Wait and see.
See and wait.
He didn’t want any extra trouble.
42
As they traveled down the highway, Sam silently made deals with the universe. He swore that if Emily was okay, he’d devote his life to helping people.
Sick people.
Poor people.
All kinds of needy people.
He would be a priest or a minister or whatever was the highest calling.
If it meant giving up music, he’d do that.
He’d move away. He’d leave everything behind. He would sacrifice anything to have Emily be all right. He’d give his own life.
Sam’s lips moved as he spoke the words out loud: “Just let her be all right.”
This day, he thought, needed to end with the discovery of Emily reading a book in a library. She’d fallen asleep. Her cell phone was off. There had been no reason to panic.
There would be no connection to Robb’s car or Destiny.
It would all be a big mix-up.
But he said over and over again to himself:
Just let her be okay.
Robb Ellis was staring at Rabbit Ears.
That was what the strange rock formation was called.
He was in the driver’s seat, looking out the window at the two rocks that jutted up from the sea of pine trees.
And then suddenly there was a siren behind them with swirling lights and a voice commanding that the car pull over.
Robb put his foot on the brake. “If we were in my car, this wouldn’t be happening. I have a radar detector.”
Sam looked at him. “We’re trying to find your car. So if we were in your car, of course this wouldn’t be happening.”
Robb exhaled as he shut his eyes, mumbling to himself: “Man up.”
Moments later the state trooper had his head in the window. “I just need your license.”
The ticket was for going eighty-seven miles an hour in a fifty-five-mile-an-hour zone.
After the ticket they didn’t get far, because Robb had to take a leak. He pulled Sam’s car over to an area along the roadway.
Standing there, doing his business under the heavy canopy of old-growth trees, Robb suddenly heard high-pitched squeaking.
He realized that the sound was above him. But just as he raised his head, something fell from a treetop nest.
And it landed right in his face.
The baby bat, nocturnal, only two weeks old, was not yet able to do more than eat and sleep and squeak. The little animal had been positioned poorly in the nest, and gravity had won the only battle being waged.
But when the baby bat hit Robb’s head, his freak-out was so extreme that he took off in a sprint, lost his balance, and slid on moss.
His ankles, he immediately realized when he went down, were always wobbly.
Sam waited in the car for ten minutes, which felt like an hour, before he opened the door to see what was taking Robb so long.
Was he doing more than just taking a leak?
The idea of finding Robb Ellis squatting somewhere out in the ferns was more than disturbing.
Maybe Robb had encountered a bear or a wolf or a mountain lion. Or maybe he’d stepped into an old, rusty hunting trap and was now thinking of gnawing off his own limb.
Whatever he was doing, it was keeping them from heading after Robb’s car and possibly finding Emily.
And nothing else mattered but her disappearance, his bad behavior, and the threat that was a girl named Destiny.
It was incredibly quiet when Sam opened the car door and started down the slope into the dense woods.
The undergrowth of moss and ferns made a kind of carpet, and Sam knew how to spot where it had been disturbed.
He found the baby bat before he found Robb. It lay on its back at the base of a towering tree. It was tiny, with immature, limp wings that were translucent even in the half-light.
The little baby’s perfect body was so fragile that Sam found himself transfixed at the sight.
Only moments before, the small animal had been alive. Sam forced himself not to connect what he was seeing to Emily.
The world wasn’t a big web where everything had a reason for being or meaning in a greater context.
Bats carried rabies.
Clarence had always warned about that.
Sam felt the panic full on. It gripped his throat and made breathing difficult. His father should be the last of his problems right now. The man was locked up and had nothing to do with what was now happening, and any thought of him was just ridiculous.
And then he heard a voice: “I’m over here.”
Only forty feet away, crumpled in a hole, was Robb Ellis. Sam dropped to his knees. “What happened?”
Robb tried to pull himself to a seated position, but he was still dazed. “I’m not sure.”
“Just take a breath. Take it easy.…” Sam nodded, adding, “Did you see a bat?”
It was all coming back to Robb now.
“Yeah. It flew down and hit me in the face. I freaked out.”
Sam shrugged. “Stuff happens.”
Robb started to get up. “You must think I’m the biggest dork.”
“Not really.”
Robb was suddenly very coherent. “I am. That’s the truth.”
Sam helped him to his feet. “Maybe you think too much about what everyone else is thinking about you.”
Robb considered the possibility. “You say the most simple things, and somehow it’s like you’re a prophet.”
Sam shook his head. “Only to you, Robb.”
“Call me Bobby. That’s my name.” He started up the incline to the road. “The Robb thing is so pretentious.”
Sam raised an eyebrow. “I’m not really sure what pretentious means.”
Robb/Bobby shook his head. “Of course not. That’s perfect.”
43
Destiny spotted the silver car across the way, idling in the corner of the parking lot. There was a big rig parked at an angle at a distance from the bathrooms.
Clouds had rolled down from the mountains, and the sky was a milky-white blanket above, which made no shadows below.
Only a slight breeze stirred the air.
It was quiet. And calm.
She needed to be the same way.
She said it out loud: “Look normal.”
She should do that now.
And so Destiny swung Robb Ellis’s SUV into the spot closest to the cinder-block bathrooms.
Isn’t that what most people would do, even if they went into a closed rest stop? Wouldn’t they be coming in to use the bathroom?
Should she get out? Should she go around the wood barricade and into the cinder-block building?
As Destiny deliberated, she could see the copper-haired man at the wheel of the silver car. And the edge of Emily.
But the man’s head was now twisting around in her direction.
And he was looking right at her.
Emily stared forward.
But she watched by looking in the side-view mirror as the door of Robb Ellis’s SUV opened and Destiny Verbeck became visible.
Her yellow-and-blue sundress and snug orange shoes made her look dainty from a distance. Even fragile.
She was real. So it can’t be a coincidence. She has to be following us.
Because didn’t she just get off the highway at a closed rest stop?
Next to her the Monster spoke. “Some kid musta stole her parents’ car.”
He seemed to admire this. Not condemn it.
His full attention was now locked on Destiny.
K.B. Walton was a trucker who’d driven for forty-one years.
He was a long-haul man, traversing the country the way other people make trips to their local grocery store.
As K.B. saw it, he was a modern-day cowboy. He moved stuff across wide-open spaces. And he did it alone, for the most part, communing in his own way with nature and the elements.
While he was out the
re battling the wind and the rain and the loneliness of the open road, he disappeared into his own thoughts, which might have been boring and dull to other people, but to K.B., they were what brought him comfort and peace.
He sang as he drove, mostly songs that he made up. His favorite creations had a country-and-western feel, and the one he was working on now was titled “How Many Scented Soaps Can a Single Man Own?”
During the course of his four decades of hauling everything from rawhide strips to cases of multicolored Italian gum balls, he’d upgraded so that he now drove a rig that had a sleeper unit complete with a mini-fridge, a toilet/shower combo, and a bed that swung down right on top of a small booth that was otherwise a tabletop.
The road had given K.B. something else besides a catalog of confessional songs, a way to pay his bills, and an escape from his boozer wife and two now-grown daughters.
It had also given him hemorrhoids, high blood pressure, and peripheral neuropathy.
The neuropathy was now his real problem. It caused tingling in his hands and his feet. And it played tricks when he least expected it, turning whole parts of his body numb and achy and cold.
With K.B.’s disability, his reaction time was slowing. And that could be a problem for someone behind the controls of eighteen wheels of heavy machinery.
His solution was to keep his troubles to himself. He was an independent operator, so he didn’t have a boss. If he got his loads delivered on time, no one cared how the stuff got there, or if the person responsible had been numb on the left side of his body for 2,856 miles.
But that morning, as he chugged up Route 97 in central Oregon, it was all catching up to him.
His left hand, his wrist, and his left elbow were immobile. His left shoulder felt like it had been frozen solid. And the tingling was spreading.
The rest stop was officially closed, but K.B. Walton realized that he had no choice but to pull over to see if he could shake the feeling of a hundred tiny bee stings in his left foot.
He parked his rig in the vacant lot, climbed into the living cubicle behind the driver’s seat, and put down the fold-out bunk bed.
He drank a fair amount of whiskey from the bottle he kept in the box above the shower/toilet stall, and he fell asleep.
Destiny held the keys to Robb Ellis’s car firmly in hand as she went around the wooden barricade and into the cinder-block building.
She realized that she was shaking.
She gripped the keys tighter and tried to focus on her surroundings.
The space was dissected into two parts by an open corridor that was covered by a green corrugated-plastic roof.
You could go left to the men’s section or to the right to the women’s part. Or you could walk straight, and you’d end up out the back.
There were two entrances and exits. That made Destiny feel better and worse at the same time.
Public bathrooms always smelled the same to her. Weird and closed in and creepy.
Now every detail of the place jumped out at her.
There were brown paper towels scattered on the cement floor, and someone had spray painted graffiti on the gray cinder-block wall. It read:
BAD SPELLERS OF THE WORLD, UNTIE!
Instead of going into the women’s side, Destiny silently moved down the center corridor, emerging out the back of the building.
A metal drinking fountain was attached to the wall. Someone had written in black Magic Marker next to the on/off handle:
Please wiggle Handel
Written below this, in a different color marker, was:
If I do, will it wiggle Bach?
Destiny had no idea what that meant.
She looked down at her hand and realized that she was clutching Robb’s car keys so tightly that what must have been his house key had sliced a cut into her palm.
She forced herself to loosen her grip, and after a few deep breaths she moved to the corner of the building, where she peeked out at the parking lot.
The big rig looked abandoned.
But she could still see the orange-haired man and Emily in the silver car.
Clarence ran his fingers through his hair, which suddenly felt greasy.
Being clean was very important to him.
Maybe it was the heat, or maybe it was the buzz he got from breaking the law.
He was jacked up, that was for sure.
If the midget hadn’t shown up in the SUV, he’d have popped the girl by now.
His gun was just waiting to fire.
So what was taking the troll-baby so long? He saw her go around the wooden barrier and into the bathroom. He could imagine her now, sitting on a toilet, taking her sweet time. Did her feet even reach the ground?
And he had to go, too, damn it.
Clarence, temper rising, shifted abruptly out of park and into reverse. He stepped on the gas and made a loop, backing up so that the hood of the car was now facing the cinder-block building. This gave him a better view of the bathroom, and the trunk of the Honda was facing the other direction.
It was now hidden.
If the SUV elf didn’t come out in the next sixty seconds, he’d go to plan B.
Or even plan C.
Emily could feel him growing more and more anxious. His fingers were strumming, and his right leg twitched. Little kicks forward at nothing but air.
So she tried hard to stay still.
To be invisible.
To not provoke him.
Everything that Sam had ever told her about the man came back to her now. He heard voices. They told him what to do. He made decisions. Sudden. Irrational.
The boys had been afraid of him. That’s most of what she could remember: fear of his very being. How had Sam lived under this kind of tyranny for so many years?
Emily’s love for Sam and Riddle made her now feel as if she would explode. She had never experienced such a surge of emotion.
She understood suddenly that the two boys were some kind of miracle. They had survived this.
And then a voice, his voice, spoke.
“We’re going to get out of the car. I’ll come around and open your door. And then we’re going behind the car. If you run, if you even turn the wrong way, I’ll shoot you. Your choice.”
Emily knew how to do manipulation techniques to solve derivations in calculus using a graphing calculator. She knew how to conjugate Spanish language verbs in six tenses. But she had not been taught about psychopaths.
She struggled to use her ability to feel what he was feeling. And right now she knew he was a bundle of frustration.
He was ready to blow up.
Emily suddenly shifted to Destiny. She tried to imagine what was happening in that bathroom.
Forget how she got in Bobby’s car and to this rest stop or why she had found her.
Focus on the result.
Was she inside calling for help?
Were the police or the highway patrolmen about to arrive?
Would helicopters appear in the sky and come to her rescue?
Any moment would she hear sirens and the amplified voices of authorities telling the Monster that it was all over?
They would say that he should put down the gun and step out of the vehicle.
Is that what would happen next?
Destiny was crunched low, with her butt right on her heels.
She could see the door open on the driver’s side and then, seconds later, the door on the passenger’s side angled wide. But she was at the wrong angle to follow what was happening.
She edged higher up and caught sight of Emily Bell being led behind the silver car, where they both disappeared from view.
44
Sam now drove. Bobby Ellis spoke to the OnBoard technician.
Sam kept his eyes on the highway, but he saw Bobby’s chin move up and down. He was listening and seemingly agreeing with someone.
And then Bobby said: “Thank you. I appreciate it. You’ve got my number. You can call back if there are any changes.” br />
Bobby pressed a button on his cell phone and ended the call. “The car hasn’t moved in five minutes. It looks like it’s in a rest stop.”
Sam took his eyes off the road to look at Bobby. “Call the police.”
“We don’t need to do that.”
Sam’s voice got louder. “Yes, we do. Call them.”
Bobby shook his head. “We’ll be there in less than thirty minutes.”
Sam was yelling now. “Just call! Do it! Call the police!”
“It’s not the police. We’re not in a city anymore. The jurisdiction would be state troopers.”
Sam reached for his cell phone. “So we call state troopers!”
But before he could do that, his own phone rang. Sam looked down at the digital display.
He knew that number. It was the Bell house.
He felt his heart inside his chest fold inward with relief.
This was it.
It was Emily calling from home. Right here would be the explanation. And this nightmare would all be over.
Sam pressed the button and heard Riddle’s voice. It was tight. Low. Barely audible. “I think Dad got out of jail. I think he’s trying to get us.”
They stood at the back of the silver car with the trunk now popped open, and Emily was struck by the sound that the wind makes when it blows pine trees.
She’d heard it her whole life. A gentle swooshing.
The needles rub up against one another and create a rustling noise that a person never forgets.
Would she remember this day with the sound of the pine needles?
Would she live to have that experience?
Focus.
On.
Details.
If she could see every single thing around her, every small detail, that meant that she was, in fact, alive.
He had one hand on her upper arm. He gripped it. Very hard.
She knew that there would be bruises in two places: where his thumb dug into the inner portion of her arm, and on the outside, where his other fingers took hold.
He had one hand on her. And one hand on the gun. The heat coming from inside the trunk could be felt several feet away.