Edgewise (3 page)

The island was still burning in the center of the kitchen, spitting out sparks. As she watched, the oak work-surface collapsed sideways, and two drawers fell out, showering cutlery all over the floor.

“Tasha!” she croaked. “Sammy!” Her throat was raw and she couldn't shout any louder.
“Tasha!”
The two figures in black could still be in the house, and if they heard her calling out, they might come back and finish her off; but right at this moment she didn't care. She just needed to know that her children were safe.

She cried out again, but there was no reply. The fire was dying down, although the smoke was billowing much more densely. Lily lifted up her hands as if she were praying and started to bite at the cords around her wrists. The figure with the demon's horns had tied her painfully tight, and she had to gnaw at the cord until her gums bled. But the knots weren't complicated, and gradually she managed to tug one end loose, and then another. After three or four minutes she was able to untie her waist and her ankles and climb unsteadily onto her feet.

She hobbled to the utility room and let Sergeant out. He stopped barking and circled worriedly around her legs, his tail lashing from side to side.

“Steady, boy,” she coughed. “Quiet now.”

She opened the kitchen door and stepped out into the hallway. There was no sign of the two figures. She waited for a moment and then limped toward the foot of the stairs. A horrifying apparition approached her, until she found herself standing face-to-face with her reflection in the long mirror by the front door. Her forehead and her cheeks were scarlet and her eyebrows had been singed, which gave her a mad, expressionless look. Her sleep-T was scorched, and her feet were swollen with blisters. The right side of her hair had been burned into crispy, prickly clumps.

She coughed, and coughed again, and couldn't stop coughing, but she mounted the stairs and made her way across the landing to Tasha's bedroom.

“Tasha?” The door was ajar. “Tasha?”

She switched on the light. Tasha's comforter was pulled right back and her bed was empty. Still coughing, Lily went to Sammy's room. His bed was empty, too.

She leaned back against the wall.
Jeff.
It must have been Jeff. Who else hated her so much, and wanted the children?

She went to her bedroom and picked up the phone. Her fingers left oily black marks on the receiver, and she was shivering uncontrollably.

“Police,” she said. “And fire department.” And then, catching sight of herself in the mirrored doors of her closet, “Paramedics, too, I guess.”

The next morning she opened her eyes and her sister Agnes was sitting next to her bed, smiling at her. The hospital room was the palest of pale blues, and it was filled with white October sunlight. On the windowsill stood a large glass vase of white and yellow roses.

She lifted off her oxygen mask. “Agnes,” she croaked, trying to sit up.

Agnes said, “Ssh,” and gently pushed her back against her pillows. Then she held her very close, and kissed her.

“I'm so glad you came,” said Lily. “When did you come?”

“First time, about three o'clock this morning. Ned drove me up here. I looked in on you but you were totally out of it, so I went home and came back again.”

Lily reached out and took hold of Agnes's hands. She wanted to say something, but her throat was so sore and she was all filled up with tears.

“It's okay,” said Agnes. “I talked to the doctors and they said that you're going to be fine. Minor burns, bruising, smoke inhalation. Your hair's a bit singed. But nothing worse than that.”

“What about Tasha and Sammy?”

“No news so far. The police have called in the FBI.”

“Already?” Lily tried to sit up again, but she started coughing again, and had to lie back.

“It's procedure, apparently, whenever young children go missing.”

“My God, if those men have hurt them . . .”

“I'm sure they haven't, Lily. I'm sure they won't. The police think that Jeff has probably taken them.”

“They were going to burn me alive. They said they were going to burn me like a witch.”

“I know. But you're going to be okay, sweetheart. The doctor said that you should be able to go home in a couple days.”

Lily pressed her oxygen mask against her face and took half a dozen deep breaths. Then she said, “Is Jeff not at home?”

Agnes shook her head. “He hasn't been seen for over a week. He left his job without saying anything to anyone, and the police say that his mother hasn't seen him since the end of September.”

“Oh, God.”

Lily lay back and all she could do was look at Agnes and hold her hands. Agnes was five years younger than she was, just twenty-nine years old, but her serious face and her brown eyes and her wavy brunette hair always made her look more mature. Lily had always thought that there was something of the Catholic saint about her.

The nurse came in, a plump girl with unnaturally rosy cheeks. “You're awake, then, Ms. Blake! I'll check your vitals and then you can have some breakfast.”

“I'd like to see a mirror,” said Lily.

The nurse looked at Agnes warily. “I don't know if you ought to, just yet.”

“Please,” coughed Lily.

Agnes opened her pocketbook and produced a small compact mirror. Lily peered into it and saw a swollen, reddened face, glistening with lidocaine gel. One eye was purple and almost completely closed. Her eyebrows were shriveled and the hair on the left-hand side of her head was prickly, like a burned sweeping-brush. She stared at herself for a long time, saying nothing. The truth was, she could hardly believe that it was her.

“Your burns are only superficial,” flustered the nurse. “Doctor Perlstein says you won't have any facial scarring.”

Lily nodded. “That's good.” She handed the mirror back. “Not quite ready for mascara, though, am I?”

“Lily . . .” said Agnes.

“It's all right,” Lily insisted. “I didn't die, and I'm going to get my children back.”

Agnes picked up a manila envelope and opened it for her. “I brought you this,” she said. “I thought it might give you some hope.”

It was a color photograph of Tasha and Sammy taken in the summer when they had spent a week with Agnes and Ned in Wayzata. They were sitting on the swing in the backyard, surrounded by roses. Sammy had his left eye squinched up against the sunshine. Tasha was throwing her head back and laughing. Lily looked at it for a moment and her eyes suddenly filled up with tears.

“I'll get them back,” she said, and she was quaking with emotion. “I don't care what it takes, I'll get them back. And those men who took them, they're going to burn in hell.”

Early that afternoon, Special Agents Rylance and Kellogg came into her room and stood beside her bed with their hands in their pockets. Special Agent Rylance was the older of the two, with a gray comb-over and dark pouches under his eyes and suspicious-looking stains on his yellow satin necktie, while Special Agent Kellogg was young and thin-faced and edgy, with a slicked-back pompadour and sideburns that made him look curiously dated, as if he had stepped out of a high-school prom in 1965 for a cigarette and unexpectedly found himself in the twenty-first century.

Already there were more than a dozen get-well cards beside Lily's bed, and it seemed as if the nurses were bringing in fresh flowers every few minutes. Agent Rylance picked up one of the cards and read it. “Best wishes from Bennie and Fiona and Bill and all at Concord Realty. God be with you.”

He put down the card and said, “Doctors said you could have been barbecued, Mrs. Blake. You sure lucked out there.”

“Luck had nothing to do with it,” Lily coughed. “I was trying to survive.”

Special Agent Kellogg said, “The police pretty much filled us in on the problems that you've been experiencing with your ex-husband—the custody battle, all of that. But did he ever give you any indication at all that he might be thinking of kidnapping your kids, or trying to harm you?”

Lily cleared her throat. “Never. I mean, Jeff always had a temper. But he was childish, you know, rather than vicious. He slammed doors and shouted and broke things. He never hit me. Most of the time, whenever he got really angry, he just stormed out of the house.”

“These two men who took your kids . . . do you have any idea at all as to who they might have been? Like, did your ex-husband ever mention that he was joining one of those fathers' action groups?”

“No. Jeff isn't really a joiner. He wouldn't even join a car pool.”

“The thing is, Mrs. Blake, the way your children were taken and the harm that was done to you, we've come across several similar instances of this before, most of them in Minnesota and Wisconsin and Illinois, Children being kidnapped and their mothers being ritually burned to death.”

Special Agent Rylance said, “We've been trying to track down these sickos for three and a half years now. We believe they belong to an organization calling itself Fathers' League Against Mothers' Evil—FLAME for short.”

“I still can't believe that Jeff would want to see me dead. I mean, he's very emotional, very unstable, but I don't think he's capable of killing the mother of his own children.”

“The police said that one of the guys who attacked you accused you of having an affair.” He opened his notebook and squinted at it, as if he was having trouble reading his own writing. “A Robert Dane—is that right?”

“Sure. Robert and I dated a few times. He works for the Neighborhood Revitalization Program and that's how we met. But it's never been anything serious. I've never brought him home and Tasha and Sammy don't even know about him.”

“Would your ex-husband be jealous if he found out that you were seeing another man?”

“I don't know. Maybe. He always used to say that I'd never find anybody else to replace him.”

“Okay,” said Special Agent Rylance. “I'm just trying to get a hook on the guy.”

Lily took a few more inhalations of oxygen. Then she said, “I'd never bring Jeff down. When he and I were first married, everything was wonderful. We were so happy that I could hardly believe it was true.”

“So what went wrong?”

“Money, mostly. When I met him, Jeff had a really great job at 3M, in the IT division. We saved up and bought a three-bedroom starter house in Bloomington and when Jeff was promoted we moved to West Calhoun—to the house I'm living in now. It was pretty dilapidated when we first moved in, but we started to fix it up and we were hoping to sell it in a few years and upgrade nearer to Lake Harriet.”

“But then Jeff lost his job?”

“Not exactly, 3M merged two of its divisions and Jeff was sidelined. All of a sudden he had a smaller staff and much less money and no real prospects of promotion. He had a blazing argument with the CEO and he quit. He thought he could walk straight into another high-flying job, someplace else. But of course he was that much older and the marketplace was crowded with young whiz kids. He ended up doing computer maintenance for a small company in Richfield.”

“So things got financially tight?”

“For a while. But then my friend Margaret Allison found me a job at Concord Realty. I loved the job. I
still
love it. I was only there for six months before I was promoted to area sales manager. By the end of the first year I was earning three times what Jeff was bringing home.” She shrugged, and then she said, “I guess that made him feel less of a man.”

“So that's when the marital disagreements started?”

“First of all we had endless petty arguments about stupid things like what we were going to eat for dinner, and what color we were going to paint the den. Jeff used to say, “Why bother asking me? You're the one who pays for it all.” Then our personal life started to suffer. You know. After a while we couldn't stay in the same room together for five minutes without having some kind of a row.”

“When was the last time you heard from him?” asked Special Agent Kellogg.

“Two months ago. It was Sammy's birthday and he asked if he could come round and give him a present. I said absolutely no.”

“How so? That seems like a pretty reasonable request.”

“Well, you'd think so, wouldn't you? But I let him come round to Tasha's birthday party last April, and he went crazy. He ended up pulling the tablecloth and all the birthday food ended up on the floor.”

“I see.”

The nurse came in and told Lily that it was time for her meds.

“Okay,” said Special Agent Rylance. “We'll leave you in peace. But let me just ask you this: was there any place that your ex-husband ever talked about as being like a sanctuary? Someplace that he had good memories of, where he might possibly take the children to bring back some of his happier times?”

“If he had a place like that, he never told me about it. He was born and raised here in Minneapolis. Went to school here, got his first job here. Maybe his mother might know.”

“We'll ask her. She's next on our list.”

Lily said, “You are going to find my children, aren't you?”

“Mrs. Blake, the FBI's child abduction investigation center is the best in the world. We'll find them for you, and that's a promise.”

Agnes came back in. She sat on the edge of Lily's bed and stroked her arm.

“Maybe we should say a prayer,” she said.

But Lily said, “No. I'm only going to say a prayer when I find them.”

“Is there anything else I can do?”

Lily thought for a moment and then said, “Yes, there is. Go find some scissors for me, and a razor.”

“What?”

“Scissors, and a razor. They're bound to have some in the hospital store. I want you to shave off what's left of my hair.”

Lily sat up in bed with a towel wrapped around her neck while Agnes carefully shaved her head. She kept her eyes closed while the warm soapy water ran down her face and the back of her neck, and said nothing at all, so that there was no sound but the chiming of the hospital paging system in the corridor outside and the soft persistent scratching of the razor.