The Twenty-Three 3 (Promise Falls) (27 page)

FORTY-FOUR

THERE
had been a lot of screaming and yelling before things had quieted down the previous evening. Celeste had been yelling at Dwayne to explain how Cal had come to be tied up in the garage. Dwayne was shouting back that he had no idea. Cal had cried “Bullshit!” on that. Then Celeste turned her anger on her brother, shouting that he had very likely broken her husband’s leg when Cal went at him with the two-by-four.

And then Crystal had started screaming hysterically at no one in particular.

At that point, Cal moved to calm her. He tried to bring the girl into his arms, but she was reluctant at first, standing rigidly, arms tight to her body. He knelt down next to her, spoke softly to her, but not before telling Celeste and Dwayne to go into the house.

“Don’t think about hightailing it out of here,” Cal had warned his brother-in-law. “Because I’ll find you, and when I do, I’m gonna be mad.”

Dwayne had said nothing as he retreated from the garage. But
as he and his wife headed back toward the house, they could be heard arguing again.

“I’m okay,” Cal had told Crystal. “I really am. I’ve got a bump on the head, but otherwise I’m fine.”

“There wouldn’t be anybody to look after me till my dad gets here,” she said, “if you were dead.”

“I’m not dead.” He’d put his hands on her upper arms, squeezed. “I’m sorry you had to see all that. You’ve been through enough.”

“I heard the phone.”

Cal smiled. “You saved me.”

“Celeste phoned you, but I heard it. Dwayne said he didn’t hear anything, but I was sure. He was lying.”

“Yes, he was lying.”

“Are you going to kill him?”

Cal had shaken his head. “I don’t think so.”

“But you might.”

He was reminded that Crystal was not good at detecting irony or sarcasm. “I will definitely not kill him.”

“Because I’m okay with it if you do.”

“Celeste would be very upset with me.” He’d given her shoulders another squeeze. “You were there for me. I don’t know what might have happened if you hadn’t found me.”

Crystal had moved into his arms, put hers around him. “I love you,” she’d said.

Other than Crystal, no one had had any sleep by the time the sun came up.

Dwayne had finally come clean on what was going on. His friend Harry at the printing operation—a guy he had, years ago, gone to high school with—was part of a gang that was ripping off electronics stores. They’d stolen from parked trucks and broken into several stores over the last eighteen months and had acquired a lot of product.

Harry said they were starting to worry the police might be onto them, and they needed a few places to hide the merchandise. Harry knew that Dwayne wasn’t making much money these days, what with the town canceling many of his paving contracts, so he approached him. “Hide this stuff for us,” he said, “and we’ll give you a thousand bucks.”

Dwayne wrestled with it for a while. He convinced himself he wasn’t really doing anything wrong. He hadn’t stolen the goods. He wasn’t in on any of that. He hadn’t planned it, he hadn’t driven the truck, and he hadn’t broken into any places. All he was doing now was hanging on to some stuff for a friend. He told himself he didn’t really know for sure where it had come from. Harry could have been making up a wild story just to sound more important.

Sure.

So he started hiding stuff for Harry. He’d been doing it for the better part of a month. Celeste wasn’t sure whether to be horrified or relieved. At least she knew now that when her husband was gone at odd hours, he wasn’t having an affair.

Although, if you got caught sleeping with another woman, you weren’t likely to end up in jail.

When Cal guessed correctly that something was going on in the garage, Dwayne panicked. Once he’d knocked him out, he didn’t know what else to do but tie him up and hide him in the garage until he figured out his next step.

He was on the phone with Harry, trying to come up with a plan, when Crystal appeared, determined to find Cal.

“What was Harry’s plan?” Cal asked.

Dwayne was hesitant. “We hadn’t really come up with anything.”

“Was Harry’s plan to kill me?”

Dwayne, who was sitting across the kitchen table from Cal, holding an ice pack to his thigh, couldn’t look his brother-in-law in the eye. “There was no way I’d let that happen.
No way.
”

“But Harry put it out there.”

“And I shut it down.”

“Oh my God,” Celeste said, pacing the kitchen floor. “How can this be happening? How is it possible? What the hell were you thinking?”

“I know,” Dwayne said sheepishly. “I fucked up.”

“Fucked up?” Celeste said. “Is that what you’d call this? A fuckup? A fuckup is when you back the truck into the mailbox. This—I don’t even know what to call this—this is a
catastrophe
. How could you have gotten us into this? This is my
brother
! You actually discussed with this asshole the idea of killing my brother!”

“I told you, that never would have happened.”

“What if Harry decided if you wouldn’t be part of it? He’d just do it anyway?”

Dwayne looked blankly at his wife.

Cal said, “What if Harry decided you were as much a liability as me?”

That made him blink. “No. I mean, we go back. Harry and me go way back.”

Cal sighed. Celeste was about to light into her husband again, but her brother raised a calming hand. “We’re going to figure this out.”

“Figure it out?” she said. “How? By you laying charges against my husband? Because if I was you, that’s what I’d be thinking of doing. I’d want to send this son of a bitch to jail—that’s what I’d want to do.” But then her face began to crumple. “But tell me you’re not going to do that.”

Cal slowly shook his head. “I’m not going to do that.” He looked at Dwayne. “But that doesn’t mean you still couldn’t end up in prison. You’ve got a garage filled with stolen merchandise. You need to get rid of it.”

“I can’t just do that.”

“Why not?” Celeste asked.

“Are you kidding? Harry and his buddies expect to get it back when they think it’s safe. And there’s the matter of the money. They’ve paid me to do a job.”

“How much?” Celeste asked.

“So far, nineteen hundred.”

“So give it back.”

Dwayne lowered his eyes. “It’s already all gone.”

Cal was very quiet. Thinking.

Celeste said, “What are we going to do, Cal? What the hell are we going to do?”

He said to his brother-in-law, “Call Harry. Set up a meeting. Tell him we want to do a return.”

FORTY-FIVE

SAMANTHA
Worthington had taken the call Thursday afternoon while working at the Laundromat. It was someone in the prosecutor’s office in Boston, who’d been involved in the trial against Brandon.

“He’s on the loose,” the woman said. “During a hospital visit to see his mother. He got away. Thought you should know.”

The first thing Sam did, after going into the bathroom to throw up, was call the owner of the Laundromat and tell him she was gone. Right then, right now. She was walking out the door and she didn’t know when she would be back.

Didn’t even lock up. There were three customers in the middle of doing their laundry. Clothes agitating in washers, spinning round in dryers. Sam walked out the back door, got in her car, and headed straight for her son’s school.

Classes would have been over in another ten minutes, but Sam felt there was no time to spare. Her ex-husband had escaped the night before. That gave him plenty of time to get to Promise Falls. Granted, he might have a few challenges in that regard. He’d have
to find transportation. He’d have to get out of the Boston area without being seen.

But what if he had someone helping him? Ed Noble was in jail, but maybe another one of Brandon’s idiotic friends had stepped into the breach. Maybe he was in Promise Falls already. Maybe he was waiting for her at her house.

She parked illegally at the school’s main entrance, went to the office, and said she had to pull Carl out now.

The office secretary said, “The bell will be going in just seven minutes, Ms. Worthington, so—”

“Now!”

Carl was dismissed from his class and showed up in the office two minutes later. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“Get in the car,” she said.

By the time they were almost home, she’d told him what she knew. They had to get out of town before his father got there.

“How do we even know he’s coming?” Carl asked.

“Are you kidding me?” his mother said. “After all the shit his parents pulled? What do you think he’s going to do? Go to Disneyland?”

But she couldn’t shake the fear that he might already be in the house. Carl had an idea.

“Drop me off a block away,” he said. “I’ll sneak up and peek in the windows and see if he’s there.”

Sam didn’t want to put her son in a risky situation. “Not a chance.”

“I can
do
it,” he said. “I’ve done it before.”

“What?”

“Like, one time—you won’t get mad, okay?”

Sam, with some reluctance, said, “Okay.”

“I found this dead cat on the road. It had been hit by a car, but it hadn’t been split open or anything, and me and my friends wanted to have a closer look at it, you know? So we put it in a bag, but then no one else wanted to take it home and they wanted me to do it, so I
said okay, but I knew you’d freak out if you saw me come into the house with a bag filled with a dead cat, so before I came in, I peeked in the windows and saw you were in the kitchen, which gave me just enough time to get in the front door and up to my room.”

Sam was speechless.

“Anyway, I had it for like a day in my closet and it was starting to smell, so I put it in the garbage.”

Sam was going to ask Carl just when this had happened, then decided it did not matter.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll let you out here. I’m going to sit in the car, right here in this spot. You go find out if he’s in the house.”

Carl bolted from the car and almost instantly disappeared, ducking between houses half a block from their place.

Four minutes went by. Then six. Sam was starting to worry. The kid wasn’t as smart as he thought. Brandon must have been in the house and had spotted him. Grabbed him. Now she had to decide whether to call the police or—

Carl opened the passenger door, jumped in. “All clear,” he said.

Sam gave him his marching orders. Pack a bag, fast. She’d dig out the camping supplies. She’d find that cheap Styrofoam cooler and dump food from the fridge into it. They’d raid the cupboard for other stuff, then throw everything into the car as quickly as possible.

One of the last things she put into the car was the pump-action shotgun.

You just never knew.

She’d wrapped it up in a blanket, placed it on the floor of the backseat, the barrel propped up on the hump. She’d put three shells in the chamber, pulled the fore-end back to cock the hammer and load a shell, moved the slide back forward. All she’d have to do was pull the trigger.

“Do
not
touch that,” she told Carl.

Just before hitting the road, she went to a bank machine and took out five hundred. Her daily maximum withdrawal, but it wouldn’t have mattered if she’d been allowed to take out more.
Once she’d made the withdrawal, all that was left was thirty-four bucks.

She headed north to Lake Luzerne. It wouldn’t take long to get to Camp Sunrise. Brandon knew she and Carl still went on camping trips, but she was pretty sure he didn’t know the name of their favorite campsite.

But when she got there, the place was fully booked. The kid in the booth suggested they try Call of the Loon Acres. There might still be some vacant campsites if they moved fast.

They got the second-to-last spot.

She and Carl pitched the tent, brought in their sleeping bags, set up the Coleman stove on their picnic table. If you were going to hide out, you might as well have some fun doing it. This, at least, was a hideout Sam could afford. She had enough cash to stay here for a week or more. They’d live on the food they’d taken from the house, and when that ran out, they’d hit a local grocery store.

No restaurants, no fast-food joints. Too expensive. Sam didn’t know how long they’d have to stay here. She figured the police would be out in force looking for Brandon and would have him back behind bars before too long.

Sam parked her car around the back of the tent. She hadn’t wanted to keep the shotgun in the tent with her. Didn’t want to take that kind of risk with Carl in there. But she had left it on the backseat of the car, the blanket no longer wrapped around it, but covering it loosely. So, if need be, she could run to the car, open the back door, and have that shotgun in hand in seconds.

She felt bad about David.

Carl had asked her, “Are you going to call him?”

She wanted to. But hadn’t she involved him enough in her problems? David had already rescued Carl from Ed. Did she want him having to rescue them from Brandon? Shouldn’t she be able to handle her own shit?

The truth was, David was better off without her. Samantha Worthington, she told herself, was bad news.

About as bad as it got.

By the time they’d set themselves up at Call of the Loon—seriously, how did they come up with
that
?—it was something of a moot point. There was almost no cell service there. And Sam was starting to think she was safer with the phone turned off completely. She didn’t want anyone triangulating her position. Not that Brandon was likely to have the means to do that, but who knew? Maybe he had a friend somewhere who could do something like that.

Not worth taking the chance.

So now it was Sunday morning. They’d spent three nights sleeping in this tent, and the novelty was wearing off. The first couple of days had been, considering everything, fun. They’d gone on some hikes, seen a deer, if not a loon. The park bordered on the lake, and while it was still too early in the year to swim—the water was freezing—they’d wandered out onto the docks, skipped some stones.

But the night before, as they were bunking down for the night, Carl had said, “Can we go back tomorrow?”

“I don’t know.”

“This has been fun, but I don’t want to do it anymore. I want to go back. I want to see my friends. I want to see Ethan. I want to be in school Tuesday. I don’t know what I missed on Friday. I’m going to have to catch up. If we’re gone for lots of days, I’m going to get way behind and then I won’t get into the next grade.”

“I don’t know if it’s safe to go back. Tell you what. Tomorrow, we’ll take a ride someplace where we get cell reception, and I’ll make a call. See if the police have found your father.”

“Would it be so bad?” he’d asked.

“Would what be so bad?”

“If he found us?”

She could hardly believe what he was asking.

“Your father—and I’m sorry to say this—is a convicted criminal, Carl. He robbed a bank. He knocked someone out in the hospital. He’s a bad, bad person.”

Carl had thought about that. “I know.”

“And now he’s an
escaped
convict. A person like that is pretty desperate. There’s no telling what he might do.”

“But doesn’t Dad love me?” Carl had asked.

Sam had felt the tears welling up in her eyes. “Yes, he loves you. For all his faults, he loves you.”

“He never beat me or anything.”

“I know. He never did that.”

“If he was a really bad man, he’d have beat me. And you. Did he ever beat you?”

Sam hadn’t wanted to get into the times Brandon had scared the hell out of her. Had he ever actually, deliberately hurt her? There was that time he’d knocked the speaker off the shelf and it had landed on her foot, but he couldn’t have known that would happen. But he’d shaken a fist at her more than once. She’d seen him start to take a swing, then stop himself.

She knew he had it in him.

“Go to sleep,” she’d finally said.

They both slept well. Sam looked at her watch, saw that it was nearly nine. Carl was still sleeping soundly. She got dressed, laced up her shoes, then slowly raised the front flap zipper without waking her son. Sam slipped out, stood, did some stretches. Sleeping on the ground was not all it was cracked up to be. The truth was, she wanted to be home as much as Carl did.

She fired up the Coleman, filled a small pot with water from a nearby tap. Some of the other guests had mentioned something about the water in Promise Falls being contaminated. Maybe getting out of town had its benefits.

She put the pot on the stove. She spooned out some instant coffee from a jar of Nescafé into a paper cup. Once the water was boiling, she’d pour it in. It wasn’t exactly Starbucks, but it would have to do.

Sam filled the cup, tossed the rest of the boiling water onto the dirt, turned off the flame on the stove. She blew on the coffee, then took a tentative sip.

“Ahh,” she said.

“You always did like your cup of joe in the morning.”

The voice came from behind her. She whirled around so quickly she dropped the coffee onto the ground.

“Hi,” said Brandon. “It’s great to see you, Sam.”