Mountain Madness (25 page)

TWENTY-SEVEN

LIBBY HAD EXPECTED
a CSI team and a photographer and a whole slew of miscellaneous law enforcers, just like you saw on TV, but no one else arrived. The two deputies, who had apparently done most of the evidence-collecting themselves before she got there, also finished by themselves, bagging individual items, Willis taking a few last pictures with a small digital camera and his partner writing things down in his notebook. Mike remembered and told them about a knife under his bed, and they seemed to bag it a little more carefully than they had the rest of the evidence. Libby didn’t know enough details of tonight’s fiasco to guess why the knife might be of any particular importance, but she was glad they weren’t lackadaisical about everything. She guessed they were probably doing everything they could, but to her it still didn’t seem like enough.

After their little powwow disbanded, she’d gone out to turn off the Honda’s lights and then come back inside to make herself a cup of tea. Fully caffeinated with a little sugar and milk. While she boiled the water, Mike came in and took two mugs from the cabinet.

“Better make it two,” he said, and she took another teabag from the jar beside the microwave.

The deputies hadn’t told them whether or not they could clean up the mess in the kitchen yet, and so they left it, stepping around the shards and busying themselves with the tea.

They’d only just finished steeping their bags when the two lawmen called them into the living room to tell them they were done. Libby didn’t think they’d been at it nearly long enough, didn’t understand how they could possibly have collected all the evidence already, but she said nothing.

Willis gave them a business card with his number and extension at the sheriff’s department in addition to the numbers for both his home phone and his cell. He told them to call him first thing if anything else happened, not to worry about the hour, and Libby felt a little better. The four of them exited the house and stood in a cluster on the over-lit porch.

In the light, Willis’s beard blazed. He said, “And you might see some more deputies here and there, until they’re finished canvassing the area. More than likely they’ll leave you alone—unless they find something—but don’t worry if you hear a knock on the door in the middle of the night. Well, maybe worry a little, I don’t want you letting your guard down, just in case, but don’t go blowing any holes in the doors, okay?”

“I don’t have a gun,” said Mike.

“Good. It’s better that way.”

Libby thanked him half sincerely. Mike shook hands with both deputies and crossed his arms over his chest. They stood side by side on the porch until the sheriff’s deputies had gotten into their Explorer, turned the vehicle around, and disappeared around the bend in the driveway; then they reentered the house.

—:—:—:—

They cleaned the mess up like a couple of mindless robots, sipping their tea between chores. Mike duct-taped a piece of cardboard to the outside of the kitchen window while Libby swept the broken glass, and then they reorganized the living room together. The bedroom doorjamb had broken beyond repair, but Mike said he had the materials to make himself a new one later, after things had settled down, speaking automatically, as if not totally aware of what he was saying. He’d have to replace the ruined kitchen window screen, but the bedroom window’s was only bent. Mike managed to pry it back into its original shape, or at least close enough that it fit into the window frame. Libby wiped up the blood on the bedroom floor and scrubbed the area with a hardwood cleaner Mike got her from the workshop. She cleaned up most of the mess, but some had seeped deep into the floorboards, which must not have been well sealed.

It wasn’t that she wanted to clean, but anytime she stopped, she felt herself getting hysterical. So she kept going. And kept going. And kept going.

“Don’t worry too much about that,” Mike said. “I’ll have to sand down the floors and then refinish them. Even if the stains were barely noticeable, I don’t think I could sleep in here every night knowing they were there.”

“Speaking of which,” said Libby, sitting on her bent legs, wiping a strand of hair from her face, “would you mind if I stayed here? There’s no way I’ll ever fall asleep, but maybe I could camp out on the couch, wait for the phone to ring.”

“Are you kidding? I wouldn’t let you leave if you wanted to. I’d go crazy if you left. Probably will anyway.”

Libby smiled despite the handful of bloody rags. “Thanks.”

“You should be here if anything happens. If they find him, I mean.” He stepped to his bed, which the deputies had moved to get to the knife, and pushed it back against the wall. Their tea sat on the nightstand. Mike picked up the mugs and handed Libby hers.

“You really got stabbed?”

Mike shrugged. “I guess technically.” Libby was still sitting on the floor, and Mike eased onto the edge of the bed. “Actually, I’m surprised it wasn’t worse. He really jabbed me good.”

Libby swallowed a mouthful of warm tea and shivered anyway. “Are you sure you shouldn’t be in the hospital?”

Mike shrugged again. “No, but I don’t think their doctor guy would have been so casual about it if he thought there was any chance it might turn worse. The way he talked, you’d have thought I just stubbed my toe.”

“I guess that’s lucky.” She shifted her legs beneath her so she sat cross-legged.

Mike raised his eyebrows, and Libby guessed
lucky
wasn’t the word he’d have picked.

She said, “I still don’t understand this. Why would anybody take Trevor? Some random psycho just wandered onto your property?”

“I don’t know.” He rested his mug on his leg. “You sure you didn’t hire out one of your boyfriends to do it?”

She frowned. “That’s not funny.”

He raised his hand in apology, smiling a little. “Sorry. Just a tease. I know it’s nothing like that.”

“I want to know what happened. Those cops weren’t exactly chatterboxes when it came to details.”

“Let’s get more tea first,” Mike said, “and then I’ll tell you.”

They did, and then they sat together on the couch and Mike talked for a long time.

TWENTY-EIGHT

ZACH CAUGHT JUST
a glimpse of the place through the trees before they turned onto the driveway. He shivered. The barbwire fence along the road was in shambles, some of the wooden uprights rotted completely through and in pieces on the ground, sections of wire loose and coiled like rusted robot snakes. Zach didn’t know what the fence was originally intended to keep in (or out), but it did nothing now except make the place ugly.

It became obvious very quickly that the owners of this property weren’t especially concerned with either upkeep or looks. The mailbox looked about a hundred years old, though Zach wasn’t sure people had mailboxes a hundred years ago, or mail for that matter. The driveway was gravel, like his own, and Trevor Pullman’s, and most of the driveways this far into the mountains, but in this case the rock was spread too thin, leaving bare patches of ground in which weeds and grass thrived. Zach would have thought the passage of the truck would keep the vegetation down, but maybe Crazy Dave usually left the property from a different access point, or maybe he didn’t leave much, maybe he was one of those hermits Zach had read about, the kind of weirdo who lived off the land and hardly came into the real world.

The truck jounced along the uneven ground, its headlights lighting the shack of a house at times, at other times the sky or the ground or the encircling trees. Zach and the Pullman boy, Trevor, both sat up in the truck’s bed, but the dog—Zach guessed he’d have to call the animal Manny, for lack of a legitimate name—lay flat on his belly, sniffing occasionally and whimpering.

Smells something bad
, Zach thought. He knew dogs had a fantastic sense of smell, that they could detect odors from a great distance that humans couldn’t smell from right up close, like sickness or a coming storm.

Manny whined again and buried his head beneath his paws.

“You think he lives here?” Trevor whispered.

Zach nodded, watching the ramshackle dump as the driveway curved toward it and smoothed out so that the headlights quit their erratic bouncing. The small front porch, hardly wider than the entry door, had two weathered columns. Zach thought you called a little porch like that something else—
a covered stoop?
—but wasn’t sure. Unpainted shutters hung from the window frames; in some cases they had disconnected completely and fallen to the dirt beneath. From one of the windows drooped a flower box that appeared to have held nothing but weeds for many years.

The truck circled around the house and came to a stop in the back yard. Not that you could really call it a yard. The back
dirt patch
might have been a better name. They’d stopped with the front bumper almost touching a tree-stump chopping block from which an ax stuck out at an angle, but Zach could only just make out the thing from his place in the truck bed and lost sight of it altogether when the pickup’s headlights flicked off.

“I’m scared,” Trevor said to him.

Zach said, “Me, too.”

Manny panted and let out a little woof, as if not wanting to be left out.

“Do you think he’ll kill us?” Trevor asked, still holding the bloody shirtsleeve to his forehead.

He looked away, couldn’t bear to see what he’d done to the poor little kid. “No,” he said, “not if we kill him first.”

The truck’s door creaked open, and they went silent.

“Boys?” The man’s voice sounded strange somehow, as if he was a little scared himself.
But why should
he
be scared
? Zach wondered.

Neither of them answered, though the dog panted a little and then sneezed.

“I don’t want to ever have to hurt you again,” the man said. “So don’t go and do anything stupid, okay?”

Silence.

“Okay, Georgie?”

Zach thought it might be easier—and safer—to respond. “Fine.”

“Okay, Davy?”

Zach elbowed Trevor in the ribs and whispered, “I think that’s you.”

“Oh,” Trevor said. “Uh, okay.” He waited for a while before adding, “Sir.”

Beside the truck, Dave smiled. Zach saw it with his adjusting eyes and shuddered.

“Georgie, you open up the tailgate and get out with Manny. Go straight inside. And don’t think I haven’t forgotten what you did.”

Of course, Zach’s first thought was that he should jump out of the truck, go directly to the ax, pluck it free like King Arthur’s sword from a stone, and swing it into Dave’s head. Except too many things could go wrong with that plan. He might twist his ankle jumping out of the truck, he might not manage to get the ax free, or he might get it free only to swing it accidentally into Trevor or himself. Dave said he hadn’t forgotten what Zach tried to do, but neither had Zach forgotten what he
had
done: cracked Trevor in the head with a nail-studded club. Luckily, the nail had missed the other boy. If you could call that luck. He might not be so lucky a second time.

He decided to follow the maniac’s instructions. They would have other chances to escape, better chances.

He hoped.

The handle felt rough beneath his fingers, maybe with rust or maybe only with wear and tear. The tailgate squeaked open and fell from his grip, thudding to a stop at an angle almost level with the truck bed. The dog started to rush off the pickup, but Zach grabbed him by the collar and quickly snapped the leash, which he’d removed during their ride, back into place.

“Good,” said Dave. He waited until they’d gotten to the back door and opened it before he said, “Now you, Davy.”

Zach stepped into the dark room wondering what the deal was with all the names. Hadn’t this guy said
he
used to be Davy? Zach couldn’t pretend to know what was going on and wasn’t sure he’d have known if the kidnapper sat them down and explained it for an hour. You couldn’t understand crazy if you weren’t crazy yourself, could you? He didn’t think so.

He heard the tailgate squeak back into place, and the leash went suddenly lax when the dog stopped ahead of him.

“It’s okay,” said Zach. “It’s just the truck.” He reached down to pet the dog’s head, a barely visible gray spot in the dark. Manny relaxed somewhat at Zach’s touch, swished his tail a few times across the floor.

Dave brought the smaller boy into the room with them and flipped on an overhead light.

Zach saw the dining room table first. It was larger than their own table back home, but a little more worn, the legs curved and uneven. Zach could tell it was the kind of table that wobbled if you placed something on it, or bumped against it, or maybe even if you looked at it funny. The seats of the chairs bowed, and some of the spindles making up their backs were splintered or missing altogether.

The linoleum was cracked in some places, bubbled in others, as if things had been buried beneath and a few of them had escaped. The walls had floor to ceiling vertical stripes every couple of feet that might have been old glue, like maybe wallpaper had hung there at one time.

The man brushed against Zach, and the dog jumped up to its feet, tail motionless, tense. Then Trevor was beside him and taking his hand the way only small children will: without hesitation or embarrassment. Zach squeezed the younger boy’s fingers tight and wanted to whisper something reassuring, but he dared not speak. Talking in this place would have been like talking in church, but different in a way Zach couldn’t quite put into words.

“This way,” Dave said, and he led them into a second dark room, not bothering with lights.

Zach thought this guy must have night vision goggles for eyes.

He sensed more than saw the hallway ahead, imagined it closing in around him as if he were trying to push his way through a small tunnel rather than an average-sized corridor. Except nothing touched him, nothing but the floor against his clapping sneakers and Trevor’s sweaty hand and Manny’s dog leash wrapped around his other set of fingers. The dog whined hard now, and Zach smelled something rotten, something like road kill.