Fifty feet to his right a mountain stream threw itself off the cliff. Down and down the water went, pale in the starlight, down into the silent valley. To Billy the stream sounded like the trumpet that calls you to death. Some archangel blows it. Supposedly.
He was falling. The slope was too steep and the soil too loose to hold him. He pressed himself back against the bank. It felt like he was in an elevator, just starting off but speeding up quickly. In another moment he was going to be out in the air, falling to the music of the water. He saw a dog walking lazily across the compound between the cabins.
"Momma," he said. He scrabbled, he grabbed at the loose
dirt, he found that he most desperately did not want to die. He'd had hardly any life yet! He threw back his head and screamed, and the stars wavered in his tears.
As if it was a hook made of cold iron, the man's hand closed around his upper arm. Then his face was there, beside Billy's face. "I love you," he said in a voice loud enough to be heard over the gush of the falls.
How Billy hated to hear that! But the man was strong and he laid himself against the arm and watched the stars disappear as he was dragged back into the cliff-hugging woods.
Roughly, the man pulled Billy up the slope. It took him a long time and a lot of rest stops. He wheezed and cursed under his breath, but never for a second did he release Billy's arm, let alone loosen his grip.
At first Billy was defiant, thinking that he would get away again and this time he would find some tiny path down the face of the cliff, secret since the days of the Indians and the mountain men.
But his shoulder and knee hurt where he had hit them, and his feet were raw and he wanted to be warm again.
The man pulled him along, and at length the dim light in the van's ceiling began to flicker in the trees. "Do you still have to do your business?" the man asked.
"Yes," Billy said.
"Come over here." He pulled him toward the van. "I wasn't planning to use these, but it's your fault." He opened the front door and lifted the passenger seat. Underneath it was a toolbox. Billy sucked in his breath when he saw what looked like a small gun in the man's hand. But it wasn't a gun, it was handcuffs in a leather case. They were neat, just like cops had.
He snapped them on Billy's wrists, clicking them until they were tight. Then he checked them with the flashlight. "OK," he said, "you have three minutes. If you pull anything like that again, you're going to find out that I punish."
Billy tried to walk on his own but could only stagger. His feet hurt so much he had to balance on their sides, bandy-legged. He lifted the front of his pajama shirt and pissed where he stood, watching the stream of urine smoke in the mountain cold.
"Where are we?" he asked as he finished.
"The mountains of the moon, as far as you're concerned. Get in the van."
The man made him lie on the miserable little bed again, and the straps soon replaced the handcuffs. The cot had become so familiar he felt almost like he belonged there.
"This is gonna be tight," the man said, wrapping the thickest of the straps around his chest, "and it's gonna be hell because it is so tight. But I can do worse. I can certainly do worse."
He tightened the strap until Billy was reduced to shallow breaths. "I can't—"
He slapped a strip of wide gray tape over Billy's mouth. "Can't breathe? That's because the chest strap is too tight. You're being punished this way, and it might go on for some little time."
Billy pressed himself as hard against the strap as he could. He couldn't breathe, he was scared to death!
"You'll manage well enough if you relax." The man took his hair in his fist, forced Billy to look at him. "I am going to attend to your feet. I am going to do everything to help you. And you will find that I can be very, very nice. Our life together can be wonderful, Billy. But I want you to understand something."
He brought his face close and it was horrible to see, sweaty, scratched from the pine needles, fat. The eyes were funny, though. You expected really mean eyes. But this guy had the woebegone expression of a big old floppy hound.
"If you keep trying to get away, if you give me a hard time, if you cause me trouble, then I will turn around and go right back to Stevensville, and you know what I will do? I will kill your parents. Did you hear me? I will kill them both and it will be hard and slow. Then I will kill your sister. And you will watch all this. Then I will burn down your house and leave you naked in the middle of nowhere with no parents and no home and no sister. And it will all be your fault. "
These words were like fists blasting Billy's face; the shock of them made him as dizzy as real blows would have. He had never dreamed that his mom and dad were in any danger.
He had to be tough, he mustn't cry! 'Now, like the man says, relax. You do things his way, you won't get Mom and Dad and Sally killed. So do things his way, dumbhead!' Now what was
it he was going to say to the man? Something, and it had seemed darn important.
The man began working on his feet. He cleaned them with tweezers and cotton as Billy raised his head and looked down his body at the figure with the flashlight and the little blue first-aid kit. There was a smell of alcohol, and then the pain was so great that Billy threw his head back and shrieked behind the
gag.
Soon the sting stopped, though. He felt bandages being put on. That was a lot better.
Then he remembered what it was he had to say. Despite the agony, despite his half-suffocated condition and his gag, he started trying to communicate with the man. Again he lifted his head. He made urgent sounds behind the gag. He worked his mouth, stabbed at the tape with his tongue, mustered what little saliva he had to try to float it off.
Finally the man took notice. He crawled up the van and gingerly removed the tape. Billy swallowed, cleared his throat, and met the eyes. The hound-dog expression was gone, replaced by a warm, contented look.
"My mother," Billy murmured. His voice was so thick it sounded like an animal growling. He stopped talking, tried again to get some spit in his mouth. It seemed enormously important that he be understood. "My mother," he repeated with all the clarity he could muster, "always gives me a cup of hot chocolate when I get hurt."
Part Three
________
THE CUP
OF KINDNESS
13.
The first day she kept wanting to organize yet another search. But they'd already looked everywhere they could, and they had clear evidence of the abduction.
She kept telling herself, 'It really happened. Some total stranger came in here and just took him.' Her basement, her stairs, his bedroom—as the police painstakingly re-created the movements of the intruder these family places came to seem charged with darkness at midday.
On the second day it seemed as if the investigators would never stop poking through her things, lifting chairs, vacuuming, scraping, spreading dirty fingerprint powders. But when they finally did leave she panicked, fearing that they had given up. She had to stifle the impulse to run after them.
On the third day time revealed itself as the true enemy. There remained nothing but the silent phone and the regular tolling of the clock.
Mary told herself to reestablish the routine of the household. She should start by cleaning up the extensive mess left by the fingerprint men. One impulse moved her to throw herself into it, to put on an apron full of pockets and stuff them with Pine Sol and 409 and Windex and start working. She knew how to disappear into housework.
Because it was an escape from worrying about Billy, she feared work as much as she longed for it.
All Monday and most of Tuesday people had come to the house bringing the kind of covered dishes that made Mary think of funerals. Her mother had always taken a casserole over
when a friend had died, apparently on the theory that grief whets the appetite but destroys the ability to cook. When Mother herself passed on, her friends brought fleets of casseroles, whole cooploads of roasted chickens, reefs of salad, enough food to feed the mourners for two years.
Now, as evening fell, Mary was coming to recognize what all the activity of the past forty-eight hours concealed. Behind it was complete helplessness.
The last investigator to leave was a forensic surveyor who had made a map of the property and a set of drawings of the interior of the house. Hundreds of pictures were taken, and every means had been used to gather not only fingerprints, but even glove prints and any bit of hair or debris that might be relevant.
Toddcaster had explained that most of this wasn't intended to gain information that would locate Billy, but rather to find evidence that would place the suspect at the scene when he was eventually found.
"What will they do to find him?"
"Old-fashioned police work—following up leads, canvassing, trying to pick up the trail."
"It's a big country," Mark said bitterly. He was full of guilt for not being more aggressive when Billy had reported the man in the front yard. Mary worried that his recriminations were sapping his drive.
They had found the exact place under the tree where the man had stood, and even virtually invisible indentations that indicated he'd spent some time lying down. He'd been able to rest, maybe even take a nap, while he waited for the house to get quiet. What kind of a monster could be that cool?
Mary had gone there late last night and stood watching the windows of the house. Shafts of light fell onto the grass. She saw Mark come into their bedroom, saw Sally's dim night-light and Billy's black window. She saw Mark sitting on the side of their bed with his head in his hands.
The most awful part was that her little boy was so vulnerable. He was full of posturing and bluster. He'd pretend to be tough and that would probably do nothing but make his situation worse.
Her son was one of the brightest, most inventive, most cheerful children she had ever known. It was easy to make friends with Billy, all you had to do was smile. He had a temper, but even when he got mad it only took him a couple of minutes to cool down.
He had his limitations, though; she couldn't imagine him escaping from a smart adult.
You knew exactly how Billy felt at all times. He lied with his eyebrows raised and an expression of comic innocence on his face. He might as well be carrying a sign.
The poor little boy was not in any way equipped for this. Oh, he might run away from his kidnapper if he could, but he wouldn't get very far. You taught your children the basics— don't go with strangers, memorize your phone number— but how could you ever teach them to deal with the kind of onslaught he must be enduring now?
Beyond the basics he didn't know much about sex, so he would probably be mystified and revolted by the man's advances. That was the most hideous part, to imagine him being .. . handled. When you thought of the brute process of a man having sex with a little boy, it just made you want to wither and die.
In addition to helping the police and watching the FBI methodically dismember her home, she had been compelled to be a hostess. Winnie Lacy, the wife of the police chief, June Edwards, the mother of Billy's best friend, Tom Benton's perky little assistant principal Dougal Frazer—who had been instrumental in getting Mark his new job—had all come to the house. Mark's best friend among the faculty, Jim McLean, had offered himself as general helper until the autumn term started. Sally, bless her soul, had made iced tea and served the food from the covered dishes.
At first the investigators were reassuring. "Most of these cases have a local slant. Most of these guys are repeat offenders, and we'll interview every known molester in the state. Most of the cases are closed within forty-eight hours."
But the magic forty-eight hours passed, and only silence.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children had referred the Nearys to a support group. It met in Des Moines,
and they were getting together tonight. There were five other families in the group. Two of them had runaway children and three were victims of parental abduction. Nobody had—with certainty—lost a child to a stranger.
Nevertheless Mark and Mary and Sally got into the car and drove two hours to the meeting, held in the basement of a Catholic church in an unfamiliar part of Des Moines. Behind them they left Jim McLean staring at the TV and snacking from the array of dishes still on the coffee table. He would be there if Billy called.
Mary wanted to drive but Mark insisted. She knew why: he also hungered for control over the nightmare. They were both clawing darkness, falling, and she knew that Mark felt it perhaps even more than she did. He had been having severe headaches, something completely new for him. This morning she had massaged his neck and shoulders for half an hour, and he was taking as much Advil as the label allowed. She watched him twisting his neck as the old wagon wheezed south. "I really don't mind driving," she said.
"It relaxes me."
They rode in silence. To the west the sunset slowly bloomed. Soon the last edge of the red disk dropped below the horizon, leaving a bright orange line shimmering beneath a sky that rose from yellow to infinite green. Night swept down out of the heights. A star floated in the emptiness, enormous and of a beauty so great that it made Mary feel as if she was starving for a sustenance she could not name. Both of her kids were amateur astronomers. "What's that star?" she asked Sally.
"Venus. It sets in an hour."
Was Billy seeing it, too? She hoped not. Stargazing would be sure to remind her poor son of home. He was so sensitive, and so devoted to his family. Summer before last he'd gone to camp, only to return after a week with the most spectacular case of homesickness the counselors had ever seen.
Mark had thought it was because he was insecure, that it was an anxiety he could overcome. But Mary understood her son's real problem: the camp was too structured. Billy was an adventurer, a lover of freedom, hungry for independence ... on his terms.
She wanted to hug him so badly she thought she was going to go mad.
Mark turned on the radio. There was an all-news station in Des Moines, and they listened to that. The stories were muttered incantations. Mary closed her ears, letting it all bleed into nonmeaning. Her mind waited only for two words: William Neary.
For an hour she waited, but the words never came. So quickly Billy had become old news. "Are you listening?" she asked Mark.
"Not really. Just passing the time."
Sally spoke. "Do you remember the time Billy put the firecrackers in the toaster?"
Mark said, "No, I do not."
"But you remember it exploded?"
"I recall throwing it out the kitchen door. Billy did that?"
Sally laughed. Then she started to sing.