Chris Jordan - Torn

“Why is that?” Shane asks.

“Because Roland wasn’t a laptop kind of guy. He just wasn’t.”

When we get up to leave, Troy waits until Shane clears the door and then gives me a thumbs-up and a nod of approval. He thinks I made the right choice, bringing in the big guy. In contrast to Tommy Petruchio, who scorns the notion of outside investigators.

One out of two. I’ll take those odds.

Up to now, the only laws I’ve ever broken have to do with traffic. Speeding and a few parking tickets. I never even shoplifted when that was a ‘thing’ with my old Jersey girl posse. It wasn’t a moral reservation at the time-can you have moral reservations about The Gap?-more a fear that I’d get caught, be publicly embarrassed.

So I’m surprised at my own reaction when Shane proposes breaking the law. No hesitation, I’m all for it.

“Okay, but I don’t want you in the vicinity,” Shane cautions. “Even if you don’t actually enter the premises you could still be held as an accessory.”

“For checking that nasty old trailer? You said it doesn’t have a proper lock on the door, so it’s not exactly breaking and entering. Just entering.”

“Entering a private domicile without invitation is, at the very least, trespassing,” Shane reminds me.

“Is trespassing a serious crime?”

“Depends on the circumstances. It can very serious if there’s an intent to burglarize.”

“Are we going to burglarize?”

“Depends on what we find.”

“Good,” I say. “Let’s do it.”

“Really, Mrs. Corbin, it’s best if you leave this to me. You can bail me out if I get caught.”

He makes getting bailed sound so routine that I have to ask, “Have you ever been arrested?”

“I’ve never been charged or convicted,” he says, somehow making it sound dignified.

“So you have been arrested.”

He shrugs. “More like taken into custody. Hazard of the job. Pushing to locate a missing kid, sometimes you go over the legal line. It happens.”

Eventually we agree that I’ll drop him off and drive away and he’ll call me on the cell when he wants to be picked up. Which sounds very sane and reasonable until I pull into the rutted, unpaved driveway to turn around and catch a glimpse of Roland Penny’s broken-down old trailer glinting in the setting sun.

I can’t resist. Throwing the big Town Car into Park, I grab my purse, get out. “Screw it,” I tell a startled Shane. “If they want to arrest a grieving mother for checking out the rat hole of the man who blew up her son’s school, let them.”

“Mrs. Corbin, really, I think it would be better-”

“Are you coming?” I ask, striding off through the ankle-deep snow.

“Okay then,” says Shane, shortening his gait to keep pace with me. “When did it snow? Last night?”

“Early this morning.”

“No footprints,” he points out. “So nobody has been poking around here recently.”

The rock the creep lived under isn’t exactly a classic Airstream. It’s a battered old construction trailer left over from some long-ago project, plunked down on a parcel of land once exploited for gravel pits. A power line was brought in years ago, but not much else. According to Troy, Roland was paying a hundred a month to an absentee owner, and from the look of things he wasn’t getting any bargain. One of the aluminum side panels has been kicked in, revealing a thin stuffing of dirty, waterlogged insulation, and some plastic water pipes that must by now be frozen solid. There’s only one small window, the cracked glass held together with a strip of duct tape. The door hangs on broken hinges, propped closed with a cinder block.

We saw this much from the paved road. It looks even less appealing close-up. Shane removes the cinder block. The door swings open, screeching back at the cold wind that’s just now stirring.

“After you,” I say, losing some of my conviction. “Don’t bump your head.”

The air temperature is dropping quickly with the sun. The old trailer is an icebox that never warmed up and because of the low headroom Shane has to remain in a crouch as he fumbles for a flashlight. No surprise, the power has been shut off. No heat, no lights, and we have to wade through the bottles and cans and rubbish that Roland left behind. It’s doubtful the state police search could have made things worse. This has the feeling of long-term disorder, and the cold stench of rot and frozen mildew is all-pervasive.

If this is how the monster lived, how he was raised, then for the first time I have a twinge of sympathy. A very small twinge. Living in circumstances as wretched as this must be truly awful, but it doesn’t mean you get to take it out on innocent children.

In addition to being disgusting-to say the man lived like an animal would be insulting to most animals-the place, basically one small room with a nonfunctioning toilet, the place is spooky, okay? You can feel him here, and understand why he might have welcomed violence as an alternative to an unbearable reality.

“So what are we looking for?” I ask, my voice a little shaky.

“I’ll know it when I find it,” says Shane. “Maybe.”

“You’ve seen places like this before,” I say, picking up on his vibe.

“Believe it or not, I’ve seen worse.”

The flashlight beam sweeps through the debris underfoot. Everything seems to have ended up on the floor, possibly as a result of the police search. Or maybe because gravity is trying to suck the place back into the earth.

“This explains why Troy was so sure Roland didn’t have a functioning computer,” I say. “He didn’t have a functioning anything. Not even a TV set.”

“And yet he had an iPod,” Shane muses.

“Anybody can buy an iPod,” I point out. Keeping my hands in my pockets so I don’t have to touch anything. Trying not to breath mold spores through my nose.

“You still need a computer to put songs on it,” Shane reminds me. “You need, at the very least, an Internet account, and there’s nothing to indicate he did. He didn’t have a credit or debit card. He didn’t have credit, period. So where did he get his music and how did he sync it to the iPod?”

“Maybe somebody gave it to him fully loaded-no Internet or computer required.”

“Exactly,” Shane says. “Like the three grand.”

“You know what?” I say suddenly. “I’m going to wait out in the car.”

“Good idea,” he says, shuffling carefully through the discarded junk, prodding it with his flashlight. “Hold on!”

I freeze in the open doorway. The first thought, an almost electric cascade of raw nerves, is that he’s come upon a booby trap. A trip wire or timer. Another bomb that will blow me into darkness, again.

But it’s not a bomb, it’s a book. A thick paperback swollen with absorbed moisture. The cover has been torn off and the title page is missing. Shane holds it up, illuminating the stiff, water-damaged pages with the beam of his flashlight.

“The Rule of One,” he says, squinting. “Isn’t that Arthur Conklin’s famous book?”

After we bought our dream house Jed and I spent all of our free time trying to make the dream part come true. First thing you need to know about old farmhouses is that they are old. Old means the sills have rotted, a sizable undertaking to repair, best left to contractors who specialize in that sort of thing. Old means it isn’t properly insulated, especially upstairs under the eaves, and that means taking down the crumbling lath-and-plaster walls. When the plaster is finally gone, the wiring is exposed, so you might as well bring it up to code. Once the new gypsum-board walls are painted you start on the floors. Stripping, sanding, repairing, refinishing. Oh, and don’t forget the ancient lead-sealed plumbing, left over from the Romans, apparently. Best to remove all that nasty lead if you’re planning to get pregnant and you don’t want the baby to have two heads.