Ridley Pearson - Beyond Recognition

Nick glanced hotly over his shoulder and met the boy’s eyes. Ben felt his stomach go to jelly. Nick grabbed hold of Ben’s shirt, which tore off in his hand as Ben jerked away. Ben screamed, stumbled back, and fell.

The intruder sprang like a cat, blocking Ben’s chance at the front door. Boxing him in, he stepped closer, arms spread wide. Ben threw a lamp at the man, turned over a chair, and reached for the door of the downstairs closet, the only escape available to him. From the corner of his one good eye, Ben picked up movement to his right; his stepfather was conscious and coming to his feet, unseen by the intruder, whose full attention was fixed on the boy. The man said clearly, “I want my fucking money.”

Ben realized that by standing there he could buy his stepfather time to come up from behind. But instinct won out-he grabbed the closet doorknob and turned.

The intruder lunged for him. Ben kicked out, blindly connecting with something that cracked. The man let out a ferocious cry. Ben slipped into the darkness, yanked the door shut behind him, and held the doorknob tight. It rotated despite Ben’s efforts. The door opened a crack. That burned hand, with its shiny pink skin, slipped through the crack in the door.

At that moment there was a huge crash. The flipper was smashed in the door and the intruder screamed again and withdrew it. Ben, retching, was sent reeling backward onto his butt, onto the trap door that led to the basement crawl space.

How many times had his stepfather cautioned him not to go down there? He had put the fear of God into him, which of course had done nothing to convince Ben to stay out. Even nailing the trap door shut had not prevented Ben from prying it open, but his subsequent expedition, his encounter with thick spider webs and a terrible smell, had finished off his curiosity once and for all. That had been over a year ago, and yet he still remembered that disgusting smell.

The enormous crash was followed by total silence. Someone’s dead, Ben thought. He pulled hard on the trap door, shaking it left and right to wiggle free the nails he had loosened a year earlier. It opened. He slipped down inside, the trap door closing above him.

The crawl space was perhaps three feet high. He had to crouch in order to move. At the far end, light seeped through the cheap construction, casting a dusty gray light throughout. It smelled damp and foul, though better than a year before. Ben crabwalked toward the darkest corner, immediately caught in a sticky tangle of spiderweb. He smacked his head on a cold, sweating water pipe.

He froze in place as he heard slow footsteps overhead. Fear pumped through him. The next sound was the closet door coming open. “Kid,” the muffled voice cautioned, “you’re pissing me off here.”

The trap door squeaked as the man stepped on it. He was in the closet!

Ben inched toward the darkness, heart pounding, chest heaving, throat dry, skin prickly. A heavy foot thumped loudly on the trap door, testing. It thumped again.

Ben dragged himself deeper into the darkness, consumed by spiderwebs, convinced that his stepfather was dead and his own death imminent.

Light flashed sharply behind him as the trap door came open. “Don’t fuck with me, kid. You’re pissing me off something bad.” He tested. “Kid?”

Ben stopped, suddenly wanting to answer. He didn’t care about the money; he would gladly give it up. He opened his mouth to reply, but nothing would come out. Slowly, carefully, as if someone had let the air out of him, Ben laid himself down prone on the dusty gravel. He would hide. It was all that was left.

The ground was disturbed there, humped, the gravel mixed with dried mud. He tried to make himself as thin, as low, as invisible as possible. The intruder’s leg entered through the hatch. The man was coming down after him.

Ben had run out of options. He couldn’t think what to do. Face pressed low to the gravel, he peered toward the open hatch and the flood of light there.

Ben’s one good eye shifted focus, the resulting perspective out of proportion. It was not gravel or stone or mud that he saw. It was not the wooden supports rising at equal intervals from poured concrete pads to support the floor overhead. Nor was it the pair of legs groping for where to land. All this remained within his field of vision, yet all that Ben could see, the entire focal point of his attention, was an arc of dull yellow metal a few inches in front of his face.

He reached out and pinched the yellow metal between his fingers. A ring. A gold ring.

At once he knew. It spoke to him in the familiar soft, tender, feminine voice that he had longed to hear. Hearing that voice brought a tightness to his throat and blurred his eyes.

His mother’s wedding ring. He knew this absolutely and without doubt. His mother’s grave.

Impelled by anger, rage, and grief, without a second thought, he sprang to his feet, crouched low, and flew through the crawl space, fingers clutching the ring. He charged wildly, knocking over the man named Nick without any outward effort other than the sheer determination to be gone from this place as fast as his feet would carry him. The intruder fell back. Ben leaped through the trap door access and hurried out of the closet.

His stepfather was just coming to, dazed and badly beaten. Ben stopped abruptly and stared down at him. Disappointment drained him: The man was alive . Their eyes met. Ben held up the ring for him to see. He reared back and kicked with more force than he knew he possessed. Jack’s head snapped back sharply and thudded onto the floor.

Ben had never dared raise a hand to the guy. The realization of what he had just done, coupled with the knowledge of his mother’s grave and the presence of the intruder behind him, sent him out the door at a full sprint. The call to 911 would come, but not until he reached a pay phone several blocks later. “I want to report a murder,” the terrified young voice was recorded as saying. “He killed my mother! She’s under the house!”

For the second time that youthful voice was recorded by the Seattle Communications Center. This time, the address given by the boy matched the address of an earlier recorded call, though that connection was missed. The center’s computer-aided dispatch system assigned the call to a patrol car near Seattle University. The driver of that car, officer Patrick Shannon, would find an unconscious man on the living room floor, the victim of an assault.

As directed, he would hold this man for questioning and pursue evidence of a possible body in the crawl space.

A second car was dispatched to the pay phone from which the 911 call had been made. The phone was back on the hook, the receiver warm to the touch.

Far away from this phone, a small boy sped through the night. Running, running, running. Running until his legs would carry him no more.

Boldt was thinking that there are many shades of gray, many moods to accompany these shades, and not all dark, as many people believed. There was the gray of morning, leaning more toward the color of lint in a laundry dryer; there was the gray of noon, a dripping gray that bleeds from the sky and enhances the lush greens of the ivy and the grass; there was the gray of evening, dark and foreboding, warning of a pitch-black nighttime that turns all men blind and all children scared. One learned to live with gray in Seattle. The gray of moods. The gray area between right and wrong.

Sergeant Lou Boldt was one of many who saw the paperwork on the decomposed female corpse discovered in a crawl space. Boldt felt convinced all they needed was a few hours in the Box with the suspect. They would win the confession. A grounder, as the saying went. If this failed, Dixie would need to ID the remains, and they would work up a connection between the victim and the suspect. Time-consuming, but feasible. It was just the kind of case that attracted Boldt, though, due to the arsons, all he could do was manage it from a distance. Based on neighbors’ statements, city services was looking for a young boy believed to be the suspect’s stepson and more than likely the source of the anonymous 911 call that had led to the discovery of the corpse. To Boldt, it added up to another runaway somewhere on the streets of Seattle-a possible witness, a scared and terrified young boy, whose picture had been found at the house and was already part of the case file.