“What does it say in the ransom note?” Grace asked.
No answer. Wags kept looking down, hanging his head, bent like one of those old people who can’t straighten. His eyes got silvery. Nat waved Grace and Izzie away. They backed out of the room, Izzie first, then Grace.
“Maybe you should lie down,” Nat said.
Wags looked up, didn’t seem to notice that the girls had gone, maybe because his eyes were overflowing again. “Don’t you want to hear about Night of the Following Day?”
“Later.” But Nat didn’t want to hear it at all. At that moment, looking at Wags in his misery, Nat knew that the kidnapping thing was out. He didn’t understand the connection, but he knew. “First you’re going to lie down,” he said.
Wags stared at him. “Good idea,” he said at last. “Your very best.” Wags started moving in that stiff way, but not toward his old bedroom. Instead, he went to the snowman, gouged all the pills out of his face in one swipe, threw the window open wide, flung them out. The cold wind blew his hair straight back, as though he were going very fast. Then he had his head out in the night and one foot up on the sill.
Nat grabbed him, pulled him back into the room. Who would have imagined that a skinny kid like Wags would be so strong?
“Jason Patric dies at the end, you asshole,” Wags said, wriggling free. Nat went to grab him again. Wags threw a punch. No one had ever thrown a punch at Nat before. He saw it coming, had time to block it or duck, or at least turn his head and not get hit flush on the nose. But no one had thrown a punch at him before, and this one did hit him flush on the nose. His eyes stung, he saw stars and, stepping back to recover, slipped in the snowman’s puddle and went down.
Wags stood over him in fury. “You’re just like all the others,” Wags said, “only worse.” Then Wags’s foot swung into view and Nat started to roll; the foot with the rubber boot, not the Timberland, thank God — Nat’s last thought for a while.
When he opened his eyes, dawn was breaking on a dark day, hardly lighter than night, and his room was cold. The window was open. His head hurt.
He got up, went to the window, looked out. No sign of Wags, no sign that he’d jumped and been carried off or jumped and walked away. Nothing down there but the baseball cap. Nat turned back to the room. The snowman was gone, the floor where he’d stood almost dry. He closed the window.
What next? His head hurt; he felt slow and stupid. Next would be the hospital bracelet, the phone number, a call. Where had he last seen it? Couldn’t remember. He searched the outer room, searched Wags’s old bedroom, didn’t find the bracelet. Wouldn’t need the bracelet if he could remember the name of the place. But he couldn’t. Or he could call Wags’s mom and get the name of the place from her. Rather than that, he went down on his hands and knees to try again. The door opened.
Grace; no, Izzie, he saw, as she came in from the dark hall and the light hit her hair. Izzie. She looked as though she’d just had eight hours’ sleep followed by one of those runner’s-high workouts; her hair still wet and gleaming from the shower. He rose.
“Nat! What happened to you?”
“Me?”
“Your nose.”
He resisted the urge to touch it. “I’m fine.”
She glanced around. “Wags cleared out?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” She closed the door, lowered her voice. “It’s done.”
“What’s done?”
“The plan, of course. Sure you’re okay?”
But the plan was out. “Done?” he said. “Done in what way?”
“Don’t worry. Everything went smoothly. Grace called, as me, and said she’d been-” She lowered her voice still more. “-you know, kidnapped. We toyed with the idea of asking for yen, the kind of interesting twist that makes things authentic, but then we-”
“Called who?”
“Our father. You’re acting funny, Nat, like you’re hearing this for the first time. Sure you’re-”
“She called as you?”
“Why not? No one can tell us apart on the phone. ‘This is Izzie, something terrible’s happened, I’m so scared,’ blah blah blah, million dollars, sequential, nondenominational, whatever it was, blah blah.” Izzie laughed; she had that untamed look of Grace’s in her eye.
“We have to stop this.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We just do.”
“Nat. I told you. It’s done. Grace is hiding down in the cave and the money’s on its way.”
“The money’s on its way?”
“It’s nothing to him-didn’t we mention that? He’s sending someone. Someone gives it to me, I give it to no one, Grace reappears. We get back to normal life. Voila.”
He shook his head. That hurt, and had no other effect.
“You and Wags had a little disagreement, didn’t you?” She came closer, brushed her lips against the tip of his nose, barely touching it. “Give me a kiss.”
He kissed her. They’d kissed maybe dozens of times by now, but never like this.
24
“The fantasist denies reality to himself, the liar does so only to others.” Illustrate with examples from history or literature.
All those years, growing up in this town-Inverness, the name itself snotty and hateful-all those years and he’d never once been inside a house on the Hill. Been in their yards, as he was in the backyard of Leo Uzig’s house now, the summers he worked for one landscaper or another, but never inside. They had nice yards up on the Hill, and this was a nice one, surprisingly big, with different kinds of trees and a high stone wall. A snow-covered terrace led up to double back doors, heavy and black with brass fittings, like the door at the front. No cheap sliders, no bulkhead with stairs down to the basement, nothing easy. Funny thing, though, about people who lived on the Hill, especially those who’d lived there since the time when no one locked their doors-some still didn’t lock them. Freedy tried the polished brass handle. Locked.
He stepped back, almost knocking over the bird feeder, checked the house, hoping for balconies, windows cracked open an inch or two, maybe a One of the double doors opened. An old woman came out with a bag of birdseed in her hand, saw Freedy, stopped. She was all in white-a long white housecoat, white slippers-except for her hat, red with earflaps sticking out to the side. She looked like somebody’s old gran. He himself had no old gran, his mother’s mother, whoever that might have been, belonging to some earlier life. Not to mention the other side, where The other side. Freedy had maybe the most amazing thought of his whole life, a kind of jump or leap, like you turn the key in the ignition and then you’re there, without doing the actual drive. This, this old thing with the watery eyes and the Kleenex sticking out of her goddamn sleeve, could be his gran! They stared at each other. Freedy knew he should say something, but what? No idea. Had he run into a situation he didn’t know how to handle? That would be a first.
He got lucky-a nice change. The old lady spoke first. “Can I help you, young man?” she said.
“I, uh, represent the Aqua Group,” Freedy said; meant to say Agua, too late.
“We’re happy with what we have now.”
