Drawn Into Darkness (11 page)

“Any for Amy?” Ned asked, hoping he already knew the answer.

Chad shook his head hard and turned away. His anger at Amy didn't run very deep, then. Good. Ned put the cushion back on the sofa where it belonged. With his back turned, it took him a moment to realize that his son's labored breathing had turned to sobs.

“Hey! Chad, it's okay.” Hurrying to him, Ned tried to put his arms around him.

Chad pulled away.

“Goddamn,” Ned complained, “let me be a good father for once in my life, would you?” He hugged his son, and this time Chad let his head rest on his father's shoulder, let Ned rub his quaking back with his dry old hands. “It'll be okay.”

“I don't see how.” Chad straightened and stood back.

Ned handed him a box of Kleenex, then headed to the kitchen and came back with two tall glasses of iced tea that might as well have been an energy drink, there was so much sugar in it. Good and proper Alabama sweet tea. He handed Chad his, and they both sat down. They sipped. Chad wasn't looking at him. Ned gave him some time to regroup.

After the minutes had passed, he started making small talk. How old were the twins now, how were they doing in school, what did they like to do outside of school? Pretty soon he had Chad facing him, telling him Kyle was building a skateboard ramp in the backyard and Kayla liked to draw those big-eyed pointy-faced Japanese cartoon pictures. He described Kayla as popular but running with the right kind of kids and Kyle as more individualistic, having a few good friends. Ned watched Chad's face become more relaxed, sometimes even smiling, as he talked. He was careful not to mention Amy, not yet. After a while he turned on the TV, and under pretense of watching tennis, he and Chad both napped, Ned in the recliner with Oliver on his lap, Chad on the sofa. Ned saw Chad nodding off, and smiled to himself; good. Chad had to be feeling less angry, less tense, if he could sleep. Ned allowed himself to doze from sheer weariness; he had worked the night before.

After they had snoozed the afternoon away, they went out for supper at a steak house. Ned encouraged Chad to have a beer, asked him about his job, talked baseball with him, and tried not to show quite how much Chad's presence meant to him. He knew what he had to do, and he wasn't looking forward to it.

He waited until they were back in the apartment and had found Chad the stuff he needed in order to spend the night on the sofa. He waited until they sat down again and were talking some more.

He started small. “Is Amy still working at that nursing home?”

“No.” Chad's tone turned curt, and watching his face, Ned thought of shutters closing over a window. “No, she doesn't have time for anything except trying to find our son.”

“That one time I met Amy, she seemed like a good woman,” Ned ventured.

“Good? She's so damn good I can't begin to keep up with her. She's dedicated her life to finding our son, and I—” Chad turned his face away, and his voice rasped. “Sometimes I hate myself, but I have got the shits of the whole thing.”

“Nothing wrong with that. However you feel is how you feel.”

“That's Zen, Dad,” said Chad sarcastically.

“Whatever. Are you and Amy getting along together at all?”

“No.”

“Sleeping together?”

“No.”

“Are you and she equally pissed at each other?”

“I—actually, no, I don't think she's really pissed, but she won't cut me a break either.”

“When's the last time you had some fun?”

“Fun?”

“Good time. Joy in life.”

“With Justin gone?”

“You want to move on, right? When's the last time you had a vacation?”

“Vacation? What's that?”

Ned ignored the sarcasm. “When's the last time you went someplace?”

“Back before—back when we still had Justin, we took the kids to Disney World.”

Ned refrained from snorting like a horse. “That's not what I mean. When's the last time you and Amy went someplace together? Just the two of you?”

Chad actually turned his head to look at him, a bit wide-eyed. “I don't recall ever doing that since the kids were born.”

“Well, it's high time you did.”

“We can't.”

“Why not?”

“We're broke. We can't afford it.”

Ned said, “You can't afford not to.”

“Dad, get real.”

“I am real. A trip to get you two started working things out would be a heck of a lot cheaper than a divorce.”

“I can't just take off work.”

“Why not? You already did. You're here, aren't you?”

“Well, I can't tear Amy away from her self-appointed job looking for Justin.”

“Have you asked her nicely?”

Chad rolled his eyes. “What does it matter? We can't just leave the kids.”

“Sure you can. Their grandpa will take care of them.” Then, as Chad gawked at him without apparent comprehension, Ned added, “Me.”

F
or me the day became a haze of hurry hurry hurry, trapped on a narrow serpentine of road in a jungle of dusky trees and things, whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, that bit. With my innards cramped by hunger, my skin in a mess of itchy lumps and bloody scratches, and Stoat a dark and evil goat-demon looming ever larger in my mind, I walked as fast as I could. Justin lagged a bit behind me. Given his longer legs and more resilient youth, this made no sense except in terms of ambivalence. He wasn't nearly as ready for his future, or as anxious to have one, as I was.

But there was nothing I could do about him except keep hustling and hoping for any kind of sanctuary or assistance. I had thought it would be simple to flag somebody down, but not a single vehicle had come our way since the dust-coated monstrosity of a pickup I had failed to alert. We had walked for several miles, yet I had not seen any human habitation, not even a trailer.

Sunlight slanted low through the moss and mistletoe of the treetops. If Stoat was not already on the hunt for us, he had come home from work by now and would be soon.

“Hey,” Justin said, breaking a long silence, “what do you think's back here? I mean, besides mosquitoes?”

I lifted my despairing stare from the ground and looked. By “back here” he referred to a very overgrown track heading off the dirt road. No sandy ruts, just wildflowers. Okay, weeds.

“I have no idea, but we're going to find out,” I said, immediately wading into the knee-high jungle. “Anything to get out of plain sight. Ow,” I added as I encountered a bull thistle. “Put your socks on.”

He did so and followed me. The grass and weeds, I noticed, looked bent or flattened where we had swished through them or stepped on them. I went back and whacked the verdure with my catalpa branch until I'd achieved a sort of parity, either flattening everything or making some of it spring back up. Justin picked a path forward while I walked backward, flailing away.

He started to laugh. “You look insane!”

“What makes you think I'm not?”

“Gimme the branch.” Interesting that he had managed to lose his own. “I'll do it.”

“Why? You want to look insane?” I had to smile as I handed him the catalpa branch.

“Just trying to lend a hand,” he said in a manly tone. Back turned, swinging his new weapon as I led the way, Justin called, “Watch for snakes, Miss Lee Anna.”

The “Miss,” I knew by now, was a Southern honorific, usually affectionate but sometimes patronizing.

“Just call me Lee,” I responded.

Typical of myself, I had chosen the oddest moment to decide that I did not want to be Liana the clinging vine ever again. Miss Lee of the Jungle, I stalked along, watching for snakes.

And seeing them. They sure grew big down here, all different kinds and colors, their thick coils pressing down the springy grass. Big and lazy, reluctant to relinquish the sun after too much chilling rain, they generally slipped away like water down a drain when I got close enough to really look at them. But a few played possum. One of these, a large but harmless gray and white oak snake, I grasped firmly around the middle, lifting it and taking possession of it.

I did this on impulse. When I was a little girl, I had often captured turtles, frogs, caterpillars, praying mantises, and, yes, snakes, to keep for a few hours, just long enough to get acquainted with them before I put them back where I had found them. My mother approved; she had helped me look up the various species in her twelve-volume nature encyclopedia. But my ex-husband, who didn't seem to like anything about nature, went postal if I so much as touched a hoppy-toad, vehemently insisting that I wash my hands at once, as if I were plotting to poison him with critter cooties. So I had been away from my truer self for a long time.

The oak snake came with me so docilely it felt almost as if he or she were welcoming me back. It tucked its head into the comforting cave of my shorts pocket, while the rest of it wrapped around my waist.

I walked on, and the next snake I saw, as if to restore antithesis to my life's dialectic, was a cottonmouth as thick as my arm, a snake only God the mother of us all could love. It reared its mud-colored head and gaped the puffy white lining of its mouth at me, threatening to use its fangs even though I stood a good ten feet away.

I called, “Justin, bring the stick, would you?”

He did, and by repeatedly swooshing the moccasin with its leafy end, he discomfited it enough so that it departed to find a more peaceful place. “Better stand still awhile till we're sure it's not coming at us,” he said.

We did stand still, and the late afternoon light cast long shadows, and I noticed that the grassy way through the swamp we had been following, the opening between trees barely worthy to be called a lane, had broadened into a wider clearing. Was it ending? If so, why?

Before I had realized what I should start looking for, Justin spotted it. “Hey! There's a little fishing cabin under the live oaks!”

“Where?” I saw nothing at first. When he pointed it out, I understood why. I would not have called it a cabin, or even a shack; it was barely a shanty. Its gray and splintered never-painted planks blended into the swamp woods and the shade of the live oaks that stooped over it. Judging by the weeds everywhere, no one lived here or had been here for some time. Although a rickety gray outhouse stood by, the place seemed barely habitable overnight. Very likely we would find rats in there, and mice, and maybe snakes. But for me, and I thought I could speak for Justin too, only one thing mattered: was there by any chance some food?

•   •   •

Maypop County sheriff's deputy Bernardo “Bernie” Morales caught the call regarding a suspicious stench at a rental property on the state road north. Maypop PD took calls only in town; the Sheriff's Office took care of the county, and what the Staters did, Bernie often wondered.

Bernie had responded to many such calls, and usually they involved dead fish left under the front steps as a prank. Without hurry, he drove to the address in his much-abused old cruiser, which in his birthplace—Chile, South America—would have been called by an insulting name insinuating that it was a latrine on wheels. Although he was the only Latino cop in Maypop County, Bernie did not think of himself as Hispanic, but rather as a Chileno citizen of the U.S.A. Like many of his friends in the Chilean army, after discharge Bernie had gone on a work visa to Orlando, Florida, kingdom of a cartoon mouse and many good jobs. His plan had been to save his money, go home to Chile, buy a taxi, and be rich. Instead, too many beautiful gringas had spent his money for him, until he had fallen in love with Tammy Lou Steverson.

Tammy Lou was just passing through Orlando. Her home, her family, her roots, were in Maypop, Florida. Bernie had moved there to court her, working for McDonald's until he had married her, and they had lived there ever since. An uncle of Tammy Lou's served as a deputy in the Sheriff's Office. As soon as Bernie had obtained his citizenship papers, he had begun to do likewise. Now a balding, slightly overweight man who could have passed for an Italian if it were not for his accent, Bernie had grown to love the job. It seldom bored him, and sometimes it gave him a chance to help someone.

Pulling off the road at the address he had been given, Bernie blinked and shook his head at the gaudiness of the small house's neon pink paint job. But the moment he opened his car door to get out, the odor that assaulted his nostrils took up all his attention. He frowned. This was no mere case of dead fish.

There was no need to draw a weapon, he decided; whatever had happened here was in the past tense. Still, it would be better, he decided, to enter the pink house some way other than by the front door, where the odor stank strongest and where, he noted, a package had been left in a plastic bag by the mail carrier who had called this in. Ducking under mimosa trees, he walked around back, stopping to stare at the Toyota parked out of sight of the road and out of place; what was it doing there?

He tried the kitchen door, unsurprised when the knob turned in his hand. In the Maypop area, most people locked the front door to let friends know they were not home, but left the back one unlocked in case somebody needed to get in.

Bernie entered. He did not pull his gun to point it various directions while yelling “Police!” He just walked in.

What he noticed first in the kitchen was how the things on the table—saltshakers, napkin holder, a pink pottery catchall bowl, bottles of stool softener and Tylenol and Tums—how everything stood exactly centered, like soldiers ranked along an imaginary line. Yet in the sink he saw a heap of dirty, messily stacked dishes with bugs and cobwebs on them. Cobwebs on dishes—that said something. The dishes looked slimy, and they stank.

But something else smelled far worse. Proceeding to the living room, Bernie found an unpleasantly dead dog on the carpet near the door. It looked like it had been a miniature dachshund, poor little thing, somebody's pet.

This was not good.

Bending over it, careful not to touch, Bernie counted three bullet wounds.

So where was the gun?

Standing up, Bernie took a look around the room. He saw no weapon. Which was not a surprise, because Bernie very much doubted that the woman who lived here had shot her own pet and left it lying on the carpet.

Still scanning the living room, Bernie noticed that all the books and magazines on the coffee table and the sofa's end table were stacked exactly on top of one another, corners aligned, according to size.

Also he saw from marks in the carpet that the furniture had been moved. Straightened.

He shook his head and went to investigate his doubts, checking out the bedroom. There he found an unmade bed. And in the bathroom, talcum powder covered everything like that north Florida rarity, a thin snowfall.

Bernie recalled the report: the mail carrier said a single woman named Liana Clymer, aka Liana Leppo, lived here. The flowery sheets in the bedroom, the cosmetics in the bathroom, and the Hello Kitty artwork on the walls tended to confirm this. The kitchen sink plus the bedroom and bathroom showed she didn't care much about keeping things orderly. So who had rearranged the kitchen table, straightened the furniture, and put the mail-order catalogs in tidy stacks?

An intruder?

The same intruder who had shot the dog?

A compulsively tidy person who had let the dog bleed to death on the carpet?

Shaking his head, Bernie started muttering to himself in Spanish, as he often did when something stank figuratively even more than literally. Where was the woman who was supposed to live here, and why had she left her dog to rot? He needed to contact her or someone who knew her.

Bernie roamed the small house, pulling out drawers and checking shelves, searching for more information. Old enough to remember how things used to be, Bernie missed address books, landline telephones with important numbers posted next to them, piles of snail mail. What he needed to find was the Clymer woman's cell phone or, better yet, her handbag with a cell phone in it.

He found neither purse nor phone.

Which caused him to say something particularly profane in Spanish, because what the hell was going on? The Clymer woman took her purse and went somewhere, but without her car, and leaving her dog dead on the floor?

Bernie had reached the point at which he should have left the scene, gone to file a Missing Persons report, and turned it over to the chief sheriff. What happened after that would be none of his business.

What was most likely to happen was nothing. This woman had no kin in Maypop to pressure for an investigation. It was no crime for adults to go missing.

Still swearing in his favorite language for that purpose, Bernie decided to fix one thing at least. He opened the front door, took what the mail carrier had left, and put it inside, so that it would not advertise the emptiness of the house. Then, not yet satisfied, Bernie headed back into the bedroom, where he had seen a laptop computer.

He booted it up, knees jiggling with guilty impatience as he sat on a chair that was too small for him. The laptop hummed into beaming compliance, requiring no password. Bernie invoked the Internet symbol, then the e-mail envelope. Again, no need for a password; it seemed Liana Clymer stayed logged on. Bernie searched her contacts list for people with the names Clymer or Leppo. There were several. He addressed a single e-mail to all of them, scowling as he struggled to compose a suitable message:

Hello family of Liana Clymer, aka Liana Leppo. This is Deputy Bernardo Morales of the Maypop County (Florida) Sheriff's Office contacting you. I have been alerted by a mail carrier that Liana seems to be missing from her residence. She seems to have been gone for several days as there is a dachshund dead of bullet wounds and decaying in her living room, her car is parked out of sight in the backyard, and her purse and car keys

Bernie stopped to think, then saved the draft, headed out into the backyard, and tried the Toyota's driver's side door. It was locked. Shading his face from the sun with his hands, he peered in through the window, then went around to the passenger side and tried again. He saw no keys in the ignition or anywhere else. Satisfied, he walked back into the pink house and resumed his e-mail.

purse and car keys are unaccounted for. I will file a Missing Under Suspicious Circumstances report but beyond that I have no duty or authority. It is not in my job description to write this e-mail but where I come from it would be considered the honorable thing to do. How you respond is of course your business and not mine.

Sincerely,

Deputy Bernardo Morales

He added the Sheriff's Office's phone number, complete with area code, paused to think again whether he might get in trouble about this, then shrugged and clicked Send. Tammy Lou, still after twenty years the love of his life, told him often that he had a bigger heart than any other man she had ever met. Bernie considered this meant he was a true Chileno. By sending the e-mail, he had maybe broken a rule, but before being a deputy of the sheriff he was first a caballero, a gentleman.