Project Cain (3 page)

It would be the last night I ever spent there.

The next day, they came for me.

And I would have to be tired and furious and confused in other places.

T
he day started out with me simply waiting in my house. Waiting and more waiting.

I called my dad’s various phones again. Still nothing.

So, late afternoon, I decided to walk to Mr. Eble’s house.

Mr. Eble had been my Humanities tutor for almost two years. Three hours a day, three days a week. Writing, lit, art, history, etc. I had another tutor for math and science. Eble had the whole ponytail, sandals, PhD-from-Brown thing going. Other than my dad, he was probably the smartest guy I’d ever met. I figured he’d have an idea of what I should do.

He lived maybe fifteen minutes away by car. He always drove, or rode his bike, to our house for tutoring, but my dad had driven me out there a couple of times to drop stuff off. So I knew exactly where he lived.

It took nearly two hours to get there.

As I walked, I tried imagining what was going on in all the houses I passed.

What LIES were being told in them even now?

They looked like normal houses, normal families. But so had my house the day before. What were the fathers and mothers in these
other
houses up to? What big secrets had
they
not revealed? All those unseen lives and plans and thoughts. All those lies.

Still, it was during this time that I was holding on to the possibility that my father was just, you know, messing with me. This was some kind of test. Or he’d had, maybe, a slight nervous breakdown of some kind. He’d been doing nothing but work for months now, twenty hours a day lately. Or . . .

But there really was no “Or.” No matter how hard I tried to make some sense over what he’d told me, over his big vanishing act, I just couldn’t do it. The whole thing, from a logical viewpoint, made no sense. The entire previous night remained outside the realm of reality.

I was hoping Mr. Eble would help me think it all through. But when I finally arrived, he wouldn’t even answer the stupid door. I knocked and waited forever in the sweltering sun. (Probably wasn’t even all that hot, and it’d probably been ten minutes. But I was in a place now where each and every moment felt like my whole body was just gonna explode from rage and chaos.)

Eventually his voice came out through the front window and told me to go home.

He’d been inside the whole time.

I was too angry to cry.

He said he couldn’t talk to me and that I should leave. He told me to please go away.

I told him I was freaked out. Scared. I told him that something bad had happened and that I needed to find my dad.

He just said: I’m sorry, Jeff.

That’s it. Not another word.

I’m sorry, Jeff.

This coming from the second smartest guy in the world.

It took me
three
hours to get home.

When I passed the same houses again, I imagined everyone inside screaming. Crying.

I imagined houses filled with secret rooms and dead people.

•  •  •

Much later I would learn my dad had fired Mr. Eble the day before.

Gone to his house and accused him of molesting me. Claimed Eble’d shown me all this porn and other weird stuff. It was all total bullshit. But my dad had threatened lawsuits and jail time. Said he’d spend his whole fortune and use all his big contacts to ruin Eble if he ever contacted me again.

You have to admit. My father had a plan.

•  •  •

The scientists at DSTI
also
had a plan.

And I watched that one unfold from the Reimers’  bushes.

The Reimers being our closest neighbors, and me being a big fan of cutting through their backyard to get to ours. Good thing. If I’d come home any other way, DSTI would have had me.

As I started past the bushes and over the short stone wall separating our yards, I noticed the two vans parked at the top of our driveway. And then I noticed the guys. All dressed in black, just like in the movies. Ninja Jason Bourne stuff. I knew instinctively and indisputably: They were not there to help me. In this, it seems, my dad had told me the truth. The NEW TRUTH. The one I was starting to finally believe.
How could I not?

I didn’t know 100% that they were from DSTI. But since my dad had warned me about them, I was a good 95%. I also wasn’t sure at first
if they’d come for me or my dad. My first thought, honestly, was that they’d come for my dad. That he was in some kinda trouble with whoever these guys were (DSTI or not) and that’s why he’d left. Maybe I was just kidding myself.
How to know for sure?

So I watched and waited. Hidden in the darkness between two bushes.

They used the basement door behind our house. Kept going in and out like a trail of ants. Emptying my whole house. Just straight up taking shit. I watched this for almost an hour.

It hadn’t occurred to me to set the house’s alarm system when I’d left. I now rationalized they would have just overridden it somehow anyway. They seemed like guys who knew exactly what they were doing. I thought I recognized one of them as one of the scientists from DSTI, but couldn’t be sure. It was dark and I kept far away.

When they finally left, I busted open the kitchen window to get back into my own home. Really pathetic. I was most definitely NOT a guy who knew exactly what he was doing. I knew only that I didn’t want to be too obvious and use one of the main doors or the garage. I knew I didn’t want to be seen. I used a two-by-four from behind the shed to pop the latch, and it worked just like I’d seen in a movie. That was less pathetic. Maybe there was some hope for me after all.

I figured I’d just wait it all out until Dad returned. (I still, falsely, believed this was a possibility.) What other options were there, really? Where was I gonna go?

Inside, I discovered they’d taken all the computers and all my dad’s office files. The ones from his MAIN office, not from the secret room. (Turns out they hadn’t found the secret room and didn’t even know
it was there.) They took our answering machine and emptied some old file cabinets from downstairs too. That made sense. My dad was obviously up to something involving DSTI and his work there. DSTI would want to confiscate all of that.

They ALSO, however, found and took the envelope with a thousand bucks. SHIT! I’d left it just lying there in my room, like an idiot. That was now totally gone. So stupid.

But they’d taken other things too, things that had nothing to do with me being stupid. Things that didn’t make any sense at first. Framed photos off the wall. The pictures of ME.
Only
the ones of me. And they’d also removed all my clothes. Just MY clothes again. Cleared out the closet and drawers in my room. Even went through the hamper and laundry room. They’d taken all my books, my classwork. Soccer trophies. Bass guitar.
Dark Knight
movie poster. My PS3. Skateboard in the garage. My toothbrush and zit pads. My bottle of allergy medication. They even stole Zeus, my bearded dragon. His cage and lamp and food and everything.

So, that night, it was just me and the shriveled corpse in the house. It didn’t even feel like my own house anymore. It felt more like a movie set, a prop. As if I could push on one of those walls in just the right way and the whole house would come down and reveal itself for what it was. Another lie.

In the darkness I stared out the window and into the neighborhood.

Tried unsuccessfully to ignore the imagined urgent sound of slow and constant scratching behind the wall of my dad’s secret room. Tried to tell myself that companies don’t
capture
people. That American businesses don’t break into homes and kidnap children.

But an unfamiliar car now sat at the end of my street.

And inside the car I could see them. Shadowed forms. Sitting. Watching back.

Two men left behind to wait for me.

Because of who I was. Because of
what
I was.

First they’d made my stuff disappear.

And now they were waiting for me.

•  •  •

They didn’t wait long.

I
stood outside my father’s secret room again.

The tiny hidden panel pushed aside, tiny brass key in hand. Ready to go in and
stay
in this time. Because inside, I would find answers. Right? I would just get on his laptops in there or maybe read his little collection of handwritten journals, and everything would make perfect sense. Right? I would know everything I needed to know.

WHERE
he was. And
WHO
he was.

And maybe a little more about
WHAT
and
WHY
 I was.

Right?

Believe me. I stood outside that room a long, long time.

But this time, my hesitation was not from fear of some shrunken dirty corpse waiting for me in there perched just behind the door with dark claws gleaming in the dark. I knew it was safely in the refrigerated box (always had been) and I’d imagined the whole thing.

Now, I think mostly I just wanted to hold on to a handful of those lies a little longer.

•  •  •

If I am being totally honest, and that’s a goal here, I’ve always been just a little creeped out by my dad. There’s no better word for it. Most guys seem to think of their dads as mean or cool or pointless or funny or even scary in some way. Mine was always just a little
creepy
. He stared too much, too long. Was always way too interested in what I was saying or doing. For years I’d written this off to the fact that Mom had been killed and I was all that he had left. I was the only family he had anymore. Why wouldn’t he stare at me all the time? If my mom came back, I’d probably just stare at her too. But over the last year or so, it’d actually gotten worse. It’d gotten, well,
more
creepy. So when he came to my room that night and dumped all that weirdness on me, I’ll admit that maybe other things in our life, my dad’s and mine, started to make more sense.

Now, as to all the stuff after . . .

I suspected and feared even then that the rotting corpse was only the beginning.

And that my father was involved in much, much worse things than that.

•  •  •

That’s why I stood there, outside his secret room, for as long as I did.

I knew that the more I learned about what my father had
really
been up to all these months, years—the more I understood what he’d
really
been thinking—all of it would become TRUE. Everything. All the evidence I needed for the things he’d told me was just a foot away now. The intellectual proof I needed for what my heart and gut were already telling me—it was all here and now.

It didn’t matter. I never made it back into that room. Ever.

Someone was in my house again.

I heard them moving downstairs. The DSTI ninjas had returned.

I could hardly breathe, my heart going a zillion miles a minute. I slowly edged to the railing, snuck a peek. I wanted to puke. Just as I was starting to tell myself it was all in my head, I saw him.

It was real. Like he’d stomped right out of a nightmare. I wanted to scream
and
puke.

One of the guys from the car, I figured.

Now downstairs in our family room.

Looking for me.

One guy with a gun.

•  •  •

For the record, I feel kinda mean calling my dad “creepy” just now. I mean, regardless of the things he did. I want you to know that, until those last weeks, he was, by my understanding of the words, a “good father.” I never wanted for anything. He put a lot of effort into my schooling. He supported my every interest. We didn’t, like, toss the football around and stuff, but we talked a lot about history and science stuff. And we liked to go on hikes in the woods and go to cool museums, and sometimes we watched old movies together. He told terrible jokes and gave stiff hugs. But the hugs were still there all the same. And perhaps he was doing it all—raising me, I mean—for really terrible reasons. But at the time, I didn’t know that, and so I say it was good.