The Quiet Game (40 page)

“By the back bathroom.”

There’s no exterior door anywhere near that bathroom. And going through the front door would be suicide. I wouldn’t even make it to the bedrooms before being overcome by smoke. I hug Annie and pass her to Mom, then kiss them both.

“When the firemen get here, tell them to look for Ervin.”

My mother blanches. “Penn, you can’t go in there.”

“I’m not leaving Ruby in there to die.”

Livy grabs my arm from behind. “Penn, it’s too late. Wait for the fire truck.”

I yank my arm free and sprint toward the garage before either of them can say more. In the garage I grab a shovel, then race around to the back of the house. As I near it, I begin smashing windows, trying to give the trapped
smoke as many outlets as possible. I may be feeding oxygen to the blaze, but if I don’t get some smoke out of there, I’ll never reach Ruby alive.

The back bathroom has no window, but the adjacent bedroom does. A high, horizontal one about five feet wide and eighteen inches tall. I smash the glass with the shovel and stand back as thick gray smoke explodes through the opening. After thirty seconds, the plume thins a little, and I put my hand through the window. The heat is intense, but when I stand on tiptoe and put my face to the opening, I see no flames.

Taking off my shirt, I soak it in water at the outdoor faucet, then tie it around my face. I am scraping the window sill clean of glass shards when the scream comes. The sound is an alloy of animal terror and human agony, a child’s wail from the throat of an eighty-year-old woman. An eighty-year-old woman who showed me more love and kindness than anyone but my mother. I feel like someone stuck my fingers into a 220-volt socket.

“Ruby! Ruby, it’s Penn! I’m coming to get you!”

Hooking both hands over the sill, I swing my right leg up into the window and pull myself into the frame. The smoke that looked thin from outside instantly scorches my eyes, throat, and lungs. Breathing is pointless until I get my face down to the floor. I roll off the window frame and drop to the carpet.

There’s air here, but the smoke is still too thick to see through. Before I lose my nerve, I shut my eyes and crawl around the bed toward the door that leads to the hallway. If I hadn’t lived in this house for fourteen years—and stayed here for the past few nights—I wouldn’t have a chance of finding Ruby. That’s why Officer Ervin didn’t get out. He’s probably lying unconscious in the hall, if he even made it past the den furniture.

At the doorway I pause and shout again.

“Ruby!
Rubeee!
”

All I hear is a living roar, the sound of fire devouring wood and carpet, curtains and glass, photos and china, silver and books—
Books.
My father’s library is burning. If Ruby was not somewhere in this house, I would probably risk my life to save those books.

The bathroom,
I remember.
Ruby fell by the bathroom.

Thankfully, the heat is more intense to my right, toward the central hall. I put my nose to the carpet, take a breath, and crawl to my left, toward the bathroom. It’s two rooms, really, a narrow dressing room and linen closet with the commode and bathtub in a smaller cubicle beyond. I go through the door on my belly, groping forward like a soldier clearing a minefield.

The dressing room is empty. As I crawl toward the commode, my nostrils start to whistle with each breath. Panic ambushes me, like a wild thing tearing around in my chest.
Maybe Ruby isn’t here at all. Maybe Ervin got her out.
Maybe the scream I heard was the sound she made as he dragged her out.
I can’t search the whole house. That’s how firemen get killed, trying to save people who aren’t there. I grope around the commode and inside the bathtub, then scramble back to the bathroom door.

The roar is closer.

“Ruby! It’s Penn! Are you here?”

At first there is only the roar. Then a whimper floats out of the noise like a leaf from a bonfire. It came from the central hall. My lungs feel near to bursting, but I alligator along the carpet toward the corner, my eyes shut tight. The heat is nearly unendurable. Forcing my stinging eyes open, I look down the hall.

Dancing tongues of red and orange caper out of the black smoke like laughing demons. Primal terror seizes my muscles, paralyzing me long enough to fully comprehend the danger. Then my reptile brain shrieks:
Death! Run!

But I don’t run. I can’t. When I was six years old, a German shepherd got out of a neighbor’s backyard and trapped me in a corner of our carport. That dog weighed ninety pounds, and when it bared its teeth and lunged at my face, all I could do was throw up my arms. When its teeth ripped into my flesh, I was too panic-stricken even to yell for help. After a seeming eternity of gnashing teeth and blood, I heard a sound like a hatchet hitting a watermelon, and saw a black woman as tall as our house swinging a shovel like a broadsword, bludgeoning that monstrous animal within an inch of its life. Ruby Flowers was terrified of dogs, but when she saw “her baby” in danger, she pressed down her fear and charged out of our house like the wrath of God.

Fixing that image in my mind, I shut my eyes and crawl toward the flames. The frantic reptile voice whispers that the orange demons are flanking me, racing across the roof to close off my escape. But I hold Ruby’s face in my mind, keep inching forward.

My hand touches flesh.

Bone.

An ankle.

The smell of cooked meat fills my nose and lungs, and I vomit up the wine I drank with Livy. Retching in the darkness, I take hold of the ankle and pull with all my strength. Something gives, and Ruby screams. At least she’s alive. A broken hip can kill an old woman, but not as quickly as fire.

Switching ankles, I pull with both hands, dragging her far enough to get clear of the flames. She’s moaning now, the sound like that of a wounded animal. I press my nose to the floor, take another breath of smoke, then get to my knees and heave her over my shoulder. As I struggle to my feet, dizziness
pitches me against the wall, but somehow I right myself and stagger back toward the bedrooms.

The smoke is dense here too, but at the center of it is a dim, cool flicker of blue. I lean toward that blueness, trying to keep Ruby on my shoulder as I go forward.
Move your feet,
I yell silently.
Move . . .
It’s as though my nerve fibers are shorting out one by one, attenuating the signals firing from my brain. Again the stench of scorched meat gags me, but I’m almost to the light. With a last heave I lift Ruby onto the windowsill and hold her there.

I don’t want to drop her, but I can barely stand, much less lower her the six feet to the ground.

Suddenly two bright yellow gloves appear and pull her from my grasp. Male voices are shouting through the window, but I can’t make out the words. The world outside the window seems part of some other universe. More yellow hands reach out of the brightness, reaching for me, but they are too far away.

I am falling.

The sun is in my eyes, and the skin of my face is burning.

A teenager wearing a black fireman’s hat is holding something over my mouth and nose, and something like cool ambrosia is laving the burning walls of my lungs. I try to suck in more of it, but the effort triggers a coughing fit, great wracking spasms like blades tearing at my ribs and trachea as smoke pours from my nose and throat.

“Penn, I’m here,” says a woman’s voice.

“Mom?”

“Livy.”

I see her face beside the fireman’s now, her hair still damp from the Cold Hole. She takes my hand and squeezes gently.

“Ruby?” I ask.

“She’s right over there. Look to your left.”

As I turn, I see two paramedics rolling a gurney across the lawn. A third is holding an IV bag at shoulder level as it drains fluid into Ruby’s arm.

“I want to see her,” I croak, rolling over and getting to my knees.

“Easy, sir,” says the fireman. “You’ve been through a little hell in the past few minutes.”

He’s not really a teenager. He’s probably in his mid-twenties, with a thin blond mustache and a hank of straight hair spilling from under his helmet.

“The cop?” I ask, recalling Officer Ervin’s droopy beagle eyes. “The cop who went in after her?”

“We got him out. Take it easy.”

“I’m okay . . . really.”

Livy slides under my right arm as I get to my feet, supporting me with surprising strength. I’ve never felt so jittery in my life. All my muscles are quivering and jerking as though exhausted by an overexpenditure of adrenaline, and my heart is laboring noticeably in my chest.

“The library,” I remember. “My dad’s books.”

Livy shakes her head. “It’s too late. The whole house is going up. It’s a miracle you got out alive.”

“That’s a fact,” says the fireman. “We pulled you out just as the flames came through the bedroom door.”

“Thank you. I know I could have died in there.”

He smiles and gives me a salute. “You done pretty good yourself, buddy.”

With Livy’s help I make my way around to the front yard.

It looks as though every neighbor for a square mile has come to watch the fire. The crowd fills the surrounding yards and much of the street. Two fire trucks have their hoses trained on the house, and a third on the old oak with the creeper vine.

My mother runs up to me, her face ashen. “Penn! I can’t find Annie!”

I jerk erect and shake my head clear. “Where did you see her last?”

“After you went in. It was taking so long—I was looking for you. I just put her down for a second!”

“How long ago?”

“Three or four minutes!”

The area is so choked with people that Annie could be ten feet away and we’d still miss her. The only thing in our favor is that we know most of the people in the crowd. Within five minutes, everyone on the street is looking for her.

As I run shirtless through the throng, fighting down panic, all I can think is that this fire was no accident. The “boom” my mother heard had to be some kind of fire bomb. This whole disaster was staged to draw the attention of the cop watching the house. And it did. Officer Ervin bravely charged into the inferno to save Ruby’s life, and in the process left my mother and daughter unprotected. My similar effort completed the kidnapper’s work, by breaking my mother’s concentration.

After five minutes of searching in vain, I realize I have to call the police. I prosecuted several kidnaping cases in Houston, and I learned one thing from the FBI agents who worked them. The first hour is the best chance of finding the victim, and every lost minute can mean disaster.

As I run across the street to use our neighbor’s phone, a ripple of noise like the roar at a football stadium rolls through the crowd. I turn back to our house, expecting to see the roof collapsing, the spectacular climax of residential fires.
But it’s not the roof. The crowd parts like the Red Sea, and my mother comes running through the open space.

She’s carrying Annie in her arms.

Relief surges through me with such force that I nearly faint for the second time. But I run forward and hug them both as tightly as I dare. Annie’s face is white with terror, and her chin is quivering.

“Someone dropped her off at Edna Hensley’s,” Mom gasps. “Edna answered her door and saw Annie standing there crying.”

A heavyset, blue-haired woman I faintly recognize has appeared behind my mother, wheezing from her exertions. Edna Hensley.

“Where do you live?” I ask her.

“About a half mile away. You’ve been there before, Penn. When you were a little boy.”

“Who dropped her off?”

Edna shakes her head. “I didn’t see anyone. Not a car, not anything.” Her gaze darkens. She reaches into her pocket, pulls out a folded sheet of construction paper, and hands it to me.

I unfold the paper with shaking hands. Printed on it in magic marker are the words:
THIS IS HOW EASY IT IS
.
LAY OFF
,
ASSHOLE
.

Livy braces me from the side, making sure I keep my feet.

I am back in Houston, watching Arthur Lee Hanratty’s brother carry Annie out of the house, a tiny bundle about to disappear forever. It’s as though I missed him that night, and he has returned to try again. But he can’t. He’s been dead for four years. His youngest brother is alive, but this isn’t his work. Whoever kidnapped Annie today could easily have killed her, and the last surviving Hanratty would have done so, taking his revenge for his two brothers. This is something else entirely. This is a warning. This is the Del Payton case.

“Mom, take this piece of paper to the Lewises’ house and put it in a Ziploc bag. I’ll take care of Annie.”

She is reluctant to go, but she does. I thank Edna Hensley, then carry Annie through the crowd to Livy’s borrowed Fiat and sit in the passenger seat, hugging her against me, rocking slowly, murmuring reassurances in her ear. She is still shivering, and her skin is frighteningly cold. I need to find out everything she can remember about her kidnapper before she starts blocking out the trauma, but I don’t want to upset her any more than she already is.