The Last Child (12 page)

She was frightened, probably medicated, so Hunt moved with caution. He’d seen mental breakdowns before, and that’s what this looked like, like she was ripped at the seams. He held out his hands, fingers spread. “Mrs. Merrimon.”

“Johnny!” Irrational. Face turned up as the rain beat down.

Hunt guessed that Tiffany Shore’s abduction had scraped the soil off whatever poor grave she’d made for thoughts of her daughter’s fate. She’d woken to an empty house, to another empty bed.

“Mrs. Merrimon,” Hunt spoke softly.

She looked up, and even with the light full on her face, her eyes remained wide and dark. “Where’s my son?”

Hunt knelt and placed his hands on her shoulders. “It’s okay,” he said. “Everything will be okay.”

For that second, she calmed; then her face cracked, and when she spoke, her voice was so soft he barely heard it. “Where’s Alyssa?” she asked, but Hunt had no answer. He watched the grief take her down. It broke her at the waist. She splayed her hands on the ground, dug her fingers into soft earth. “Make it stop,” she whispered.

Hunt’s duty was clear. She needed help. Johnny needed to be taken from her and placed in a stable environment. He should be on the phone to Social Services; he knew as much. But he knew something else as well. If he took her son, it would destroy the last good bit of her, and he couldn’t do that. She rocked in the mud.

“Please make it stop.”

“Katherine…”

“My babies…”

Hunt sat back on his heels, laid a hand on her shoulder. “Trust me,” he said. When she looked up, eyes tortured and lost, he said her name again, then took her arm to help her stand.

Twenty minutes later, the rain had stopped. A marked car turned into the drive, and Hunt saw a flash of blond as the dome light winked on and Officer Laura Taylor made for the porch. She was in her late twenties, broad-bodied but with a narrow face. She’d had a thing for Hunt once upon a time, but that was ancient history. Now she was in love with a NASCAR driver out of Charlotte. The driver had no idea who she was, but that didn’t bother her. Persistence, according to Officer Taylor, was a virtue.

She clumped up the steps and frowned as she spoke. “You’re looking sharp, Hunt.”

“What do you mean?”

She gestured at his clothes. “Wet clothes. Mud on your suit.” The gesture rose to include his head. “What are you, a surfer now?”

“A surfer?” Hunt touched his hair. Soaking wet, it hung below his collar.

“I can cut that for you.”

“That’s okay.”

“Suit yourself.” She pushed past him to glance through the open door. “You were pretty vague on the phone.”

Taylor was a stickler for the rules, but Hunt chose her for a reason. Underneath it all, the cop, the regulations, and the ball-breaking attitude, Taylor was a soft touch. Hunt trusted her to do what was right. “I just need you to keep an eye on her,” he said. “Make sure she doesn’t do anything stupid.”

“How bad is it?”

“She’s in bed, calm for the moment; but she’s on something, pills probably. She’s lost it once. Could pop again. But she’s a good person and tomorrow’s another day. I think she deserves a chance.”

When Taylor leaned back, she looked unimpressed. “Word around town is that she’s pretty messed up.”

“Messed up, how?”

“Don’t get defensive.”

“I’m not.”

A smile under glittering eyes. “Bullshit. Look at you. White lips, those ropes in your neck. You look like I’m talking about your mother. Or your wife.”

Hunt lowered his voice, forced himself to relax. “Messed up how?”

Taylor shrugged without sympathy and tilted her head toward the house. “She showed up at school once to pick up her daughter. That was four months after the girl got snatched. When they told her that Alyssa wasn’t there, she refused to leave. Demanded to see her. Started screaming when they tried to explain. It got so out of control that the resource officer escorted her off the school grounds. She sat in her car for three hours, crying. And you know Officer Daniels?”

“The new guy?”

“He responded to a breaking and entering call about six weeks ago and found her asleep in her old house, just curled up on the sofa. Fetal, he said.” Taylor looked around at the dilapidated house. “Messed up.”

Hunt held his words for long seconds, and when he spoke, he tried hard to make her understand. “Do you have children, Laura?”

“You know I don’t.” She showed small teeth. “Children would interfere with the job.”

“Then trust me on this. She deserves a break.” Taylor held Hunt’s gaze, and he knew she was doing the math. Taylor was a street cop, not a babysitter; and Hunt’s request was not about channels or procedure. “Someone needs to be here in case her son returns. That’s legit.”

“And the rest of it?”

“Just make sure she doesn’t wander off or take any more pills.”

“You’re hanging your ass out on this, Hunt, and you’re asking me to bare my fine, sculpted backside, too.”

“I know that.”

“If she’s this bad—booze, pills, whatever—then the kid should be in state custody. If something happens to him because you refused to take action…”

“That’s my risk.”

She looked out at the rain, and the worry showed. “People are talking. About you and her.”

“The talk’s unfounded.”

Hard eyes. “Is it?”

“She’s a victim,” Hunt said coldly. “And she’s married. I have no interest beyond a professional one.”

“I think you’re lying,” Taylor said.

“Maybe,” he replied. “But not to you.”

Taylor drummed her fingers on the slick, vinyl belt that held her weapon, her cuffs, her Mace. “That’s deep, Hunt. So profound it’s downright female.” The words were not unkind.

“Will you help me?”

“I’m your friend. Don’t bring me into something sordid.”

“She’s a good woman and I lost her kid. That’s it.” The moment stretched. “Johnny Merrimon,” Hunt said. “Would you know him if you saw him?”

“A kid shows up, I’ll assume it’s him.”

Hunt nodded. “I owe you.”

He turned but she stopped him. “She must be something special.”

Hunt hesitated, but had no reason to lie. “They both are,” he said. “Her and her son.”

“Not to take anything away from these people, but why?”

Hunt pictured the kid, the way he understood his mother’s vulnerability and did what he could to protect her when no one else would. Hunt saw him buying groceries at six in the morning, throwing a rock through Ken Holloway’s window, not once, but five times, just to get him away from his mother. “I used to see them around town before all this happened. They were always together, all four of them. Church. The park. Concerts on the green. They were a beautiful family.” He shrugged, and both knew that there were things left unsaid. “I don’t like tragedies.”

Officer Taylor laughed without humor.

“What?” Hunt asked.

“You’re a cop,” she said. “Everything is a tragedy.”

“Maybe.”

“Yeah, right.” Her tone was disbelieving. “Maybe.”

A hundred yards down the road, parked in a darkened drive, Johnny watched Hunt’s car pull away from his house. He dipped down as it sped past, but another one still sat in the place that his mother normally parked. Johnny had seen the cars just in time, Hunt’s sedan, the marked car with dark lights on the roof. He chewed on a fingernail, tasted dirt. All he wanted to do was check on his mom. Just once. But the cops…

Damn
.

An old couple lived in the house where Johnny was parked. On warm days, the husband sat on the porch, smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and watched his wife garden in a faded housedress that gapped in the front and showed more white skin and blue veins than Johnny thought a body should have. But they always waved and smiled when he passed on his bike, the woman with stained hands, the man with stained teeth.

Johnny climbed out of the car and closed the door. He heard rustling sounds and water dripping, the churr of frogs on trees and the hiss of tires as another car angled down the hill and splashed its lights against the low-slung cottage. Ducking, he slipped around the side of the house and began working his way through the backyards that stretched between the car and his own house. He moved past sheds that smelled of lawn clippings and rot, a trampoline that had rusted springs and a dangerous tilt. He ducked clotheslines, went over fences, and caught glimpses of neighbors he barely knew.

He slowed as he drew near his mother’s window. Her light burned yellow, and when he raised his head, he saw her sitting on the side of her bed. Tear-stained and splashed with mud, she sagged as if some vital string had been cut. She held a framed photograph, and her lips moved as she laid a finger on the glass and rolled her back to an unseen weight. But Johnny felt no sympathy. What leapt up in his chest was a sudden anger. She acted like Alyssa was gone for good, like there was no hope left.

She was so weak.

But when the photograph tilted, Johnny saw that it was not his sister’s photo that had wrecked his mother.

It was his father’s.

Johnny dropped below the sill. She’d burned them. Johnny remembered the day, a bright afternoon with fire in the backyard and the acrid smell of photographs charring down to nothing. He saw it like it was yesterday, how he’d stolen three of the photos from his mother’s hand and run crazy circles as she’d stumbled and wept and screamed at him to give them back. He knew where all three of those photos were, too: one in his sock drawer, two in the suitcase he kept for Alyssa.

The one his mother held was different. In it his father was young, with parted lips and flashing eyes. He wore a suit and tie. He looked like a movie star.

For an instant, the image blurred in his mind, then Johnny knuckled moisture from his right eye and moved through the shaggy yard to the tree line. He pushed hard into the darkness, trying to forget the sight of his mother with that photograph. It made him sad, and sadness made him weak.

Johnny spit in the dirt.

This was no night for weak.

A small trail took him under trees that scratched the night sky with a canopy so vast and dense it gave a whole new meaning to dark. Beyond the old growth was a tobacco farm gone to scrub. The tall trees disappeared. Poison ivy crawled over bare earth and milkweed rose taller than his head. A hundred yards in, he hopped a creek that ran swollen and brown. Briars took skin from his arms. When he came to the old tobacco barn, he stopped and listened. He’d once found two older boys inside smoking pot. That was months ago, but Johnny never forgot the chase they gave him. He put a hand on the barn. The squared-off logs were ridged by age, and most of the chinking had crumbled to ruin, but it was solid enough. Johnny put an eye to a gap and peered inside. Darkness. Silence. He made for the door.

Inside, he stepped on an old bucket and reached above the lintel. It took all the length of his arm, but he felt it there, just where he’d left it. The bag came out with a dragging sound and a rainfall of mouse droppings. It was blue and moldy, still stained reddish-brown along the bottom seams. Johnny breathed in the smell of it, the stink of dirt and bird and dead plants. He dropped to the ground outside and felt his breath go shaky. Johnny peered into the scrub and listened hard.

Then he pulled dry wood from the barn and built a fire.

A big one.

Hunt pulled into David Wilson’s driveway as a high wind assaulted the last of the storm clouds. When he looked down he saw that small parts of the world had gone silver white: a puddle on the concrete drive, beads on the hood of his car. The street ended at the back of some faceless building that marked the edge of the college campus. Well-kept houses sheltered faculty families and a few students with parents wealthy enough to swing the rent. The lots were narrow, the trees tall and broad. Thin strips of green marked old joints in the concrete sidewalk. Weeds. Moss. The air smelled of growing things.

The rain that kept the neighbors in had also kept the police presence quiet, but Hunt saw signs that that would soon end. A man stood at the curb four houses down, a plastic bag hanging from his hand as he stared. Across the street, a cigarette sparked in the darkness. Hunt cursed under his breath and turned for the door. The house was a small Tudor with age-stained beams set into dark brick. A strip of grass separated it from its neighbor; a detached two-car garage filled the back corner. Hunt saw Yoakum through an undraped window and made for the door.

Inside, wood floors showed scars from long use and little care. Stairs rose to the right, the banister dark and slick. The kitchen was in the back, a glint of stainless steel and white linoleum that gleamed under hard lights. A uniformed cop nodded from the living room and Hunt nodded back. Another turned, and then a third. None of them looked Hunt in the eye, but he understood.

It all seemed very familiar.

David Wilson had been a professor, and the house felt like it: dark wood, exposed brick, a smell that was either fresh tobacco or old pot. Yoakum stepped in from the dining room and offered a smile that was perfunctory and meaningless. “I am not the bearer of glad tidings,” he said.

Hunt studied the interior of the house. “Start at the beginning.”

“The house belongs to the college. Wilson gets to live here as a perk. He’s been here for three years.”

“Nice perk.” Hunt reconsidered the house, noticed more quick glances from other cops.

Yoakum saw it, too, and lowered his voice. “They’re worried for you.”

“Worried?”

“Alyssa was a year ago, yesterday. No one has forgotten.”

Hunt looked around the room, eyes tight, mouth, too. Yoakum gave a shrug, trouble and worry in his eyes, too. “Just tell me about David Wilson,” Hunt said.

“He’s the head of the biology department. Well respected, as far as I can tell. Widely published. Kids admire him. Administration admires him, too.”

“You made it plain to the college that Wilson’s not a suspect? I don’t want to ruin a good man’s reputation for no reason.”

“Material witness, I told them. Saw something that got him killed.”