What Comes Next (52 page)

Her fingertips swept over the form of the key. Something round. Something long. Something awful. She recoiled sharply, gasping, as if her fingers were burned by heat.

She thought,
The baby’s cries. They were a lie.

The children playing. They were a lie.

The sound of the argument. That was a lie.

The police upstairs. That was a lie.

A key to set yourself free…

The worst lie of all.

It was not a key to a locked door at her feet.

It was a gun.

42

Adrian took at least three wrong turns and got thoroughly lost once on a series of potholed roads that meandered through small towns that would have been Norman Rockwell pretty if not marred by an insistent undercurrent of hard times and poverty. Too many old rusted-out cars up on cinder blocks in side yards, too many abandoned pieces of farming machinery leaning up against rickety fences. He passed faded red barns that hadn’t been painted in dozens of years, with rooflines that sagged from the burdens of too many harsh winter snows, next to double-wide trailers adorned with satellite dishes. Hand-painted signs for
authentic
maple syrup or
authentic
American Indian artifacts sprouted up frequently.

He was on roads that didn’t lead to popular destinations. These were winding, narrow, two-lane trails that pushed away from the parts of New England that make up the tourist brochures for each state. Great stands of tangled forest trees swept in patches away from the highways, their leaves filling in with vibrant greens. Fields that had once seen dairy cows and sheep rolled between the tree lines. These were ignored parts of America that people hurriedly pass through while trying to get somewhere else, usually to an expensive lakeside summer home or a high-end ski condo. He was forced more than once to backtrack after pulling to the side to painstakingly inspect the old-fashioned tattered paper map he’d retrieved from his glove compartment.

He didn’t really have a plan.

His erratic path, filled with old-man missteps, had delayed him significantly. He knew he was in a flat-out hurry. He steered the car and pushed on the gas pedal like someone in a panicky
get-to-the-hospital
rush, jerking the car forward one minute, then braking hard when he thought he would lose control on some sharp corner. He kept reminding himself not to take another mistaken turn.
A wrong turn might be fatal,
he said to himself, sometimes breaking out loud with a grunted “Get going, get going…”

Adrian tried to keep thinking of Jennifer, but even this was slippery and difficult. There were warring images:
Jennifer determined in pink Red Sox hat, when he’d first seen her; Jennifer in the smiling false picture that adorned the police Missing Persons alert resting on the seat next to him; Jennifer blindfolded and nearly naked, staring out at the camera while being questioned by a concealed interrogator.

He knew which Jennifer he would find when he located the farmhouse.

What was left of the reasonable professor of psychology, onetime department chairman, the thoroughly respectable part of him, told him that he should be calling Detective Collins and letting her know where he was and what he was doing. This would have been the prudent thing to do. He realized he could even call the sex offender and fill him in on where he was. Either Wolfe or Terri Collins would certainly have a much better idea about how to proceed than Adrian did.

But Adrian had decided to give up on being reasonable at the very moment he set off in the car that morning. He did not know if his behavior could be assigned to his disease.
Maybe,
he considered.
Maybe this is just the craziest part of it all coming out and taking over. Maybe if I took a handful of those pills that don’t work I would be doing something different.

Maybe not.

Adrian dramatically slowed down the old Volvo so that he was creeping down a small, two-lane back road, looking right and left for something that would tell him he was close. He half expected some pickup truck to come whipping around a corner, horn blasting, angry that he was crawling dangerously along. He suspected he didn’t have far to go. He wondered if he should have called the realtor, gotten good directions, maybe even asked her to meet him and show him the way. But there was an insistent voice within him that told him everything he was doing was better done alone. Brian, he suspected, was behind this advice. He was always the type that trusted himself the most and others much less. Maybe Cassie, as well. She had an artist’s
I need to be by myself
approach. Certainly Tommy, who was always wonderfully self-reliant, would contribute.

He steered the Volvo into a school bus turnaround by the side of the roadway and ground to a halt, tires crunching on loose gravel. According to his torn map, and to the GPS coordinates that he’d obtained and all the real estate information he’d printed out, the driveway leading to the farm was a quarter mile up the road. Adrian stared in that direction. A single battered blue mailbox, angled like a drunken sailor after a night on the town, marked a solitary entrance.

His first inclination was simply to drive up, get out, and knock on the door. He started to put the car in gear but a hand touched his shoulder and he heard Tommy whisper, “I don’t think that will work, Dad.”

Adrian paused.

“What do you think, Brian?” he asked. He used the same tone he would have when running a long-winded faculty meeting, opening the floor for complaints and opinions, of which there would be many. “Tommy says not to just go up to the front door.”

“Listen to the lad, Audie. Frontal assaults are usually easily beaten back, even when you have the element of surprise. And you know, you don’t really have any idea what to expect.”

“Then what…”

“Stealth, Dad,” Tommy chimed in, although he was still speaking in a very low voice. “You want to sneak up on them.”

Brian quickly added, “I think this is the time to move cautiously, Audie. No bluster. No demands. No sudden
Here I am where’s Jennifer?
sort of attack. What we need is to go get the lay of the land.”

“Cassie?” he asked out loud.

“Listen to the two of them, Audie. They have much more experience than you in this sort of operation.”

He wasn’t certain this was precisely true. Sure Brian had led a company of men through the jungle in a war, and Tommy had filmed numerous military operations before he went out on the assault that killed him. But Adrian had imagined that Jennifer was more like one of his lab rats. She was in a maze and he was watching the experiment unfold. This thought made some sense to him. He was accustomed to patiently observing matters, and finding a place where he could once again watch seemed natural.

Adrian took another long look at the pictures from the realtor’s website. Then he folded them all up and stuck them in the inside pocket of his coat. He was halfway out of the car when he heard Cassie whisper,
“Don’t forget it.”

Adrian shook his head and muttered, “Stay focused!” He thought he was down to maybe fifty percent ability to reason and think straight. Maybe less. Without her warning, he would have been lost. “Sorry, Possum,” he replied. “You’re right. I’ll need it.” He reached back into the car and grasped his dead brother’s 9mm Ruger from the passenger seat.

The gun’s heft seemed familiar. He thought he’d had much more use for the weapon than Brian ever had. His brother had used it only the one time to kill himself. Adrian had used it to
almost
kill himself, and then to repeatedly threaten Mark Wolfe, who had helped lead him to this moment, and now he might have occasion to use it again. He tried to put it in his jacket pocket but it would not fit. He tried to jam it into his pants belt but what seemed so easy for television and movie stars made him feel unbalanced, and he thought it would slip out and he might lose it. So, gripping it tightly, he kept the gun in his hand.

Adrian lifted his head. He could hear a small breeze moving through tree branches. Shafts of sunlight and dark shadows swayed back and forth, shifting positions defined by the wind. A flock of coal black crows raucously rose from a bloody highway meal when he startled them. He trotted across the road and started to make his way toward the driveway. He was glad no one had come along, because he thought he looked either totally ridiculous or deadly insane.

Terri Collins drove hard, pushing her small car well past any limit that might be safe. Mark Wolfe gripped the handhold above the passenger seat, a wild grin on his face and eyes wide open with what seemed like roller-coaster excitement. Miles swept underneath the wheels. For much of the trip they traveled in silence, broken only by the seductive, metallic voice of the GPS directions that came over an application on her cell phone.

She did not know how much time they had made up on the professor. Some, but enough? She was sure this was an emergency, but she would have been hard pressed to explain exactly why it was so urgent.
Prevent a half-crazed psychology teacher from shooting someone innocent?
That was possible.
Find a runaway teenager being exploited on a porn website?
That was possible.
Do neither and make a fool out of herself?
Likely.

At one point Wolfe had laughed. She had been doing close to a hundred miles per hour, and the sex offender thought this incredibly amusing. “Some trooper would have busted me, for sure,” he said. “And gotten a big surprise when he ran my plates and license. Guys with records like mine
never
talk their way out of a speeding ticket. But you’re lucky.”

Terri did not think she was fortunate. In fact, she would have welcomed a state police car surging up fast behind her. It would have given her the excuse to ask him for assistance.

She wasn’t sure she needed help. She wasn’t sure she
didn’t
need help. It seemed to her that she was caught up in some sort of curious quest, accompanied by the most distasteful Sancho Panza ever, in pursuit of a Quixote that didn’t even have the literary knight-errant’s loose connection to reality.

The GPS voice steered them off the interstate and onto back roads. She drove her car as fast as the narrow roads would allow. Her tires complained. Wolfe swayed in the passenger seat, driven first right, then left by the force of momentum.

A shifting landscape of idyllic isolation swept past the windshield. The forests and fields should have been peaceful and beautiful, but instead they seemed to the detective as if they were hiding something. For a moment she thought she had stepped outside of reason, not knowing that the same thought had crossed Adrian’s mind earlier. Everything in the town where she worked and where she had her family made sense to her. Maybe everything was not always ideal but she understood all the dark undercurrents and shadows that she dealt with on a daily basis so they didn’t seem unusual or frightening to her.

This trip was something far different. These were dark notions that were far beyond any black horizon she had ever experienced in her years as a cop. She shook her head, as if she were replying to a question, but none had been asked.

Mark Wolfe stared down at directions. “Ten miles on this road,” he said. “Actually ten point eight, according to this. And then one more turn and another four point three and we should be there. Assuming this is correct and all. Sometimes MapQuest is, sometimes it isn’t.” He laughed. “I never thought I’d be a cop’s navigator.”

She ignored this comment although she followed his directions while waiting for the GPS voice to confirm what the sex offender had already told her.

Adrian found a path that seemed to parallel the driveway, leading through the trees that marked the side of the road to the farmhouse. He took that route, maneuvering over fallen trunks and tromping on spongy damp earth. Scrub brush tugged at his clothes, and within a few minutes the path narrowed and grew more tangled, and he found himself fighting against the spring growth.

He wove in and out, thorns grabbing at his pants and hands, pushing brush away, turning right, then left, trying to beat a trail that one instant seemed open and accessible and then, a few yards farther on, became impassable. Nature’s obstacles conspired to make progress increasingly hard, and while Adrian would not concede that he was lost again he knew he was being forced in directions that took him away from where he wanted to go. He had hoped for a straight path but discovered instead that he was being twisted about. He struggled to keep his sense of direction intact as he bushwhacked his way forward. He expected Brian to tell him something about how the jungles in Vietnam were far worse, but he could hear only his brother’s hard, quick, exhausted breathing beside him, except that when he stopped for a moment’s rest he realized it was his own.

He felt trapped. He wanted to start shooting the 9mm as if bullets could clear a trail for him. Sweat dripped down from his forehead even with the mild temperatures. It was like being in a fight, and he punched out, pushing a limb from his face, kicking at thorn brush that clung to his pants.

Adrian took a second to look up. The blue sky seemed to light his way. He forced himself forward, although he understood that the concept of
forward
might have meant sideways or even backward. He was turned around completely, defeated by tangled forest. For a second he was filled with fear, thinking that he’d launched himself into a no-man’s-land he could never get out of and that he had been abruptly destined to spend whatever time he had left on earth lost in a thick mess of trees and bushes, doomed by a single poor choice.

He wanted to panic, scream for help. He grabbed at branches and pulled himself in whatever direction was manageable. He slapped away dead wood and tripped more than once. The fight bloodied him; he could feel scratches on his hands and across his face.

He cursed his age, his disease, and his obsession.