You're Next

arms were threadbare, the walls dented and scuffed, but the foster girls looked healthy and the house was suffused with the rich scent of tomato soup.

‘Can I help you?’ the woman asked.

He didn’t know how long he’d been standing there. ‘Jocelyn Wilder?’

The woman twisted her curly gray hair up into a knot. ‘Yes?’

‘Can we talk for a moment in private?’

Kat swiped at her nose with a sleeve. She was staring at her shoes. Jocelyn’s gaze flicked to her, then back to Mike. ‘Do you want to play outside, sugar?’

Head down, Kat walked through the open back door and sat alone on a bench. Warily, Jocelyn gestured toward the kitchen, and he followed her through a swinging door. They faced off over yellow peeling linoleum. Her handsome face showed that she’d dealt with a variation of this scene a time or two.

He said, ‘We’re in trouble. I need to take care of some business.’

‘Sir, I don’t run a-’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know. But if she goes into the system, she’ll be in danger.’

‘A lot of kids are in danger.’

‘Not like this.’

She blinked. ‘What does that mean? Like she’ll be killed?’ Though she’d said it herself, the word made an impression. ‘Why would anyone want to kill her? She’s a little girl.’

‘I don’t know,’ Mike said. ‘That’s what I need to find out. I have to go. I have to be gone. My car can’t be out front. If they see the car, they’ll know she’s here.’

Jocelyn regarded him skeptically, but he could see the concern blossoming beneath the surface.

‘I’m sorry to put this on you,’ he said.

She made a sound that was a cross between a snort and a laugh. ‘You’re not going to put anything on me, Mr…?’

She crossed her considerable arms, legs planted, an immobile force. She was the kind of foster mom who’d take you by the ear and drag you to Valley Liquors to fess up to stealing nip bottles of Jack Daniel’s. Mike knew her as he’d known the Couch Mother, which meant he could read her. The watery blue eyes. The feathered skin at her temples. The kindness etched into every crease of her venerable face.

He held a hand up, palm down, calming the waters or holding his balance; he wasn’t sure which. ‘Don’t trust anything you might hear on the news. Don’t trust anyone. Anyone, no matter who they say they are. If you turn her in, if you call the cops or Child Protective Services, she will be hunted down.’

‘Well, that’s quite a thing, isn’t it?’ She swallowed angrily, her neck clucking up and down, and looked away.

‘You know kids. Talk to my daughter and you’ll know I’m telling the truth.’

‘How’d you find me?’

He swung the rucksack off his shoulder, letting it thunk to the floor. ‘This holds two hundred thousand dollars in cash. It’s not blood money. It’s from our savings before all this happened. You can declare it as an anonymous donation, pay taxes, whatever. It’s yours to keep. Spend it on the other kids, too, so they don’t get jealous.’

‘Donations don’t work that way. I don’t want your money regardless.’

‘Keep it in case you need it.’

‘You’re not listening to me.’

‘Then will you guard it for me?’

‘Like collateral?’ She practically spit the words.

‘I will be back.’

‘When?’

‘Soon.’

‘I won’t do it,’ she said, with grave finality.

‘You will,’ he said gently. ‘I know that you will.’

‘Two hundred thousand.’ She set her hands on her hips, the flesh wobbling around her arms. ‘Why so much money if you’re coming back?’

His face felt unattached to him, a separate entity, a stone mask. If it cracked, it would crumble away and leave nothing behind. He heard a noise escape him, and Jocelyn’s stance softened. She lowered her hands to her sides, seeming to take pity on him as he fought for composure.

‘So she can have whatever she needs until then.’ He gestured at the rucksack. ‘Her clothes are in there, too. They’re her clothes. Buy whatever for the others-’

‘All my girls have their own clothes,’ she said indignantly.

‘And,’ he said faintly, ‘she has head lice.’

‘Splendid.’

‘I tried mayonnaise-’

‘It doesn’t work. You need the heavy-duty stuff.’

He toed the linoleum. It was no longer his right to object. ‘Okay.’

‘Any other problems? Drug-resistant tuberculosis, perhaps?’

‘No.’

‘I can’t do this – I won’t do this – for long,’ she said. ‘It’s illegal, which puts the whole family at risk. I have no birth certificate for her. What am I supposed to do if-’

‘You don’t run a battered-women and children’s shelter for seventeen years without figuring out how to give people a new life.’

A glare. ‘You’ve certainly done your homework.’ She took a deep breath. ‘That was a long time ago.’

‘Not so long that you couldn’t get the right folks in the right offices on the phone. If it comes to that.’

‘If it comes to that,’ she repeated sharply.

She let out an angry laugh, and he saw it again, the steel in her eyes that said she was the kind of woman who could figure out just about anything she decided was necessary.

‘And why should I believe you are coming back?’ she asked.

‘Because I told her I would.’

‘Then you’d better goddamned come back, hadn’t you?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

Turning to the stove, she dismissed him with a wave.

He pushed through the swinging door into the foyer. They were all as he’d left them, the girls fixated on the TV, the toddler twisting one-legged Barbie’s remaining limbs this way and that, and his daughter sitting on the bench just through the open rear door, her untied shoelaces scraping the concrete. Her fingers fiddled with themselves autistically in her lap. Her lips were bunching; she was doing everything not to cry. He filled the doorway. He didn’t want to blink – there was only this moment of seeing her, of capturing her image, and then it would be over. For a moment he thought he might just fly apart there in the doorway like a horror-movie effect.

Finally Kat looked up, fixing that amber-and-brown gaze on him. ‘Please, Daddy.’

Tearing his gaze from her, he turned away.

He drifted numbly through the front door and back to the stolen Camry. Snowball II remained on the dashboard where Kat had perched him. He held the tiny stuffed animal in his hands and looked at the house but couldn’t bring himself to go back in and deliver it to her. Resting it on the passenger seat, he drove off. A few miles up the road, he noticed the baby monitor down by his feet where he’d dropped it after the chase.

He threw it out the window.

Chapter 42

Mike blinked back to consciousness in a motel room with a vague recollection of driving for hours to put as much distance between him and Jocelyn Wilder’s foster home as possible. Space, he hoped, would lessen temptation. Snowball II was mashed in his fist, and between his legs was a brown-bagged bottle of Jack Daniel’s, though he had no memory of wanting to get drunk. He sat with the TV flickering across his face, pulling from the