Drawn Into Darkness (8 page)

I wanted to wrap my arms around the kid and weep on his shoulder, thank you oh thank you my hero—

“I—hit him—hard—but I didn't want to—kill—”

My knees still wobbled, but I started to get a grip. Justin didn't need a clinging vine right now. Like it or not, Stoat had been his family, sort of, for the past two years, and he felt as if he had just betrayed his word and maybe orphaned himself. He needed me to be strong.

I got strong. “You didn't kill him.” Crouching over Stoat, I felt a pulse in his neck, and I could see him breathing. “You just conked him good.” Stoat's gun lay near his limp hand. Standing up, I snatched the gun as if swinging a snake by the tail; grabbing it by the tip of its barrel, I winged it like a boomerang into the middle of the Chatawhatchimahoosim. The river.

Weapon gone, Stoat lay unconscious, yet my terror of the thin gray man only increased.

“We've got to get out of here, Justin!”

The boy hadn't moved from where he stood sobbing and shaking.

“Justin.” I found that I lacked the guts to hop over Stoat, but I got to Justin roundabouts and gave him a solid hug. “Thanks for saving my ass. Now we have to save yours. Did he leave the key in the van?”

“I, um, I guess so.” Justin's guess-so was hardly more than a whisper.

“Then come on. Run!” Still holding the flashlight, grabbing his wrist with one hand, I hauled him with me toward the van. Partway there he kicked out of neutral and got himself in gear, passing me. He yanked open the passenger's side door at the same time as I got to the driver's side and aimed the flashlight at the ignition.

No key.

“Sometimes he sticks it on top of the sun visor,” Justin said, voice strained.

I flipped the visor. Papers fell down, but nothing with a metallic jingle. I scanned the dashboard, the seats, the floor. Nothing.

“Oh, shit.” Justin sounded choked. “He must have put it in his pocket.”

“Come on.” I started running back toward where we had left Stoat, but after only a few strides I stopped dead, grabbed Justin by the wrist so I wouldn't lose him in the dark, and turned off the flashlight.

From where we had left Stoat, maybe thirty feet away, I heard the sounds of groans and fervid curses. Chillingly specific curses regarding the punk and the bitch and what he would do to them when he caught them.

“Run!” Justin sounded panicked, yet he had the good sense not to yell; he spoke just loud enough for me to hear him in the hullabaloo of rain, river, and frogs. No way had he betrayed us to Stoat.

Just the same I pulled him toward me and spoke close to his ear. “Run where?” Heading into the woods, thick with palmetto, would have been like running through razor wire in the night. And Stoat would catch us with the van if we tried to escape back up the road.

“I—I don't know!”

Stoat roared, “What the fuck? A baseball bat! I'll show them how to use a baseball bat.” Damn. He didn't have his goddamn gun, but he did have a weapon.

I imagined him using the baseball bat like a walking stick, staggering to his feet.

In the total drenching darkness we could not see him and he could not see us. But to find the van, all he had to do was feel his way up the sand slope. And once he turned on the headlights, we were roadkill, if not worse.

Adrenaline is a remarkable stimulant of both body and mind. I said softly, “Justin, can you swim?”

“Of course. Why?”

“We're going into the river.” I envisioned a Southern, sandy river with no rocks, no white water, and most certainly no waterfalls.

“That's crazy! Alligators, moccasins—”

Well, yes, there was that.

People down here called the poisonous cottonmouth viper, aka water moccasin, simply “moccasins.” Indeed, some people called all snakes “moccasins,” as if they were terrified by Native American footwear.

I declared, “I'd rather face a snake any day than
him
.” By Stoat's constant swearing I could tell that, yes, he was on the move, feeling his way toward the van—and us. “The river, Justin. It's our only chance.”

I felt his hand grip my wrist the way mine gripped his, so that we forged a strong link. “Okay.” He sounded more brave than desperate. “Let's go.”

“Quietly.” Instinctively I crouched, keeping my head down. Justin did the same. Like a pair of soldiers under fire we scuttled past the noise pollution that was Stoat—I think we blundered within ten feet of him, and if he had shut his foul mouth, he might have heard us. But he kept stumbling toward the van. Quite blindly in the dark we dashed away from it, toward the hiding place we could not see.

F
irst I felt water puddling around my ankles, and within a few steps, the river current shoving against my shins. Stumbling, I almost lost my balance, and Justin stood still, bracing his feet and hanging on to me. Now the water reached up to my knees—

Muffled by frogs and distance, I heard a slamming sound.

Slam. Door. Van.

“Down!” I hurled myself into darkness, pulling Justin with me.

We ducked just as the van's headlights blazed on, blindingly bright for an instant before our heads hit the water.

Had Stoat seen us? Would he see us now? Desperately hoping not, I held my breath and did a pretty good imitation of a log just by keeping still. Clutching my arm and taking his cue from me, Justin did the same. Meanwhile, the river current swirled us around and took charge of us, so by the time I had to raise my head and gasp for air, we were nicely downstream, away from the area where the van's headlights still shone across the surface of the water.

But not quite far enough downstream to suit me, because the van's lights also shone on the all-too-familiar figure of a quick, slim man near the flooded river's edge.

“Uncle Steve!” gasped Justin, bobbing alongside me.

“Stop calling him your uncle! He's a kidnapper and a pedophile and a rapist and he deserves—” I managed to cease firing from a sawed-off shotgun of rage I hadn't even realized I had in me. Words badly aimed, scattering, good for nothing. “Sorry, Justin. Are you okay?” I tried to reach for his hand, which had slipped out of mine, but I didn't find it.

“He knows where we went,” Justin said in the dead voice of someone who has already given up.

Actually, bent over and pacing back and forth at the edge of the water, Stoat seemed to be hunting upstream and down like an old hound dog. And the river carried us farther away from him every moment.

“I don't think so,” I told Justin. “Our tracks are rained out. He doesn't even know what he's looking for.”

But he did. He found it, reached down to seize it, and turned it on.

The flashlight.

Justin gulped air and disappeared underwater at the same time I did. Holding my breath and hurrying myself along with the rushing river, I fired some angry mental bullets at myself. Damn flashlight, I didn't even remember dropping it. Stupid, clueless, what was I thinking, why hadn't I thrown it into the drink like the gun?

Really, rationally, I did not think it likely that Stoat had seen us when he had turned on the flashlight, but at the same time, I felt an irrational fear that he had, and I knew Justin would be feeling it a hundred times worse, would be absolutely sure his “uncle” knew exactly where he was and would come after him.

A burning feeling started in my lungs. I thrust myself to the surface and gasped for air while trying to clear my eyes of bleary water so I could see.

But there was nothing to see. Complete darkness. Either the river had taken us around a bend that hid everything from our view, or Stoat and his flashlight and his van were gone.

I asked the darkness, “Justin?”

No answer.

“Justin!”

Nothing. And it was high time to get out of this flooding river. At any moment it might conk me with a floating log or smash me against a fallen tree. Which, with my luck, would have snakes on it.

“Justin!” I called, uselessly, before I kicked, managing to lie more or less on top of the water, and by swimming across the river current, I aimed, I hoped, toward shore. The opposite shore from the one we had left Stoat on.

I was just getting into the rhythm of a pretty good Australian crawl—stroke, up and over, stroke—when my extended hand touched something that felt like a big tree. But when I tried to grab on to it, it lashed like a giant whip, threw me aside as if I were made of cork, and took off.

“Sorry, alligator,” I said politely, treading water. Having never before in my life been in a situation like this, I found it impossible to predict my own reactions or even explain them. I reached out again, could not find the alligator, and promptly panicked because now it could be behind me, underneath me, anywhere.

“Justin!”
Why not yell? Between the swoosh of the water and the gibbering of the frogs, he could be a few yards away from me and still not hear me.

No answer.

Anxiety kicked me from inside as if I were pregnant with worry. That boy might as well have been one of my sons. Getting myself drowned along with him would not help him. Once again I swam, trying hard not to thrash (were alligators, like sharks, attracted to thrashing?), and headed toward shore.

But where was my strength? I was only menopausal, dammit, not geriatric. I had been a lifeguard not so many years ago, which meant I had been a strong, fast swimmer. But I couldn't seem to make any progress muscling myself out of this damn pushy water—

Conk.
The river bashed my shoulder against something rough and hard that could have been an alligator but didn't move and was therefore of the tree persuasion. Or so I surmised in the total darkness. The river immediately twisted me and tried to whirl me away from it, but I grabbed hold and managed to get a leg flung over the thing, which lay horizontal, partially above the waterline.

Definitely a tree, I found as I crawled onto it. A nice, round, fat, sturdy tree. Embracing it—I had always aligned myself with tree huggers, but never before had I actually thrown my arms around a trunk—I lay on my belly with the side of my face pressed against the bark and most of me at last out of the flooded river. Despite rain and darkness, I felt tension drain out of me; I lay limp, with no idea how exhausted I had been until strength began to return.

“Justin?” I called to the night.

No answer. I sighed, sat up, and began to inch toward shore. To make sure I hadn't gotten turned around in the darkness, I stuck a foot down into the river. The direction of the current reassured me, and I went on, feeling my way along the tree trunk on all fours until something, I suppose the stub of a branch, poked my collarbone. I tried to circumnavigate the obstacle, slipped, and ended up back in the water. But this time, mothers be praised, it wasn't wash-me-away water, only a quieter eddy in which I could stand on the bottom. In fact, the water reached not far above my waist.

But if I thought I was out of trouble, the notion was premature. Blundering toward what I hoped was shore, I collided with tree branches, stumbled, fell, dunked myself in water over my head, fumbled my way upright, sneezed, stumbled only two steps before I dunked myself again, got up, and did it all again, muttering a few new words I had learned from Stoat, before I finally reached dry land.

Well, not dry land, exactly. It was still raining. But I did find a stretch of something that was not flooding river.

I sat. I panted. I called for Justin. I intended to sit and call for Justin until daybreak, but my body had other ideas. At some point I toppled sideways and, curled in the wet sand, fell sound asleep.

•   •   •

I awoke to find myself basking in bright sunshine, feeling pleasantly warmed, grateful that the rain had stopped and even more grateful that it was no longer dark. Seldom had I so ardently appreciated simply being able to see.

The only immediate problem was that I had company. I was not the only life-form basking on that stretch of sand. When I opened my eyes, they stared straight at a brown thing that looked a bit too much like a snake. I had to blink and focus right in front of my nose to see—whoa. It really was the head of a reptile. At first I tried to convince myself it was a lizard or something, not a snake, but I remembered all too clearly reading about the poisonous snakes of Florida, that vipers had eyes like those of a cat, unlike the beady eyes of harmless snakes, and I remembered laughing because who the heck was ever going to get close enough to a snake to check out the pupils of its eyes?

Well, here I was looking into a snake's eye, and even though a bony ridge like an eyebrow shadowed it, I could see quite clearly the vertical black slit of its pupil.

Water moccasin.

My heartbeat might have sped up somewhat, but I did not bother to panic. After all, things could have been a lot worse. It could have been Stoat.

I must not move or I might be bitten. Sheer inertia had kept me still when I awoke. The bliss of lying in a position other than spread-eagle had made me so lazy I hadn't even lifted my head. Now I realized that the only part of me I could safely move was my eyeballs.

I deployed them as best I could from where I lay sprawled in the sand. Focusing beyond a blur of mud-colored snake, I could see water sparkling, and some turtles basking on a log—doubtless the tree trunk I had grabbed on to last night—and beyond the river a solid wall of forest with mistletoe balls in the oaks and scraggly pines towering above all the other trees. Trying to make out the river's far bank, I thought I saw a sketchy line of yellow-tan sand between the gleaming brown water and the mostly green jumble of forest. Understandably, I was not certain, but I thought maybe the river level was beginning to go down.

I took another look at the log, really a long-dead fallen tree with its roots somewhere above my horizontal head. Yes, turtles and all, it seemed to slant a bit higher above the water than it had last night. If I could judge by what I had felt in the dark of the night.

Okay, so I couldn't really tell. Why did I care?

Justin, that was why. Floodwater going down could only be good for him if—if he was still out in this swamp somewhere, if Stoat hadn't gotten him.

Was he at least
alive
? Or had he bumped his head on something and drowned? Or had Stoat killed him?

Never once did I think in terms of Justin's recapture, because I felt certain Stoat had wanted to kill him even
before
Justin had conked him with a baseball bat last night, thereby totally and irrevocably pissing him off.

God, where was Justin? I needed to get up, call for him, go looking for him, but here I lay helpless because of a damn poisonous snake sleeping in front of my nose. Or at least I supposed it was sleeping. How could I tell? It didn't have eyelids, but I hadn't seen any movement in its eye, which seemed unnervingly fixated on me.

Probably just my imagination. And I remembered the book said snakes were deaf. What if I ever so slowly inched away—

No. The book also said that snakes made up for being deaf by sensing vibrations.

Besides which, I didn't know what was behind me. With my luck, there could be another snake cuddled up against my rear end.

Gaah. Creepy thought.

Well, sooner or later, it or they had to go away, right?

Right.

Meanwhile, I tried to pass the time by looking at anything and everything else. The turtles. Stumpy heads and legs striped with yellow.

Lichens on the log like green-gray rosettes with sprinkles of paprika—spores?

A turtle plunking into the water, showing its yellow-orange belly shell.

Beyond, a wading bird landing for a moment on the log—some kind of small heron or bittern with chartreuse legs—quickly gone again, flapping upriver.

Long wait.

Wait. I heard something. Not too far away, somebody trying to start a lawn mower. Stupid thing blustered, spit, and died, the way they always did. Again, and again. But finally, protesting, it was coaxed to continue, its loud gasps steadied into a regular chugging, and I heard it heading closer to me.

Lawn mower?

Boat motor. Already the boat had appeared, a shining aluminum savior perhaps twelve feet long, a rudimentary rectangle in which sat two burly trucker-hatted men. I did not dare move because of the snake, but surely they would see me.

“. . . water this high, we should be able to get clear into Chipoluga Swamp, places we couldn't ordinarily,” one of them was saying to the other.

“All right!” In the local Southern accent, this sounded like, “Aw, rat!” He went on, “That'll be a sat to see.”

See me,
I begged mentally, my heart pounding as they scudded past, hurried along by the high-running river. I couldn't move or yell because of the damn water moccasin, but there I lay like a corpse on the bank; how could they not see me?

But they didn't.

“We got the beer?”

“Damn straight we got the beer. You think I'd forget the beer?”

Idiots. Beer-swilling Bubbas. Still talking of beer, they disappeared downriver. The grumble of their motor blended into the distance.

•   •   •

“Meatloaf, please don't sit on my face.” Still in bed, Amy Bradley shoved the cat off her forehead, only to feel him settling on her pillow as close as possible to her, on top of where her hair lay, with his blunt snout purring whisker-tickly feline secrets into her ear.

Since she and Chad had started quarreling, Amy had been finding it harder and harder to get herself out of bed and pointed in a direction in the morning. It had been weeks since she had made breakfast for Chad before he left for work, at first because they weren't speaking, and later because she couldn't get moving, not even to see the twins off to school. The kids took care of themselves, and every morning before leaving, Kayla climbed the stairs to say bye to her mom. Today, Amy had gathered enough energy to call her daughter over to her bedside, hug her, kiss her, and tell her she loved her. As always, Kayla had “forgotten” to close the bedroom door when she left. And as always, Meatloaf had come in to sprinkle Amy's bed with the cat litter caught between his paw pads. Meatloaf was never allowed outside the house. The Bradleys were too afraid something might happen to him.

“Meatloaf,” Amy told the cat breathing in her ear, “I've been awake for hours, no thanks to you, so why can't I seem to get up?”

The phone rang.

Amy groaned, shoved the cat aside, and achieved rapid verticality. The urgent need to run and answer every single phone call had started the day Justin was abducted, and no amount of passing time could abate it.