Jeffery Deaver - The Bodies Left Behind

“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 stared 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.