“You broke in? What are you, some kind of spy or something?”
Allen laughed aloud. “Nothing like that. Just lucky.”
“But my father wasn’t there.”
Allen looked at the boy’s clever young face. He sat down again. “Jamie, I believe your father is dead.”
The boy’s pupils darkened. “No. He can’t be.”
“Jamie, it’s been on the news, but I asked Rachel not to let you know. His plane went down over the sea. As far as I know, they’re still looking for the wreckage.” There was some reaction to the detail of the plane going down, but hardly anything that looked like a start of guilt. Maybe now was best, to push for it. “Jamie, I found the piece of paper in the back of the third book.”
The boy looked confused for a moment, and then it hit him, what Allen’s words meant, and his face flushed with enough guilt to make any prosecutor grin with joy. The expression made Allen, reluctant prosecutor that he was, feel queasy.
Still, he pressed on. “It had to do with how to make a plane crash,” he said, but he was talking to boy’s bent head. “What do you know about it, Jamie?”
“I found it, in my father’s office. I thought, I don’t know, maybe he was going to do some kind of insurance thing. He’d been talking about it the day before, how the plane would be worth more crashed than it was on the ground. And he must’ve asked Howard to research it, because it was some kind of printout from the Internet, it looked like. My father . . . he really doesn’t know anything about computers.” He glanced up at that, as if to see how Allen took this revelation of weakness in the All-powerful. Seeing no reaction, he ducked his head again, waiting for Allen’s response.
So what did you expect, a tearful confession? Allen rubbed at his second-day stubble and went to use the toilet. He splashed the road film from his face and drank some cold water, thinking that his mouth was going to taste monstrously foul when he woke up if he didn’t brush his teeth, but the effort of digging through his carry-on was too great. He went back into the main room and tossed Jamie the remote for the TV.
“No X-rated films, you hear?” he said, dredging up a grin to make it a joke. “Your aunt Rachel would never forgive me.”
Jamie gave him an uncertain smile back, and Allen was overwhelmed with the pathos of the whole situation. Before he could think about it, he squatted down and put a hand around the back of the boy’s neck, giving it a soft squeeze. “We’ll get through this together, Jamie. I promise you.”
Before Allen could rise, Jamie whirled in the chair and threw his arms around Allen, hanging on for all he was worth. Allen’s immediate impulse was to pull away fast—with abused kids, you had to watch out for their own assumptions about adult behavior. But he caught himself; the boy was vibrating with tension, but there was no eroticism in the contact, so Allen stayed where he was, allowing the boy to cling to him until the tremors began to fade. Only then did he stand up, slowly. He patted the boy’s shoulder and walked to the bed near the door. His boots came off reluctantly, unlaced for the first time in thirty hours, and he gave his body over to the embrace of the blessedly firm mattress. Paradise.
The TV came on behind him, immediately dialed down to a whisper. Allen said into the pillow, “You can put it a little louder than that.” The sound came up one increment, and then a second. “Oh, and if you get hungry, there’s some snacks in the paper bag.”
Allen’s watchful brain, fading fast, did a final perimeter check of the room and the situation, making sure he’d covered everything. He thought he had; if not, he’d done his best. Now if only the kid didn’t try to crawl into bed with him and send him straight through the roof. If only he could be absolutely positive that the boy’s fervent embrace had not been the gesture of a clever manipulator. If only he didn’t keep seeing the open, smiling brown face of a boy in a ragged Eiffel Tower T-shirt, leading his new GI friends into an ambush.
Allen lay, motionless and beyond the reach of any dreams, for four hours. The room was dim when his eyes came open. He lay for a minute, to be certain that nothing nearby had caused him to wake, but his ears held no fading memory of a disturbance; merely his internal clock telling him that it was time to be on their way.
He turned over in the bed, obscurely pleased by the awareness that despite his mind’s doubts, his jungle reflexes had trusted Jamie enough to turn his back on him while he slept. Jamie heard his motion and looked across the room, a chocolate smear in one corner of his mouth and a half-empty bottle of apple juice in his hand.
Allen sat up, scrubbed at the remnants of his Harrison Ford haircut, and asked the boy what he was watching.
“A Jackie Chan movie. I’ve seen it before.”
“You hungry?”
“Yeah. I ate the chips and most of the cookies.”
“That’s fine. I saw a burger place coming in, I’ll go and get us dinner. What kind of burgers you like?”
“The big ones. With bacon?”
“Fries? Milk shake?”
“Can I have a Coke?” He made it sound like a rare treat.
“Sure.”
Allen shaved and showered and put on a clean shirt, then his jacket, since it seemed to be cooling off. At the door he told Jamie, “Lock the door and do up the chain behind me, and don’t let anyone in.”
He waited until he heard both locks slide shut, and went to buy their dinner. In the end, he bought enough for four, including the dinner salad and iced tea that a woman might order.
He knocked on the room door, and saw with approval the peephole go dark before the locks opened. They ate most of the food watching the end of the Jackie Chan movie, and Allen packed away the remaining burger in case one of them got hungry later. The iced tea went down the toilet, the salad he emptied into one of the bags to leave in the next garbage can he happened across. The ghostly family of four packed their bags and left Coeur d’Alene. By nightfall, they had crossed into Washington State.
As a native of western Washington, Allen had never really felt that the dry, flat farmland east of the mountains was part of the same state. Still, it was comforting to see the familiar colors of the highway signs, and to know that by morning, he would be closing in on home ground.
Not that he intended to be home. Twenty-six years of painfully constructed habit died hard, and he could no more have pointed the car’s nose straight west along I90 than he could have strolled into the Coeur d’Alene police station with Jamie and asked one of the cops if the kid looked familiar. He had no reason to think anyone was looking for them; on the other hand, he’d not reached his current ripe old age with no felonies tacked to his name by flirting with carelessness. That was one of the reasons he’d bought the Honda back in Helena, because here its Washington State plates would blend in. And why he would now follow the roads less traveled, not only as the less obvious way from there to here, but because any pursuing car would have a harder time to hide, to say nothing of avoiding the risk of looking up to find a bored Highway Patrol car riding his back bumper. The southern routes were longer and more tiring, which made it unlikely they would reach Seattle that day, but the back of his scalp was happier if he didn’t zero in on the target.
Besides, it would give him more time to talk with Jamie. If the kid ever woke up.
The curly dark head was resting against the passenger window, using one of Allen’s sweatshirts as a pillow. From time to time, when oncoming headlights lit up the front seat, Allen would glance over at his companion, wondering. It was such a straightforward job, the one he’d done all these years—complicated in its details, sure, but basically it had boiled down to taking endangered innocents from a threat and hiding them until the threat could be rendered null, either by distance or steel bars.
He’d never before faced the question of whether or not he was helping an actual innocent. Sure, some of the mothers had taken out their own pain on their children, but once the main tormenter had been removed from the picture and counseling begun, they had generally settled down to
a guilt-ridden but affectionate maternal role.
As he’d thought back in May: If Jamie was even a year older, Allen might have been more willing to consider the boy lost, already formed into his adult role as a perpetuator of abuse. A year younger, and he’d have been more confident of the child’s malleability, more secure in the knowledge that surrounding the boy with Rachel’s family would wither the root cause of violent behavior. Violent adults are created, and the chief element in their makeup is shame: shame at being pushed around, shame at being too weak to protect themselves (and often their mothers and siblings) from Dad’s fists, shame at passing on the only form of self-respect they had ever learned—beating up someone smaller. A childhood of humiliation rides up on the tumult of adolescence: It was at Jamie’s age that kids joined gangs, that kids shot up schools full of tormentors. That kids hauled off and brutally kicked the dog that loved them.
The boys who brought guns to their middle school were often as soft and unformed-looking as Jamie. They probably looked every bit as innocent when they were asleep with their head against the side window of a car, traveling an unlit road in the middle of the night. They probably showed just as little grief at the news that a father was dead. Allen opened his mouth to ask the kid about explosives, to ask him if he’d ever researched bombs or looked at one of the school-shooter Web sites on his computer, but then he made himself shut his mouth, unwilling to bring it all out into the open here and now.
Alice, Allen said to the road ahead, I hope to God you can sort this mess out.
Chapter 31
Jamie watched between slitted eyelids as the road scrolled past the headlights of the car. This was turning into one of Father’s hunting trips, endless back roads at all hours, the warm feeling of having Father all to himself alongside the growing knot of what was to come, until it would feel like when he had the flu, shivery on one level but safe in bed on the other. He often pretended to be asleep when Father was driving, too. But he’d never really thought that Father was fooled by the act.
Allen, though, seemed to be buying it, which made Jamie both happy at the man’s innocence and frightened for him. Because Father wasn’t dead, whether his plane went down or not. Jamie didn’t know how he could be so sure about it, but in his bones he just couldn’t imagine that the world was now without Father. Which meant that Father was not dead. And if Father was alive, sooner or later he would come for him, that too was beyond question. If Allen was standing between them when it happened, the big man wouldn’t stand a chance.
He just wished he could get his thoughts straight. Allen was a good person who wanted only to help him, and Father was . . . well, he was Father, and about as helpful as a coiled cobra. So why didn’t he side with Allen? Why couldn’t he just shift his loyalties? He did understand why Allen had to take him away from Montana—he didn’t like leaving, even though Montana bored him to tears, but he understood it. One thing he did have straight in his head: The Johnson farm was no place for Father. Jamie had been living in a state of huge frustration and cold terror ever since Sally had gone missing, and (other than leaving Terry behind, which really sucked) he’d have been willing to run through fire to get into Allen’s car and drive away. He felt like one of those mother birds that fakes a hurt wing to lead a predator away from the nest. In spite of his intentions, first Rachel and then Sally had got in under his skin, and although he’d do his best in the future to make sure nobody ever did that again, he still had to say, he didn’t want Father anywhere near them, not in the sort of mood he was sure to be in when he finally laid eyes on Jamie.
That was why he’d gone into a panic when Sally had disappeared. The idea of Father’s hands on that little girl was more than Jamie could bear. He’d wanted to run off then and there, to give Father what he really wanted, so he’d leave the Johnsons alone.
But he’d allowed Pete and Rachel to keep him there, partly because he wasn’t absolutely positive that it was Father—or Howard—who’d led Sally away, but also because he figured that if he wasn’t there when Father came, it would make it even worse for the Johnsons. He’d stayed, in truth, because he couldn’t convince the whole family that they had to leave, and he figured that he, at least, knew what they would be in for, and he would be on the lookout. He’d not gotten much sleep, the last week. And no computer time either, since he’d spent most of every night watching the dark driveway and the access road beyond, praying that he wouldn’t see a set of approaching headlights that slowed and then went dark.
At least Pete had a gun. And although Jamie wasn’t supposed to know how to get at it, he’d figured out where the key was before dawn the day after the stranger had appeared. He didn’t think he could shoot Father face-to-face, but maybe he could have made Father think he would, and buy time for the Johnsons to escape.
He’d pictured the scene a hundred times during those long nights just past: Father looming up in the front door; Jamie standing his ground with Pete’s bird gun; Rachel and Sally and the others creeping down the stairs at his back and fleeing out the kitchen door; Terry standing by his leg, teeth bared; and the look on Father’s face. Jamie’s guts would go into a cold twist at the thought of that look, the rage that turned Father’s eyes to ice chips and made his mouth turn up into an expression only a crazy person would imagine was a smile. But Jamie’s cinematic imagination persisted in adding to Father’s expression just a trace of respect, when Jamie stood up to him at last. Late on the fourth or fifth night of his watch, the strange thought had come to him that Father might even like to be killed by his son, that it would make him proud, as he bled to death on Rachel’s braided carpet, to know that his son had the guts to pull the trigger.
But it was nonsense, and that particular part of the fantasy had burst faster than a soap bubble. Gun or no, Father would have taken him apart. And then he would have gone after the Johnsons, for protecting him. And then he would have come after Allen, and Alice, and anyone else linked to Jamie’s helpers.
But then Allen arrived so openly that anyone for miles around could see, and led Jamie away from the Johnson house in broad daylight, which was about as much safety as Jamie could give the family. And so here he was, sitting in a car with a man who figured he was rescuing Jamie, while all the time Jamie knew that he himself held the man’s life in his own skinny hands. He would allow Allen to carry him far away from Montana, since it was just possible that everyone was right, that Sally’s abductor was some stranger and that the family hadn’t come onto Father’s radar, and nobody was watching to see him get into the car and drive off. But in any case the question was the same: How long would he let Allen keep him? He kind of liked Allen, more than he’d thought possible, but he had to stop doing that; he might have to give Allen to Father in order to save his own hide, before this was over.
It was so confusing, and he was really tired. It was no wonder that he’d turned to the laptop, its black case so comfortingly real, the online conversations so unconnected with murderous parents and the stench of cow shit. Last night, spotting the familiar shape in Allen’s leather carry-on while he was looking for something to eat, it had been like settling into a mother’s lap. Allen’s laptop’s like a lap, he thought, sleep rising up until his thoughts began to run together. And Allen never even suspected. He was as clueless as Rachel, Rachel who’d thought Jamie generous and good for wanting to get away from the farm. None of them knew what Jamie was inside; none of them realized that Father was the only one who really knew him.
As Jamie’s eyelids closed for real, his last confused image was not of the road, but of his shoe kicking hard at the warm, eager, loyal dog at his feet.
Why had he done that, anyway?
Allen drove through the night, stopping once for gas and coffee; Jamie did not stir. The hills rose up and the vegetation in the headlights greened. They went over White Pass, and on the other side, for the first time, Allen began to feel safe. Home ground now, he told himself. Just a matter of hours until he could meet Alice and begi
n to unlock the conundrum.
There was a diner open in Morton, and he went in and bought some dry-looking sandwiches. Jamie was sitting up when he got back into the car.
“You hungry?” he asked the boy, putting the sandwiches on the dash.
Jamie hesitated. “I need to pee.” He shot a glance at Allen to see his reaction, but the admission—which Father would have twisted around, made into a sure sign of weakness, and then used to torment him—had little or no impression on this driver.
“The toilet’s just inside the door,” Allen said, starting in on his sandwich. When the boy got back, Allen put the car back into gear. “We’ll get to the freeway in a little while, check into a motel for a couple of hours before we turn north for Seattle.”
“Wish I was old enough to help drive,” Jamie offered.
God, don’t we all, Allen thought fervently. If the boy had been eighteen, none of these problems would have come up—others, no doubt, but not these, and they sure as hell wouldn’t have been Allen’s. He would have spent the last week putting up bookshelves with Rae then packed his bags and gone to the airport with her. That was another reason he wanted to stop when they got to the freeway instead of pressing on to Seattle, barely two hours north: Rae’s flight was at ten o’clock. If he reached Seattle in plenty of time, he did not think he could bear it, knowing she was so close.
“Too bad it’s not daylight,” he told his passenger, to take his thoughts off of Rae and airplanes. “You’d see that we’re driving straight between two mountains. One of them’s a volcano.”
“Really?”
“Mount Saint Helens. Used to be the most beautiful mountain, had a gorgeous lake right at the top. I went there when I was your age, we used to find these rocks that would float on water. Of course, that’s because it was a volcano, but nobody thought about it then.”
“Is that the one that erupted a while ago?”