Run (9 page)

She wasn’t shocked.

She fumbles around, trying to think of the right thing to say. I expect that there is no right thing. We’ve been kept away from her for our entire lives and she went along with it. I want to be kind. I want to think that all of this has been for our own good, but I’m not sure. The betrayal is deep, and apparently, shared.

“The last time I saw your mother  …  last Labor Day  …  she told me that she thought you’d have to move again soon. She thought he was closing in on her. I told her that she was paranoid, you know, more paranoid than cautious. I told her to stay put. I told her that his threats would never evolve into reality. I  …  ”

Aunt Ginger is shaking as she speaks. She’s falling apart. I don’t want to confront her right now, but really?
Really?
Did she see our mother last Labor Day? Did this aunt who we never knew existed up until twenty-four hours ago stay in touch with our mother, and nobody bothered to tell us?

“Are you really our mom’s sister?” says Hayden, whose mind is obviously going to the same place as mine.

She manages a smile and directs it at him. “Older sister. Yes, I am.”

“Do we have any other aunts and uncles?” he asks. “Do we have cousins?”

Aunt Ginger wipes her eyes again, leaving a trail of mascara on her sleeve. “No other aunts and uncles. But yes, I have a son and daughter,” she says. “I don’t see them  …  often.”

Again, I’m stunned. At this point, however, I wonder why I should be? My mother lied about her sister. She lied about my real father, for years. Why not lie about everyone else in the family?

Aunt Ginger offers us food and drink. Hayden takes her up on the offer, but I don’t.

“Aunt Ginger,” I say, “do you know where my  …  where he took Mom?”

She shakes her head no.

“Do you know where he lives?”

Again, no
.

“Are you going to help us find Mom?”

Aunt Ginger hesitates. “Let’s figure it out later.”

“There is no later,” I say in the most direct way that I can.

She bites down on her lower lip before speaking. “I mean, after you eat and rest.”

I don’t understand her peculiar reluctance.
Her sister has been abducted by a serial
killer. Why is she being so weird?

Hayden’s eyes have landed on a cheese sandwich and a stack of Pringles potato chips that Aunt Ginger has set on two denim-blue plates that she’s placed on an enormous table in the kitchen. On the wall adjacent to the table are some photographs. Lots of them. My heart skips a beat and I feel a surge of bewilderment. My school photo is among a bunch of images of complete strangers. There’s an old picture of Hayden, too. We were part of a family. We just didn’t know it.

Aunt Ginger turns to me and mouths some words.

“After he’s in bed, we’ll talk then.”

I sit down across from my brother while our aunt pours milk from a carton. I don’t even like milk, but I say nothing. I sit there thinking of how the forces have collided to make my life worse than it has ever been.

And how my mother has less than six days to stay alive if I don’t do something about it.

Chapter Seven

Cash: $24.50.

Food: Not an issue.

Shelter: A spare bedroom in our aunt’s house in Idaho.

Weapons: Gun, crapola scissors, ice pick from kitchen.

Plan: The same. Find Mom. Kill Dad.

HAYDEN IS ASLEEP IN A bedroom across the hall from mine. The house on Moon Gulch Road is so quiet I can actually hear the clock in the foyer ticking away the time. If it has a loud chime, I will creep downstairs after midnight and stop it. I am a light sleeper and I think that tonight will be one for the record books. My mind has been racing, looping, spinning, since we arrived in Idaho. I don’t know what I’m going to find out, but I know that whatever it is, it will change me. I peek in on my brother, but I don’t go inside his room. His cheeks are pink and he’s sleeping hard, which makes me feel just a little bit lighter. I hope that his dreams take him far away from what we’ve been through since everything happened.

I pad downstairs and find Aunt Ginger in the darkened living room, the curtains still drawn. The TV is still on mute. The light flickering over her face alters her appearance a little. She doesn’t look like my mother at all. Her eyes are darker, her hair is long and lifeless, without even the faintest trace of a shimmer. By the time I take a seat next to her, I had learned everything I could about her by studying all the photographs in the hallway, and yes, digging through every drawer that I could when she was getting our rooms ready. I know that she is single. She loves the scent of lavender. I know that she is estranged from her son and daughter. I don’t exactly know why, and when it gets right down to it, I really don’t care. What I do care about is the truth. What I care about is finding my mother.

“What happened to my mom?” I ask.

“What happened to her?” Aunt Ginger repeats my question, her expression confused. Or pretending to be confused. “Didn’t you tell me he took her?”

I’m not going to fall for that stall tactic.

“Not now.
Back then
,” I say. We both know what I’m getting at. But I let it slide.

Aunt Ginger gets up from the sofa, leaving me all alone, nearly swallowed up by its dark brown, velvet fabric. She keeps her face away from me, to the wall, but I can see it reflected on the glass of a framed picture. She is searching for the right words and I know that it has to be difficult.

It is for me too.

“When I was twenty, your mom was sixteen,” she begins. “She was coming home from feeding the neighbor’s cat. It was summer and the dahlias were in bloom. We had planned to go out shoppping after dinner. She needed a new outfit for a party at the end of the month.” Aunt Ginger hesitates, lost in a memory that must be bittersweet and horrific at the same time. I give her a minute. I have memories like that too; the kind that take me far away from the present.

“No one saw it happen,” she says, back from wherever her thoughts have taken her. “I mean, she just vanished. It was as if Courtney was just lifted up away from home by a helicopter or something. There was no trace of her. Nothing.”

She pauses, her face darkening as she goes back in time. She stops. I prod her. “What happened?”

Again, Aunt Ginger weighs how much she’ll say. I want it all, but she looks at me and sees a kid. She has no idea how much strength I have or what I would do for my family. What I’d do even for her.

“How much do you know?” she finally asks.

I slide to the edge of the sofa. “I know who my real father is, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Aunt Ginger spins around. Her long almost-sister-wife hair swings behind her like a pulled curtain. There is a look on her face that I can only describe as relief. Her eyes study mine for some deeper connection, some meaning. She nods at me.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

I want to say something off the cuff, something flippant, to defuse how I really feel. I don’t want her to know that I’ve imagined my DNA being made up of serial-killer genetic matter, a ladder of code that only leads to violence and murder. But I don’t.

“What happened to her?” I persist.

“Your mom had been abducted by a monster. That’s what happened.”

“Besides getting her pregnant, what did he do? I have to know what you know if I’m going to find her.”

She shakes her head. “Sweetheart. You’re not going to find her.”

Again, she clearly doesn’t know me. She doesn’t know what I’d do for someone in my family. She doesn’t have a family. She’s all alone. She’s not a fighter. I am.

“Because she’s already dead?” I ask, serving up the only concern I really have. If she’s dead, I can’t find her. Save her. Tell her how much I need her.

Tell her how pissed I am that she lied to me about everything.

Aunt Ginger returns to the brown velvet sofa. “No, no, not that. Because your mother wouldn’t want you to.”

“I’m not going to just let her die,” I say, now wondering how this woman, my mother’s own sister, could have any inkling of what my mother would want me to do. My mother expects a lot of me. She left me and Hayden alone with a bunch of clues. She wants me to try and find her.

I look over at the stolen purse, slumped by the front door where I dropped it when we first came inside. I consider retrieving it and pulling out the letters to show Aunt Ginger exactly what Mom told me to do. I think of the gun too. I hold back on those things.

“Look. I’m not a kid. Tell me everything. I have a right to know.”

Aunt Ginger’s hands tremble a little and I touch them. They feel cold. Bone cold. “Right. You do. It’s just that it’s so hard. So hard to talk about.”

I nod because I understand, but there’s a life at stake here.

“Start,” I say. “Tell me everything.”

Aunt Ginger inhaled half the oxygen in the room. “Your mom said she stopped to help someone who was trying to load some things into the back of a truck. The things weren’t heavy, she told me later. Just awkward. Your mom is like that. Always helping people. When she wasn’t looking, he came from behind her and put something over her mouth. Chloroform, she thinks. It could have been something else  …  ”

My face doesn’t give away how I’m feeling. “Go on,” I manage to say. “What happened after she was taken?”

At first Aunt Ginger looks in the direction of the flickering images of the silent TV, but I can tell that she’s not really watching it. I let her take another moment. Reliving whatever happened to Mom is painful for her. I get that.

She starts slowly. The words pummeling me:
captive
,
abused
,
tortured
. She tells me that my mother was subjected to the vilest of humiliations. She says that only the sickest, most depraved mind could conceive of the things done to her. Now that she started, it all comes tumbling out, and my aunt seems to be in another, horrifying world, until her eyes focus back on mine, realizing who I am. How old I am.

She stops. “You wanted to hear this, right?”

A long lapse hangs in the air.

“Of course. I said I did.”

She stares at me with her penetrating eyes. She wants me to understand this next part, to embrace it.

“A weaker person would have folded and given up,” she says. “But Courtney is the bravest girl that ever lived.”

I wonder how she could say that. We’ve been on the run my entire life. Exactly how is hiding brave?

“How did she get away?” I ask when she takes another pause from reliving the nightmare.

Aunt Ginger swallows and looks me in the eye. We are holding hands now. Hers no longer feel like ice.

“She said she was able to drug his coffee. She doesn’t even know what the pills she used were. She should have cut his throat while she had the chance. It was the biggest mistake of her life. She regretted it more than anyone could ever know. She said she was too weak to kill him, no matter what he’d done to her.”

“Why didn’t she just go to the police and have him arrested?”

“Look, I can see you don’t really understand. Not every criminal is caught. Not every victim is believed.”

“I know that, but I still don’t understand. It’s worth a try, right?”

“Your mother
did
file a report. And she had her body probed and scraped for evidence. She said it was nearly as humiliating as what he’d done to her. She even told me once that she felt the police and the doctors were almost an extension of her captor’s crimes. Their questions were like acid poured over her wounds. They didn’t think that she had been abused, raped, whatever. Our mother—your grandmother—didn’t believe her. Even I wondered about it.”

“But why didn’t anyone believe her?”

“Because she’d been captured once before.” A pause. “Or she said she was.”

Now I am confused. Completely.

“The year before she was raped,” she goes on, “your mother disappeared. She claimed she’d been kidnapped, but, well  …  ”

I can tell by the way she’s wringing her hands that this part is hard for her to disclose. The torture of my mother was, oddly, easier. “She’d run off to be with a boy. She had gone to the coast. She was afraid she would get in trouble so she made up a story.”

My aunt sees the look on my face and she pounces. “She
was
kidnapped. She
was
brutalized by that monster who raped her. She wasn’t lying about that.”

Her explanation placates me only a little. “So if she made a complaint to the police, why did he carry on stalking her? If it was all out in the open, he had to know that even if he wasn’t arrested that the police would be watching his every move.”

“Like I said, the police didn’t believe her. We don’t know why for sure. It might have been the past incident. Or there might have been more to it.”