Drawn Into Darkness (2 page)

Would she know him if she saw him now, almost two years later?

It didn't matter. She would search for him twenty years if that was what it took. For the rest of her life if she had to.

But Chad was beginning to feel differently.

He had endured the first anniversary of the abduction hand in hand with her, through the sad ceremony, the painful emotions, the candlelight vigil. But no more than a week later he had turned over in bed and said the words of a practical-minded man, the words of a realist, the words Amy was not sure she could ever forgive him for saying.

“Pretty soon,” Chad had said, “there's going to come a tipping point when we will have to stop.”

In bed, in darkness. Pillow talk. How long had it been now since pillow talk, or since they had even slept together?

Sleepy and not paying much attention, Amy had mumbled, “Stop what?”

“Stop trying to believe Justin might be alive when common sense says he's dead.”

Common sense and experts: statistically speaking, most children abducted by strangers are killed within the first seventy-two hours after they disappear, and most of
those
are dead even before the searches start. Amy knew this and she knew Chad knew it.

“Chad, you've got to be kidding.” Amy felt wide-awake now. More than just awake. Palpitating. Panicked. “We can't give up on Justin!”

“How long are we supposed to live a nightmare? How long are we supposed to keep hoping when there's hardly any hope? And don't you think you should spend more time with the twins?”

“I keep them involved—”

“Posting their brother's picture on the Internet? Bullshit. You're neglecting them to chase an unrealistic dream—”

“Stop it, Chad!” Amy tried to keep her voice low so as not to disturb the children's sleep. She and Chad never made any kind of noise that might wake up the twins.

Chad said just as quietly, “I can't stop. This thing is killing us, deep-sixing our marriage. We have to move on.”

“I'm Justin's mother! I can't give up on him!”

“You were my wife before you were anybody's mother.”

Silence. Amy could not reply to that. Or not in any way that Chad could bear to hear. She had known since the moment Justin was born that motherhood came before anything else. It was a mother's instinct to protect her children, and if that meant protecting them from their own father, so be it. Amy put her children ahead of her husband. If she had to choose between Chad and her babies, Chad would have to go.

But she could not say this to him. And she felt pregnant with the knowledge, felt it kicking inside her, causing her to spend a mostly sleepless night.

A few days later Chad tried again, this time using the mundane argument of money, expenses, numbers on the bank statements. He said they had to cut back on their efforts to find Justin, which had almost buried them financially despite donations from hordes of sympathetic people. He thought Amy should help out by going back to work at Delaine Assisted Living. And they both should pay more attention to the twins. They should make an effort to become an untroubled family again. They should get back to normal. A new normal.

Amy could not help feeling horrified at her husband's “common sense.” They quarreled. And a day or two later, again. And so on. It had been months now.

Chad wanted her back at work? Amy found herself barely able to do any kind of work at all. There had been a time, before Justin's disappearance, when Amy had gone to both yoga and Zumba classes after a full day at her job, when she had gotten up extra early some mornings to go jogging with friends, when she had created delicate, gift-worthy jewelry out of wire and beads, when she had started to weave (not crochet or knit) a colorful afghan for the sofa. Now, discouraged by Chad, she no longer spent all her time searching for Justin, yet she could not take up any of her hobbies again. Instead, she found herself wistfully bringing home angel figurines she picked up at yard sales, thrift shops, and dollar stores. Wasting more money, Chad complained, and she did not even try to tell him that placing angels throughout the house was the only way she could bear living in her own home. A lot of the time she moped around, feeling desolate. More so after each quarrel with her husband.

And each fight got worse than the last, until now when Amy had really pissed Chad off, spending their last dime for a television commercial about Justin. “It might make all the difference,” Amy had argued. “Look how many people
America's Most Wanted
has located.”

“John Walsh,” Chad had retorted in stinging tones. “Let me remind you, Amy, his missing son is dead, always was dead, and always will be dead.”

“But he never gave up.”

“So now he's your hero instead of me?”

True enough, Amy thought, sitting uncomfortably on what should have been a comfy sofa, watching the rodeo on TV and feeling the knowledge that she could never give up still kicking like an overdue baby in her belly. Sensing another elephant in the room, Amy almost let herself think she stood to lose more than her son. She almost let herself think that pretty soon, if things went on this way, there was going to come a tipping point—make that a ripping point. The taut fabric of her marriage would soon tear apart.

D
espite the heat, which sent my mind searching for quotes from Milton or Dante as I walked along the shoulder of the road, still this place did not qualify as hell, only a fantastically weird limbo of sprawling vines thick with the largest, most grotesque and barbaric wildflower I had ever seen: circular blossoms wider than my hand, each made of twelve creamy bracts upon which lay wriggly purple tentacle-like petals radiating from an erect and somewhat cruciform yellow center. The Spaniards had called it “passionflower” because it had made them think of the passion of Christ on the cross. Dumbidity only knew why Floridians called the magnificently weird blossom “maypop.” And how ironic, I found, that the down-home place in which I now lived had been named after the most strikingly fantastic wildflower I had ever seen.

Amid the passionflower vines, a giant seashell lay in the sand—although sixty miles inland from the Gulf, still this place was almost as sandy as a beach—but the shell was part of a dead armadillo, really. Wacko things like them lived in my local limbo. Blue-tailed lizards, for instance. Walking fast to get out of the heat, I saw one scuttle away, its tail even more electric in color than the shack I was going to visit. I heard mockingbirds ranting almost loud enough to compete with the sound of Schweitzer's stubborn barking.

The blue shack lacked much by way of a porch. Its old wooden steps were not painted any peacock color; they were not painted at all. But at least they looked solid. I climbed them to the narrow stoop in front of the door and looked for a doorbell. There wasn't any. I knocked.

Waited a minute, self-conscious in my shorts—of course I wore shorts; everybody down here wore shorts, but my legs needed to be shaved. Every female down here seemed naturally hairless. And they all, men, women, and children, wore flip-flops. Everywhere. Dressy flip-flops for church, weddings, and funerals. But I couldn't stand the feel of the things, the thong between my toes. I wore socks and sneakers. Momentarily I wished I could have pulled up my pink socks far enough to cover the hair on my legs. But then, mentally, I shrugged. Who the hell cared how I looked?

Just as I was lifting my hand to tap again, the door opened. A pale teenage boy with long bleached hair in cornrows stood there raising his blond eyebrows at me. Immediately I felt absurd; I might as well have been carrying a placard that said
DIVORCED, EMOTIONALLY NEEDY
. “Um, hi,” I blurted. “I'm your new neighbor in the pink house, so I came over to meet my neighbors in the blue house. We should get along, huh? Pink and blue?”

God, I was babbling. I blushed. But the kid smiled, a small smile, but its shy generosity, not typically teenage, diverted my attention from his rather extreme hair with its many cornrows and braids to his face. Without a possibility of ever being handsome in a chiseled-chin/cheekbone way, he was a total cutie. Wide, sensitive mouth, short nose, liquid brown calf eyes, soft smooth tawny skin without a blemish.

“What's going on, Justin?” yelled a male voice from somewhere in the back of the shack.

“Visitor, Uncle Steve,” he yelled back. “Come on in,” he invited, holding the door open for me. Gratefully I stepped into a dim and blessedly cool living room where an air conditioner's hum competed with babble from Dish TV. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I looked around the room and saw its personality as being a bit anal, with sofa, lounge chair, end tables, and lamps arranged with rectilinear precision and spotlessly clean.

I heard Uncle Steve approaching, but saw him only as a silhouette against window light from the back door, quick and slim.

“Have a seat.” The teenage boy gestured me toward one end of the impeccable sofa. The carpet, too, I saw, was innocent of dirt in any form. Yet nothing looked new, and nobody had decorated. No throw pillows, no color scheme, and nothing worth noticing hanging on the walls. All the essentials were in evidence, yet the place felt oddly incomplete, as if it were a motel room, as if nobody lived here.

And the man hurrying in gave every impression of being exactly that: nobody. Not very tall and not well built, narrow-shouldered and hollow-chested and stooping, he was a gray man, by which I mean more than the color of his goatee and his thin hair pulled back into an aging-hippie ponytail and maybe his pebble eyes set too close together, shrinking into his cork-colored face like a turtle into its shell. Pinched, beak-nosed, and weaselly, he looked like the result of centuries of inbreeding. “Steven Stoat,” he said tonelessly, standing over me as I perched on his sofa but not offering his hand. “And you are?”

“Um, Liana Clymer.” I wasn't legally, not yet, but I was using my birth name. The cutesy-poo alliteration of my married name, Liana Leppo, had always annoyed me.

“She lives in the pink house, Uncle Steve.” The kid sat down on the opposite end of the sofa from me, where he could watch TV.

“I just moved in last week, so I thought I'd introduce myself. Actually, I came looking for somebody to talk with. Another woman,” I added quickly so he wouldn't get the wrong idea. I really had assumed there would be a woman in the house, a wife or a girlfriend. But if there were, the place would have had the pillows and tchotchkes it lacked. I couldn't imagine any woman living here and not wanting to pretty the place up. “But there isn't any, is there?”

The man's inhospitable scrutiny had begun to irk me. Having asked a direct question, I made myself wait for an answer.

He backed off and sat down in an armchair, but he didn't say a word.

I tried again. “Is your name Steven with a
v
or with a
ph
?”

Even though he did not actually roll his eyes, something in his silent stare made me feel as if he had.

“Are you the one who keeps this house so neat and tidy?”

Nothing. Not even a frown.

Screw him. I would get out of here soon, but I would stay long enough to show him that he didn't faze me. I turned my attention to Justin. “What's that on your T-shirt?” Like me and also like his uncle, he wore a tee with something printed on the front. Mine said, “Bad Spellers of the Wrold, Untie.”

Justin readily turned his attention away from the TV to answer me. “It's supposed to be a dolphin.” He had a pleasant, husky voice, not quite a child's voice yet far from being a rebellious weird-haired teen's. “But it got kind of messed up, see?” Turning toward me, he tugged the tee straight, stretching it like a canvas.

I would not have been able to tell that the broken, smeared image was a dolphin. “I see,” I said. “Dolphin by Picasso.”

Justin laughed, and his grin seemed to light up the dim room. “Dolphin by jammed screen print machine,” he said. “Uncle Steve works at this business that makes T-shirts for tourists, and he brings home the ones that get screwed up.”

“That's nice. Unless he screws them up on purpose,” I added, trying for another laugh.

“No, he'd never do that,” Justin said quickly, no smile, his voice stressed. “Uncle Steve's a perfectionist.” But I heard no pride in the words, only smothered anxiety.

“Just kidding.” I glanced at the Stoat man, his nearly fleshless face still blank, a muddle on his T-shirt that looked like it might have been a skull and crossbones. If so, it suited him, the parchment skin of his head pitted with acne and etched with lines from being stretched too tight over his own skull. He was the sort of person who made me wonder whether
anyone
loved him. I looked away again, deciding to be interested in the TV.

“What are you watching?” I scooted along the sofa toward Justin.

“Rodeo. There's nothing else on.”

“What would you rather be watching?”

“NASCAR.”

“What's that?”

“You never heard of NASCAR racing?” His genuine and ingenuous astonishment touched off an unexpected ache in my chest; something about him reminded me of my own boys when they were that age, of how much they had still been children even though they looked like young men. “Children are still children for a long, long time,” my grandmother used to say before she died, and I had found out how true that was by my sons' reaction to the divorce.

“Course, you come from up north, right?” Worried eyes on me, afraid he'd been rude, Justin tried to excuse my ignorance.

I smiled at him. “Do I have a Yankee accent?”

“Um, sort of.” Now he was even more afraid of offending me. “But it's okay, you know? Nice. Just a little different.”

Peripherally I could see Uncle Steve, aka Steven Stoat, leaning back in his chair, but I sensed more than saw that he was not relaxed at all. Too bad for him that he didn't like company. I'd leave in a minute, when I was ready. “Oh, look!” I said of the picture on the TV screen. “Barrel racing!” and I paid close attention as a girl in a huge pink cowboy hat and matching outfit spurred a black horse toward a barrel and skidded him around it. As she completed the course, her time was announced by a deep, drawling voice, which went on to say, “Now, while we wait for the next rider, folks, please listen up to this important appeal.”

A picture of a dark-haired boy with shining brown eyes and a winsome smile appeared on the TV.

I gasped, recognizing him instantly, although he looked a couple of years younger and he had done radical things to his hair. “Justin, that's you!”

“No, it's not!” He grabbed for the remote, his voice a frightened squeak, but it was too late. The words
MISSING, ENDANGERED
, plus a phone number, had appeared on the screen, and the announcer was saying, “Justin Bradley, shown here at the age of twelve, was last seen riding his bike away from his Delaine, Alabama, home—”

Justin killed the TV, and as for me, fear preceded rational thought, but what was the use of that when I didn't have a scream-and-run reaction? I was brought up to be civilized, and to freeze like a baby bunny when the shadow of the hawk passes over. Now, still mentally struggling to define what sort of faux pas I had committed, I said, “Well, I guess I'll be going,” in a voice that completely failed to sound casual, and I started to stand up.

As if I could unring a bell? It had been all over the moment I gasped.

“I guess you'd better not,” the Stoat man said tonelessly. “Sit down.” On his feet, pushing me back into the depths of the sofa, he stood over me, and although his only weapons were his hands and his stare, I might have felt less intimidated if he had been a stereotypical bad guy with a snarl and a handgun. Truly, I might have felt less freaked-out if he had looked mean and cruel. Or dangerous and panicky, or anything except blank like a reptile, the way he was watching me. “Justin,” he said without shifting his attention from me, “have you seen that ad on TV before?” His voice, although not loud at all and not very deep, nevertheless made me start to tremble.

“No, sir.” Not Uncle Steve, but “sir.” Justin was afraid of him too.

“You sure?”

“Positive, sir.”

“Just the same, you shouldn't have left the TV on in front of her. And you shouldn't have answered the door. You think just because it's been a while, now it's okay to take chances? It's not. The rules are still the rules. Don't
you
go to the door if anybody knocks. You hear me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you shouldn't have let her in. You know you don't let anybody in unless I say, you hear?”

“Yes, sir.” He sounded wretched. Even though I sat trapped in the corner of the sofa shaking like a rabbit in a snare, I felt for him.

“All right.” He snapped his fingers at Justin. “Get me a bottle of beer.”

Only sometime after I woke up did I appreciate how clever he was. If he had asked Justin to bring him his gun, there was a slight chance that the boy, even as thoroughly indoctrinated as he was, might have reverted to being the kid his parents had raised, might have tried to use the weapon to save me. If he had said bring him the baseball bat, there was still the same remote chance. But by demanding a beer, he sounded as if he wanted to relax.

Justin jumped up to get him a cold bottle of Coors from the fridge. And even I unfroze enough to whisper, “Listen, you don't have to worry about me. I won't tell anybody. If you say Justin is your nephew, I believe you. I—”

Didn't get to say any more. Justin handed Stoat the beer, and without opening it he swung the bottle hard at my head.

Blackness.

•   •   •

Regaining consciousness felt visually and mentally like being in a kaleidoscope, needing to put the shifting pieces together. At first I thought I was back in my longtime home in Pennsylvania, and then with a jolt of heartache I remembered the divorce, and my own parents siding with my ex, damn them, and my new fuchsia cottage in the weirdest part of Florida, where I had spent many hours miserably lying on the bed looking up at the ceiling—but there was something different about this ceiling, and who—my double vision was trying to tell me—who was looking down at me?

My heart started pounding. I knew I was in trouble even before I managed to focus on the sparse man holding a handgun, a long-barreled revolver that seemed too big for him. But that was an illusion caused by his slim build. One look into his empty eyes showed that no weapon was too big for this—this psycho standing over me as I lay immodestly spread out on the bed.

My arms and legs jumped, jerked. Some instinct even more atavistic than fear made me want to curl up, roll away from him, drop off the bed onto the floor, crawl under it. But I couldn't. Only my left hand flew up. Hard, hurtful tethers bit my ankles and my right wrist. I squeaked, but shut up immediately as—what was his name?—Steven Stoat angled the gun barrel toward my head. At the same time an anomalously gentle hand gripped my left wrist, swung it back to the bed, and snapped something metallic around it. Then I felt the arm drawn straight by some force fastening it to the corner of the bed.