Drawn Into Darkness (25 page)

He wanted to reach the creek and wade along its bank back the way he had come, to the road. Just the first part, getting to the water, took seemingly hours of stumbling, as if the tree roots were clutching at his feet. Then, as he waded along the edge of the creek, some unknown object tripped him so that he fell into the water. He didn't mind, but he would have enjoyed his impromptu bath better if he had seen it coming.

Limping along the edge of the shadowy water, he bumped against some kind of a wooden structure and explored it with his hands for a while before he realized it was the bridge where the road crossed the creek. And even then, getting out of the water and onto the roadway was a feat accomplished by sheer blundering.

Finally he felt smooth sand beneath his sore feet again. He looked up, but could no longer see the stars. So he studied the faint sheen of the creek to make sure he was headed in the direction he wanted. Then he walked onward. His hunger had become, like his injuries, pain to be ignored.

After a while he urged himself into a lope. After another while he realized why he was able to do this. It was getting light out. He could see a little.

It was morning, but not Thursday anymore. Realizing it was Friday, Justin felt a little bit like Rip van Winkle.

He kept loping along the dirt road until the dawn turned to daylight, and far ahead he saw metallic glints sparkling between the trees: traffic. People going to work. He had almost reached the paved road. Looking down at himself, all dirty and damaged, he realized he could not let anyone see him that way. So, keeping his fragmentary glimpses of cars and pickup trucks within sight to guide him home, he headed into the woods again, woods with normal, narrow trees. He had put swampland behind him now. He was not too far from home.

Home? Like hell. He knew Stoat would kill him on sight, yet he was still thinking of Stoat's house as home and he knew this was crazy, which was just another reason why he couldn't tell anybody about himself yet. Because then the whole world would find out what a fucked-up mess he was.

The woods slowed him to a walk, and even though he could now see where he was going, he still got his skin ripped by the green thorny vines that twined everywhere; there was no avoiding them. Once the woods finally let go of him, he forced his overtaxed body into a trot through a cotton field, staying so far back from the road that nobody could recognize him even if they noticed him. The smudges of blood from his bleeding feet nearly matched the red clay.

Then he had to fight his way through woods again. Make that jungle so damn thick he ended up getting down on all fours to burrow under the green tangle like a fox. So his feet were grateful for the break, but his hands and knees were not. It felt like a very long time—hell, it
was
a long time—before he made it out of that mess. With the sun scorching him from high in the sky, he felt weak from heat and fatigue, hunger and thirst.

But he recognized the cow pasture he was in. Home—no, Stoat's blue shack—was getting closer. The shack where his socks and shoes and spare clothes were, and some food, and money. That was all. Then he would buy a bus ticket or something, go to his grandfather.

He handled the cow pasture the same way he'd handled the cotton field, trotting straight across at a cautious distance from the road, meanwhile wondering whether he could possibly find something to eat. He was wavering and stumbling as he jogged. When he neared the far side, he saw a feeding trough. The next moment he was there as if he had flown, looking for anything edible. Dried corn would have been fine with him. Purina cow chow would have been even better. But he saw only wisps of hay and a few nuggets, some kind of kibble, scattered underneath. With shaking hands he tried to gather them—

“Hey!” a man's voice yelled from somewhere across the pasture. “What the hell you doing?”

The farmer! A friend of Stoat's. Justin ran without looking back, never knew how close or far away the man was. He did not dare give him a glimpse of his face. He sprinted past a house and two trailers to dive into the woods. But as soon as wax myrtle, yaupon, and palmetto hid him, he collapsed to the ground and had a kind of fit like a sick dog, convulsing and shaking hard, trying not to whimper and yip; he bit his lip till it bled. It took a while before he was able to get up and walk on.

Not run or jog. Walk. Even when he found the four-wheeler track he would follow the rest of the way through the woods, he couldn't get his wretchedly hungry body or his painful, bloody, plodding feet to move any faster. It was just about all he could do to stay upright and moving. When he finally saw the bright blue house through the trees, he could have cried.

Until he saw something was wrong. He stopped as if he'd hit a wall.

He knew without having to get any closer what that yellow stuff across the back door was. Police tape.

What the hell? Lee must have found a way out of the swamp, because it looked like she had gone and called the cops.

This was a good thing, he reminded himself, that Lee was safe. Lee was the best. She understood him better than anybody. He wished she would have let him stay with her and be her son. He knew she didn't mean any harm, calling cops to his house. But there they were. Now what the hell was he supposed to do?

Justin dropped to his hands and knees, at first in despair, then in caution. He crawled forward to have a closer look. Nearing the edge of the woods, he bellied down to combat crawl, peering at the back of the bright blue Stoat shack for any sign of movement. At a distance, across the road, he could see the front and side of Lee's bright pink shack too.

Maybe she was home and he could go over there and she would give him something to eat. She would. And she wouldn't shout at him or curse him or hit him for running away either.

Justin blinked, trying to get his thinking into focus. He had run away, but why? The night when they had bedded down on bunks in the fishing shack seemed as far away as something on
Star Trek
, as if the swamp were an alien planet. He had run because—because Lee wanted him to go back to his parents. Dad. Mom. Mythical beings he could barely remember as he lay in the sandy dirt just being tired and starved, even his thoughts almost too tired and starved to move. “Mom” was a blank, yet the word caused a hot ache in his chest that tugged him toward Lee.

His body responded, trying to get up. Get up. Go. Somebody was at home over there, opening the windows, he could see them opening. But over here it was only cops—

Duh. He couldn't go to Lee because Lee had called the cops. Because Lee was a good person, not messed up like him, and she wanted to do things right. She couldn't help it that Justin just wasn't ready.

Justin's body let go of all hope and sagged back into the sandy dirt at the verge of Stoat's backyard. He lay there without moving as the sun set and the day began to darken. He wanted to give up and sleep, but hunger tore at him like a wolf, insisting that he had to stay awake and do something. His own body, ordering him around.

From where he lay, he could see only the back and one side of the shack. But the place was so small he could tell nobody had turned on any lights inside. Not like he'd been watching for lights to come on, not like he still had brains enough for that, but all of a sudden he noticed there weren't any. Not even the blue flickering glow of a TV set. Could it be there was nobody in the house? Not even Stoat?

What were the chances that anybody was in there waiting in the dark? He could see that Stoat's van was not parked in its usual spot at the corner. As for cops, who cared anymore? Hunger made him reckless and willing to take the risk. He heaved himself to his feet in the bushes, waited a moment until a spinning sense of vertigo passed. Then he took a deep breath and stepped into the open.

He traversed the backyard quickly, noting that his feet hurt even worse than his gut; despite his hunger, socks and shoes had to come first. He ripped the yellow tape away from the back door, then pushed it open in the dark as he had done many times before. But even though he lived here, supposedly, he did not turn on a light yet. A sense of constant guilt had been beaten into him for the past couple of years, making him feel as if he must be sneaky. He found his way through the shack to the bedroom just by shuffling his feet. But in the bedroom they encountered obstacles. Clothing seemed to be strewn all over the floor. In order to find his shoes he needed to turn on the light.

He groped for the switch on the wall, found it, flipped it, then blinked in the blaze of the ceiling fixture, staring at the mess. The cops had really tossed the place. What the hell had they been looking for?

His clothing lay all over. Quickly he shucked off the filthy clothes he had been wearing for three days and found clean ones to put on. He felt too uneasy to shower; his dunk in the creek last night would have to do. He should have soaked his feet in soapy water, smeared them with antibiotics, and bandaged them, but that would have taken as much time as a shower. Instead, he found two pairs of cushy white cotton tube socks and put them on one over the other. He didn't see his comfortable old Chucks, so they were probably still under his side of the bed where they belonged. Stepping over piles of clothing, he went there, and yes! He found the floppy, forgiving shoes, and by lacing them loosely, he was able to put them on.

Dressed, he substituted one of his own baseball hats for the green relic Lee had found, turned off the bedroom light, then headed for the kitchen. He didn't need to turn on a light there, just open the refrigerator. He gulped some Mountain Dew straight from the two-liter bottle, then grabbed the loaf of bread, the pink salami, and some sliced cheese. But no matter how much his stomach howled and gnawed, sitting at the table to make a sandwich seemed out of the question. Carrying the food, Justin headed for the back door.

But the moment he opened it, he heard the panting breath and pounding feet of someone running toward him. He dropped his food and froze, trying to see who it was. Not Stoat, thank God. Young man—no, young men. Two of them now, barely visible, but he could hear their voices.

“Quinn, it's him. The one on the tapes.”

Justin's mind seized upon nothing of this beyond the word “Quinn.” In the fading light he saw nothing except the faces of the two young men, and he saw Lee in them, and he knew them; they were Lee's sons, Forrest and Quinn. He could not question how they had come to be there; it was simply a miracle. He named them like Adam naming creation. “Quinn and Forrest?” And a great sunrise of emotion suffused him.

“U
m, car keys, the keys to my car,” I babbled as Stoat pressed his way-too-sharp knife blade to my throat. I had three choices: tell him where the keys were and be killed, or not tell him where the keys were and be killed, or come up with some convincing prevarication to live a few hours longer. The survival instinct made me a time miser, hanging on to every minute no matter how miserable. I needed a lifesaver lie, stat.

Bless my control freak husband, he had made me a good liar.

The thought of Georg inspired me.

“I know where there's a key. I think I know,” I prattled. “It's under, um, I remember my ex-husband put a spare somewhere on the underside of the car in one of those little magnetic boxes, you know the kind I mean? On the whatchacallit, undercarriage of the car.”

Stoat's already tight grip constricted around my shoulders, his knife bit the skin of my neck, and he said several harsh things, concluding with, “
Where
on the undercarriage of the car, bitch?”

“I don't know. Not exactly. That's where
he
put them. It was his idea. I never—”

“Oh, shut up.” Suddenly Stoat turned me loose, not so much letting me go as unable to stand me anymore; he thrust me away from him, hard. I fell onto the sofa and decided to stay there.

Stoat raged, “You expect me to
crawl
under your bitty-ass stupid Yankee car to find the fucking key?”

At first I thought this was rhetorical, but he glowered at me as if he wanted a reply, so I said, “Sir, I expect nothing, sir.”

“You're goddamn right. It's getting dark out there. I don't suppose you got a freaking flashlight?”

I did not. Practical equipment has never been my forte. I did not own any flashlight. . . . Wait a minute.

“There's a little one in my, um . . .” I could not help hesitating, terrorized, dreading to displease him.

“In your
what
?”

“In my purse, sir. A little LED light shaped like Eeyore.”

“What the hell?”

“Kind of a—a blue donkey, sir . . .”

“Shut the fuck up. Just goddamn shut up, would you, and let me think.”

I did as he said. I shut up, and from my seat on the sofa, I watched him think. In the darkening room he loomed over me, buck knife in hand, way too much like doom incarnate. I knew what he was thinking. He was considering his options. He could go to his house and get the car keys out of my purse, but meanwhile, what was he to do with me? Duct-tape me to the chair again? It seemed to me that he must be running out of duct tape. He could take me with him, walk me over there at gunpoint? Make that knife point? Either way, somebody might drive past, and I might make a break for it, try to get away, and it was too goddamn long of a walk. He wouldn't like that option. But the other one was to crawl under my car searching for a goddamn key box on its murky underside, with what illumination? And even supposing he could find a flashlight, maybe hike to his disabled van and get one out of the glove box, then what was he supposed to do with me meanwhile? Tie me up with something other than duct tape, like what, Schweitzer's leash? Or take me along, when he knew damn well I would try to escape?

Most people, when they are thinking, gaze off into space. Stoat did not. He stared straight at me, looking down his unlovely nose with his stony eyes—yes, I realized with a shock, eyes, plural. His second reptilian eye had reappeared, showing that his swelling was down. He had to be feeling better. Damn.

I didn't like his returning health. And I didn't like the way he was looking at me. Forget shutting up; I had to distract him. It was time to try that oldest of advice-column canards: Get Him Talking About Himself.

I cleared my throat and smiled as if I were on a first date. “Stoat,” I ventured, “I know you're from around here. Do you have brothers or sisters close by?”

He gave me a flinty squint-eyed stare. “Why? You planning to leave them something in your will?”

“Just asking.”

He relented. “Sure, I had sisters and brothers. Three of each.”

“That's a big family. Were you poor?”

“We was sharecroppers. Course we was poor.”

“But you had a good mother and father?” I asked with faked innocence, figuring otherwise.

“Of course.” Shifting from one foot to the other, he sounded no more impatient than usual. “Ma and Pa were good, God-fearing people.”

God-fearing. Interesting. “Was your mother the one who taught you how to keep everything so neat and tidy?”

Scowling, Stoat looked perplexed in his goatlike way. “I don't recall that in particular. Ma just kept me fed reasonable and clothes on my butt and she whupped me when I needed it.” He grinned, apparently delighted by memories of parental violence. “Course Dad whupped harder.”

“Were you scared of him?”

“Course I was! What the hell you getting at?”

Reminding myself that I was trying to prolong my life didn't keep my big mouth from doing its worst. I said earnestly, “Well, I was wondering if your God-fearing mother and father would want you around if they knew you were a faggot.”

Stoat lurched toward me. “What the hell you talking about?”

“Why, what you did with Justin.”

“Now, that's just sick, not knowing the difference between me and Justin and a pair of faggots!” Ranting, Stoat stood over me, bent to get in my face. “I'm a pedophile and Justin is just—just—innocent. Hey, Justin's a
virgin
, didja ever think of it that way?” Stoat spoke with such fervor that his spittle flew into my face. “Justin ain't fucked nothing. He just
got
fucked and fucked, but he never fucked
me
, so I ain't no faggot and if anybody thinks I am, they're crazier than you are, bitch.”

Okay, I had succeeded in sticking it to Stoat before he killed me, but I didn't enjoy it much, watching his body language while I tensed to run if he raised the knife.

Nodding solemnly, I asked, “But would your mother think—”

“She wouldn't think nothing!” Stoat's voice shot up to a screech. “Why would she want to think! Her and Pa sent us to church when we was kids, but it wasn't their fault whatever we done once we was grown. They visited my brothers in prison, didn't they?”

“I wouldn't know,” I said, ultrasoothing. “You never told me.”

Stoat glowered at me uncertainly.

I went on. “But you did tell me you made it a point to remain celibate until your parents had passed away.”

“That was just to spare their feelings! I wouldn't want to know all about what
they
did for sex, would I? Like, I think my father bruised my mother up some, and I know he used a whip, but that ain't
sick
, just embarrassing. I would never let them know I knew. Sex things ain't nothing to be ashamed of, but they should ought to be kept private.”

“Of course. I absolutely agree.” Then the imp of the perverse got into me again. Dying no longer looked so bad if I could put the screws to Stoat first. “So, are your brothers in prison for sex crimes?”

Saying that was like providing a spark to gas fumes; Stoat's explosion seemed to fill the room. Rearing to stand ramrod straight, he shouted a stream of obscenities and curses too dizzying to remember and too foul to repeat. “You stupid bitch!” was the mildest of it. “You think I got to be what I am because of my
brothers
? Screw that! Whatever I done in my life was on my own, with nobody's damn help, you dumb cow. . . .”

I think throughout the entire rant I did a pretty good job of sitting still and looking vaguely sympathetic, although I kind of curled my arms around myself to protect my tender underbelly in case of attack.

A valid instinct. Way too suddenly, in midobscenity, Stoat fell silent with his lips still moving. Mouth open, he hunched over like a giant fishhook to glare down at me. Then he closed his thin lips while his narrow flinty eyes remained open to stare at me. Eyes with no humanity in them, they might as well have belonged to an anaconda.

Very quietly he said, “Tricky bitch, what the fuck you up to, fucking with me?”

•   •   •

“You
know
us?” Quinn blurted, staring at the boy standing in the doorway of the blue shack, the victimized boy he had given hardly a thought in his desperation to find Mom.

“You know us?” Forrest echoed, sounding just as much taken aback.

“I know your mom.” His voice had a pleasant huskiness, a burr.

He spoke quietly, but Quinn nearly shouted at him. “Where
is
she?”

“Isn't she right over there?” In the semidarkness, the boy gestured toward the pink shack. “Her house?”

“No!” Quinn could not help stepping forward as if in threat.

The boy reached inside the doorway for the switch to turn on the back porch light. Sixty watts, maybe, but to Quinn it seemed too bright; it showed too much, reminding him that this kid had been through a lot. Quinn saw his pale, bruised face, his wide eyes, his bitten lip, his childish mouth trembling—no, not just his mouth; he shook all over. He had been brave enough to turn on the light, but he quaked and swayed, clinging to the doorway's frame for support.

Quinn exclaimed, “We won't hurt you!”

He felt his brother shove past him, hurrying forward. “He's falling over.” Forrest caught the kid by his shoulders and eased him to a seat on the slab of pavement outside the back door. He knelt beside him. “Are you going to faint? Head down between your knees.”

The kid resisted. “I'll be all right when I eat.” With one faltering hand he fumbled at the loaf of bread he had dropped.

Quinn stepped in, opening the bread bag and handing the boy a slice. Cheap soft white bread, about as much good as giving the kid a cube of sugar. Quinn found the salami and cheese, sat down on the ground with his long legs crossed, and started to put together a sandwich for the boy. “What's your name?”

“Justin,” he said with his mouth full.

“Justin. Okay, Justin, take a breath and tell us how you know our mom.”

He waited with strained patience while the boy swallowed bread and took more than one breath. Finally Justin said, “I lived here with my uncle Steve. Um, Stoat.”

Quinn noted the past tense but said nothing.

“And?” Forrest coaxed.

“And Miss Lee Anna came over on Sunday.” Quinn saw the boy's eyes dart as if looking for a place to hide from things he didn't want to say. “Unc—um, Stoat knocked her out and put her on a bed with handcuffs.”

This would have been hard for Quinn to follow if he had not already seen that bed. God. That awful bed. Blood on the bare mattress, blood on the handcuffs. Mom's.

Quinn bit his lip to remain silent, but Forrest cried out,
“Why?”

With raw pain in his voice Justin said, “Because of me.” He ducked his head, hiding his face.

Quinn shoved the sandwich into his hands and said softly to his brother, “Forrie, don't interrupt. Let him tell it his way.” He watched Justin eat and waited until the boy's head came back up before he asked, “Then what happened?”

Justin swallowed, then swallowed again, then said, “Tuesday it rained. So Tuesday night, he took her out to the swamp to kill her. And me, I figured, because—anyway, I snuck a baseball bat into the truck and when we got there I—I—I don't know why I didn't just kill him then and there. Anyway, I hit him on the head, and me and Lee, I mean your mother, we went into the river. . . .”

Unfathomable emotions rattled the boy's voice like a cage. As if he couldn't stand to listen, Forrest said, “Justin, take your time. Are you saying you saved Mom's life?”

Again, Justin gulped twice before answering. “I thought so. We ran off into the swamp and we about starved until last night—no, night before last—we found a shack with some food. Then it took me until tonight to get back here for more food and fresh clothes and some shoes because my feet are a mess.” He stiffened as if remembering danger temporarily forgotten, and his husky voice grew tight. “I need to get away. If Stoat finds me here, I'm dead.”

Quinn said, “We won't let anybody hurt you, Justin,” surprised to realize how much he meant it. This soft-spoken, scared, gutsy, messed-up kid had walked right into his heart when he wasn't looking, high-top Chucks and all. Quinn had a pretty good idea that Justin had invaded Mom's heart similarly. And that Mom had somehow found out he was being sexually abused and had gotten herself in trouble trying to save him. According to Justin, they had both escaped from Stoat. But there was too much the boy wasn't saying. Where was Mom now?

Forrest surely had the same question, but he broached it indirectly. “Justin, when was the last time you saw Mom?”

“Right about this time last—no, a couple of nights ago.”

“Okay.” It wasn't really okay, Quinn knew, and he gave his brother points for keeping his voice gentle. “Where?”

“At the fishing shack in the swamp. Asleep.”

“You left when she was asleep?”

Instead of answering, the kid dropped his sandwich to the ground as if he had lost all appetite. He sat staring into the night.

Quinn urged, “Justin, look at me.”

He did, his eyes narrowed with nearly tangible pain; Quinn felt its impact. Justin burst out, “It's all my fault if Stoat got her. I didn't rub out my tracks, I left a trail he could see, I'm so fricking stupid, and that really did sound like his van. . . .” He had started to sweat and shake. “But she has to be all right! She has to be home!” Wildly he gestured in the direction of the pink shack. “She has to!”

“She's not,” Quinn said, and despite his best effort to be gentle, the words sounded stony bleak.

“But she has to be!” Justin cried. “I saw somebody open the windows over there!”