The women cackled softly.
“We’re trying to find a girl,” I said.
“You can have both of these ones,” he said, and the women cackled some more. I laughed along with them, showing I could appreciate clever repartee.
Sean was drifting away, heading toward the bridge. From what I could see, it spanned little more than a creek, and was only about forty feet long.
“A girl came running along here last night, about this time,” I said. “It was raining, and she might have been on her cell phone.”
“What she look like?” one of the women asked.
“About seventeen, five and a half feet tall, slight, with short blond hair,” I told them. “We think that while she was making the call, someone may have stopped, given her a ride maybe.”
“What time did we go in last night?” the woman asked the man.
“We didn’t even sit out here,” he said. “’Cause it was raining. We enjoyed our evening festivities indoors.”
“That’s right. We didn’t come out here at all,” the second woman said.
I was trying to keep track of what they were saying while keeping an eye on Sean. He was at the bridge, which had two streetlamps at each end, and was peering over the right railing.
“You didn’t hear anything at all?” I asked. “Nothing out of the ordinary?”
“Nope. Except for Mildred here, who had some terrible gas.” He pointed to the woman to his left. There was more cackling.
“And those damn dogs,” Mildred said.
“What dogs?” I asked.
The man said, “They’ve been going at it, off and on, all day, like they’ve been fightin’ over somethin’. Settled down lately.”
“Where?”
The man pointed in Sean’s direction. I turned my head. He was on the other side of the bridge now, leaning over the railing, looking down into the dark. Sean shouted: “Come here! Come here!”
I ran.
“Down there,” he said as I came up alongside him. “It looks like there’s something down there.”
I shone the light down. Water trickled along a gravel bed, probably no more than six inches of it at its deepest point. Along the bank, close to the abutment, there was something lighter in color up against the dirt and brush.
I played the light over it. It looked to me like a foot, and a leg, up to the knee. Badly mangled. I wouldn’t be able to see any more until I got under there.
Sean was starting to move, but I grabbed his arm and said, “Stay here.”
“I gotta see if—”
“Stay here,” I repeated, more firmly.
I ran to the end of the bridge, then cut my way through brush and tall grasses that matted the hill down to the creek. I nearly fell twice, my foot slipping on a beer bottle or can. I worked my way toward the slope of the abutment, shining the light ahead of me.
It was a body. And it was a mess.
From what I could tell, it was a young woman with short blond hair. Wearing the same clothes I’d seen Hanna in the night before. Most of them, anyway.
She was naked from the waist down.
She was on her side, her legs angled down toward the creek. I shone the light on her face, and I was as sure as I could be that this was the girl I’d found in my car when I came out of Iggy’s.
“Jesus,” I said under my breath.
The phone in my jacket pocket, pressed against my chest, went off. It was like someone had placed the paddles of a heart defibrillator on me.
I reached for the phone, nearly dropped it next to the body, and put it to my ear before I’d had a chance to see who it was.
“Hello,” I said.
“You left a message,” Augustus Perry said. He sounded annoyed. “What do you want?”
“What I called about has changed. Something else has moved to the top of the list.”
Twenty-one
She looks out the window and sees that their boy is home. Well, not a boy, really. He’s a man now. But isn’t that how mothers always view their sons? As their boys?
“I’m just here for a couple minutes,” he says to her as he comes through the door. “I’ve been running around all night putting out fires and I’m not done yet. But I wanted to see how he is.”
“Wound up,” she says.
“Did you give him something?”
“No, but I may have to. He needs his sleep.”
“I’m doing everything I can,” he says. “This’ll all get sorted out.”
His mother shakes her head doubtfully. “We started off with one big problem and you turned it into two.” She’s about to say something else, but bites her lip. But he knows what it would have been. That if it weren’t for him, they wouldn’t have this problem in the basement to begin with.
“I told you I’m going to deal with this. There’s a couple things I can do before morning.”
“You better, because I feel like this is all ready to blow up in our face. It’s like waiting for the other shoe to drop, but when it does, it’s going to land on a mine.” She sighs. “You’re just one brainstorm after another.”
Wearily, he takes a seat at the kitchen table. “God, I just want things to be normal. Things have never been normal.”
“Some people’s lives are never normal,” she says. “That’s just the way it is.” She surveys the room, but she’s really looking beyond it. More to herself than her son, she says, “It’s like we’re all prisoners. I haven’t had a vacation in years.”
“And I haven’t had a life,” he says. “This overshadows everything. It’s no wonder she broke up with me.”
“She wasn’t right for you.” His mother never thought any of his girlfriends were right for him. “What did she say, exactly?”
“She didn’t really say anything. She just ended it. But I know why. It’s because she could tell something wasn’t right. I mean, I couldn’t even bring her here, to meet you. It had to be at a coffee shop. She had to think it was weird that everything about this house was off limits.”
The woman puts her hand to her forehead. It’s late, and she’s exhausted. “You have more important things to worry about. Finding that girl, and then the boy. Making sure he can’t hurt us.”
“I know. You don’t have to keep telling me.”
“Even after you find them, deal with them, we may have to make some changes around here,” she says, casting her eyes down to the floor, as though she can see right through it.
“I’m going to go down and see him.”
“There’s something going on with his book,” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s never where I can see it. He says he writes in it after I’ve gone. That’s not like him. I’m worried what he might be writing in it. I need you to go down and find it.”
He goes downstairs, is gone several minutes. When he returns, he says to his mother, “It’s not there. I couldn’t find it anywhere.”
“What’d he say?”
“I asked him what he’d done with it. He said he didn’t remember.”
“Tell me he didn’t...”
“I think he did. I think he gave it to the kid.”
The woman closes her eyes, as though she’s in physical pain.
“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “It’s all gibberish. It’s meaningless.”