Daniel crossed the bridge spanning Pine River, and then turned onto West Creek Drive.
He’d only driven on this road a couple times, but based on how close he was to the lake, he figured he was less than a mile from the property.
Sheriff Byers watched Hollister carefully, waiting for him to let his guard down long enough to move in and disarm him.
“Put down the knife, Brandon.”
“No.”
“Put it—”
“No! Sit down.” He checked the clock on the wall and fidgeted with a small case on his belt, about the size of a cell phone case. “Now.”
“You said before that you wanted my help, but I’m not going to help you with anything while you’re threatening me with that knife.”
Hollister didn’t move.
They both stood their ground.
The sheriff tried a different tack. “Why did you stab me if you want me to help you?”
“I wanted to kill you at first, but he told me not to.”
“Who told you not to?”
“He’s coming and . . . you don’t know what it’s like. Time becomes . . .” His voice broke with what sounded like a tremor of fear. “I want the world to know the truth about what they’re doing there.”
“Where? At the prison? Were you mistreated?”
“Not the prison. The institute!” Hollister tapped the blade against the side of his own head. “In your brain. They do things up there. Make it seem like . . .”
“Brandon, you need to set that knife down.”
Hollister aimed it at him. “You’re the one who arrested me! It’s your fault I ended up there!”
“Okay. What institute are you talking about? The Traybor Institute?”
“They were asking for volunteers, said it would shorten our sentences, but . . . in the room.” His hand was quivering. “They strap you down. Can you imagine solitary confinement? But without a break, without any relief. That’s what it felt like—weeks—even though I was . . .” Hollister shook his head violently. “They won’t believe me.” He waved theknife back and forth as if to accentuate his point. “But they will believe you.”
Careful. This guy is losing it. Keep him talking, but don’t push things.
“Alright, I’m listening. Tell me what’s going on.”
CHAPTER
FIFTY-EIGHT
Daniel parked.
Exited the car.
There weren’t any other vehicles in the driveway, but the lights inside the cabin were on, so it appeared someone was there.
Check it out, then go meet with Mr. Zacharias.
He approached the front window to see if he could peer inside, but the shades were tightly drawn.
Going around the side of the cabin, he found some French doors on the deck.
Through the glass he could see two men standing at the other end of the room in the main living area.
One of them was his dad.
He’s alive!
Thank God, he’s alive!
The other guy was about ten feet away from him, holding a knife.
Daniel recognized him as the prisoner he’d seen at the Traybor Institute.
It’s Brandon Hollister. He went to prison for murder. He’s going after your dad!
Daniel tried opening the French doors but they were locked. With the wind already rattling the glass, neither man noticed him.
You need to get in there. You need to help your dad.
But how?
He returned to the front of the cabin, but that door was locked as well.
Alright, then.
Find another way in.
Nicole set her laptop on the dresser beside the door so the microphone would pick up Ty’s voice from the hallway.
Having someone admit to the wolf poaching was a good idea, but it wasn’t going to be her who was confessing to the world.
“So does your dad know what you’ve been doing?” she asked.
There are tons of ways to call for help online, and as she worked, she sent out texts and emails to at least half a dozen of her friends that she needed the cops at her house now.
Ty didn’t reply so she went on. “Or, what about those three guys you always hang out with?”
“No one else knows. It’s our little secret.”
She checked the levels, made sure that his voice was coming through.
Yes.
Good.
He tried the doorknob again. “Open the door, Nicole.”
“So you shot all the wolves yourself?”
She waited. He said nothing.
“Why’d you kill the wolves, Ty?”
“Target practice.”
She felt another surge of anger because of what he’d done. “Even if you put the gun in my garage, it’d get tracked back to you. Even you must know that much.”
“You think I’d use my own rifle?”
“What? Whose did you use?”
“There’s this research center. There’s a certain guy who works there. I borrowed his Browning Automatic. Now—”
“You mean you stole it.”
He cranked on the doorknob one more time. “I’m not here to hurt you, Nicole. I just want us to come to an understanding.”
“What kind of understanding?”
C’mon, Daniel. Hurry!
“One that—”
As she was uploading the audio she accidentally tapped ‘Play’ and it started replaying, aloud.
“What was that?” Ty shouted. “You recorded me?”
Oh, no!
She scrambled to post the audio, but Ty slammed his fist against the door and she retreated across the room.
He pounded it again, trying to break it open.
Nicole dropped her computer onto her bed.
And went for her purse.
Moments ago at his car, Daniel had used Larry’s phone to punch in 911 to get some officers and an ambulance here for his dad. Dispatch told him that with the roads as bad as they were and with him being that far out of town it might be up to eight or ten minutes before any help could arrive.
No.
That was way too long.
He needed to do something himself to help his dad.
Opening the trunk, Daniel retrieved the shovel that he kept to dig out of snowbanks if necessary, then headed for the deck of the cabin.
The sheriff listened as Brandon Hollister explained what he’d gone through at the Traybor Institute.
He kept checking the clock. “When he gets here we’ll take care of everything.”
“When who gets here?”
“You’ll see.”
“After I help you, what are you going to do with me? Are you going to let me go?”
“You get your name on the wall.”
“What?”
Daniel didn’t know for sure if this was going to work, but he did know that if he sat around doing nothing waiting for help to arrive and Hollister killed his dad, he would never forgive himself.
Positioning himself close to the glass French doors, he gripped the shovel’s handle, as if it were a baseball bat, then brought it back behind his shoulder and swung it forward as hard as he could, smashing the blade through the door, which shattered, spraying glass across the inside of the cabin.
Avoiding the jagged teeth of glass that were still embedded at the bottom of the doorframe, Daniel stepped through it, raised the shovel, and started toward Hollister. “Drop the knife.”
While the guy was distracted, Daniel’s dad made his move, springing at him.
They struggled for a moment and Daniel dropped the shovel and went to help his father, but by the time he’d crossed the room, his dad had already torqued Hollister’s arm back, forcing him to drop the blade.
“No!” Hollister struggled fiercely, but couldn’t get away. “You don’t understand!”
“Quiet, Brandon.” Daniel’s dad kicked the knife across the floor toward the front door. “Dan, are you okay?”
“Yeah. You?”
“I’m good.” But he was obviously in pain as he led Hollister, who was trying his best to break free, to a nearby room. “Come here, Dan, I need your help.”
His dad maneuvered Hollister to a cot and had Daniel clamp the open handcuff around the man’s wrist, shackling him to the frame.
Once he was restrained, his dad searched Hollister’s pockets and came up with the handcuff key. However, as he was stepping back, Hollister suddenly whipped a syringe out of a case on his belt with his free hand and stabbed it into Daniel’s dad’s leg, depressing the plunger as he did.
“There,” he said. “Let’s see where that takes us.”
Sheriff Byers yanked the empty syringe out of his leg and threw it across the room. “What was that?” he demanded. “What’d you give me?”
Hollister just smirked. “You’re about to get very sleepy, Sheriff.”
CHAPTER
FIFTY-NINE
Kyle turned onto Nicole’s street. At the edge of his headlights’ beams, he could see that neither of her parents’ cars was in the driveway.
But Ty Bell’s SUV was.
Daniel’s dad couldn’t get an answer from Hollister, so he went into the other room and began flipping through the empty syringes and medicine bottles on the counter, trying to identify what he might’ve been drugged with.
“I called 911 a few minutes ago,” Daniel told him. “They’re on their way.”
Nicole watched in alarm as the lock broke apart and the door flew open.
Knocking over the dresser, Ty barreled toward her.
When he was about to reach out and grab her, she brought her hand forward and emptied the pepper spray into his face.
He cried out and threw his hands up, rubbing frantically at his eyes.
“Dad, sit down,” Daniel said. “An ambulance is coming.”
His father, who was looking weaker by the second, stumbled over to the couch. “Hollister said you had a bump on the head?”
“I’m fine.” He didn’t mention the fire or the near-drowning. “Just rest until the paramedics get here.”
The front door to Nicole’s house was unlocked and Kyle burst inside. “Nicole? Are you okay?”
She shouted to him from the upstairs bedroom.
Sprinting up the steps, he found Ty Bell drawing his fist back to punch her.
Kyle grabbed him by the shoulders and manhandled him to the floor.
His eyes were puffy and swollen.
He was crying out in pain and anger.
Nicole was still holding the can of pepper spray. “He has my phone,” she told Kyle.
Despite Ty’s best efforts to fight him off, Kyle didn’t waste any time recovering it from his pocket.
While Nicole put a call through to the police, Kyle said, “We need to make sure he doesn’t go anywhere.”
“There’s some duct tape in the kitchen in the drawer beside the fridge.”
“That’ll work.”
CHAPTER
SIXTY
6:28 P.M.
3 MINUTES LEFT
As Daniel’s dad positioned himself on the couch, he cringed in pain.
Keep him talking.
“Dad, do you remember Grady Planisek?”
“What?”
“Grady Planisek. He was a kid who disappeared back when I was nine.”
“Okay,” he answered, half out of it.
“Listen: He has something to do with what’s going on here. Someone used Grady’s name today to . . .”
Who did you hear calling from the stairs Saturday night right before you passed out?
Mr. Bell?
Ty?
Grady Planisek?
“Something’s not right here, Dad. Something doesn’t follow.”
Daniel’s thoughts shot forward, circled back around. Looked for a place to land.
In that blur, Betty warned you to be careful who you told your secrets to. “You have to stop him before it happens again,” she said. “You can’t let him get away with it.”
Then there was the old man in the hospital. He’d warned Daniel, “You don’t have time. He’ll do it again.”
Who was he talking about?
Who’ll do it again?
But you might have been imagining him. You don’t know if he was really there.
“Did you see someone else on Saturday night?” Daniel asked his dad.
“What?” By the way he spoke Daniel could tell he was fading fast.
Dispatch said eight or ten minutes.
That’s too long.
Going into the other room, Daniel tried to get Hollister to tell him what the drug was, but the man just jangled his handcuffed wrist. “Let me go and I’ll tell you.”
Daniel listened for sirens, but only heard the sound of the wind in the night. Snow was blowing in through the splintered glass of the French door, and even here on this side of the cabin, he could feel the gusts of cold air.
“Well?” Hollister asked. “Are you going to save your father? You just have to uncuff me and I’ll help you. I promise.”
“That’s not gonna happen.”
Daniel returned to his dad. “We need to get you to the hospital.” He reached out a hand to help him to his feet. “Come on, I’ll drive you myself.”
“We can’t just leave Hollister here.”
“He’s cuffed. He’s not going anywhere. There are officers on their way.”
“Just give me a moment.” His dad closed his eyes and didn’t take Daniel’s hand. “I need to catch my breath.”
But as the seconds passed, his father didn’t move.
“Dad?”
Don’t let him fall asleep.
“Dad!”
Daniel shook his shoulder to keep him awake.
He stirred. “Yeah. I’m good.”
“We’re leaving. Now. C’mon. We need to go.”
This time his dad didn’t object and he let Daniel help him to his feet; however, Daniel found that he needed to support most of his weight.
As he wrapped his arm around his father’s side and carefully avoided putting pressure on the bandages, the blood on them made him think of the dream of seeing him in the kitchen, and also of his own hand getting ground up in the sink, when the blades of the garbage disposal chewed through his skin, his bones, his—
Why did you block out what happened at the barn when you were a kid?
Because it was too traumatic.
Because your mind was trying to protect you.
As Daniel started helping his dad toward the door, the blood made him remember.
Not everything in your blurs is one hundred percent the same as things in real life.
The hay baler was running.
The garbage disposal ground up your—
Then in a rush, it came back to him—images overlapping each other all in a matter of seconds, and the memory of that day flashed before him.
Your grandma is sad most of the time so when you go over there with your parents you play by yourself a lot, sometimes up in the attic, sometimes in the field or the woods near her house.
Sometimes in the barn on the neighbor’s property.
One day you find a wooden box in her attic. Your parents are talking with your grandma in the living room and it isn’t hard for you to slip out the back door unseen with the box.
You cross the field to the barn to sit by yourself in the hayloft and look through what’s in it.
There’s a lock and a key in there.
That intrigues you.
You sit on the bench up there and read through the journals, flip through the photos.
It’s late afternoon and it has started to rain outside.
Then you hear a man and a boy enter the barn. They’re talking, but it doesn’t sound like the boy wants to be here.
You don’t want them to see what you’ve been doing up here in the loft, so you put everything back in the box and you lock it and hide it under the bench. You don’t want to get caught, so you slip
behind a hay bale.
The boy starts crying.
At first it’s soft, but then it gets louder.
You can hear the man tell him to stop, to be quiet, and then to shut up!
The boy’s crying turns into terrified screaming, and then you hear the sound of the hay baler running. And when it stops, it’s quiet down there in the barn.
No more crying.
No more screaming.
You’re scared.
You want to leave, to run back to your grandma’s house, but then you hear someone coming up the ladder.
Heavy footsteps.
It’s the man.
He knows you’re here. He’s coming for you!
You slide farther behind the hay bale, but you can’t get completely hidden and you see him reach the top of the ladder.
He takes out a jackknife and flicks out the blade.
You freeze, too terrified to move.
No, no, no.
He walks to the wall of the barn and carves something into the wood.
It takes awhile, but when he steps away you can see the words: Grady Planisek was here.
Then he goes back down the ladder and you wait a long time to make sure he’s gone.
At last you climb down from the hayloft and run through the rain to your grandma’s house. You leave the box in the loft so you won’t have to carry it, won’t have to explain anything when you get back to her house.
You don’t tell anyone what happened. You keep it to yourself.
The sound of the hay baler.
The boy’s screams.
The silence afterward.
No, you don’t tell anyone what happened in the barn.
You throw the key into the field and you never go back to that barn again.
6:31 P.M.
IT ALL COMES TOGETHER.
That man in the barn, that man, that man—
You didn’t know him back then, but you do now.
Yes, you mentioned the property to him. He knows that you piece things together.
That’s why he tried to kill you.