Now, standing motionless in the middle of the overflowing food court, smelling the juxtaposed odors of fried fish and chocolate chip cookies, hearing but not listening to the chattering shoppers and the carousel’s souped-up elevator music, Libby felt the old chest pump beating its way to an all-time record.
If her fingers hadn’t instinctively tightened around the soda, she surely would have dropped it onto the tile between her feet and ended up standing in a yellow puddle looking like she’d wet herself. But as it was, she managed to hold on long enough to move a few steps to her left and plop the cup onto the corner of the nearest table, where an elderly couple looked up only long enough to eye her suspiciously.
While her heart continued shooting adrenaline through her body like bullets from a rattling machine gun, Libby wove her way through the tables and chairs toward the spinning carousel and its crowd of would-be riders.
She’d left her bags under her chair, and although she realized this somewhere deep in the back of her mind, she didn’t care. Until she had her arms cinched around her son’s narrow body, there would be room in her head for only one thought:
Walking past the table where they had shared their early dinner, Libby looked for the group of girls Trevor had been charming before she’d gone to get her refill.
The girls clustered together near the back of the gathered onlookers, shuffling their feet and biting at their lips but looking otherwise undisturbed. One of them would have screamed if someone had jerked Trevor right out from under their noses, wouldn’t they? Kids these days weren’t
“Please.” The word came out like the hiss from a broken steam pipe. “Where did he go?”
The girl’s eyes bulged. “Wh…who?”
“Trevor.” Libby gave the girl a quick shake and heard a woman somewhere behind her gasp. “My son.” Shake. “Trevor.” Shake shake. “You were just talking to him.”
Libby looked left and then right, ignoring the non-responsive girl, staring past hairy legs and grungy sneakers to see if maybe her son had simply fallen or was kneeling on the ground and out of immediate sight. “Trevor!”
One of the girl’s friends, a blonde-haired pixie, stepped forward and plucked Libby’s hands off her friend’s shoulders. “He left, ma’am.”
It wasn’t only the
“Did you see where he went? Any of you?” She scanned the rest of the girls and the crowd around them. “Somebody must have seen.”
They shook their heads, all mute and sorry looking.
“There’s a candy shop up that way a ways,” the pixie said, tilting her head away from the carousel. “He coulda gone there.”
Libby’s gaze flicked in the direction the girl had indicated, and she shook her head. “But you were
The pixie shook her head and said only, “I’m sorry.”
Libby wanted to scream. She’d had her back turned for a few seconds, maybe five, surely not long enough for Trevor to meander his way out of the crowd so casually that no one even noticed which direction he’d gone.
She hurried away from the girls and the rest of the unhelpful crowd, too worried about her son to let the scene she’d made or the pity-filled eyes tracking her progress embarrass her.
Libby rushed toward the candy store. Trevor wouldn’t have disobeyed her so deliberately, but she had no idea where else to look or what other alternatives to pursue. She’d come close enough to smell the licorice when another option, as sometimes happens, presented itself. The barrel-chested man standing stoically beside the cell phone kiosk cocked his head, and for the first time since setting down her soda, Libby felt her heart slowing down and her brain speeding up.
FIVE
Dave moved toward the small house. You might have called it a lumber if he hadn’t been so surefooted, so eerily quiet. He stepped over the discarded tennis ball and across a long length of garden hose that had all but disappeared beneath the tall grass like a scar beneath an untrimmed beard. He’d never come this close; on his previous visits, he’d kept to the woods, stayed hidden even during nighttime hours, when it would have been easy enough to spy on the boy and his mother through their drooping window curtains. The place was even shabbier than he’d realized. Scaly paint hung from the siding like loose, dead skin, and a ring of grass and dirt stains around the perimeter spoke of careless weed-whacking and untreated rain and snow damage. Dave climbed a pair of craggy steps to the back door. The weeds growing from the cracked concrete exemplified the home’s pitiful landscaping.
His own home wasn’t exactly a paradise, wasn’t really a home at all (over time he’d gone from thinking of it as a prison to considering it a sort of base of operations), but that was different. This house was meant for a family. Dave had no family. Not anymore. Not yet.
He pulled on the screen door first, spied a simple disengaged hook and eye closure and reached for the knob of the inner door, which was likewise unsecured.
He slipped inside. The knife in his right cargo pocket thunked against the doorframe, but the sound was faint, nearly inaudible even to Dave himself. His footsteps weren’t much louder. A two-person dinette set occupied a shadowy alcove on his left, the table covered in papers and bills, the front leg of one of the chairs splintered so badly it couldn’t possibly have supported an adult. From his place just inside the back door, he saw a sofa and one arm of a recliner in the adjoining living room, but he didn’t give any of those things much more than a casual glance. The dark-haired woman stood at the kitchen sink, not ten feet away, and he’d made it halfway to her before the muscles in her back so much as tensed.
She’d been washing her hands. The splashing faucet sprayed the dish-cluttered sink and most of the countertop around it. A worn washer ring. Dave could have fixed it in a couple of minutes.
The boy must have been somewhere deeper in the house, his bedroom or maybe a bathroom. Dave stopped in the center of the kitchen and watched the woman shut off the water and dry her hands on an incongruously fancy dishtowel. He hadn’t closed the door behind him—the wind blew it all the way open now, and it knocked against the wall with a single sharp
Whether the woman was responding solely to that sound or had also somehow sensed his presence, Dave wasn’t sure, but he watched her spin toward him with ravenous anticipation. He’d never come so close to her, never seen her face from less than a hundred feet away. He’d sometimes wondered if she would be clear skinned and beautiful, or heavily wrinkled and haggish. Blue eyes or green? Brown? He almost licked his lips.
Her nose was a finely shaped wedge, pert with a pair of inconspicuous nostrils, like something out of a fairy tale, elfish. There had been fairy tales when he was very young. They were one of the things he remembered. One of the things he’d been allowed to remember.
If she had kept her mouth shut, Dave would have gone to her for a closer look at the perfect little nose, might even have given it a friendly kiss.
Instead, she screamed.
Her mouth might have been the entrance to a strange miniature cave, her teeth pale, blunt stalactites and