The Edge of Sleep (39 page)

“There are ways to avoid it,” Karen said.

“Yes, there are,” Becker agreed. “If he’s smart enough, if he knows the country, if he suspects a trap.”

“Or he could be on the other side of the search line to begin with. He could ignore the bluff and stay where he is. He could turn north and head to Canada.”

“In which case we’re no worse off than we were. Look, Karen, it’s not a great plan, but it is something positive, something we can do immediately. We have no time to lose.”

Karen was silent, still staring at the map.

“Bobby Reynolds lasted only three weeks,” Becker said. Karen winced. “Lamont is getting faster and faster. Jack may have ...”

“I know.”

“Of course,” he said. He put his hand on her back, but she stepped away from him.

“All right,” she said.

“All you have to do is convince the state boys to go along,” Becker said.

She snorted dismissively. “That I can do,” she said.

As they started toward the others, she said, “Do you know what really scares me?”

“What?”

“This is the first time you’ve admitted that it’s Lamont.” Becker sighed. “I seem to hurt you no matter what I do,” he said. “Every way I turn. I’m wrong. I’m sorry ...”

She slipped her hand into his and gave him a brief squeeze.

At least it was contact. Becker thought. She gave me that much at least.

In the camp office, after conferring with the state police. Becker and Karen settled in for the night in silence, Becker on the cot, Karen resuming her place at the window. A few hours before dawn she slipped onto the cot and spooned against him, the two of them barely fitting on the stretched canvas. Becker realized she had taken off the holster as well as her blouse and skirt. He put his arms around her and waited to see what else she required, but it was all she needed.

“I don’t know what else to do,” she whispered, lost. “I’ve done everything I know how to do.”

“We’ll find him,” Becker said.

“I know,” she said. “And when we do. I’ll kill him.” Becker was startled. He had meant they would find Jack. Just before dawn he awoke again and knew by the tremors of her body that she was crying, but she did not make a sound. When she got up at first light her eyes were dry but so red they looked painful. The bags under them extended downward almost to her cheeks a spreading smudge of charcoal.

Chapter 23

A
SH FOUND DEE’S PILLS IN
her purse and painstakingly counted them onto the counter of the bathroom sink. She hadn’t taken any in the longest time. He heard her voice from the other room, high, bright, and animated as she told the new Tommy how lucky he really was that she had found him. Ash wondered if he could force Dee to take a pill. He had managed to do that in the past when she was in her sadness, lying inert in the back of the car. He had been able then to put the pill far back on her tongue and hold her jaw closed until she swallowed. But that was when she was too weak to resist him.

He had never seen her this high, this long, and it frightened him. She was different this time; she seemed to need more, as if Tommy wasn’t quite enough anymore. She was talking more and more about the workers who had taken her boy away, about how she had gotten him back just in time. In the past she had seldom talked about anything but the boy. Now she seemed as interested in revenge on the workers as the boy himself, and the change frightened Ash. He didn’t dare to think it, but it seemed almost as if Dee wasn’t really in control. And if she wasn’t in control of things, where did that leave him? He knew he certainly wasn’t.

If he tried to make her take a pill now, she would fight him and he knew he couldn’t fight back. He could never hurt Dee, no matter what. It wasn’t even thinkable. He would hurt himself before he would ever hurt his Dee.

Ash returned to his position by the door, facing the television set, which sat atop the dresser opposite the bed, the screen canted toward Ash. The new Tommy sat naked on the bed, covering himself with his hands as Dee talked to him. The boy looked frightened, but Ash detected defiance in his face, too. He had already demonstrated his courage by running for freedom. Ash hoped he didn’t try anything else that stupid, because Dee seemed close enough to an explosion as it was, without provocation.

“Dee,” Ash said, abruptly. “Look, Dee.”

He pointed to the television where a morning show had just been interrupted by a special report. The new Tommy’s face filled the screen.

“It’s Tommy,” he said. That made her look and she turned the sound up immediately. “Look, Tommy, you’re on television.”

Jack’s face was replaced by the image of Karen Crist, soberly intoning plans for a manhunt. Her face was so gaunt and drawn, her appearance on television so unexpected, that it took Jack a few seconds to be sure it was her.

“My mother,” he said, amazed.

Dee stood close to the set, her face screwed up as if it gave off poison.

“The bitch,” Dee said.

“That’s my mother,” Tommy said again.

Dee slapped him so hard he fell back onto the bed.

“That’s the bitch who took you,” she said. “Don’t you ever call her your mother. She’s not your mother, she’s one of the caseworkers. She saw you, she saw how wonderful you are, how precious you are, and she wanted you for her own, so she made up all those lies about me so they’d help her steal you.”

Karen’s image was replaced by a map with a curved red line drawn across it and triangles like arrowheads pointing in the direction of advance. It looked like the chart of a military campaign.

“The bitch, the bitch, the bitch!”

Ash struggled to make sense of it all while Tommy slowly came upright on the bed again, holding his face where she had struck him. He had forgotten his modesty.

“She’s coming.” Dee said. “The bitch is coming, she’s going to try to steal you away.”

Dee hurled the suitcase on the bed and threw her clothes into it.

“Well, she’s not going to do it. She won’t get you again.” The regular program had returned to the television screen and Dee snapped it off.

“Dress him,” Dee spat at Ash. “We’re leaving now.” Dee was packed in two minutes. She knelt in front of Jack, who stood in the center of the room, his pants on, his shoes untied.

“Don’t you worry, I won’t let her take you again.” She took Jack’s face in her hands. “You are so, so precious to me. I couldn’t stand it if she took you away again. You couldn’t stand it either, could you. Tommy? It would hurt you just as much as me. Don’t you worry. She won’t get you again. I’ll see you dead first.”

Dee stood and nodded, and Ash lowered the bedspread over Jack like a net.

They drove west, away from the red line on the television map. At a junction outside of Becket, two state police cars were parked perpendicularly across the highway, slowing the traffic as troopers peered into each passing car. Dee veered away from the troopers and headed northwest, into the mountains. She listened to the radio as she drove—something Ash had known her to do but rarely—and when another report of the manhunt was announced, she began to mutter darkly again about “the bitch.” Ash could hear her from under the bedspread, but he hoped that Tommy, covered by both the bedspread and Ash’s body, could not.

A few miles later Dee shunted away from troopers at another junction, taking the only unobstructed road left open to her, straight into the eminence of Mt. Jefferson.

On the steepest grade, she rounded a tum and saw before her a long line of cars parked in the ascending lane. As she braked to a halt, muttering an obscenity, she could see the rear taillights of the car at the top of the road change from red to blank as the car inched forward. The shifting red made its way downhill like a slow wave as one after another the automobiles released their brakes and advanced one car length. By the time Dee moved forward, the line was solidly red once more and a beige Subaru station wagon had pulled into place behind her.

“Ash, can you hear me?”

“Yes, Dee,” he said, his voice muffled by the bedspread over him.

“Listen carefully.” She glanced in her rearview mirror and saw the driver of the car behind her, a handsome, full-faced man with the look of Viking ancestors. He looked idly at Dee’s car, then patiently at the line in front of him, the woods to either side.

“It’s a roadblock,” Dee said. “I want you to take Tommy and go straight into the woods. Do you understand?”

“Straight into the woods.”

“Straight into the woods and back to the motel. Do you understand. Ash? I will meet you at the motel. We’ve been driving in a semicircle so far. The motel is on the other side of the mountain. Can you do that. Ash?”

“Yes.”

“And quickly, do it as fast as you can. I’m going to talk to the man behind us and when I tell you to go, I want you to get into the woods and out of sight as fast as you can go. All right?”

“All right. Dee.”

“Good. Stay covered until I tell you, then run as fast as you can.” She opened her car door, then hesitated.

“And Ash, you must not let them take Tommy away from you. They would make him suffer too much, and I know you don’t want that.”

“I don’t want him to suffer.”

“Of course not. But they will make him suffer if they get hold of him again. If they’re going to catch him, I want you to treat him the way you did your family. Do you understand?”

Ash was silent.

“Do you understand what to do. Ash?”

“Yes, Dee,” he said, reluctantly.

“Good. Now when I tell you to run, you take Tommy and run into the woods and then over the mountain. All right?”

“All right.”

“And who do you love?”

“I love you. Dee.”

“I love you, too. Ash,” she said as she left her car and walked back down the line.

Ash whispered to Jack, who lay beneath him, sheltered by Ash’s bulk. “It won’t hurt, I promise,” Ash said. “I’m going to carry you, but it won’t hurt.”

Jack said nothing.

Dee smiled broadly as the driver of the Subaru rolled down his window to speak to her. The refrigerated air from the car feathered across her face like a north wind.

“I can’t stick around for this nonsense, whatever it is,” Dee said. “My kid’s home alone; he’s got a little flu.”

“I’m sorry,” the man said. Dee detected a faint European accent.

“It’s nothing serious, but you know how we mothers are. We worry.”

“Of course you do,” he said sympathetically.

“So I’m going to turn around and go on back.”

“Yes, of course.”

“So if you wouldn’t mind backing up a little so I can just swing around. You be careful, though. Somebody might be coming up behind you and we don’t want anything to happen to you.”

The driver smiled at her. “I’ll be all right.”

“Oh, that’s what you all say,” Dee said. “Then look what happens to you.”

The driver was not quite sure what she meant, but she seemed so amused by him that he laughed.

Dee returned to her car and stood by the open door. When the driver of the Subaru turned to look over his shoulder while driving backwards, she shouted, “Now, Ash!” and the big man burst from the backseat, a large bedspread-covered bundle clutched in his arms. As he charged into the trees, bent over his burden, he looked like a parody of a football fullback running into the line with a football tucked into his belly.

Karen and Becker had set up a temporary headquarters with the State Patrol captain to monitor the radio reports coming in from the roadblocks as well as outside calls to the Bureau. The day started with good news.

“They found an old snapshot of Taylor Ashford,” Karen told Becker. “They faxed it from Pennsylvania to Albany. The bad news is the agents left for here before the fax came in. Albany is faxing it to the Massachusetts State Patrol and to the cop house in Becket. But the nearest State Patrol fax is forty-five minutes from here.”

“And I’m not sure our fax works,” volunteered Blocker. Karen had kept the two local cops, Blocker and Reese, with them to act as envoys or chauffeurs as the case demanded. “We don’t use it that much,” he added sheepishly.

“So we’ll have it in forty-five minutes,” said Becker, sounding more philosophical than he felt. There was nothing to do but wait.

When the initial report from the roadblocks came in, Karen was the first to react.

“He may have been seen,” Karen said matter-of-factly as she slid into Reese’s police cruiser. Becker could tell she was trying not to get excited prematurely. “There’s a call from a woman; the details are a little vague, I’m going to check it out.”

“Keep in touch,” Becker said.

Reese climbed behind the steering wheel, started the car, then waited for Karen’s order. Becker could see she had him trained already.

“No, you keep in touch,” she said. “If you find him, remember, he’s mine.”

Becker grinned. “I’ll remember. I don’t want any part of him. I’m on medical extension, remember?”

“You remember.”

“Good luck,” he said.

“There’s probably nothing to this,” she said grimly. She nodded and the car shot forward.

Becker’s call came a few minutes later. The caller was one of the patrolmen manning the roadblock on Winkler Road on Mt. Jefferson. “We have a motorist here,” he said, “Mr. Odd Ronning, who tells us he saw a man leave the line on Winkler Road and run into the woods. He says the man was carrying something wrapped in a blanket.”

“I know him,” said Blocker.

“Who?”

“Mr. Ronning. Very smart guy. If he says he saw it, he saw it.”

Becker grabbed Blocker and propelled him into the passenger seat of his squad car while Becker took the wheel.

“Tell them to hold him there,” he called back to the captain.

“Uh, technically, I should be driving,” Blocker said. Becker had the siren and lights going and was already taking a curve at a speed that made Blocker uneasy.

“We need you on the radio,” Becker said. “I need two hands on the wheel.”

“I see that,” Blocker said.

“Call the roadblock on Winkler and tell them to hold all cars coming down the mountain.”

“Down the mountain? I thought we were going up.”