Eerie (2 page)

“Is he alive?” Paige begs.

“I don’t know.”

She begins to cry.

Hysterical.

“It’s gonna be all right,” Grant says.

“No,” she screams.

Grant leans in closer. He will never forget the smell of blood.

“Dad,” he whispers. “It’s Grant.”

His father’s hands still clench around the steering wheel. “Please do something if … if you’re okay. If you can hear me. Just make a sound.”

He will never recover from the silence.

“What’s happening, Grant?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is Daddy okay?”

The tears are coming. Grant tries to hold back the sob, but there’s no stopping it. He lies on the glass-covered roof and cries with his sister for a long time.

• • •

The engine has gone silent.

The last spinning wheel creaked to a halt.

Cold mountain air streams in through the busted windows.

Grant has unbuckled his sister and helped her out of the seat, and now they lie side-by-side on the roof, huddled together and shivering.

The air becomes redolent of wet evergreen trees. Rain is falling, pattering on the pine-needled floor of the forest and on the Impala’s undercarriage.

The headlight dims away, now just a feeble swath of light.

The boy has no concept of how long they’ve been upended on this mountainside.

“Can you check Dad again?” Paige asks.

“I can’t move my leg anymore.”

“Why?”

“It hurts a lot and it’s stiff.”

In the darkness, the boy finds his sister’s hand and holds it.

“Do you think Daddy’s dead?” she asks.

“I don’t know.”

“Are we going to die?”

“Someone will find us.”

“But what if they don’t come?”

“Then I’ll crawl up the mountain and find someone myself.”

“But your leg is hurt.”

“I can do it if I have to.”

“What’s it called,” she says, “when you don’t have a mom or a dad?”

“Orphan.”

Grant braces against another push of fear-fueled emotion. So many questions springing up he feels like he’s drowning.

Where will they live?

Who will pay for their food?

Their clothes?

Will he have to get a job?

Who will make them go to bed?

Who will fix their meals?

Make them eat good food?

Who will make them go to school?

“Is that what we are now, Grant?” Paige asks. “Are we orphans?”

“No, we’re brother and sister, Paige.”

“What if—”

“No matter what happens, I’ll take care of you.”

“But you’re only seven.”

“So?”

“You don’t even know how to add.”

“But you do. And I can do the other stuff. We can help each other. Like how Mom and Dad did.”

Grant turns over in the dark, his face inches away from Paige’s. Her breath smells faintly of spearmint gum. It warms his face sweetly.

“Don’t be scared, Paige.”

“But I am.” Her voice breaks.

“I won’t let anything happen to you.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

“Swear.”

“I swear to you, Paige. I’ll protect you.”

“Will we still live in our house?”

“Of course. Where else would we live? It’ll be just like it was only I’ll be taking care of you.”

She draws in a labored wheeze.

“It hurts when I breathe.”

“Then don’t breathe hard.”

Grant wants to call out to their father again, but he fears it might upset her.

“I’m cold, Grant.”

“Me too.”

“How long until someone finds us?”

“They’ll be here soon. Do you want to hear a story while we wait?”

“No.”

“Not even your favorite?”

“Which one?”

“The one about the crazy scientist in the castle on the hill.”

“It’s too scary.”

“You always say that. But this one’s different.”

Through the windshield, the beam of light has weakened such that it only offers a yellowed patch of illumination on the nearest tree.

“How is it different?”

“I can’t just tell you. It’ll ruin it.”

“Okay.” Paige moves in closer.

Outside, the headlight expires.

Pitch black inside the car now.

The rain is falling harder, and for a moment, Grant is paralyzed by the horror of it all.

“Come on,” Paige says.

She nudges him in the dark.

Grant begins, his voice unsteady: “Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Paige.”

“Just like me?”

“Just like you. And she had an older brother named Grant.”

“Just like you.”

He blinks through the tears reforming in his eyes.

Fights through the tremor in his voice.

Don’t cry.

The mantra for a lifetime.

“Yes, just like me.”

“Did they have parents?”

Everything inside the car is terribly still, but the woods around them have become alive in the silence. Rain pelts the carpet of leaves on the forest floor. Things snap in the darkness. The hoot of a lonesome owl goes unanswered.

The world outside is huge—so many things for a little boy to be afraid of.

“No. Paige and Grant lived in a beautiful house all by themselves, and they were very brave.”

Thirty-One Years Later

Chapter 1

“Where’d you go for lunch?” Sophie asked.

Grant shook his head as he typed
Benjamin Seymour
and
Seattle
into the Google query box.

“I’m not playing this game.”

“Come on. Don’t make me go through your receipts.”

“Will my participation in this conversation make it end sooner?”

“The Panda Express at Northgate?”

“Nope.”

“Subway?”

Grant frowned at his partner across the border fence that divided their desks into equal surface areas—two messy inboxes, stacks of files, blank narrative forms, expense reports, a shared, miniature artificial Christmas tree.

“Subway it was.” Sophie scribbled on a pad. She looked good today—a charcoal-colored pantsuit with a lavender blouse and a matching necklace, turquoise with silver fringing. She was of African and Native American descent. Sometimes, Grant thought he could see the Cherokee lineage in her dark almond eyes and hair so purely straight and black it shimmered like the blued steel of his service carry, an H&K P2000. They’d been working together since Benington had transferred to the North precinct two years ago.

“What are you writing down?” Grant asked.

“Keep in mind I haven’t adjusted for wherever you eat on the weekends, but so far this year, I have seventy-nine documented visits to Subway.”

“That’s the best detective work I’ve ever seen you do, Benington.”

“Got a few more numbers for you.”

Grant surrendered, setting his work aside.

“Fine. Let’s hear them.”

“Forty. Three hundred sixteen. And, oh my God, one thousand five hundred eighty.”

“Never mind, I don’t want to know this.”

“Forty is the approximate time in minutes you’ve waited while they toasted your sandwich, three hundred sixteen is the number of cheese slices you’ve eaten this year, and finally, one thousand five hundred eighty little round meat shapes have given their lives during the spicy Italian genocide of twenty-eleven.”

“Where did you get those numbers?”

“Google and basic math. Does Subway sponsor you?”

“It’s a solid restaurant,” Grant said, turning back to his computer.

“It’s not a restaurant.”

On the far side of the room, he could hear the sergeant chewing someone’s ass through the telephone. Otherwise, the cluster of desks and cubes stood mostly empty. The only other detective on the floor was Art Dobbs, the man on a much quieter, more civilized phone call.

Grant studied his search results which had returned a hundred thousand hits.

“Damn,” he said.

“What?”

“Getting no love on my search. Guy was pretty quiet for a big spender.”

Grant appended the word
attorney
to the string and tried again.

Just twenty-eight hundred hits this time, the first page dominated by Seymour’s firm’s website and numerous legal search engine results.

“
Was
?” Sophie said. “That’s kind of cold.”

“He’s been missing …” Grant glanced at his watch “… forty-nine hours.”

“Still possible he just left town and didn’t feel like telling the world.”

“No, I spoke with a few of his partners this morning. They described him as a man who played hard but worked even harder. He had a trial scheduled to begin this morning and I was assured that Seymour never let his extracurriculars interfere with work. He’s one of Seattle’s preeminent trial lawyers.”

“I never heard of him.”

“That’s ‘cause he does civil litigation.”

“Still say he went off on a bender. Probably licking his wounds as we speak in some swank hotel.”

“Well, I find it interesting,” Grant said.

“What?”

“That
your
missing guy—what’s his name again?”

“Talbert.”

“That Talbert has such a similar work hard/play hard profile. Real estate developer. High net worth. Mr. Life-of-the-Party. How long’s he been AWOL?”

“Three days.”

“And you think he’s just off having some ‘me time’ too?”

Sophie shook her head. “He missed meetings. Important ones. We sure these guys didn’t know each other? Decide to run off to Vegas?”

Grant shook his head. “Nothing points that way, but I’m wondering if there’s a connection we’ve missed.”

The roasted earthiness of brewing coffee wafted in from the break room.

The copy machine began to chug in a distant corner.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

“This is just a stab in the dark, but what sort of trouble might two wealthy, workaholic playboys such as these get themselves into?”

“Drugs.”

“Sure, but I didn’t get the sense that Seymour was into anything harder than a lot of high-end booze and a little weed. It’s not exactly a life-and-death proposition scoring in this city.”

“Women.”

“Yep.”

Sophie smiled, a beautiful thing.

She said, “So you’re theorizing our boys were murdered by a serial killer prostitute?”

“Not ready to go that far yet. Just saying let’s explore this direction.”

“And this hunch is based on …”

“Nothing at all.”

“Glad to see you don’t let your training get in the way of your job.”

“Can’t train instinct, Sophie. You’re on Facebook, right?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you call it when you ask someone to be your friend? Other than pathetic.”

She rolled her eyes. “A friend request.”

“Send one to Talbert and Seymour. I’ll call my contact at Seymour’s office and see if they can log into his account and accept your request. You do the same with Talbert’s people.”

“You want me to go through and compare their lists of friends.”

“Maybe we get lucky and they share some female acquaintances. Facebook is the new street corner.” Grant glanced at his watch. “I gotta get outta here.”

He stood, grabbed his jacket.

“You’re just gonna leave all this to me?”

“Sorry, but I have to drive out to Kirkland. Haven’t been in six weeks.”

Sophie’s eyes softened.

“No problem. I’ll get on this.”

Chapter 2

Construction paper ornaments hung in chains along the walls of the empty visiting room where Grant sat. Every season, the patients of the acute psychiatric unit who could handle a pair of scissors without hurting themselves or someone else made Christmas decorations for the less stable residents to paint. The results were all over the map. Some were nebulous shapes with smears of color. Others possessed the compulsive detail of a Franciscan altarpiece.

Grant closed the magazine. He’d lost track of how many times he’d perused it in the last year. Judging by the dates on the stack of
National Geographic
in front of him, the tradition was safe for the foreseeable future.

“That article on Russian warplanes must get better and better.”

Grant looked up to find an attractive nurse about his age wheeling a man through the doorway.

“A good waiting room magazine ages like fine wine,” he said, returning it to the pile. “How is he, Angela?”

“He’s been a perfect gentleman.”

The man in the wheelchair looked older and gaunter—or maybe Grant just imagined that. His tufts of gray hair could stand a trimming. Grant noticed a bandage peeking out from beneath the nurse’s sleeve.

Asked, “He didn’t do that, did he?”

“No, we keep his fingernails trimmed now. This is from a patient who had an episode last night.”

She parked the wheelchair in front of Grant.

The man’s eyes struggled to focus on him, but they had all the control of a pair of marbles.

“Hi, Dad.”

Angela smiled apologetically. “He’s a little more sedated than usual.”

Protocol was to let them know he was coming ahead of time so they could medicate his father. Without the cocktail of depressants, antipsychotics, and muscle relaxers, his father’s outbursts were vicious. Even now as his head lolled, padded restraints kept his wrists secured to the wheelchair.

“It’s dinnertime,” Angela said. “I can bring his tray in and feed him while you visit.”

“Is it four o’clock already?”

“Early bird special. Boston clam chowder. They like their routine around here.”

“Just bring the food. I’ll feed him. Thanks, Angela.”

She smiled and left.

Grant pulled his father’s chair closer and inspected him. Decades of violent tremors had ruined his physique, the joints and angles of his body gradually becoming more dramatic, muscles ropier, until finally the fifty-nine-year-old man looked like he might have just been unearthed from a tomb.

Grant’s greatest fear had once been that he’d never get his father back. But that hope didn’t survive the first few years following the crash. Now he feared that contorted body. That his father’s mind might be a lucid prisoner inside it.