something like that – something that meant he wasn’t actually getting my calls.
I decided I’d pay him a visit instead. So I wrapped up what I needed to at the office and headed out. I got to his site just after nine, and at first glance, I thought I’d hit paydirt. The SUV was there. The bikes were there. The picnic table was set with plates and chips and hotdog rolls.
A little early for chips and hotdogs, I thought. Then again, I didn’t have kids, so what did I know? Maybe they’d insisted on hot dogs for breakfast. Or maybe Mr. Day hadn’t packed enough breakfast items, or one of the kids had left the cooler open overnight. Maybe racoons had gotten into things. Whatever the reason, it was a hotdogs for breakfast kind of day.
Which meant they were there, because the food hadn’t been eaten yet.
I parked at the end of the site and got out of my vehicle. I didn’t see anyone, but I supposed maybe they were in their tents still. Maybe getting dressed for the day.
I glanced around. Two prepared plates sat on the table beside a little camping grill. Someone was going to be disappointed: the third plate, and its roll and chips was on the ground, carried off by wind probably.
“Mr. Day?” I called.
No answer. No shuffling from inside the tents, no curious scrambling to see who it might be, not even any furtive whispers. No, “Oh no, it’s him again.”
Just the silence of a calm morning: gentle breezes and happy birds and busy insects, all going about their business.
I took a few more steps into the site. Gravel crunched under my heels. I knelt by the plate with its scattered contents. And I frowned. The plate was one of those white paper deals: disposable, but better for the environment. No Styrofoam or non-degradable materials.
The problem was, this one had already started the degrading process. It was soaked and mushy, as if from morning dew. So were the chips – not quite as soggy, but oddly wet to the touch. The hot dog roll, by contrast, was hard and crusty, like it had spent a long time in the open air and gone stale.
I left them where I found them and moved to the picnic table. The other plates followed the same pattern: soggy chips, wet paper, and stale rolls. I lifted the lid on the grill. The interior was cold and laid out with shriveled wieners.