by Rachel Caine
And there's no one here at all.
Sam ducks into the small bathroom, then out again. "The shower's still got some moisture in it. It's humid, so that might be left over from earlier today." He gives me that look. "You got lucky, Gwen. He could have been in here."
"Come on, he had everything on timers, which meant he wasn't," I snapped. "Handling this with kid gloves isn't going to get us anywhere, Sam. And it won't protect my kids."
Sam shakes his head, but he can't fault my feelings . . . he loves my kids, too, I know that. Our friendship is, by any standards, peculiar; it shouldn't exist, and sometimes I feel like it's skating on thin ice over a terribly dark fall. But he wants what I want. That will never change.
Standing in this stranger's cabin, I can feel that sense of darkness again. This man leads a hidden life. I don't know what variety of depravity he practices, but I know it will be something awful.
It's hard to look at this normal place, the calm neatness of it, when he's dedicated his life to destroying other people's. I'm angry. Probably too angry. I want to smash everything. And what's stopping me? Truth is, we're already committing a crime just by being inside. Breaking and entering. Vandalism seems like a reasonable add-on.
"Look around," I tell Sam. "There has to be something we can take with us. Something to tell us what he's into, and maybe, if we're lucky, he'll have correspondence with Melvin."
Sam nods, but he pointedly checks his watch; if there was some kind of alarm system, we're already in trouble. I doubt there is, though. Someone who makes a practice of living so far away from civilization doesn't depend on 911. Our security provided by Smith and Wesson. If he was here, or anywhere near, he'd have opened fire on us already. We're safe. For now.
"Papers," I tell him. "Electronic records. Anything that looks like it could be of use, okay? Ten minutes."
"Five," he says, and then he leaves me to it.
There's a small desk shoved into the corner of this small room. Like everything else, it's painfully neat and clean, made of burnished maple in plain country style. I open drawers, then pull them out and dump them to look behind and underneath. We can't conceal our intrusion here. Might as well do a thorough job of it.
I find nothing I can immediately identify as important. Receipts, mostly. Printed papers that seem not very illuminating. I grab everything and shove it into my backpack.
I'm wearing gloves, so I've left no prints behind; I put everything back in the drawers and slot them back in place. I check the closet. There's a gigantic gun safe, but as I'm staring at it, I see a shoe box up on top. I open it. More receipts. I cram those into my backpack. One drifts down behind the safe, and as I'm groping blindly back there for it, my fingers brush the sharp edges of something that doesn't quite belong.
I push it, and it moves.
Magnetic. I detach it from the safe and pull it out. It's a shallow box with a sliding top, like the old hide-a-key my grandmother used to put in the wheel well of her car.
This one holds a USB.
I never would have found it if I hadn't dropped a page behind the safe. It was in a space that would have been missed in a search, and the gun safe is too huge and heavy to move without major effort.
I retrieve the fallen page, and I put that and the USB in the backpack.
"Got anything?" Sam calls.
"Receipts, some printouts, and a thumb drive," I say. "No computer, just a power cord. He must have taken that with him. You?"
He appears in the doorway. I can't read his expression, but something about it makes me step back from the closet and come toward him. "You'd better see this," he says. I know I'm not going to like it, but I follow him out into the main room. Everything in its place. Everything clean and orderly. I wonder if this man has a military background, because every surface gleams. If there are fingerprints here, I can't spot any.
Sam opens up a closet. It looks like a normal pantry, just deep enough to reach into. Eight shelves, top to bottom, packed with canned goods and sundries. Whoever this Absalom asshole is, he likes canned tuna and quick-prep casserole kits.
Sam puts a finger to his lips and pushes on the shelves. They swing back without so much as a squeak, and behind that is a set of stairs. Motion lights click on, revealing a wall with cheap faux-wood paneling, and below, at the bottom of the steps, like a living thing, crouches a steel door with a key lock. I feel the darkness of it breathe up through the chilly air, and for a moment I don't move. I can't. I feel like it's watching me, assessing me for weaknesses.
I'm paralyzed by flashbacks to my ex-husband's torture chamber, so carefully hidden inside my own house. To the basement of Lancel Graham's tumbledown cabin up in the hills above Stillhouse Lake, where he lovingly re-created that horror.
This feels like something just as bad.
We go down slowly, careful of our steps; Sam's probably concerned about noise, but I'm not. I'm worried about hidden traps and tripwires. This place feels like death. Like threats and consequences.
"Stop," I whisper, when Sam takes the last step down. He's about four feet from the door. He listens, and pauses, and looks at me. I keep staring at the steel face of the thing, and I slowly shake my head. "This is wrong. Don't."
"Gwen--"
"Please, Sam." I feel sick, and I am shaking now. The urgency hurts. "We've got to go. Now. Right now." I am not psychic, have no trace of any kind of power or gift, but I have instincts. Instincts I ignored for years with Melvin Royal. I should have known what he was doing, what kind of horror show was going on under my roof. I never did, at least not in any conscious way.
Never again. I don't know what will happen if Sam touches that door, but I can feel it's wrong. This is a job for the FBI now, not a couple of renegade amateur thieves. This place feels claustrophobic, and I feel like I'm being watched.
Sam accepts my decision, and that's a gift I can't measure; most men, I believe, would have ignored me and gone straight on ahead. As a consequence, we are almost to the top of the stairs when, with a whispering sigh, the door at the bottom of the stairs cracks open. There's a faint, almost inaudible click.
Sam pauses. I don't know what's coming out of that door, and I don't want to know. I grab Sam, lunge forward--past the shelves, out of the closet--and drag him along with me.
Sam has just cleared the doorway when something picks us up and throws us, violently, across the room. I lift and cross my arms in front of my face, draw my legs up in an instinctive attempt to protect my brain and belly, and I hardly feel it when I hit the wall. I definitely don't feel hitting the floor, because suddenly I'm just there, lying on wood and looking up as a blast of orange light floods the room. I don't understand what it is. I feel a wave of heat, and then the roof is, strangely, moving away from me, like a giant has picked it up. The lights we've turned on blow out like candles, and I'm looking at stars and trees and then everything, everything, is on fire.
5
GWEN
I come conscious again, coughing, with someone pouring water on my face. The water's cold, and I'm shivering, and I roll over and cough helplessly for a few moments. Awareness starts somewhere in me, reporting pain in my back, in my leg, in my arm. My brain's good at analyzing these things, and it tells me it's nothing too serious. I hope it's not lying to me. My head hurts as well, and that seems of more concern. My mouth tastes like an ashtray, and I grab blindly for the water bottle that's been splashing my face and rinse out my mouth. I spit it out on the ground, then chug thirstily. That's probably a mistake. The thick weight of water hits my stomach hard.
I roll up to my knees, sway a little, find my balance, make it to my feet. I'm in the clearing, near the tree line. Sam is kneeling next to me, and he looks worse than I feel--bloody from a cut on his head, shaking, favoring one side as he tries to get up. I help him. He winces and presses a hand to his ribs.
"How did we--" I turn back toward the cabin.
It's an inferno. I lose my words when I see it, and the reality that we w
ere in there comes down on me. I stare, mesmerized. How did we get out?
"I pulled you out. What the hell, Sam?" says a new voice. It belongs to a man standing a distance away, who's watching the blaze. He's more than six feet, wearing a black tufted parka, which I envy right now, and as he shifts, a gold badge on a chain around his neck catches the light. Cop, I think, and I freeze. But the badge is different. I can't immediately identify it. My eyes won't focus finely enough. He's African American, and his voice has a slow southern accent that makes him sound amiable, though I can see him studying me, calculating, weighing my worth. He's also wearing a bulletproof vest under the parka, I realize, as the wind blows a hot gust from the burning cabin and flaps it back.
FBI. It's right there on his vest.
"Mike Lustig," he says. "And you're both a pair of goddamn idiots. What happened?" He directs that last part past me, and Sam winces as he shifts position.
"Is that a general question, or do you want something specific?"
"You said you were going to look around. What the fuck did you do?"
My brain clears a little. Mike Lustig. Sam's FBI friend. He has an escalating curse level. I wish he'd lower his volume, because my ears are ringing constantly, and my head pounds like a bass drum.
"There was some kind of booby trap," I tell him. "Down in the basement. We didn't open the door, but someone else did. We were lucky to get out of that hallway before it blew."
"Not luck," Sam says. "You smelled a trap, and I didn't."
Mike looks from one of us to the other. "And you don't know what was in the hidden room?"
"No."
"Damn," he says. "He could have had anything down there. A captive, even."
I go cold. "Are you saying that . . . that there was someone down there? Someone we could have rescued?"
Mike just looks at us. Sam shifts finally and says, "Jesus, Mike. What did you know about this guy?"
Lustig ignores the question. "I need to get you to town for a checkup. That cut needs stitches. Favoring your side, too. Broken ribs? How about you, Ms. Proctor?"
"Stop changing the subject!" Sam shouts.
Mike looks past us at the burning cabin. The damage, I realize, is already beyond repair; the place is falling in on itself. He sighs. "This is going to attract attention. Engine company's probably on the way already; they take fire seriously up in these hills. Come on. I'll brief you in the car." He turns and walks away, into the trees, and for a long second, I just stand there, trying to understand what has happened, what the hell is going on. Nothing's making sense. Maybe that's shock; maybe that's the fact my brain has been severely rattled inside its bone cage.
It takes Sam's hand on my shoulder silently urging me along to make me follow, and I keep looking back at the raging inferno, the sparks spitting high at heaven.
What was in that room? Who the hell are these people? They're not just hackers. It's not just a blackmail ring, either.
I'm not sure if I'm brave enough to want to know the answer.
We sit in the back of the FBI agent's SUV, which is both a comfort and a worry; I'm fairly certain these doors won't pop open at the pull of a latch. He provides us with strong, dark coffee from a thermos before he steps out to make some calls. I drink it thirstily, more for the warmth than the taste. Sam doesn't say much. Neither do I. We watch the fire, still visible through the trees, and the garland of blinking red-and-blue lights snaking up-mountain toward us.
I finally say, "So that's your friend. Agent Lustig."
"Yeah, we served together," Sam says. "He joined the FBI; I re-upped." He's staring out at the fire, but his gaze cuts suddenly toward Lustig, who is on the phone outside the vehicle. Lustig is pacing back and forth, possibly just to keep warm, but I can't help but think he's also betraying some anxiety. "He knows something he didn't tell us."
"I gathered that," I say, and I wince when I shift to relieve an ache. It wakes something sharper. Still not broken, I think, but I've definitely stressed everything. "Has it occurred to you that maybe he's using you as much as you think you're using him?"
I think he isn't going to respond, but he does. He says, without looking away from Lustig, "He's a good guy."
"He's going to get us killed," I say.
"No," Sam says, and he looks directly at me now. "You nearly got us killed. We were supposed to stay outside, not go charging in. You wanted to do that."
He's right. I'm angry because he's right, and I know that's a terrible reaction to have, so I bite my lip and manage to stop myself from escalating the argument. I'm tired, I hurt, and I have the awful feeling that we started something here that's out of our control. And what did we get for it? Not much. A backpack stuffed with receipts that probably won't lead anywhere.
My voice comes out a little shaky when I say, "What do you think was in the room--"
"Don't go there," Sam says, putting an arm around me. It's unexpected, and welcome. We both reek of foul-smelling smoke, but I don't mind. "We can't know what he was hiding down there, and he damn sure wasn't about to let us find out."
"What if it was someone--"
"No," he says. "You'll rip your guts out if you do that. Don't."
I sense he doesn't want to imagine it. I do, because I must: a young woman, maybe the age of Melvin's chosen victims. Locked up, tied up maybe. Left to burn if anyone comes close to finding her.
"Maybe it was him," I say. "Maybe he was down there, and he opened the door."
"That's a happier thought," Sam agrees, but he shakes his head. "I was looking at the door when it opened. The knob didn't turn. There was nobody on the other side. It was like a . . . remote-control release."
"You mean we tripped some kind of sensor?"
"Maybe. But . . . maybe someone was watching us. Waiting for us to take the bait. And when we didn't . . ."
That was right; I felt it click together inside. I'd had an overwhelming sense of being watched on those stairs. And I'd been right. Someone had been behind a camera. Probably had watched us going through the whole house. It was only after we'd found the hidden basement room that he'd taken action, though. "He was watching," I agree. "And he was off-site. He had a remote control to open that door and set off the explosion. He must have been close by."
"Not necessarily. He could have all of it routed through an app." He gives me a fleeting trace of a smile. "The way you set up the cameras on your house."
He's right. I'd used Internet-capable cameras to monitor my house at Stillhouse Lake, and I could access and watch remotely from anywhere. The tools were common, and commercially available. "And the door?"
"Some Wi-Fi security apps let you lock and unlock doors," he says. "He was probably watching us from the moment we broke in. Once we'd found the secret stairs, he waited for us to go down and open the door. That was probably booby-trapped; maybe he has some kind of disarming signal for the bomb he sends before he goes in himself. When we didn't take the bait--"
"He triggered it for us," I finish. "So he could be anywhere. We've got nothing."
"Not necessarily," he says, nodding to the packs we've got dumped in the floorboards between our feet. They're stuffed with papers. It's something. I hope. "Gwen, remember--"
Whatever he's about to tell me, he's interrupted by Lustig, who yanks the door open and says, "Okay, here's what's about to happen. All hell is going to break loose and rain down shit on us. County sheriffs, fire, ambulance. I'm going to claim federal jurisdiction. You two get taken to the hospital, but you do not move until I get there. And you do not answer questions until I get there. Understood?"
"Mike," Sam says. "What the hell did we get into?"
The look Mike Lustig gives him is a two-parter: one says, Not here, and then flicks to me to indicate I'm not someone he wants to be letting in on the story. And why would he? Mike knows who I am. Who my ex-husband is. He probably doesn't trust me any farther than he can throw a Sherman tank. That's fair. I don't trust him at all, and the fact that he's got a badge and
a gun and these doors don't open from the inside makes me itch all over. He's Sam's friend, sure. But he isn't mine. My trust isn't contagious.
Lustig shuts the door again, cutting off a cold blast of wind that carries an edge of ice with it, and leans against the SUV as the first responder--a black-and-white county-sheriff SUV--rounds the curve and pulls to a stop beside us. No sirens, but the pulsing flare of the lights turns everything raw and cold in bursts, renders everything alien, even Sam's face. I try the door. It doesn't open. My heart thumps faster, and I look around for something, anything, I can use. Reflex. I can slither over the seat to the front and get out that way, I reassure myself. There might even be an extra gun in the glove compartment. If not, I can be out and running in seconds, and in these woods, in the dark, they'd have a hell of a time tracking me down.
It's an academic exercise, this escape plan. I do it for every situation when I feel the least bit out of control. It helps. I've practiced the art of evade, attack, escape for years now in my head, and I've trained for it. My life--and the lives of my kids--depends on it.
"So what's our story?" I ask Sam. "Because the truth isn't going to fly. Not for this."
"Stick as close to it as we can," he says. "We came looking for answers. Found the door wide open. Went in to see if someone was hurt, discovered the secret room, got the hell out just in time."
It doesn't paint us as innocent, but it doesn't indicate we brought dynamite and blew the place to smithereens, either, which I'm completely behind. I nod. Door is wide open. I visualize it in my mind, imagining our cautious approach, calling out, looking for someone who's hurt. I imagine it until it seems so real it could be true, and then I keep on imagining it until it is true, and the other thing is a distant possibility. It's the only way to consistently, convincingly lie: you have to believe it.
So I make myself believe it. Of course, if the door doesn't burn completely, and they can determine it was locked, then we're screwed. But given the inferno, I think we're safe on that score.
More vehicles crowd around us, penning us in: two fire trucks, a single ambulance, another official-looking SUV, maybe from the forest service. The firefighters are carrying loads of hose into the woods up toward the blaze, and I hear the buzz overhead of a light aircraft; they're spotting for spread of the fire.