“What does he want?”
One of the psychologists to whom we’d taken him had advised us to go along, let the fantasy play itself out. Insisting that what he was seeing wasn’t real, wasn’t there, was a guaranteed red-faced, arched-back rage. Of course, said the doctor. How would you feel if someone told you that what you were certain you were seeing wasn’t there? He had a point. But at the same time, weren’t we just enabling these delusions?
“He wants you to know that he’s sorry,” my son said. “He didn’t mean to kill those girls.”
My whole body froze, all the moisture drained away from my mouth and my throat.
“But he said he’d probably have to do it again, if he could.”
“Okay,” I said. “Try to get some sleep.”
It was critical not to overreact. Any show of high emotion filled him with a kind of manic energy. He’d never go to sleep. And those few hours that he slept in his own bed, before he came to stand in my doorway, were where my whole life was lived.
“Can you stay until he goes away?”
I lay down on the floor beside his bed, where I often lay until he fell asleep. The carpet was plush beneath me. Sometimes I read. Sometimes I tried to meditate. Tonight I just stared at the blue wall, my mind reeling and racing. How does he know? I wondered. Had he overheard a conversation between my mother and me?
After a while he turned over and fell asleep. I lay there, for I don’t know how long, staring at the ceiling, trying not to shake apart.
13
I crouched behind the desk and started inching my way along the wall toward the exit at the front of the structure. There were some bulging boxes blocking my way, though, and I found myself in a junk maze-an old file cabinet, a dusty CPU, a stepladder, some rusted buckets of paint. I made myself very small and wished I had brought the Mace that Ainsley always wanted us to carry. It sat uselessly on the table by the door where we all kept our keys.
Someone was rustling in the leaves and litter outside, then creaking up the steps. Then silence. I couldn’t control my breathing, which was coming deep and panicked, except to hold my breath.
Then there was a loud cracking sound, and a string of expletives issued in a deep male voice, one I recognized. I had a feeling those floorboards weren’t going to hold. I made my way toward the door, and saw Langdon pulling his foot out from where he’d stepped through the porch. All the tension and fear drained from my body, leaving me weak with relief.
“Hey!” he called. “Lana, come out here. I know you’re in there.”
I pushed open the door, and he gave me an annoyed look.
“What in the world are you doing out here in the middle of the night?” he asked.
“What are you doing here?” I said. He looked funny, angry and embarrassed. I tried not to laugh.
“I was leaving the library and I saw you take your bike off campus,” he said. “What are you thinking?”
I looked off to the road and saw his Volkswagen Touareg hybrid (the SUV for people who don’t want to admit that they drive an SUV). I was puzzled how he could have seen me, gotten into his car, and followed before I had ridden out of sight. Maybe I wasn’t as fast as I thought I was. Or maybe he hadn’t been leaving the library. Whatever, I was glad to see him. This had been a much scarier errand than I thought it would be. I’m not always as tough as I think I am.
“You know,” he said. He’d extracted his foot from the broken wood and was now sitting on one of the steps massaging his injured ankle. “There’s a girl missing and you’re out here in the freezing cold night on your bike. That is not the action of the intelligent person I know you to be.”
“Are you okay?” I asked, sitting beside him.
“What are you doing here, of all places? And how the hell did you get in?”
He often smelled of cigarettes, but only faintly. A secret smoker like Rachel, hiding their deadly little habit, telling themselves lies about how much they smoke and why it’s not so bad for them. I had always found this a little disappointing about him. I considered him so forthright, such a straight arrow. But then it’s not actually as if he had ever lied about it. He’s never claimed not to be a smoker. And it was really none of my business. I thought about the rumor Beck had reveled in sharing with me. That wasn’t my business, either.
“Lana,” he said. And now he sounded stern, like a father. “What are you doing here?”
I was ashamed to tell him why I was there. It was ridiculous really. But since I couldn’t come up with an even remotely believable lie, I told him the truth about Luke’s game. When I was done, he looked at me, awestruck.
“How could you let yourself get caught up in something like this with him?” he asked. He looked so surprised, so disappointed, that I flushed with shame. He was right. How could I? I thought of myself researching chess moves and looking up clues, running around in the night. It was embarrassing.
“It’s harmless,” I said lamely. “It’s just a game.”
“Is it?”
“What else?” I said. “He’s eleven.”
Langdon shook his shaggy head and rubbed his jaw vigorously, the stubble there rasping like sandpaper.
“He’s an emotionally disturbed child and you’re an adult in his life, his babysitter. You’re enabling him.”
I hadn’t thought about it that way. To me, it seemed like Luke was calling the shots. It was his game, and I was doing his bidding. He was home asleep in bed, and I was running around in the night following clues. But, of course, Langdon was right. He was a kid. I was the adult, the supposed rational, reasonable one, the one who set the limits. I didn’t have anything to say. I just sat there, feeling like an asshole.
“Let me see the poem,” he said. I handed it to him and he took the wrinkled card and key in his hand. “Where did he get this key?”
I told him I didn’t know. But Langdon didn’t acknowledge me, just sat staring at the words in the beam of my flashlight. I was shivering from the cold.
“So what was the secret?”
I was tired of saying that I didn’t know, so I just lifted my shoulders and shook my head. Langdon kept his eyes on me; it was a searching stare, a puzzle-solving gaze. He was trying to figure me out, to solve this odd situation in which we’d found ourselves.
“How are you going to find out?” He looked suddenly interested, curious.
“I’m not sure I am.”
Obviously, it was the right thing to do to call off the game, just give up. I’d just admit to Luke that he was smarter than I was. That was his agenda, right? He just wanted to prove that he could get me to do what he wanted, create puzzles that I couldn’t solve? Whatever burning competitiveness I was feeling was patently ridiculous. I needed to get over it.
I could tell that Langdon was curious, too, though. He was curious about Luke. After all, he was a geek like me. He was a man who studied, pondered, and treated the abnormal human psyche. And the psyche was, of course, the ultimate puzzle. Each individual person a brand-new mystery to solve-how did mental illness come to take root in this mind, how would it manifest itself, how could it be treated? Could it be treated or cured through therapy, medication, or alternative methods? Or must it merely be managed so that a person might be less of a danger to himself or others? Diagnosis and treatment, especially with children, were as slippery and elusive as eels. Young people were always changing, growing, and learning. So their illnesses were always evolving-sometimes worsening, sometimes disappearing altogether.
“Did you find the next clue?”
“No,” I lied. I don’t even know why I lied. But part of me felt like this was my game with Luke. It was up to me to continue it or not.