I&#39ll Be There (16 page)

But now there were new rules.

The boys couldn’t leave the room in the daytime. He didn’t want them out wandering around meeting people. And of course there would be no phone calls.

Places like the Liberty Motel didn’t have phones in the rooms any more, so it wasn’t like Clarence had to make that off-limits.

The world had gone cellular, and all that was left in room seven was the old phone jack on the far wall. Someone had spilled some kind of red sauce on the carpet and while it had mostly been
cleaned up, dried red spots speckled the phone jack and flecked the grey wall.

Sam found himself staring at the phone jack, imagining that he was some kind of bug that could climb inside the hole and disappear forever into another world and another life.

Since they weren’t allowed to go out when it was light, the two boys spent most of the day asleep. It took a few nights to adjust to staying up late and being let out at dusk. Once on the
street they’d go to the closest burger place and scrounge around for cold French fries and bun bits in the trash.

Clarence spent his time looking for small things worth money to finger. He’d unload them at their next stop, which would be a bigger town. He lifted a few wallets from a golfcourse
changing room. He helped an old lady put her groceries in her car and then followed her home from the market.

He took all of her jewellery when she left later in the day to play bridge. A simple broken glass pane on the back door, and he was in and out of her place in ten minutes. He took a Coke from
her refrigerator and was considerate enough to put the can in her recycling container before he left.

Discovering the traitors had centred him.

He’d been neglecting his duties. He was a thinker. That was for sure. And lately he’d done a lot of thinking about his boys.

And the snake smiled.

Emily sat in Bobby Ellis’s car, staring at the ramshackle house. It didn’t look like any place she would have imagined Sam and Riddle living.

The houses and apartments out off River Road were all rundown and in general disrepair, so not connecting the two brothers to a specific one had been a way of protecting her from their
reality.

But now it was staring her in the face.

Was he in there now? Were he and Riddle behind the faded old sheet that fluttered from the half-open, dirty window?

And what was worse – that he was there and hadn’t contacted her in all this time? Or that he was gone?

Bobby Ellis interrupted her thoughts. ‘Do you want to go knock on the door or something?’

Emily nodded.

Bobby looked at her. She seemed confused, but at least she wasn’t hating him, that much he could tell. ‘Do you want me to go with you?’

Emily shook her head and then opened the door and got out. She walked to the front door and knocked. No answer. She knocked again. No answer. Then her hand went to the knob and she slowly turned
it to the right. It wasn’t locked.

Emily respected rules and privacy. She wasn’t someone who was pushy and she didn’t consider herself aggressive. But she didn’t even hesitate. She simply pressed the door
forward and walked in.

Bobby was watching from the SUV. Now what was she doing? Was she going in?

Bad idea.

He was up and out of the car.

Inside was a mess. Someone had moved out fast and had made a point of trashing the place in the process. Emily stepped backward at the sight, bumping right into Bobby Ellis.

‘Oh, sorry.’

Bobby looked over her head into the room. ‘We shouldn’t be in here . . .’

But Emily was already moving forward on the ancient wall-to-wall carpeting, which was flattened into a dirty rust-coloured sheet of former synthetic fibres. She called out, ‘Hello . . . Is
anybody here?’

Silence. And then a sound came from the back of the house. Someone was there. Bobby put his hand out to stop her, but Emily kept going and he had no choice but to follow.

‘Sam? Riddle?’ She called out, but no one answered. She continued down the cramped little hallway.

Bobby Ellis was more than six feet tall and played football, but he wasn’t any kind of hero. And right now the last thing he wanted to do was violate Session law HB 0300, which, if he
remembered the code as his father had taught him when they went to the firing range together, stated,
It is unlawful to enter and remain upon private property without permission of the property
owner.

So what were they now doing?

Bobby followed Emily down a narrow hallway. The sound in the back room was louder now. Bobby wanted to run. He wanted to scream and run. He had watched way, way, way too many horror movies,
because he wanted to scream and run and hide.

But of course that wouldn’t look good. So he stayed right behind her.

She was angry now.

And it was the worst kind of anger, because it was at herself. Just the mention of the word
father
had changed Sam.

How could she have thought she knew him so well when she had not known him at all?

When she’d seen that look in his eyes, a look that had to be pain, how could she not have pressed him harder to explain his past? And to explain his present.

She moved towards the sound, calling out more urgently now. ‘Sam?’

They passed a dirty bathroom and a small bedroom, where a mattress was on the floor. At the end of the hall was another bedroom. And that’s where the sound was coming from. It was some
kind of thumping. Emily kept going towards the closed door.

Behind her, she could now hear Bobby Ellis breathing. She was both glad he was there and resentful that he was seeing all of this. She wanted him to leave and she wanted him to be there all at
the same time.

When she reached the closed door, she took the handle firmly and turned. She thought she could hear Bobby Ellis swallow. She opened the door, and the sound stopped. That’s when she saw the
two kittens.

There was an open window on the far wall, and they were leaping up, trying to return to the windowsill to get out. And from the look of things, they’d been at it for a while.

The room had stacks of paperback books in piles everywhere. Some looked like they’d been pulled straight from the trash; others looked as if they’d been in someone’s house for
decades. When the kittens jumped towards the window, they landed, most often, on the books, sending the piles to the floor.

Emily stepped around the books and went right for the scrawny little cats. She scooped them up, turning to Bobby, who had stayed in the doorway. ‘They look like they’re starving to
death . . .’

He had more pressing thoughts on his mind than scrawny kittens. ‘Emily, we really have to get out of here.’

That’s when she saw the sketch pad that her mother had given Riddle. It was in the corner under a plastic milk crate. Emily handed Bobby Ellis the two bony kittens, not listening as he
said, ‘I’m allergic to cats.’

She picked up the sketch pad and thumbed through the pages. It was Riddle’s work. But it was stuff she’d never seen before. Instead of drawing the electrical circuitry of a toaster
oven, these line drawings were all of food.

The kittens, wide-eyed with fear, now sat in the milk crate, which was positioned between Bobby and Emily in the front seat of the SUV. Bobby kept the windows down, doing his
best to minimise the fact that his eyes were feeling itchy and it was getting harder and harder to breathe.

Emily was on the phone talking to her mother. She had the sketch pad she’d taken from the room in her lap. Her eyes darted from the road to the crying kittens. She was explaining how Bobby
had taken a photo of a man, maybe their father, and how he had the license plate of a truck and how they’d gone to the place together and how they’d found something she called a riddle
book, which wasn’t what it looked like to him, but he wasn’t about to correct anything she said.

Because he wasn’t calling the shots, that was for sure.

He was the driver; he was along for the ride, and that would have to be enough for now. Up ahead, the light turned red and he put on the brake, easing to a stop. He glanced over at Emily’s
profile. The wind whipped her long hair back and forth in front of her face as she spoke to her mother.

She was so brave and so bold and so determined.

And he was mesmerised.

Emily’s parents met Bobby’s parents at the Black Angus Steak House where the two families discussed the events of the day. After dinner, the fathers went together
to the police station.

Emily wanted to go with them, but everyone felt that she’d had enough for one day. Plus the two kittens were at home.

Debbie had taken them in to the vet, and Emily was persuaded that she should be with the cats, since they’d been given antibiotics and were supposed to be watched.

Bobby told Emily he’d call her before he went to bed and give her an update from his side of things. They seemed to be in this together now.

When Bobby got home, he took a long, hot shower and silently thanked Jessica Pope, who had asked him to go with her to get a double mocha after school and had changed his life.

If Jessica hadn’t forced him into the lie about investigative work, he’d be watching the Cartoon Network right now, which was something he kept secret from even his closest friends.
He still liked little kids’ shows. And he still had daydreams that he was the most popular and interesting guy in high school.

And now those dreams seemed to be coming true.

Detective Darius Sanderson knew the Ellis family. So when Derrick Ellis and Tim Bell arrived, a front-desk officer took them straight back to Detective Sanderson’s
office.

The detective had on bright sweatpants and a multicoloured parka. An unlit cigar was in the corner of his mouth, which he chewed at night instead of smoked. Once he got started, he
couldn’t stop, so even though during the day he wouldn’t have had the nasty thing in the office, now it was wedged in between his back left molars, sticking out the side of his mouth
like a wet stick.

There weren’t many African Americans on the force in town, and Sanderson was conscious of the fact that he was often scrutinised in a different way than his white counterpart, Dave Wilson.
And now, with a late-night call that he’d been told was important, Sanderson wished that he wasn’t wearing running shoes when the two men were ushered into his office.

Sanderson got to his feet and shook their hands. He wanted to get this over with fast. With no need for small talk, he launched right in with, ‘So what do you have for me?’

After he’d heard the story, told mostly by Tim Bell, the detective settled deep into his seat.

Two minors. Neither in school. One showing signs of physical neglect. Single-parent father calling the shots. Kids seemed afraid of him. License plates that didn’t match a vehicle.
Abandoned house out on Needle Lane, which was the area where stolen property had spiked in the last three months. Vandalism to Tim Bell’s car.

Certainly there was a need to find these people and question them. And to help, there was a trail. A vehicle, a license plate, and a photo.

It was a nice package. After he said goodnight, Sanderson could have waited until the morning to go to work, but instead he took off his shoes, got himself a cup of coffee, and went online to
start the file.

By the time Tim Bell and Derrick Ellis shook hands on the sidewalk and promised to stay in touch, the picture Bobby Ellis had taken had been uploaded into the state law enforcement system and an
APB had been issued for the vehicle and the license plates.

They’d been in the Liberty Motel for ten days when Mrs Dairy, the old lady who changed the towels and emptied the wastebaskets, insisted that she had to do the carpets.
She claimed it was some kind of state law.

Sam, half-asleep, wondered if after all the things his father had done, he’d be arrested for not allowing a woman, who looked like she was over a hundred years old, to vacuum their dirty
motel room.

But instead of arguing, Clarence told the boys to get up, and they all filed out into the truck and let the ancient lady push around a red Hoover upright vacuum originally purchased in 1972.

Other people would have looked at Mrs Dairy’s life and seen sorrow and disappointment. But she refused to view it that way.

While it was true that her husband had left her early in their marriage with a disabled child and a stack of unpaid bills, she’d managed to get by. Her little Eddie had suffocated when he
was eight years old, after he’d climbed into an empty refrigerator that someone had left in a back alley. They had all kinds of warnings about doing that now. But Eddie had a heart problem
that couldn’t be fixed, so maybe it was all a blessing.

She liked to think so.

That’s why she went to St Jude’s. They dealt with the positive and with the life hereafter, and Mrs Dairy was looking forward to that. Plus the church was on the better side of town,
and they served cream and milk with their coffee after service, not dry non-dairy creamer. Her name was Mrs Dairy after all. She wasn’t going to shake a can of white powder into a hot
beverage.

She was now eighty-four and a half years old, which seemed like the time most people would have long ago retired. Still, she appreciated that she had a job at the Liberty. But her vision was no
longer that great, and the vacuum seemed to slam into the sides of things more with each passing day.

And on this morning, while Clarence and the two boys tried to fall back asleep in the truck, Mrs Dairy drove the vacuum straight into the corner floor lamp. It tipped over and crashed onto the
bedside table. There were pieces of cheap white milk glass now speckling the carpet, and Mrs Dairy got down on her knees to try to find the bigger shards.

That’s when she saw the green velvet box taped to the underside of the bed.

What the hell was that?

Thick duct tape was holding a small container to the wooden slat, and that just wasn’t right. Maybe there was some kind of explosive in that little box. And maybe terrorists were out there
who were going to blow up the Liberty Motel because of its name.