Surrender, New York

  “Yeah. That would certainly screw with what’s left of your mental balance,” Mike said. I could only nod quickly in reply. “But somehow, I’m doubting any of it has happened. And if you want to know why, it’s because you convinced me too good. Whoever’s behind this, ultimately, on the ground they need her—the person-who-must-not-be-mentioned, I mean—they might move her somewhere, but what you’re thinking about? I doubt it. Whatever’s happening, she’s still too useful.” Having finished the water, Mike reached back for the scotch flask.

  “Hey,” I said, actually feeling somewhat relieved by what he’d said. “Don’t drink too much more of that—whatever we find, I’m going to need you sharp.”

  “L.T., please,” Mike said, as we finally turned off of Route 7 and onto County Route 34. “I’ve had maybe two shots, altogether, over an hour ago. You know me better than that.”

  “Just go easy.” By now we’d reached the statue of Caractacus Jones. “There’s a couple of Cokes in the food bin. Grab one, it’ll sharpen you up.” Mike did as he was told, holding his can up to the statue as I circled the town square, vainly hoping for a glimpse of Cousin Caitlin’s cruiser.

  “Here’s to you, Colonel,” Mike said, taking a deep draft of the Coke. “And to your damned riddle…” As Mike recapped the Coke he seemed to realize what I was doing, at which point his own expression began to look more apprehensive. We were just leaving the square and starting down the straight length of foliage-enfolded road toward Death’s Head Hollow when he murmured, “Wasn’t that Amazon beauty Caitlin supposed to be patrolling around here?”

  His answer came as soon as he’d asked the question: up ahead, at the entrance to the hollow, the flashing blues, reds, and whites of not only Caitlin’s car, but several other marked and unmarked vehicles—including one that I recognized as Mitch McCarron’s cruiser—were pulsing away.

  “Jesus,” I murmured, almost mad with fear. “We’re too late. Too fucking late…”

  “You don’t know that,” Mike said firmly, trying to believe it. “Mitch sent Caitlin backup after we spoke to him, that’s all. No big deal. Just standard procedure, right?” His face darkened as we drew closer. “But then why’s he here, too? And what the hell are they all looking at?”

  Too drained to even try to answer Mike’s questions, I slowly pulled the Empress over to the side of the road. “Mike,” I said, in little more than a whisper. “I need you to drive up the hollow.”

  “Trajan, they’re going to want us over there, we’ve got to stop—”

  “Above all, we cannot stop,” I answered. “Or rather, you can’t. We’ll switch seats—you take the wheel. I’ll get out when we pass them, but we’ll only pause for a second—then you get up to Shiloh and tell Lucas whatever you have to: say the old girl had a heart attack and I had to go with her to the hospital. Get Annabel to help, I’m guessing she knows all about this, too; give him whatever he wants, ice cream, beer laced with Ambien, I don’t give a shit, but you keep him in that house!”

  “Annabel knows all about it—about what?” Mike shook his head as I got out and he grabbed the wheel and pulled himself into the driver’s seat.

  “Just move,” I said, getting myself back into the car.

  Mike knew well enough that whatever was up was big, and I think he suspected, based on my earlier state, that something fairly terrible had happened to Ambyr, something that had to be kept from Lucas. When we pulled into the hollow, we both noted that the various occupants of the cruisers, including Caitlin and Mitch, were all gathered around something in the tall grass at the base of a big maple that had stood at the entrance to Death’s Head Hollow for all of my life, and for long before that, its limbs growing outward and almost parallel to the ground. Because of this, it was a favorite climbing tree for the children of Surrender, and I had often seen them making their way out onto those limbs. When I’d been a boy, the sight had filled me with enormous envy, and I’d have given a great deal to have been able to tackle that tree; now, however, I would have given almost anything to stay away from it.

  And I wondered, if my worst imaginings of the moment proved accurate, whether such children would ever play there again…

  I got out of the car as Mitch and the other troopers turned to catch sight of us, and then sent Mike on his way. As I approached the tree through the moist grass, I picked Clarissa’s face out of the cluster of officers when she turned on my approach. Her shoulders wrapped in a North African shawl, she was closer to the tree than the others, and I could see that her features were ashen. She met me several paces from the crowd and, unusually for her, embraced me very tightly.

  “Again,” she murmured, her still-strong frame trembling. “It’s happened again—after so long…”

  I didn’t say anything in reply; there wasn’t much need to. Now that I was close enough, I could see that there was a length of quarter-inch nylon cord hanging from a bough of the maple some fifteen feet from the ground. It had been cut at just about the spot that someone of Caitlin’s height could have reached with her arm fully extended. She and the several other troopers parted for me, while Mitch put a hand to my shoulder.

  “I’m sorry, Trajan,” he said. “But don’t worry—we’re going to figure out what all this business means. We’re going to get these sons of bitches…”

  I didn’t answer, just nodded once and took a step in front of him; and there, lying in the grass in a position that could almost have been taken for restful, if the expression on the face and the protruding of the swollen purple tongue had not been so obscene, was Derek. The nylon rope around his neck had garroted him savagely, breaking through the skin at spots. His clothes were the same that he had worn to dinner when he’d come to Shiloh: he had dressed his best, for the deliverance that had become his doom. On his chest was pinned a large piece of notepaper, its message terribly simple; indeed, its few words made the citizens of Surrender who, all those generations ago, had sacrificed the lives of two young men in like fashion to Colonel Jones’ wrath seem quite eloquent:

  THIS IS ON YOU—NOW BACK OFF.

  I got onto my one knee by the boy, whose eyes were still open and somewhat swollen from the breaking of his neck; then I looked to Mitch. “Any idea how far away Weaver is?”

  “Out of county, on call,” Mitch said. “Gonna be at least an hour.”

  “Okay, then.” I reached down, put my hand to Derek’s brow, and brought it down on his eyelids. Rigor sets in faster on the eyes and eyelids than on most parts of the body—sometimes taking as little as two hours—and I wasn’t going to leave the boy with that ghastly stare on the off chance that Ernest Weaver might pass up a McDonald’s on his way to Surrender. Despite the slight protrusion of the dark orbs themselves, the lids slid over them easily; and with my back covering my work, I decided to finish the job by coaxing the swollen tongue into the mouth and closing the jaw. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mitch indicate silence to any of the assembled troopers who might want to protest; and with these small acts of respect done, heartbreaking as they were, Derek finally looked as much at peace as possible. I brushed some of his hair from his cold forehead, murmuring:

  “And so, Derek—flights of angels, kid…”

  Knowing that there was so much more yet to be taken care of, that night, I pulled myself up on my cane with some help from Mitch, and rejoined Clarissa. There was no real point in my hanging around and joining the wait to see when Weaver would show up and pompously pronounce the already obvious cause of death; there was, on the other hand, every point in getting back to Shiloh, and getting Mike down to the scene to do what he could before some FIC tech made a hash of the whole thing. Whatever time and caffeine hadn’t done to burn the small amount of scotch from his body, the sight of Derek would, and he’d be sharp. So, after reintroducing myself to Caitlin, I turned to Mitch and asked if Ambyr and Lucas’ cousin could drive my great-aunt and myself back up to the farm. My thought was that his cousin’s presence might help Lucas with the shock of Derek’s
death; but surprisingly, Clarissa protested rather firmly that she’d rather walk, glancing my way to indicate I’d better not argue the point. I wasn’t certain how far I was going to make it up Death’s Head on foot; but, going into my pockets for a cigarette, I discovered that the ever-reliable Mike had at some point slipped the scotch flask into my jacket pocket. Thus armed, I figured I’d be okay, although I didn’t want to take a snort until we were out of sight of the uniforms.

  We’d only gotten about a hundred yards up the hollow, however, before Clarissa stopped me, firmly taking hold of my arm and then my hand. “Bad as that was, Trajan,” she said rather desperately, “there’s more to come. Get a good grip on yourself.”

  With those words, my insides took a momentary dip, and I went for the whiskey flask without opening it. “Marcianna…?” I said, in what was scarcely a whisper.

  Clarissa’s grip loosened just a bit, and she frowned at me. “What? Your God damned cheetah? That’s what you’re worried about, right now?”

  “It’s the only thing in question,” I mumbled, finally sipping the whiskey.

  But Clarissa quickly grabbed the flask from me. “Your pet is fine! Jesus, Trajan—here! I found it in the master bedroom.” She shoved a small piece of paper into my hand: a sheet of inexpensive white stationery likely purchased at Target, I quickly conjectured. When unfolded, it revealed yet another simple message, written in a delicate, neat hand that wavered just a bit as it warned:

  We have the girl.

  I suppose Clarissa was waiting for some kind of deeply emotional response; for tears, at least; all I can be certain of is that, when what she in fact got was a small, bitter smile, it caused her to slap me across the face, I think as much to bring me to my senses as to punish me.

  “It’s all right, Clarissa,” I said, scarcely even feeling the sting on my cheek. “Nothing will happen to Ambyr. But who did you leave at the house?”

  “I was able to get Happy and Chick to come up,” she answered, perhaps a little surprised that I’d guessed at her move. “And they’re armed, don’t worry.”

  “I’m not worried,” I said. “They’re armed, I’m armed, everybody in this damned county’s armed—and yet the only shooting in this case has been on the part of law enforcement. ‘You cannot escape it, in this country…’ ”

  “Trajan, I will slap you again,” Clarissa said, “if you don’t start making sense. Don’t you understand—they’ve taken Ambyr!”

  “I understand that Ambyr’s gone, Clarissa—trust me on that.” I finally got a cigarette into my mouth, where I left it hanging for a few seconds as I looked back at what little we could see of the pulsing cruiser lights. “And I understand that Derek’s dead,” I whispered. “I understand that he never stood much of a chance—and how shitty that was…” I shook my head hard, at which Clarissa pulled out her lighter and put it to the butt in my mouth. “We’ve got to get Mike down here, fast. Which means we’ve got to get back to the house.” Then I drank the last of the Talisker in a few big pulls.

  “Do you need to get drunk?” Clarissa said, as we turned to start walking again. “Is it that bad?”

  “Don’t worry—that was just for my hip. No, I won’t get drunk; but let’s go. And on the way, I’ll tell you a little story. About a girl; a girl who, intentionally or not, left breadcrumbs behind her…”

  “I’ve already said that I’m not going to talk to you,” Clarissa warned, “if you’re just going to babble like an idiot. What the hell are we going to tell Lucas, Trajan? What the hell has happened to his sister? And what the hell do these people want from us?”

  “ ‘These people’—that’s complicated, Aunt…” We kept on moving through the unique blackness that was the lowermost part of Death’s Head Hollow at night, with the sky increasingly obscured by a canopy of interlacing trees that, despite their extraordinary beauty during the day, could take on a brooding, even threatening air in the dark, one that brought to mind every bit of the misery that the old cart path had seen in its earliest years. “But,” I went on, “I can say that each of them hungers for the same results: power, success, more. Indeed, their common and basic urge is just that—they crave, Clarissa, and with a voraciousness that is frightening…”

  At which point, some might say at long last, the terribleness of Derek’s death, of Lucas’ sudden aloneness, and of Ambyr’s supposed disappearance hit me extraordinarily hard: my words caught in my throat, as my body shook and my eyes welled up. Clarissa had chosen that same instant to light one of her Camels, and she was able to make out my features in the glow offered by her lighter; upon which she hooked her right arm tight in my free one, being careful not to let her own steps interfere with those of my prosthesis. When my voice returned, I said, with an unsteadiness that belied any professional detachment, “I can only tell you as much of it as I know, Aunt. You may not credit the story, until I can prove it; any more than you will believe me when I say that I’m beginning to understand what old Caractacus meant, when he came to Surrender that last time…”

  {iv.}

  As the hours of that wretched night wore on, Lucas entered a dissociative state of the type that can all too easily become long term and lead to severe personality disorders. That much of a preliminary diagnosis I was able to reach on my own, despite my closeness to the boy, and it was admittedly an obvious one; but it was later supported by Clarissa’s personal doctor, as well as by a psychologist from Fraser, the pair of whom came to Shiloh in the morning (such were the strings that my great-aunt could still pull, vestiges of an age that would doubtless pass with her). The kid remained in the master bedroom at Shiloh, eyes fixed on the emptiness around him, all of his sister’s belongings having disappeared with her. This last struck even Clarissa as a strange feature to characterize a kidnapping; and perhaps even so young and tortured a mind as Lucas’ could see it. Yet if the thought did occur to him, he made no more comment on it than he did on anything else. He just sat in an easy chair by the room’s westward window, immovable as stone and hysterically silent, staring at a single, indefinable point in the abandoned chamber until the lines under his eyes became bags so terribly discolored that he looked as if he had taken bad blows in a fight; and in this, of course, his outer body was only revealing his inward reality.

  There was perhaps some danger of Lucas’ withdrawing so far into himself that the person he had been would become splintered and finally obliterated, given that the death of his best friend—his effective brother—and the disappearance of his sister had followed the desertion of his parents far too quickly. Yet I had been through a lot with him, by now; and his ability to face down several moments of risk and danger with something that transcended precocity proved that his coping mechanisms had been developed to a point that I’d seen only in a few young people, or even adults. For the most part, I’d observed such strength among those stricken by chronic and painful illnesses, cancer (especially given my own experience) among them; yet I knew that the “disease” of Lucas’ life—desertion—brought with it psychic costs as great as any physical malady, when it occurred so repetitively and brutally; and so I could not dismiss the danger of real harm, whatever my own feelings about his ability to rebound.

  We got at least some encouragement when, in talking not only to the generalists present but to a pediatric psychiatrist in Albany whom Clarissa managed to get on the phone mid-morning, a consensus was reached that the period of Lucas’ newfound stress had likely been too short for there to be serious risk of transition to a fugue state (a kind of amnesia, encompassing not just events but the entire persona) or other personality disorder. Furthermore, we agreed that if we could somehow spark a response in him, a response that would end his almost inhuman determination to retreat into himself, we could stave off the seeds of chronic depression, bipolarity, and even schizophrenia that too often grow out of such cases, particularly in adolescents.

  We decided to take shifts monitoring our young friend—each of us staying for four or five hour
s at a time in the bedroom with him—and await some sign that would allow us to ward off what was, to me, the ultimate danger: the psychopharmacologists who, if we took Lucas to a hospital, would try to jerk him back to reality with drugs. And through the hours of waiting and hoping, each of us—myself, Mike, Clarissa, and even Annabel—clung ever more tightly to the belief that Lucas trusted us enough to come back, and to reassemble the pieces that had always made him so unique, and such a fighter for so much longer than should ever have been his lot. Yet our role was not simple attendance: we also needed to be on the lookout for that unknown thing that we’d all, professionals and caring friends alike, agreed might assist or trigger his process of return. And not long after the conference call, I stumbled on it. After we’d talked to the pediatric psychiatrist, I returned to Marcianna’s enclosure, where I’d spent as much of the night as I could in her company. I fed and hung out with her for just a few minutes, then returned to the house and headed up to the master bedroom, where Mike was keeping watch in an armchair just inside the door, using his iPad to go over the few trace results he’d been able to obtain from Derek’s body the night before. I slowly approached the west window, and noticed that, off in the distance, Marcianna had again started to issue that particular chirruping that I knew was inspired by the killer on the ridgeline. I made no mention of it, as I leaned down to stare into Lucas’ terribly hollow gaze—

  At which point something remarkable happened: each time that Marcianna let loose her high, somewhat desperate call, Lucas’ eyes—so motionless and dead, to that point, even their blinking having been reduced to an absolute minimum—reacted. It was not a dramatic movement, just the barest beginnings of a twitch; but it was real and unprecedented, all the same. In order to confirm the observation, I retreated to where Mike was sitting, and quietly asked him to take a look and judge whether I was simply seeing something that I wanted to see; but he soon confirmed that this was the first example of response we’d had in over twelve hours.