Delusion Road (34 page)

Back in the car, he fought the sobs that threatened to undo him and managed to tell her about the after-school program at Brookdale Elementary, and he slumped back in the seat as Willa gunned the car in that direction. As she drove, he was grateful for her stunned silence, which he used to try to get himself under control. He couldn’t go into the school looking like this. His appearance would alarm the adults and, worse, upset Isaac.

When they arrived moments later, Keegan thought he could do this. Taking deep breaths and dragging a sleeve across his face, he got out and forced himself not to run through the school’s entrance. Arriving at the gymnasium, he found Ms. Tomlinson among the adults supervising the students, most of them playing a game his shock-numbed brain couldn’t identify. Isaac, of course, wasn’t part of that activity. He sat in the far corner amid several brightly coloured plastic disks, Ms. Tomlinson kneeling beside
him chatting. Looking up, she gave Keegan her usual broad smile and got to her feet.

As he approached, though, her smile faltered. “Is everything all right, Keegan?” she asked.

He nodded, afraid to acknowledge whatever it was about him that she’d seemed to notice. “Hey, buddy,” he said softly as he squatted beside his brother. “Time to go.”

Isaac, of course, gave no indication he’d heard him, merely reached for another disk and added it to one of three rows he’d made.

Keegan tried again. “Isaac, we have to leave.” He expected to have to repeat himself, to take Isaac’s chin in his hand and establish eye contact to draw him back from wherever he was in his head, but his brother surprised him. He looked up.

Keegan passed him his outdoor shoes and was relieved to see him begin putting them on. He turned to Ms. Tomlinson. “I’d help you clean this up, but—”

“No need,” said the EA. She held out Isaac’s knapsack.

“Thanks,” he said, taking it. He knew he’d never see her again and he wanted to say more, wanted to tell her how much he appreciated the way she’d cared for his brother, but there wasn’t time. He took Isaac’s hand and led him out.

Keegan expected to have to do some major convincing to get his brother into the unfamiliar car, but Isaac surprised him again. Once he saw Willa behind the wheel, he opened the back door and climbed in. As Keegan reached across him for the seatbelt, Isaac’s eyes never left her, ignoring Keegan as he drew the belt down and fastened it.

“What now?” asked Willa as he got into the front seat. “Call 911?”

Keegan shook his head. “They might be monitoring emergency calls in this area.”

“Then what do we do?”

Keegan had no idea. He couldn’t keep his mind from returning to their living room, to that overturned lamp that used to be brown. “Just drive, okay?”

He’d been such a fool to think they could ever be safe, to think he could have a life here or anywhere else. The night before last as he’d lain on his bed doing homework, he’d even let himself make plans, his thoughts wandering again and again to Willa and the part she would play in them. He’d had to force himself to concentrate on those last few chapters of
The Mountain and the Valley.
Watching the streets slide by now, choking back the fear that threatened to engulf him, Keegan realized that book had been a warning of sorts. He just hadn’t recognized it at the time.

It was the first novel he’d ever read where the main character died at the end.

W
illa forced him to tell her everything. And if she hadn’t seen the condition of his living room, she might have thought Keegan was summarizing a movie, one of those crime dramas that included a parental advisory about violent content. But even if she
hadn’t
seen that living room, the call Keegan placed to a guy named Forbes made the whole thing blood-chillingly real.

The moment they’d left the elementary school, Keegan had pulled out his phone, but his hands were trembling so badly he’d messed up the number three times before banging the cell against the armrest again and again, cursing.

“I have hands-free,” she’d told him, grateful she’d paired her phone with the car’s Bluetooth that morning. She pressed a button on the steering wheel, and an automated voice said, “Number, please.”

Keegan had spoken the number slowly, and after the voice asked for confirmation, the connection was made. A man had answered almost immediately. “Special Agent Forbes.”

Keegan had opened his mouth to speak, but suddenly he was sobbing and Willa had had to leap in, telling what little she knew. The FBI agent had immediately given her the third degree, but
eventually he’d seemed satisfied she was no threat. He’d asked her if there was someplace safe she could take Keegan and his brother and she told him yes. She’d been about to give him the location, but he’d cut her off. “Can you tell me without telling me?” he’d asked, and she realized what he was saying, the warning he was giving her. She’d thought for a moment. “Fundy,” she’d said finally, hoping the agent had access to her parents’ information. He did. A few seconds later, he’d said, “Got it. I’ll coordinate with local law enforcement and send support there as soon as I get Canadian clearance. You’re sure it’s safe?”

“I’m sure. Is it okay if I phone my dad and tell—”

“Too dangerous. You can call him after the team arrives.” His next words hadn’t been for her. “Keegan,” he’d said, his voice strong, confident, “we’ll find your dad. I promise.” And then the connection was broken.

Willa had continued to drive, unsure what to say. Keegan was no longer sobbing, but he’d given no indication he’d heard Forbes’s comment. “That was reassuring,” she offered, trying to sound as positive as she could.

But Keegan had turned to the window. “He just said they’d find him. He didn’t promise they’d find him alive.”

She’d had nothing to say to that, and she’d driven in silence for a few minutes before once more trying to get him talking, to keep him talking. She was hoping that the energy involved in explaining would keep his mind from that scene back at his house, the blood on the floor, but she was unprepared for the story he shared with her, for the loss that had followed his family and then all but destroyed it.

They had been living in a well-to-do area of Chicago until his father had lost his job as a result of corporate downsizing when the markets tanked—”increasing shareholders’ profits at the expense of employees,” Keegan told her, his voice a muted monotone. And because of the lousy economy, no one was hiring and his father had gone without work for months, depleting their savings before forfeiting on car payments, mortgage, everything. They’d lost it all.

And then a ray of hope—his father had gotten a job with a trucking outfit on the West Side owned by a guy named Battaglia. Less than a month later, the feds contacted him.

“The feds?” Willa asked Keegan.

“A special task force. They’d had Battaglia on their radar for a long time.”

“What’d they want your dad to do?”

“To keep an eye out for anything that didn’t seem right. To call them if he found something.”

“And he did?”

“He was getting ready for an audit, and he discovered problems with some of the accounts, money that didn’t seem to jibe. My mom—” He turned toward the window again.

“Were she and your dad still together then?”

He nodded.

“How’d she feel about him reporting to the feds?”

He didn’t answer right away, the silence spooling out as the Sonic ate up the road, and Willa began to wonder if Keegan had heard the question. Then he spoke. “She said he shouldn’t get involved, that he was lucky to have a job. They—” He stopped,
and seconds passed before he continued. “They argued about it. A lot. But he called the FBI anyway.”

Willa understood now. “So that’s why she left him.” When he offered no comment, she struggled to keep the conversation going. “What happened then?”

She watched as he raised a hand to the window, his index finger moving against the glass as if following a pattern visible only to him. “My dad traced the money to a guy named Pavel Morozov.”

“Morozov,” she repeated. Why did that name sound familiar?

“Calls himself a businessman, but he’s into everything. Drugs, racketeering, prostitution, weapons smuggling, the whole nine yards.”

Now it came to her—she’d seen something about him in the newspaper. “Wasn’t he indicted for something?”

Keegan shook his head. “He was arrested, but the case they had against him fell apart. Their witness—” It was like he couldn’t say the words. But he didn’t have to.

“What did your dad have to do with Morozov?”

“He figured out how Morozov used Battaglia’s company to launder his drug money. He collected evidence that proved it.”

“Wasn’t he worried they’d find out?”

“The feds said they’d protect us.”

Willa needed a moment to let everything she’d heard sink in, but she was reluctant to let silence fill the car again. “When did all this happen?” she asked.

“The end of March.”

“So your father’s already testified against Morozov.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

There was a long pause before Keegan replied. “Dad refused to until the feds got us set up with new identities, and it took time working with Canadian authorities to place us here.”

“But why Canada? Why not just stay in the States?”

“After what happened, they figured we’d be safer out of the country.”

Willa waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. “After
what
happened?”

He turned to the window again, his finger moving slowly against the glass once more. “Battaglia suspected something.” He paused again, as if getting everything straight in his head. “Forbes figures that Morozov had cops on his payroll, but the FBI didn’t know it then. They made that connection after.”

“After what?”

His index finger curled into his palm with the others, his hand now a fist pressed hard against the glass. “After they killed my mother.”

The car’s right tires dropped onto the shoulder, gravel and dust billowing behind them as Willa fought to get them back on the pavement, and her hands were trembling when she finally got the vehicle evened out. But not from their near accident. She wanted to respond, wanted to say she was sorry, but it didn’t seem enough. “Keegan—” she began, but she had no more words.

“Morozov’s men blew up the house we were renting. Made it look like a gas leak. She was the only one inside.”

Willa didn’t have to look at him to know he was struggling with the memory.

“All four of us would’ve been killed if my dad hadn’t left
earlier than usual that day. They’d been arguing again, and my dad got fed up, stormed out. He usually gave Isaac and me a drive to school—” He made a sound like his throat was closing over, and she knew he was sobbing again, silently this time.

Willa’s hands gripped the steering wheel as she remembered their first day in Shedrand’s class, how instead of copying notes Keegan had been drawing a campfire. But it wasn’t. She’d just seen him draw and redraw the same thing on the window, and she now knew it for what it was. She thought of those flames, his mother trapped inside them, and she struggled against a sob that crowded her own throat.

“You know what the worst part is?” said Keegan after a long moment, his voice thick.

Can there
be
a worst part? thought Willa. “What?” she asked, dreading his answer.

“One of the last things my dad said to me was that he knew I didn’t care what happened to him.”

Yes, she decided, there
is
a worst part.

“But he was wrong,” said Keegan. And then he was sobbing again, his hands over his face, his shoulders quaking.

Something flapped in the back seat. Her vision blurred by tears of her own, Willa looked in the rear-view mirror, shocked to find that she’d forgotten all about Isaac. He’d been completely silent the whole time, motionless behind her, but no longer. His arms bent toward his chest, he flapped his hands repeatedly, whimpering.

“Keegan?” she said. “What’s happening?”

The sobs beside her diminished, and Keegan pulled up the bottom of his shirt, wiping his face with it. When he spoke, his
voice was like gravel. “He’s stimming,” he explained. “He does it when he gets overwhelmed. It’s my fault.” He turned toward the back, rearranging his features into an expression that was supposed to be reassuring but, to Willa’s mind, looked grim. “Hey, buddy,” he said softly, “it’s okay. Everything’s gonna be okay.”

But Willa could see in the mirror that Isaac wasn’t convinced, his hands flapping faster and faster. The sounds he was making seemed less like whimpers now, their rise and fall becoming more distinct, almost repetitive. And then she recognized they
were
repetitive, the same series of sounds coming again and again. But they were more than just sounds. They were words. Numbers.

“… two eight dot one nine four dot two five three dot one one seven dot one two eight dot one nine four dot two five three dot one one seven dot one two eight dot one nine …”

“What’s he saying?”

Keegan didn’t reply, and when she pulled her eyes momentarily from the road to glance at him, she saw astonishment ripple across his face. “I don’t know,” he said finally, his words hushed, almost reverent. “I’ve never seen him do this. He doesn’t speak.”

“Never?”

“A little when he was younger, but not for a long time.”

“… one two eight dot one nine four dot two five three dot one one …”

“What do you think it means? It’s the same sequence over and over, right? Is it some kind of phone number?”

“Two many digits. Unless it’s an international number, but then there’s those dots.” He shook his head. “I have no idea.”

Willa remembered what Keegan had said about his brother the afternoon she had driven him back from the look-off, a
moment that seemed a million years ago now. “You told me you think he understands everything. He just doesn’t have ways to show people what’s in his head, right?” Looking at Isaac in the mirror again, she asked, “Do you think this has something to do with your father?”

“Maybe,” said Keegan. “I don’t know how, but maybe.”