Please, God, let them be alive, I prayed.
I lurched into a room the size of a garage. A woman and a boy cowered, straining to get away from me. Each had a five—foot—long chain that led from a shackle on a wrist to a metal ring secured to the wall.
“Kate! Jason!”
They looked dazed. The pupils of their eyes were unnaturally large, black squeezing out the white around them. I could think of only one thing that would do that. Gader had told me that one of Lester Dant’s numerous crimes had been drug dealing. I looked down at something I’d knocked over when I broke in. A waste can. Empty vials and used syringes had tumbled from it.
You son of a bitch, you drugged them! I inwardly screamed.
Kate and Jason kept cowering. They wore the kind of clothes that I associated with going to church. Kate had dark pumps, a knee—long modest blue dress, and a matching ribbon in her hair. Jason had black Oxfords, black trousers, and a white shirt topped with a bow tie. Their hair was meticulously combed, with the not—quite—natural look when someone else does the job. Their faces were pale, with hollows under their eyes. Kate wore lipstick, which was smeared.
The only furniture was a bed they’d been slumped on until the noises I’d made crashing into the room had terrified them.
“Kate, it’s me! It’s Brad!”
They cringed, desperate to keep a distance from me.
“Jason, it’s Dad!”
Moaning, the boy squirmed back to the limit of his chain.
They’d never seen me with a beard. The drugs had so fogged their minds that they didn’t recognize me. All they knew was that the violence of my entrance made me a threat.
“Listen to me! You’re safe!”
I returned to the tunnel for the hammer and chisel. When I rushed toward Kate and Jason, they thrust their arms over their heads to protect themselves.
“You don’t have to be afraid anymore!”
Their whimpers were obscured by the clang of the hammer against the chisel as I struck next to one of the metal rings embedded in the wall. Concrete flew. The fumes from the gasoline hadn’t yet reached the chamber. For the moment, the danger of sparks didn’t worry me as I slammed harder at the ring and the concrete around it. No longer whimpering, Kate and Jason were speechless with terror. Suddenly the ring to which Jason was anchored thumped onto the mattress.
I redirected the chisel toward the ring that held Kate. As I struck concrete above her head, she trembled. She reminded me of a dog that had been intimidated so often that it cowered at the sight of its owner.
My God, that’s what she thinks, I realized. I imagined the drugged haze through which she and Jason must have been seeing me. My beard was the most pronounced thing about my appearance.
Petey’s
beard was the feature they’d have most noticed in the swirl of their half—consciousness. Sweet Jesus, they thought I was Petey.
In outrage, I realized what had happened. Petey had tried to condition them, to make Kate call him Brad and Jason call him Dad—more important, to make them believe it. He’d drugged them until they didn’t know who they were. Day after day, he’d persisted in the same routine, determined to take away their will and resistance, to mold them into the obedient, worshipful wife and son of his fantasies. He didn’t want a wife and son who had minds of their own. What he needed were puppets who acted out his delusions.
“It’s me! It’s really me!” I pounded the chisel against the wall. “It’s Brad!”
Their eyes widened with greater terror.
“Jason, I’m not who you think I am! I really am your father!”
I didn’t have time to explain. I had to get them outside before the fumes spread farther and the house exploded. With one last frantic blow, I knocked away the ring that held Kate to the wall.
She and Jason were too frightened to move.
I grabbed their chains and dragged them toward the gap in the doorway. I squeezed into the tunnel and used their chains to pull them through one at a time. Immediately, I felt light—headed, realizing that the fumes were starting to suffocate me. Tugging Kate and Jason along the tunnel, I was again reminded of dogs that refused to go with their master. I reached the basement, seeing smoke billow from the fake light switch that had almost electrocuted me. The detonator. When it burst into flame, the house would blow up.
Daylight gleamed through the open trapdoor.
“You’re almost free, Kate! Jason, you’ll soon be out of here!”
But as we started up the stairs, Jason gaped and jerked back. He screamed. Above us, a shadow loomed into view, blocking part of the light. Then the light was blocked totally as Petey slammed the trapdoor shut.
Smoke billowed thicker from the fake light switch. I coughed but couldn’t clear my lungs. A rumble above the trapdoor warned me that Petey was sliding the heavy workbench onto it. I drew my pistol and shot toward the noise. As four bullet holes appeared in the trapdoor, I realized in dismay that the muzzle flashes from my pistol might detonate the fumes.
My ears rang from the shots. Gasoline now covered most of the floor. Frantic, I looked around for a way to get out. Above the laundry sink, the boarded—over window caught my attention. I ran back for the hammer, raced toward the laundry sink, and pried the boards from the window.
It was the type that had to be pulled up on an angle and held in place by a hook in the ceiling. When I opened it, I heard the wind, which had become even stronger since I’d entered the house. Feeling a gust hit my face, I lifted Jason. He struggled as I pushed him through the opening. I lifted Kate, shocked by how little she weighed. The sight of the outdoors, of freedom, gave her some life. With greater energy, she squirmed through the window’s opening, desperate to get away from me.
Any moment, I feared, a searing blast would rip me apart. I climbed onto the sink, and just as I shoved my chest through the opening, the sink pulled away from the wall, crashing under my weight. I grabbed a branch on a shrub and dangled. The branch bent. I sank.
I clawed at the earth, kept slipping back into the basement, braced my elbows against each side of the window, and stopped. Below me, the concrete wall tore my jeans as I kneed against it, struggling to squirm upward. Even with the wind at my face and the smoke coming past me through the window, I smelled the gasoline.
I grabbed another branch and pulled myself hand over hand through the opening. But the buckle on my gun belt wedged against the sill. I tried to raise my hips, working to ease the buckle over the sill. I heard it scrape on the concrete. I sucked in my stomach, raised my hips as high as I could, felt the buckle slip free, and tugged forward harder, inching through the opening. My hips came through. My thighs. As soon as I was on my hands and knees, I surged up.
Adrenaline burned my muscles as I raced from the bushes at the side of the house. I saw Petey’s truck, which the boards over the window had prevented me from hearing when he’d returned to the house. I didn’t see Kate and Jason, but I was certain that, even dazed, they’d have known enough to run in the opposite direction from the truck. I whirled to charge after them toward the back of the house, to cross the clearing and reach the cover of the forest… .
And found myself ten feet from Petey, who aimed a shotgun at my chest.
He trembled with rage.
I couldn’t draw my pistol and shoot before he pulled the trigger. Even if I hit him, my 9—mm bullet might not kill him, but with a shotgun at ten feet, he was sure to blow my chest apart.
“Stop, Petey!” With my beard, I couldn’t be sure he recognized me. “It’s me! It’s Brad!”
Even before I shouted, his eyes had narrowed. He looked startled. Straining to see past my beard, he realized who I was.
The wind buffeted us so hard, I could barely hear him murmur, “Brad.”
“Listen to me!
Did they tell you who Lester was?
” I shouted, doing the only thing I could think of to distract him from shooting. “
Do you know why they took you?
”
“Lester,” he murmured.
“
Did they tell you Lester was Orval and Eunice’s only child?
”
Smoke poured from the basement window.
Moving away from it, I had to keep distracting him. “
Did they tell you he died, that they went crazy with grief?
”
The house would soon explode.
“They’d already lost three children to stillbirths!” I kept my voice raised, inching toward the trees. “The rest of the Dants were dead! Eunice couldn’t conceive any longer. Lester was their only chance of continuing the family line.”
Petey sighted along the shotgun’s barrel. “Lester.”
As smoke billowed, I moved closer to the trees. “They were desperate to replace him. But they couldn’t do it in Brockton. That was too close to home. They might have been recognized.”
Petey kept pace with me, the shotgun aimed at my chest.
“So they set out on the interstate, driving from one town to another. They waited for God to direct them, to put a boy of the same age before them. They tried one town after another. They crossed from Indiana into Ohio. They passed Columbus. They came to Woodford.” I spoke faster, more intensely. “We’ll never know what made them leave the interstate and pick our town. Something must have seemed a sign from God. As they drove this way and that, they turned a corner, and there you were, all by yourself, pedaling down a street that seemed deserted.”
“ ‘Can you tell us how to get to the interstate?’ ” Petey said it with such bitterness. “ ‘Do you believe in God? Do you believe in the end of the world?’ ”
The smoke worsened. I tasted it as I neared the trees.
He moved with me, his finger looking tighter on the shotgun.
“They took you, and they put you in that underground room, and they told you your name was Lester, and they punished you if you didn’t act like their son.”
“Lester.”
I thought I saw flames beyond the smoke at the basement window.
“ ‘
This my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found
.’ Luke, fifteen, twenty—four,” Petey said.
“When you told me you’d been molested, I thought you meant sexually.”
I took another step.
So did Petey.
The wind gusted harder.
“But you didn’t mean sexually. You meant molested in your
mind
. In your
soul
. They wanted you to be Lester so much that they beat you and starved you; they treated you like an animal, until you didn’t know who you were. It was so awful that in the end you were ready to be anybody they wanted you to be as long as they didn’t hurt you, as long as they took away your bodily wastes and gave you something to eat.”
“They taught me the good book,” Petey said. “ ‘
The truth shall make you free.
’ John, eight, thirty—two.”
“The truth is, you
can
be free. I’ll get help for you, Petey! It’s not too late! Once the police understand why you did what you did,
they’ll
want you to get help, too. I promise you, life can be better. Don’t let Orval and Eunice destroy you again. Stop being what they made you into, Petey.”
“Don’t call me Petey!”
My voice broke. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am. I know that your life changed because of me, that everything would have been different if I hadn’t sent you home from that baseball game! But, damn it, we were just kids. How was I to know that the Dants were going to grab you?
Nobody
could have known about them. You were just my little brother tagging along. I didn’t mean for it to happen, Petey.” Tears streamed down my face. “There wasn’t a night since you disappeared that I didn’t beg God to bring you back safe, that I didn’t plead for a second chance. Let me make it up to you, Petey. Please, let me try to give you the life that Orval and Eunice took from you.”
“Stop calling me Petey!”
“You’re right. When you came to my house, you asked me to call you Peter, but I didn’t. We’re not kids anymore. You’re Peter.”
“No! Don’t call me that, either!”
Staring at the shotgun’s trigger, I made a placating gesture. “Okay. Whatever you want, Lester.”
“I’m
not
Lester!”
“Then I don’t understand. Who
are
you?”
“
Brad.
”
The dark intensity in his eyes made clear how serious he was. I’d ruined
his
life. Now
he’d
stolen
mine.
Taking my wife and son, he’d convinced himself that he was also taking my identity. In his mind, he
was
me. As the depths of his insanity became obvious, my legs felt unsteady. “I’m so sorry. God help you,” I murmured.
“No.” His tone left no doubt that he was going to pull the trigger. “God help
you
.”
The blast hurtled me into the bushes. Not from the shotgun. The blast from the house. As the building exploded, the shock wave lifted me off my feet and threw me into the undergrowth. Wreckage flew, chopping tree branches, shredding leaves.
Dimly, I became aware enough to smell smoke and hear the crackle of flames. In pain, I slowly sat up. I felt dizzy, sick to my stomach. The ringing in my ears was unbearable.
I’d been thrown into a hollow. That was the only reason I’d survived the shrapnel from the blast. Chunks of smoking, burning wreckage lay around me. Bushes were on fire. The wind thrust the flames from tree to tree.
Coughing from the smoke, I staggered to my feet. I stared around, searching for Petey. I faced the burning crater of the house. He wasn’t on the ground where we’d last stood. He must have been thrown into the undergrowth the same as I had been.
Flames crowded me. Kate and Jason. I had to find them. As I stumbled deeper into the forest, I prayed that they’d kept running, that they were far enough away that the fire wouldn’t reach them.
And that Petey wouldn’t. He’d do everything in his power to get them back.
Unless he was dead. Unless the blast had killed him.
Then where was his body? After the explosion, there was so little cover that I should have been able to see his corpse. Where
was
he?