You're Next (36 page)

The first thought to break through Mike’s delirious relief was that Dodge and William had found her and forced her to call.
He didn’t know what he was saying, but in between the rush of his words and the thrum of his thoughts he registered his wife’s
replies: ‘Yes, I’m alive. I’m alive. I’m right here, babe.’

And: ‘—need you. Need you here. I’m so scared.’

And: ‘No, no one’s got me. I’m safe. Laid out, sore as hell, and I smell like a nursing home, but I’m safe.’

His brain finally caught up to what was happening, sounding a single clarion note over the din of their voices:
She’s alive.

She was sobbing, her voice cracked and aching. ‘—was terrified when I woke up yesterday. Thought you were—’

She’s alive.

And: ‘—almost twenty-four hours to get my voice working. I had Shep’s number, the one you gave to me back—’

Alive
.

And: ‘No, I haven’t called anyone. They told me my father’s been on a scorched-earth campaign to find me, but I knew to wait,
to only talk to you. Shep told me some crazy stuff – an Indian tribe? – and that no one can know where I am. That you guys
are on the run.’

Her next question brought him crashing back into his body, stilling the background buzz of his own words. It sent him into
a kind of reverse shock, his senses heightened to a painful clarity.

She asked, again, ‘How’s my baby?’

There was nothing but pure, raw sensation. The plastic bumps of the steering wheel digging into the meat of his fingers. Windshield
condensation blurring the edges of the yellow sign of Hank’s motel up ahead. The wrinkles of his shirt forming ridges against
his lower back.

Mike cleared his throat, hard. ‘Shep . . . Shep didn’t tell you?’

‘Tell me what?’ All the warmth had gone from her voice.

He forced out the words. ‘I had to leave her.’

‘Leave her?
Leave
her? How long ago?’

Five days, fourteen hours, and seventeen minutes.

He said brusquely, ‘Couple of days.’

‘
Days
? Did you say . . .’

‘Annabel, I promise you—’

‘Have you checked on her?’

‘I . . . I couldn’t. I can’t. There were—’

‘She’s been alone? Without you?’ Her words deteriorated into something unintelligible. Her breath came in loud puffs across
the receiver. ‘You
know
she’s okay, though? Right now?’

He heard himself hesitate a beat too long. ‘. . . Yes.’

‘No.’ Her voice had turned fragile, tiny, pleading. ‘Uh-uh. No. Where is she?’

Shep said, ‘Um . . .’

Mike had forgotten they were on a three-way call. The sound of his wife’s voice had overwhelmed all other considerations,
but Shep’s interjection knocked him back to harsh reality.

He said, ‘I can’t . . . I can’t tell you.’

Annabel was breathing hard, maybe hyperventilating. In the background he heard the beep of a cardiac monitor. ‘What does that
mean
?’ she said.

‘You’re on a hospital phone,’ he said.

‘I can’t
walk
yet, Mike.’ Her tone had gone flat. ‘Where else would I be?’

‘They’re still looking for us. And you. They came after you
once to get to me and Kat. We don’t know if they’re monitoring your line right now. I can’t tell you over this phone.’

‘
Where’s my daughter?
’

‘They could be listening. Right now.’

‘Does Shep know where she is?’

‘No one knows.’

‘Except you.’

‘I’m getting her tomorrow, Annabel. We’re almost out of this. We are one step from nailing them and starting to put our lives
back together. Hours away, honey.
Hours
.’

She was crying again, hopelessly. He imagined her, injured and bed-bound in a strange room, pumped full of drugs and terror.

Without registering it he had pulled in to a parking space by Hank’s door and set the car in park. ‘I will pick her up tomorrow,’
he said, ‘and bring her to you.’

‘Please just tell me where she . . . that she’s . . .’

He summoned all of his strength to harden his heart to her.

Not a husband
.

‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Everything will be okay.’

‘I need to know.’ Her words, drawn out through sobs. ‘I just need to hear my baby’s voice.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I love you.’

He snapped the phone shut. ‘I’m sorry,’ he told it. ‘I’m sorry I’m sorry.’ Heat rolled up from his neck into his face, and
he punched the steering wheel. Once, twice, three times. His knuckles screamed.

He sat panting.
Hours away
, he reminded himself.
Hours
.

Annabel was alive. Impossibly, he had even more at stake now.

He grabbed the gray envelope and hurried across the parking lot to Hank’s room. When he knocked on the door, Hank called out,
‘Yeah, come in.’

The door was unlocked. Mike pushed in, the room led to by a brief hall. It was dark, lit only by the laptop, which sat open
on the tiny desk, throwing off a lavender swirl of screen saver. Hank
sat on the bed, facing away, his shoulders slumped. ‘Yeah, come in,’ Hank said again. The screen saver threw dappled light
across half of his body before the glow shifted to the ceiling.

Mike stopped at the verge of the room, felt the smile bloom on his face. ‘We did it, Hank.’

A meow came out of the dark, and Hank’s fat tabby oozed from the blackness to rub against Mike’s leg. It sat on his foot and
began assiduously licking its front paw.

Mike held up the envelope. ‘It’s all right here.’

The screen saver kept on, mapping blocks of light on the far wall, the lampshade, Mike’s shoes. A section of warped floorboards
flashed into sight ahead. A trail of tiny paw prints, rendered in smeared black, led from around the side of the bed to the
cat at Mike’s feet.

Icy horripilation moved up Mike’s arms, crawling across the back of his shoulders.

He dropped the envelope, reaching for the .357 tucked into his jeans. The envelope slapped the floorboards, and the cat started,
scampering off, leaving fresh prints of blood.

Mike brought the revolver up, aiming, pivoting to take in the half dark around him. Across the room Hank sat as still as marble,
facing away. Only then did Mike see the microcassette recorder on the comforter beside him. Hank’s voice issued again from
the tiny speakers: ‘
Yeah, come in
.’

Mike put his back to the wall, barely hearing his thoughts above the roar of blood in his head. A faint rustle came from the
unlit bathroom between him and the front door. He was pinned in the brief hall. Inching forward into the room, he charted
a trembling course toward a corner. The screen saver kept on with its disco alteration, bringing the walls and ceiling to
life, making them bulge and contract like lungs. In the watery light, he noted the Ethernet cord trailing from the back of
the laptop to the outlet beneath the desk, and he knew with fierce, distraught conviction that they’d tracked Hank to the
motel when he’d logged in.

The cat bolted back into view, a whisper against the dust ruffle, and Mike started, a quick movement matching him in the space
beside the curtains. He pivoted ninety degrees and pulled the trigger, the muzzle flash lighting the wall mirror already spiderwebbing
around the bullet hole.

Too late he heard something whistling through the air behind him, and then the warped floorboards rushed up and hit him in
the face.

Janine, the oldest, kept a cocoon on a twig in a giant pickle jar, which Ms Wilder set on the ledge above the kitchen radiator
in hopes of warming the chrysalis to fruition. Before every meal the girls watched it for signs of life. Traditions, though
few and plain, were adhered to with rigor.

Kat slept in the fourth bedroom on a mattress laid between two bunk beds. She slept fitfully, and by the time she did drift
off, she was trampled during the morning bathroom stampede. The other girls were neither nice nor cruel, though in some ways
their indifference was worse. As if Kat were no more than another in a long line of undistinguished bodies that had rotated
under this roof, no different from the countless that had predated her and the countless more that would arrive to displace
her. She slept curled up like a puppy and smoothed out the top sheet before breakfast in a semblance of making a bed. She
realized that she was doing her best to leave no imprint behind.

Most of the girls were swept off to school, and Kat cherished the relative quiet brought by the days. She sat in the family
room, watching Ms Wilder through the kitchen doorway, shifting to keep her in sight as she moved to the stove or the little
letter desk to pay her bills. Finally Ms Wilder looked over at her and said, ‘Honey, you’d better find something to do afore
your eyeballs fall out,’ and Kat had skulked over to the bay window, plopped herself down, and stared at the road, reparsing
her father’s last words to her, searching out hidden meanings and nuance.

You’ll think I won’t know how great you turned out.

There were so many gaps and spaces, and it was too late to ask him to fill them in.

You need to be tough. Your life is at stake. No one can know anything about you
.

She was Katherine Smith from San Diego – they’d been there a few times for SeaWorld and Legoland, and she could describe the
smell of the mist coming off the ocean. But so far no one had asked, not even Ms Wilder.

I will come back for you
.

Nothing uncertain about that. Was there?

Staring at the occasional passing car, she strained her mind but couldn’t remember if her father had said anything about
when
he’d come back. Two weeks? Two years? When she was a teenager?

Kerry Ann, the three-year-old, was tattooing Kat’s knee with a drumstick. Kat brought the drumstick over to a broken xylophone
and tried to play her the Orphan Annie song she’d practiced a lifetime ago with her piano teacher, but she couldn’t get it
right, and besides, Kerry Ann was distracted chasing the cat.

When everyone got home from school, Kat tried to disappear into the walls. She sat at the bay window as the girls stormed
around with their backpacks and hair bunchies and rambling stories. Her scalp itched from the chemical treatment; she had
been pleasantly surprised that no one had made fun of her when Ms Wilder had combed the gunk through her hair on the first
night. They’d all been there before.

Janine took note of Kat staring at the street and halted. She was pretty in a bug-eyed sort of way.

‘Don’t waste your time,’ she said.

‘He’s coming,’ Kat said. ‘He swore it to me.’

Janine pushed out her bottom lip with her tongue and applied a bright swath of lipstick. ‘You’ll learn,’ she said, and pranced
over to join the cluster of girls at the pickle jar.

Their conversation washed over her, but she barely heard.

‘Maybe it’s a monarch.’

‘Ms Wilder says it’s the wrong season.’

‘Oh, ’cuz Ms Wilder knows everything?’

‘She knows more than you.’

‘There are lots of kinds of butterflies. Besides, monarchs are too Halloweeny. I hope it’s yellow instead of orange and black.’

‘Just as long as it’s not a ugly
moth
.’

It was as if Kat were underwater, the voices warped and distant. She pressed her nose to the glass. There was just her and
the street and a caught-in-her-throat prayer that her father would show up with a stolen car and a smile.

During dinner Kat did everything not to cry. She chewed and swallowed, forcing food through the stricture of her throat. She
tried not to meet anyone’s gaze, because she knew if she did, she’d break and start crying and then that’s who she’d be forever
after: Katherine Smith, the Girl Who Cried at Dinner. So she directed her gaze at the twig and the cocoon. As the girls rose
to clear – her job was silverware – she saw it pulse once.

That secret got her through after-dinner chores and teeth brushing. When she prepared for bed, she saw that one of the girls
had stepped on her pillow with dirty feet. A dark smudge right in the middle. She padded down the hall. Ms Wilder was in the
family room with the older girls, watching a
Hannah Montana
rerun – Jackson pouring cereal from the box into his mouth, half of it making it in.

‘Sorry to be trouble,’ Kat said, ‘but can I have . . .? My pillowcase is dirty. Can I have another one?’

A few of the girls tittered, and Kat’s face grew hot.

Ms Wilder said, ‘Honey, what we got is what we got.’

They turned their focus back to the TV. Kat stood there feeling stupid.

Ms Wilder said, ‘Something else?’

‘I . . . Do I get to go to school?’

Ms Wilder said, ‘We’re working on that.’

‘I wouldn’t complain if I was you,’ Janine offered. ‘Not about
school
.’

As Kat passed the kitchen, she peered in at the cocoon and saw a seam where it had cracked. She went back to bed with her
heart pounding and flipped the pillow over so it was clean side up.

Lying there, she stared up at the bunks towering on either side of her. The younger girls were all asleep – Emilia even snored
some – but Kat couldn’t so much as close her eyes. Sometime later she heard the TV zap off with a crackle, and there were
footsteps and creaks and doors closing, and then there was nothing but the hum of the radiator.

Kat lay as long as she could and then slipped out and tiptoed into the kitchen. The cocoon was laid open, curled on the twig
like a dead leaf, but she couldn’t see the butterfly anywhere. Slowly, it dawned on her that it wasn’t a butterfly at all,
that what she’d mistaken for a fat bulge on the twig was really a newborn moth.

It was brown and fuzzy and very ordinary.

She thought about the pet lizard she’d wanted to keep and forgotten in the truck and how her dad had brought it in at night
and how it had slid stiffly around in the jar. Before she’d really considered it, she had the pickle jar under her arm and
was creeping out into the backyard, the night snaking up her sleeves and pajama legs and raising goose bumps. Pulled tight
to the fence was a parked cop car, which made her feel safer even though there was no one inside. At the back of the lot,
beyond the play structures, rose a line of thinning trees, and Kat couldn’t help but think about how much lusher the ones
were that lined her own backyard.

She remembered her father’s words –
I will come back for you –
but she couldn’t remember his expression when he’d said it, and she realized that soon she might not remember his face at
all. And then the words might blur, too – what he’d said and what
she thought she remembered – and it hit her with horror that one day, one day she’d really
become
Katherine Smith of San Diego.

He’s coming
, she told herself.
He swore it.

She looked down at the pickle jar, her little secret that no one else had seen, the girls’ sneers returning:
Just as long as it’s not a ugly
moth.

It had spread its wings against the glass, and even here across the road from the streetlights she could see the tiny patterns,
beige against chestnut, like a masterfully inlaid floor.

She thought about the disappointment and cackling that would ensue once the girls discovered that their butterfly was a common
moth, and she ran her thumb across the sharp spots on the lid where breathing holes had been gouged with a screwdriver or
a knife.

You’ll learn
.

With a savage twist, she removed the lid and held the jar aloft. The moth hesitated there on the side of the glass, and then
it flicked once and cleared the mouth of the jar. She watched it jerk its way around the nearest tree trunk, rising, rising,
and finally losing itself against the pitchblack sky.

No more than twenty feet away, among the trunks of the trees, an orange dot flared to life.

She froze, zeroing in on the point of light, suddenly aware of the silence, her isolation, the charcoal air that had blanketed
the shadows at the edge of the yard. The faintest crackle of burning paper rose above the evening hum.

A cigarette.

Now gone.

Suddenly sweating, one uneasy foot half set down on dirt, she squinted at the grainy air beneath the dip of the branch, unable
to discern much in the gathered darkness by the trunk. Whoever was there, she had come right up on him. Her breathing had
gone all jerky.

The ember burned back to life, illuminating a sliver of face – edge of chin, cheek, temple. And a uniform collar. A police
uniform. The man went with the cop car. She didn’t recognize his face and didn’t know what he was doing there in the dark.

No one can know anything about you
.

The cherry died, the face vanishing back into the deep dusk.

Kat took a quick step toward the house, her sandal catching on a bulge in the asphalt. ‘Oh.’ She laughed nervously, trying
for casual. ‘I didn’t see you for a long time.’

A voice came at her from the darkness, calm and low. ‘Longer than you think.’

The words froze her.

‘It’s okay, sweetie. I’m a cop. I patrol this area. Make sure everyone’s safe. You’re new here, right? What’s your name?’

She forced her mouth to work. ‘Katherine Smith.’ She managed a polite smile and took a step back, and then another.

‘Now, smile pretty.’ A camera flash blinded her.

She turned and broke for the house, breath firing her lungs. Something in the act of running stoked the terror, and she sprinted
blindly, with abandon, her ankles throbbing, her chest burning. The trail up to her lawn, fifty yards away, might as well
have been a mile. When she reached the rear door, she stopped, panting, and finally risked a look back. The yard was still.

An instant later the cop car roared to life at the curb. It pulled out, its headlights strafing the fence and casting a swath
of broken light across the now-empty space between the tree trunks.