Харлан Кобен - The Boy from the Woods

Who the hell was he to tell her it wouldn’t work?

“My dad had the idea. I could just hide down here. He’d just pretend to be worried.”

“But then the cops showed up for real.”

“Right. We didn’t count on that. And he can’t tell the truth. Imagine if that gets out — what he’d done, what I’d done. I mean, I’d get demolished in school. So he’s freaking out right about now.”

The basement door opened. From the top of the stairs, Bernard Pine called down. “Naomi?”

“It’s okay, Dad.”

“Who are you talking to, honey?”

Naomi’s smile was bright now. “A friend.”

Wilde nodded. He wanted to ask whether there was anything he could do, but he already knew the answer. He headed toward the basement stairs. Bernard Pine’s eyes widened when he came into view.

“Who the—?”

“I was just leaving,” Wilde said.

“How did you...?”

Naomi said, “It’s okay, Dad.”

Wilde walked up the stairs. As he passed Bernard Pine, he stuck out his hand. Pine took it. Wilde handed him a card. No name, just a phone number.

“If I can help,” Wilde said.

Pine glanced toward the windows. “The police might see you...”

But Wilde shook his head and started toward the back door. He had his mask in his hand now. “They won’t.”

One minute later, Wilde was back in the woods.

As Wilde headed back toward Laila’s, he called Hester.

“Naomi is fine.”

He explained.

When he finished, Hester shouted, “Are you shitting me?”

“This is good news,” he said. “She’s safe.”

“Oh, great, fine, she’s safe, la-di-dah. But in case you missed it, I just went live on air saying a teenage girl went missing. Now you tell me she’s hiding in her own basement. I’m going to look like a fool.”

“Ah,” Wilde said.

“Ah?”

“That’s all I got. Ah.”

“And all I got is my reputation. Well, that and my good looks.”

“It’ll be okay, Hester.”

She sighed. “Yeah, I know. You going back to the house?”

“Yes.”

“So you’ll tell Matthew?”

“I’ll tell him enough of it.”

“And then you’ll go to bed with Laila?”

He didn’t reply.

“Sorry,” she said.

“Get some sleep, Hester.”

“You too, Wilde.”

The next day, Naomi was back in school. She hoped no one would ask too many questions. But they did. Soon her story collapsed, and the truth — that she had “cheated” in the game of Challenge — came to light.

If school life had been hell for Naomi before, this latest revelation raised that hell to the tenth power.

A week later, Naomi Pine disappeared again.

Everyone assumed that she’d run away.

Four days after that, a severed finger was found.

A car pulled into his hidden road.

Wilde knew that because he’d laid down a rubber hose alarm, the kind you see every day at gas stations across this country, at the entranceway. Old school but more effective in this setting — animals set off motion detectors. They’d trip every hour with false alarms. Only something heavier, like cars, triggered the hose alarm.

He had just been staring at the small screen at the time, more specifically at an email from one of those ancestry sites with a subject that trumpeted, “WE HAVE YOUR DNA RESULTS RIGHT HERE!” when the notification about the intruder popped up. Wilde had been debating whether to click the link or let sleeping dogs lie, just as he’d debated whether to take the test at all, whether to begin this journey down a probably dark path in the first place. Submitting his DNA under a pseudonym, he’d concluded, was safe enough. He didn’t have to look at the results. He could just let them sit there behind that link.

There were those who would wonder why Wilde had waited so long, why he hadn’t already taken this obvious step. With companies like 23andMe and Ancestry.com advertising nonstop about how they’d helped reunite hundreds if not thousands of long-lost relatives, wouldn’t it be natural for Wilde to send in his own swab and perhaps learn his own origin story? The extemporaneous, unthought-out answer was yes, of course — but when he took more time with it, when he contemplated the full ramifications, Wilde wasn’t so sure.

Should Wilde, a man who enjoyed living off the grid, a man who really couldn’t connect to most people, open the door to meeting strangers who could claim him as blood and thrust themselves into his life?

Did he want that?

What possible good could come from learning about his past?

The rubber hose alarm triggered the rest of Wilde’s more state-of-the-art system. Most times, especially a few years back, if a car pulled onto the road, it was by mistake. A wrong turn. Wilde had, in fact, set up a clearing right past the road’s entrance so as to make it easy for a car to realize its error, K-turn, and head back out. Now though, with the overgrowth of vegetation in full effect, the turnoff wasn’t really visible from the main road, so those accidental visitors were far rarer.

Still, they happened. And that could be the case here.

When the second and third motion detectors kicked in, it became clear that the car had no intention of turning around. That meant that someone was looking for him.

Wilde lived in a customized spheroid-shape pod called an Ecocapsule. The Ecocapsule was a micro smart house or off-the-grid eco-abode or compact mobile home, whatever you wanted to call it, created by a Slovakian friend he met while serving in the Gulf. The structure resembled a giant dinosaur egg, though Wilde, using five different matte colors, had painted it camouflage to keep it hidden from view. The total living space was small, under seventy square feet, one room, but it had all he needed — a kitchenette with a cooking plate and mini fridge, a full bathroom with water-saving faucet and showerhead and an incinerator toilet, which turned waste into ash. The furniture was build-ins — table, cabinets, storage, a folding bed that could be either a twin or double — all made from lightweight honeycomb panels with an ash-wood veneer finish. The egg exterior was made from insulated fiberglass shells overlaid on a steel framework.

The Ecocapsule was — no reason to pretend otherwise — supercool.

There were those who would assume from the dwelling that Wilde must be an “eco-nut” or extremist. He wasn’t. The capsule gave him privacy and protection. It was self-sustainable and thus totally off the grid. There were photovoltaic power cells on the roof and a pole with a wind turbine that could be mounted when he needed more battery charge. The spheroid shape made collecting rainwater easy, but if there was a dry spell, Wilde could add water by any source — lake, stream, a hose, whatever. The water would then be cleaned via reverse-osmosis water filters and UV LED lamp, making it instantly potable. The storage tank and water heater were adequate for one man, though Wilde would confess to enjoying luxuriating under Laila’s jet-propulsion showerhead and seemingly limitless supply of hot water.

There was no washer and dryer, no microwave, no television. He didn’t really care. His electronic needs consisted of a laptop and phone, which were easy enough to power up in the capsule. There were no thermostats or light switches — all of those sorts of functions were performed via the smart-home app.

The pod was also easy to put on a trailer and move, something Wilde did every few weeks or months, even if the move was only fifty or a hundred yards. At this stage of the game, it was probably overkill to move that often, but when his home stayed in one place too long, it felt to him as though the pod (and thus he himself?) were taking root.