Ruin Falls (8 page)

“What happened?” Liz asked.

Matthew remained in the spot he had occupied when they first entered the house. One look at the hewn carving of his face told Liz that her question wouldn’t be answered.

Paul had been here. She knew it. And from Matthew’s fierce expression, which looked capable of shattering the window he was staring at, and Mary’s meek, huddled demeanor, it seemed possible that he still was.

Liz started for the stairs, running as if she might be chased.

In the second-floor hallway there were two doors, one open, one shut. Sunlight shot through windows on either end of the hall. This close to the roof, the house felt like a sauna.

The open door revealed Matthew and Mary’s room. A queen-sized bed was adorned by a single flocked pillow, and the blades of a window fan cycled.

Liz placed her hand on the closed door, picturing Reid and Ally huddled together, and quashing the knowledge that her children would never be able to keep quiet for this long.

The second bedroom was still and bare. A lifeless drape at the window couldn’t entirely keep out the light, and starry bursts of dust danced in its stream, as if this room was infrequently aired. Liz shielded her eyes, squinting.

“Satisfied?” Matthew said from behind.

Liz suppressed a start at the sound of his voice, turning around unsteadily.

Mary stood silently in the shadow made by her husband’s body.

Liz peered back into the room. There was a twin bed, made up flat with a blue sheet. The dresser was devoid of anything besides a few books. A stand of shelves mocked her with its emptiness.

Downstairs an old-fashioned phone let out a squawk.

Liz elbowed in front of Mary, then Matthew, beating them both down the stairs to a small table in the sitting room. She snatched up the receiver, its cord hitting her neck as she answered.

“Hello? Hello? Paul?”

There was an audible pause on the line, a sound like rushing. Then someone spoke.

“This is Frank Mercy. I live down the road. I’m looking for Matthew.”

Liz’s in-laws stood before her in the parlor.

“That’ll be my neighbor,” Matthew said. “Wanting to talk to me about fencing.”

Liz wasn’t sure which posed more of a dead end: Matthew’s stony implacability or his wife’s timid refusal to talk. She was about to hand over the phone when something occurred to her, and she quietly pressed the button to end the call.

Matthew frowned. “You had no right to do—”

Liz’s voice trembled. “My children are missing. I have a right to do anything.”

Mary winced, but Matthew’s eyebrows knit, not an ounce of sympathy in the stormy expression.

“Paul called here today,” Liz said. “At least he said he did, when we were with the cops. Was he lying? Or did you receive a phone call from him?”

Maybe, just possibly, Paul had dialed his mother from a new phone. His old one was obsolete not because he wouldn’t have any use for a cell phone
—everybody
needed a cell phone—but because he wanted to hide from Liz. She looked down at the receiver in her hand, trying to make sense of the archaic technology, how you would access a call list.

“We don’t have any of that,” Mary said, all but whispering. “Caller ID. Missed calls.”

Liz pounced on the moment of communication. “Not missed. Paul spoke to you.”

Matthew took the phone out of Liz’s hand. His fingers were as hot as soldering irons, and Liz recoiled from their touch. A rivulet of sweat ran down each of her father-in-law’s temples.

“I didn’t hear from Paul. He didn’t come here for a visit or to mess up my front door,” Matthew added, eyes eagle-bright. How could Liz have imagined her father-in-law failing to notice any detail she herself was able to spot? “Now,” he concluded, “I’ll thank you to leave.”

Liz dropped her head, beaten. Racing down the stairs, she had seen herself besting the likes of Matthew Daniels, rendered somehow strong, smarter than she had been, as any female became when her children were threatened. But Liz was in no shape to wage a fight. She was a mother without a clue how to find her children.

A mother who had lost them in the first place.

Heated tears traced their course, and Liz felt disgust like a boil upon her.

Surprisingly, it was Mary who spoke.

“It’s too close to nightfall to let her drive out,” she said in a gentle tone. “Elizabeth will have to spend the night.”

“Fine.” Matthew spoke in a tone hard enough to split wood. “But if you sleep under my roof, if you eat under my roof, if you so much as
make water under my roof, then you are obliged to follow one rule. And that is that you do not mention the son who will never do any of those things here again for as long as I live!”

The floorboards reverberated beneath the thud of his boots as Matthew stalked off.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I
t was as automatic as a homing pigeon’s flight. Liz went upstairs to the room that must’ve been Paul’s and plugged her cell phone in to charge. No way was she going to be without the use of it right now. The lit-up screen drew Liz’s finger, and she hit the button to speed-dial Jill without even having to look.

When her best friend answered, Liz couldn’t speak. She sank down onto the floor, phone pressed to her ear. Perspiration pooled between her skin and the plastic backing.

It took Jill only a second to enter the silence. “What’s going on? Where are you?”

Still nothing from Liz. Her lips felt thick and numb, unworkable.

“It’s something bad?” Jill said, an interpreter for the unseen.

Always, since they had met as kindergarteners at Wedeskyull Consolidated, Liz and Jill had been able to communicate wordlessly. On that first day of school, it had been a shared fear of the bus, their entangled hands enabling them to climb the towering steps. After that, a flashed look, raised brow, or traded snort signaled anything from needed distraction when a teacher posed too challenging a question to a
Get me out of here
when last year’s discarded boyfriend came around again. But this went beyond words in a whole other way.

As soon as Liz said what she had to say to Jill, it was going to become real.

Her best friend’s voice was a soothing hum in the overheated room. “I’m not going to say something asinine like
It’s all right
. I’m here, if you can talk. Whenever you want to talk.”

“Oh, Jill.” Liz began to sob.

“Shhh, shhh,” Jill murmured.

“Oh no. Oh, Jill. Oh no!”

“Liz!” Jill was crying, too. “Liz, shit, you’re really scaring me. It’s okay. It’s okay. Where are you? Are you all right?”

Liz couldn’t reply.

“Dammit. I said the asinine thing. Liz!” Her voice hit a high note. “Elizabeth Burke Daniels, you tell me what’s wrong right now!”

“It’s Paul,” Liz sobbed. “Paul. He’s taken the kids.”

Silence pulsed over the connection in the wake of Liz’s statement.

“What the what?” Jill said at last. “I don’t even know what that means.”

Maybe it was hearing her friend talk in something approaching her usual tone. It jogged Liz back into a semblance of normalcy herself.

“Neither do I,” she muttered.

“That is not what I was—expecting. I don’t know what I was expecting. I’m sorry, but what the hell are you talking about?”

Liz relayed her dire discovery, each unfolding turn that led to Paul’s act, in as clear a stream of words as she could muster. The rug felt like burrs against her thighs, and she separated herself stickily from its weave. The act of telling had amounted to exertion. Liz was perspiring and out of breath, panting a bit as the story finally wound down.

Jill sounded blank. “But—how do you know what that means? How do you know Paul’s not—I don’t know, pissed at you, he’s seemed kind of pissy lately—and they just came back here?”

Something let loose inside Liz. There was the matter of the disconnected cell phone, but she ignored that for now. She wiped dampness off her face and arms and neck, words tumbling out. “I—well—maybe I don’t. Oh my God. Jill, can you—”

“You don’t have to say it.” There were fluttery sounds in the background,
Jill rising, looking around. “Andy!” she called out, causing a brief ping of recrimination in Liz.

Andy shouldn’t be disturbed at this hour, not in his current state, and not for what was surely going to turn out to be a wild goose chase.

But what if it wasn’t?

“It’s fine, Andy will be fine,” Jill shouted, reading her, somewhere away from the phone. “I’ll call you as soon as I get there,” she added, and ended the call.

For a few minutes, Liz switched between staring down at the phone’s blank face, willing it to light up, and forcing herself to walk back and forth across the room, saying things inside her head about watched pots. Finally she acknowledged two things. First, that it would take Jill at least twenty minutes to get to Liz’s house, even if she tore down the road that left town and snaked out to the valley, and second that Liz could smell the acrid stink of her own body, an accumulation of sweat and fear and at least one missed shower.

She had left all her clothes in her suitcase back in the hotel; the idea of going anywhere near the fourth floor again had been anathema to her. The ones she was wearing would have to do, slack and wrinkled as they were. They felt a little fresher once Liz had located the tiny bathroom and sluiced off her skin under an icy rush of water, turning no hot on at all.

Dressed again, hair wet upon her back, Liz stepped out into the hall. There was a harsh, rasping sound coming from downstairs, and she followed it. Her father-in-law’s form blocked sight, but the motions he was making were unmistakable. His big hand concealed a square of sandpaper, and the other held a brush that began to stroke on a fresh layer of paint.

Mary emerged from the kitchen, twisting the hem of her apron between her hands. “It’s too hot to eat,” she said, as if she were to blame for the weather. “But suppertime has come and gone, so I fixed us all a little something. Come in.”

The kitchen was at the back of the house, where the sun had long
since passed overhead, making the temperature marginally cooler. Matthew sat at the head of the table, and Liz took a seat on the opposite side, vinyl chair cushion sticking to her thighs. A bowl of chicken salad and another of cut-up fruit sat on the speckled surface. Mary poured cold tea, and Liz, who couldn’t have taken a bite of anything solid, downed a glass gratefully.

Only Matthew’s appetite appeared to be intact. He shoveled chunks of chicken onto his fork, using one finger to push.

“I put my purse in Paul’s old bedroom,” Liz said. “Is that where you’d like me to sleep?”

Matthew and Mary exchanged glances.

“Don’t see as there’s much choice,” Matthew said.

“We only have the one spare,” Mary apologized. “Paul was our only.”

Liz looked up.

“Is our only,” Mary corrected hurriedly.

Matthew’s eyebrows intersected in a frown. “We’re modest people, and it’s served us well. I tried to teach my son to live that way, too.” His own tone contained no note of apology. Rather, his implication seemed to be that Paul had strayed from the family tradition.

“I think we’ve done the same,” Liz retorted.

But she couldn’t keep up any sort of bold front. Thinking of the ways they’d tried to connect both children to nature and the earth, to help them understand where their sustenance came from and what went into its creation, made Liz long with a dizzying pang for Ally’s eager affinity. She even missed the constant squabbles required to stop Reid from forming a Jenga pile with rocks, or making him weed in the gardens as opposed to locating buried seeds with fingers that seemed able to see beneath dirt.

She fingered the slick oilcloth on the table. “Why has Paul done this? You must know something. It was like you were expecting me when I arrived.”

Matthew’s gaze fell hot upon her. “We figured you’d be coming because a cop paid a visit before you got here. It wasn’t any surprise to see you after that.”

The piece of chicken that Liz had been trying to chew turned to
paste in her mouth as understanding finally dawned. The babysitting cop’s friend on the Junction Bridge force. He had delivered on his promise.

Liz brought her napkin up and spat out the lump.

“The policeman asked some questions,” Mary said quietly. “Whether Paul had been here with the children, things like that.”

Liz stood and pushed back her chair, its legs grinding across the wooden floor.

“I see. That does explain things.” She paused to take a breath. “Thank you for dinner. I’ll be sure to leave first thing in the morning.”

Upstairs her phone began to ring.

Her in-laws looked up, their faces startled by the sound. It occurred to Liz how quiet and muted this place must be most of the time.

When Liz finally reached the phone, Jill delivered the news as any good doctor knew to: swiftly, definitively, leaving no room for false hope.

“They’re not here, Lizzie. It doesn’t look as if anyone has been inside since you packed up the place.”

In the background there came a faint mew of bewilderment, one of Andy’s noises. Jill’s voice grew distant as she sought to comfort her son.

“Andy, sweetheart, come here, no, not over there …”

Liz’s cell phone had been plugged into the sole electrical outlet in the room; it sat in the wall beneath a window. Liz heard a smart
thwack
as her forehead hit the glass. Outside, night had finally fallen and everything was dark, as wide and empty a blank as all that lay before her now.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

L
iz lay on top of a thin sheet, blanket puddled on the floor below, too hot to sleep although exhaustion pulled at her like weights. Whatever adrenaline had driven her here, prompting her crazed rush at Matthew in the yard and subsequent confrontation with him by the phone, was now drained. Time spent in this house had come to nothing, and the recession of hope left Liz limp and helpless.

The cattle lowed miserably from the fields or their stalls; they were uncomfortable, too. A faint breeze stirred the curtains at the windows, but the temperature was so hot that the current of air provided no relief. Every now and then the sky lit greenly, casting an eerie glow over the room: somewhere far off, heat lightning was spiking. Liz got up and shoved the splintering frame of the window another inch or two higher. She turned around beneath the sloping eaves.