Lake Country (14 page)

The muffled yammer of the television was the first thing he heard as he approached the cabin. It wasn’t quite so amusing tonight.

He thought about trying to get a look through the east windows to see if he could get the lay of the land in there, but he didn’t care to break an ankle crawling around the piled, jagged rock apron in the dark. So he climbed the steps up to the porch, walked heavily across the pine boards, and announced himself in a loud, clear voice on his way through the front door:
It’s Mike, I’m coming in, don’t shoot my ass
.

The way it turned out, he didn’t have to worry.

Mike found Minnesota Public Enemy #1 passed out on the old leather couch by the fireplace, snoring
loudly over the cackle of an after-hours infomercial. He stopped with his hand on the latch and scanned the rest of the room. You could see the better part of the place from the entryway, the main room going maybe twenty by thirty feet corner to corner, opening up to the rail-lined half-story landing.

Every lamp was burning. Above the fireplace, a trophy walleye hung shellacked and gleaming in the yellow light, posed over an old cane fishing pole in a frozen mimic of its former glory. Most of the furniture sat around a large rag rug in the middle of the floor. There was a rough sideboard, some handmade shelves, a few other trophies mounted here and there on the walls. An old steamer trunk sat in one corner, an antique rocker in another.

No sign of the girl who belonged to the car outside. Only Darryl, sawing logs in the middle of it all.

Mike went over. Darryl was slouched half upright amid a scatter of empty beer cans and a spilled bag of Doritos, legs splayed in front of him, one hand resting on the .45 at his side. His unwashed hair stood up from his head in matted clumps. His mouth hung open. His stomach rose and fell. He sounded like a dump truck climbing a hill.

On the coffee table, Mike saw yet another fifth of Old Crow, this one already worn down to a couple inches in the bottom of the bottle. The bottle sat next to a yellowed stack of last season’s newspapers:
The Lake Country Herald—Voice of Brainerd/Baxter Vacation Land
.

On the floor beneath the coffee table sat Darryl’s rucksack, alongside a zipped gym bag. The gym bag Mike couldn’t remember seeing before, but he didn’t
need to look to know that he’d find Toby Lunden’s cash inside.

Jesus. Mike stepped forward. He leaned down into Darryl’s atmosphere, a noxious cloud of body odor and ethyl fumes, and slipped the gun from beneath his limp fingers.

There came an immediate hitch in Darryl’s snore. He closed his mouth, shifted position, and was silent a moment. Mike stood like stone and waited.

Slowly, Darryl’s mouth fell open again, and the snoring resumed.

For the first time all day, Mike felt relieved. He’d seen Darryl sleep like the dead for twenty-four hours after a bender, and by his rough calculations—thinking back over the past two or three days—this one would go down as a bender for the books.

Maybe all of this would go easier than he’d expected. He checked his watch. An hour and change before he had to call Hal.

Mike thumbed the safety catch on the .45, tucked the gun in the back of his waistband, and went to find the girl. He knew she couldn’t be far: The cabin was no more than a thousand square feet all told, twelve hundred square at the most. Downstairs there was the main room, a small farmhouse kitchen, one bedroom, and a mud porch in back. A varnished pine staircase led up to the loft, which had been divvied up into a pair of smaller bedrooms.

Mike followed a hunch up the creaking staircase and knew he’d guessed correctly. The door to the bedroom at the top of the stairs stood open, but the door to the second bedroom, across the landing, was closed.

On the floor near the second bedroom he saw the cordless DeWalt drill Hal kept in the boat shed with the rest of his away-from-home tools. On approach, Mike understood why the shed door had been standing open when he’d arrived:

Darryl had removed the latch and the padlock from the shed, brought the whole thing inside, and reinstalled it here, on the second bedroom door. Mike looked down and saw little piles of fresh sawdust from the drill holes in the door frame. No light showed through the crack at the bottom of the door.

He tapped the door softly with a knuckle and said, “Juliet?”

Nothing.

He tapped louder and said, “Juliet, my name is Mike. I’m a friend. Are you okay?”

Again, not a sound in reply. He pressed one ear against the door, plugged the other with a finger. He couldn’t hear anything apart from his own pulse, the sound of the television, and Darryl snoring away downstairs.

He imagined the Benson girl in there, cowering at his voice, holding her breath. Quiet as a mouse.

Or maybe she was sleeping, just like Darryl.

Or maybe there was some other reason she was quiet.

Mike didn’t want to overthink it. He stooped down and grabbed up the drill, still outfitted with the driver bit Darryl had used. To the closed door he said, “Juliet. I’m coming in to help you. Don’t be scared, okay?”

With that he went to work, zipping out the screws with six long pulls of the drill trigger. He caught the
screws one at a time in his palm, caught the assembly as it fell from the door frame. He set the drill and the hardware down on the floor, then stood and listened again. Still nothing. The snoring downstairs went on undisturbed.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m coming in now. It’s me, Mike. Don’t be scared.”

He pulled the door open slowly and stepped inside the darkened room. The moon shone in through the sash window, casting the room in lambent shapes and shadows. Mike reached in, found the light switch, and flipped it on.

For the next several moments he stood there, eyes adjusting to the sudden change in light, trying to make sense out of what he was seeing.

Then, without thinking about it, he said aloud to the empty room, “You’re fucking kidding me.”

Mike Barlowe had never been the smartest kid in class. He’d never been the dumbest, but he’d never been the smartest. He’d graduated high school somewhere in the back third of the pack, and instead of going to college or trade school, he’d gone to war.

But you didn’t need a degree in anything to be able to see how things had happened here. The tiny loft bedroom looked like a crime scene: wall-to-wall upheaval, smeared all over with signs of violence. Then, once the initial visual shock subsided, what first looked like grim chaos assembled itself into relatively simple order.

Either way, the room was empty.

He hadn’t tied her up, Darryl. A mark in the gentleman’s column there. Mike saw that he’d left her a big plastic water bottle on the nightstand to drink from, a galvanized bait bucket in the corner to pee in. All a girl needed.

To keep her leashed yet able to use the makeshift facilities if need arose, Darryl had tethered her to the bed by the ankle on eight feet of heavy-duty fish stringer—yet another item he’d have found in the canoe shed, along with the drill and the bait bucket.

Mike knew all of this because he could see the evidence Juliet Benson had left behind: the abandoned bindings; the bloody footprints zigzagging the bare wood floor; the bed shoved up against the wall beneath the open window; the sheet knotted securely to a spindle in the bed’s foot rail, trailing over the windowsill, disappearing from view.

He barely knew what the Benson girl looked like, apart from the photo they’d shown on the news, yet he could imagine her clearly in his mind: her predicament, her solution, the evident results. Standing there, surveying the state of the room, he might as well have been reviewing security-camera footage of her escape. He could see it all in his mind, every step of the way.

Certainly she would have been able to hear the television downstairs, even through the padlocked door. Which meant that at some point she’d have been able to hear the snoring begin, the same way Mike could hear it now.

Mike wondered how long she’d waited before working up her courage. He imagined her testing, calling out for attention first, just to be sure no attention would be paid. Of course Darryl hadn’t heard her, any more than he’d heard Mike honking the Power Wagon outside. And when no amount of hollering caused the snoring to stop—when at last she’d managed to satisfy herself that the coast was as clear as it was liable to get anytime soon—she’d gone to work.

The fish stringer was made of tough yellow nylon cord, with a steel ring on one end and a six-inch gill needle—about the diameter of a number-two pencil—on the other.

Darryl had secured one end of the cord to the girl and the other end to the bed, using a number of plastic zip ties. These Mike recognized from his own toolbox at home, left over from three months he’d spent doing installs for the cable company last spring.

The zip ties were a handy way to bundle up coaxial line. They were tough enough to batten a loose muffler on a 1992 two-door Buick Skylark indefinitely. They were good for all kinds of little jobs, really. Now that Mike thought of it, the zip ties were almost no different from the flex cuffs they’d used on captured Iraqi insurgents, once upon a time.

Mike had never seen anyone slip out of a pair of properly cinched flex cuffs, but Darryl had taken steps to ensure that Juliet Benson wouldn’t be the first. He’d used half a dozen of the things to lash the steel ring to her ankle.

On the other end of the cord, Darryl had used several more ties to splint the stringer needle tightly alongside another spindle in the foot rail. He’d wound the stringer cord tightly around the spindle, top to bottom, crimping off the cord with one last tie at the end.

Had it been Mike’s job to do, he might have fastened the cord to the iron bed frame instead of to the wooden foot rail, but that could have been hindsight on his part.

The practical fact was that this was a sturdy old bed, handmade from solid oak. Not like the new crap you could get for a price at the Furniture Barn. Kicking out one of these spindles with bare feet would have been a tall order for most anybody without a black belt in something, and Juliet Benson’s spindle
had been reinforced with 10-gauge steel and five-hundred-pound nylon. Bottom line: You wouldn’t have expected her to be going anywhere.

But the girl was smart.

Smart enough to shove the mattress off the bed, lift the box spring, and find exactly what she needed: a spare floorboard someone had thought to saw down and use as a bed slat.

For Juliet Benson’s purposes, a four-foot pry bar.

The slat now lay on the floor over by the night table, discarded near a parcel of thick dust where the bed had been. Looking at the bed in its new spot under the window, Mike could see the ragged wood splinters still caught in the ruined spindle holes, top and bottom, where she’d managed to pry out her binding post.

She’d taken the spindle with her to the cedar chest in the near corner, where she could sit down. Mike imagined her there, fixed in concentration, working the coils of stringer cord loose enough to expose the steel tip of the gill needle. It wouldn’t have been easy. She would have had to stay patient. Very patient.

But she’d gotten the job done. And now she’d made herself a new tool: a sort of improvised awl mounted on a ramming handle.

Crouching next to the cedar chest, examining the abandoned spindle like some primitive artifact, Mike decided that it was about as well suited an implement as she could have come up with under the circumstances.

Then again, this was where the blood started. And Mike could see how that must have happened too.

The zip ties wouldn’t have surrendered easily, and
she’d had five or six of them to go through. He saw her pushing against the restraints with the steel prong until her arms shook. He saw her slip and gouge herself, saw the tip of the gill needle digging furrows in her skin. He saw her stifle an outcry as the furrows welled up with blood. He saw her sitting there on the cedar chest with her fists clenched, biting back tears. Or at least he imagined it that way.

Then he imagined her pulling herself together, starting again. Working on each band one at a time.

How many times had she slipped before she was through?

It didn’t matter. The stringer, the bed spindle, and the severed zip ties now lay in a pile on the floor where she’d dropped them, a tangle of rope and sprung manacles. The bloody smears and bare heel prints charted her movements from there.

The window wasn’t actually open, Mike discovered. Darryl had fixed that for good measure. Mike could see the fresh screws toenailed into the bottom corners of the window, fastening the sash to the frame.

He also saw flakes of broken glass still caught in the bed quilt, now discarded in a pile on the floor. Mike imagined that she’d used the quilt as protection, or a sound baffle, or both.

Leaning out through the vacant opening into the cool, tangy night air, he could see wicked-looking shards of broken windowpane glinting amid the jagged rock below, just beyond the dangling end of the sheet.

She climbed down into that
, he thought.
Barefoot
. She wouldn’t have had any other choice.

Mike went downstairs. As he crossed the room, the programming on television cut away to a commercial for Buck Morningside Bail Bonds. Familiar as they were this time of night, Mike had to shake his head at the stroke of timing.

Sometimes it seemed like the universe had a sarcastic sense of humor. Sometimes it seemed like the universe could be kind of an asshole.

He went over to the couch, nudged Darryl with the side of his foot, and said, “Dude. Wake up.”

He might as well have been talking to Buck Morningside on the tube. Mike stepped around the coffee table and turned off the television so he could hear himself think. He came back and kicked Darryl in the leg. It was like kicking a side of beef. Mike kicked harder the second time. He raised his voice and said, “Wake up, man.”

Darryl was as stubborn asleep as he was awake.

Screw this
, Mike thought. He went upstairs, grabbed the bait bucket from the bedroom, brought it down with him. His knee had protested these stairs before, but Mike hardly felt it now. He took the bucket outside, filled it full of water from the hose bib around the side of the cabin. Two gallons, icy cold.