Mountain Madness

  Before he left, he found a clean towel in one of the drawers and laid it on the counter where the old one had been. Perfect.

  His footsteps echoed through the stillness as he left the kitchen, so much louder now than when he’d padded his way inside. He passed the questionable dinette without paying it any attention and let himself out the back door. Behind him, a line of red footprints led directly from the body to the exit, showing no deviation and no hesitation.

  He stepped over the garden hose again, passed by the tennis ball and strode toward the woods, where he’d hid less than fifteen minutes before. The fork-trunked oak was the largest tree on the property, its lower limbs wide enough around that they nearly could have been trees of their own. Dave had never had a tree house himself and hadn’t seen enough of them in his life to fairly rate this one, but he could say with a hundred percent certainty that, as a kid, he would have given just about anything for this sort of hideaway. He could just imagine sitting in the shadows of a hundred breeze-blown leaves, sniffing the fresh air and listening to the birdsongs. It would be heaven to a nature-loving kid. Or at least it would have been to Davy. Maybe still would.

  Except if Dave had built himself such a getaway, he never would have made the same mistake the maker of this particular one had: he wouldn’t have made it adult accessible.

  Standing with one foot on the ground and the other on an exposed root, he gripped the rung closest in height to his chest in both hands and yanked at it with all his might. It didn’t budge. Holding on to the next highest one, he did a partial pull-up, not quite enough to get his chin over the board but enough to test whether it would hold his weight. Solid. He stepped onto the first rung and climbed.

  The ladder didn’t lead straight up the trunk but spiraled around it instead. Knots and branches occasionally provided natural, supplemental footholds. Dave eased his way up, eyes on the hatch in the fort’s floor, constantly expecting one of the rungs to break off in his hands or splinter beneath his scrambling feet despite their apparent sturdiness. He winked his scratched eye every ten or fifteen seconds, trying to keep it moist and fend off the worst of the pain. By the time he got his head through the access hole, he was sweating. The wounds on his face throbbed in time with his heartbeat, and a series of tears dripped from his injured eye down the side of his nose and across his pressed lips.

  If Dave hadn’t slipped a little at the last second, the rock would have hit him square in the teeth. Fortunately for him, he did and it didn’t. His head dropped just beneath the platform’s surface not half a second before the stone went sailing by, and he listened while it crashed through tree limbs and into the underbrush below. Rather than wait for another rock, he lunged up and into the tree house. The boy sat in the corner with his arm flopped out in front of him.

  “Trying to bean me?” Dave said, pushing himself into a sitting position, not wanting to advance any farther until the boy seemed ready for him to do so.

  “I—”

  Dave waved a hand unconcernedly and forced out a little laugh. “Forget it. Georgie would have done the same thing.”

  The kid said nothing. He looked away from Dave and over the edge of the platform. Thinking about a jump, Dave figured. The fall might leave him with a broken leg or a fractured skull, but it was a reasonable consideration. Dave wouldn’t have blamed him a bit. He remembered the way the kid had looked coming down from this tree earlier, like a bird gliding to earth. After such a display, it wouldn’t have surprised him much if the boy hit the ground running or flew off through the trees like a whooping crane.

  He pulled another toothpick from his breast pocket and flipped it into his mouth. He wasn’t sure where he’d lost the first one, but it didn’t especially matter. He had plenty. He looked for a replacement twig while he waited to see what the kid would do.

  After what must have been a full minute, the boy looked back up at Dave and slumped. It was perhaps the most physical and obvious act of surrender Dave had ever seen, and done without a single spoken word—but Dave wasn’t about to let down his guard. He’d seen plenty of opossum, had played it once or twice himself.

  “You know,” Dave said after plucking the pick from his mouth, “that rock near knocked my head off. You ever play much ball?” He closed his good eye, saw the world momentarily through a watery haze.

  The kid looked at the weathered boards between his legs.

  “Georgie never played except for a year of tee-ball. Would it be all right if I called you Georgie?”

  No response, but the boy did take another quick peek over the edge. Dave had to admire his pluck.

  He started to reinsert the toothpick, then jammed it into the crease of his ear instead and folded his hands in his lap. “There’s something I guess you ought to know.” He waited for the boy to look at him but finally continued when he didn’t. “That woman inside there.” He nodded his head toward the house, though the boy still wouldn’t look. “I guess she’s dead.”

  Finally, some life from the boy. His head jerked up, and the muscles in his body flexed and jumped. His eyes bore into Dave, showing first anger, then fear, and finally misery, the transitions between each lasting for only a blink apiece. The kid had gone from slack into an almost immediate hunch and now resembled a field cat ready to pounce. Dave didn’t move or react. He knew better than to show any fear.

  “You—” The boy was almost shaking. “You lie.”

  “Nope.” Dave shook his head once, slowly, to the left and then back to center. “I stuck her with a knife.” Dave pulled out the front of his shirt and looked from it back to the boy, saying here’s the evidence without saying anything. “But there’s something else.”

  “No.” He shook his head, twitched a little, and shook his head again.

  “There’s something else,” Dave repeated. “She wasn’t your mommy any more than she was my missus.” He took the toothpick from his ear. “She was a liar, Georgie, and she was all wrong.” He popped in the unchewed end and chomped down.

  The boy changed position a little, got his feet behind him. No longer a hunched cat; now a sprinter waiting for the flat crack of the starting gun. “You’re lying,” he said in a voice much deeper and manlier than the one he’d used in the kitchen.

  “Nope. Daddies shouldn’t ever lie to their boys. But I promise you this: we’ll find you your rightful mommy. I will make things right.”

  On some level, he’d expected what happened next all along. The boy charged. Dave scooted sideways at the last second and reached out a hand. If he hadn’t moved quickly enough, the kid would undoubtedly have toppled over the railing and onto the forest floor below. Might even have brained himself on the very rock he’d tried throwing at Dave. Instead, Dave wrapped his hand around one of the boy’s flailing ankles and held on tight.

  The boy flew forward, not getting his hands out in front of him in time, hitting the two-by-four guardrail forehead first before dropping with a groan to the platform beside Dave. The crack of wood came at some point during the commotion, but Dave couldn’t pick out exactly when it happened or where the sound originated. It could have been the rail or one of the floorboards beneath them, or even one of the supporting tree limbs. Regardless, Dave wanted to get them down from there as soon as possible. He flipped the boy onto his back and pushed his hair away to examine the damage.

  The abrasion just above the left eye looked bad but not dangerously so. The kid (Georgie, Dave thought, he’s Georgie now) had his eyes closed and wasn’t moving, but Dave felt his heartbeat and saw the rise and fall of his chest. Just stunned, more than likely. Dave got onto his hands and knees, moved to the hole, dropped down to the first rung and dragged the child after him. Gritting his teeth, he wiped a fresh bout of tears from his tortured eye. He climbed down far enough to give himself some room and pulled Georgie onto his shoulder, crumpling a little at the added weight but able, just barely, to manage the load and keep hold of the tree at the same time. He spit his toothpick past the trunk, took a deep
breath, and began the arduous descent.

  SIX

  “FIRST THING IS I need you to relax, okay?” The guard uncrossed his arms, and one hand dangled by his utility belt as if preparing for a quick draw, though the item positioned where a normal policeman carried a holstered gun was, in this man’s case, only a two-way radio. He reached his other hand out to Libby’s shoulder in a comforting gesture but made no actual contact. “Now tell me again. Slowly.”

  Libby sighed and rolled her eyes so drastically that her head rolled a little bit with them. This was ridiculous. By now Trevor could be gagged and duct-taped into the trunk of some pervert’s car, the two of them already headed for Wyoming while she stood here flapping and re-flapping her gums.

  “His name is Trevor. Pullman. I gave him five dollars to ride the carousel,” she said. “He didn’t want me to wait with him. I stayed at the table.” Short, quick sentences. Just the facts, ma’am. “I got up to refill my soda. I turned around, and he was missing.”

  “Uh huh,” the guy (S. Tucker according to his name tag) said, sounding less like a law enforcer than an urging psychiatrist. “And then?” He was massive. Maybe he sprinkled steroids on his breakfast cereal instead of sugar or took a raw egg break while his fellow guards sipped their coffees. If his face hadn’t been so meticulously razored, she’d have sworn she was standing here talking to a grizzly bear.

  “I’d seen him talking to a group of girls,” she said, trying to stand still but not able to keep herself from fidgeting. “I asked if they saw where he went.” She shifted her weight from her left foot to her right. “They said no.” She crossed one hand over her abdomen just beneath her breasts and scratched at the elbow of her other arm.

  Tucker, who’d been leaning forward a little, returned to his normal standing height, which seemed to Libby no more than a few inches shy of ten feet, and retracted his beefy arm. He stuck his thumbs under his belt and rocked once, almost imperceptibly, from heel to toe. “Well, I’ll tell you what,” he said. His voice was as pumped up as the rest of him, deep but smooth, a little like James Earl Jones’s. “In my experience, nine times out of ten, a parent loses her child and he turns up in the toy store checking out the action figures or the Lego sets. You say you gave him five dollars?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “And I think that carousel ride is about a buck and a half, am I right?”

  Libby shrugged. She had no idea how much the mall charged, which was why she’d given Trevor the five in the first place. “I guess you’d know better than me. But who cares how much the ride costs, I—”

  “Hold on, now. If you were…how old did you say your boy is? Six?”

  Libby nodded.

  “If you were a six-year-old boy with all that cash burning a hole in your pocket and in a place where there was nothing to do but spend it, how long would you wait in line?”

  “He never put it in his pocket,” was all she could think to say, though she knew how idiotic it must sound. “Anyway, Trevor wouldn’t do that. Not after he promised to stay where I could see him. He’s…he’s just not like that. He’s a good boy.” Libby wanted to grab hold of the guard by his belt and drag him with her down the hallway. With his Mufasa’s voice, he could have drawn Trevor’s attention from halfway across the complex.

  “Oh,” Tucker said, grinning now. “I’m sure he’s as good as any of the rest of them. But, fact is, little boys are ornery. They wander where their noses lead them. Like untrained puppies.”

  Libby wasn’t sure she cared much for that particular metaphor. If Trevor was the untrained puppy, that made her the inept master, and she’d be damned if she would stand here and let some khaki-clad mountain criticize her parenting skills.

  “Listen,” she said, pointing a finger that was a jointed twig compared to his enormous logs. “If there’s something you can do, do it. Please. After that, if you want to stand here talking to yourself for the rest of the night, that’s fine by me. But I’m going to look for my son now, while there’s still a chance of finding him.”

  She spun around and stormed away from the kiosk without waiting for a response. As she moved, arcing around a distracted-looking man pushing a twin stroller with a full load of two wiggling boys, she heard the guard activate his radio and mumble something between bursts of static. Maybe he was calling for help; maybe he was just sharing a laugh with one of his buddies. Who knew? She wanted to believe the former, didn’t want to succumb to cynicism, but she also knew she couldn’t let herself count on any forthcoming help. Not for sure. For now, she could rely only on herself.

  She prowled the passageway, two simultaneous thoughts driving her: I will find him and I am not a bad mother. Part of her wondered if she really might catch him in the toy store or the arcade or standing at a shop window drooling over some comic book superhero the way he’d drooled over that box of cereal at the supermarket, but another nightmarish part of her expected to encounter some gangly fiend instead, with a trussed-up Trevor under his arm and a maniacal cackle bubbling out from between his lips.

  She found nothing in the candy emporium, nothing in the bookshop or the sports center, where she knew he sometimes liked to look at trading cards. She had nearly made it back to the food court, head over her shoulder, looking at a boy who almost could have been Trevor if his hair had been a shade lighter and his ears about three sizes smaller, when she ran over the stranger and bounced back with a grunt.

  “Hey,” the guy said, moving toward her. For a second, she thought about ignoring him, pushing past without saying a word and continuing her search, but then she got a look at his face and stopped. The man was no stranger, and she didn’t think she’d ever been so glad to see him.

  “What’s going on?” Mike asked her, frowning. “Where’s Trevor?”

  SEVEN

  MIKE PARKED THE truck at the far end of the lot not because he couldn’t find a space closer to the food court entrance, but simply because he always parked at the far ends of lots. He wasn’t afraid the pickup might get dinged by a careless door opener or a runaway shopping cart—at this point, the truck couldn’t have looked much more battered if you’d taken a grenade to it—he liked the outskirts. That was all. After being folded into the cab of his truck for any uncomfortable length of time, he was usually ready to stretch his legs and get his blood pumping. It was one of the things Libby had loved to tease him about and one of the eccentricities he no longer had to try to defend.

  He left the windows down, as was also his policy, so that the cab might be reasonably cool when he and Trevor returned. He had half a dozen ancient cassette tapes in the truck’s glove box, each worth nothing and thus more valuable than the vehicle itself. Even with the engine running and the doors unlocked, he figured the thing most likely to get nabbed would be his copy of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

  He passed through the farthest section of the lot, stepping over a curbed area of grass that acted as a traffic regulator in a way painted yellow lines never seemed to manage in the parking lots of the world. Pasted against the far side of the small island was a pile of windblown refuse comprised mostly of damp newspaper and flyers, an abstract mess of dirty papier-mâché.

  Litterbugs. The mountains had their share too, of course, but somehow the grime always seemed thicker down here, less manageable. You got the impression that with a lot of dedicated clean-up you could eventually scrub those mountain roads clean but that the stains here in the lowlands were permanent.

  Mike imagined a team of boy scouts with buckets and sponges going to work on the access road to his property and grinned sardonically as he stepped through the doors of the Mountain View. Upon seeing the grand carousel and the converging throng around it, however, his mind quieted, and his eyes bulged.

  Jesus. A fake Santa Claus at Christmas was one thing, but the shopping mall had really gone all out with this one. Except for the music, which seemed to come from aftermarket loudspeakers inconsistent with the rest of the ornamentation, this thing was
the real deal. A craftsman himself, he could appreciate the time and manual labor that had gone into the creation of such a masterpiece. In today’s pre-fabricated, cookie-cutter world, things like this carousel were remnants of an era gone forever by the wayside.

  A trio of teenage girls in ripped jeans and too-tight t-shirts bumped him from behind, striding in through the doors with their heads held high and their shoulders pulled back, a royal entourage from some universe gone terribly wrong. Mike tried hard not to stare at the exposed slices of flesh through the tears in the seats of their pants.

  He stepped deeper into the mall and out of the path of any future entrants. Libby had said she’d meet him in the food court, but she hadn’t specified where; Mike had counted on her finding him, maybe flagging him down or shouting his name from wherever she and Trevor might be. But he guessed she probably hadn’t known about the carousel when she’d suggested the meeting place. Keeping Trevor away from that ride would undoubtedly have been harder than keeping a hungry dog from a steaming t-bone. If Mike knew his son, there was only one place the two of them could be.

  Mike walked casually past food-court diners, not in any rush. A quick look at his watch told him he’d actually arrived a few minutes early, despite the truck, and the line for the carousel was extensive. If Libby and Trevor were among that crowd, none of them would be going anywhere for quite some time anyway.

  Walking closer to the waiting crowd, Mike let out a little whistle of disbelief. Two hundred people must have been standing in line, many of them children and young teenagers. Mike didn’t think he’d had that much patience as a kid. Hell, he wasn’t sure he had it now.

  He moved around the perimeter of the crowd, always more comfortable away from the center of activity, scanning the field of hair, looking for Libby’s distinctively sleek do. Her hair. He’d always loved it, from the day they’d met, and he hadn’t grown so bitter that he couldn’t still see it for what it really was.