The Bodies Left Behind: A Novel Page 10
About fifty feet up the driveway they paused.
Hart scanned what they could see, which wasn’t much because of the dusk. Bats swooped nearby. And some other creature zipped past his head, floating down to a scampering landing.
Hell, a flying squirrel. Hart’d never seen one.
He was squinting at the Mercedes, noting the broken window. He saw no signs of the women.
It was Lewis who spotted them. He happened to look back down the driveway toward the private road. “Hart. Look. What’s that?”
He turned, half expecting to see Brynn rising from the bushes about to fire that black service piece of hers. But he saw nothing.
“What?”
“There they are! On the lake.”
Hart turned to look. About two hundred feet into the lake was a low boat, a skiff or canoe. It was moving toward the opposite shore but very slowly. It was hard to see for certain but he thought there were two people in it. Brynn and Michelle had seen the men, stopped paddling and hunched down, keeping a low profile. The momentum was carrying them toward the opposite shore.
Lewis said, “That alarm, it wasn’t a mistake. It was to distract us. So they could get away in the fucking boat.”
The man had made a good catch. Hart hadn’t even been looking at the lake. He bridled once again at being outguessed—and he decided it was probably Brynn who’d tried to trick them.
The men ran down to the shore.
“Too far for the scattergun,” Lewis said, grimacing, disappointed. “And I’m not much of a pistol shot.”
But Hart was. He went to a range at least once a week. Now, holding his gun in one hand, he began firing, slowly, adjusting the elevation of the barrel as he did so. The sharp detonation rolled across the lake with each shot and returned as a pale echo. The first and second kicked up water in front of the boat; the rest did not. They were right on target. One shot every few seconds, the bullets pelted the canoe, sending fragments of wood or fiberglass into the air. He must’ve hit at least one of them—he saw her slump forward and heard a woman’s panicked scream filling the damp air.
More shots. The wailing stopped abruptly. The canoe capsized and sank.
Hart reloaded.
“Nothing’s moving,” Lewis said, shouting because of their numb ears. “You got ’em, Hart.”
“Well, we gotta make sure.” Hart nodded at a small skiff nearby. “Can you row?”
“Sure,” Lewis answered.
“Bring some rocks. To weigh the bodies down.”
“That was some fine shooting, Hart. I mean, really.” Lewis muscled the small boat upright.
But Hart wasn’t thinking about marksmanship. Shooting was just a skill and in this business you had to be good at it, just like you couldn’t be a carpenter without knowing how to plane or lathe. No, he was recalling his earlier thoughts. Now that the evening’s mission was finished he had to turn his attention to what came next: how to anticipate and prepare for the hard consequences that would flow from these women’s deaths.
Because, Hart knew, they surely would.
GRAHAM BOYD SAT
forward on the green couch, frowning, looking not at the TV screen but at an antiqued table nearby, splotched in white and gold, under which sat a box containing the only knitting project he’d ever known Brynn to tackle—a sweater for a niece. She’d given it up years ago, after six inches of uneven sleeve. Anna looked up from her own knitting. “I let it go for a while.”
Her son-in-law lifted an eyebrow.
She traded the big blue needles for a remote control, turned down the volume. Once again, Graham caught a glimpse of a tougher core within her than the spun hair and faint smile in her powdered face suggested.
“You might as well tell me. I’ll get it out of you sooner or later.”
What the hell was she talking about? He looked away, at some nonsense on the flat screen.
Her eyes didn’t leave him. “That call, right? The one from the school?”
He started to say something, then paused. But he went ahead finally. “Was a little worse than I let on.”
“Thought so.”
He explained what Joey’s section advisor had said—about the boy’s cutting school, the forgery, the ’phalting and even the suspension last fall. “And there were some other fights he got into too. I didn’t have the heart to ask his advisor about it.”
Well, which one?…
“Ah.” Anna nodded. “I had a feeling.”
“You did?”
She retrieved the knitting project. “What’re you going to do about it?”
Graham shrugged. He sat back. “Had an idea to talk to him. But I’ll leave that for Brynn. Let her handle it.”
“Been eating at you, I could see. You didn’t laugh once at Drew Carey.”
“If this’s happened once, it’s happened before. Cutting class? Don’t you think?”
“Most likely. My experience with children.” Anna was speaking from knowledge. Brynn had an older brother and a younger sister, a teacher and computer salesperson, respectively. Pleasant, kind people, fun people. Conventional. Brynn tended to swim upstream more than her siblings.
Anna McKenzie now dropped the Hallmark-Channel demeanor, which she donned like camouflage when needed. The tone in her voice changed, day to night. “What I want to say: You never discipline him, Graham.”
“After Keith, I never knew whether to do this or that.”
“You’re not Keith. Thank God. Don’t worry.”
“Brynn doesn’t let me. Or that’s the message I get. And I never pushed. I don’t want to undermine her. He’s her son.”
“Not just,” she reminded quickly. “He’s your boy too now. You get the whole package—even came with an ornery old lady you hadn’t bargained for.”
He gave a laugh. “But I want to be careful. Joey…I know he had a tough time with the divorce.”
“Who doesn’t? That’s life. No reason for you to be a shrinking violet when it comes to him.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
“I am. Go up and see him. Now.” She added, “Maybe it’s the best thing in the world Brynn went out on that call tonight. Give you two a chance to talk.”
“What do I say? I tried coming up with something. It was stupid.”
“Go with your instincts. If it feels right it probably is. That’s what I did with my children. Got some things right. And some things wrong. Obviously.”
The last word was heavily seasoned.
“You think?”
“I think. Somebody’s got to be in charge. He can’t be. And Brynn…” The woman said nothing more.
“Any advice?”
Anna laughed. “He’s the child. You’re the adult.”
Graham supposed that was a brilliant insight but it didn’t seem to help.
Evidently she could see he was confused. “Play it by ear.”
Graham exhaled and walked upstairs, the steps creaking under his big frame. He knocked on the boy’s door and entered without waiting for a response, which he’d never done before.
Joey’s round, freckled face looked up from his desk, dominated by a large flat-screen monitor. He’d put his knit hat back on, like a rapper. He was apparently instant-messaging with a friend. A webcam was involved. Graham didn’t like it that the friend could see him, see the room.
“How’s the homework coming?”
“Finished.” He typed away, not looking at the keyboard. Or at Graham.
On the wall was a series of still pictures from the Gus Van Sant movie Paranoid Park, about skateboarders in Portland. Joey must have printed them out. It was a good movie—for adults. Graham had protested about their taking the boy. But Joey had become obsessed with the movie and sulked until Brynn had acquiesced. As it turned out, though, they’d fled the theater after one particularly horrific scene. Graham had dodged the incident that a told-you-so would have bought, though he came real close to telling his wife that next time she should listen to him.
“Who?”
“You’re IM’ing?”
“Just some guy.”
“Joey.”
“Tony.” The boy continued to stare at the screen. Graham’s secretary could type 120 words a minute. Joey seemed to be going faster.
Worried it might be an adult, Graham asked, “Tony who?”
“In my, you know, class. Tony Metzer.” His tone suggested that Graham had met him, though he knew he hadn’t. “We’re, like, into Turbo Planet. He can’t get past level six. I can get to eight. I’m helping him.”
“Well, it’s late. That’s enough IM’ing for tonight.”
Joey continued typing and Graham wondered if he was being defiant or just saying good-bye. Would this become a fight? The man’s palms sweated. He’d fired employees for theft, he’d faced down a burglar who’d broken into the office, he’d stopped knife fights among his workers. None of those incidents had made him as nervous as this.
After some fast keystrokes the computer screen went back to the desktop. The boy looked up pleasantly. Asking, What now?
“How’s the arm?”
“Good.”
The boy picked up his game controller. Pushed buttons so fast his fingers were a blur. Joey had dozens of electronic gadgets—MP3 players, iPod, cell phone, computer. He seemed to have plenty of friends but he communicated more with his fingers than with words spoken face-to-face.
“You want some aspirin?”
“Naw, it’s okay.”
The boy concentrated on the game but his stepfather could see he’d grown wary.
Graham’s first thought was to trick the boy into confessing about the ’phalting but that seemed to go against the instinct that Anna had told him to rely on. He thought back to his dishpan reflections: dialogue, not confrontation.
The boy was silent. The only noise was the click of the controller and the electronic bass beat of the sound track of the game, as a cartoon character strolled along a fantastical road.
Okay, get to it.
“Joey, can I ask you why you skip school?”
“Skip school?”
“Why? Are there problems with teachers? Maybe with some other students?”
“I don’t skip.”
“I heard from the school. You skipped today.”
“No, I didn’t.” He kept playing on the computer.
“I think you did.”
“No,” the boy said credibly. “I didn’t.”
Graham saw a major flaw with the dialogue approach. “You’ve never skipped?”
“I don’t know. Like, once I got sick on the way to school and I came home. Mom was at work and I couldn’t get her.”
“You can always call me. My company’s five minutes from here and fifteen minutes from school. I can be there in no time.”
“But you can’t sign me out.”
“Yes, I can. I’m on the list. Your mother put me on the list.” Didn’t the boy know that? “Tell you what, Joey, shut that off.”
“Shut it off?”
“Yeah. Shut it off.”
“I’m nearly to—”
“No. Come on. Shut it off.”
He continued to play.
“Or I’ll unplug it.” Graham rose and reached for the cord.
Joey stared at him. “No! That’ll dump the memory. Don’t. I’ll save it.”
He continued to play for a moment—a dense twenty seconds—and then hit some buttons, and with a deflating computer-generated sound the screen froze.
Graham sat down on the bed, near the boy.
“I know you and your mother talked about your accident today. Did you tell her you skipped school?” Graham was wondering if Brynn knew and hadn’t told him.
“I didn’t skip school.”
“I talked to Mr. Raditzky. He says you forged the note from your mother.”
“He’s lying.” Eyes evasive.
“Why would he lie?”
“He doesn’t like me.”
“He sounded pretty concerned about you.”
“You just don’t get it.” Apparently thinking that this was irrefutable proof of his innocence, he turned back to the frozen screen. A creature of some sort bounced up and down. Running in place. The boy eyed the game controller. He didn’t go for it.
“Joey, somebody from school saw you ’phalting on Elden Street.”
The boy’s eyes flickered. “They’re lying too. It was Rad, right? He’s making that up.”
“I don’t think they were, Joey. I think they saw you on your board, going forty miles an hour down Elden Street when you wiped out.”
He bounced onto his bed, past Graham, and pulled a book off the shelf.
“So you didn’t tell your mother you cut and you didn’t tell her you were ’phalting, did you?”
“I wasn’t ’phalting. I was just boarding. I went off the parking lot steps.”
“Is that where you had the accident today?”
A pause. “Not really. But I don’t ’phalt.”
“Have you ever?”
“No.”
Graham was at a complete loss. This was going nowhere.
Instinct…
“Where’s your board?”
Joey glanced at Graham and said nothing. Turned back to the book.
“Where?” his stepfather asked adamantly.
“I don’t know.”
Graham opened the closet, where the boy’s skateboard was sitting on a pile of athletic shoes.
“No more boarding this month.”
“Mom said two days!”
Graham thought Brynn had said three. “One month. And you have to promise that you’re never going to ’phalt again.”
“I don’t ’phalt!”
“Joey.”
“This’s such bullshit!”
“Don’t say that to me.”
“Mom doesn’t mind.”
Was that true? “Well, I do.”
“You can’t stop me. You’re not my father!”
Graham felt an urge to argue. To explain about authority and hierarchy and family units, his and the boy’s respective roles in the household. An argument on the merits, though, seemed like an automatic loss.
Instinct, he reminded himself.
Okay. Let’s see what happens.
“Are you going to tell me the truth?”
“I am telling the truth,” the boy raged and started to cry.
Graham’s heart was pounding furiously. Was he being honest? This was so hard. He tried to keep his voice steady. “Joey, your mother and I love you very much. We were both worried sick about you when we heard you’d been hurt.”
“You don’t love me. Nobody does.” The tears stopped as quickly as they’d started and he slouched back, reading his book.
“Joey…” Graham leaned forward. “I’m doing this because I care about you.” He smiled. “Come on. Brush your teeth, put on your PJs. Time for bed.”
The boy didn’t move. His eyes were frantically scanning words he wasn’t even seeing.
Graham rose and left the room, carrying the skateboard. He headed downstairs, fighting the urge with every step to go back and apologize and beg the boy to be happy and forgive him.
But instinct won. Graham continued to the ground floor, put the skateboard on the top shelf of the closet.
Anna watched him. She seemed amused. Graham didn’t think anything was funny.
“When’ll Brynn be home?” his mother-in-law asked.
He looked at his watch. “Soon, I’d guess. She’ll probably get dinner but she’ll eat in the car.”
“She shouldn’t do that. Not on those roads at night. You look down for one minute, pick up your sandwich and there’s a deer in front of you. Or a bear. Jamie Henderson nearly hit one. It was just there.”
“I heard that, I think. Big one?”
“Big enough.” A nod toward the ceiling. “How’d it go?”
“Not good.
”
She continued to give him a half-smile.
“What?” he asked, irritated.
“It’s a start.”
Graham rolled his eyes. “I don’t think so.”
“Trust me. Sometimes just delivering a message is the important thing. Whatever that message is. Remember that.”
He picked up the phone and dialed Brynn again. It went right to voice mail. He tossed the phone on the table and stared absently at the TV screen. Thinking again about the yellow jackets. How he’d been going about his business, wheeling a big shaggy plant, enjoying the day, never realizing that he’d trod on the nest ten feet back.
Never realizing it until the hard little dots, with their fiery stingers, were all over him.
He thought now: And why does it even matter?
Just let it go.
Graham reached for the remote control. Upstairs, a door slammed.
BRYNN AND MICHELLE
were making their way through scruffy tangled forest about three hundred yards north of the Feldmans’ house. Here the trees were denser, mostly lush pine, spruce and fir. The view of the lake was cut off. The car alarm had been an unfortunate mistake. But, since it had happened, Brynn hoped that she’d turned it around to work to their advantage, making the men think that it was an intentional distraction and that the women were escaping by canoe to the far shore of the lake. In fact, though, they’d used the boat only to paddle downstream a short distance and cross to the opposite shore of the creek. They’d propped up life preservers to look like two huddling passengers and then shoved the canoe into the speedy current, which propelled the vessel into the lake.
They’d then hurried as best they could, given Michelle’s ankle, away from the lake house enclave, north toward Marquette State Park.
When the gunfire came, as Brynn expected, she was ready and let go a fierce, harrowing scream. Then abruptly stopped as if shot. She’d known the men would be half deafened and, with the confusing echoes from the hills, couldn’t tell that the scream had come from someplace else entirely. The trick might not fool them for long but she was sure she’d bought some time.
“Can we stop now?” Michelle asked.
“Why, does your ankle hurt?”
“Well, sure it does. But I mean, let’s just wait here. They’ll be gone soon.” She was eating her snack crackers. Brynn looked at them. Michelle, reluctantly, it seemed, offered her some. She ate a handful hungrily.