Authors: User
There’s nothing else back here.
Keeping her distance, Sue walks sideways around the van. She sees a child’s car seat on the front passenger side.
Veda’s car seat.
It’s empty.
The driver’s seat is empty as well.
Sue slowly opens the passenger door, leaning in, placing one hand on the padded car seat, fingertips brushing over the stale cracker crumbs and dried raisins that have found their way into its creases over the months. The fabric upholstery is still warm. Pressing her nose against the seat’s headrest, Sue smells Veda’s hair, where the back of her skull probably lay just a few seconds earlier.
Veda, what did they do with you? Where are you now?
Behind her in the darkness, she hears the trill of the cell phone in the Expedition. She starts walking toward it and thinks she sees something moving in the back of the vehicle, the shape in the garbage bags sitting upright against the rear window.
Watching her.
6:01A.M.
Sue blinks, squinting. It’s too dark to tell whether she’s imagining him there or not. Up front the phone is still ringing. That’s definitely real. She opens the driver’s side door, takes the phone, and steps away. Her headache is gone again, drowned in adrenaline.
Sue hitsTALK .
“Where’s my daughter?”
“Oh, that’s right,” the voice on the other end says. “You thought she was in the van, didn’t you? Well, it’s a good thing she wasn’t, Susan. You could’ve really hurt her when you crashed into it.” He pauses. “But if I were you, I wouldn’t worry about where she is now, just where you’re going to be in another ninety minutes, when her life is on the line.”
“White’s Cove. I’ll be there.”
“That’s good,” the voice says. “Meanwhile it looks like your passenger is showing some life of his own.”
She glances into the back of the Expedition. The shape against the glass is no longer there. He must’ve lain down again or lost his strength. Maybe he wasn’t sitting up at all. Walking to the driver’s side, the phone clasped to her ear, Sue looks in but doesn’t see the thing in the garbage bags poking its head up. The Expedition is silent inside. She climbs behind the wheel, starts the engine. “You want me to—”
“Get back on the road,” the voice on the other end says. “Get moving.”
Sue puts the Expedition in gear. She drives the rest of the way out of town. The yellow lines leap through her headlights, behind the snow, a peculiar feeling of dislocation filtering through her mind. Something is happening here. She’s going forward, but she’s also traveling backward. Backward in time, more than twenty years, to the day that she and Phillip saw the man at the park. This is not a voluntary remembrance. It’s like the memory is being leached from her pores.
Looking through the windshield of the Expedition, Sue can already make out the worn-out assortment of leftover playground equipment through eleven-year-old eyes, wilting in the muggy heat of that lost August afternoon. She and Phillip were sitting on the cracked plastic swings, idly kicking their legs at the small patches of muddy earth underneath them, the last remnants of a weak rain two days earlier. Twenty yards away, two younger children, scrubby-looking toddlers in dirty shirts and skinned knees, giggled and shrieked as they ran up and down through the low weeds while their mothers, mobile-home women in Spandex pants, watched anxiously, smoking cigarettes.
They were the only other kids here. Most people had stopped letting their children venture beyond the center of town that summer. Instead they went to the movies or the mall or played at Sheckard Park in the middle of town, or their parents packed them off to band camp or chauffeured them to the gated community pool two towns over. Sue’s mother didn’t know that she and Phillip had ridden their bikes out here today—she thought they were at the East Town Mall catching a matinee—and Phillip’s parents…well, Phillip’s parents never really seemed to question where Phillip was. When in doubt, they assumed that he was at the public library, studying. And more often than not, they were right.
But today, he and Sue had come out here to sit on the swings, kick their feet up and catch a too-infrequent breeze lifting from the empty field down the road, bringing the smell of industrial solvents from the mill in town. Phillip had bought them both Cokes from the 7-Eleven on the bike ride out, the wet plastic bottles covered with dirt and wood chips. Sue wasn’t sure why they’d come here, except that they liked it—the conversations they had here seemed different from any conversation she ever had with anybody else, ever. Sure, she and Phillip would talk about school and TV, and how screwed up their parents were. But they also talked a lot about the future—Phillip had already decided he was going to be some kind of millionaire, Sue said she wanted to be an Alaskan bush pilot or possibly a doctor. Sometimes they didn’t talk about anything at all, just sat in comfortable silence.
It was during one of those silences, disturbed only by the soft creak of the swings, when Phillip had glanced up and said, almost conversationally, “Hey. Do you recognize that car?”
Sue looked past the dirty playground equipment over to the flattened patch of dirt that served as a parking lot. She saw two rundown cars that the trailer-park moms had arrived in, a rusted-out Chevy and a Ford station wagon with fake wood paneling, parked right in front of the gate. Across the lot, in the shadow of a giant elm tree, sat a long, boxy sedan, a Plymouth or something, she wasn’t sure. It was burnt orange with a black roof. From where she and Phillip sat now, there was just enough of a glare on the windshield that she couldn’t tell whether or not there was someone behind the wheel.
“It’s been there for a while,” Phillip said. “It pulled up right after we got here. Did you notice?”
Sue shook her head, still swinging back and forth, dragging the toes of her Chuck Taylors in the cracked and drying mud. She
hadn’t
noticed, which was strange—her mother was always telling her what an observant girl she was. But the Plymouth had arrived so silently that it must have completely escaped her attention. Like it materialized out of nowhere, she thought, and shivered.
“What if it’s him?” Phillip asked abruptly.
She glanced at him. “Cut it out.”
“I’m serious. You know he’s out there somewhere. It could be him.”
“Oh, please,” Sue said, in the drabbest voice she could muster. They almost never talked about the Engineer. Not because it scared them, but quite the opposite—it was old news, almost boring to them. All summer the Engineer was all that everybody in town talked about, certainly their parents and teachers and neighbors never gave the topic a rest.
He jumped off his swing. “I’m going over there to check it out.”
“Oh, right.” She was used to this from him. “What are you going to do, tap on the glass and ask him, Excuse me, do you mind if I check your trunk for human heads?”
“He always goes for the eyes,” Phillip said, not looking back at her. “He shoots them out. He doesn’t keep souvenirs.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“It’s true and you know it. It’s in all the papers. And he only gets kids twelve and under.”
Sue stopped swinging. Phillip was still walking briskly away from her, headed through the high grass toward the makeshift parking lot, and that was when she realized that he was serious. He was really going. The clarity of his intention startled her so much that the first word out of her mouth—“Wait!”—came out garbled and almost inaudible. Jumping off the swing, she cleared her throat and hurried to catch up.
“Phillip, what do you think you’re doing?”
“Just what I said. I’m going to check it out.”
“You can’t do that.”
He cocked an eyebrow at her. “Why not?”
She sighed. It was his favorite question, and half the time she couldn’t answer it. She decided to discard whatever remained of her sarcastic detachment and address the issue head-on. “Okay, what if it is the guy?”
“What’s he going to do, jump out of the car and grab me?” Phillip asked, not slowing his pace. “In broad daylight?”
“We’re pretty far from town.”
“Come on,” he said, and if he was less sure of himself, he didn’t let on.
“So what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to walk by, like I’m headed to the field, and as I pass him, just kind of take a look inside, see what he looks like. Maybe he’s wearing the bib overalls with the blue stripes on them like that kid back in Wickham said.”
“Yeah, I’m sure that’s exactly what he’s wearing,” Sue said, not exactly sure why she was so reluctant to let Phillip get close to the Plymouth, only that the feeling of apprehension was building in her chest and abdomen, the way her head felt when she dove all the way to the bottom of the deep end of a pool. “Come on, let’s just go—okay?”
For the first time he stopped and stared back at her. His dark eyes were serious, as grown-up as she’d ever seen them, and all at once she knew exactly what he was going to look like as a grown man—it might’ve even been the first time that she realized she loved him, a little.
“What if it happens tonight?” he asked. “And in the morning everybody’s talking about some kid that got killed by the Engineer, and we both know we could’ve done something about it but we didn’t. Do you want that on your conscience?”
She took a breath, considered any number of possible replies:
That’s not going to happen
or
My conscience has nothing to do with this
or simply the ever-popular
Oh please,
but in the end she didn’t say anything. They were a dozen steps from the edge of the bare, tire-packed earth, putting them twenty or thirty good strides from the orange Plymouth, and it was clear now that she wasn’t going to stop him.
She glanced back over her shoulder to where the toddlers and their mothers had been playing, but the dingy little playground was empty. The blue Chevy and the rusty Ford were gone, must have left while she and Phillip were talking. The only car left in the lot was the Plymouth.
Sue nodded. “If we see anything that looks funny, we run straight to the police. I mean it, Phillip.”
“No duh, genius,” he smirked. “I’m not Magnum, PI.”
“Yeah, you’re more like Higgins.” The banter, however lame, made her feel a little better, and the next thought was even more comforting.
Of course it’s not going to be the Engineer in there. Phillip could go up to the guy, climb in the backseat and ask him what he thought about the Red Sox’s chances for the playoffs,
it wouldn’t matter because there’s no way the man that killed a dozen kids is sitting right there, twenty feet away from us.
No, of course not. It wasn’t the Engineer, it was just some worker bee from the paper mill, some lunchbox-toting working stiff like her own father who came down here to eat his onion sandwich and maybe sneak a warm Bud before going back to the factory floor. And when they got up to the orange Plymouth, Phillip would see that for himself.
Sue was still reassuring herself with these thoughts when the driver’s side door opened and the man in blue-striped bib overalls looked out at them, and smiled.
6:38A.M.
Sue sits up fast, eyes wide open, panic dousing her like an ice-cold jet of water, shooting down both arms and fusing her spinal column into a steel rod. The road is jumping at her crookedly—so crookedly that it’s not the road at all, it’s a thick row of trees plowing in her headlights, and she jerks the wheel hard around, the Expedition’s back tires skidding but finding something to pull against under the ice. And she’s back on course, breathing fast, trying not to have a heart attack.
She checks the dashboard clock. How long has she been out?
A few seconds, she thinks. Certainly no longer. It wasn’t like she was dozing, though. It was more like being
gone,
transported, spirited away back to that summer day in ’83. She can practically smell the metallic rust from the swing’s chains on her palms and the high, acrid stench of the mill hanging in the air, the swamp below the bridge not far away. And despite the fact that it’s got to be at least ten below outside with the wind chill, and the Expedition’s broken side window is letting in all kinds of cold air, Sue realizes that underneath these strange, ill-fitting clothes she’s filmed from scalp to ankles in a clinging layer of sweat. Not perspiration—kids didn’t perspire, not even girls. They sweated.
The phone rings. She grabs it.
“Wake up, Susan.”
“I’m awake,” she croaks.
“You were drifting a little there,” the voice chides. “Can’t have that. Not with Veda relying on you to keep her alive.”
“Why can’t you tell me where she is?” Sue blurts, just defenseless enough from her vision of August 1983 that the question comes out sounding helpless. It sounds, actually, like a child’s question, in a child’s voice. “I just want to know she’s all right.”
“She’s all right, Susan. As long as you stay on the road and don’t crash into any trees, she’ll be just dandy.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Always keep my promises, Susan,” the voice says. “The only thing that matters is you. Getting you and your cargo where you need to be. At the other end of this route.”
“Why is that so important to you?”
“Why?” She anticipates scorn, maybe even laughter, but his earnestness sounds genuine. “You ought to know that by now. I’ve been in this business for a long, long time. I’m an old hand at it, nearly as old as the country itself. Haven’t you realized that yet?”
Sue lowers her hand from her mouth, looking for the first time at the cell phone she’s been holding against her face. It’s a small, sleek device, chrome-colored, made by the good people at AT&T Wireless. She peers at the three little holes where the voice has come out, imagines being able to somehow shimmy through those invisible cell frequencies to wherever the voice is crouched, with her daughter at its side and a blade to Veda’s throat.
“Isaac Hamilton,” she says. “That’s you, isn’t it?”
“Ah. Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“It’s been you the whole time.”
“The whole time,” the voice echoes, and there’s something almost soothing about the ease with which his voice dovetails with hers. “Oh Susan, if only you knew how close you were. You know, I actually think you might make it.”