Last to Know (26 page)

Only I know the pathway through those brambles leading up the hill to the well, not that far really, perhaps five hundred yards, but it’s a secret kept for years now. No ordinance map has ever shown the well’s location, no local has ever so much as mentioned its existence. There’s a small lean-to erected long ago, someone’s dream vision of escaping the real world: merely a stunted walled-in mud-brick room, roofed in bamboo, laced with branches and leaves. In one corner I have provided a bucket for the necessary relieving of nature’s call. Not that I cared, I just didn’t want to have to play the heroic rescuer wading through filth.

I rolled Diz off the cart onto the floor then bound his hands in front of him with a strong piece of vine I had previously cut from the undergrowth. A second length secured his ankles, more loosely though, so he might make it across to the bucket without having to be carried. I was avoiding carrying him not because of his weight, which was meager, but because he might smell me, recognize me the way an animal does. For good measure, I tied his thighs together. Now I was sure he could not move.

I stepped back, took a look at my handiwork, went to the corner where I had stashed the coil of rope, took it and threaded it around his neck, securing it with one of those seafaring knots Boy Scouts are sometimes taught, to get their badge. This one was better than that though. I had practiced long enough to make certain I knew what I was doing.

So, there I had Diz, on the earthen floor, propped against the mud wall, rope around neck, chin drooping on his chest, tethered arms sticking out in front of him, thighs strapped, ankles bound.

I was in complete control of his future.

50

It was later that Rose realized Diz was not in his room. A hungry eleven-year-old always showed up in time for meals, or anything in between, but not this evening. She went onto the deck and yelled his name, noting that the small boat was still at the jetty. Diz was not allowed to take the boat out alone without first asking permission and telling them exactly where he was going, and why.

She went back inside and got the big brass handbell then stood on the deck, clanging until her ears ached, but still Diz did not appear at his usual fast trot from around the corner, or from the woods, or a walk to the village to get a smoothie. He’d told them Tweedies made the best ever and his father told him they’d been doing it like that since he was a kid and he prayed they would never change the recipe.

Still, Rose felt sure Diz had not gone there today because he would have had to ask her for money since he’d already spent his allowance on fishing lures and a video of punk rockers so loud she’d had to ask him to use his earphones so the rest of the house wouldn’t be deafened.

She stopped ringing the bell and had pushed the sleeves of her red T-shirt up her arms, staring, a little worried, at the lake. Then she heard a car crunch up the sandy road and swing to a stop. Thinking it must be Diz, that someone had given him a lift back from the village, and that she was gonna have to give him hell for going there alone, without asking her, she ran round the side of the house and saw Harry’s dark green Jag.

Harry was in love with Mal but it didn’t stop his heart from giving a little lurch when he spotted Rose, standing forlornly under the trees in her too-large white shorts that drooped to her lovely knees, and her breasts rounded at the V of her red tee, with her long brown curly hair floating sideways in the sudden breeze that rattled boats against jetties and soughed in the treetops like wind in a fairy story. Beyond the white clapboard house, the lake was suddenly all silver sparkle, reminding Harry of Christmas ornaments. The only thing that spoiled this image was the despairing droop to lovely Rose’s shoulders.

Squeeze stuck his head out of the car window and Rose went and tickled his ears, though even now she couldn’t help thinking it would be nicer to be tickling cute Harry Jordan’s ears, set flat against his head, but of course that was an irrelevant thought. She was a married woman and Harry had a gorgeous girlfriend. Rose knew she was gorgeous because she had seen her on TV.

Harry got out of the car and gave her a hug that lingered only fractionally too long. There was, they both knew, a little something between them, that frisson of electricity which, notwithstanding other obligations, other loves, other lives, would always be there. Another time, another place perhaps something could have happened, but, Rose told herself firmly, not now. And with what she had going on with Wally and the family she had other things to think about.

“I don’t suppose you spotted Diz on your way through the village?” she asked, stepping back.

“No, I didn’t.” Harry opened the door for the dog and it bounded out in one long solid leap. “Like a bird in flight,” Harry marveled, laughing as Squeeze, freed, ran madly round.

“Kicking up his heels.” Rose smiled. “I guess if Diz is out there, Squeeze’ll find him.”

Any thoughts about Rose as a woman fled from Harry’s mind and he became a cop again; he wasn’t that worried; boys were boys and Diz might be up to anything, but with proximity to the lake there was always concern.

He’d also caught the flicker of concern beneath Rose’s quiet words. “You really don’t know where Diz is?”

She lifted a shoulder in a helpless shrug. “Y’know, he just went out for a walk, I guess. He had his binoculars. He hasn’t taken the boat—I mean, he wouldn’t anyway without asking permission. Wally never lets any of our kids go out on the lake alone.” She half smiled, remembering something Diz had said. “Whenever Diz got fed up and threatened to leave, he’d say he’d go and live on the island with the badgers. I told him they didn’t have fries or chocolate there so he always reconsidered.”

“Where did he pick to run away to instead?”

“Nowhere, actually.” Rose frowned, trying to think. “Diz is not the kind of boy to run away. He kind of likes it here at home, even with Wally and … well, everything that went down. He was ‘supportive.’” Her eyes met Harry’s anxious ones. “In fact, just the other night he said to me, it’s you and me alone here, Mom, I’m gonna take care of you.”

“Obviously you’ve been calling him, he’d have heard the bell.”

“He always comes for that, he knows it means suppertime.”

“Then I think we’d better go look for him.”

Harry called Squeeze, who galloped from the bushes and skidded to a stop, then sat, head tilted, eyes fixed on Harry, awaiting instructions. Squeeze had no official training as a search dog; it was simply a natural instinct in him and he had worked many disaster scenes, sniffing out victims.

Rose went to salvage one of Diz’s as yet unwashed T-shirts from the laundry room, then gave it to the dog to sniff. Then she put on sneakers and she and Harry followed the dog as it took them on a narrow trail framed in brambles ripe with berries, dark with juice. Behind them the hill buzzed with cicadas; in front of them the lake gleamed gray as the dusk. The dog stopped here and there but Harry could tell it had no lead. It was getting dark and his concern was rising.

He said, “We’d better go back and get help.”

Rose closed her eyes and gave a horrified little gasp. “You don’t mean … you can’t think something might have happened to him?”

Harry put an arm around her shoulders and said as confidently as he could, “I’m not thinking anything yet, Rose, only that your boy should be home and he’s not. It’s getting dark and we need to get up a search party. He might have fallen, he could have broken a leg, lost his way.”

Back at the house Harry got on the phone to the local police station. A search party was hastily organized, firemen arrived in their truck, sheriffs in black-and-whites, surprised neighbors asked what was going on, offering immediate help; another search party was organized from the village. Within an hour the now-dark woods were being systematically combed for any sign of Diz.

Wally came home, and Roman and the twins. Rose was trying to keep the panic out of her voice when she told them what was going on. They immediately went out to help, calling for Diz, searching the sandy shore road, flashlights gleaming into the undergrowth.

Then local TV arrived with a sympathetic young man, and Rose, frantic, went on camera holding up a picture of Diz and asking anyone who might have seen him to contact the sheriff’s office.

Wally and the twins stood beside her. “He’s just a lost boy,” Wally said simply. “Please help us try to find him.”

The hearts of those watching went out to them. All except for one. Actually two, because at that moment Diz was unconscious and unaware he had been kidnapped. He was not even able yet to think about where he was. Or what might happen to him.

51

Mal was still jet-lagged, hungover, and exhausted but she was feeling good. When she’d kissed Harry goodbye at Boston’s Logan air terminal, she’d watched him climb into the unmarked police car that met him, driven by Detective Rossetti, of course, and in which she, a mere civilian, was not allowed to ride. She regretted leaving Harry but the endless-seeming flight from Paris in economy, because that was the way Harry traveled, had left her creased, cramped, and with freezing feet. Where did all that icy air that swept around one’s legs come from when the rest of the plane’s air felt like warm mush. They didn’t even have those small round buttons you used to be able to twist in your direction anymore; now “air” on a plane was universal: you got what they gave you.

She had not even envied Harry his police car; the limo that had met her felt pretty good. As did the shower later, clothes stripped en route to the bathroom, hair and skin soaking up water like a sponge, even the shampoo that got in her eyes was okay. Dried off, wrapped in her best robe—gray plush, old and baby-soft, wet hair flapping round her shoulders, a glass of Napa Sauvignon Blanc in hand, complete with two ice cubes just the way she liked it—not something she would ever do in front of wine purists but Mal liked her beverages with an edge of chill—she slumped on the sofa, opened her iMac, and Googled Bea Havnel.

Instantly, Bea was looking straight at her with those unafraid blue eyes: calm, composed, almost regal in her bearing. Harry was right, this was no shrinking violet; Mal could swear the woman was enjoying the media attention, the notoriety even, which obviously she was confident she would shake off. Her very stance seemed to invite the watcher to dare to accuse her, this lovely gentle young woman, of any crime, other than being present when her mother burned to death with a knife in her eye, and being there when Jemima Forester was found with her throat cut. “Unfortunate circumstances,” as Mike Leverage had no doubt said. Mal thought he was right.

Wondering what Rose Osborne felt about all this, she Googled her too, but there was nothing.

She switched on the TV news. And there was Rose with Wally, standing on her porch, telling some young media guy with a microphone that her son had gone missing.

Mal sat up and took notice.

“His name is Diz,” Rose was saying, holding up his photograph for the camera. “He went fishing earlier and we have not seen him since. We feared an accident but Diz is an excellent swimmer and he knows Evening Lake well.”

“Does that mean you think your son might have been abducted?”

The reporter stuck the mike closer to Rose’s face and she took a nervous step back, grabbing her husband’s hand. Her white gypsy blouse slid off her shoulder and she pushed her long dark hair impatiently away as she hitched it back up. She had on old paint-stained jeans and flip-flops. Mal thought that it was probably the first time ever that Rose looked her age, as well as very worried. And very “womanly,” Mal thought, remembering Harry’s closeness to her.

Mal tried to get Harry on the phone but he didn’t answer. She left a message. “What else can fate have in store for this lovely woman? Have you tracked down the boy? Please, Harry, let me know.”

Harry’s response a couple of minutes later was terse. One word. “No.”

Mal knew not to push it and went back to her glass of wine, and to watch the news. She had been going to fix a tuna sandwich but suddenly was no longer hungry.

*   *   *

Harry and Rossetti were driving along the shore road with Squeeze in the back of the BMW, head sticking out the window, sniffing and making the yelping noises that, being a malamute, were his personal form of excited communication.

“We could use him as a tracker dog,” Rossetti said.

“I think we’re gonna need one,” Harry said. Rose had called him with the news Diz was missing. He’d immediately gotten a squad car out there to organize a search.

“You told me to trust you,” she’d said. Accusingly, he’d thought.

“And you still must,” he said, though he had no idea of what might have happened to Diz. “We’ll find him,” he promised. “He probably just got lost in the hills, he might have tripped, broken an ankle.”

“He had his cell phone.”

“There are many places around Evening Lake with no reception; most likely Diz couldn’t use it. I know it’s ridiculous to tell you not to worry, Rose, of course your whole family must be worried. A search party is on its way and Rossetti and I will be there as soon as possible.”

“Why do you always call him Rossetti?” Rose asked, out of the blue.

“I can’t get around to thinking of him as a real person,” Harry said, grinning at his friend, who had slipped on the black quilted vest, hand-tailored, over his dark blue custom-made shirt and removed his pink-flowered Liberty silk tie. Now he unbuttoned his shirt at the neck. He was ready to go search the hills for the missing boy.

“We’ll be there soon,” Harry told Rose. “Just hang on, okay?”

“Better put sneakers on,” he told Rossetti, eyeing his shiny brown loafers. “We’re going walking.”

52

It had not escaped Harry’s notice that the man who knew the terrain better than anyone had not shown up to help search for the missing boy.

“Len Doutzer knows this place like the back of his hand.” He frowned at Rossetti. “Better, even. He strides these hills like he owns ’em, and it wouldn’t surprise me to find out he did, some of them anyway. Len is a mysterious character; I’m willing to bet if we search the land records we’ll find his name there.”