Drawn Into Darkness (10 page)

Justin didn't hear me out. He turned and ran away.

“Wait till I leave them a
note
at least!” I screamed after him.

He showed no sign of hearing, but sprinted straight up the weedy lane that ran down to the boat ramp.

•   •   •

Mail carrier Casey Fay Hummel pulled off the road and stopped at the pink house's mailbox, which like all the rest of them faced inward, with its back side to the road. Looked kind of weird to people who didn't come from around here, or so they said. Casey Fay had lived in the area all her life, and having the mailbox face away from the road made a lot more sense to her than having to stop on the road to deliver or pick up mail. This way she pulled clear off the pavement, nobody was likely to rear-end her, and she could sit in the driver's seat, like a sane person, and put the mail into the box from there.

Huh. The new woman who lived in the pink house hadn't picked up her mail either Monday or yesterday, which was Tuesday. No big deal, just credit card applications. Casey Fay started to shove today's mail in on top—

Oops. Liana Clymer—or Leppo; judging by her mail, she seemed to go by both names—anyway, Liana had a big package that would not fit into the mailbox, something from Kookrite Kitchenware.

Retrieving the accumulated mail along with today's, Casey Fay steered onto the yard in front of the pink house—hardly anybody had “lawns” down here, let alone paved driveways; the whole world was for driving on. Well, except for pure swamp, but people didn't live there. Casey Fay stopped between two mimosa trees in front of the place where Liana Clymer lived, and beeped her horn.

She waited a minute, because rather than just dropping the mail at the door, she really wanted to have a look at the new woman who was renting the house where Old Lady Ingle had lived so many years before going into the nursing home. Like everybody else around here, Casey Fay kept track of, well, everybody. But if Liana Clymer/Leppo was a Yankee, maybe she thought honking your horn was rude and she wouldn't come to the door. The reason a little beep-beep was
not
rude was because it gave the person inside the house a chance to get some clothes on before somebody knocked on their door. Some people spent the summer days sitting butt naked in front of a fan, especially if they only had window air conditioners, when even central air couldn't keep up with the heat.

But the house door didn't open, so Casey Fay sighed, gathered all the mail plus the parcel, got out of her aging Chevy Cavalier, and walked up three wooden steps and across a small porch to the door.

Even before she knocked, she knew something was wrong. That strong odor, unmistakable. Something had died.

Why would anybody let something dead lie and stink in their house? Unless it was—the person herself?

Nose wrinkling, Casey Fay put the envelopes and the parcel into a transparent plastic bag she pulled from her pocket, knotted it to protect the contents against rain, then left the entire package on the porch by the door, as was policy when something wouldn't fit in the mailbox. Yet, after slowly retreating down the steps, she didn't leave. Not sure what she was looking for, she walked to the side windows and peeked in, seeing nothing except a shadowy bedroom. Still uneasy, she ventured around back—

Now, why in hell would anybody leave her car, in this case a metallic blue Toyota Matrix, parked in the backyard under the clothesline?

And if the car was here, why didn't the Clymer woman seem to be home? Unless she was lying dead inside the house . . .

Casey Fay knocked at the back door anyway, but when nobody opened it, she found she'd already made up her mind. She sure didn't like that smell coming from behind the front door. As she walked back to her old Chevy, she pulled out her cell phone and dialed 911.

“H
ey! Justin, damn it . . .” Given no choice—or it felt like no choice, as if Justin were a three-year-old chasing a rattlesnake and I were his mom—I ran after him.

I might never have caught up with him if it hadn't been for sandspurs. Those small weeds didn't look like much, but just as their name implied, they grew thick in sandy ground and had seeds that were—prickly was not the word. These things were vicious, like Mexican cowboy rowels.

“Ow!” Justin yelped, trying to run through them barefoot. Cursing fluently enough to show that he was indeed no longer the sweet little boy his parents remembered, he limped to a halt before he could reach the dirt road. He raised one foot to pull sandspurs out of it. Catching up with him, I glimpsed red; the little green devils had stuck him deep enough to draw blood. And he couldn't bear putting his weight on either foot for long. Swearing, he hopped from one to the other as if he were standing on hot coals.

“Sit down,” I told him, trying to get hold of him somehow to help him ease the weight off his feet, but like a drowning person he grabbed me instead and nearly pulled me down with him. Yet his butt had barely touched the ground before he started protesting, “What if Stoat comes?”

It was a horribly real possibility with no solution. Sitting on the ground, I lifted one of Justin's feet into my lap and started pulling the sandspurs out of it with my fingernails as quickly as I could.

“What if he drove down here right now, what are we going to do?” Justin insisted.

“What if we're little pink seashells on a vast ocean beach and someone steps on us?” I grumbled, waxing existentialist at him. “What if the world is a flake of dandruff on a Titan's head, and he gets itchy?” I finished with one of his feet and grabbed the other. “Hold still!” I complained as he winced—whether from physical pain or from mental anguish, it was hard to tell. “What if Stoat the Goat
doesn't
drive down here right now?”

“You're loony,” Justin said.

“Kierkegaard called it a leap of faith. Stay where you are a minute.” Finished with his feet, I reached for my own to yank off my wet sneakers, then my equally soppy socks. “Put those on.” I handed them to Justin.

“These?” He accepted them with two fingers. “How am I supposed to fit my feet into these?”

“However you can.”

“They don't even reach past my heel,” Justin complained, stretching my socks to their utmost.

I pushed my sneakers back onto my bare feet, but just as I started to stand up, I heard the growl of a vehicle approaching on the dirt road that passed not nearly far enough away from us. I lapsed back onto the ground, mutely terrified it might be Stoat.

Justin whimpered, “If they turn down here, they'll see us!”

Terror had made me memorize the sound of Stoat's van bone-marrow deep, and—I exhaled in relief—this vehicle wasn't it. “That's not Stoat,” I said, lurching to my feet.

“Lee Anna, what're you
doing
?” Justin yelped.

I windmilled my arms. Trying to flag down some help for us, that's what I was doing, but the truck—spewing loud country music, it was one of those asinine jacked-up trucks with balls, literally, having a long antenna with tennis balls skewered on it arching over its cargo bed. Stained yellow by sand, ballsy whip bobbing, the overtall truck drove past the boat ramp entry without stopping.

To stifle a pang of hungry disappointment I said, “Well, at least now we know there are people back here.”

“Who cares? We need to get out of here.”

The restrained panic in Justin's voice echoed the fear I had felt when I heard the car, and helped me concede in my mind that we could not hang around to wait for the boating Bubbas to get back from Chipoluga Swamp. We were on the run from Stoat.

Looking back the way we had come, I noticed with dismay the clear prints of our feet in the sand. “Justin, may I borrow that knife you found?”

“Sure. Which blade?”

“Biggest.”

He pried the blade into position with his thumbnail and handed the knife to me. “You're, like, really polite,” he said as if I puzzled him. “If Uncle, um, Stoat wants something, he snaps his fingers.”

“I noticed.” I struggled to cut a low branch from a catalpa tree, succeeded, returned the knife to Justin, then backtracked to sweep the sand with it—catalpas, aka bean trees, have very broad leaves. My branch resembled a fan more than a broom, but did a pretty good job of erasing our tracks.

“Sweet,” Justin remarked when I had made my way back to him.

“Like tupelo honey,” I agreed. “Okay, let's go. Single file.” He went first, and I followed, trailing the catalpa branch behind me. Looking back, I saw to my satisfaction that my improvised drag was doing a pretty good job of erasing our footprints.

Weeds flourished around my ankles—wildflowers, really, and any other time I would have been exclaiming over their blossoms. But now all my attention was focused on listening for the sound of a certain vehicle approaching. Okay, Stoat was so anal that maybe he had reported to work and was putting screen prints of cats in bikinis on the front of T-shirts right now, in which case we had time. But what if he wasn't quite that anal? What if he was out here looking for us?

Still, we reached the dirt road safely and turned left, away from where Stoat would enter. Justin didn't need foot protection on the smooth, sandy road. Standing on one leg to pull off a pink sock, he remarked, “I feel like a flamingo.”

He made me smile. “Okay, flamingo, keep walking.”

“Just a minute.” Balling my socks into his pockets, Justin deployed his knife and cut himself a tree branch to drag. Side by side, we hiked onward at the quickest pace I could manage.

Any other time I would have been fascinated, crossing the most rudimentary of wooden bridges and looking down between the boards at minnows, frogs, maybe a baby alligator in the water below, passing forests that were not forests, seeing the still green sheen of swamp water between trunks shaped like tepees. But under the circumstances all I could think was that we had to keep moving, find some kind of sanctuary before Stoat found us. Silent, we listened for the cough of the white van, or for any crackle of brush or outcry of birds in the muted midday swamp.

Time passed without any alarm. I decided to speak.

“You okay?” I asked Justin, wanting input but not wanting to ask the specific questions on my mind: How do you feel about me? Will you listen to me or do you think I am a pain? How about what I'm trying to accomplish, which is getting you home; are we on the same page at all?

Understandably puzzled by my question, Justin stared at me. “Okay? Compared to what?”

“Compared to yesterday or the day before.”

“I am, like, floating, it feels so good to be away from Unc—uh, you know. I guess I sort of never saw how bad it was until I got away.”

“Are you looking forward to calling your parents when we get out of here?”

Silence.

“Justin?”

Without turning to look at me, he said, “I kind of wish we could just be like this forever.”

“Like what?”

“Like, just kind of be lost in the middle of nowhere. Walking in the sun. I don't care that I'm tired and hungry. That gives me something to think about, so it's okay, okay? I don't want to think about my parents yet.”

“Okay,” I lied, feeling a dark cloud sail into my personal sunny day. I did care that I was tired and hungry. I cared quite a bit.

And I cared about getting Justin back to his parents whether that was what he thought he wanted or not. I cared enormously.

But I'd deal with that once we got, quite literally, out of the woods.

If
we got out. If Stoat didn't find us first.

•   •   •

“Oliver,” said Ned Bradley to his dog, “dip me in cream and throw me to the kittens. I'll be licked.”

He had been saying this, or variations of it, and walking around his apartment in circles ever since he had received the phone call from his son telling him that he was ditching work and driving up to Birmingham to see him. This had never happened before. In fact, he hadn't actually laid eyes on Chad in years.

“Laid eyes on.” Odd expression. As if seeing were like touching, like the laying on of hands. Like a blessing.

Which was what Chad needed, the way Ned figured. He intuited that Chad was badly upset to be coming anywhere near him. He guessed he was Chad's last hope of—of something. An anchor. A family.

“What have we got to eat?” Ned crouched to confer with his dog nose to nose. “Or drink? Jeez, I wish I could offer him a beer.” But Ned didn't have any beer in the fridge or whiskey in the cupboard. There was still time for him to run out and get some, but Chad would never believe Ned didn't keep it around all the time, that it was just for his visit.

Ned stood up to stare at his Tree of Life tapestry, telling himself that his son had every right to suspect the worst of him. It was up to him to prove to Chad that he was really, truly no longer drinking.

Snacks, then. What could he put together for snacks?

He was just about to head for the kitchen when the doorbell rang.

Heart thumping, Ned strode over and pressed the intercom. “Yes?”

“Dad.” Ned thought this sounded curiously monotone, even for a single syllable.

“I'll be down.” Chad had never been to the apartment and might have some difficulty finding it, so rather than just buzz him in, Ned headed for the elevator and pressed
G
for ground floor.

When the elevator doors opened, he got his first glimpse of his son standing behind a plate glass door. One look, and he could tell Chad was an emergency on feet. He wore his Dixieland Trucking uniform with his oval name patch on the shirt; he really had been driving to work when suddenly he couldn't go on. When Ned opened the door, Chad walked in without offering to hug or even shake hands. His face looked as hard and flat as his voice, saying, “Which way?”

“Tenth floor.” Ned didn't try to make small talk in the elevator, even though the silence felt thick enough to choke him. Chad didn't speak until he got into the apartment and Oliver, fuzzy ears flapping, ran to meet them.

“Hey, dog!” Chad dropped to one knee to greet Oliver with both hands. “What's his name?”

“Oliver. Because he always wants more.”

“I know how that is.” Chad sounded morose again. “Where's your bathroom?”

Ned pointed the way. “Have a seat,” he offered after Chad had returned. “Iced tea?”

Chad slumped on the sofa. “No, thanks.”

“Something to eat?”

Chad shook his head.

“Winning Lotto tickets? Five thousand bucks a day for life?”

Although Chad didn't smile, he did focus on his father in a guarded way. Ned sat down on the chair closest to his son and said as neutrally as he could, “What's the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“Bullshit.”

“It's nothing, Dad!”

His tone kept Ned at a distance but not Oliver. He sat his furry butt in front of Chad, peering up at him with liquid-eyed canine concern. Chad glanced at the dog and quickly looked away again.

Ned coaxed, “Come on, son. You don't drive three hours for nothing. Why are you here?”

Chad puffed his lips in exasperation before saying, “I felt like, if I went to work, I'd punch somebody.”

“Angry at the whole world, huh?” Ned let sympathy into his voice, but not too much. Chad wouldn't have liked too much. “What about if you went home to Amy?”

“She doesn't deserve to have me always pissed at her.”

“But you are.”

“Yes, goddamn it! If she'd just let go about Justin—”

Chad broke off, looking awkward.

Ned coaxed, “Go on. If Amy would just let go about Justin, then what?”

“Then—damn it, I don't know! But she won't, and I'm thinking about divorce, and it's your fault.”

Chad had become loud enough to make Oliver change his mind about sitting in front of him. The dog retreated.

“Aahhh,” said Ned to fill the moment it took him to process what Chad had said. “I understand.” This was true. “You've brought your anger to me—”

“Well, if you hadn't left Mom and me, none of this would have happened!”

Ned accepted this absurd accusation without blinking. “You never had a chance to tell me off, did you?”

“No, and I don't want to.”

“Yes, you do.” Ned stood up. “You want to hit me.”

“No, I
don't
.”

“Yes, you do, Picklepuss.” As a little boy, Chad had always hated to be called Picklepuss when he was having a snit fit. “Come on, snootface.” He'd always hated that too. Ned picked up a sofa pillow by the corner and swung it at Chad's head.

That was all it took. Instantly the boy—no, a strong man now—was on his feet charging him like a bull with fists. Sidestepping, Ned grabbed a big square cushion from the sofa and deployed it like a shield. Chad's fist thudded into it.

“Ow,” Ned said, more in acknowledgment than in mockery.

“Shut up!”

Ned did not shut up. “Ow,” he repeated, “ow, ow, ow,” as Chad punched the sofa cushion again and again. Ned noticed that Oliver was nowhere to be seen; most likely he was hiding under the bed. Sensible dog. Chad kept punching, harder and harder, but always at Ned's protective shield rather than at Ned himself. Watching his son closely, Ned saw trickles of sweat on his flushed forehead. Then, panting, Chad bent over with his hands on his knees.

Ned allowed him only a short rest. “More,” he coached. “This time for the bastard who stole Justin.”

“Fucking hell!” Chad slammed his fist into the cushion-cum-punching-bag, shouting profanities as he hammered, attacked, assaulted, hitting even harder than before. “Goddamn everything!” Once again he wore himself out and stopped, panting for breath.