Read Drawn Into Darkness Online

Authors: Nancy Springer

Drawn Into Darkness (9 page)

Barefoot and in her nightgown, she sprinted across the upstairs hallway into the room devoted to 1-800-4JUSTIN. They had an ordinary landline in there as well. Amy snatched up the phone and shoved it against her head.

“Hello,” she mumbled.

“Amy.”

She woke up fast, recognizing her husband's voice. “Honey?”

“Yes.” Chad sounded devoid of any honey; it had been a long time since he had called her anything sweet. “Amy, this is just to let you know I ditched work today—”

Amy gasped,
“What?”
Chad had taken personal days when Justin was abducted, but she had never known him to outright ditch work.

He went on speaking as if he hadn't heard her. “—and I'm driving up to Birmingham to see my dad—”

This was even more unheard of, so unlike Chad that Amy lost her breath and could not speak. She found herself clinging to the cordless phone for imaginary support.

“—so I don't know whether I'll be home tonight,” Chad concluded. “Don't worry if I'm not.”

Don't
worry
? Amy felt too scared to worry. Panic gave her the strength she needed to say, “Wait! Chad, what's this about?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” She smiled painfully; it was what Justin would have said when he was in trouble at school. She said now, “Don't ‘nothing' me, Charles Stuart Bradley, and don't you dare hang up.”

“No, ma'am. Yes, ma'am.” Chad sounded a little more alive than before.

“Can you pull over?” She could tell by the whooshing and roaring background sounds of vehicles and semis that he was on the interstate. “So we can talk?”

“What for, Amy?” His voice had gone dull again. “I really don't have anything to tell you.”

“Sure you do. There must be some reason—”

“I need—I don't know what I need. I just can't stand it anymore. Anything.”

Terror more than courage helped her say it. “Chad, are you leaving me?” It was okay that her voice trembled. Let him hear how she felt.

Silence, except for the sounds of speed and distance in the phone. The sounds of someone running away.

“Chad?” Her voice shook even more.

His words so low she could barely hear them, he said, “I admit the thought has crossed my mind. But, Amy,” he went on more forcefully, “Dad talked me out of it. He said the worst thing he ever did was to leave Mom and me. That's why I'm going to see him.”

“Oh,” Amy said, or exhaled, almost in a whisper.

“Amy?”

“I'm here.”

“Okay. Don't worry. I'll call you.”

“Chad, I—”

“Gotta go.” He disconnected.

“I really do love you,” said Amy to the lifeless phone.

TEN

L
ying along the riverbank right beside an unfriendly neighborhood water moccasin, listening to the boat's motor dwindling way and fighting an impulse to cry, I forced my mind back to a contemplation of the glories of nature.

I saw another leggy bird beauty, this time white, skimming the opposite shore. Some kind of egret.

And a black vulture circling over the woods, soaring, its tapering wings forming a slight V. Why did buzzards get no respect when they were beautiful things in flight?

Long wait.

Flickers of songbird in the far trees.

Something moving on the far shore, maybe a deer? No, too golden, bobbing blond head—

Justin! Walking downstream along the other edge of the river.

The sight of him alive made me feel almost dizzy with happiness and—and he simply had to see me. I couldn't let him go past as the boaters had.

He disappeared from my view behind my snake-in-residence.

Lying with my right shoulder in the sand and my left one in the air, I took the risk of gingerly raising my left arm skyward and swinging it, waving.

The snake camped in front of me turned its head and sampled the air with its forked tongue.

And I saw Justin emerging from behind the visual obstruction, almost past me already, his eyes on his footing, his head not turned in my direction.

The incident of the two blind Bubbas had made me desperate enough to take risks. One of my few talents is whistling loudly enough to summon a taxi. Pretty sure the snake hadn't heard—I mean sensed—anything like that before, but with no idea how it would react, I put my tongue to my teeth and shrilled.

Justin's head snapped up. So did the snake's. Justin stood still and looked toward me. As soon as I was sure he had seen me waving, I froze with my hand in the air.

The snake shot its head up to loom over me like a cobra without the hood. Hissing, it opened its mouth wide, I mean really wide, showing off the startling interior seemingly upholstered in puffy white silk.

Justin walked into the river, heading toward me.

All the turtles evacuated the log. I didn't see them, not with my gaze fixed on the pristine lining of the snake's mouth, but I heard them plopping into the water. Nothing else made quite the same splash as a big turtle.

I also heard Justin splashing as he swam across the river. The rhythmic sound changed from splashing to sloshing when he reached shallower water and walked.

The snake swiveled its rearing head toward Justin.

I heard him say, “Whoa. Lee Anna, lie still.”

I wanted to tell him no duh, but that would have involved moving my mouth. With my hand still straight up in the air I felt like some sort of ridiculous modern sculpture.

I heard the snap of a branch breaking and wondered whether Justin had stepped on it or what. I heard his footsteps padding along the sand toward me.

The snake struck.

Faster than my eyes could follow.

I almost screamed. At first I thought it was biting Justin.

Launching almost its whole long burly body, it struck again. And again. And again. A little farther from me each time.

Forgetting all about the imaginary snake lying on the other side of me, I rolled away, sat up, and saw Justin holding the cottonmouth at bay with a long, dead stick. As I struggled to stand up, the snake struck the tip of the stick again and broke off a considerable piece of it, which fell into the edge of the river and floated.

Justin froze.

I did the same, in a most undignified pose, with my butt in the air and my hands on the ground.

The snake eyed the only moving thing, which was the stick in the water. Then with simple dignity it slithered into the river and swam away, its head gracefully raised as if it were an ugly brown swan.

I breathed out, staggered to my feet, and cried “Justin!” as he headed toward me to help me. Without permission I hugged him rather hard.

“Please get off,” he begged, although he did hug me back. A little.

I backed off.

“God,” he complained, “that was like being attacked by a giant dish sponge.”

Finding myself shaky in the knees, I plopped my butt on the sand again and said, “Wow. That snake. Thank you for—”

“Forget it.” Blushing, he looked upriver, not at me. “We don't have time. Uncle Steve has to be hunting for us.”

“I told you, he is
so
not your uncle.”

“What do you want me to call him?”

“Stoat the Goat.”

He looked at me and cracked up. He actually fell down on the sand beside me, laughing. At first I was pleased, but then I realized he sounded a bit hysterical. I laid a hand on his forehead until he calmed down some, then demanded, “Justin. What happened?”

“Huh?” he mumbled, still giggling.

“What happened after we got separated last night?”

“Oh. That. He knew we went down the river.” No more giggles, and no eye contact either. “He came after us with the flashlight.”

I felt cold little lizard feet run down my spine at the thought of Stoat searching for us to kill us. As smoothly as I could, I said, “Since you're here, I take it he didn't find you?”

“He almost did find me. He waded right past me, but he didn't see me. I'd come up for air in the middle of a mess of brush and stuff the flood had piled up against something, and I guess it hid me pretty good. It was just dumb luck I happened to come up there.”

“Dumb luck is as good as any other kind.”

He tilted his head back in the sand to look at me upside down. “What the heck does that mean?”

“It means I read Nietzsche in college. In other words, it means nothing. How long did Stoat keep hunting?”

“Too damn long. After he gave up on the river, he went into the woods. From where I was, I could see the reflection of his flashlight in the water. Even when I couldn't see it anymore, I didn't dare come out.”

“You mean you were still in the river?”

“Of course I was. All night. I finally heard the van drive away around dawn.”

“Then he's not here now.” Ridiculous, the tsunami of relief this assumption provided me, considering that I remained stranded in the wilderness.

“He probably just went home to eat something and grab another gun. He'll be back. Heck, he could already be back. When I heard that boat, I thought it was him, so I hid.”

“It wasn't him. It was two men, but they went right past and didn't see me.”

No comment. It occurred to me that Justin must have peeked at the boat himself, or he wouldn't know it wasn't Stoat and he'd still be hiding.

“Why didn't you yell?” I asked. “Flag them down?” I would have if I hadn't been situated too close to a snake.

Justin shrugged. Damn. In some ways he was so much a typical teenager.

“Well,” I said, swallowing my irritation, “if they launched from that same boat ramp, their car will be there.”

“Truck,” Justin said. “You don't haul a boat with a car.”

Teenager.

“Whatever.” Acting far more brisk than I felt, I got on my feet. “Let's go have a look.”

Justin didn't move. “What if Stoat's there?”

“It's a chance we'll have to take. Stoat thinks we're somewhere down the river, so we're better off heading back upstream, don't you think? Justin?”

He just shrugged again.

I swore to myself that I wasn't going to get parental with him. “We'd better get a move on,” I said in a neutral tone, starting upstream along the riverbank. “Come on, Justin.”

He didn't say a word, but he got up and followed me.

•   •   •

The river had taken away Justin's flip-flops.

There's an old saying my father liked to recite at annoying times: “For want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe the horse was lost, for want of a horse the rider was lost, for want of a rider the kingdom was lost, and all for the want of a horseshoe nail.” I guess Dad was a kind of philosopher on that subject. It's the little stuff that screws you good, like the
Columbia
's O-ring or the Crocodile Hunter's stingray or, according to fractal theory, some butterfly in India fluttering its wings to eventually cause Superstorm Sandy.

I still had my socks and sneakers, sodden but intact on my feet, but with Justin barefoot, for a thousand sharp, pointy, and/or venomous reasons we couldn't slip into the woods to stay out of sight. We had to walk on the sandy bank of the river, where anybody could see us.

Which explained why, luckily for me, he had been on the riverbank to save my life a second time.

Progressing upriver, we discovered that we shared the bank with several snakes and four alligators, all of which slid into the water before we got anywhere near them.

They weren't what scared us.

The whole way back to the boat ramp, neither of us said a word. We kept pausing to listen. Warily we rounded a bend in the river, then stopped, glimpsing somebody's old blue pickup truck through a screen of leaves. If the river curve was the one that had hidden me from Stoat last night, then the blue pickup had to be sitting at the same boat ramp where he had taken us.

The problem was, what if Stoat was there too?

Justin and I stared at each other, silently discussing this. Then, gesturing for him to stay where he was, I headed into the woods to have a look at the boat ramp and its parking area from a hidden vantage point. The rain had soaked and muffled most of the noisy vegetation, so my main stealth problem was to keep my aforementioned big mouth from screaming or swearing as I edged between palmettos that tried to saw my legs off and knee-high Spanish dagger—each long leaf might as well have been a switchblade—and other things that tried to stick major thorns into me. What the hell. My skin was just one big mosquito bite anyway; why should I care if the vegetation now started sucking my blood?

Finally I got to where I had a clear view of the blue pickup, which sat with its nose tilted upward and its rear end partway down the boat ramp. In all the open space around it I could see no other vehicle and no people, least of all Stoat.

Rather than ouching my way back to Justin, I broke into the open, jogged down where he could see me, and beckoned forcefully. “Come on!” I snapped.

“What's your hurry?”

“I'm hungry! I want to raid their truck!”

By the time he joined me, I was already in the truck bed pushing aside fishing rods to open a tackle box with no idea what I hoped to find. Bait? I didn't think Justin and I were quite ready to eat worms, especially not plastic ones, which were the only kind I found, along with fishhooks and sinkers and every conceivable lure, including bright-colored tubular foam ones with a fringe, kind of like Nerf squid.

“Get out!” Justin meant this as an expression of excitement, I think, as he reached over my shoulder and picked up an insignificant-looking rectangular object.

“What's that?”

“An everything tool!” He opened and explored it as he spoke. “Pliers, file, knives, can opener—”

“Why would a guy keep condoms in his tackle box?” I had just found some.

“Because his wife would never look there. Oh, my God!” Justin had opened the other tackle box, and he lifted out a can of “Field's Pride Whole Kernel Sweet Corn.” Feverishly he applied his can opener to it.

“Okay, why would a guy keep a can of corn in his tackle box?” I asked, genuinely puzzled.

“Bait. Some people use corn on little hooks to catch bream.”

Justin got the can's lid off, flung it aside, and lifted his find to his mouth with trembling hands. He poured corn into himself almost as if drinking it. Trickles of cloudy liquid ran down his chin.

When he had gulped all he could that way, and lowered the can to poke a grimy finger into it, he noticed me watching him and visibly startled. “I'm sorry! You said you were hungry. Do you want some?”

“No, thanks.” I had to laugh at him even though my gut grumbled painfully. “No, I have the usual feminine fatty deposits to draw on.”

He grubbed the remaining corn kernels out of the can with his finger to eat them, making sure he didn't miss a single one. Meanwhile, I felt insight forming. When Justin had set the empty corn can aside, I asked, “Did Stoat starve you?”

“Sometimes.” He looked away from me. “Maybe you could find some food up front?”

While he rooted around the truck bed some more, I searched the cab, finding lottery tickets, old and new, cigarette butts in the drink holder, and a filthy greenish item lying on a seat like a road-killed turtle, actually a battered Maypop Goobers baseball cap. And country music CDs in the center console along with all the usual detritus: pennies, toothpicks, three cough drops, rubber bands, greasy terry cloth rags, and a stubby flashlight. With some vague idea it might prove useful, I stuck the flashlight into my shorts pocket, then continued pawing through the truck cab. In some fast-food rubbish on the floor I found a few stale french fries, which I ate with revulsion. With similar revulsion, but knowing what the sun could do to my unprotected face, I jammed the greasy baseball hat onto my head. As an afterthought, I shoved the cough drops into my mouth for the sake of the sugar in them.

Out of the cab and heading back toward Justin, I said, “Okay, while we wait, let's use the fishing rods and those rubber worms—”

Startled, he interrupted my hunger fantasy of food on the fin in the swollen river. “Wait? What do you mean, wait?”

“Wait for these men to get back so they can take us to the police.”

“We can't do that! What if Stoat—”

“We'll hear the van in plenty of time to hide. But if he was going to come here, he'd
be
here already, don't you think?”

“I think you're crazy! This is the first place Unc—Stoat is going to come, even if it's just to park the van!”

“Like I said, we'll hide. This blue truck is the first
vehicle
I've seen in this godforsaken swamp and those two Bubbas in the boat are the first
people
I've seen, and I'm not—”

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