John Brandon - Citrus County

Toby stayed east of Route 19, tacking northward behind stores selling above-ground pools, used tires. A defunct dance studio. Toby had no clue how Citrus County stayed afloat. The roads were cracking and pine trees were toppling onto buildings. Toby hoped that when the manatees gave up the ghost or a hurricane finally got a bead on Citrus County, trucks of guys would come down from Tallahassee and dynamite the place and slide it off into the Gulf of Mexico to sink.

The bookstore was cavernous and had few customers. It was past lunchtime already, the lazy hours. Toby hurried past the bank of registers in the front, where he was smirked at by a college-aged girl with a dark front tooth. The TV was nestled back among the periodicals and was always tuned to the news from Tampa. Toby positioned a bench. He waited through patter about the nation’s top companies to work for, about the poaching of rare orchids. The anchorman grew serious and spoke the words “Citrus County.” He spoke Kaley’s name. Photos of her appeared next to the anchorman’s head. There were those eyes, just as they’d been when Toby nabbed her, round as saucers. The anchorman outlined the search efforts, just getting underway, led in large part by Kaley’s father, a mosquito control worker. There had been hopes, when the girl had first been discovered missing, that she’d left the house on her own and wandered into the woods, sleepwalking or something, playing a game, but overnight those hopes had lost steam. Now churches were pledging help, along with Little League teams and off-duty cops from surrounding counties. The FBI bloodhounds were on their way, but the woods were fouled with ATV tracks, the personal effects of vagrants, the droppings of stray mutts, abandoned appliances, the remains of bonfires, beer and liquor bottles. Pictures of Kaley were to be tacked to every power pole for miles. There was talk of roadblocks. Toby didn’t know if the response to what he’d done was so swift because this type of thing never happened or because it happened a lot. The kidnapper, according to the authorities, was likely a white male between thirty and fifty-five.

Toby was in one spot, still, while the world rushed around him. He felt powerful. He’d thrown the county into a commotion, had given everyone something important to do. He’d dealt a blow to the wonderful Shelby Register, the only person in the whole county worth injuring. He’d probably made her a different girl. She wouldn’t be so sure of herself now. She’d be lost like everyone else. And the searchers were looking for the wrong culprit. They were looking for a dime-a-dozen perverted old man when they should’ve been looking for an adolescent the likes of which they’d never fathomed.

The bookstore smelled like dust. It didn’t smell like books. Racks and racks of magazines stared out at nothing. The anchorman took a moment to regain his solemnity. He informed the viewers that Kaley’s father’s plea to the kidnapper would be re-aired in a matter of minutes. Toby imagined all the news crews crawling the perimeter of the Registers’ property, spying just like he had. He could see the reporters picking at their hairdos in car windows, the women stumbling in their pumps and the men pulling their jackets on and off. It was the news crews, not the cops, who’d found Toby’s footprints, the big Velcro shoes. They knew where Toby had crouched. They thought Toby was a dirty old man. They thought he was in Alabama by now. Still, Toby had to worry that through dumb luck someone would happen on the bunker. There was plenty of dumb luck in the world, even if none of it ever alighted on Toby.

Shelby’s dad slumped forward, his hands clutched loosely in front of him. He introduced himself as Ben Register. He seemed okay. He was a man in charge of a huge project he strongly believed in. He knew Kaley was still alive, he said. He instructed the kidnapper to drop his daughter at a mall or restaurant or school and speed off, drive somewhere and let the girl go free. She was a problem that was easy to get rid of. Kaley’s dad stressed the fact that the kidnapper, at this point, could still get away with this, but the longer he kept Kaley the more chance he’d get caught. Kaley’s dad didn’t blame the kidnapper for whatever evil he was in the grips of. He took time to look into several cameras. “Every wrong thing you’ve ever done can be in the past. Now you’ve got a chance to do something right.”

It felt strange to Toby, knowing that this man was talking to him . The man didn’t know it, but everything he was saying into all those cameras and tape recorders was meant for Toby and Toby only. Ben Register’s words were going to float away on the wind and land in the Gulf somewhere. They meant nothing. Every wrong thing Toby had done was in the past. He’d finally done something he was meant to do.

The news people, after only a couple days, were showing the effects of spending their nights at the Best Western, eating their dinners at the Chinese buffet, drinking gallons of cheap coffee. Out the window, Shelby caught the cameramen playing cards. They were like actors paid to play cameramen. Nothing Shelby saw seemed genuine. Colors seemed too vivid, the air charged. The sky above was in disarray. There was no sun, as if the sun had been a bomb and it had gone off and blown shreds of cloud into every corner of the world.

Shelby did not want false hope. She did not want to be in shock or denial. She did not want to wait around while her heart hoped and hoped until it was too tired. Shelby wanted to open the front door and scream at all the people out in the road in front of her house. She wanted to tell them to take their decorum and concern and indignation and go the hell home. She wanted the jaded cameramen to go film something else. She wanted to tell the cops who kept coming into her house to check on her and to get themselves glasses of water that they weren’t welcome. She wanted to tell all the searchers that her family wasn’t one that had a scare and then had it turn out all right. Her family was the type that got it right between the eyes. She wanted to tell the reporters that there’d be nothing further to report, that her father would not do an interview and she would not do an interview and her sister would not be found. Shelby’s chest was tight as a fist. She didn’t want to be here. She wanted to be out in the middle of a desert, or out on a vast tundra somewhere.

She could already see what this meant for her and her father, but she could not understand that her sister was gone. She could see that for the rest of her life she would be forced to imagine what Kaley would’ve been like at this age, at this age, at this age, but she could not shake the feeling that her sister was hiding somewhere in the house, that Shelby would open a cabinet in the kitchen to get dishwashing liquid and Kaley would be crouching under there, grinning. Shelby could not grasp that this had happened to her family, her family which, if anything was fair, should’ve been immune to more tragedy. She would never grasp it.

When Shelby had come in from the porch to get her father some crackers and had walked into the kitchen and opened the fridge, she’d known something wasn’t right. Before she’d looked through the archway and seen the open back sliding door, she’d known that something didn’t smell right in the house. Smells were missing and there were extra smells. She’d thought of all the mosquitoes that must be coming in. She’d walked over and put her hand on the handle but she hadn’t slid the door shut. She had extended her arm out into the humid night air, which was moist but was the exact same temperature as the air in the house. Inside, the house was a wilderness. The walls and roof and foundation meant nothing. They encased a wilderness.