I sighed. That morning I’d called Dave from the pediatrician’s office phone under the pretense that I needed to reach my husband. Dave was already in Laconia.
In the next room, TJ stirred, fussed. A sudden sleepy cry broke the air. I walked backward out of Elias’s room and shut the door silently, as though his spirit resided there and was owed absolute peace. Wherever he was, I hoped he had found a full measure of that.
The sound of the truck pulling into the gravel driveway woke me from a light sleep. Beside me TJ lay sprawled on his back in his diaper and undershirt, his plump cheeks moving in a faint rhythm as though dreaming of milk. The clock beside me said it was three-thirty in the morning. A car door slammed; beside me TJ shifted at the noise, but did not open his eyes. I felt relieved they had come home before morning, just as Cade had promised. I hated the thought of taking TJ away for good without seeing his father one last time.
I turned over and attempted to fall back to sleep, but within a couple of minutes the front door creaked open and I heard the heavy footfalls of Dodge’s boots, then the sound of something being dragged. Cade’s voice came in low and clipped. Dodge muttered a reply, and the dragging sound was replaced by grunts that indicated a heavy object being hoisted by both men.
I rolled over and lay still, my mind attuned to the puzzle of noise from downstairs. Perhaps they had hit a deer, like the day Cade had wrecked his car and Candy had butchered the doe in the front yard. But if that were the case, why would they have brought it inside in one piece? I lay there a while longer, listening. Then I eased myself past TJ and tiptoed down the stairs.
The front door was still open, the screen door propped with a brick, but the porch light was off. Dodge and Cade were both outside, unloading the truck. I looked around the downstairs. The only light came from the lamp next to Elias’s chair that we typically left on all night no matter what. I wandered toward the darkened kitchen. No blood or soil, no sign of whatever they had carried. A basket on the kitchen island overflowed with sweet corn. The beagles’ food bowls sat beside each other on the counter awaiting the day’s breakfast. On a slate square above the stove hung a tole painting of a house with a curl of smoke emerging from the chimney, beside a quote in country- primitive script: “He restoreth my soul, Psalms 23:3.” I could read it by the narrow band of light that blazed beneath the tightly closed door of the cellar. I looked at that door for a moment, considering. Then I threw it open and ventured down the stairs.
In the center of the room, tied with bungee cord to Eddy’s good Windsor chair, sat Drew Fielder. Above the strip of duct tape that covered his mouth he looked out at me with hollow, doomed eyes. The sleeves of his blue pin-striped oxford shirt were pushed above his elbows; his wrists were bound behind his back, and one leg of his khaki pants was slashed with a dark wet stain that appeared to be urine. Drew’s ankles were bound to the legs of the chair with tape, and his shoes were gone. Above his head the metal cord of the lightbulb swung slowly, like a pendulum marking time with great cans of milk powder and freeze-dried meats.
I screamed and, by instinct, jerked the tape from his mouth. He spit out a wadded paper towel and gasped in a deep breath of air. “Jill,” he said, “get me out of here.”
Already I could hear the rapid footsteps of the men returning to the house. “That had to be Jill,” I heard Cade saying. At the sound of his voice Drew strained his shoulders toward me, bumping his head against my arm, and I skittered back from his desperate touch. Cade’s boots and Dodge’s were quick and hollow against the stairs. Before I could turn I backed into Cade, who clapped his hand over my mouth when I startled, whispering a shushing noise like the one he used with TJ.
“Goddamn it,” Dodge muttered, coming down the stairs behind Cade. “
“Cade,” Drew said. “What the
Cade let me go, and I turned to him with a look of mute shock. “Don’t, Jill,” he said. “The guy’s had it coming for three years now. He’s alive, so chill.”
“Call the cops, Jill,” Drew said.
Dodge pointed at him. “You, shut up.”
“You better pick your loyalties wisely right now,” Drew told me. “They’ll be here by tonight, busting down his door.”
“In your dreams,” said Cade.
Drew looked him in the eye. “Watch and wait. You’re already on the shit list, man. You made a bad, bad move.”
Dodge grabbed the chair by its sides and dragged it backward toward the wall, tipping Drew back. The legs scraped the concrete with a broken and dissonant squeal before Dodge roughly righted it again and set to work securing it to the wall with a length of chain. I turned to Cade, who was moving his baseball cap up and down with a nervousness that belied his glowering expression.
“We’re on plan C,” he informed me in a curt voice. Dodge tossed him a pack of zip ties pulled from his back pocket, and as Cade caught it I saw Elias suddenly clear in my mind’s eye, the way he was in the woods that day— the bulk of his curled shoulders, the sweat on his temples, the dreadful distance in his gaze. Cade pocketed the bag as if it meant nothing to him, and said to Drew, “I’m not on any shit list anywhere. So sit tight.”
“The hell you aren’t. Why do you think you didn’t get my job?” Cade looked at him sharply, his hand stilled for a moment on the brim of his cap. To Dodge, Drew said, “Are you the Powell guy? Richard or something? Yeah, he’s the guy on the watch list. The antigovernment nut job. No chance Bylina’s guys were ever going to clear you for my job when your family runs with this guy.”
“Shut up,” he said, but Dodge fixed the chain against a second hook and rose grinning. I stopped at the base of the stairs and looked at Drew, momentarily halting my effort to leave. If Drew already knew about Cade’s family, we were all in more trouble than I could have imagined. For all these months I had written off Dodge’s claims as paranoia, but if they were true, then I was already an accessory. I had known so much and said so little, and whatever agency knew Dodge’s name might also know about me and my silence. The fact that I had reasons for it wouldn’t matter. People always did.
“They got me on a watch list, huh?” he said, ignoring Cade’s scowl.
“Gag that asshole back up,” said Cade.
“Why? Let him talk. I’m interested.”
Cade gave a shake of his head and moved toward Drew, but the sharpness of my voice stopped him. “This matters, Cade. Let him say what he knows.”
The way Drew’s arms were fixed behind his back made it impossible to fully raise his head, but he looked up as best he could and trained his glance on me. “Call them, Jill. They’re coming anyway, and you’ve got a lot to lose.”
“She’s not on your side, little buddy,” said Dodge.
“Is that true, Jill?” asked Drew. His voice was plaintive. “You really on the side of this yuck-a-puck and your jackass baby daddy? I always thought you were better than that.”
“I’m on my son’s side. Tell me what watch list you’re talking about.”
“Will you help me if I do?”
“She can’t do a damn thing for you,” said Cade. He looked to Dodge and asked, “What do you want to do about the truck?”
“I’ll go clean it out once we’ve got him situated. You can hold down the fort.”
“We can get Scooter to do it. He should be over any minute now. I texted him from the road.”
Drew’s piercing eye contact kept drawing me back in. “C’mon, Jill, don’t be a bitch right now,” he said, and what sympathy I had built for him turned sour. “Who kept you company on Christmas? When this guy abandoned you for his
That evening flashed into my mind. “I paid for my own dinner. And then you tried to get me to go to bed with you.”
Cade looked at him sharply. His face turned pink. Dodge made a noise that sounded like the yowl of a cat, all
