"Just making sure." Alba flashed her a smile. He pulled his hand from his pocket, pointed, and addressed Graham. "Nice to have you with us." Then he left.
"Some people think the Ouija board is the tool of the devil," Isobel said, back to her knitting. The scarf she was making was purple.
Distracted, Graham watched Alba as he made his way through the enclosed courtyard. "I'm not sure I believe in the devil."
"You don't think people are evil?"
Oh, he
knew
people were evil. No question about that. "I just don't think there's some red guy with a tail and horns running around."
Her needles stopped clicking. She looked up at him and laughed.
"So what do you think Tuonela's new name should be?" Isobel asked.
"You know it will be something nonthreatening."
"I like Shadow Falls."
"They'll never name it Shadow Falls. Too dark. Too spooky. The whole thing is stupid. You can't change something by changing the name."
The bell rang and they gathered everything up. "Stitch and bitch is over," Isobel announced with a laugh. She always said that, and she always laughed. He hadn't understood why it was so funny until she explained that knitting was something old ladies usually did.
"See you in American history." Graham jumped to his feet.
The rest of the day went quickly. When school let out Graham walked home, planning to head to the theater that evening for play practice.
The sun was low in the sky, and the day had cooled off so that the air was actually cold, and Graham was glad for the stocking cap. His mind drifted, and he had a slight smile on his face as he thought about Isobel.
Behind him a vehicle took the corner and headed in his direction. When it was almost even with him, it slowed, keeping pace. He looked, half expecting to see Rachel Burton, or maybe even Travis and his buddies.
It was a car he recognized, with his mother behind the wheel.
He froze; then his brain kicked in.
Run!
His leg muscles tensed. He pivoted and ran.
Sprinting through a yard. Slipping between houses, skidding down a hill.
She's coming!
He knew she was coming. No matter how fast he ran.
As he moved he dug into the front pocket of his jeans, his fingers coming in contact with the house key. His lungs were raw as he vaulted over the iron fence around his dad's yard. He sprinted up the sidewalk, taking the porch steps three at a time.
At the door his hand shook as he struggled to get the key in the hole. He finally made it, turned the key, and fell inside the living room, slamming and locking the door behind him.
A minute later the front door shuddered with ferocious, angry pounding. "Open up!" came his mother's voice. "I know you're in there!"
Evan, who had been sleeping, flew out of his bedroom. "What the... ?"
"It's my mother!"
Terror. She would make him leave. She would make him go back with her.
Evan moved toward the door.
"No! Don't open it! You can't open it!"
Evan opened the door and stepped back to avoid the sunlight.
Graham ran to the bedroom.
While Evan was trying to figure out what the hell was going on, Lydia charged into the living room, blinking at the darkness.
"Shut the door," Evan said.
She backtracked and slammed it. "Where's Graham?"
"I think you and I need to talk."
"I came to get Graham. I have no interest in talking to you."
She'd aged at least twenty-five years since he'd last seen her. She smelled like stale cigarette smoke. Her hair was shoulder-length, a curly medium brown with quite a bit of gray.
He had to keep reminding himself that this was the girl he'd known in high school, even though she looked nothing like the slim, beautiful, sexy Lydia.
"Let's talk about this."
"Talk about it?" She let out a harsh laugh. "Like you wanted to talk about it years ago? You have no right to discuss anything about Graham. Have you supported him in any way these past sixteen years? Have you even acknowledged his existence? No. He is my son, and only my son."
Something crashed in the other room.
Lydia turned to the sound, then marched to Graham's bedroom and forced open the door. "Get your things. We're leaving. Now!"
"No!"
Graham was lying on the bed, clutching a pillow, one knee drawn up to his chest, his eyes huge and glassy.
One thing was apparent: He was terrified of his own mother.
And with a realization that practically brought Evan to his knees, he knew Lydia was right: He had no legal hold over his son.
"We are going."
Graham could no longer defy a direct command. He scrambled from the bed and began to blindly gather his belongings, stuffing them into his large backpack.
"That's enough," Lydia said. "Let's get out of here. Right
now."
Lydia led the way, both of them walking down the hallway. Graham didn't look at Evan.
She opened the door.
Evan moved fast. In a few strides he caught up with her and slammed the door closed before she could exit.
She did a double take, then struggled unsuccessfully to make her face expressionless. "What are you doing?" Unable to hide her fear, she lifted a hand to her throat.
"Graham isn't leaving here," Evan said, his voice quiet and low and threatening.
Police chief Seymour Burton pulled the search warrant from his jacket and knocked on the front door of the one-story ranch-style home with yellow aluminum siding and white trim. When no one answered after a repeated series of knocks, Seymour stepped back and let his boys smash the lock on the hollow wooden door.
"Somebody go around the back. Make sure he doesn't try to get out that way."
Even though there was surely a special place in hell for child molesters and child pornographers, Seymour wanted to make sure Ed Wilson II would be able to visit a special place in prison first. They'd been watching him for months and had finally gathered enough evidence for a search warrant.
Seymour pulled out his Smith & Wesson, pushed open the door, and slipped inside. It smelled like cat shit, grease, and body odor. Like some old guy who hadn't bathed in a year and never did his laundry. Guess he had more important things to do.
The plastic shades were pulled down tight, and even though it was still light outside, the house was dark. Seymour shouted into the darkness, announcing their purpose.
Nobody answered. The house was silent.
Seymour nodded for the young cop named Aber-nathy to go past him. It didn't take long to determine that no one was upstairs. A quick scan of the basement revealed the same thing.
Abernathy opened a door that led outside.
"Nobody here," the other cop said, joining them in the basement.
Seymour silently cursed his decision to make a daylight raid. But they'd been tracking Wilson's habits, and it had seemed the best time to catch him at home.
In one corner of the basement was a bondage setup, with chains and black leather cuffs hanging from the ceiling. Nearby was a desk with a computer.
"Pack up the computer," Seymour said.
He snapped on a pair of latex gloves and opened a drawer. It was stuffed with photos: some five-by-sevens, but mainly eight-by-tens. All in color. Hundreds. Seymour went through them. All young nude boys.
He shuffled through the photos, looking for any faces that might be familiar. He found one.
Damn.
His cell phone rang.
It was Evan Stroud. He sounded a little wound up.
"Graham's mother is here," Evan said. "At my house. She wants to take Graham back to Arizona. Is there any way I can keep him in Tuonela? Somebody I can contact? Somebody who can help?"
Seymour stared at the photo in his hand, a full-frontal nude of Graham Yates. "Don't let him leave your house. I'll be there in less than an hour. I think there's a way we can keep him around for at least a few more days."
Seymour remained at the yellow house long enough to make sure evidence was being gathered correctly. Then he headed for Evan's, lighting a cigarette as soon as he got in the car. Once he was parked outside Evan's house, he finished his smoke, crushed out the butt in the ashtray, and grabbed the manila folder off the seat.
He was never sure why he'd become a cop. He hadn't been into authority. And he wasn't an excitement junkie. And he certainly didn't like giving people bad news or making them uncomfortable.
He took a deep breath and walked up the wooden steps to the front door. Evan must have heard him arrive. Before he could knock, the door opened.
The sun was down past the horizon, but the sky was still light. Seymour stepped inside and closed the door behind him.
The air was electric, saturated with tension and anger and fear. His own home life with his wife and daughter had been calm. There had never been much drama.
Seymour had always liked Evan. Now, seeing him with a new kind of desperation in his eyes, Seymour felt sorry for him.
He turned to the other person in the room. "You must be Lydia Yates." Seymour held out his hand, and the woman reluctantly took it.
He remembered her. In trouble a lot. One of those girls who was always in heat, his mother would have said. Seymour had been a patrol officer then, and he'd caught her having sex on more than one occasion. At that time she'd seemed to have cast a spell over most of the boys her age. Looking at her now, he doubted she'd cast any spells in a long time.
"I don't know what this is about." Lydia dropped his hand and got back to her problem. "I came here to get my son. And now this asshole refuses to let me leave with him."
"I'd like to talk to Graham in private," Seymour told the two adults.
Evan motioned toward the hallway. "He's in the bedroom on the left."
Seymour walked down the hall. The door was ajar. He pushed it open, then closed it tightly behind him.
Graham sat on the edge of the bed, both feet on the floor, his fists between his knees. He gave Seymour a slight nod, then looked back down.
He wasn't crying right now, but he had been.
Seymour pulled a straight chair from a nearby desk, turning it around so he faced Graham. "I hear your mom is here to take you back with her."
Graham nodded.
"Do you want to go?"
Graham shook his head.
"That's what I thought."
Graham looked up. A minute ago his eyes had been flat and dead. Now they held a spark of hope that didn't make Seymour's job any easier.
"Can I stay?" His voice was thick.
"I have a way for us to delay things. Long enough to get a judge in here to look at your case. Find a way for you to stay here at least part of the time."
"He's my dad. The DNA tests came back, and he's really my dad. That should help, shouldn't it?"
"I would think so."
But kids usually went to the mothers. That's just the way it was. And it wasn't as if Evan had had anything to do with Graham up to this point. Plus, with Evan's illness ... the situation didn't look good.
Seymour opened the folder. "We just raided a house on Fifth Avenue, where I found this." He pulled out an eight-by-ten color photo.
Blood drained from Graham's face and he turned a pasty white. He broke out in a sheen of sweat, and his eyes began to roll.
Seymour jumped to his feet. "Put your head down."
The kid wasn't hearing anything; Seymour pressed Graham's head down until his body quit shaking and his breathing became a little more normal. Then Graham slowly sat up and wiped his face with the hem of his long-sleeved T-shirt.
"Do you want to tell me how this happened?" Seymour asked quietly, returning to his seat.
"I was broke. I was hungry. I ran into some kids who said a guy would pay me a hundred bucks for some photos."
"Who were the kids who told you this?" Seymour pulled a small notebook from the breast pocket of his shirt and flipped through the pages until he came to a blank one.
"I don't know who they were. Just some kids."
"What did they look like?"
"I dunno. Guys. About my age. It was dark. I only saw them a little while. I don't remember."
Seymour didn't believe him, but he would let it go for now.
He'd spent a lot of time—years, actually—wondering why so many of today's kids were so messed up. Being a cop, he'd run into a lot of them who had no moral compass. Young sociopaths. But the percentage of young sociopaths had taken a huge leap over the past twenty years.
It was bad, really bad. And he was afraid there was no fixing it, because you couldn't go back. Right now it was cool to be shallow and ironic and heartless. But Graham wasn't like that. Somehow he'd managed to cling to some good part of himself.
"So you went to this guy's house, and he took pictures of you," Seymour said. "Did anything else happen?"
"What do you mean?"
Young girls never liked to admit to being raped, but boys were worse. They rarely offered the information without being coaxed. "Were you sexually molested?" Seymour asked.
"No!"
"Graham?" Seymour prodded, keeping his voice low and matter-of-fact.
Graham looked up. "I wasn't. I swear. Oh, he wanted to. He told me he wouldn't pay unless I had sex with him. So I left. Without any money."
Seymour believed him.
"So now what?" Graham asked.
"We need to go down to the police station and file a report. Then we'll have to take your deposition."
That was the part of the process Seymour hoped to drag out so Graham would be forced to stay in town. "Sometimes it can take a little while to get that all set up. Have to find a stenographer and such."
Mary Pelton lived in town, and she was always eager for more work, but Seymour would just forget to call her for a day or two.
"Do you need to put me in jail? 'Cause if you do, I'm cool with that. I don't mind."
The kid would rather go to jail than be sent home with his mother. Seymour closed his small notebook and slid it back into his pocket. "You won't need to go to jail, but we'll have to get the judge's permission for you to remain here until the deposition."