Harmless (17 page)

He had to check inside.
You never know
.

He stepped through the gouged doorway into a room smelling of urine and rot. The place was stripped of its original contents except for a thick stovepipe elbow joint that lay on the floor, like an old diver’s helmet calcifying at the bottom of a garbage-strewn sea. Sofa cushions, bottles, and disintegrating beer cases lay around the room, and derivative graffiti covered every surface, but the rotting party paraphernalia did not completely submerge the room’s older function as a bunkhouse. Grooves had been worn into the plaster by the missing bunks, the long straight lines topped
by scuffs and grease marks, a nocturnal record of exhausted sleep. He tried to imagine the loggers’ faces, their sharp expressions and defiant facial hair, the bug bites, welts, and bruises mottling their bodies—a collection of second sons of farmers or sons of landless men.

Alex would see the same picture differently. He’d see men gathering in the bunkhouse after a day of work for a game of cards and ball-busting, or a dozy reading session with one of the books and magazines they passed around. It was a life, a place to be every day, with dignity and the total absorption of labour.

Joseph stepped on something soft. A thin futon was sprawled on the floor, its surface a mandala of sweat and other bodily fluids. A pair of rusty handcuffs lay beside the mattress, one cuff gaping open like a trap. He felt the breath leave his body.

He backed away, but it was too late, the image was ripping through his mind: Franny, her neck and shoulders ringed with bite marks, chained to a piss-smelling mattress while some rat-faced man raped her, all of it captured on grainy video to be posted later for fellow devotees. He ran back outside hugging his sides, trying to draw breath, dire conclusions massing just beneath his consciousness, rising up like a pod of whales about to smash their way through the ice. He’d gotten everything wrong. Would the sight of him and Jane fucking really have sent the girls fleeing into the woods? Even if it had, why didn’t the girls just follow the path out to the highway when it got dark?

No, their journey into the woods spoke of intent. Of brute force.
Male
force.

The girls hadn’t run into the forest, they were carried in by Alex’s ex-soldiers, the lurkers at the woods’ edge. Good men once, now hollowed out by combat, driven to regain from the female body the power stolen from them by the horrors of war. Fantasizing wouldn’t be enough. They’d want total control, the power to debase, to break, to kill.

The scenario was too plausible to deny. Fleeing the scene of Joseph and Jane’s betrayal, the girls run into the vet, his combat-trained hands tensed behind his back, his friend hiding in the trees. The girls know not to speak to strange men, but the vet puts on a meek expression, telling them he’s hurt his leg. Can they lend him a hand? He just needs to use the phone. He even jokes about how he thought he’d end up as the coyotes’ second course—serial killers are said to be charming. The girls hesitate, but the man reminds Franny of a beggar she passes on her way to school. They go to him, and when Franny reaches out he locks her thin wrist in the vise of his hands and pins her to the ground while his partner cracks Rebecca in the jaw. The first man hits Franny when she struggles, twists her wrists until she begs him to stop. Yes, she’ll obey. The man likes that word:
obey
. He tells her to say it again. Yes, she’ll do anything, if he’ll just stop hurting her. The girls are carried off to a destination the police will never find, because the men have worked on their plan, supported it with alibis, a hideout, and a place to stash the bodies after the girls are used up. How long will that take? How many rounds do each of the men get with the victims?

The vomit shot from Joseph’s mouth into one of the firepits. Where was he when the men snatched her? Walking
back to the farm, or still rolling in the dirt with Jane? Franny’s cries should have pulled him out of his lust, out of space and time, and dropped him in the evildoers’ path, his flaming sword at the ready.

He staggered away and tripped over a root. The ground was soft, dead matter returning to dust—the mingled remains of leaves, coyotes, deer, birds, and bad fathers like him. He could see Franny’s face, first stricken with horror, then the blank acceptance as the men hurt her. How was it possible to contemplate his daughter’s violation without his mind shattering or his hair turning white? The world was letting him in on a horrible secret, that the real curse of being human is that you never stop thinking—even when you lose the most precious thing in your life, your mind keeps turning over ideas, making observations, your inner voice chattering like a prisoner handcuffed to your wrist. Even an animal forced to chew its own leg off to escape a trap is spared this torture.

“She can’t be dead,” he said to himself. “If she’s dead then I’m dead!”

Someone better take that into account. You
can
die of a broken heart; it had to be true, even if history argued otherwise, with its millions of survivors of wars and death camps and natural disasters.

“I’ll die. I will fucking die!”

Sobs rattled his lips but he fought them down. He slapped his own face, surprised he could inflict such sharp pain on himself. He had to focus. He forced himself to walk toward the road, ignoring the terrible images in his head, trying to see them as clouds passing, as the instructor had advised in
the one yoga class he’d attended, where he’d hoped to meet a different kind of woman or become a different type of man. The resolution didn’t last. Nothing did with him.

“Shut up!” he screamed. “Shut up!”

He was useless. Why, in this desperate hour, couldn’t he shut up and focus? He had things to do. The police would want him and Martha to do a press conference, appeal to the public for help—as if that had ever worked, as if child murderers would be swayed by his and Martha’s appeal to their morality and compassion. You wouldn’t get him in front of a bank of microphones. If a reporter pointed a camera at him he’d roll up his sleeve, tear off a strip of his own flesh, and hold it up for the perpetrators to see.
This is what you’ve done to me
, he’d say,
and this is what I’ll do to you when I find you
.

He slapped himself, harder this time. Alex was waiting. Alex had a plan. Alex had a gun. They’d find the girls, even if they were chained to a wall in a makeshift torture chamber. There was still time.

He made it to the logging road, the tears in his eyes blurring his flashlight beam into a yellow smear across a wet windshield.

“I’ll die if you take her,” he said. But he wouldn’t. He’d survive. He’d see her face reflected in store windows and in crowds on the subway, her memory tormenting him to the point of insanity. Then, one day, he’d notice a beautiful woman on the street or enjoy the taste of a hamburger or lose himself in the book he was reading, and he would fail Franny again.
We all betray our will to perfection
.

“Shut up!”

He fell to his knees and stayed there, waiting for the judgment—for lightning to strike or the earth to open up beneath him. He rolled onto his side, giving in to the sobs.

“What are you doing?” Alex’s voice was close.

“Leave me alone! I’m waiting.”

“For what?

“Leave me alone.” Let Alex figure it out for himself. “Go away!”

“Joseph, look at me! Look! I found something that belongs to Rebecca on the path!”

Alex stood triumphant, his right hand clenching a shiny bauble Joseph couldn’t see clearly. A residue of anxiety left Alex’s face as Joseph rose to his knees.

“It’s Rebecca’s,” Alex said, holding a dangling gold-and-purple earring aloft in a pocket of electric light, as if his arm was reaching into a better world, one of warm bright bedrooms and playfully garish jewellery. “I just found it!”

“Are you sure it’s hers?”

“Her favourite colour is purple.”

“Most girls choose purple as their favourite colour. I read that somewhere.”

Alex mashed the earring under his nose and inhaled. “You think I don’t know what my daughter’s perfume smells like?”

Of course Alex knew his daughter’s favourite scent. Joseph didn’t even know Franny’s favourite shampoo—he bought whatever was on sale. Was anyone surprised?

“Wait, I remember these. Rebecca bought them when we were in Toronto this spring.”

Joseph remembered the visit. The family came down to see a specialist about Liam’s asthma, and Jane invited him and Franny to meet for lunch in Chinatown. Joseph dropped Franny off at the restaurant, waiting until the last moment before telling her that he had to be somewhere, which may or may not have been true. Franny told him not to worry, she’d tell them he had an important meeting. He’d thought she was being a loyal daughter, but no, she just knew not to expect better from him.

“She liked the gold thread on the purple.” Alex brought the flashlight closer and illuminated the gold snaking around the purple glass, the Good Father following the golden twine through the Forest Perilous to find his lost daughter. And what was Joseph’s role? Pack horse? The flawed sidekick who sacrifices his life to complete the hero’s quest? He bit his lip, the pain focusing his attention. This was good news.

“It was lying on the path over there,” Alex said. “They must have passed this way.”

The story scanned, but he might as well have found one of Rebecca’s limbs for all the comfort it brought Joseph.

“You don’t believe me?” Alex stepped closer. Something in his voice, a vein of flint scraping against granite, made Joseph wince. “How else did it get here?”

“Okay, it’s her earring.” Joseph wasn’t arguing: bad men had forced Franny and Rebecca down the path to their lair, knocking free an earring on the way.

“The path we’ve been following eventually crosses a rural road,” Alex said. “It’s very isolated, but there are a few farms there, and the commune. The girls will reach that road soon.”

Joseph fought down a fresh wave of nausea. When the girls reached the commune it would all begin, the real nightmare.

“Alex, we both know the girls didn’t go down that path of their own volition. You know what I’m talking about.” He was afraid to look at Alex’s face. “The girls must have been abducted.”

He waited for the bolt of lightning. For Alex to contradict him. When he didn’t respond, Joseph risked a peek at his face. Alex was staring into the dark logging camp, his mouth drawn tight.

“You’ve known it all along,” Joseph said.

“I suspected. I told you I didn’t like the look of that guy.”

“There was more than one.” Joseph remembered: that brief glimpse of men in the woods when he was sitting at the fire.

“Probably. They’re on foot. They can’t have gotten very far.”

Joseph nodded. Thank God he wasn’t in this alone. “Fire the gun. Twice.”

“Why?”

“The signal. To tell Julian we need help.”

“He won’t hear it. Do you have any idea how far we are from the farm?”

Joseph didn’t want to admit that for all he knew the distance they’d covered could have been one mile or ten. “We have to get back. We’ll show the cops the earring. They’ve probably already sent out a search party.”

“Have they?” Alex stepped even closer, as if he were examining a defect on Joseph’s face.

“When we tell them what we know, the cops will call in everything they’ve got.” Joseph could see it—the men, with their paper coffee cups and flashlights, methodically combing the woods, the search dogs, the helicopters. “They’ll get a posse of volunteers. That’s how it works.”

“In the movies.”

“On the news.”

“So tell me, how long after the kids are reported missing does this
posse
show up?”

Okay, someone had to call the posse at home, and the posse would have to square things with dozens of bosses and wives. The posse had to make coffee and sandwiches.

“Listen to me, Joseph. They’ve cut the police budget three times since I moved up here.”

“Posses are free.”

“Liz already called, but nothing will happen until the cops are sure the girls are missing.”

“How much more proof do they need?”

“Not proof—
time
. It’s been four or five hours at most. With all the shit teenagers get up to around here, you think they’ll blow the summer budget on
that
?”

“We have to go to the police!”

Alex bent down and put his hand on Joseph’s shoulder, meeting him full on with his grave, searching eyes. Men did this in movies when the chips were down—now Joseph knew they did it in real life too. There was comfort in that.

“Of course you want to go to the cops,” Alex said. “And that’s just what those men want us to do. They know exactly how long it’ll take for the police to get organized, and by
then they’ll have covered their tracks. You think they’ve never done this before?”

Of course they had. These men fed on women’s pain and humiliation, survived on it. When one of them was caught, another took his place, as if the world demanded an annual offering of dead and broken women so the rest of us can live in peace. The odds against Franny being chosen for sacrifice must be a million to one, but someone had to win the lottery.

Alex squeezed his shoulder. “We should have gone into the woods as soon as we realized the girls were missing and left the others with their instructions. That’s what they wanted—someone to tell them what to do.”

He was right: what were all those stunned expressions around the campfire but the paralysis of indecision?

“We were afraid to take charge,” Alex said. “It’s the story of our fucking lives. Wait for somebody to act—the cops, the corporations, the politicians—then form a strong opinion about the actions. Listen, Joseph, we’re here
now
. We’re here and we know the girls are close.”

“But the cops, they know how to do this.”

“You see a search party?” Alex pointed his flashlight down the road and then up into the treetops. “Any helicopters?”

“What are you saying?” He needed to hear it said out loud.

“It’s up to us, Joseph. No one can help us find our daughters. No one can help us find those men.”