Paradise County (49 page)

This time he had made sure she was not going to be able to knock away the key.

Panting, crying, Neely jumped to her feet and raced around behind the bed, wrestling the big, bulky box spring into place. It was not quite wide enough to fit; when she got it into position there was still space left between the spring and the wall.

But not enough. He pulled the chain off with a horrible rattling sound just as she got the spring into place, and shoved his shoulder against the bars. Neely jumped back out of the way as the spring smacked into the wall.

The door was open. He was coming through.

“Help!” Neely screamed, backing up into the far corner. “Please, somebody, help me!”

His arm was through the gap, and his shoulder—but that was all. It was not wide enough.

He could not get through.

Thank you, God, Neely thought, and, her bones having turned suddenly to jelly, fell to her knees.

He began spraying pepper spray at her through the gap.

Forty-nine

T
he next few days passed with excruciating slowness. No word was heard from the runaways. An army of police and private investigators, courtesy of the Haywood estate, were searching for them, but so far not so much as a single sighting of a battered blue pickup truck carrying a tall black-haired boy and a pretty blond-haired girl had been reported.

Joe grew haggard. Jenny and Josh were pale and unnaturally quiet, growing more subdued with every hour that passed without word of their brother. They tended to trail Joe around, and he spent as much time with them as he could. Alex, too, was becoming concerned. Neely might run away—all right, she often
did
run away—but she always turned up again in a day or so. She couldn’t imagine her sister just vanishing for this length of time without a word.

The worst thing about it was, there was nothing any of them could do. Joe had searched the area until there wasn’t a single blacktop or gravel or dirt road left that he hadn’t driven down; the police had searched the area, even dredging suspect ponds on the chance that the pickup might have somehow driven off the road; neighbors and friends
had conducted a walking search of woods and fields until the consensus was that the kids were not anywhere within a thirty-mile radius.

That left the whole rest of the country to be searched.

Andrea called, warning Alex that a reporter was interested in Neely’s disappearance, and, sure enough, stories about the case appeared in the national media. But they were small stories, focused on the troubled life of a billionaire’s teenage daughter, slanted so that Neely appeared as a drug-abusing party girl with multiple body piercings who’d made a habit out of being a runaway. The stories caused barely a ripple, and, even with accompanying pictures, produced no leads at all.

In the midst of all this, some semblance of normal life had to be maintained. After the second day, Josh and Jenny had to go back to school. Joe had never really stopped work, and Cary was training Victory Dance with meticulous care. Having been told about Cary’s entering the horse in some important upcoming race, Alex was not surprised. But Cary had lost his enthusiasm even for Victory Dance, as Alex saw when he sat down to eat supper with them each night.

Alex was practically living in Joe’s house now. They were maintaining the fiction of sleeping in separate beds at night for the sake of the children, but Joe had not slept more than a couple of hours at a stretch since Eli’s disappearance, and the truth was that they passed the nighttime hours in his bed or on the couch in the living room together, alternately talking and making love.

Tommy stopped by one night after supper to talk to Joe. Upon seeing his car pull up, the whole family had rushed onto the porch, hoping for news of Eli and Neely. But after telling all of them that the reason for his visit had nothing to do with that, Tommy took Joe outside and spoke to him alone.

When Tommy was gone, Joe walked back into the kitchen, where Josh, Jenny, Alex, and Cary were cleaning up after the evening meal. Four pairs of eyes looked up at him expectantly as he entered.

“Josh, Jen, come on into the living room,” he said, his voice very gentle. Alex’s eyes widened in alarm as they met his. It was clear that whatever
Tommy had told him, it was some kind of bad news. “Alex, you and Pop might as well come too.”

When they were all seated in the living room, Joe on the couch with Jenny and Josh on either side of him and Alex and Cary in the adjacent chairs, Joe told them: Laura’s body had been identified, and it appeared that she had been murdered in June of 1991, shortly after she had visited them for the last time.

“So that’s why she never came to see us in all these years,” Josh said thoughtfully. “I wondered. It’s kind of strange, never seeing your mom at all, you know. Most kids who get divorced live with their moms, and if they don’t see one of their parents it’s, like, their dad.”

“’Fraid you got stuck with me, pal,” Joe said, obviously striving for a light note as he ran his hand over Josh’s shorn head.

“That’s okay,” Josh said, looking at him quickly. Since Eli’s disappearance, Josh had seemed almost to be walking on eggshells around Joe. “I don’t mind being stuck with you. I mean, if you don’t mind being stuck with me.”

Joe’s eyes sharpened on Josh’s face. “What do you mean, if I don’t mind being stuck with you? ’Course I don’t mind being stuck with you. I love you. You’re my son.”

“Eli’s gone and I’m not,” Josh blurted in a rush, his eyes tearing up. “I keep thinking you wish it was me who was gone and him who was here.”

“Oh, God.” Joe sounded stricken. “Josh, no.” He wrapped an arm around Josh’s shoulders and leaned toward him, looking earnestly into his face. “Josh, you’re every bit as important to me as Eli, don’t ever think you’re not. You’re the only Joshua I have. Whichever one of you is gone, it doesn’t make any difference: I would hurt just as bad. I need you both here. I need you all three here.”

Josh leaned over, gave Joe a quick, clumsy hug, then jumped up and, with a self-conscious glance around, left the room.

Joe started to get up, apparently meaning to follow him, but Jenny tugged at his arm.

“Daddy,” she said, looking up at him with an almost stark expression in her eyes. “I’ve been thinking: If Mom came here and got murdered,
then that means there’s somebody around here who kills people. Maybe whoever it is got Eli and Neely, too.”

Later that night, after he had spent private time with both Josh and Jenny and they had gone to bed, Joe asked Alex if she wanted to go for a walk. Cary was still there, plopped on the couch with them watching TV. He’d been staying at Joe’s house late the last several nights, usually until eleven or so. Like the rest of them, Alex guessed, Cary didn’t feel like being alone.

“I’ll stay here until you get back,” he said, waving a hand at Joe. “Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.”

It was a beautiful night, cold and clear, with scuttling clouds making a game of peekaboo out of looking up at a sky full of stars. The three-quarter moon was small and high overhead. The wind was up, blowing Alex’s hair back from her face. Pale strands of it trailed across the sleeve of Joe’s coat.

“I’ve got to go check on the horses up at Whistledown,” he said, looking down at her. Her hand was tucked in his, and she was walking close against his side. “Feel like walking that far, or you just want to go down the road a little and let me come out again later?”

“Whistledown’s fine,” Alex said. “I need to stop by the house, anyway, and pick up some more clothes.”

They walked down the road anyway, and up the driveway because the going was easier.

The house was dark because Alex hadn’t been staying there. As soon as they got inside Joe walked through it, turning on lights as he went, glancing in all the rooms. Neely’s room was almost poignant, Alex thought: the clothes she had worn on their last shopping trip still hung over the back of the chair in the corner, and her electric curlers sat on the dresser. Other belongings filled corners and niches, and her denim backpack lay on her bed.

Neely, where are you? she asked silently. Are you ever coming back?

It was the first time she had entertained the possibility that maybe, just maybe, her sister might
not
be coming back.

Maybe something terrible had befallen her. Alex’s stomach knotted at the thought.

Something terrible had happened to Joe’s ex-wife here, whether the locals called this place Paradise County or not.

“You okay?” Joe was beside her now, looking down at her. Not wanting to upset him with her imaginings—he was distraught enough over Eli without her adding to it—she nodded and smiled, and together they walked downstairs.

“God, I’m tired,” Joe said as he headed into the den and collapsed into the big blue leather chair beside the couch. He scrubbed his hands over his face and looked up to smile at Alex. “Sleeping with you is killing me. You’re too restless.”

He reached out and caught her hand, pulling her down onto his lap. She went willingly, curling her arms around his neck. “That’s because I’ve gone cold turkey on my sleeping pills. I’ve found too many interesting things to do at night.”

He laughed. “You were restless when you were taking those things. You drove me crazy when I was listening to you over the walkie-talkie. Up and down and walking around all night.”

“I never did! Once I took a sleeping pill and fell asleep, I was out like a light.”

“If you say so.” His smile faded. “God, that was hard tonight. I didn’t know Josh felt like that.”

“How were they when you went upstairs to talk to them?”

“Josh was okay.” He grimaced. “Jenny cried.”

“Because her mother was dead?”

Joe nodded. “Can you believe that? Jenny was only a baby the last time she saw Laura. She couldn’t possibly have any memories of her, fond or otherwise. But she cried.”

“Laura was her mother,” Alex said gently. “Whether she has any memories of her or not.”

Joe took a deep breath, and slanted an unsmiling look down at her.

“She was the mother from hell,” he said. “She was a drug addict, a booze hound, a party girl all the way. Once she got into drugs, I never felt safe leaving her with the kids. She would just up and leave them whenever she felt like it. She’d go off for days at a time with any man who’d buy her drugs. That’s what I think happened to her: I think she got into some kind of drug deal gone wrong. All those years when the kids and I didn’t see her I prayed to God to keep her away. You know what she did, the last time she came to see me? She said she’d take the kids away from me if I didn’t give her the money she wanted. Understand, she didn’t want them. She didn’t even know them by that point. But she knew that I would pay through the nose to keep them. And I did.”

He slanted a look down at Alex, and smiled humorlessly. “And then tonight Jenny cried for her. I sat with my little girl until she fell asleep, and I lied to her and told her how much her mother had loved her and wanted her and how proud she was of her. Hell, Alex, Laura didn’t give the flick of her eyelashes about Jenny, or any of them. All she cared about in the end was coming up with enough money to get high.”

Alex gave a wordless murmur of sympathy, and kissed the prickly underside of his jaw.

“I’ve never told anybody else what happened the last night Laura came to see me,” he said, “just you.”

Offering the only solace she could, Alex tightened her arms around his neck and pulled his head down and kissed him. She unbuttoned his flannel shirt and ran her mouth over his chest, then slid down to the floor so that she was kneeling at his feet. Nibbling at his flat belly, listening to the quickening rasp of his breathing, she unzipped his jeans, pulled him out and made love to him with her mouth. After the first swift intake of his breath he sat very still, with his eyes half shut and his hands clenched over the arms of the chair, watching her through slitted eyes the color of the sea.

Finally, growling with passion, he came down onto the floor with her, flipping her onto her back and stripping them both naked with swift efficiency. He kissed her all over, her mouth, her breasts, between her legs, until she was writhing and moaning and gasping with need. Then he
took her with a fierce hunger that she matched with her own. When it was over, with their bodies still joined, he propped himself up on his elbows above her and looked down at her with a slight smile that made her heart turn over in her breast.