Long Lost

  “And then?”

  “My predecessor retired. I came here to take his place. Before he left, he explained about the community and told me what I’ve just told you. He said that, despite the doctor’s expectations, the baby lived. In fact, a week before I arrived, Orval had brought the child to town to show how healthy the boy was, to prove to the doctor that God’s will was the only thing that mattered.”

  “But …” I felt more puzzled. “What’s this got to do with … You said you met Lester after a fire.”

  “Years later.”

  I leaned forward.

  “The smoke woke just about everybody in town. I remember it was a Labor Day weekend. A heat wave had just broken, so most people had their air conditioners off and the windows open, taking advantage of a breeze. My wife and I stepped outside, coughing, wondering whose house was on fire. Then I realized that the fire wasn’t in Brockton. Even with the smoke in the streets, I could see a glow on the horizon, to the south, in the direction of where Orval and Eunice had their farm. I knew that it couldn’t be any other Dant’s place, because by then Orval, Eunice, and Lester were the only Dants left.

  “Somebody rang the alarm at the fire station, the signal for volunteers. But when I got there, people had realized that the fire wasn’t in town. There was a lot of confusion about whether we should go out to help them or whether we should let Orval and Eunice pay for insisting that they didn’t need us. In the end, the town made me proud. The fire brigade had a truck filled with water. They drove it out there, and a whole lot of people went in cars. But even before we got close, it was obvious from the extent of the glow on the horizon that even a dozen trucks filled with water wouldn’t make a difference.

  “It hadn’t rained in a month. The wind got stronger. On the left, flames streaked across pastures. Sections of timber were ablaze. Far off, a house and a barn were on fire. We did what we could to stop the flames from spreading across the road. Other than that, we were helpless. By then, it was dawn, and somebody shouted toward a burning field. I looked that way and saw a young man stumble ahead of the flames. He swatted at his smoking clothes, reached a fence, and toppled over it. I got to him first. He was sobbing. I’d never seen eyes so big with fear, but it was obvious that they weren’t registering anything. He was blind from hysteria. I tried to stop him, but he lurched to his feet and staggered along the road. It took three of us to get him to the ground and smother the smoke coming off him.”

  “That was Lester?”

  The reverend nodded. “He wasn’t able to tell us what happened until three days later. After we got him to the ground, something seemed to shut off in him. He became catatonic. We took him to the clinic. He didn’t have any serious burns or other obvious injuries, so the doctor treated him for shock. When it was safe to move him, my wife and I brought him here.” Reverend Benedict indicated the cottage behind the church.

  His eyes saddened. “When Lester was alert enough, he told us about the fire, how the smoke and the dogs barking had wakened him. He’d shouted to warn his parents. He’d tried to run down the hall to their room, but the flames were outside his door, and he had to climb out his window. In the yard, he kept shouting to warn his parents. Past the flames in their bedroom, he heard them screaming, but when he tried to get in through the window and pull them out, the heat was like a wall that wouldn’t let him through. The breeze had spread the fire beyond the house. The barn and the outbuildings, the fields and the woods — everything was on fire. The only way he escaped was by throwing himself into a cattle trough, soaking himself, and running across a pasture while the fire chased him. In the week that he stayed with us, sometimes he woke screaming from nightmares of hearing his parents’ screams.”

  Imagining their agony, I shook my head from side to side. “Did anybody ever learn what caused the fire?”

  “Lester said that a light switch had stopped working in the kitchen. His father had planned to fix it the next day.”

  “I know about buildings. It sounds like an electrical short,” I said. “Fire can spread along faulty wires and accumulate behind the walls. When it breaks through, the flames are everywhere at once.”

  “According to Lester, it was terrifyingly fast.”

  “And then what happened? You said that he stayed with you for a week.”

  “We wanted him to stay longer, but one morning, my wife looked in on him, and he was gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “We’d bought some clothes for him. They were missing. A pillowcase was missing also. He must have used it as a duffel bag. Bread, cookies, and cold cuts were taken from the kitchen.”

  “He left in the middle of the night? Why?”

  “I think it had something to do with my being a minister and the cottage being next to a church.”

  “I don’t understand. Lester was raised in a religious family. The church shouldn’t have bothered him.”

  “Their beliefs were drastically different from mine.”

  “I still don’t …”

  “The Dants believed that God turns His back on us because of our sinful nature. What I preach is that God loves us because we’re His children. I’ve always suspected that the night before Lester ran away, he overheard me practicing my Sunday sermon. He probably thought he was hearing the words of the Devil.”

  “And you never saw him again?”

  “Not until last year when the FBI agent showed me that photograph.”

  In despair, I peered down at it—at Lester Dant, not my brother. The hope upon which I’d based my search no longer kept me going.

  Reverend Benedict looked even sadder. “My wife and I wanted children, but we weren’t able to have any. While Lester recuperated, she and I had talked about becoming his guardians. When he ran away, we felt as if we’d lost a child of our own.” He turned his gaze toward the cemetery beyond the rose garden. “She died last summer.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Lord, how I miss her.” He looked down at his wrinkled hands. “The last I heard about Lester …” Emotion made him pause. “A month after he ran away, he was in Loganville. That’s a town about a hundred miles east of here. A fellow minister happened to mention a helpless young man who showed up one day and whom members of the congregation were taking care of. I went there to find out if it was Lester and to try to persuade him to come back home, but he was gone by the time I got there. If I’d somehow convinced him to stay with us”—the reverend drew a breath—“perhaps none of the tragedies he caused would have happened.”

  “You did everything possible. Lester’s the one to blame.”

  “Only God can determine that.”

  The effort of explaining had obviously tired him. I stood from the bench and shook his hand. “Thank you, Reverend. This was painful for you. I appreciate the effort.”

  “My prayers go with you.”

  “I need them. You said that Orval and Eunice lived south of town?”

  “About eight miles.”

  “Everything’s different now, I suppose.”

  “An agribusiness wound up farming the land. But not much has changed. If you head that way, you can just make out the burned farmhouse from the road.”

  6

  I don’t remember driving south of town. I was so dazed by what I’d learned that it’s a wonder I didn’t drift off the narrow road and hit something. I really had no idea why I was going out to where the fire had happened. But the alternative was to drive pointlessly back to Denver, and I refused to do that. Payne’s words kept coming back to me: “Nothing beats going to the places and people you want to know about.” The ruined Dant farm became one of those places.

  A sign at the side of the road was weathered, partially overgrown with brush. But something in my subconscious noticed it, bringing me to attention. A large piece of plywood. What I assumed had once been black letters had faded to gray.

  REPENT.

  That was all, but it was enough to make me realize that I’d entered Dant country. O
n the right, beyond a pasture, I saw a farmhouse. It was distant, but even from the road, I could tell that it was listing, about to collapse, and that its windows had been broken. The roof on a barn next to it had already caved in.

  But the reverend had said that Orval Dant’s property had been on the left, so I focused my attention over there and soon noticed scorched stumps bordering fields of knee—high crops. I came to a section of trees, where tall burned timber stood among comparatively shorter, lush new trees. Then the land opened out again, and I saw the weed—covered furrows of a dirt lane stretching back what seemed a quarter of a mile to a wide mound of something near another section of new trees.

  A metal gate blocked my way. It had a lock on a chain. I got out and tested the lock, finding it secure. A strengthening breeze carried a hint of moisture. Earlier, the sky had been stark blue, but now it was hazy, darkening on the horizon. The rain wouldn’t reach me for a couple of hours. Even so, I reached into the car and got my knapsack, which had trail food, water, and a rain jacket, among other things. The jacket was what most concerned me, but the truth was, I’d learned the hard way that even an apparently harmless walk in the woods might not work out as planned. I’d also learned from what had happened at the rest area four nights earlier. My pistol was in the knapsack.

  I felt the pack’s satisfying weight against my back as I climbed the fence. Dust puffed around my sneakers when I came down on the opposite side. I started at a walk, but as I looked at the bushes around me, I was reminded of something that Kate, Jason, and I had done the summer before they’d been kidnapped. An architect friend had bought an old cabin up in the mountains. Trees and undergrowth had almost smothered the log building, so one Sunday he’d invited his friends up to help clear the place in exchange for barbecued steaks and all the beer we could drink. Our families were welcome also. Jason had thought it would be fun working next to me, helping to drag the cut bushes away, and I’d felt my chest swell with pride that the little guy had tried so hard. He made Kate laugh when he objected to her wiping the dirt and sweat from his face and making him look like a sissy.

  Now, frustrated that I was no closer to finding them, I increased speed along the lane, anger pushing me. I stretched my legs as far and fast as I could, the sun hot on my face, sweat beading my skin, my jeans and shirt sticking to me.

  A quarter of a mile was too short. I felt so infuriated that I could have run for miles, as I used to before I’d left Denver. But back in Denver, I’d been hopeful, whereas my frantic speed along that lane was a measure of how strongly I felt defeated.

  I reached the end and slowed. The wide mound that I’d seen from the road revealed itself to be the blackened walls of a collapsed wooden structure. Its boards had been reduced to long slabs of charcoal that had toppled into a chaotic pile. Dead leaves were wedged in the gaps. Thorny bushes and vines whose three—leafed pattern warned of poison ivy sprouted from the debris. Beyond, a larger structure (presumably the barn) had similarly burned and collapsed.

  Despite the sweat I’d worked up, I felt cold. I told myself that I was only imposing my mood on what I was seeing. All the same, I couldn’t ignore what had happened there. Lester Dant’s parents had burned to death thirty feet from where I stood. Blackness overwhelmed me.

  What the hell am I doing? I thought. I was about to go back to the car, when something beyond the gutted house caught my attention: an area of about thirty by thirty feet enclosed by a low stone wall. The stones had been darkened by the fire. Some had fallen. I passed the ruins, trying to avoid the poison ivy as I approached the walled—in area. It had an opening where a gate had once been, and when I came closer, I saw that the enclosed area, too, was filled with poison ivy, dead leaves, and thorny bushes. But, amid the chaos, I noticed regularly spaced clumps. Stepping closer, I realized that they were small piles of rocks arranged in rows. The pattern was too familiar not to be recognized as a graveyard. Instead of mounds, there were depressions, the earth having settled onto decaying wooden coffins and the moldering bodies within them. The depressions were common to most old graveyards. The only reason they didn’t appear in modern cemeteries was that coffins were now made from metal and graves had sleeves of concrete onto which a concrete lid was placed after the coffin was lowered and the mourners had departed.

  In that dismal enclosure, generations of Dants had been buried. I imagined the pain and the loneliness with which their loved ones had laid them to rest. What struck me most was how many of the graves were short, indicating the deaths of children.

  I don’t know how long I stared at the graves, meditating about the independent community that the Dants had hoped to establish and how severely their dreams had failed. At last, I stepped away, going around the back of the ruins.

  A small animal skittered through trees behind me. A squirrel perhaps. But because I’d detected no signs of life around the place, the sound startled me. There weren’t even any birds.

  Sweating from the stark sun, I noticed that the storm clouds were a little closer. Wary of more poison ivy, I continued around the back of the burned house. Abruptly my legs felt unsteady. For an instant, I feared that something was wrong with my brain, that I was having a stroke and my balance was gone. My footing became even more unsteady. My lungs fought for air when I realized in panic that it wasn’t my brain or my legs. The ground beneath me parted. I plunged.

  With a gasp, I stopped, caught at my hips. My legs dangled in an unseen open area. Heart racing, I pressed my hands against the ground and strained to push myself up through the hole that trapped me.

  Immediately my hands felt as unsteady as my legs had. The more I pushed them against the earth, the more they sank into it. I dropped again, but not before I flung out my arms, blocking my fall an instant before the widening hole would have sucked me all the way down.

  My legs dangled helplessly, my body swaying in the emptiness beneath me. Only my head and shoulders were above ground, my weight supported by my outstretched arms. Hearing muffled rattles below me, I couldn’t make my lungs work fast enough to take in all the air I needed. The ground sagged again. As the rattles got louder, I shouted and plummeted all the way into the hole.

  7

  With a shock, my feet hit bottom. The impact bent my knees and threw me backward into darkness, jolting me against something. My knapsack jammed against my back, the flashlight, water bottle, and pistol in it walloping against my shoulder blades. I cracked my head and almost passed out. A moldy earthen smell widened my nostrils. The furious whir of rattles made me press harder against what I’d struck.

  It felt like a wall. It was made from wood that had turned spongy. Simultaneously, I realized that what I’d fallen onto was the rotted remains of a wooden floor. Concrete showed through. It was pooled with water and had soaked my pants. But none of that mattered. All I cared about were the rattles in the darkness across from me and the rippling movement in the sunlight that came down through the hole in the ground.

  Snakes. I scrambled to my feet, pressing into a corner. The flashlight, get the damned flashlight, I thought. Frantic, I tugged the knapsack off my back, yanked at its zipper, and reached in, fumbling for the light. In a rush, I turned it on and aimed its powerful beam at the darkness across from me.

  The floor over there was alive with coiled snakes, their angry rattles echoing. A moan caught in my throat. I switched the flashlight’s aim toward the scummy water at my feet, fearing that snakes would be coiled there. But the green—tinted water was free of them. It was about two inches deep, and I prayed that something in its scum was noxious to them. The floor tilted down toward the corner I was in, which explained why the water had collected there, but to my right and left and in the corner across from me, the raised part of the floor was dry, which was why the snakes had gathered on that side.

  How far can a rattlesnake spring? I thought. Twice its length? Three times? If so, the snakes could fling themselves across the water at me. But my fall had startled them, making them dart back be
fore they coiled. Their writhing mass was on the other side of the enclosure, a sufficient distance to keep me safe for the moment.

  The enclosure. What the hell had I fallen into? It was about the size of a double—car garage. To the left of the opposite corner, a portion of the wall had collapsed. Behind its wooden exterior, insulation and concrete had toppled inward, exposing dank earth. A downward channel in the earth showed that whoever had poured the concrete for this chamber had failed to put in adequate drainage behind it. Rain had filtered down, accumulating behind the concrete until its weight had overwhelmed that section of the wall.

  The gap explained how water had gotten into the chamber. So did the roof—not concrete, but made of timbers with plywood slabs on top (the hole in the roof showed the layers) and a waterproof rubber sheet above that, with six inches of earth over everything. Nothing prevented mice and other small animals from burrowing through the earth, reaching the rubber sheet and chewing through it. Once rain soaked down to the support beams, the process of rot would have begun, ultimately making the roof incapable of bearing weight.

  But the chamber had obviously been built years earlier. During that much time, more than just a few inches of water would have accumulated where I was standing. There had to be a crack in the floor that allowed the water to seep away. That would have caused further erosion, explaining why the floor tilted toward the corner I was in.

  I stared toward the fallen section of the wall. In the exposed earth, a channel angled toward the surface—the snakes used it to come and go. I wondered desperately if I could dig up through it, piling the earth in the chamber behind me as I went.

  But how was I going to get past the snakes? As the rattles intensified, I braced the flashlight under my right arm and fumbled in my knapsack, gripping the pistol. Immediately I realized the flaw in what I intended. Even with fifteen rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber, not to mention a further fifteen—round magazine in the knapsack, I couldn’t hope to kill every snake. Oh, I could hit most of them. There were so many that it would be difficult for me to miss. But all of them? Killing them, not merely wounding? No way. Besides, I had to consider the effect of the gunshots. The reports would send the surviving snakes into a frenzy, making them strike insanely at anything that moved, even if it meant flinging themselves across the water to get at me. And what about ricocheting bullets slamming back at me?