The Bodies Left Behind (12 page)

“You’re mad,” she said, her voice an irritating whine. “I’m sorry. I said I was sorry.”

“It’s okay. But we have to move. Fast. They’re on their way.” She handed Michelle the boots she’d found inside, the smaller pair, which should fit fine. Michelle’s own boots were chic and stylish, with spiky three-inch heels—just the sort for a young professional. But useless footgear for fleeing from killers.

Michelle stared at the fleece boots. She didn’t move.

“Hurry.”

“Mine are fine.”

“No, they’re not. You can’t wear those.” A nod at the designer footwear.

Michelle said, “I don’t like to wear other people’s clothes. It’s…gross.” Her voice was a hollow whisper.

Maybe she meant dead people’s clothes.

A glance toward Number 2. No sign of the men. Not yet.

“I’m sorry, Michelle. I know it’s upsetting. But you have to. And now.”

“I’m fine with these.”

“No. You can’t. Especially with a hurt ankle.”

Another hesitation. It was as if the woman were a pouty eight-year-old. Brynn took her firmly by the shoulders. “Michelle. They could be here any minute. We don’t have any choice.” Her voice was harsh. “Put the goddamn boots on. Now!”

A long moment. Michelle’s jaw trembling, eyes red, she snatched away the hiking boots and leaned against the Mercedes to put them on. Brynn jogged to the garage and found beside it what she’d seen when she’d arrived: a canoe under a tarp. She hefted it. The fiberglass boat wasn’t more than forty or fifty pounds.

Although Yahoo’s estimate was accurate and two hundred yards separated them from the shoreline, a stream was only about thirty feet from the house and it ran pretty much straight to the lake.

In the garage she found life preservers and paddles.

Michelle was staring down at her friend’s boots, grimacing. She looked like a rich customer who’d been sold inferior footwear and was about to complain to the store manager.

Brynn snapped, “Come on. Help me.”

Michelle glanced back toward the house at 2 Lake View and, her face troubled, shoved the crackers in her pocket, then hurried to the canoe. The two women dragged it to the stream. Michelle climbed in with her pool cue walking stick and Brynn handed her the spear, paddles and life vests.

With a look back at the morass of forest, through which the killers were surely sprinting right now, the deputy climbed in and shoved off into the stream, a dark artery seeping toward a dark heart.

THE MEN RAN

At the sound of the horn, Hart had realized that rather than head for the county road, like he’d thought, the women had snuck back to the Feldman house. They’d probably broken into the Mercedes hoping to fix the tire, not thinking the car was alarmed. He and Lewis had started running directly for the place but immediately encountered bogs and some wide streams. Hart started to ford one but Lewis said, “No, your feet’ll chafe bad. Gotta keep ’em dry.”

Hart, never an outdoorsman, hadn’t thought about that. The men returned to the driveway and jogged to Lake View Drive and then north toward number 2.

“We go…up careful,” Hart said, out of breath, when they were halfway to the Feldmans’ driveway. “Still…could be a trap.” The jogging was hell on his wounded arm. He winced and tried moving it into different positions. Nothing helped.

“A trap?”

“Still…worried about a gun.”

Lewis seemed a lot less obnoxious now. “Sure.”

They slowed at the mailbox, then started up the drive, Hart first, both of them sticking to the shadows. Lewis was silent, thank God. The kid was catching on, if you could call a thirty-five-year-old a kid. Hart thought again of his brother.

About fifty feet up the driveway they paused.

Hart scanned what they could see, which wasn’t much because of the dusk. Bats swooped nearby. And some other creature zipped past his head, floating down to a scampering landing.

Hell, a flying squirrel. Hart’d never seen one.

He was squinting at the Mercedes, noting the broken window. He saw no signs of the women.

It was Lewis who spotted them. He happened to look back down the driveway toward the private road. “Hart. Look. What’s that?”

He turned, half expecting to see Brynn rising from the bushes about to fire that black service piece of hers. But he saw nothing.

“What?”

“There they are! On the lake.”

Hart turned to look. About two hundred feet into the lake was a low boat, a skiff or canoe. It was moving toward the opposite shore but very slowly. It was hard to see for certain but he thought there were two people in it. Brynn and Michelle had seen the men, stopped paddling and hunched down, keeping a low profile. The momentum was carrying them toward the opposite shore.

Lewis said, “That alarm, it wasn’t a mistake. It was to distract us. So they could get away in the fucking boat.”

The man had made a good catch. Hart hadn’t even been looking at the lake. He bridled once again at being outguessed—and he decided it was probably Brynn who’d tried to trick them.

The men ran down to the shore.

“Too far for the scattergun,” Lewis said, grimacing, disappointed. “And I’m not much of a pistol shot.”

But Hart was. He went to a range at least once a week. Now, holding his gun in one hand, he began firing, slowly, adjusting the elevation of the barrel as he did so. The sharp detonation rolled across the lake with each shot and returned as a pale echo. The first and second kicked up water in front of the boat; the rest did not. They were right on target. One shot
every few seconds, the bullets pelted the canoe, sending fragments of wood or fiberglass into the air. He must’ve hit at least one of them—he saw her slump forward and heard a woman’s panicked scream filling the damp air.

More shots. The wailing stopped abruptly. The canoe capsized and sank.

Hart reloaded.

“Nothing’s moving,” Lewis said, shouting because of their numb ears. “You got ’em, Hart.”

“Well, we gotta make sure.” Hart nodded at a small skiff nearby. “Can you row?”

“Sure,” Lewis answered.

“Bring some rocks. To weigh the bodies down.”

“That was some fine shooting, Hart. I mean, really.” Lewis muscled the small boat upright.

But Hart wasn’t thinking about marksmanship. Shooting was just a skill and in this business you had to be good at it, just like you couldn’t be a carpenter without knowing how to plane or lathe. No, he was recalling his earlier thoughts. Now that the evening’s mission was finished he had to turn his attention to what came next: how to anticipate and prepare for the hard consequences that would flow from these women’s deaths.

Because, Hart knew, they surely would.

GRAHAM BOYD SAT

Anna looked up from her own knitting. “I let it go for a while.”

Her son-in-law lifted an eyebrow.

She traded the big blue needles for a remote control, turned down the volume. Once again, Graham caught a glimpse of a tougher core within her than the spun hair and faint smile in her powdered face suggested.

“You might as well tell me. I’ll get it out of you sooner or later.”

What the hell was she talking about? He looked away, at some nonsense on the flat screen.

Her eyes didn’t leave him. “That call, right? The one from the school?”

He started to say something, then paused. But he went ahead finally. “Was a little worse than I let on.”

“Thought so.”

He explained what Joey’s section advisor had said—about the boy’s cutting school, the forgery, the ’phalting and even the suspension last fall. “And there were some other fights he got into too. I didn’t have the heart to ask his advisor about it.”

Well, which one?…

“Ah.” Anna nodded. “I had a feeling.”

“You did?”

She retrieved the knitting project. “What’re you going to do about it?”

Graham shrugged. He sat back. “Had an idea to talk to him. But I’ll leave that for Brynn. Let her handle it.”

“Been eating at you, I could see. You didn’t laugh once at Drew Carey.”

“If this’s happened once, it’s happened before. Cutting class? Don’t you think?”

“Most likely. My experience with children.” Anna was speaking from knowledge. Brynn had an older brother and a younger sister, a teacher and computer salesperson, respectively. Pleasant, kind people, fun people. Conventional. Brynn tended to swim upstream more than her siblings.

Anna McKenzie now dropped the Hallmark-Channel demeanor, which she donned like camouflage when needed. The tone in her voice changed, day to night. “What I want to say: You
never
discipline him, Graham.”

“After Keith, I never knew whether to do this or that.”

“You’re not Keith. Thank God. Don’t worry.”

“Brynn doesn’t let me. Or that’s the message I get. And I never pushed. I don’t want to undermine her. He’s her son.”

“Not just,” she reminded quickly. “He’s your boy too now. You get the whole package—even came with an ornery old lady you hadn’t bargained for.”

He gave a laugh. “But I want to be careful. Joey…I know he had a tough time with the divorce.”

“Who doesn’t? That’s life. No reason for you to be a shrinking violet when it comes to him.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“I am. Go up and see him. Now.” She added, “Maybe it’s the best thing in the world Brynn went out on that call tonight. Give you two a chance to talk.”

“What do I say? I tried coming up with something. It was stupid.”

“Go with your instincts. If it feels right it probably is. That’s what I did with my children. Got some things right. And some things wrong. Obviously.”

The last word was heavily seasoned.

“You think?”

“I think. Somebody’s got to be in charge. He can’t be. And Brynn…” The woman said nothing more.

“Any advice?”

Anna laughed. “He’s the child. You’re the adult.”

Graham supposed that was a brilliant insight but it didn’t seem to help.

Evidently she could see he was confused. “Play it by ear.”

Graham exhaled and walked upstairs, the steps creaking under his big frame. He knocked on the boy’s door and entered without waiting for a response, which he’d never done before.

Joey’s round, freckled face looked up from his desk, dominated by a large flat-screen monitor. He’d put his knit hat back on, like a rapper. He was apparently instant-messaging with a friend. A webcam was involved. Graham didn’t like it that the friend could see him, see the room.

“How’s the homework coming?”

“Finished.” He typed away, not looking at the keyboard. Or at Graham.

On the wall was a series of still pictures from the Gus Van Sant movie
Paranoid Park,
about skateboarders in Portland. Joey must have printed them out. It was a good movie—for adults. Graham had protested about their taking the boy. But Joey had become obsessed with the movie and sulked until Brynn had acquiesced. As it turned out, though, they’d fled the theater after one particularly horrific scene. Graham had dodged the incident that a told-you-so would have bought, though he came real close to telling his wife that next time she should listen to him.

“Who’s that?” Graham asked, glancing at the screen.

“Who?”

“You’re IM’ing?”

“Just some guy.”

“Joey.”

“Tony.” The boy continued to stare at the screen. Graham’s secretary could type 120 words a minute. Joey seemed to be going faster.

Worried it might be an adult, Graham asked, “Tony who?”

“In my, you know, class. Tony Metzer.” His tone suggested that Graham had met him, though he knew he hadn’t. “We’re, like, into Turbo Planet. He can’t get past level six. I can get to eight. I’m helping him.”

“Well, it’s late. That’s enough IM’ing for tonight.”

Joey continued typing and Graham wondered if he was being defiant or just saying good-bye. Would this become a fight? The man’s palms sweated. He’d fired employees for theft, he’d faced down a burglar who’d broken into the office, he’d stopped knife fights among his workers. None of those incidents had made him as nervous as this.

After some fast keystrokes the computer screen went back to the desktop. The boy looked up pleasantly. Asking, What now?

“How’s the arm?”

“Good.”

The boy picked up his game controller. Pushed buttons so fast his fingers were a blur. Joey had dozens of electronic gadgets—MP3 players, iPod, cell phone, computer. He seemed to have plenty of friends but he communicated more with his fingers than with words spoken face-to-face.

“You want some aspirin?”

“Naw, it’s okay.”

The boy concentrated on the game but his stepfather could see he’d grown wary.

Graham’s first thought was to trick the boy into confessing about the ’phalting but that seemed to go against the instinct that Anna had told him to rely on. He thought back to his dishpan reflections: dialogue, not confrontation.

The boy was silent. The only noise was the click of the controller and the electronic bass beat of the sound track of the game, as a cartoon character strolled along a fantastical road.

Okay, get to it.

“Joey, can I ask you why you skip school?”

“Skip school?”

“Why? Are there problems with teachers? Maybe with some other students?”

“I don’t skip.”

“I heard from the school. You skipped today.”

“No, I didn’t.” He kept playing on the computer.

“I think you did.”

“No,” the boy said credibly. “I didn’t.”

Graham saw a major flaw with the dialogue approach. “You’ve never skipped?”

“I don’t know. Like, once I got sick on the way to school and I came home. Mom was at work and I couldn’t get her.”