Among Prey (6 page)

George nodded his head with a bit too much vigor to show goodwill, but he said, “I understand. You have to do your job. I just can’t believe someone would accuse Bobby.”

“Well, we’re very sorry to have bothered you and your family, and we’ll let you get back to your evening.”

The officers left, and Carol gave an overstimulated Bobby an extra tranquilizer. He tried to watch another cartoon, since his viewing of what was to have been his final show of the evening had been interrupted (Carol was amazed anyone thought Bobby didn’t notice what was going on around him), but the pills soon had him dreamy and she led him to bed just before the night man showed up.

Before she went to her own room, she went to the dayroom to look at Bobby’s dolls. She didn’t say anything to the Miltons or the police, but the marks must certainly have been wounds. His other work with the dolls had been too careful to dismiss this as “a mentally handicapped kid accidentally splattering some paint.” He was smart. No one knew for certain what had happened to the girls who’d gone missing, but, while their parents held out hope they’d be found, it was hard to believe someone had a basement full of live little girls. The weekend nurse had let Bobby see the news, and then he’d inferred the same sad conclusion Carol had: the girls had been murdered.

* * *

Bobby’s therapist agreed to meet with him at the city hospital, where he spent half his time anyway. Carol and the Miltons decided it would be best if Bobby didn’t go back to LYLAS Dolls, even after George had ensured that Amber was fired from the store. Bobby was a creature of habit and willful about certain things, and even if Carol didn’t take him across the street, she wasn’t sure he wouldn’t go himself. What she was very sure of was that if he got it into his head to do so, she couldn’t stop him. So they just never returned to the area.

Stephanie, the weekend nurse, also lost her job over the debacle. Carol could have let it slide, the fact that she must have been letting Bobby watch the news, but Stephanie had called in sick too many Saturdays. Over the previous decade, weekend nurses had come and gone, but Carol had become part of the family. She had no trouble convincing the Miltons they needed a new weekend nurse. They were generous people, as Carol felt the very wealthy should be, but they wouldn’t stand for being taken advantage of, particularly not with regard to Bobby.

Otherwise, things got back to normal pretty quickly. They didn’t talk about the episode, as it brought out too much emotion. Carol had to hold back from telling them how lucky they were to be rich. If they’d been average people, things could have gone much differently.

Little girls continued to disappear. Two more were abducted, others also disappeared from sight because their parents no longer allowed them outside. They didn’t walk home. They didn’t play in the streets, the park, even in their yards. The little girls were gone, locked away like dolls inside their toy boxes and dollhouses. Boys ran wild in the streets as usual, but parents stopped even escorting their daughters out. It only took a moment of inattention for the predator to snatch a child. A parent could be reading the ingredients on a box of snack cakes and look up and have no daughter. They could be in the bleachers at a ball game and pay a little bit too much attention to an exciting play and turn to find nothing but an empty seat and a lingering warmth in the air.

But there were no bodies. And unlike in the serial killer thrillers Carol often liked to read on a lazy Sunday, this killer didn’t leave elaborate clues. Like most criminals, this person didn’t want to get caught, but to continue committing crimes.

There was only one odd occurrence before Carol’s world came crashing down. She was straightening up after Bobby, something she didn’t technically have to do, but which she sometimes did just because clutter annoyed her. Bobby had left his dolls out. She couldn’t shake the feeling they weren’t tossed about haphazardly, but had been twisted into their death poses. She wished for the thousandth time since that night with the police that she could throw the damn things out, but Bobby would have gone ballistic.

As she surveyed the grisly scene, she noticed two drawings lying among the dolls. At first, she’d thought them rejects from his sketchpad tossed aside randomly. Then, like the dolls, they clicked into place. What seemed random chaos was not, but fit into a pattern Carol couldn’t understand, and that frightened her.

The drawings portrayed the two newly missing girls. Girls who’d only gone missing after the Miltons had fired the weekend nurse.

How the hell was Bobby getting this information? Though he showed no signs of being literate—showed no interest in written words whatsoever—Carol had started keeping the newspaper out of his dayroom.

Carol walked over to Bobby, where he sat watching cartoons. She wanted to ask him how he knew what the girls were wearing when they were taken, and why he thought he knew how they had died. Beaten, from the bruising on their faces, then strangled, from the bruising around their throats. But she knew she would get no answer from him. So what she asked for was the television remote.

He looked at her outstretched hand, but didn’t move his own, which almost engulfed the controller.

“I promise I’ll give it right back.”

She interpreted his blank stare.

“Only one minute, I promise.”

He held out his hand, the remote sitting across his wide palm.

Carol flipped through the channels. The Miltons got hundreds of channels, and on Bobby’s television every one of them except the twenty-two children’s stations were locked. Carol gave him back the remote, and he quickly found his cartoon again.

It had been a long shot. Even if he had figured out how to unlock the restricted channels, the sounds of adults speaking would have immediately gotten Carol’s attention. She went back to the dolls and placed them carefully in their special toy box. She sensed Bobby’s attention, and looked up to find him watching her. His gaze went from her face to the drawings in her hand, and she placed them in the box.

“Bobby, can I look at your drawing pad?”

He didn’t respond. If she asked him to show her his drawings, he would, but he didn’t answer questions.

She went to the table where he did his art and opened his sketchbook. She never paid much attention to what Bobby drew, because he didn’t show her his drawings.

Carol flipped through the pages. Everyone treated Bobby like a toddler, but judging by the drawings, Carol guessed he was as smart as a third-grader. He just didn’t respond in a way that could be easily tested. His drawings were filled with battle scenes between superheroes or Power Rangers. There was nothing particularly morbid portrayed anywhere. So the drawings of the girls were anomalous.

Carol couldn’t figure out if that made them more or less frightening.

* * *

“Carol, it’s for you,” Martha, the housekeeper, said over the phone system.

“Thanks!” Carol shouted across the room at the phone. She looked over to Bobby first, a habit whenever anything happened. He was engrossed in another episode of Power Rangers. She picked up the phone. “Hello? This is Carol.”

“Lacee’s been gone for three days now. She never came home from school on Wednesday.”

It was Julie, talking about Carol’s niece. For longer than a moment she couldn’t speak. It wasn’t that she had nothing to say, but that she had too many things to say, too many questions to ask, and they were all trying to come out at once. She finally settled on, “So Lacee hasn’t slept at home for the past three nights?”

“Right.” Julie was sobbing so loudly the word barely made it through, but Carol could feel nothing but rage. The maelstrom of emotion had spun into a tight little bundle of rage.

“Why the fuck didn’t you tell me? What is wrong with you?”

“Because I figured she was just being a bad kid and you’d gripe me out over it like you always do!” The phone distorted Julie’s roar into digital buzzes and squeaks.

If Julie had been standing there, Carol would have thrown her to the ground and pummeled her like she had when they were kids. She would have banged her sister’s thick skull off the floor. But Julie wasn’t there, and having a shouting competition over the phone wasn’t going to accomplish anything.

So after finding control over her voice, Carol asked, “When did you last see her?”

Julie’s breathing quieted a little, became less ragged, less ready to fuel a scream, and she said, “Wednesday morning, before she left for the bus stop.”

“Did you watch her get on the bus?”

“No.” Sensing the accusation flinging itself back and forth in Carol’s skull, Julie continued, “I was in the damn shower getting ready for work.”

“Did she make it to school?”

“No.”

Oh God, he’d taken her. Whoever was stealing the girls had stolen Lacee. She was so beautiful and so goddamn trusting because Julie had failed to instill any sense of the world’s dangers in her.

“I gave a list of her friends to the police. They all swear they don’t know where she is.”

“Do the police think…?” The words caught in Carol’s throat like a bite of something doughy, and it was expanding.

“They won’t rule it out. They said one other girl was twelve.”

Was
. Julie just said
was
. Julie had given up on Lacee, but there could still be time. The other girls might be dead, but there could still be time for her.

Carol dropped the phone and ran to Bobby’s special toy box. She scooped the dolls out. They still hadn’t been back to LYLAS Dolls, so the dolls weren’t important. She took out the drawings that had been shuffled to the bottom. Only two, the two she’d already seen.

A shadow blanketed her. Bobby loomed over her, watching her.

“Are there any more?” she asked as calmly as she could. He stared at her with those eyes, the eyes that told her he was much smarter than he let on. He stared and he said nothing.

He stood between her and the table. Probably not intentionally, but she pushed past him and snatched up his sketchpad.

“Is it in here?” she asked.

He raised a hand, slowly reaching for it. She spun around and began to flip through the pages one at a time.

Power Ranger. Power Ranger. Superhero. Superhero battle. Power Ranger. Tank. She went through them faster and faster until the pages hovered on the other side, refusing to settle any more quickly. She slapped them down, but they seemed to move even slower when she did. She began tearing the pages out and tossing them aside.

Bobby reached past her for the pad. She spun to face him and shouted, “No!” and he slowly withdrew his hand.

Soon, every flat surface was covered in ripped drawings. The last drifted to the Berber carpet as Carol looked at the spiral-bound sheaf of blank pages in her hands. She grabbed a corner, curled the pages and flipped through them. Nothing. There were no new drawings of girls, no drawing of Lacee.

Carol tried to think. Did that mean Lacee was alive? He only drew them with wounds.

“Bobby, do you know about Lacee? Do you know if she’s okay?”

Bobby backed away a step. He stared at her, but then flicked his eyes down to his drawings quickly before continuing to stare. His expression was blank, and this time, Carol couldn’t read him. He’d shut himself away from her, and he presented her the inscrutable face other people always saw.

“In one of those?” Carol asked. She’d only seen drawings of the stupid shit he watched on TV all day long, but she knelt down and began sliding the drawings around. Their ragged spiral edges snagged the carpet, and their rips snagged each other, and they didn’t slide smoothly, and soon Carol was crushing them up and throwing them aside. Tank. Power Ranger. Tank. Superhero. No girls. No Lacee.

“How do you know?” Carol asked. She fought to speak calmly and quietly.

Bobby didn’t answer. Of course he didn’t answer.

Carol stood and swept the ripped pages that had landed on the table onto the floor. She placed the drawing pad on the table and pulled the chair out. “Sit.”

Bobby sat.

She grabbed the Tupperware full of colored pencils and dragged it to his right hand. “Draw her.”

He didn’t move. Carol took a pencil out and pressed it flat against the back of his hand.

“Take it.” His palm had been resting on the tabletop, and she saw the effort in his body as he pressed it flat. She pried at his fingers, tried to slip the colored pencil beneath them. “Take it!”

He glanced at her quickly, then took the pencil.

“Now draw her. Draw Lacee.”

Once again, he didn’t move. He sat, shoulders hunched into a flannel mound.

“Draw her,” she said again. She could feel they were the last calm words she would be able to speak. When he didn’t begin drawing, she started to move his hand for him, drawing a starter line on the page. She’d forced a green pencil into his hand. Hadn’t even noticed. She took her hands away from his, and the line stopped. “Draw!”

But he didn’t move. He bunched his shoulders higher. He no longer looked at her, but looked straight ahead, out one of the big windows.

He wasn’t even paying attention.

“Draw her! Draw her! I know you know, so fucking draw her!” She tried moving his hand again, but this time he tightened the muscles in his forearm, and she couldn’t move it. She smacked his arm, and the pencil snapped against the pad.