Mountain Madness (23 page)

She took a long swallow of beer, closed her eyes and urged the alcohol to never mind with her liver and kill her brain cells already.

His tongue on her face—she still felt it working its way from her lips to her earlobe and leaving behind a wide, sticky trail.

Oh God
. Maybe she should have shoved the potato peeler into his brain while she’d still had the chance. Or maybe she should have shoved it into her own once he’d left. Anything to avoid these god-awful memories.

She finished the beer and tried unsuccessfully to suppress a burp worse than any you’d hear at a Friday night frat party, not that she’d been to any of those in years.

She mentally excused herself before letting loose a second, only slightly less garish belch.

She set the empty bottle down beside the tub. It clinked on the tile. Before she let herself have the second, she lit the rest of her tea lights and distributed them around the tub. She cut into her lime, both the air and the water around her flickering like she was in a pool of molten gold. Lime juice dripped from the fruit as she sectioned it and landed on the unsubmerged slopes of her breasts. She looked down and saw something near her nipple that she hadn’t noticed before. A bruise, long and curved around the contour of her chest, finger shaped. Libby shuddered.

The last thing she needed was a visible reminder of the attack, something she would see every time she changed clothes or took a shower, when she was naked and already feeling her most vulnerable. She grabbed a washcloth from beside the bar of soap on the ledge and draped it over the offensive mark. The damp material clung to her chest, its weight comforting. She hadn’t realized her breasts were sore until the washcloth began to ease some of the pain.

She opened another beer and twisted one of the lime slices through the mouth. Juice sprayed her check and dribbled down the side of the bottle, but most of it stayed inside the bottle’s neck and fell down into the beer along with the misshapen piece of fruit. Libby took a sip and set the bottle on the tub’s ledge.

Eyes closed, she leaned back in the water, let her head dip underneath until nothing remained above the surface but her flaring nostrils. Her hair floated up and tickled at her ears, and though she still heard the music from the bedroom, it was muffled and nonsensical. She breathed slowly and reemerged only after the bathwater tried to eek its way into her ear canals. As she broke the surface, the water sluiced off her face, out of her hair, and down her neck to the concealing washcloth. She opened her eyes and sighed.

She hadn’t yet opened her book, a mystery by an author whose novels she’d recently discovered—actually more of a comedy than a mystery, if it was anything like the previous volumes in the series—but now she thought a little fiction might do her some good, get her mind off what had happened to her today in the real world.

She’d forgotten to bring a towel to dry her hands, but the bathmat beside the tub lay within reach. She flapped an arm over the edge and brushed against the empty beer on the floor before finding the shaggy mat and grabbing hold of it. She pulled the thing close enough to dry both hands, careful not to get it near any of the open flames, and let it fall back to the ground in a heap when she was through.

The book was a little on the slim side, maybe two or three hundred pages, and the cover felt slick against her fingers. She skipped the reviews and the author’s note and the rest of the junk and jumped straight into the action. Thirty pages in, she’d finished her second beer, and the bath had finally begun to cool. She thought about adding a little more hot water and reading another couple of chapters but decided maybe she’d had enough. The bath had been nice, had relaxed her muscles a little and given her a chance to escape, but tempting though it might be, she couldn’t spend the rest of her life here, if only because she didn’t want raisins for fingers and a belly as scaly as an alligator’s.

She didn’t have a bookmark, but she abhorred dog-earing, so she committed the page number to memory instead, closed the book, and set it on the floor beside her two empty beers.

She unplugged the drain with her toes and waited for all but the last few inches of water to disappear before sitting up and blowing out her candles.

Thoughts of Trevor popped into her mind. She thought about his dirty shorts and underwear and the embarrassment in his voice when he’d told them he’d messed himself. Then she remembered the carousel, the classical music, the way they’d all ridden together, smiling and laughing. At least their trip to the mall had ended well.

She wondered what her son was up to now, probably playing a board game with Mike or watching TV, maybe sitting in front of an open comic book and studying the pictures. Trevor always
studied
the comic books, never simply glanced at them. After closing the back cover of any particular issue, he could tell you everything about any character in any frame, right down to the details of their costume. He almost seemed to have a photographic memory, though he’d never shown such ability in any other aspect of his life.

Libby frowned. She’d been looking forward to a night by herself, but now she found herself missing Trevor and, to a lesser extent, Mike. It would have been nice to spend a little time together as a family, even if they weren’t exactly a family anymore.

She’d left the towel by the sink while washing the Marshall slime off her face. Now, in order to get to it, she had to traipse across the floor, leaving wet footprints behind her, her still-sore breasts bouncing. She dried herself off at the sink and then wiped at the floor, getting most of the moisture and leaving the rest to evaporate or seep into the grout or whatever it was water eventually did.

She thought she’d call Trevor before he went to sleep, tell him goodnight and blow him a kiss through the mouthpiece. Sometimes, when he was home, she snuck into his room to watch him sleep, tucked him in tight and kissed him on the top of his head before crawling into bed herself. She couldn’t do that tonight, but at least she could hear his voice and tell him she loved him.

She wrapped her towel around her body and tied it in a knot near her armpit. She hadn’t looked for the bruise, had purposefully looked everywhere
except
her chest, and now she wondered how long she could pretend the mark wasn’t there.
Tonight at least
, she hoped,
please God don’t let me dream about that pervert and his wandering hands or about that throbbing mound in his pants
. She could have gone the rest of her life without remembering the feel of his stubble on her cheek, but she was afraid both Marshall and his rough face would haunt her dreams for weeks to come. Or months. Hell, she might have nightmares about tonight for the rest of her life.

Bastard
. She could only imagine how she’d feel if he’d actually gotten what he came for.

She remembered the daisies, still in their vase in the kitchen. At least she would get some satisfaction when she stomped on the things until they were nothing but green goo running in the indentations of the linoleum.

She took her book with her to the bedroom but left the candles and the remaining beers. She might come back later for another drink, and she might not.

The CD had just restarted itself. Libby walked to the stereo and shut it off before plucking the phone from its base and dialing Mike’s number.

The phone rang five times before someone picked up.

“Pullman residence,” said an unfamiliar voice.

Libby frowned. If the stranger on the other end had answered with only
hello
, she might have thought she’d dialed the wrong number. But he’d said
Pullman
.

What’s going on?

“Who is this?” she asked, not able to keep a certain amount of sharpness out of her voice.

The man who responded sounded something like John Wayne, or the way Libby thought John Wayne was supposed to sound—she’d never actually seen one of his movies. “May I ask who’s calling?”

“Where’s my son?” Libby said loudly, ignoring the question. “And my husband? What’s going on there?”

The word
husband
only barely registered. She hadn’t meant to say it.

“Miss,” the voice said, “please identify yourself.”

“Why don’t you identify
yourself
?” Libby said, not in the mood for another strange man trying to take control of the situation.

“Ma’am,” the stranger said, “I’m afraid—”

Libby cut him off. “Give me Mike right now.” Her first thought was that both Mike and Trevor had been in a car accident. She’d hated that pickup of Mike’s since the day he bought it. It was untrustworthy, dangerous. If her website business had been any more lucrative, she’d have bought Mike a new vehicle herself and torched that truck until there was nothing left but a foul stench in the air and a mound of ashes on the ground.

Although she hadn’t actually expected it, Mike’s voice came onto the line. “Lib?”

“Mike. What’s going on?”

“I was about to call you. You need to come up here,” he said.

“Why? What’s happening?” A tear splashed against her wrist, and she realized she’d been crying.

“It’s Trevor,” he said, and before he could go on, Libby dropped the phone and began pawing through her closet. She loosened the towel and let it drop to the floor, then stepped into a pair of panties and some jeans. She pulled on the first blouse she found.

Trevor
, she thought, wondering how much anguish a parent could possibly endure in any given day. She slipped on a pair of running shoes, skipped the socks. From the bed, she heard a squeaky voice. She hurried over and picked up the receiver.

“I’ll be there in thirty minutes,” she said, knowing it was a forty-five minute drive. She hung up without waiting for a response and then ran.

TWENTY-FOUR

A DEPUTY STOOD
in the kitchen, peering at the broken glass like a mystic studying tea leaves, as if he thought he might divine some clue from the shape of the mess alone.

A man in jeans and a t-shirt, who might have been a cop or a doctor or a lumberjack for all Mike knew, swabbed the knife wound in Mike’s hip. “You’re very lucky, Mr. Pullman,” he said in an almost nonexistent accent that might have been British or Irish. “Something like this could have been much more serious.”

It’s just a booboo
, Mike expected him to say,
No big deal. Let’s get you a Big Bird band-aid.

Mike sat on the couch with his pants around his ankles, his underwear pulled just beneath his thatch of pubic hair but still covering his penis and testicles. Barely. He looked at the third man across the room, the quiet, bearded deputy with the inch-long scar just beneath his eye who had answered the phone when Libby called. “Listen,” he said, “isn’t there something else we can be doing? I mean, that asshole’s got my son. We’re not gonna find him sitting around my living room playing doctor.”

The man hovering over Mike’s lap huffed.

Rather than answer Mike’s question, the bearded deputy, Willis, asked one of his own. “This man you say took your son, did he have a dog with him?”

Mike shook his head, though not in answer to the question. “First of all, I don’t
say
he took my son, he
did
take him. They’re gone, and getting farther away every second. Did he have a dog? How the hell should I know? What kind of question is that? He had a knife and he had a foot the size of Texas. How’s that? Maybe if you get a sketch artist up here we can figure out what kind of sneakers he was wearing.”

The bearded man stared through the living room window and never turned to Mike. “We think he might have had a dog,” he said to the window, “and if you would answer my questions, we’d be that much closer to finding your boy.” He seemed focused on something outside.

Mike sighed and rubbed his face while the man on his knees before him continued his ministrations.

“Okay,” he said after a minute. “I think I might have heard some barking, but I never saw a dog. I’m not even a hundred percent sure about the barking. With all the stabbing and kicks to the head, I might have been out of it a little.” Mike saw the deputy’s face reflected in the window, looking transparent, ghostly. The lawman smiled.

“Of course, Mr. Pullman.”

“What’s the deal with the dog?” Mike asked. “How does that help us?”

Willis finally turned away from the window and came across the room. “Do you know a Bethany Winston?”

“Beth—” Mike started and then nodded. “Yeah, I guess. She lives just down that way.” He gestured with his head. “Why? Did something happen?”

Willis sat down on the edge of the coffee table, his holstered gun tapping against the tabletop and the leather of his utility belt creaking. “Bethany Winston was attacked earlier tonight,” he said simply and crossed his arms over his chest. “Guy stole her dog and cut her up a little.”

“Cut…my God,” Mike said. “Is she okay?”

“Will be,” Willis said. “She said the guy had a boy with him; little boy about her age.”

The second deputy came in from the kitchen, looking unsatisfied, thumbs tucked into his belt and chewing at his bottom lip.

Mike said, “Yes, that’s what I’m telling you. Skinny kid, maybe eleven years old. He attacked the guy in my bedroom. I don’t think he was exactly here voluntarily.”

“No,” said the deputy.

The doctor, if he was one, poked at Mike, who hissed. “Easy,” he said. He turned back to Willis. “So what? You’re saying there’s two kidnapped kids?”

The lip-chewing deputy, whose name Mike had already forgotten, opened his mouth to say something, but Willis held up a hand to him. “I’m not saying anything,” Willis said to Mike, “but that’s one possibility.”

Mike didn’t want to ask about the other possibilities—he could figure those out for himself—but he did say, “Isn’t there
something
else we could be doing right now? If he’s out there, if my son is with that lunatic and there’s another boy with him, shouldn’t we be doing something?”