Dismember (30 page)

The wheelbarrow jerked, bounced over molehills or stones or who knew what. Moving so slowly, Dave/Hank saw the skeletons long before he reached the station wagon. Their sun-bleached skulls all pointed in different directions. The one in the passenger’s seat was aimed directly his way, grinning, eyes pulling on him like black holes. He hadn’t known whether the bodies would still be here or not, had thought maybe the animals would have crawled in through the broken windows and snatched away the bones one at a time. But either the bodies had been too hard to get to, or the animals simply hadn’t been interested, because from what Dave/Hank could see, the skeletons remained mostly intact. Even the dog’s bones were there. He spat out the mangled sliver of wood.

Bits of memory came to him. He remembered a bloated tongue, though he couldn’t remember to which body it had belonged. He remembered a gaping chest wound and thought it might have been Georgie’s. So long ago. He supposed he’d repressed the rest of it.

The wheelbarrow tilted to one side, and he applied enough pressure to keep it upright. The body shifted and thumped against the side of the basket. He moved again, pulled the wheelbarrow around the back of the car to the unoccupied side of the back seat. He wouldn’t let himself think about the bones in the car. The bodies inside weren’t his family, not anymore. His family had returned from the dead, and he was their savior.

On the other side of the car, he dropped the handles and took a second to stretch his shoulders. His left bicep burned, but a few quick flexes brought the pain down to a tolerable level. He reached for the back door and tried the handle. It didn’t budge. He yanked on it harder but with no more success. It had rusted shut.

Oh well. The window was gone. Tiny triangles of broken glass poked up from between the cracked rubber weather strips like monstrous teeth from between dead lips. He looked back at the body, telling himself this would be the last time he would ever have to lift it. He allowed himself a thirty-second breather before reaching into the wheelbarrow.

The bedding stunk. He supposed the stench wasn’t any worse now than it had ever been, but somehow, as he lifted the body to the empty window frame, it seemed to have taken on a whole new odor. Dave/Hank poked one end of the roll through the window and shoved. It was like trying to push a socked foot into a shoe that was already laced. He groaned and leaned on the bundle, pushed on it from different angles and punched at the protruding mounds, some of which were probably body parts.

The body finally popped into the car. Dave/Hank heard rattling bones and rasping cloth, but he didn’t look inside at the damage he’d done. His business here was done forever. The car had its full load—it could finish its trip to Hell.

Dave/Hank thought about bringing back the wheelbarrow but decided to leave it be. He didn’t want to have to mess with dragging it all the way back to the house, wrenching it over fallen trees and through prickling bushes. If he needed it that badly, he could always come back, but he didn’t think he would. The wheelbarrow and its stolen tire had served their purpose.

Hank Abbott rubbed his hands together, blew out a long exhalation, and walked away from the station wagon, looking at nothing but the path ahead.

T
HIRTY-TWO

L
ibby sat on Trevor’s bed. She had one of his action figures, a cartoony looking guy with red skin, pressed between her hands. Mike had stayed in the living room by the phone, but she’d wanted to get up and stretch her legs. She’d ended up here, looking through Trevor’s things, thinking about him and crying.

She twisted the action figure around and found a hole on his back probably meant to connect with some accessory, maybe a jet pack or an extra set of bendable arms. She wasn’t sure, couldn’t remember buying this particular toy. Mike had probably gotten this one for their son on one of their weekends together.

Not for the first time, Libby thought about how strange it was that Trevor’s life contained portions to which she was not privy. He spent whole days away from her, doing things she didn’t know about (though he often told her of the days’ events in extreme detail), having conversations she wasn’t a part of. She supposed it was the same when he went to school. Him with his little friends, talking about comic books and superheroes, television shows and movies. But it
wasn’t
the same. The time Trevor spent in this house, away from her, was the result of her and Mike’s failed marriage. It was her fault. Every kid went to school, but not every kid’s parents split up. She dropped the toy onto the X-Men pillow beside her and rubbed her face.

No more police had arrived, no knocks on the door, no check-up calls, which she took to mean no progress. If they’d found Trevor somewhere in the woods, they’d have brought him directly home. Surely. She tried to imagine where Trevor was but quickly shut off her imagination when the images took a nasty turn. It was better to sit here and play with his toys, to try not to think about what was happening to him, to wait.

She plucked the action figure from the pillow and flew him lazily through the air. When the phone rang, she dropped the toy on the mattress, and looked toward the living room. Part of her didn’t believe it, thought it must be her mind playing a trick on her. Another part recognized the sound as reality but didn’t want to know what news the phone call might bring. What if they’d found Trevor’s body? What if the kidnapper wanted a million dollars they didn’t have?

She hopped off Trevor’s bed. Although she felt like she’d hesitated forever, she entered the living room before the phone could ring a third time.

At the mall, Mike had wanted to blame Libby for losing Trevor, had wanted to scream at her, but now it was his fault. He’d done what he could, but it hadn’t been enough. He’d failed. Trevor was gone because of his inadequacy as a father.

He leaned back on the couch and wiped a tear from his cheek.

He wondered about Trevor and the other boy, if they were safe, if they were still alive. He didn’t want to think those kinds of thoughts but couldn’t help it. Libby had always been good at controlling her thoughts, but he had not. His mind went where it wanted—he simply tagged along. Sometimes he chalked it up to artistic tendencies, but right now he cursed his overdeveloped imagination.

He looked toward the hallway. He didn’t know for sure, but he thought Libby had probably gone to Trevor’s bedroom. They could have sat together and talked, had another cup of tea, but once they’d exhausted their conversation about Trevor, things had gotten a little awkward. Mike hadn’t wanted their conversation to get too deep, too emotional, because he thought it might make her uncomfortable, but you could only go so long on small talk, especially on a night like tonight, when already mundane topics like weather and work seemed all the more unimportant.

He thought about the kidnapper. Why would he take Trevor? He’d asked himself the question a hundred times, and he still had no answers. Had he gotten the wrong kid—meant to get some rich, spoiled brat and taken Mike’s precious Trevor instead? Maybe, although Mike couldn’t imagine anyone coming into this house and thinking they were rich or even well off. It could have been a random act of violence, but that didn’t make sense either. Nothing about the kidnapper had seemed random. He’d come into the house purposefully, come straight to the bedroom and gone after Trevor with only a single attempt to wound Mike. If he’d been after meaningless violence, Mike would have been the more accessible target. Besides, if it had been for the money, they’d have gotten a phone call, and if it had been pure aggression, the guy would have killed both Mike and Trevor on the spot, not taken the boy with him. Something else was going on here, something he didn’t understand.

From the table beside the couch, the phone rang. He’d put it on the charger after the cops left.

He looked at the phone but didn’t move to answer it. What if Deputy Willis had called to tell him they’d found Trevor’s body stuffed into a drainage ditch or spread across the highway? He didn’t know how he would handle that, if he
could
handle it. Surely, if he heard such a thing, his heart would simply stop beating and he’d drift off to wherever it was dead people went, to wherever Trevor had gone.

He reached for the phone and held it in his hand, not pressing the talk button, watching the fluttering light and trying to hope.

Libby came into the room looking worried and ten years older than normal. She opened her mouth to say something, but before she could, Mike punched the talk button and pressed the receiver to his ear.

“Yes?” he said. “Hello.”

T
HIRTY-THREE

I
t had taken Trevor a long time to move across the crawlspace above the ceiling. The yellow stuff (or at least what he
hoped
was the yellow stuff, what he dared not let himself think might be the cobwebs of giant vampire spiders) kept getting on his face and in his hair and itching him. The ceiling joists sometimes bowed and tilted at crazy angles. He almost slipped a couple of times, and although he didn’t know if he was heavy enough to break through sections of ceiling that didn’t have water damage, he didn’t want to test it.

He crawled in the dark until he thought he’d gotten to the other side of the house, where, if he remembered right and hadn’t gotten himself all turned around, the kitchen was. Once there, he waited, listening for sounds from beneath, for some sign that he’d been caught and that the crazy man was waiting for him to show himself.

The only sounds he heard were his heartbeat and sometimes a creaking board from behind him, which was scary because it sounded like a monster chasing after him but also okay because he knew it was really just the house settling. Houses settled down and made funny sounds sometimes. His daddy had told him all about it.

After repositioning himself so he was straddling one of the boards, his feet splayed and resting on the joists to either side, Trevor felt for the lump inside his chest pocket.
Good
, he thought,
still there
.

Holding tight to the board beneath his bottom, he lifted one of his feet and tapped it against the ceiling between the joists, moving by feel alone, everything black blurs on blacker blurs. He’d expected the ceiling to be hard, like rock, but to his surprise, it cracked and gave way easily. Trevor kicked a little harder, and his foot went right through.

The yellow stuff tickled his exposed leg just above his sock, and he heard something clap against the floor in the room below. He pulled his foot out of the hole he’d made and tried to look through it.

He saw nothing below. The hole was gray, lighter than everything else up here, and he saw it all right, but he had no idea which room lay below. If it was a room at all. Maybe he’d kicked his way into a closet or a dead space
between
rooms. Or maybe Trevor had gotten all mixed up and come back to where he’d started, maybe he was staring down into the windowless room and Zach was just below, staring up, wondering how he could be so unlucky, how he could have gotten stuck with a doofus like Trevor.

No. That didn’t make any sense. There were lights on in the windowless room. Unless Zach had turned the lights off—and Trevor couldn’t think of any reason why he might do such a stupid thing—this was someplace different.

He kicked again, and the gray hole widened. Another chunk of ceiling smacked against the floor below.

Still, no sounds came from the house other than those he was making himself, no cries of
Hey, what do you think you’re doing up there?
and no blasting guns trying to turn him into Trevor jelly. He wondered if the crazy man had left, or if maybe he wasn’t very good at hearing. He guessed if he hadn’t gotten caught yet, he probably wouldn’t, so he poked his foot through the ceiling again and kicked his leg back and forth until he thought he’d made a hole big enough to fit through. Bits of ceiling rained against the ground, and Trevor felt the dust—and of course the yellow stuff—on his bare leg.

He leaned over and squinted through the darkness.

The kitchen.

A dark and shadowy kitchen, but a kitchen for sure. The half-full package of bread on the counter beside the sink proved that. The refrigerator was right beneath him. Or almost right beneath. Close enough he thought he could swing through the hole and onto the top with only a teensy chance of falling to his death. He held a hand over the phone and leaned closer to the hole.

The refrigerator hummed. On top of that sound was the chirping of crickets, though Trevor didn’t know if he was hearing them through an open door or window, or simply through the roof. He wriggled even closer to the hole and positioned himself for a swing onto the fridge.

His arms wobbled, tired—he supposed
all
of him was tired, but his arms especially. He poked his tongue from the corner of his mouth and went for the fridge anyway. If he fell, at least he could say he tried.