"Who's that?" Graham asked, glancing at the screen.
"Who?"
"You're IM'ing?"
"Just some guy."
"Joey."
"Tony." The boy continued to stare at the screen. Graham's secretary could type 120 words a minute. Joey seemed to be going faster.
Worried it might be an adult, Graham asked, "Tony who?"
"In my, you know, class. Tony Metzer." His tone suggested that Graham had met him, though he knew he hadn't. "We're, like, into Turbo Planet. He can't get past level six. I can get to eight. I'm helping him."
"Well, it's late. That's enough IM'ing for tonight."
Joey continued typing and Graham wondered if he was being defiant or just saying good-bye. Would this become a fight? The man's palms sweated. He'd fired employees for theft, he'd faced down a burglar who'd broken into the office, he'd stopped knife fights among his workers. None of those incidents had made him as nervous as this.
After some fast keystrokes the computer screen went back to the desktop. The boy looked up pleasantly. Asking, What now?
"How's the arm?"
"Good."
The boy picked up his game controller. Pushed buttons so fast his fingers were a blur. Joey had dozens of electronic gadgets--MP3 players, iPod, cell phone, computer. He seemed to have plenty of friends but he communicated more with his fingers than with words spoken face-to-face.
"You want some aspirin?"
"Naw, it's okay."
The boy concentrated on the game but his stepfather could see he'd grown wary.
Graham's first thought was to trick the boy into confessing about the 'phalting but that seemed to go against the instinct that Anna had told him to rely on. He thought back to his dishpan reflections: dialogue, not confrontation.
The boy was silent. The only noise was the click of the controller and the electronic bass beat of the sound track of the game, as a cartoon character strolled along a fantastical road.
Okay, get to it.
"Joey, can I ask you why you skip school?"
"Skip school?"
"Why? Are there problems with teachers? Maybe with some other students?"
"I don't skip."
"I heard from the school. You skipped today."
"No, I didn't." He kept playing on the computer.
"I think you did."
"No," the boy said credibly. "I didn't."
Graham saw a major flaw with the dialogue approach. "You've never skipped?"
"I don't know. Like, once I got sick on the way to school and I came home. Mom was at work and I couldn't get her."
"You can always call me. My company's five minutes from here and fifteen minutes from school. I can be there in no time."
"But you can't sign me out."
"Yes, I can. I'm on the list. Your mother put me on the list." Didn't the boy know that? "Tell you what, Joey, shut that off."
"Shut it off?"
"Yeah. Shut it off."
"I'm nearly to--"
"No. Come on. Shut it off."
He continued to play.
"Or I'll unplug it." Graham rose and reached for the cord.
Joey stared at him. "No! That'll dump the memory. Don't. I'll save it."
He continued to play for a moment--a dense twenty seconds--and then hit some buttons, and with a deflating computer-generated sound the screen froze.
Graham sat down on the bed, near the boy.
"I know you and your mother talked about your accident today. Did you tell her you skipped school?" Graham was wondering if Brynn knew and hadn't told him.
"I didn't skip school."
"I talked to Mr. Raditzky. He says you forged the note from your mother."
"He's lying." Eyes evasive.
"Why would he lie?"
"He doesn't like me."
"He sounded pretty concerned about you."
"You just don't get it." Apparently thinking that this was irrefutable proof of his innocence, he turned back to the frozen screen. A creature of some sort bounced up and down. Running in place. The boy eyed the game controller. He didn't go for it.
"Joey, somebody from school saw you 'phalting on Elden Street."
The boy's eyes flickered. "They're lying too. It was Rad, right? He's making that up."
"I don't think they were, Joey. I think they saw you on your board, going forty miles an hour down Elden Street when you wiped out."
He bounced onto his bed, past Graham, and pulled a book off the shelf.
"So you didn't tell your mother you cut and you didn't tell her you were 'phalting, did you?"
"I wasn't 'phalting. I was just boarding. I went off the parking lot steps."
"Is that where you had the accident today?"
A pause. "Not really. But I don't 'phalt."
"Have you ever?"
"No."
Graham was at a complete loss. This was going nowhere.
Instinct...
"Where's your board?"
Joey glanced at Graham and said nothing. Turned back to the book.
"Where?" his stepfather asked adamantly.
"I don't know."
Graham opened the closet, where the boy's skateboard was sitting on a pile of athletic shoes.
"No more boarding this month."
"Mom said two days!"
Graham thought Brynn had said three. "One month. And you have to promise that you're never going to 'phalt again."
"I don't 'phalt!"
"Joey."
"This's such bullshit!"
"Don't say that to me."
"Mom doesn't mind."
Was that true? "Well, I do."
"You can't stop me. You're not my father!"
Graham felt an urge to argue. To explain about authority and hierarchy and family units, his and the boy's respective roles in the household. An argument on the merits, though, seemed like an automatic loss.
Instinct, he reminded himself.
Okay. Let's see what happens.
"Are you going to tell me the truth?"
"I am telling the truth," the boy raged and started to cry.
Graham's heart was pounding furiously. Was he being honest? This was so hard. He tried to keep his voice steady. "Joey, your mother and I love you very much. We were both worried sick about you when we heard you'd been hurt."
"You don't love me. Nobody does." The tears stopped as quickly as they'd started and he slouched back, reading his book.
"Joey..." Graham leaned forward. "I'm doing this because I care about you." He smiled. "Come on. Brush your teeth, put on your PJs. Time for bed."
The boy didn't move. His eyes were frantically scanning words he wasn't even seeing.
Graham rose and left the room, carrying the skateboard. He headed downstairs, fighting the urge with every step to go back and apologize and beg the boy to be happy and forgive him.
But instinct won. Graham continued to the ground floor, put the skateboard on the top shelf of the closet.
Anna watched him. She seemed amused. Graham didn't think anything was funny.
"When'll Brynn be home?" his mother-in-law asked.
He looked at his watch. "Soon, I'd guess. She'll probably get dinner but she'll eat in the car."
"She shouldn't do that. Not on those roads at night. You look down for one minute, pick up your sandwich and there's a deer in front of you. Or a bear. Jamie Henderson nearly hit one. It was just there."
"I heard that, I think. Big one?"
"Big enough." A nod toward the ceiling. "How'd it go?"
"Not good."
She continued to give him a half-smile.
"What?" he asked, irritated.
"It's a start."
Graham rolled his eyes. "I don't think so."
"Trust me. Sometimes just delivering a message is the important thing. Whatever that message is. Remember that."
He picked up the phone and dialed Brynn again. It went right to voice mail. He tossed the phone on the table and star
ed absently at the TV screen. Thinking again about the yellow jackets. How he'd been going about his business, wheeling a big shaggy plant, enjoying the day, never realizing that he'd trod on the nest ten feet back.
Never realizing it until the hard little dots, with their fiery stingers, were all over him.
He thought now: And why does it even matter?
Just let it go.
Graham reached for the remote control. Upstairs, a door slammed.
BRYNN AND MICHELLE
were making their way through scruffy tangled forest about three hundred yards north of the Feldmans' house. Here the trees were denser, mostly lush pine, spruce and fir. The view of the lake was cut off. The car alarm had been an unfortunate mistake. But, since it had happened, Brynn hoped that she'd turned it around to work to their advantage, making the men think that it was an intentional distraction and that the women were escaping by canoe to the far shore of the lake. In fact, though, they'd used the boat only to paddle downstream a short distance and cross to the opposite shore of the creek. They'd propped up life preservers to look like two huddling passengers and then shoved the canoe into the speedy current, which propelled the vessel into the lake.
They'd then hurried as best they could, given Michelle's ankle, away from the lake house enclave, north toward Marquette State Park.
When the gunfire came, as Brynn expected, she was ready and let go a fierce, harrowing scream. Then abruptly stopped as if shot. She'd known the men would be half deafened and, with the confusing echoes from the hills, couldn't tell that the scream had come from someplace else entirely. The trick might not fool them for long but she was sure she'd bought some time.
"Can we stop now?" Michelle asked.
"Why, does your ankle hurt?"
"Well, sure it does. But I mean, let's just wait here. They'll be gone soon." She was eating her snack crackers. Brynn looked at them. Michelle, reluctantly, it seemed, offered her some. She ate a handful hungrily.
"We can't stop. We have to keep going."
"Where?"
"North."
"What does 'north' mean? Is there a cabin that way or something, or a phone?"
"We're getting as far away from them as we can. Into the park."
Michelle slowed. "Look at this place. It's all a mess, it's tangled and...well, a mess. There aren't any paths. It's freezing."
And you in that two-thousand-dollar coat...complaining, Brynn reflected.
"There's a ranger station maybe four, five miles from here."
"Five miles!"
"Shhh."
"That's bullshit. We can't walk five miles through this."
"You're in good shape. You run, right?"
"On a treadmill at my health club. Not in places like this. And which way do we go? I'm already lost."
"I know the general direction."
"The woods? I can't!"
"We don't have any choice."
"You don't understand.... I'm afraid of snakes."
"They're more afraid of you, believe me."
Michelle displayed the crackers. "This isn't going to be enough food. Do you know about hypoglycemia? Everyone thinks it's nothing. But I could faint."
Brynn said firmly, "Michelle, there are men out there who want to kill us. Snakes and your blood sugar really come pretty low on the scale of problems here."
"I can't do it." The woman reminded Brynn of Joey's first day at elementary school: he'd planted his feet and refused to go. It took two days for her to persuade him to attend. In fact, Brynn now recognized similar signs of hysteria in Michelle's face. The young woman stopped walking altogether. Her eyes were wide and she gestured broadly with twitchy hands. "I shop at Whole Foods. I buy coffee at Starbucks. This isn't me, this isn't my world. I can't do it!"
"Michelle," Brynn said gently, "it'll be okay. It's only a state park. Thousands of people come through here every summer."
"On the paths, the trails."
"And we're going to find one."
"But people get lost. I saw this thing on TV. This couple got lost and they froze to death and the animals ate their bodies."
"Michelle--"
"No, I don't want to go! Let's hide here. We'll find a place. Please." She looked as if she was going to cry.
Brynn remembered that the poor woman had seen her friends shot down--and had nearly been killed herself. She tried to be patient. "No. That one man, at least, Hart, he'll come after us as soon as he finds we tricked 'em with the boat. He won't know for sure we came this way but he might guess."
Michelle looked back, her eyes zipping around in panic, her breath fast.
"Okay?"
Michelle ate another handful of crackers, not offering any to Brynn, and then shoved them back into her pocket. She gave a disgusted grimace. "All right. You win."
With one more glance back, the women started their trek, moving as fast as they could, picking their way around the tangles, many of which would be impossible to get through even with machetes. There were plenty of conifer woods, though, and it was possible to find flat routes unobstructed by steel-wool underbrush.
They continued on, away from the houses, Michelle doing a fair job of keeping up the pace despite the limp. Brynn gripped her spear firmly, feeling both confident and ridiculous because of the weapon.
Soon they'd covered another quarter mile, then a half.
Brynn started and spun around. She'd heard a voice.
But it was only Michelle, muttering to herself, her face ghostly in the blue moonlight. Brynn too had the habit of self-dialog. She'd lost her father to disease and a dear friend in the department to a drunk driver. And she'd lost a husband too. She had talked to herself during those times of sorrow, praying for strength or just plain rambling. For some reason, she'd found, words made pain less painful. She'd done the same just that afternoon, with Joey in the X-ray unit at the hospital. She couldn't remember what she'd said then.
They skirted scummy ponds choked with bog bean and cranberry. She was surprised to see a swath of moonlight illuminate a cluster of pitcher plants--a carnivore Brynn had learned about when helping Joey with a report for school. Frogs screeched urgently and birds gave mournful calls. It was too early in the season for mosquitoes, thank the Lord. Brynn was a magnet and in the summer wore citronella like perfume.
Reassuring herself now as much as Michelle, Brynn whispered, "I've been to the park on two search-and-rescues here." She'd volunteered for the assignments to put to use some of the expertise she'd picked up at the State Police tactical training seminars, which included an optional--and extremely exhausting and painful--mini-survival course.
One of the two search-and-rescues here had actually become a very unpleasant body-recovery operation. But Brynn didn't mention that.
"I don't know the place real well but I have a rough idea of the layout. The Joliet Trail's near here someplace, no more than a mile or two. You know it?"
Michelle shook her head, eyes on the bed of pine needles in front of her feet. She wiped her nose on her sleeve.
"The trail'll take us to that ranger station. It'll be closed now but we could find a phone or a gun there."
The station was Brynn's first choice. But, she went on to explain, if they missed the building or couldn't break into it they could continue on the Joliet, which angled northeast till it crossed the Snake River. "We can follow the river east to Point of Rocks. That's a good-sized town on the other side of the park. They'll have stores--for a phone--and a public safety office of some kind. Probably part-time but we can wake 'em up. It's a ways, six or seven miles, but we can follow the river and it's pretty flat walking. The other option when we hit the Snake is to turn west. And climb the rocks along the Snake River Gorge. That'll take us to the interstate by the bridge. There's traffic all the time there. A trucker or somebody'll stop for us."
"Climb the rocks," Michelle muttered. "I'm afraid of heights."
So was Brynn (though that hadn't stopped her rappelling down a sheer cliff face
to a waiting keg of Old Milwaukee--the traditional graduation exercise in the State Police course). And the climb at the gorge would be steep and dangerous. The bridge was nearly one hundred feet above the river and the rocks were often nearly vertical faces. It was in that part of the park where the body the law officers had been searching for had been recovered. A young man had lost his footing. The fall was only twenty feet but he'd been impaled on a sharp tree limb. The coroner said it probably took him twenty minutes to die.
To this day Brynn McKenzie was haunted by the image.
As they moved from the pine into ancient forest--denser and slathered in darkness--Brynn tried to pick out the route that would be easiest on Michelle's ankle. But the way was often impacted with rooty brush, tangles of saplings and vines, forcing them around. Some they just had to fight their way through.
And some routes were so dim they avoided them completely for fear of missing a steep drop-off or deep bog.
And always, reminders that they weren't really alone. Bats zipped by, owls hooted. Brynn gasped when she trod on the end of a deer rib rack, which swung up and clapped her in the knee. She danced away from the bleached, chewed bone. The scarred skull of the animal was nearby.
Michelle stared at the skeletal remains, eyes wide, without response.
"Let's go. It's just bones."
They pushed through the tangled wilderness for another hundred yards. Suddenly Michelle stumbled, grabbed a branch to support herself and winced.
"What's the matter?"
She ripped off her thin glove, staring at her hand. Two thorns from the branch had punctured her palm and broken off into her skin. Her eyes flushed with horror.
"No! no, it's just blackberry. You're fine. Here. Let me look."
"No! Don't touch it."
But Brynn took the woman's hand and flicked the candle lighter over the skin, examining the tiny wounds. "We just want to get them out so it doesn't get infected. In five minutes you won't feel a thing."
Brynn eased the thorns out of her skin and the woman winced, whimpering and staring at the growing dots of blood. Brynn pulled out the bottle of alcohol, dampened the edge of a sock with it and started to bathe the wounds. She couldn't help notice the dark, artistic nails.