Eric Lustbader - First Daughter

"What I can guarantee is hope," Jack said shortly. "Hope is her food and drink. Only hope will keep her going through the darkest hours."

"Hope dangles people from a slender thread," Nina said. "It's patently unfair."

They had been striding down the hallway. Now Jack stopped, turned to her. "Do you know anything about darkest hours?"

Nina stood staring at him. She didn't answer, because apparently she had nothing to say.

"I've had my darkest hours," Jack continued. "And now the Carsons are having theirs."

He stood very still, but there was so much energy coming off him that Nina, as if slapped in the face, took an involuntary step back.

His eyes glittered. "I will bring Alli back, Nina. You can make book on it."

JACK LED her to the right, skirting the shed. There was a swath of lawn, rather narrow by the standards of the rest of the property, beyond which lay a thick stand of fluffy pines and large, gnarled, very old oaks. By the time they reached the trees, Jack had determined that Nina had low-slung hips and a walk that, defying the odds, was distinctly sensual.

"I want you to know…" Nina stumbled over a stone as well as her words.

"What?"

"I've… had my darkest hours, too."

Jack, navigating through the rooty trees, said nothing.

"When I was a kid." Nina picked her way under tree branches, over exposed roots, the knuckles of angry fists. "My older brother… he molested me…"

Jack stopped, turned back to regard her. He was startled at her admission, which couldn't have been easy to make. But then again, it was often easier to confess to a stranger than to someone you knew.

"And when I fought back, he beat me. He said I needed to be punished."

Jack felt a ping, like the ricochet of a steel ball bounding from bumper to bumper in his own shameful pinball machine. "You know that's not true."

Nina's face was pinched, as if she wanted to make the past disappear. "He's married, got two kids. Now he's got a whole new family to dominate. How I hate him. I can't stop." She made a little sound in the back of her throat that was either a laugh or a sob. "My parents loved God, they believed in his loving kindness. How wrong were they?"

"When we were growing up," Jack said, "parents were unconscious when it came to their effect on their kids."

Nina paused for a moment, considering. "Even if you're right, it doesn't make what they did better, does it?"

They resumed their trek through the stand of weeping hemlocks and pin oaks. He heard the rustle of the wind through brittle branches, the hiss of faraway traffic, the call of a winter bird. The melancholy sounds of winter.

At length, Nina said, "Where are we going?"

"There's a secret path." Jack pointed ahead. "Well, it isn't a secret to the juniors and seniors, but to the adults…"

They had reached the far side of the tree-line. He took three or four steps to his left, moved some brush away, revealing a narrow, well-trod earthen path through brambly underbrush and the occasional evil-looking hemlock.

"Except you."

He nodded. "Except me."

Nina followed him along the twisting path, at times half bent over in order to avoid shaggy low-hanging branches. Their shoes made dry, crunching sounds, as if they were walking over mounds of dead beetles. The wind, late for an appointment, hurried through the hemlocks. Grim bull briars and brambles pulled at them.

"With all the manicured lawn, why hasn't the school pulled this stuff out?"

"Natural barbed wire," Jack said.

"What do the kids do in here?" With a hard tug, Nina pulled her coat free of a tenacious bramble. "Drugs and sex, I expect."

"I have no doubt that drugs and sex are on the students' minds," Jack said, "but so is escape."

Nina frowned. "Why escape from the lap of luxury?"

"Well, that's the million-dollar question, isn't it?"

"Who told you about it? Emma?"

Jack's laugh held a bitter edge. "Emma never told me anything." Like so much in life, this was a matter of trust. Edward Carson certainly trusted Nina, and she had bravely trusted him with her secret, and that had touched him in a way she could never imagine. "It was Alli. She was worried about Emma."

"Worried? About what?"

"She never said. I got the impression there was only so much she was prepared to tell me. But she did say that several times when Emma thought she was asleep, she crept out of the room. Alli said the one time she followed her, she saw her vanish down this path."

"Did she go after Emma?"

"She didn't say."

"Didn't you ask?"

"I take it you don't have a teenager. I went after Emma myself."

"And what happened?"

They had reached the high brick wall that surrounded the property. It was guarded on this side by a double hedge: low, sheared boxwood in front of tall privet. Jack was already behind the boxwood, had found the slight gap in the stately privet. Pushing aside the sturdy branches, he vanished into the thicket.

When Nina tried to follow him, she found the privet was so thick, she was forced to leave her coat behind, press herself bodily into what she was sure had a moment before been a gap. Shouldering her way through, she found herself on the other side, almost flush up against the brick wall. Jack was on his haunches, hands pulling at the bricks. To Nina's astonishment, they came away easily until he had a pile of approximately twenty, which left a hole in the wall large enough for a human being of small to normal size to wriggle through.

"I followed her through here."

Crouching down, Nina saw a wedge of lawn, the bole of a tree, and beyond, a field at the end of which were stands of oaks, birches, and mountain laurels.

"I saw her meet someone; I couldn't tell who, it was just a shadow standing beneath that tree," Jack said. "Either she heard a noise or some instinct caused her to look back. She saw me, she came after me, pushed me back to this side, snarling like an animal." Jack sat back on his haunches, his eyes far away. "We had a real knock-down, drag-out shouting match. She accused me of spying on her, which was, of course, the truth. I told her I wouldn't have had to spy on her if she wasn't sneaking around in the dead of night. That was a mistake. She blew up, said what she did was no business of mine, said she hated my guts, said some things I don't think she really meant, at least I hope not."

Nina was kind enough not to look at him directly. "You never found out?"

Jack dived through the hole in the wall.

ON HANDS and knees they picked their way through. There was about the hole the stink of the grave, a sickly-sweet scent that reminded Jack of the time when he was a kid and the neighbor's black cat got stuck inside the wall of his room and died there, giving off the stench of slow decay. The neighbor, an old woman married to a male harem of feral cats, wanted the black one back, to bury it properly beneath her fig tree, but Jack's father refused. "It's good for the boy to smell death, to understand it, to know it's real," he explained to her papery face and sour breath. "He needs to know that his life isn't infinite, that death will come for him, like it does for everyone, one day."

In starless night, he lay in rageful silence, listening to the sound of his own ragged heart as he breathed in the stench that penetrated to the pit of his stomach until, unable to keep to inaction, he ran across the hall, there to violently lose his supper in the low porcelain bowl. In the adjacent room, his parents made love aggressively, raucous as sailors on shore leave, with no thought that they were not alone.

JACK AND Nina stood close together on the other side. Jack wondered whether Nina was thinking the same thing he was: Is this how Alli's abductors smuggled her out of the school? Over Nina's right shoulder, the hills rolled on, leading eventually to the Georgetown Pike.