The Search for Artemis (The Chronicles of Landon Wicker) (3 page)

Panicking, he plowed through the debris, pushing his way into his room. Once inside, he slammed the door shut and leaned against it. He started to lose his breath and his heart pounded within his chest. Apart from the broken door and a bit of dust, his room looked the same as he left it. The copy of
David Copperfield
still lay on his disheveled bed and his reading lamp illuminated the room. He walked over and collapsed beside the bed, pressing his head into his hands.
What have I done?
He didn’t know why, but he knew he was responsible.
What do I do now?

He could think of only one option. He ran through his room as sweat soaked his clothes and dripped from his face. He shoved a pair of dirty jeans and a few t-shirts into a duffle bag then jumped over the corner of the bed to his nightstand and pulled out his special copy of
Treasure Island
from a small drawer and placed it on the bed. He opened it and pulled a stack of cash from its hollowed-out pages and shoved the money into his pocket.

He then grabbed a pen and a composition notebook off a stack of textbooks on the floor and rushed to his desk. As he sat there, he took a long breath and looked around his room. Pictures from his vacations with his mother and posters of his favorite rock bands lined the walls. Books and knickknacks covered his shelves. He was his mother’s son. Homework from his previous year at school and dirty clothes littered the floor, and in a corner he saw a bin with a small plastic sword sticking out of it, a pirate’s bandana dangling from its hilt. He turned back to the desk and opened up the notebook to a random page. In small letters across a line toward the top he wrote, “I’m sorry,” before tearing the page out of the notebook, folding it once down the middle, and setting it on his desk. He secured it with a third place trophy he won for the one-hundred-meter backstroke when he was eleven.

The sound of someone knocking on the apartment door startled him. He’d lingered too long. Panicked, he grabbed his cell phone off his desk, sped to the other side of his room, and opened the window. With one foot on the fire escape, he turned around and looked at his bedroom once more. Something told him this could be the last time he would ever see it. A moment later he climbed down the metal ladder into the alley.

RUN AWAY

Landon stopped running when he reached the park. It was only a mile or two from the apartment, but he knew that it was large and dark and that there would be plenty of places to hide for the night. Thinking of the one place he knew best, he went straight for the lake. His mother brought him there so many times as a kid that he felt he could name every tree and animal in a fifty foot radius.

Choosing a weeping willow with a large patch of grass at its base, Landon curled up, trying to sleep. It seemed impossible at first. The adrenaline wearing off in his system made his body twitch all over, and his mind was still spinning from what he had seen in the apartment. He closed his eyes, but there was no closing his brain, which appeared inclined to assault him with a barrage of images from the crime scene. Landon resigned himself to a long, restless night.

Landon awoke the next morning to the sound of the ducks quacking in the lake. Somehow he fell asleep, and it was now early morning. He quickly got up and looked around. The sun peeked above the horizon, the light morning fog hadn’t lifted yet, and the ground was wet with dew. Landon immediately devised a game plan. First, he would scope out his surroundings and try to memorize all the other places he might be able to run to if someone came after him. Second, breakfast. Third, he would sit down and try to write everything he remembered from the night before. If he expected to ever rid himself of this nightmare, he needed to figure out what happened.

A number of locals ran through the footpaths of the park for a bit of morning exercise. Unlike them, Landon studied the paths, mentally noting every possible unmarked route into the trees and every dark spot behind a rock or root that he might be able to use for hiding in case of emergency. The park was more beautiful than he remembered. It was the middle of the summer; the flowers were in full bloom and the grass had filled in since the cold winter. Squirrels ran around playing in the grass and hoarding whatever they could find. Birds chirped and glided from tree to tree. The ducks and geese swam peacefully in the lake.

Once he finished his reconnaissance mission, the fog had lifted and the burdensome heat returned with a vengeance. Landon started to sweat profusely. For a reprieve, he left the park and went into a little bagel shop across the street. When he opened the door, the cool air conditioning blasted him in the face. It felt wonderful. Landon sauntered up to the counter and ordered himself a toasted everything bagel covered in a lox cream cheese spread. As he ate it, he realized there was no reason to go outside to work on his third task of his imaginary To-Do list, so he pulled out his notebook and pen and sat in the back of the shop to work.

He started by trying to remember everything he saw once he woke up in the living room, jotting down what he remembered of his father under the couch and his mother amidst the books with blood covering the floor. He noted the crumbling walls, the broken picture frames and light bulbs, the busted TV in the corner, and the overturned dining table pushed up against the back wall. After that, he couldn’t really remember anything. He closed his eyes and tried to think back to before he woke up on the floor. He remembered dinner, reading
David Copperfield
, falling asleep, waking up, and opening up his door while half asleep. Everything between opening the door and waking up on the floor was a haze; he just couldn’t remember. It was just black—a blank space in his mind. As he continued to hopelessly think back to the night before, Landon started to doodle little geometric shapes and lines in the margin of the notebook, but after about an hour of getting nowhere, he gave up and went back to the park.

For the next few days, Landon didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. Every night he slept under the willow tree, ate at the little shops and food carts around the park and watched the many people that passed through. He never stopped wondering, however, what he should do next. He wracked his brain for somewhere he could go—the apartment of a friend at school or the home of one of his mother’s co-workers—but without his cell phone he didn’t know how to ask them. He didn’t know a single one of their numbers to call, and Landon was afraid to just show up at their house and involve them in his mess. He wasn’t about to volunteer someone to become his accomplice. He was on his own, and he was on the run. Alone, he would have to figure out what was his next move.

But as the days passed, his thoughts of his next move didn’t go much further than where he was going to find money and how he was going to get food. No matter where he went, he always became aware of the person paying for a pretzel at the cart or the cash lying in a musician’s guitar case as they played to the passersby at the edge of the park. Since he’d run away from home, he’d burned through all of the money that was in his
Treasure Island
book.

After a week in the park, Landon thought he knew the place like it were his own room, but soon he  began to notice men in black suits strolling around. They weren’t regulars; he would have known. The only people he ever saw in suits at the park came with a few other people and they’d sit on a bench and eat a sandwich for a quick lunch—in and out in thirty minutes tops. These other guys would wander around the footpaths for a while and just disappear. The first time Landon noticed them, he thought he needed to keep an eye out, and if they tried anything, to run as fast as his legs could carry him to one of his hideouts.

As the days passed, they seemed to multiply. What started out as two of them soon became five and then seven, and Landon got more nervous with each new addition. They still hadn’t tried anything, but they quickly moved from strolling the footpaths to loitering about thirty or so yards from Landon’s position, wherever that might be. That night, he decided to leave the park and relocate somewhere else under the cover of darkness. They were closing in and he still hadn’t gotten any closer in his attempts to remember that night.

His notebook contained the same information scribbled one page after the other with a bunch of random doodles and drawings covering the margins, but after the first few days, he began to believe he remembered other things from that night. First, he thought he possibly saw his father’s hand move from under the couch. It was nothing more than a flick of his finger, but Landon could see it. Later he could have sworn that he remembered seeing his mother’s chest moving up and down after he removed all the books from on top of her. After a week, Landon was convinced that his parents still lived, but he feared going back home until he could remember what happened during his blackout. He still didn’t know if he was responsible.

Since he couldn’t remember, Landon started to concoct all sorts of theories as to what potentially happened that night. In one scenario, the thud that woke him up in his room was the sound of a mobster breaking into the apartment and searching for something that he believed they were hiding. That explained the state of the apartment, as the thug would have torn through the place searching for whatever it was he wanted, and it explained why Landon couldn’t remember it. He thought that after he opened his bedroom door, the mobster whacked him on the head and knocked him out before he saw anything. It seemed like a plausible explanation, but what would his parents be hiding and why would Landon’s room be left untouched?

Another scenario involved his father not being a mechanic but instead a special weapons developer for a secret branch of the government. He’d brought his most recent project home, a fireless explosive device that only destroys the contents of a single confined space. It was developed with the intention to be used in special situations where the government wanted to eliminate a target while minimizing civilian casualties. That explained why Landon’s bedroom seemed untouched, but that didn’t explain why he survived. There were always holes in his theories.

One afternoon, Landon remembered something he read in one of his textbooks; the concept was called Occam’s Razor. Supposedly, when trying to solve a problem, the simplest explanation is generally the correct one, but Landon didn’t want to believe that. If that was true, Landon did it. It
was
the simplest explanation, but Landon couldn’t think of any possible way he could have caused all of that destruction. One day, Landon brought himself to write, “I did it,” into his notebook, but since then he’d scratched through it so many times that he’d torn three pages.

For the next week and a half, Landon never stayed in the same place for more than two nights. By then, the suited men started popping up in crowds and around corners. This constant worry of getting caught began to take its toll. Landon became afraid he’d underestimated the severity of his potential crime. He always thought that it would be the police looking for him since it would have been a simple case of domestic violence gone wrong, but these guys definitely didn’t work for the police. They were like FBI, CIA, NSA, or something. Why would they get involved in something like this?

After feeling particularly alone and frightened, Landon went back to his apartment building—the place where it all began. By the time he got there, a storm had rolled in, and it poured down rain. Lightning was flashing overhead and the sound of thunder bounced deafeningly through the city streets. He tried not to get too close; he stayed in a dark alley across the street and just looked at the building, counting the windows until he found his apartment. Once he located it, he noticed that the lights inside were off. He stayed there, staring at the window for quite a long time, imagining what his mother would be cooking for dinner and what random school activity she would try to convince him to join next. Then a cab drove up to the building and Mrs. Bradford got out.

Landon didn’t really have grandparents. His mother’s parents died in a car accident while she was in college and his father’s parents wanted less to do with him than his father did. While growing up, Mrs. Bradford sort of stepped in. Landon even called her “Nana.” Her husband had died of a heart attack a few years before Landon was born, and she lived alone in the apartment down the hall from theirs. Before Landon started high school, she used to walk him back to the apartment building from the bus stop and watch him while his mother and father were at work. She made him cookies and other baked goods, and they worked on random art projects or played card games. Her favorite game was gin rummy, but Landon always seemed to beat her. He never figured out if it was because he was so good at it or if she let him win. He eventually decided on the latter.

He watched her ascend the stairs into the building, noticing she was having a lot of difficulty juggling her bag of groceries, her umbrella and her keys. As she tried to unlock the entry door, her grocery bag slipped out from under her arm and tumbled down the stairs, spilling its contents all over the sidewalk. Immediately, Landon bolted across the street to help her. He wrangled up all of the loose produce and canned goods and placed them back in the grocery sack. He then went up the short staircase and handed them back to Mrs. Bradford while making sure to keep his head down.

“Thank you so much, my dear boy,” Mrs. Bradford said.

“No problem, Nana,” Landon replied.

“Nana?”

With a speed much faster than Mrs. Bradford should be capable of, she gently placed her hand under Landon’s chin and raised his head up to look at him. Mrs. Bradford saw the boy she helped raise over the past fifteen years.

“Landon?” Mrs. Bradford questioned. Her voice was barely audible as her tears held her words back. “Is that really you? I was so worried!”

Landon looked at Mrs. Bradford in horror. He pulled her hand away from his face and stumbled down to the sidewalk, never taking his eyes off of her. The rain beat down on his soaked body, weighing down his clothes and making it difficult for him to see. He realized that in an instant, he’d revealed himself and potentially jeopardized his freedom. He also knew by the face of Mrs. Bradford that he was wrong about his parents’ survival. They were not alive. If they lived, she wouldn’t have responded like she did. Once back on the street, he turned and ran into the alley. He heard Mrs. Bradford calling to him from the apartment steps, begging him to come back. That night was the first night Landon cried.