The Fugitives (37 page)

“Aren’t those silly,” Mulligan said. They’d talked very little throughout the meal. He could tell that Kat was riveted by whatever drama was going on behind the scenes here; had no idea what it was, exactly, or why she was responding to it.

“The nicotine snacks? Beats smoking.”

“But you don’t really think so. How could you?”

“Beats dying.”

“You’re going to die anyway.”

Kat focused on him, shook her head, pushed her hair out of her face. “What are you, sixteen?”

They paid and went back out to the pickup. Two crows squabbled over some spilled fries in the lot. Mulligan began to tell Kat a story he was inordinately fond of. He’d heard it from a friend who’d heard it from someone. A couple had decided to make a joint project of quitting smoking. The plan was to take the money they consequently saved and put it aside for travel. It added up surprisingly quickly, and within a few months they were taking their first trip. After a couple of years they’d identified a specific mutual enthusiasm—roller coasters—and decided that with their savings they would go on a single, extended pilgrimage to each of the tallest, steepest, fastest roller coasters in North America. They visited many rides, blogging about them and attracting enough of an online following that they were featured in several newspapers and interviewed on network television. Then, aboard the Iron Flyer at a theme park in Ohio one evening, the woman’s lap bar sheared off as the car she was riding in began its descent from one of the ride’s peaks: she had been straining against it, her arms upraised, screaming enthusiastically. She plunged more than one hundred feet, hitting a steel crossbeam on the way down, and was killed.

“I always wondered if the guy started smoking again after that,” said Mulligan.

“Why would he?”

Mulligan was driving. A mist had settled low on the road, drifting and twisting in the headlights. Here and there were the eyes of deer, haunting the shoulders.

“I guess he wouldn’t.” Mulligan sounded slightly annoyed. “Life is so fragile, et cetera bla bla.”

“So cynical. Suffer a loss, why not throw out everything else. Sounds familiar.”

“Apart from the fact that I don’t think smoking cigarettes is a total repudiation of life, I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who’s opted to hit reset.”

“Well, that’s not me,” said Kat.

“Is that a fact?”

The speed limit dropped abruptly to thirty miles per hour. They were going sixty.

“They mean it,” cautioned Kat. Mulligan braked and she watched the needle drop. A sign encrusted with the faded emblems of the Lions, the Kiwanis, the FFA, the K of C, the Rotarians appeared, welcoming them to Leatonville. Someone had blasted the sign with buckshot, and its lower left corner was pitted with holes. An intersection loomed ahead. At its four corners were a gas station, a post office, a country store, and a Methodist church, respectively. All closed.

“Make your first left after that signal.” Kat leaned forward as the road rose and curved and she sensed the nearness of the turn. “Here,” she said.

They passed a wooded area and then a fenced yard where two penned elk stood watching the road.

“Where’s the reservation?” asked Mulligan.

“We just passed into it.”

Mulligan soon lost any sense of where he was. Kat directed him to turn three, four times before they entered a street scattered with low boxy houses. They passed the house she’d grown up in and she watched it go by. There was a light in the front window. Becky’s place was three houses down.

“It’s up there, where the truck is parked,” said Kat. Mulligan pulled up behind it and they got out. The house was dark.

TWO DAYS AGO

Argenziano used a key on his ring to permit the elevator to travel to the first subbasement. It stopped at the lobby and he froze a cluster of guests waiting to board in their tracks, holding up one hand to halt them and pointing downward with the other. The door closed on their tourist faces and the elevator started down. He exited into a deserted service corridor, its walls lined with circuit boxes and with the latticework of various kinds of piping running overhead, and stopped at a door with a laser-printed sheet taped to it that read
MORELLO CONSTRUCTION
. He used another key to open it. Inside, he took a pair of heavy duck coveralls that hung from a rolling rack and climbed into them, then selected a yellow hard hat from a shelf. With a third key, Argenziano opened a locked metal cabinet from which he removed the keys to a pickup and a small Deere backhoe.

He found the service elevator after making two false turns and rode it up to the basement, where it let him out near the pantry and the ramp that led to the loading dock at the rear of the building. Two Indians in uniform stood smoking, side by side, not looking at each other. They paid no attention to him as he passed. The Morello pickup was parked near a dumpster, and Argenziano climbed in and started the engine. He drove rapidly to Cherry City and the grounds of the old state hospital, where he parked at the entrance to the main structure, Building 50. Standing beside the truck, he scanned the grounds. It was a raw and nasty Sunday, and no one was around. He listened to a crow calling, then heard the sudden explosive flurry of wings as two of them burst out of one of the broken windows of the vacant building, flew a short distance, and landed on the lawn, where one stood and watched as the other hopped.

Argenziano swung open an unlocked gate to a chain-link enclosure and climbed aboard the small backhoe, one of several pieces of equipment parked within it. He started the machine, raised the stabilizers and the bucket, and then shifted into reverse, backing awkwardly out of the enclosure and onto the asphalt of the driveway. Soon he’d arrived at the fence surrounding the old orchard that stood behind the hospital. He found the gate and opened it, then returned to the backhoe and bumped over the broken earth and snow, glancing in the rearview from time to time to watch the buildings recede against the ashen sky as he moved deeper into the groves. At last he came to a break between the rows of bare trees. He got down from the backhoe and walked in a small circle, studying the ground. Then he climbed back into the seat, positioned the machine the way he wanted it, and began to dig.

TODAY

Becky’s truck was in the driveway. A pair of mud-encrusted boots was placed neatly beside the mat that said “OH SHIT NOT YOU AGAIN.” The curtains were pulled on the windows flanking the door on either side. Kat tried the knob. It turned.

“Becky always locks her door,” Kat said. “She gets afraid.”

“You know her well,” Mulligan said.

“We were like sisters.” Kat was still holding the doorknob. She looked straight ahead at the door’s scuffed and faded panels. “We grew up here together.”

If Mulligan had a reaction to this disclosure, it didn’t show. Kat pushed the door open and they entered the house. The door opened directly onto the main room, an open floor plan with a breakfast bar dividing the kitchen from the living area. Two stools were pulled up to the bar, and catalogs and bills were piled on the Formica countertop. A pot sat on the cold stove. Stacked in a corner, either for future use or to be discarded, were odd objects that looked as if they’d been picked out of the trash: a compact stereo system, a broken dining chair, a torn lampshade, an old inkjet printer. The entire room, in fact, looked as if it had been reclaimed as salvage; Mulligan thought of his fanciful scheme to furnish his house from the Salvation Army. And: a boxy older television set, resting like a monument adjacent to a couch and easy chair. There was no sign of a new TV.

“Her keys are here,” said Kat, jingling a ring.

They shuffled around aimlessly for another few minutes, picking things up, putting them down. Mulligan was conscious of their delaying their progress into the rest of the house, the bedrooms and bath located off the short corridor that led from the main space. The doors to all three rooms were closed. Finally, he went into the first of the bedrooms. It was the boy’s. He flipped on the light to unveil a rumpled twin bed, an unfinished pine dresser, and a small desk that looked as if no one had ever sat at it. Posters on the wall and clothes on the floor. A laptop computer was open on the bed. Mulligan turned it toward him and tapped the space bar: the kid had been watching a YouTube video of a chimpanzee peeling an orange. Kat stood in the doorway.

“The closet,” she said. “Check it.” But she came all the way into the room to yank open the folding louvered door herself. There were only clothes and shoes in there, with cardboard boxes stacked on the shelf. They were women’s clothes and women’s shoes, mostly. The boy’s things took up about a quarter of the space. They moved to the bathroom next, another unoccupied space. The sill of the tiny frosted glass window over the tub was crammed with shampoos and conditioners. Kat took one of the containers and examined it: For Graying Hair. Her mouth curled into a frown and she glanced at herself in the mirror.

“Is she older than you?”

Kat shook her head. “Her mother was gray when we were growing up. I never thought about it. I guess I just figured she was old.” She laughed, looked at herself again, and pushed her hair out of her face. She asked herself softly, “How old could she have been?”

Mulligan thought reflexively of his own mother at home five hundred miles away, weathering there in as unremarked-upon a way as the very shingles of the roof, the sides of the chicken coop from when the place had been part of a working farm, the posts his father had driven into the ground in the 1970s to fence in what he’d seriously referred to as “the barnyard” during Mulligan’s brief 4-H experiment with keeping livestock. Crone of the plains. He couldn’t remember, didn’t know, if she’d dyed her hair. All he knew was that she had grown old suddenly, once his father was gone; as a couple they’d seemed vigorous, hale, steaming toward the end in keeping with the most optimistic of American schemes, but his unanticipated destruction had sheared off some great jagged chunk of her, too. Mulligan hadn’t talked to her in over a year.

Kat moved on to the other bedroom while he lingered. Then he heard her yell.

ONE DAY AGO

Dylan Fecker hung up on an editor who was trying to lowball him on a novel. He felt like he’d been having a conversation with someone hanging by his fingertips from a slippery ledge. With ten years at his house and rapidly waning authority, the editor was old at thirty-six. It depressed Dylan when he saw them bleeding out all their self-confidence like that, getting hesitant, second-guessing their own taste, coming back with offers that were designed to be noncommittal. That’s what had happened to him; why he’d jumped the fence and become an agent. He was leaning back gazing abstractedly at the shelves, lined with the glossy spines of all his authors’ books, when the phone rang. It was Gayatri, his assistant.

“I’ve got Monte Arlecchino.”

“Lucky you.”

“Please, Dylan. He’s not being charming today.” Gaya had a nice, round Oxbridge accent that usually made Dylan feel prosperous and civilized.

“Oh, does he have his military voice on? Big phony.”

“It’s about Sandy Mulligan.”

Fecker sighed. His problem child. Typical Monday morning news. He took the call.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Time’s up,” said Arlecchino.

“Seriously?” Dimly, he heard a commotion outside. He got up and went to the window that looked out on to Mercer. A bum wearing a black plastic garbage bag was in the middle of the street, bumping a shopping cart filled with empty cans and bottles over the cobblestones. “Where Ben?” he yelled. “Ben! Where he at? We going to the Coinstar!” Southbound traffic was backing up behind him and beginning to sound its horns.

“It’s a breach, Dylan,” said Monte. “I’d like to say my hands are tied, that it’s Stuttgart. But it’s me. You know, you put your faith in these
children
. You say to them, ‘let me support your creative efforts.’ But you know what I’ve figured out, finally? It doesn’t actually cost all that much to write a book. You can do it on a shoestring, damn it. I don’t know what we’re thinking, paying people for it.” He actually sounded indignant.

“Monte, really? He’s close. Give him some time.”

“Put a prima donna like Mulligan in his place,” Monte was panting, “and all the midlist nobodies will keep in line. I’ve
got
to get out of the buggy whip business. I’m going to learn how to blow glass. I’m going to go to art school and learn how and I’m going to make all my own colorful vases.”

Dylan breathed in, held it. He exhaled slowly, counting. At ten, he breathed in again.

“I’m not unsympathetic,” said Monte. “I’ve told him. I know that woman’s suicide threw him—”

“Susannah,” said Dylan.

“Susannah. I’m truly sorry. But what can I say? I didn’t tell him to bail on her when she was six months pregnant. And it was how long ago? Life has to go on.”

“Not for her it doesn’t. Maybe not so much for him, either.”

“Not my problem.”

“So now what?”

“Lawsuit. You’ll be named as a codefendant, by the way. I wouldn’t worry about it, you’re probably indemnified. It’s mostly leverage to get you to nudge him to return the advance. Good, no?”

“Thanks for the heads-up,” said Fecker.

Outside, two police officers, a man and a woman, had approached the bum and were trying to persuade him to move to the sidewalk. The din from the horns grew louder.

TODAY

They’d been herded into the second bedroom at the back of the house, the boy and his mother, and killed there. She cradled him in her arms, his head was buried between her breasts. There were spatters, drips, stains, puddles. The room smelled like a sackful of old pennies. Kat knew, instantly, that somehow she had led the killer to Becky.

“I have to get out of here,” she said. She felt like she was going to vomit.

Mulligan felt calm, focused. Once, when he was about twenty years old, he’d been driving home when an overcast sky had suddenly grown greenish and dark. Rain had begun to fall, hard, abruptly changing force and direction, hammering the car and moving laterally against it like a wave, blinding him so that he could only feel the car being pushed sideways. It turned out that a tornado had touched down directly beside the road and skipped over and across the roadbed like a top. Throughout the twelve seconds that it had taken for the event to occur, he’d felt exactly the same as he did now in Becky Chasse’s blood-spattered bedroom: clearheaded, alert, almost relaxed, in control if not of the situation then of himself, and knowing even as it was happening that this was a kind of consolation in any event. He took Kat by the arm and led her out of the room.