“Nothing different than what Todd said this morning: Chris’s father is refusing visitors. The district attorney is going to force him, but that takes time. Red tape and all. But they can’t make him talk. Todd’s staked out your mom’s house. So far, she hasn’t come back. And there’s no chance of a search warrant without your matching DNA, and even then, it will be tough. All that proves is she had another kid.”
“We need to figure out where she’s gone,” I said.
“Police are watching her store,” Kelly said. “Place hasn’t opened today.”
“She could be anywhere,” Chris said. “If she masterminded taking Kailey, then she had a contingency plan.”
“You guys really think she took Kailey?” Kelly asked. “You have no real evidence other than this theory.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But right now, I’ve got nothing else to go on. And you have to admit, it’s a pretty good theory. It’s no coincidence Kailey is the one who went missing right after her mother’s former captor drove by her apartment.”
Kelly looked unconvinced. “All right. So what about her contingency plan?”
“Todd said they flagged Martha Beckett’s passport,” I said, “They couldn’t find one for Mary Weston.”
“If they couldn’t get a search warrant, how can they flag her passport?” Chris asked.
“Easy. She’s wanted for questioning in the disappearance of a child,” I said, inwardly smiling at his naivety. “Police could even say Justin named her as an accomplice. It’s a lie, but it would be enough. Don’t be fooled. Police break rules all the time. As long as what they’re doing doesn’t affect a court outcome, they’ll go for it.”
“Great system.”
I could have laughed. “Don’t get me started.”
“Call Justin,” Kelly said. “See if he knows of any other place his parents may have owned. Or somewhere his mother could have gone, like a special place. Anything he may have mentioned.”
“You don’t think Todd’s already done that?” I asked. “I’m sure he’s picked that kid’s brain clean.”
“Right.” She raked her fingers through her short hair until it stood on end, not unlike a porcupine. “What about you?” She directed the question at Chris. “Do you have any memory of any place with your parents other than the farm?”
“Every memory I have of my parents is there,” he said. “I was never allowed in the barn, but I remember the house. To a kid, it seemed like a giant, crumbling mansion. I used to imagine it was haunted. I never had any friends, but sometimes my dad would play hide and seek with me. Mother Mary always got pissed because she was restoring the house on her own. She worried I’d knock over paint or do something else to ruin her project.”
“She’s a monster.” That’s why I couldn’t allow myself to lose respect for my choice to end lives. I couldn’t be lumped into the same pot as someone like Martha Beckett.
“I remember one time,” Chris continued, “probably not too long before Dad’s arrest. I fell down the stairs – they were spiral, and I was running too fast. Fell the last five steps and cut my chin on the jagged woodwork. She’d been working on the trim.” He traced the faint scar along his chin. “That’s how I got this. At first she was pissed, because I was stupid, and I’d torn off the old trim. Then she realized I was cut pretty bad and had to go to the doctor. She was nice to me there.”
“For show?”
“Of course. But when you’re a little kid and your mother acts like you’re a pain in her ass, you’ll take any affection you can get.”
“She loved the house.” Kelly was tapping away on her keyboard. “I wonder…”
Chris and I crowded behind her chair waiting to see what exactly she wondered. A Pennsylvania real estate site popped up, and soon we were looking at a rambling farmhouse. It was painted a cheery yellow, with black shutters. Planters hung from the front porch, and the chimney smoked. A hint of snow on the brown grass showed the picture had to have been taken before last spring. We hadn’t had any snow yet.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and my pulse quickened.
“That’s my house.” Chris sounded strangled.
“I know. It was bought at auction two months ago.” Kelly typed some more, searching property records on the public site I never could figure out how to manage.
“By who?”
“Give me a minute.”
Tap, tap, tap on the keyboard. Chris’s heavy, uneven breathing next to me. The rushing of my own heart. I could barely hear my own thoughts.
“M. Alan Lee.” Kelly had the answer. “Do you know that name?”
Chris staggered back. “Alan is my middle name, and Lee was Mary’s maiden name.”
L
ike a man
on a suicide mission, Chris weaved through mid-afternoon traffic, jumping onto Interstate 76 and driving fast enough for a huge ticket. He’d barely given me time to stop at my place and pick up my hidden supplies. Mousecop watched me rush around the apartment with a look of disdain on his face, licking his paws and sitting next to his almost full food bowl.
“Listen to me,” I said. “We have to be objective here. If she’s got Kailey, we get her first. If we can safely rescue her and still take care of your mother, and come up with a plausible story for the cops, then we will. But you may have to accept letting them arrest her.”
His answer was a brisk nod. “But we at least try it our way.”
Our way.
The man probably never did an illegal thing in his life before he met me. Let alone made the decision to take another’s life. You don’t make those decisions rashly. I’d been fantasizing about the idea long before Justin’s release, rationalizing the action. And I now know the consequences of going down this road: I’m a killer. If there truly is a God, I don’t expect him to give me a pass because I took out the scum of the earth. After all, eye for an eye is an old world male-dominated religious belief. God himself–or herself, for that matter–never condoned vigilantism that I know of.
Even worse, I had put my own freedom at stake. But after all the kids I’d seen slip through the system’s gaping cracks while filthy creeps bent our bureaucracy to their best advantage, I chose the dark path. I was willing to sacrifice for what I believed was right. That didn’t come without a mountain of punishment. And dumping a glass of cyanide on an unsuspecting man, no matter how evil his acts, took its toll on a person.
The drive to Lancaster County had the glass-covered features of a dream; our mission seemed surreal, while the landscape shined with the stark reality of the coming winter. The heavily populated areas gradually turned to fields of harvested corn, their brown, short stalks looking piteous. Crumpled and withered, the stalks blended together, whipping past until I saw nothing but decay. Houses thinned out, replaced by farmland and long stretches of winter-brown fields. I wished it were summer. The ugly scenery was a perfect accompaniment.
Chris plugged the address into his GPS, and like every piece of modern technology, it wasn’t without its kinks. The route took us the long way around Lancaster, bypassing the city but getting us stuck on a two-lane road behind a grain truck and an Amish carriage.
I snapped a picture of the Amish family with my smartphone. The kids smiled and waved while their bearded driver looked irritated. I suppose they did get tired of being a tourist attraction.
“I think I could be Amish.” I stuck the phone back in my bag.
Chris snorted. “Says the girl with the most expensive smartphone on the market.”
“Okay, giving up stuff would be tough. Probably impossible. But if I’d been born into it, I think I would have stayed. There’s something safe and beautiful in their simplicity.”
“Simplicity is an illusion. Everyone has problems. And most of the time, the ones we expect have it easy are dealing with the worst shit.”
I couldn’t argue with that, so I shut up and gripped the door handle as he yanked the car into the right lane and passed yet another semi.
“You can’t kill your mother if you’re dead.”
The sunshine had given way to thick, gray clouds that looked full enough to burst. Rain might work to our advantage, however.
The grating female drone on the GPS announced we needed to turn in a quarter of a mile, and Chris barely slowed down enough to make it.
“Jesus!” I braced my hand on the dash. “Get a grip right now. This thing says we’re five miles away, so we need to pull over and collect ourselves. We need a plan. We can’t just go barreling in the front door.”
“Why not?” He eased off the accelerator.
“You realize you’re going back into the lion’s den of your memory, right? You don’t know how you’re going to react when you see that barn, or the house, and God knows what you’ll remember. If you break down, I can’t handle Martha on my own. Not without some kind of distraction. Translation: we need a plan, and I’m in charge.”
He scowled and pulled the car over. “Fine. What is the plan?”
“If you can keep it together, you go to the front door and knock. Let’s pray she won’t recognize you. Say you’re broken down and your cell reception sucks. Anything to get in the house. While you’re doing that, I’ll check the barn. If I don’t see anything, I’ll come around to the back door and find a way inside. Put your phone on silent. If I can’t get inside, I’ll text you.”
“What if you find Kailey in the barn?”
“I’ll send two texts.”
“What am I supposed to say to her?” He shouted the words.
I laid my hand on his arm. “Relax. I just told you.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Just keep her occupied. Try not to say anything about yourself or Kailey until you hear from me.”
“You make it sound easy.”
“I know it won’t be. And if you can’t do this, it’s okay. I’ll figure out plan B.” That was bullshit. Plan B would be calling the police. I was out of my element, with little preparation and in an unfamiliar place. If Chris couldn’t perform, I’d make sure we’d found Martha and call Todd.
“I can handle it.”
He put the car back in gear and pulled onto the road. That’s when I realized how truly isolated we were; no one had passed while we idled on the shoulder, and no one lingered behind us now. The road quickly turned to gravel, cutting through a woody countryside. The fat clouds still hovered overhead, but they’d become a more ominous gray, almost as though they were sucking up the dead grasses and fields.
I stared as one cloud grew larger, billowing into a brilliant haze until it pulsated like a racing heart on the operating table.
“Oh my God.” The words lodged in my throat as if I’d inhaled smoke. “That’s a fire.”
I
once saw
a fire department demonstration on how fast a fire can overtake a room. They’d set up a room of sorts, complete with Goodwill furniture and decor, on the lawn of a church hosting a community event. I don’t remember the exact dimensions of the room, but it was pretty standard size. And the fire turned deadly in exactly twenty-two seconds. The fire chief warned about the importance of smoke detectors, because with the right accelerant, a fire can double in size every thirty seconds.
By the time we reached the farmhouse, long streaks of fire jetted out the busted windows, and the entire house was surrounded by black smoke. I called 911, but someone must have beat me to it, because the engines squealed past us not more than a minute later.
We played the lost card, saying we were out for an afternoon tour after some stress in the city. Once they were sure we had nothing to do with starting the fire, the police told us to get lost and set up a perimeter while the firefighters fought the blaze.
We drove a half mile down the road and watched.
Neither of us spoke. Nothing to say. Nothing to do but wait. Everything–and anyone–in the house was lost, and the goal was stopping the fire from spreading to neighboring farms. The barn wasn’t on fire, and it didn’t look like anyone had been recovered from it.
At some point, I called Todd. He yelled at me for several minutes and then said he’d call Lancaster County and put them on the lookout for the body of a young girl.
“Maybe the house is empty,” I tried to say. I felt like I’d inhaled a roomful of smoke, although I’d barely been out of the car before Chris and I both decided heroism was no more than a death sentence.
Sometime after seven, when the sun had rescinded and the blaze was finally ebbing, a dusty-looking SUV pulled up beside us. My heart sank into oblivion. The vehicle bore the Lancaster County Coroner’s logo. The passenger window slid down revealing an unshaven, pissed off looking Todd.
“I didn’t expect to see you,” I said. “This isn’t your jurisdiction.”
“I’ve got a friend at the Lancaster precinct. When I told him what was going on, he invited me out.”
“Is it a kid?”
He gave me single curt nod. “I got the call on the way from the city, caught the coroner as she was leaving. Place has been empty,” Todd said, “except for the occasional contractor’s truck. No one’s met the new owner, but the gossip is that he was from the city and working on the house.”
“He?” Chris spoke for the first time in hours.
“Lancaster P.D. said the only person ever spotted out here was a man,” Todd said. “But the owner is listed as female, age 56.”
“I don’t even know my mother’s birthdate.”
“We’re having trouble locating her birth certificate,” Todd said. “Everything we know about Mary Weston says that she was born poor, married off to your father young. She was in her early thirties when he was arrested, so the age fits.”
“How many bodies are in the house?” I asked.
“Two.” Todd’s dismal tone reflected my own sorrow. Whether it turned out to be Kailey in the house or not, people had died, burned to death. And one was a child.
I’ll never understand the cruelty of life.
Todd turned and said something to the driver, who I presumed was the coroner. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Everything became very hazy after that. Time stood still while Chris and I hung out on the fringes. The air reeked of burnt wood, and when the wind gusted just right, the rancid scent of pot roast that had been barbequed to a dry pulp on a charcoal grill.
Todd mostly ignored us, talking alternately on his phone and with the local police. At times, his voice raised, and I wondered who he was arguing with.