Ruin Falls (20 page)

“Mom,” she said. “Dad.”

Her mother looked at her, before switching her gaze to Liz’s father.

“So you are back from out west,” her father said, as if Liz had ventured to Wyoming with her family.

Liz didn’t bother to ask how they had found out about her premature
return. Jill had told them what happened when Liz was still in Junction Bridge, hadn’t she? But the news could’ve been transmitted in any of a dozen small-town ways.

“Is it true?” her father asked. “Has Paul taken the children?”

Jill. Small-town ways. Liz nodded.

Her mother drew in an audible breath. “Oh, Elizabeth. Why would he do that?”

Liz stared at her mother. “I don’t know, Mom. You make it sound like—there could be a good reason.”

Again, her mother looked to her father.

Until a few years ago when they’d downsized, the Burkes had lived in the same house in Wedeskyull for four decades. Their people came from an Adirondack village a little farther north. The Burkes went to church every Sunday, visited their doctor twice a year, and worked on the other days. Liz’s father considered himself a self-taught man, while Liz’s mother was always busy, either in the house or the community. For them it was Paul who was the throwback to another era, not a visionary but a hippie. He came from away, even though his home was in the same state, and that factor also worked against him.

For a medley of these reasons, Liz and Paul had seen little of Liz’s parents once they’d married. Ally and Reid had only slightly more contact with this pair of grandparents than they had with the other. Liz’s mother contented herself with biweekly check-in calls, as regular as a metronome, and aside from the occasional summer barbeque, an hour or two stolen away from high season at Roots, or holiday suppers, the two families spent hardly any time together.

In retrospect, Liz realized that she hadn’t been much closer to her parents even when they all shared the same house. Her father was the sun she and her mother orbited distantly around, never touching it or each other.

Still, in an emergency, her parents would step in, especially her father.

“All right,” he said, clapping his hands together. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”

Liz went light as a little girl. There was a relief in having her parents here, especially her dad, and knowing exactly which role to fill.
She stepped aside to let her father into the house, telling him about the strange glass guy’s visit as she did.

“Well, I can’t see a connection there,” her father said. “Human beings tend to impose patterns. But you have enough on your plate right now without conspiracy theorizing.”

Liz felt something in her subside as she began to follow her father up the stairs.

“Have you looked through Paul’s closet?” he asked over his shoulder. “Itemized what was taken? That will give you some leads as to where they’ve gone.”

Liz’s foot faltered on the step. “What do you mean, Dad? Is Paul’s winter coat missing? So I know whether they’re in a warm or cold climate?”

If Jill were here, she’d tell my father that now we know which hemisphere to search
.

Her father came to a stop at the top of the stairs, and Liz paused on the riser beneath. She could sense her mother from behind.

“We need lists of Paul’s known contacts, the people he was spending time with,” her father said. He began to open doors along the upstairs hallway, peering into Reid and Ally’s rooms, which Liz had been avoiding. Her father stepped inside, and a host of noises ensued.

Liz was assailed by sudden clarity, as if she could see through walls. Her father was in there shuffling things around, looking at things, tugging open this, flicking shut that. Busy as a swarm, but Liz would never hear another word about this. Or rather, she might
hear
a lot. But that would be it. Talk that amounted to nothing.

Her father emerged from Reid’s room.

Liz looked at him, the face and form that had always seemed mountainous to her, hewn out of the same earth she submerged her hands in every day.

“I already went to talk to some of his students,” she said.

“That sounds like a good start. Is there anybody else?”

“I don’t know,” Liz began, her voice trailing off. There were other possibilities—the recently released coach, for instance—but she couldn’t think straight right now. “I mean, yes. I think so.”

Her father’s eyes filled with the strangest blend of traits. Pity and
love and just a trace of excitement. “I’ll start brainstorming,” he said. “Colleagues, your pastor, his doctor even.”

Liz and Paul almost never went to church. Her parents knew that, even if they disapproved. And Paul shunned Western medicine. She couldn’t think of the last time he had seen a doctor for anything.

“You’ll see,” her father said. “There are plenty of possibilities.”

Liz’s mother was nodding. “Don’t worry, dear. In the worst case, even if you turn nothing up, I’m sure Paul will be back with the children. I’m going to hug those wee ones so tight the next time I see them …”

The words sounded strange, artificial-tasting, as they left her mother’s mouth.

Her father started to descend the stairs.

Liz had to shift to make room so that he could go by.

After her parents left, a dull, weighty paralysis settled into Liz’s limbs. She was aware that she had to shake it, but she couldn’t imagine anything to conjure up life or motion. Her father had said he would help, stepping in to take over as he always did, but Liz sensed the hollowness of what he had to offer. And she herself knew no more now than she had in Junction Bridge. All her attempts had come to nothing.

No. That wasn’t true. She had discovered that website. Learned where Paul had been spending some of his time, even if she hadn’t found him yet. Liz wandered back up to the study, lifted Paul’s laptop with her good arm, and turned away from the sight of the ruined window.

On the floor in the hallway outside, she opened up a browser and typed in
PEW
. The Internet was slower out here, far away from the router, and it seemed to take forever for the page to load. Liz watched the tiny disk spinning. Once it stopped, lines of text blurred before Liz’s eyes and she could hardly make sense of them. Her arm throbbed whenever she moved the mouse. There were avatars for people called
Pam’s Mom
and
Processed
and
Enviro Pyro
. Faintly punny things or references to children from people who seemed to want to parent in a more responsible way. Threads about how to turn off the TV for
good, nature-deprivation disorder, alternatives to foods with soy or corn in them. A
Motherdoctor
who offered tips for healthy pregnancies and alternative birthing. Liz might’ve been able to imagine Paul chatting about subjects such as these, but she couldn’t find any instance of
Professor
, nor a single
Reid’s Dad
or
Ally’s Dad
on the off chance that Paul had decided to change handles.

And what did it matter if she did locate her husband in cold cyberspace? That wouldn’t have anything to do with wherever Paul was now. Liz was looking for Paul on a blank screen, in a nest of wires, when what she needed to do was pound the earth, find her children amidst live, growing things, hold the warmth of their bodies.

The urge came at her like a gathering storm.

Liz rose and walked back into the study. She picked up one of the journals Paul subscribed to, knowing there wasn’t likely to be useful information in it either, yet still leafing through, slowly at first, taking in passages, before starting to skim pages, flipping faster and faster until the type turned into skittering black beetles before her eyes.

The cover tore in her hand, and the sound was both sacrilege—Paul pored over these tracts with religious fervor—and so deeply satisfying that Liz hurled the book across the room. It hit the wall, dropping to the floor in a splayed-out position of ignominy. Liz was about to reach for another when she paused.

The first time she’d been in this study, she had built carefully segmented stacks of journals, sorting and grouping as she looked for anything that might contain a hint of meaning.

Some of those stacks were denuded now. There were fewer of them.

Liz looked around, nerve-endings alighting on her skin.

One stack of old journals remained, with a half stack, also dated, spilling over nearby. Liz went to straighten the slumping ones and an envelope fell from the center of one volume. A hard object slid around inside.

The edge of the envelope sliced her skin, and Liz let out a cry. Twin wounds on her hand and her arm pulsed in concert, but Liz ignored them, concentrating on slitting the seal.

A small, silver key dropped out, the kind that would open a lockbox.

Untold amounts of time passed—great, leaching stretches of it as Liz looked through Paul’s study, then the rest of the house, searching for a lockbox she never knew her husband had. She opened every closet and cupboard, took out each drawer. She lifted the dust ruffle on their bed, then dared to look beneath Reid’s and Ally’s, trying not to focus on the childhood detritus under there: abandoned items that had once meant everything to their owners. Liz searched the dirt-floored basement; she even checked the attic crawlspace. Finally, dusty and rumpled and disheveled, she had to give up.

There was no lockbox in the house.

Had Paul kept it in his office at school? Maybe Marjorie would know.

It was after midnight.

Liz trudged into the dining room, the room that had been left the most intact by her hunt. She curled into a ball on the floor next to the table, and fell asleep to the far-off lowing of a train, tiny key still gripped in her hand.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

B
y dawn Liz had combed the house again, still finding no sign of a box. She had neither the energy nor the will to put the house back to rights, and the siren’s call of the garden was strong. Roots was a sprawling expanse, but once it had simply been the plot of soil into which Liz deposited seeds with cupped hands, watching fronds and shoots appear weeks or months later with a sense of wonder trumped only by the first times she’d felt Reid and Ally flutter-kick inside her body.

Liz pulled on her boots and a jacket against the pre-morning chill, then went outside into the fading moonlight.

She wove between overflowing rectangles of squash, checking their wrist-thick stems for signs of blight, until she came to the raised beds that lay adjacent to the wildflower meadow. It was almost impossible to keep on top of weeds here; often an utterly perfect dame’s rocket or a spiky elecampane was discovered in a handful of bindweed that Liz or Jill had been just about to pull out.

Liz crouched down, feeling a sense of solace steal over her as she plunged her hands into the growth, separating strands. Leaves tickled her wrists above her gloves, and the loamy smell of earth filled her nostrils. Liz teased apart stalks of Indian paintbrush and cornflowers, plucking the occasional interloper and bagging it carefully to prevent spores from dispersing.

She didn’t realize how far she had migrated from her original spot, sidling on her knees deeper and deeper into the field of blossoms, until she felt a vibration of footsteps on the ground.

Liz looked up, blinking away an orangey afterglow from the flowers. The sun had risen in the sky and she had to block her eyes.

Tim spoke as she got to her feet. “This is some plot of land.”

Liz nodded, tracking his gaze.

“I saw that you called,” he said.

He was dressed in jeans; still off-duty, or just going off. Liz told Tim what had happened last night. The wind, the punching branch, the repairman who had come. Even her sense that journals might be missing from Paul’s study, along with her realization that no branch could’ve flown that far by itself.

Tim’s expression was implacable. He was no easier to read now than he had been as the completely alien species of teenage boy. Way back when, Liz and Jill had wiled away untold hours, trying to understand that species. Trying to understand Tim.

“Why don’t we go take a look?”

Liz shucked off her muddy boots before leading Tim up to Paul’s study. She flinched at the disarray, the journal she’d thrown, all the items moved in her search. But Tim appeared unfazed, taking the measure of the room. She supposed he had seen much worse.

He turned to face her. “Mind if I take a walk around outside?”

This time Liz followed.

From the ground Tim tilted his head up to the missing window, then walked a wide, looping circle toward the woods. “It came from one of these?”

Liz shook her head, the back of her neck prickling. “It was an oak branch. Not a fir.”

Tim left the evergreens and counted out his paces forward. “Still couldn’t have made it. You’re right.”

Liz nodded, tentacles of fear upon her. “The glass guy was up there,” she said. “On my roof. He broke the glass himself.”

“That’d be my guess,” Tim agreed. “That’s how he knew to come.”

“Maybe he was trying to get those journals.”

“Maybe,” Tim said. “But it’s not the biggest question I have right now.”

Liz frowned.

“Liz,” Tim said, and his tone contained an aching kindness, even if his next words penetrated like a spear. “Why were you in the yard when less than a week after your children were taken, two strangers showed up at your house?”

Liz’s fingers hooked themselves into claws; she felt crumbly bits of soil beneath her nails. She’d been pulling up weeds. When her children were missing.

Everything Jill had said was true. Liz had always accorded Paul the power to figure things out. But he hadn’t taken control—she’d ceded it. Given it up. And then her father showed up, and Liz was all set to do it again. Her terror-induced epiphany in the bunker at Matthew’s farm, when she’d realized that she could get out by herself, had been just as short-lived as her time down there. Left to her own devices, Liz embarked on futile searches and met dead ends. She was waiting for someone not only to chart a course, but to navigate it for her.