Mountain Madness (5 page)

He drove toward Foothill, the traffic still flowing around him like river water around a slow-floating log; he thought of his son, and the part of him that was Mike faded away. Trevor was waiting for his
daddy
, and Daddy was almost there.

FOUR

ONCE, MAYBE A
year ago, she’d lost sight of him in the supermarket. He’d strayed down the cereal aisle to get a closer look at a box with a swooping Batman or Spiderman while she searched for an undented can of green beans. It took only three or four seconds for her to look up, realize he was missing, and whip around the corner to find him all but salivating over the combination of sugar and superheroes. But in those few ticks of the clock, her heart must have beat about a thousand times.

Now, standing motionless in the middle of the overflowing food court, smelling the juxtaposed odors of fried fish and chocolate chip cookies, hearing but not listening to the chattering shoppers and the carousel’s souped-up elevator music, Libby felt the old chest pump beating its way to an all-time record.

If her fingers hadn’t instinctively tightened around the soda, she surely would have dropped it onto the tile between her feet and ended up standing in a yellow puddle looking like she’d wet herself. But as it was, she managed to hold on long enough to move a few steps to her left and plop the cup onto the corner of the nearest table, where an elderly couple looked up only long enough to eye her suspiciously. 

While her heart continued shooting adrenaline through her body like bullets from a rattling machine gun, Libby wove her way through the tables and chairs toward the spinning carousel and its crowd of would-be riders.

She’d left her bags under her chair, and although she realized this somewhere deep in the back of her mind, she didn’t care. Until she had her arms cinched around her son’s narrow body, there would be room in her head for only one thought:
find him
.

Walking past the table where they had shared their early dinner, Libby looked for the group of girls Trevor had been charming before she’d gone to get her refill.

Jesus
,
if I lose him over sixteen ounces of Mountain Dew, I’ll never ever forgive myself
.

The girls clustered together near the back of the gathered onlookers, shuffling their feet and biting at their lips but looking otherwise undisturbed. One of them would have screamed if someone had jerked Trevor right out from under their noses, wouldn’t they? Kids these days weren’t
that
desensitized. She pushed through the crowd, ignoring half a dozen varying degrees of protestation, and grabbed the shoulders of the first of the girls she reached.

“Please.” The word came out like the hiss from a broken steam pipe. “Where did he go?”

The girl’s eyes bulged. “Wh…who?”

“Trevor.” Libby gave the girl a quick shake and heard a woman somewhere behind her gasp. “My son.” Shake. “Trevor.” Shake shake. “You were just talking to him.”

Libby looked left and then right, ignoring the non-responsive girl, staring past hairy legs and grungy sneakers to see if maybe her son had simply fallen or was kneeling on the ground and out of immediate sight. “Trevor!”

One of the girl’s friends, a blonde-haired pixie, stepped forward and plucked Libby’s hands off her friend’s shoulders. “He left, ma’am.”

It wasn’t only the
ma’am
that got through to Libby, it was the calm and rational authority in the girl’s voice. For a moment, Libby was looking at a negotiator or some sort of diplomat, a future world leader; then the girl said, “Just chill, okay,” and the moment passed. Libby ran her hands through her hair and gave the doe-eyed girl a quick apology before turning back to the pixie.

“Did you see where he went? Any of you?” She scanned the rest of the girls and the crowd around them. “Somebody must have seen.”

They shook their heads, all mute and sorry looking.

“There’s a candy shop up that way a ways,” the pixie said, tilting her head away from the carousel. “He coulda gone there.”

Libby’s gaze flicked in the direction the girl had indicated, and she shook her head. “But you were
talking
to him. He just got out of line and headed off without saying a word, and none of you looked to see where he was going?”

The pixie shook her head and said only, “I’m sorry.”

Libby wanted to scream. She’d had her back turned for a few seconds, maybe five, surely not long enough for Trevor to meander his way out of the crowd so casually that no one even noticed which direction he’d gone.

At least nobody grabbed him
—
somebody would have noticed that
. But she was hardly relieved. Kidnapped or simply wandering, Trevor was still gone, and she had an idea finding him this time would be harder than turning into the cereal aisle.

She hurried away from the girls and the rest of the unhelpful crowd, too worried about her son to let the scene she’d made or the pity-filled eyes tracking her progress embarrass her.

Libby rushed toward the candy store. Trevor wouldn’t have disobeyed her so deliberately, but she had no idea where else to look or what other alternatives to pursue. She’d come close enough to smell the licorice when another option, as sometimes happens, presented itself. The barrel-chested man standing stoically beside the cell phone kiosk cocked his head, and for the first time since setting down her soda, Libby felt her heart slowing down and her brain speeding up.

Thank God
. She turned away from the candy store and hurried instead for the cross-armed security guard.

FIVE

DAVE MOVED TOWARD
the small house. You might have called it a lumber if he hadn’t been so surefooted, so eerily quiet. He stepped over the discarded tennis ball and across a long length of garden hose that had all but disappeared beneath the tall grass like a scar beneath an untrimmed beard. He’d never come this close; on his previous visits, he’d kept to the woods, stayed hidden even during nighttime hours, when it would have been easy enough to spy on the boy and his mother through their drooping window curtains. The place was even shabbier than he’d realized. Scaly paint hung from the siding like loose, dead skin, and a ring of grass and dirt stains around the perimeter spoke of careless weed-whacking and untreated rain and snow damage. Dave climbed a pair of craggy steps to the back door. The weeds growing from the cracked concrete exemplified the home’s pitiful landscaping.

His own home wasn’t exactly a paradise, wasn’t really a home at all (over time he’d gone from thinking of it as a prison to considering it a sort of base of operations), but that was different. This house was meant for a family. Dave had no family. Not anymore. Not yet.

He pulled on the screen door first, spied a simple disengaged hook and eye closure and reached for the knob of the inner door, which was likewise unsecured.

 He slipped inside. The knife in his right cargo pocket thunked against the doorframe, but the sound was faint, nearly inaudible even to Dave himself. His footsteps weren’t much louder. A two-person dinette set occupied a shadowy alcove on his left, the table covered in papers and bills, the front leg of one of the chairs splintered so badly it couldn’t possibly have supported an adult. From his place just inside the back door, he saw a sofa and one arm of a recliner in the adjoining living room, but he didn’t give any of those things much more than a casual glance. The dark-haired woman stood at the kitchen sink, not ten feet away, and he’d made it halfway to her before the muscles in her back so much as tensed.

She’d been washing her hands. The splashing faucet sprayed the dish-cluttered sink and most of the countertop around it. A worn washer ring. Dave could have fixed it in a couple of minutes.

The boy must have been somewhere deeper in the house, his bedroom or maybe a bathroom. Dave stopped in the center of the kitchen and watched the woman shut off the water and dry her hands on an incongruously fancy dishtowel. He hadn’t closed the door behind him—the wind blew it all the way open now, and it knocked against the wall with a single sharp
tap
.

Whether the woman was responding solely to that sound or had also somehow sensed his presence, Dave wasn’t sure, but he watched her spin toward him with ravenous anticipation. He’d never come so close to her, never seen her face from less than a hundred feet away. He’d sometimes wondered if she would be clear skinned and beautiful, or heavily wrinkled and haggish. Blue eyes or green? Brown? He almost licked his lips.

Her nose was a finely shaped wedge, pert with a pair of inconspicuous nostrils, like something out of a fairy tale, elfish. There had been fairy tales when he was very young. They were one of the things he remembered. One of the things he’d been allowed to remember.

If she had kept her mouth shut, Dave would have gone to her for a closer look at the perfect little nose, might even have given it a friendly kiss.

Instead, she screamed.

Her mouth might have been the entrance to a strange miniature cave, her teeth pale, blunt stalactites and stalagmites, her scream the shrill squeal of a million flitting bats. Startled, Dave almost took a step back, but a more basic instinct took quick control, and he stepped forward instead and punched her in the eye.

He’d meant only to shock her into silence, maybe knock her off balance a little so he could sweep in and steady her, soothe her, but his fist seemed to have the effect of something fired from a cannon, and she crumpled to the floor. Her head bounced twice on the cracked linoleum and then lolled. Dave heard footsteps and heavy breathing behind him and turned far enough around to see the boy, standing frozen in the doorway leading into the living room.

“Hello, Georgie.” Dave smiled at the boy and knelt on the floor beside the temporarily silent woman. “Don’t you worry about me and Mommy—we’re just having a little talk.”

The boy opened his mouth in an almost exact imitation of his mother, but the sound that came from his little cave was very different: a single short squeak like the hinge on a rusty gate. On the floor, the woman had come to and gotten herself up on her elbows.

“Run.” She didn’t scream it, just said it flatly, the way she might have told him to finish his broccoli.

“Hey now,” Dave said, “let’s not—”

The boy made a single clumsy move to the right, but Dave flew across the room in two giant steps and caught the kid by his slender bicep before the boy could do much more than shift his footing.

“Zach!” The woman scrambled on the floor, trying to get to her feet, but Dave had definitely done more damage than he’d intended—she got halfway up twice and fell back onto her rear end both times.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Dave said to the boy, talking quickly, wanting to get the words out before the woman could stand, wanting him to understand. “I’m here to help you. I promise I’ll save you. I swear.”

The look the boy gave him might easily have been confused for fear, but Dave recognized it for what it must really have been: awe.

He led the kid into the kitchen, to the spot on the floor where his mother still lay squirming like a flipped turtle. “We’re all going to be all right now.”

On the floor, the woman said something Dave couldn’t quite hear.

“What’s that?”

“My
husband
.” She spit the word at him. “Husband…in the other room. We’ve got a gun. He’ll—”

Dave smiled and shook his head. “Oh, Mommy. We all three of us know that’s an outright lie.” He waggled his finger at her, still smiling. “If there was a husband,” he continued, “you wouldn’t need me here at all.”

The woman stared at him blankly for several long seconds and then turned to her son and repeated, “Run,” this time with a little more conviction.

Dave tightened his grip on the kid before he could think about obeying and frowned down at the woman. “I don’t think you understand what’s happening here,” he said.

From the way she looked back up at him, Dave wondered if maybe she really
didn’t.

“It’s my birthday,” he said, shifting his gaze back and forth from mother to son, wanting to hug the both of them to his chest and weep into their hair. “Time to take my place. I’m going to make you whole.”

The woman shook her head. The boy went suddenly slack, and Dave had to look to make sure he hadn’t fainted. Except for his single squeak, the boy hadn’t made a sound. He wasn’t a mute, Dave knew. He’d heard him mumbling to himself in the back yard many times, eavesdropped as he called in to an imaginary airfield from the corner of his tree house while he pretended to pilot his way to earth, listened to him back-talking invisible foes between jump kicks and punches. He looked away from the kid. He’d talk when he was ready.

“I know you wish I could have got here sooner,” he said to the woman. “I’m sorry I couldn’t. I had things to do first. I needed to be ready.”

He let go of the boy and reached down to take the woman’s trembling hand. The flesh around her eye had already darkened and puffed. She squinted at him.

“It’s okay,” he said.

“Who—” She coughed, shook her head a little, and tried again. “Who the hell are you?” His fingers brushed against her knuckles, and she pulled her hand away as quickly as if she’d stuck it into a blazing fire.

Dave chuckled a little at this and leaned forward. He caught her fingers in his own and gave them a little squeeze. “You know who I am.”

She stared and didn’t try to pull her hand away again.

“I’m Daddy.”

Something behind him moved.

“Mom?” A soft voice, almost girly.

Dave looked over his shoulder, saw the boy backing toward the cabinets, and started to say something to him, but a sudden, stinging pain on the left side of Dave’s face cut him off. His hand darted to his cheek and came away covered in shiny red blood. The woman’s hand streaked up for another blow, but Dave caught it deftly in midair despite blurry vision and pain so agonizing he wanted to scream. She’d scratched his eyeball, but she hadn’t blinded him. Not quite. Blood slid over his lips and onto his chin. It sprayed across her face when he said, “Why would you do that?”