Looking at Kathy was harder than looking at Daniel, though not as difficult as Mitch had expected. If he could have prevented this, he would have stood between them and his brother. But now that it was done…it was done. And the heart sank rather than recoiled, and the mind fell into despondency but not into despair.
Daniel's face, eyes open, was wrenched by terror, but there was clearly puzzlement in it as well. At the penultimate moment, he must have wondered how this could be — how Anson, his one success, could be the death of him.
Systems of child-rearing and education were numberless, and no one ever died because of them, or at least not the men and women who dedicated themselves to conceiving and refining the theories.
Tasered, tied, and perhaps following a conversation, Daniel and Kathy had been stabbed. Mitch did not dwell upon the wounds.
The weapons were a pair of gardening shears and a hand trowel.
Mitch recognized them as having come from the rack of tools in his garage.
Chapter 38
Mitch closed the bodies in the learning room, and he sat at the top of the stairs to think. Fear and shock and one Red Bull weren't sufficient to clear his thoughts as fully as four hours of sleep would have done.
Battalions of wind threw themselves against the house, and the walls shuddered but withstood the siege.
Mitch could have wept if he had dared to allow himself tears, but he would not have known for whom he was crying.
He had never seen Daniel or Kathy cry. They believed in applied reason and 'mutual supportive analysis' in place of easy emotion.
How could you cry for those who never cried for themselves, who talked and talked themselves through their disappointments, their misadventures, and even their bereavements?
No one who knew the truth of this family would fault him if he cried for himself, but he had not cried for himself since he was five because he had not wanted them to have the satisfaction of his tears.
He would not cry for his brother.
The wretched kind of pity that he had felt for Anson earlier was vapor now. It had not boiled away here in the learning room, but in the trunk of the vintage Chrysler.
During his drive north from Rancho Santa Fe, with four windows open to ventilate the car, he let the draft blow from him all delusion and self-deception. The brother whom he had thought he knew, had thought he loved, in fact had never existed. Mitch had loved not a real person but instead a sociopath's performance, a phantom.
Now Anson had seized the moment to take vengeance on Daniel and Kathy, pinning the crimes on his brother, whom he thought would never be found.
If Holly was not ransomed, her kidnappers would kill her and perhaps dispose of her body at sea. Mitch would take the fall for her murder — and, somehow, for the shooting of Jason Osteen.
Such a killing spree would thrill the cable-channel true-crime shows. If he was missing — in fact dead in a desert grave — the search for him would be their leading story for weeks if not for months.
In time he might become a legend like D. B. Cooper, the airline hijacker who, decades earlier, had parachuted out of a plane with a fortune in cash, never to be heard from again.
Mitch considered returning to the learning room to collect the gardening shears and the hand trowel. The thought of wrenching the blades from the bodies repulsed him. He had done worse in recent hours; but he could not do this.
Besides, clever Anson had probably salted other evidence in addition to the gardening tools. Finding it would take time, and Mitch had no time to spare.
His wristwatch read six minutes past three in the morning. In less than nine hours, the kidnappers would call Anson with further instructions.
Forty-five of the original sixty hours remained until the midnight-Wednesday deadline.
This would be over long before then. New developments required new rules, and Mitch was going to set them.
With an imitation of wolves, the wind called him into the night.
After turning off the upstairs lights, he went down to the kitchen. In the past, Daniel had always kept a box of Hershey's bars in the refrigerator. Daniel liked his chocolate cold.
The box waited on the bottom shelf, only one bar missing. These had always been Daniel's treats, off limits to everyone else.
Mitch took the entire box. He was too exhausted and too tightly knotted with anxiety to be hungry, but he hoped that sugar might substitute for sleep.
He turned out the first-floor lights and left the house by the front door.
Brooms of fallen palm fronds swept the street, and in their wake came a rolling trash can spewing its contents. Impatiens withered and shredded themselves, shrubs shook as if trying to pull themselves up by their roots, a ripped window awning — actually green, but black in this light — flapped madly like the flag of some demonic nation, the eucalyptuses gave the wind a thousand hissing voices, and it seemed as if the moon would be blown down and the stars snuffed out like candles.
In the haunted Chrysler, Mitch set out in search of Anson.
Chapter 39
Holly works at the nail even though she makes no progress with it, because if she doesn't work at the nail, she will have nothing to do, and with nothing to do, she will go mad.
For some reason, she remembers Glenn Close playing a madwoman in Fatal Attraction. Even if she were to go crazy, Holly is not capable of boiling anyone's pet bunny in a soup pot, unless of course her family is starving and has nothing to eat or the bunny is possessed by a demon. Then all bets are off.
Suddenly the nail begins to wiggle, and that's exciting. She is so excited that she almost needs the bedpan that her kidnappers left with her.
Her excitement wanes as, during the next half-hour, she manages to extract only about a quarter of an inch of the nail from the floor plank. Then it binds and won't budge farther.
Nevertheless, a quarter of an inch is better than nothing. The spike might be — what? — three inches long. Cumulatively — discounting the breaks she took for the pizza they allowed her to have, and to rest her fingers — she has spent perhaps seven hours on the nail. If she can tease it out just a little faster, at the rate of an inch a day, by the Wednesday-midnight deadline, she will have only an inch to go.
In the event that Mitch has raised the ransom by that time, they will all just have to wait another day until she extracts the damn nail.
She has always been an optimist. People have called her sunny and cheerful and buoyant and ebullient; and annoyed by her unflagging positive outlook, a sourpuss once asked her if she was the love child of Mickey Mouse and Tinkerbell.
She could have been mean and told him the truth, that her father died in a traffic accident and her mother in childbirth, that she had been raised by a grandmother rich in love and mirth.
Instead she told him Yes, but because Tink doesn't have the hips for childbirth, I was carried to term by Daisy Duck.
At the moment, uncharacteristically, she finds it difficult to keep her spirits up. Being kidnapped fractures your funny bone.
She has two broken fingernails, and the pads of her fingers are sore. If she hadn't wrapped them in the tail of her blouse, to pad them, while she worked on the nail, they would probably be bleeding.
In the scheme of things, these injuries are insignificant. If her captors start cutting off her fingers like they
