“Then what?”
“I haven’t gotten that far yet. It’ll depend on what he finds.”
“For two hundred grand, he better find something.”
“I can’t believe you have a bank account with two hundred thousand dollars in it,” Denise said from the backseat, in a voice that was more disgusted than impressed.
“I don’t anymore,” I said.
About an hour out from Aunt Irene’s house, the roads became far more rural. The streetlights grew scarce and turns appeared out of the darkness with no warning or identifying signs. We stopped at an all-night gas station to top off the tank and allow Denise to take over in the driver’s seat. The GPS still worked, but I trusted Denise more than Google Maps at that point. Robert rode shotgun, and I returned to the third row with Erica. I was relieved to see both kids asleep, leaning against each other in the middle of the second row. It was good that they were getting some rest and even better that recent events weren’t plaguing it with nightmares. Especially Ethan. His fingers were gently laced with his sister’s, and I suddenly wanted to cry.
It was not quite 5:00 a.m. when Denise took a hairpin right that I didn’t even know was there and started our climb up the small mountain I affectionately thought of as Aunt Irene’s Hill. At first glance, the road appeared to be more of an abandoned trail than anything intended for cars. Paved with potholes and crumbling hunks of asphalt, it weaved in and out of the evergreen forest that blanketed the slope. In some spots, there was a sheer granite wall on the right, and a vertical drop of up to several hundred feet on the left, with no guardrail to provide even a false sense of security. When it veered back into the pine woods, the half-moon broke the canopy just enough in places to illuminate the odd cabin or mobile home tucked among the trees. Oftentimes there wasn’t even a driveway to signal the domicile’s presence—just a path through the trees leading from the road to the front door, if you looked hard enough to see it.
Halfway up, at an elevation of about one thousand feet, Denise turned left through two trees that looked no different than the five hundred other trees we’d passed and onto one of those hidden driveways. Aunt Irene’s place, long since abandoned, was a mere silhouette in the moonlight. A simple, rectangular rancher with the closest neighbor another half mile up the road, it was the next best thing to being invisible.
Denise pulled the Traverse to a stop just outside the front door. Robert gently roused the kids, and we all plodded up the rotting front steps with our phones on flashlight mode. The door was locked and Denise had her key, but it wouldn’t have taken much to kick it in. She first undid the dead bolt, then the doorknob, but before she could open it, Robert and I both grabbed her arm and said, “Wait.”
Our guns were drawn. We looked at each other and nodded to Denise, who pushed the door open so we could each step in and take a side. I went left, Robert went right. Other than something small and furry that went skittering across the floor, up the back of the couch and through a hole in the window behind it, the house was empty. No squatters, junkies, or large predators in sight.
“You guys feel tough now?” Denise said, walking between us. “You almost shot a baby possum.” She flipped the switch next to the door, but nothing happened. “Emily must have stopped paying the electric bill.”
“Any chance there’s still a generator in the shed out back?” I asked.
“I’ll go check,” Robert said before Denise could answer.
“No, I’ll go,” I told him. “You stay with them.” He didn’t argue.
The generator was there, but the gas was old and wouldn’t ignite. Erica held her phone light while I drained the tank, then filled it with what was left in the rusted red can next to it—which turned out to be just as old, stale, and equally useless. We found a hose sitting in a wheelbarrow with a flat tire, buried under years of cobwebs and dust. Erica brushed it off and took it with the red can to siphon some gas from the Traverse while I went back inside.
Robert and Ethan were making up a twin bed for Maggie in the spare bedroom with sheets they found in the closet. Ethan would sleep on the floor, like the gentleman Robert had taught him to be. My son’s eyes still had a vacant, faraway look I didn’t care for, but at least he was moving around under his own power and seemed to otherwise be okay. Maggie went in to help tidy up the room, and Robert went into the master bedroom to do the same. I planned to go talk to the kids—especially Ethan—as soon as Denise went to join Robert, but she came up to me instead.
“You stay away from us, understand?” she said, as if reading my mind. Her eyes were dancing. Or at least, that’s how I always thought of it. My wife was not a crier. She fought the urge the way she refused to throw up when she was sick, preferring to choke everything back and deal with the burn rather than suffer the perceived embarrassment of letting everything go. This applied to happy tears, too. Her eyes gave her away, though. When she was feeling emotional—good or bad—they shook, side to side, ever so slightly. A lingering effect of surgery she had when she was a kid to repair her optic nerves, or so she always told me. If you weren’t looking for it, you’d miss it. But I never missed it.
That little shimmer was as good as a built-in lie detector test for those inevitable occasions when she told me she was fine even though all the evidence clearly indicated she wasn’t. She wasn’t pretending to be fine now, though. And those beautiful, brown eyes were dancing harder than I’d ever seen them before. “Do what you have to do to fix this, but you don’t talk to me or the kids any more than absolutely necessary.”
“Denise, please. Let me at least tell them how sorry I am—”
“No.” The word erupted from her mouth like a shell from a howitzer. That little hiccup was gone. “You gave up the right to apologize for anything when you left us.”
“I only left to protect you from—”
“I don’t want to hear it, Ben. I spent the first eight years after you left trying to figure out why, lying awake until four a.m., telling myself over and over that the detective who came to ask us questions was wrong, that you couldn’t have done the things he said you did. But in the last two years, a wonderful thing happened: I stopped caring. You were gone and I refused to let you continue to haunt my life. And do you know what? It worked. I’m happy now, you son of a bitch, and it’s all because I stopped caring about you. We never got a cent from your life insurance policy because no one could ever prove it, but as far as I was concerned, you were dead. Gone. I moved on. The kids moved on. Whatever you did, whatever you are now, we never wanted to be a part of it. You dragged us into it, though, so if we somehow make it out of this alive, do us a favor and disappear again.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t even if I’d wanted to.
“And this time,” she added before walking away, “if you really want to protect us, don’t come back.”
Filled with fresh gas, the ancient generator roared to life, belching blue smoke and coughing several times before settling into a steady rumble that would have pissed off all the neighbors on our block back home, but out here would annoy only the few animals that hadn’t hunkered down for the winter.
Robert hooked it up to the heater, the lamp in the living room, the refrigerator and the light in the bathroom. The two bedrooms we left in the dark, and it was doubtful the TV—a box-tube relic from the late ’80s—would have worked even if it was hooked up. He also cut up an old tarp covering a rotting stack of firewood and used it to patch the hole in the window with a roll of duct tape he found in one of the kitchen drawers. The tape was so old, it looked like it might disintegrate in his hands, but it did the job.
Fortunately, the cell service had improved since my last time here. It still wasn’t great, but I had 3 out of 5 Gs, with most of the bars full. Enough to access my chat with Sergei and my dropbox. Both were still empty, but it was early. He’d said it would take some time.
The sun was just cresting the horizon, and we were all bone-tired. For an old heater, it did its job well and the house became quite comfortable. After everyone else retired to their rooms, Erica took the couch and I took the first watch. We agreed to switch off every four hours until my family had rested enough that they no longer needed someone to stand guard while they slept. Erica protested a bit, insisting I was more tired than her, but within five minutes of her head hitting the arm of the couch, she was out. Impressive considering most of the stuffing had flattened or fallen away, so it was more like sleeping on a wooden frame than a cushion. Her mouth parted and a tiny, rhythmic snore filled the room, just audible beneath the hum of the generator from outside.
I checked the flimsy dead bolt and peered out one of the three small windows carved into the top half of the front door. Narrow rectangles lined next to each other in ascending order, a style right in line with the era from which the TV hailed.
The frost on the bed of brown, fallen detritus that made up the front lawn sparkled in the early dawn light. The wind rustled a few bare branches, but nothing else moved. From my shoulder holster, I pulled out my Glock and racked the slide, making sure there was a round in the chamber.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
If I sat I knew I’d fall asleep, so I stood. Even leaning against the wall was risky. I shifted my weight back and forth from one foot to the other, absentmindedly, the way I’ve always done since Maggie was born and that gentle rocking motion was the only thing that could soothe her infant cries. Back and forth I swayed, staring through the little window in the front door all the way to the left, then the one all the way to the right, watching the frost melt and the wind whip dried leaves and pine needles around the wheels of Denise’s SUV.
After exactly four hours, Erica’s cell phone alarm beeped three times before she turned it off. She woke as if she’d never slept. Simply sat up, pocketed her phone and took my place at the door. Like a robot that just finished charging. I set my own alarm for exactly four hours later—2:03 p.m.—checking the chat room before lying down.
Nothing from Sergei.
When my head settled against the hard, stiff arm of the couch, I knew why Erica had found sleep so quickly. It felt wonderful.
The sun had nearly set when Erica shook me awake, the sky outside a dull, faded blue. It was almost 4:30 in the afternoon.
“Why did you let me sleep so long?” I grumbled, rubbing my eyes.
