NOS4A2 A Novel

The Lake


VIC BREASTSTROKED INTO THE SHALLOWS, THEN CRAWLED THE LAST few feet up onto the beach. There she rolled onto her back, legs still in the lake. She shook furiously, in fierce, almost crippling spasms, and made sounds too angry to be sobs. She might’ve been crying. She wasn’t sure. Her insides hurt badly, as if she had spent a day and a night vomiting.

In a kidnapping nothing is more important than what happens in the first thirty minutes, Vic thought, her mind replaying something she had once heard on TV.

Vic did not think what she did in the next thirty minutes mattered at all, did not think any cop anywhere had the power to find Charlie Manx and the Wraith. Still, she shoved herself to her feet, because she needed to do what she could, whether it made a difference or not.

She walked like a drunk in a hard crosswind, swaying, following a wandering path to the back door, which is where she fell again. She went up the steps on hands and knees, used the railing to get to her feet. The phone began to ring. Vic forced herself onward, through another burst of lancing pain, sharp enough to drive the breath out of her.

She reeled through the kitchen, reached the phone, caught it on the third ring, just before it could go to voice mail.

“I need help,” Vic said. “Who is this? You have to help me. Someone took my son.”

“Aw, it’s okay, Ms. McQueen,” said the little girl on the other end of the line. “Daddy will drive safe and make sure Wayne has a real good time. He’ll be here with us soon. He’ll be here in Christmasland, and we’ll show him all our games. Isn’t that fine?”

Vic hit END CALL, then dialed 911.

A woman told her she had reached emergency services. Her voice was calm and detached. “What’s your name and the nature of your emergency?”

“Victoria McQueen. I’ve been attacked. A man has kidnapped my son. I can describe the car. They only just drove away. Please send someone.”

The dispatcher tried to keep the same tone of steady calm but couldn’t quite manage it. Adrenaline changed everything.

“How badly are you hurt?”

“Forget that. Let’s talk about the kidnapper. His name is Charles Talent Manx. He’s . . . I don’t know, old.” Dead, Vic thought but didn’t say. “In his seventies. He’s over six feet tall, balding, about two hundred pounds. There’s another man with him, someone younger. I didn’t see him too well.” Because he was wearing a f*cking gasmask for some reason. But she didn’t say that either. “They’re in a Rolls-Royce Wraith, a classic, 1930s. My son is in the backseat. My son is twelve. His name is Bruce, but he doesn’t like that name.” And Vic began to cry, couldn’t help it. “He has black hair and is five feet tall and was wearing a white T-shirt with nothing on it.”

“Victoria, the police are en route. Was either of these men armed?”

“Yes. The younger one has a gun. And Manx has some kind of hammer. He hit me with it a couple times.”

“I’m dispatching an ambulance to see to your injuries. Did you happen to get the license plate?”

“It’s a f*cking Rolls-Royce from the thirties with my little boy in the back. How many of those do you think are driving around?” Her voice snagged on a sob. She coughed it up and coughed up the license-plate tag as well: “En-o-ess-four-a-two. It’s a vanity plate. Spells a German word. Nosferatu.”

“What’s it mean?”

“What’s it matter? Look it the f*ck up.”

“I’m sorry. I understand you’re upset. We’re sending out an alert now. We’re going to do everything we can to get your son back. I know you’re scared. Be calm. Please try to be calm.” Vic had a sense that the dispatcher was half talking to herself. There was a wavering tone in her voice, like the woman was struggling not to cry. “Help is on the way. Victoria—”

“Just Vic. Thank you. I’m sorry I swore at you.”

“It’s all right. Don’t worry about it. Vic, if they’re in a distinctive car like a Rolls-Royce, that’s good. That will stand out. They aren’t going to get far in a vehicle like that. If they’re anywhere on the road, someone will see them.”

But no one did.


WHEN THE EMTS TRIED TO ESCORT HER TO THE AMBULANCE, VIC ELBOWED free from them, told them to keep their f*cking hands off.

A police officer, a small, portly Indian woman, inserted herself between Vic and the men.

“You can examine her here,” she said, leading Vic back to the couch. Her voice carried the lightest of accents, a lilt that made every statement sound both vaguely musical and like a question. “It is better if she doesn’t go. What if the kidnapper calls?”

Vic huddled on the couch in her wet cutoffs, wrapped in a throw. An EMT wearing blue gloves planted himself next to her and asked her to drop the blanket and remove her shirt. That got the attention of the cops in the room, who cast surreptitious glances Vic’s way, but Vic complied wordlessly, without a second thought. She slopped her wet shirt on the floor. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and she covered her breasts with one arm, hunching forward to let the EMT look at her back.

The EMT inhaled sharply.

The Indian police officer—her name tag read CHITRA—stood on Vic’s other side, looking down the curve of Vic’s back. She made a sound herself, a soft cry of sympathy.

“I thought you said he tried to run you over,” Chitra said. “You did not say he succeeded.”

“She’s going to have to sign a form,” said the EMT. “A thing that says she refused to get in the ambulance. I need to cover my ass here. She could have cracked ribs or a popped spleen and I could miss it. I want it on record that I don’t believe treating her here is in her best medical interest.”

“Maybe it’s not in my best medical interest,” Vic said, “but it is in yours.”

Vic heard a sound go around the room—not quite laughter but close to it, a low male ripple of mirth. There were by now six or seven of them in the room, standing around pretending not to look at her chest, the tattoo of a V-6 engine set above her breasts.

A cop sat on the other side of her, the first cop she had seen who wasn’t in uniform. He wore a blue blazer that was too short at the wrists, a red tie with a coffee stain on it, and a face that would’ve won an ugly contest walking away: bushy white eyebrows turning yellow at the tips, nicotine-stained teeth, a comically gourdlike nose, a jutting cleft chin.

He dug in one pocket, then another, then lifted his wide, flat rear and found a reporter’s notebook in his back pocket. He opened it, then stared at the pad with a look of utter bafflement, as if he had been asked to write a five-hundred-word essay on impressionist painting.

It was that blank look, more than anything else, that let Vic know he wasn’t The Guy. He was a placeholder. The person who would matter—the one who would be handling the search for her son, who would coordinate resources and compile information—wasn’t here yet.

She answered his questions anyway. He started in the right place, with Wayne: age, height, weight, what he’d been wearing, if she had a recent photo. At some point Chitra walked away, then returned with an oversize hoodie that said NH STATE POLICE on the front. Vic tugged it on. It came to her knees.

“The father?” asked the ugly man, whose name was Daltry.

“Lives in Colorado.”

“Divorced?”

“Never married.”

“How’s he feel about you having custody of the kid?”

“I don’t have custody. Wayne is just—We’re on good terms about our son. It’s not an issue.”

“Got a number where we can reach him?”

“Yes, but he’s on a plane right now. He visited for the Fourth. He’s headed back this evening.”

“You sure about that? How do you know he boarded the plane?”

“I’m sure he had nothing to do with this, if that’s what you’re asking. We’re not fighting over our son. My ex is the most harmless and easygoing man you’ve ever met.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve met some pretty easygoing fellas. I know a guy up in Maine who leads a Buddhist-themed therapy group, teaches people about managing their temper and addictions through Transcendental Meditation. The only time this guy ever lost his composure was the day his wife served him with a restraining order. First he lost his Zen, then he lost two bullets in the back of her head. But that Buddhist-themed therapy group he runs sure is popular on his cell block in Shawshank. Lotta guys with anger-management issues in there.”

“Lou didn’t have anything to do with this. I told you, I know who took my son.”

“Okay, okay. I have to ask this stuff. Tell me about the guy who worked on your back. No. Wait. Tell me about his car first.”

She told him.

Daltry shook his head and made a sound that could’ve been a laugh, if it expressed any humor. Mostly what it expressed was incredulity.

“Your man ain’t too bright. If he’s on the road, I give him less than half an hour.”

“Before what?”

“Before he’s facedown in the fecking dirt with some state cop’s boot on his neck. You don’t grab a kid in an antique car and drive away. That’s about as smart as driving an ice-cream truck. Kind of stands out. People look. Everyone is going to notice a period Rolls-Royce.”

“It isn’t going to stand out.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

She didn’t know what she meant, so she didn’t say anything.

Daltry said, “And you recognized one of your assailants. This would be . . . Charles . . . Manx.” Looking at something he had scribbled in his notepad. “How would you know him?”

“He kidnapped me when I was seventeen years old. And held me for two days.”

That quieted the room.

“Look it up,” she said. “It’s in his file. Charles Talent Manx. And he’s pretty good at not getting caught. I have to change out of these wet shorts and into some sweats. I’d like to do that in my bedroom, if you don’t mind. I feel like Mom has flashed enough skin for one day.”


VIC HELD IN HER MIND HER ONE LAST GLIMPSE OF WAYNE, TRAPPED IN the backseat of the Rolls. She saw him swatting a hand at the air—Go on, get away—almost as if he were angry with her. He had already looked as pale as any corpse.

She saw Wayne in flashes, and it was like the hammer thudding into her again, walloping her in the chest instead of the back. Here he was sitting naked in a sandbox, behind their town house in Denver, a chubby three-year-old with a thatch of black hair, using a plastic shovel to bury a plastic telephone. Here he was on Christmas Day in rehab, sitting on the cracked and crinkly plastic surface of a couch, plucking at a wrapped gift, then tearing the wrapping away to show the white-boxed iPhone. Here he was walking out onto the dock with a toolbox that was too heavy for him.

Bang, each vision of him hit her, and her bruised insides clenched up again. Bang, he was a baby, sleeping naked on her naked breast. Bang, he was kneeling in the gravel next to her, arms greasy to the elbows, helping her to thread the motorcycle chain back onto its sprockets. Sometimes the pain was so intense, so pure, the room darkened at the edges of her vision and she felt faint.

At some point she had to move, couldn’t stay on the couch anymore.

“If anyone is hungry, I can make something to eat,” she said. It was almost nine-thirty in the evening by then. “I’ve got a full fridge.”

“We’ll send out for something,” Daltry said. “Don’t trouble yourself.”

They had the TV on, turned to NECN, New England Cable News. They had gone up with the alert about Wayne an hour before. Vic had seen it twice and knew she couldn’t watch it again.

First they would show the photo she had given them of Wayne in an Aerosmith T-shirt and an Avalanche wool cap, squinting into bright spring sunlight. She already regretted it, didn’t like how the cap hid his black hair and made his ears stick out.

This would be followed by a photograph of Vic herself, the one from the Search Engine website. She assumed they were showing that one to get a pretty girl on the screen—she was wearing makeup and a black skirt and cowboy boots and had her head tipped back to laugh, a jarring image, considering the situation.

They didn’t show Manx. They didn’t even say his name. They described the kidnappers only as two white males in an antique black Rolls-Royce.

“Why don’t they tell people who they’re looking for?” Vic asked the first time she saw the report.

Daltry shrugged, said he would find out, got off the couch and wandered into the yard to talk to some other men. When he came back in, though, he didn’t offer any new information, and when the report ran the second time, they were still looking for two white males, out of the approximately 14 million white males to be found in New England.

If she saw the report a third time and there wasn’t a picture of Charlie Manx—if they didn’t say his name—she thought she might put a chair through the TV.

“Please,” Vic said now. “I’ve got some slaw and cold ham. A whole loaf of bread. I could lay out sandwiches.”

Daltry shifted in his seat and looked uncertainly at some of the other policemen in the room, torn between hunger and decency.

Officer Chitra said, “I think you should. Of course. I’ll come with you.”

It was a relief to get out of the living room, which was too crowded with bodies, cops coming and going, walkie-talkies squawking continuously. She stopped to take in the view of the lawn through the open front door. In the glare of the spotlights, it was brighter in the yard at night than it had been in the midday fog. She saw the toppled fence rails and a man in rubber gloves measuring the tire treads imprinted in the soft loam.

The cop cars were flashing their strobes as if at the scene of an emergency, and never mind that the emergency had driven away hours before. Wayne strobed in her mind just like that, and for a moment she felt dangerously light-headed.

Chitra saw her sag and took her elbow, helped her the rest of the way into the kitchen. It was better in there. They had the room to themselves.

The kitchen windows looked out on the dock and the lake. The dock was lit up by more of those big tripod-mounted spotlights. A cop with a flashlight had waded into the water up to his thighs, but she couldn’t tell to what purpose. A plainclothesman watched from the end of the dock, pointing and giving directions.

A boat floated forty feet offshore. A boy stood in the front end, next to a dog, staring at the cops, the lights, the house. When Vic saw the dog, she remembered Hooper. She had not thought of him once since seeing the headlights of the Wraith in the mist.

“Someone needs to . . . go look for the dog,” Vic said. “He must be . . . outside somewhere.” She had to stop every few words to catch her breath.

Chitra looked at her with great sensitivity. “Do not worry about the dog now, Ms. McQueen. Have you had any water? It is important to hydrate yourself.”

“I’m surprised he isn’t . . . isn’t barking his . . . his head off,” Vic said. “With all this commotion.”

Chitra ran a hand down Vic’s arm, once, and again, then squeezed Vic’s elbow. Vic looked at the policewoman in sudden understanding.

“You had so much else to worry about,” Chitra said.

“Oh, God,” Vic said, and began to cry again, her whole body shaking.

“No one wanted to upset you even more.”

She rocked, holding herself, crying in a way she hadn’t since those first days after her father left her and her mother. Vic had to lean on the counter for a while, wasn’t sure her legs had the strength to continue to support her. Chitra reached over and, tentatively, rubbed her back.

“Shhh,” said Vic’s mother, dead for two months. “Just breathe, Vicki. Just breathe for me.” She said it in a light Indian accent, but Vic recognized her mother’s voice all the same. Recognized the feel of her mother’s hand on her back. Everyone you lost was still there with you, and so maybe no one was ever lost at all.

Unless they went with Charlie Manx.

In a while Vic sat down and drank a glass of water. She drained the whole thing in five swallows, without stopping for air, was desperate for it. It was lukewarm and sweet and good and tasted of the lake.

Chitra opened cupboards, looking for paper plates. Vic got up and over the other woman’s objections began to help with sandwiches. She made a row of paper plates and put two pieces of white bread on each, tears dripping off her nose and falling on the bread.

She hoped Wayne didn’t know that Hooper was dead. She thought sometimes that Wayne was closer to Hooper than he was to either her or Lou.

Vic found the ham, coleslaw, and a bag of Doritos and began to make up the plates.

“There’s a secret to cop sandwiches,” said a woman who had come in behind her.

Vic took one look and knew this was The Guy she had been waiting for, even if The Guy wasn’t a guy. This woman had frizzy brown hair and a little snub nose. She was plain at first glance, devastatingly pretty on the second. She wore a tweed coat with corduroy patches on the elbows and blue jeans and could’ve passed for a grad student at a liberal-arts college, if not for the nine-millimeter strapped under her left arm.

“What’s the secret?” Vic asked.

“Show you,” she said, and eased herself in, took the spoon, and dumped coleslaw into one of the sandwiches, on top of the ham. She built a roof of Doritos over the coleslaw, squirted Dijon mustard on the chips, buttered a slice of bread, and squished it all together. “The butter is the important part.”

“Works like glue, right?”

“Yes. And cops are, by nature, cholesterol magnets.”

“I thought the FBI only came in on kidnappings in cases where the kid has been hauled across state lines,” Vic said.

The frizzy-haired woman frowned, then glanced down at the laminated card clipped to the breast of her jacket, the one that said over an unsmiling photograph of her face:

FBI

PSYCH EVAL

Tabitha K. Hutter

“Technically, we’re not in it yet,” Hutter said. “But you’re forty minutes from three state borders and less than two hours from Canada. Your assailants have had your son for almost—”

“My assailants?” Vic said. She felt a flush of heat in her cheeks. “Why do people keep talking about my assailants, like we don’t know anything about them? It’s starting to piss me off. Charlie Manx is the man. Charlie Manx and someone else are driving around with my kid.”

“Charles Manx is dead, Ms. McQueen. He’s been dead since May.”

“Got a body?”

That gave Hutter pause. She pursed her lips, said, “He has a death certificate. There were photos of him in the morgue. He was autopsied. His chest was split open. The coroner took his heart out and weighed it. Those are convincing reasons to believe he didn’t attack you.”

“And I’ve got half a dozen reasons to believe he did,” Vic said. “They’re all up and down my back. You want me to take my shirt off and show you the bruises? Every other cop in this joint has had a good look.”

Hutter stared at her without reply. Her gaze held the simple curiosity of a small child. It rattled Vic, to be observed so intently. So few adults gave themselves permission to stare that way.

At last Hutter shifted her eyes, turned her gaze toward the kitchen table. “Will you sit with me?”

Without waiting for an answer, she picked up a leather satchel she’d brought with her and settled at the kitchen table. She peered up expectantly, waiting for Vic to sit with her.

Vic looked to Chitra, as if for advice, remembering how the woman had, for a moment, comforted her and whispered to her like her mother. But the policewoman was finishing the sandwiches and bustling them out.

Vic sat.

Hutter removed an iPad from her briefcase, and the screen glowed. More than ever, she looked like a grad student, one preparing a dissertation on the Brontë sisters, perhaps. She passed her finger over the glass, swiping through some sort of digital file, then looked up.

“At his last medical exam, Charlie Manx was listed at approximately eighty-five years old.”

“You think he’s too old to have done what he did?” Vic asked.

“I think he’s too dead. But tell me what happened, and I’ll try to get my head around it.”

Vic did not complain that she had already told the story three times, start to finish. The other times didn’t count, because this was the first cop who mattered. If any cop mattered. Vic was not sure one did. Charlie Manx had been claiming lives for a long time and had never been caught, passed through the nets that law enforcement threw at him like silver smoke. How many children had climbed into his car and never been seen again?

Hundreds, came the answer, a whisper of a thought.

Vic told her story—the parts of it she felt she could tell. She left out Maggie Leigh. She did not mention she had ridden her motorcycle onto an impossible covered bridge of the imagination, shortly before Manx tried to run her down. She did not discuss the psychotropic medication she did not take anymore.

When Vic got to the part about Manx hitting her with the hammer, Hutter frowned. She asked Vic to describe the hammer in detail, tapping the keyboard on her iPad’s screen. She stopped Vic again when Vic told her about how she had gotten up off the ground and gone after Manx with the tappet key.

“Tapper what?”

“Tappet key,” Vic said. “Triumph made them special just for their bikes. It’s a spanner. Kind of wrench. I was working on the motorcycle and had it in my pocket.”

“Where is it now?”

“I don’t know. I had it in my hand when I had to run. I was probably still holding it when I went in the lake.”

“This is when the other man started shooting at you. Tell me about that.”

She told.

“He shot Manx in the face?” Hutter said.

“It wasn’t like that. He clipped him in the ear.”

“Vic. I want you to help me think this through. This man, Charlie Manx, we agree he was probably eighty-five years old at the time of his last medical exam. He spent ten years in a coma. Most coma patients require months of rehabilitation before they can walk again. You are telling me you cut him with this tapper key—”

“Tappet.”

“—and then he was shot but still had the strength to drive away.”

What Vic could not say was that Manx wasn’t like other men. She had felt it when he swung the hammer, a coiled strength that belied his advanced age and gaunt frame. Hutter insisted that Manx had been opened up, that his heart had been removed during the autopsy, and Vic didn’t doubt it. For a man who’d had his heart taken out and put back in, a nick in the ear wasn’t that big a deal.

Instead she said, “Maybe the other guy drove. You want me to explain it? I can’t. I can only tell you what happened. What is your point? Manx has got my twelve-year-old in his car, and he’s going to kill him to get even with me, but for some reason we’re discussing the limits of your FBI imagination. Why is that?” She looked in Hutter’s face, into Hutter’s bland, calm eyes, and understood. “Jesus. You don’t believe a f*cking word, do you?”

Hutter deliberated for a time, and when she spoke, Vic had a sense that she was choosing words carefully. “I believe that your boy is missing, and I believe you’ve been hurt. I believe that you’re in hell right now. Other than that, I’m keeping my mind open. I hope you’ll see that as an asset and work with me. We both want the same thing. We want your boy back safe. If I thought it would help, I’d be out there driving around, looking for him. But that’s not how I find the bad guys. I find them by collecting information and sorting out what’s useful from what isn’t. Really, it’s not so different from your books. The Search Engine stories.”

“You know them? How young are you?”

Hutter smiled slightly. “Not that young. It’s in your file. Also, an instructor at Quantico uses pictures from Search Engine in his lectures, to show us how hard it is to pick out relevant details in a clutter of visual information.”

“What else is in my file?”

Hutter’s smile faltered slightly. Her gaze did not. “That you were found guilty of arson in Colorado in 2009. That you spent a month in a Colorado mental hospital, where you were diagnosed with severe PTSD and schizophrenia. You take antipsychotics and have a history of alcohol—”

“Jesus. You think I hallucinated getting the shit kicked out of me?” Vic said, her stomach clenching. “You think I hallucinated getting shot at?”

“We have yet to confirm a shooting took place.”

Vic pushed back her chair. “He fired at me. He fired six bullets. Emptied his gun.” Thinking now. Her back had been to the lake. It was possible every single bullet, even the one that had gone through Manx’s ear, had wound up in the water.

“We’re still looking for slugs.”

“My bruises,” Vic said.

“I don’t doubt someone fought you,” said the FBI agent. “I don’t think anyone doubts that.”

There was something about this statement—some dangerous implication—that Vic couldn’t figure out. Who would’ve fought her if not Manx? But Vic was too exhausted, too emotionally spent, to try to make sense out of it. She didn’t have it in her to work out whatever Hutter was stepping around.

Vic looked at Hutter’s laminated badge again. PSYCH EVAL. “Wait a minute. Wait a f*cking—you’re not a detective. You’re a doctor.”

“Why don’t we look at some pictures?” Hutter said.

“No,” Vic said. “That’s a complete waste of time. I don’t need to look at mug shots. I told you. One of them was wearing a gasmask. The other was Charlie Manx. I know what Charlie Manx looks like. Jesus, why the f*ck am I talking to a doctor? I want to talk to a detective.”

“I wasn’t going to ask you to look at pictures of criminals,” Hutter said. “I was going to ask you to look at pictures of hammers.”

It was such a baffling, unexpected thing to hear that Vic just sat there, mouth open, unable to make a sound.

Before anything came to her, there was a commotion in the other room. Chitra’s voice rose, wavering and querulous, and Daltry said something, and then there was a third voice, midwestern and emotional. Vic recognized the third voice at once but couldn’t work out what it was doing in her house when it ought to be on a plane, if not in Denver by now. Her confusion delayed her reaction time, so that she was not all the way out of her chair when Lou came into the room, trailing an entourage of cops.

He hardly looked like himself. His face was ashy, and his eyes stood out in his big, round face. He looked like he had lost ten pounds since Vic had last seen him, two days earlier. She rose and reached for him, and in the same moment he enfolded her in his arms.

“What are we going to do?” Lou asked her. “What the hell are we going to do now, Vic?”





The Kitchen


WHEN THEY SAT BACK DOWN AT THE TABLE, VIC TOOK LOU’S HAND, the most natural thing in the world. She was surprised to feel the heat in his chubby fingers, and she looked again at his washed-out, sweat-slick face. She recognized that he looked seriously ill but took it for fear.

There were five of them in the kitchen now. Lou and Vic and Hutter sat at the table. Daltry leaned against the kitchen counter, squeezing his alcoholic’s nose in a hankie. Officer Chitra stood in the doorway, had hustled the other cops out at Hutter’s command.

“You’re Louis Carmody,” Hutter said. She spoke like the director of the school play, letting Lou know who he would be playing in the spring performance. “You’re the father.”

“Guilty,” Lou said.

“Say again?” Hutter asked.

“Guilty as charged,” Lou said. “I’m the dad. Who are you? Are you, like, a social worker?”

“I’m an FBI agent. My name is Tabitha Hutter. A lot of the guys in the office call me Tabby the Hutt.” She smiled slightly.

“That’s funny. A lot of the guys in the place I work call me Jabba the Hutt. Only they do it because I’m a fat shit.”

“I thought you were in Denver,” Hutter said.

“Missed my flight.”

“No shit,” said Daltry. “Something come up?”

Hutter said, “Detective Daltry, I’ll conduct the Q and A, thank you.”

Daltry reached into the pocket of his coat. “Does anyone mind if I smoke?”

“Yes,” Hutter said.

Daltry held the pack for a moment, staring at her, then put it back in his pocket. There was a bland, unfocused quality to his eyes that reminded Vic of the membrane that slid across a shark’s eyes right before he chomped into a seal.

“Why did you miss your plane, Mr. Carmody?” Hutter asked.

“Because I heard from Wayne.”

“You heard from him?”

“He called me from the car on his iPhone. He said they were trying to shoot Vic. Manx and the other guy. We only talked for a minute. He had to hang up, ’cause Manx and the other fellow were walking back to the car. He was scared, really scared, but holding it together. He’s a little man, you know. He’s always been a little man.” Lou bunched his fists up on the table and lowered his head. He grimaced, as if he felt a sharp twinge of pain somewhere in his abdomen, and blinked, and tears dripped onto the table. It came over him all of a sudden, without warning. “He has to be a grown-up, ’cause Vic and me did such a shitty job of being grown-ups ourselves.” Vic put her hands over his.

Hutter and Daltry exchanged a look, hardly seemed to notice Lou dissolving into tears.

“Do you think your son turned the phone off after he talked to you?” Hutter asked.

“I thought if it had a SIM card in it, it didn’t matter if it was on or off,” Daltry said. “I thought you federal people had a workaround.”

“You can use his phone to find him,” Vic said, her pulse quickening.

Hutter ignored her, said to Daltry, “We can have that done. It would take a while. I’d have to call Boston. But if it’s an iPhone and it’s turned on, we can use the Find My iPhone function to locate him right now, right here.” She lifted her iPad slightly.

“Right,” Lou said. “That’s right. I set up Find My iPhone the day we bought it for him, because I didn’t want him to lose the thing.”

He came around the table to look over Hutter’s shoulder at her screen. His complexion was not improved by the unnatural glow of the monitor.

“What’s his e-mail address and password?” Hutter asked, turning her head to look up at Lou.

He reached out with one hand to type it himself, but before he could, the FBI agent took ahold of his wrist. She pressed two fingers into his skin, as if taking his pulse. Even from where she sat, Vic could see a spot where the skin gleamed and seemed to have a splash of dried paste on it.

Hutter shifted her gaze to Lou’s face. “You had an EKG this evening?”

“I fainted. I got upset. It was, like, a panic attack, dude. Some crazy son of a bitch has my kid. This shit happens to fat guys.”

Until now Vic had been too focused on Wayne to give much thought to Lou: how gray he looked, how exhausted. But at this, Vic felt struck through with sudden, sick apprehension.

“Oh, Lou. What do you mean, you fainted?”

“It was after Wayne hung up on me. I kind of went down for a minute. I was fine, but airport security made me sit on the floor and get an EKG, make sure I wasn’t going to vapor-lock on them.”

“Did you tell them your kid had been kidnapped?” Daltry asked.

Hutter flashed him a warning look that Daltry pretended not to see.

“I’m not sure what I said to them. I was sort of confused at first. Like, dizzy. I know I told them my kid needed me. I know I told them that. All I could think was I had to get to my car. At some point they said they were going to put me in an ambulance, and I told ’em to go . . . ah . . . have fun with themselves. So I got up and walked away. It’s possible a guy grabbed my arm and I dragged him a few feet. I was in a hurry.”

“So you didn’t talk to the police at the airport about what had happened to your son?” Daltry asked. “Didn’t you think you could get here faster if you had a police escort?”

“It didn’t even cross my mind. I wanted to talk to Vic first,” Lou said, and Vic saw Daltry and Hutter trade another glance.

“Why did you want to talk to Victoria first?” Hutter asked.

“What does it matter?” Vic cried. “Can we just think about Wayne?”

“Yes,” Hutter said, blinking, looking back down at her iPad. “That’s right. Let’s keep the focus on Wayne. How about that password?”

Vic pushed back her chair as Lou poked at the touchscreen with one thick finger. She rose, came around the corner of the table to look. Her breathing was fast and short. She felt her anticipation so keenly it was like being cut.

Hutter’s screen loaded the Find My iPhone page, which showed a map of the globe, pale blue continents against a background of dark blue ocean. In the upper right corner, a window announced:

Wayne’s iPhone





Locating

Locating

Locating

Locating

Located





A featureless field of gray blanked out the image of the globe. A glassy blue dot appeared in the silver smoothness. Squares of landscape began to appear, the map redrawing itself to show the location of the iPhone in close-up. Vic saw the blue dot traveling on a road identified as THE ST. NICK PARKWAY.

Everyone was leaning in, Daltry so close to Vic she could feel him pressing against her rear, feel his breath tickling her neck. He smelled of coffee and nicotine.

“Zoom out,” Daltry said.

Hutter tapped the screen once, and again, and again.

The map depicted a continent that somewhat resembled America. It was as if someone had made a version of the United States out of bread dough and then punched it in the center. In this new version of the nation, Cape Cod was almost half the size of Florida and the Rocky Mountains looked more like the Andes, a thousand miles of grotesquely tortured earth, great splinters of stone heaved up against one another. The country as a whole, however, had substantially shriveled, collapsing toward the center.

Most of the great cities were gone, but other points of interest had appeared in their places. In Vermont there was a dense forest, built up around a place called ORPHANHENGE; in New Hampshire there was a spot marked THE TREE HOUSE OF THE MIND. A little north of Boston, there was something called LOVECRAFT KEYHOLE; it was a crater in the rough shape of a padlock. In Maine, around the Lewiston/Auburn/Derry area, there was a place called PENNYWISE CIRCUS. A narrow highway titled THE NIGHT ROAD led south, reddening the farther it went, until it was a line of blood trickling into Florida.

The St. Nick Parkway was particularly littered with stopping points. In Illinois, WATCHFUL SNOWMEN. In Kansas, GIANT TOYS. In Pennsylvania, THE HOUSE OF SLEEP and THE GRAVEYARD OF WHAT MIGHT BE.

And in the mountains of Colorado, high in the peaks, the point at which the St. Nick Parkway dead-ended: CHRISTMASLAND.

The continent itself drifted in a sea of black, star-littered wastes; the map was captioned not UNITED STATES OF AMERICA but UNITED INSCAPES OF AMERICA.

The blue dot twitched, moving through what should’ve been western Massachusetts toward Christmasland. But UNITED INSCAPES didn’t correspond exactly to America itself. It was probably a hundred fifty miles from Laconia, New Hampshire, to Springfield, Massachusetts, but on this map it looked barely half that.

They all stared.

Daltry took his hankie from his pocket, gave his nose a thoughtful squeeze. “Any of you see Candy Land down there?” He made a harsh, throat-clearing sound that was not quite a cough, not quite a laugh.

Vic felt the kitchen going away. The world at the edges of her vision was a distorted blur. The iPad and the table remained in crisp focus but were curiously distant.

She needed something to anchor her. She felt in danger of coming unmoored from the kitchen floor . . . a balloon slipping out of a child’s hand. She took Lou’s wrist, something to hold on to. He had always been there when she needed something to hold on to.

When she looked at him, though, she saw a reflection of her own ringing shock. His pupils were pinpricks. His breath was short and labored.

In a surprisingly normal tone of voice, Hutter said, “I don’t know what I’m looking at here. Does this mean anything to either of you two? This curious map? Christmasland? The St. Nick Parkway?”

“Does it?” Lou asked, staring helplessly at Vic.

What he was really asking, Vic understood, was DO we tell her about Christmasland? About the things you believed when you were crazy?

“No,” Vic breathed, answering all questions—spoken and unspoken—at the same time.