Ruin Falls (6 page)

The cop nodded.

“At first I thought I saw the children underneath the blankets.” She indicated the couch they were sitting on, and although this one wasn’t dismantled, she saw a sofa bed, its thin mattress and ill-fitting tangle of sheets. “But when I pulled them back—the blankets—nobody was there.”

The cop nodded again.

“So then I checked the bathroom because the kids love water games—” Splinters seemed to sit on her tongue and she worked to speak around them.

The cop sat silently, legs spread, palms resting on his thighs.

“But they weren’t in the bathroom either.”

The cop tracked her gaze across the new suite.

“So I opened up the door, the one to the room, and …” Liz stopped.

The cop gestured her wordlessly on.

“… I looked out by that low wall in the hall. I was afraid that they had fallen.”

But she was remembering now, recalling exactly what she had done, and she suddenly couldn’t speak. Words shriveled in her throat. She looked down into her glass, which was empty.

The door to the suite they were occupying swung open, and Bissell stood there. His gaze slid past Liz’s; he wouldn’t look at her.

Liz spoke to the other cop; she spoke to no one at all. Her voice sounded stunned and airless in her ears. “I flipped the lock at the top of the door.”

The cop frowned.

Bissell summoned him forward, still not looking in Liz’s direction.

Liz understood the reason for his change in demeanor, how her status had altered abruptly from victim to something much more murky.

When she had opened the door to look out in the hall for the kids, the bar lock at the top had been secured.

Which meant that whoever had taken the children had to have reentered the room.

Maybe she’d begun to figure it out even earlier, when she felt pinpricks of anger pierce her ability to cleave to her husband. Or upon reflecting during the drive out on the revised roles in their marriage. And if she was right about this, then she was right about what must have happened next, the reason Bissell had gone so chilly and distant.

Liz stood and faced the detective, forcing him to meet her stare.

“Paul is gone, too,” she said.

THE BOY

K
urt Pierson sat in his car with his fists wrapped around the steering wheel as if he were trying to compress the plastic into a narrower ring. Blue, snaky veins stood out on the tops of his hands. It was his first day alone with his son, and the boy was about to wreck it. Kurt could sense a point not too far off, like the thin gray line of a horizon. He could see himself reaching it, and after that no attempt to salvage this day would work.

“I said be quiet,” Kurt said from the front of the car.

“Why?” the boy asked. “How come?”

Kurt clenched the wheel. He didn’t understand how an instruction to be quiet could generate not silence, but instead an instantaneous response. He wouldn’t have believed that he could have a stupid child—Kurt himself was the son of two doctors—but after less than an hour spent taking care of the boy, he was beginning to wonder.

He had been a lot smarter at eleven than Tom.

Kurt had always hated the boy’s name—the boy’s mother had chosen it—and he avoided addressing his son directly as much as possible. But if the boy was to be in Kurt’s care now, then Kurt would need to start using a proper designation.

“Why do we have to go on a drive?” the boy said.

Tom, Kurt bade himself.

“Where are we going? Why isn’t Mom bringing me to school? Where’s Mom?”

The questions swarmed around Kurt’s head like insects. The boy had an entitled tone, almost as if he were jeering, which made Kurt want to show him how lucky he was. How little the boy or any child was in fact entitled to, and how much they had by sheer accident of birth.

Kurt had made do with far less.

He let go of the wheel, but the sight of his hands rolling into fists gave him pause. He didn’t want to do this now, and he took a quick, furtive look around. No one was there, observing a man alone with a boy in a car. That part was working out at least. Not that a father being out with his son in the morning should’ve attracted any attention, but Kurt believed in keeping a low profile. Until the time came to have a high one.

He glanced at the clock on the dashboard. Fifty-five minutes before they were scheduled to meet in person for the first time. Presuming he could get the boy to go.

“Guess what?” he said, forcing an upbeat note.

A huff of breath. “What?”

Still, it was a much more appropriate mode for a response. Father poses a question, son inquires in return. Kurt felt his mood brightening along with his tone. If he could just get rid of the skeptical note in the boy’s voice, he might have the son he’d always hoped for. A smart one, giving pleasure to his parents as soon as his intellect started to become apparent in childhood. The truth was, Kurt’s parents hadn’t exactly seemed to take joy in Kurt’s accomplishments, but that was because both were psychiatrists, trained to be judicious with their emotions, to observe with distance. It hadn’t bothered Kurt; he knew that they felt all the same things regular parents did. They just exhibited what they felt
—exhibited
, a psychiatric term—in different ways.

“Well, Tom,” Kurt said, the name stiff as a piece of glass on his tongue, “we get to go on a trip today.”

Now, when he didn’t want it, there was silence from the back of the car.

“Did you hear me?”

“A trip,” Tom repeated, as if the term had gone out of fashion.

“That’s right. Isn’t that great?”

Silence again. Kurt unclasped one hand from the steering wheel and turned around, laying his arm along the back of the seat.

Tom straightened from his slouch. His seat belt cinched his neck.

“It’s something,” he said. “What about Mom?”

It occurred to Kurt to lie. It would’ve been easier that way. Just say,
Mom will meet us there
, and no more of the mosquitoey drone from the backseat that made Kurt want to bang the boy’s head into the windshield.

But Kurt was smarter than that. He’d gotten into a top liberal arts college, and even if his time there hadn’t ended so well, the admission had been a point of pride for Kurt’s parents. He could remember how they told their fellow physicians, unsmiling, but noting the name of the school and its proclivity for producing people of importance: lawyers, politicians, doctors like themselves. Kurt hadn’t wound up in any of those professions, waylaid by the abrupt end to his school career, but that only meant that his intelligence had never gotten channeled, was still unspent. He could apply it to the challenge of child-rearing, which was turning out to be quite a challenge indeed.

But perhaps he had an aptitude for it, for Kurt intuited, as surely as if he’d been given predictive charts, that if he lied to the boy now, it would only provoke a crisis on the other end.

He kept his gaze fixed on the backseat. “Mom will be staying here.”

Tom’s face popped like a balloon.

Kurt couldn’t deny the small lick of pleasure that gave him. “That’s right,” he said, as remote and detached as his own parents had been. Maybe they too had felt charges of emotion inside. Maybe they had just kept them hidden.

Kurt’s mother had been addicted to true crime novels throughout his childhood. They were the one thing he could recall provoking any sort of light or heat from her. He could still see his mother, sitting in her chair by the living room window, lips slightly parted and breath coming fast as she turned each page. After his mother had gone up to bed, Kurt would look at these books, reading with a blend of fascination
and disgust. There was a man called the Shoemaker who had gone on killing sprees, taking along his own son to help massacre the women.

Kurt refocused on the boy in back. His eyes were very wide, though dry.

“Your mother has been in charge for a long time,” Kurt said, still in that tone of cool remove, whose effectiveness he now understood. The boy was docile, no longer making demands, nor even asking any questions. Tom. The name was growing on Kurt.

He reached out and chucked his son under the chin, choosing to ignore it when Tom flinched. “Now it’s my turn.”

CHAPTER NINE

H
e had made his escape after asking Bissell to wait while he used the bathroom, the cop who had babysat Liz all day explained, walking the two of them down to the lobby. Liz was having trouble catching her breath. She felt as if she had been plunged into a cold, depthless sea. She kept stopping, putting a hand on her chest, or the inside of the elevator, even just the wall to steady herself. Then she would bend over, trying to see if that brought air down into her lungs.

“Ma’am?”

She was a ma’am now.

“Do you need me to call someone?”

Who was there to call? Her husband? High, hysterical laughter frothed, which Liz squelched. If she allowed herself to feel all that she was feeling now, she would be no use to anyone, certainly not her missing children.

How could Paul have done this to her? Taken the children she had loved, and cared for, and nurtured every day, starting even before they were born. Not to mention the fact that the terror had nearly killed her. Was still killing her, although now she could at least tell herself that as horrible as things were, they didn’t amount to the one case she had been trying to run from all day, ever since the moment she had woken to find Reid and Ally gone.

Paul had tried to prevent her from envisioning such a terrifyingly lethal scenario. But rather than easing any small part of her fury, this recollection only heightened it. The fact that he had offered assurance as if it were a hypothetical, when all along he knew he was speaking the truth, struck her as hideously cruel.

Bissell was waiting downstairs. Locating Paul shouldn’t take long, he said to the other cop. There was an APB out for their car. His voice seemed to come from many yards away; Liz could barely make out what he said. But she focused on the part about finding Paul. Because once they did that, Liz wasn’t sure if she’d fall upon her husband in fury or relief.

Another of the local police force, a policewoman with a take-charge frown, entered through the sliding doors. She let in a spongy rush of heat, and also something else. The realization that this wasn’t going to be so easy.

Rage crested inside Liz again.

“That green Altima you wanted a BOLO on,” the female cop announced.

Bissell emerged from his corner to gesture the policewoman on.

“It’s still in the lot.”

Liz stood with the babysitting cop in the conference room where she and Paul had first been questioned. Water bottles, coffee carafe, chairs, all still waiting to be used by phantom attendees. Also missing was Bissell, who didn’t seem to be involved with their case anymore.

There was no case.

Liz could hardly believe it. “My husband kidnapping my children isn’t a case?” she demanded. “Isn’t a
crime
?”

The babysitting cop pulled a chair into place and took a seat, indicating that Liz should do the same. “This isn’t a kidnapping,” he told her. “Some states might handle it differently, but in New York we don’t get involved in domestic disputes.”

Liz heard the hiss of the words as she took in their meaning. There was no one to help.

“There’s nothing more we can do.” The cop had the grace to look away. “It’s not even a custody situation, in which case there’s a protocol
in place. You and your husband are still married, not even separated.”

A taut, tense silence drew out.

The cop turned back toward her. “Was there anything?”

Liz frowned.

“Anything to make you think …” He paused. “Even something small that may’ve passed unnoticed at the time. But now, in hindsight, might occur to you.” He looked more closely at her. “Something that could’ve made your husband want to take away your children.”

The words hit her like single, small blows.

The cop seemed to subside. “Listen, I contacted a buddy of mine on the Junction Bridge force.”

She recognized it as the name of the town they’d been headed to.

“As a favor to me, he’s gonna take a drive up. Look around. Maybe have a talk with Mr. and Mrs. Daniels.”

Her in-laws. It took Liz a beat to realize what was called for.

“Thank you,” she said. “I appreciate that.”

The cop withdrew a card from his wallet. “I’ll call you if anything comes up. And you feel free to check in, too.”

“Thank you,” Liz said again. “I will.”

She rose. Her legs felt rigid, and she had to flex her fingers. Too many days not spent crouching over the soil had a way of making her stiff. She’d always preferred squatting to sitting.

Which was lucky because she had the feeling that she wouldn’t be sitting still anytime soon. Liz waited until the cop left before plunging into the steamy cauldron outside, sky an electric blue sheet overhead. She got into their car and drove off.

CHAPTER TEN

I
magining the level of cold, pure calculation that had driven Paul all morning—complacent in the knowledge of their children’s safety while terror beat circles around Liz—made her insides flare with fury.

Who was this man she’d married? Liz couldn’t comprehend him, a person who’d been like a part of her, who had in fact become a physical part of her. It was like looking into a mirror and seeing a stranger stare back. Or a monster.

The food the cop had coaxed her to eat a thousand hours ago threatened to come back up. She lowered the car window and spat out bitter-tasting fluid. The afternoon air wrapped itself around her face like a terrycloth turban. She couldn’t hear anything for the buzzing hive in her head, and she wrestled the car over to the side of the road. An accident now would slow her down. And if something happened to her, Reid and Ally would be left forever in Paul’s care.

His care.

What had he whispered in her ear?

The kids are going to be fine
.

Liz’s nails dug into the steering wheel with such force that they made dimples in the plastic. She forced herself to unhook her fingers, and they ached in the relaxing.