NOS4A2 A Novel

The Lake


BY THE TIME HUTTER WAS DONE WITH HER THAT AFTERNOON, VIC felt wrung out, as if she were recovering from a bout of stomach flu. Her joints were sore, and her back throbbed. She was desperately hungry but when presented with a turkey sandwich was almost overcome with an urge to vomit. She couldn’t even choke down a whole piece of toast.

She told Hutter all the old lies about Manx: how he had injected her with something and put her in his car, how she had escaped him in Colorado at the Sleigh House. They sat in the kitchen, Hutter asking the questions and Vic answering them as best she could, while cops came in and out.

After Vic had told the story of her kidnapping, Hutter wanted to hear about the years after. She wanted to know about the derangement that had led Vic to spend time in a mental hospital. She wanted to know about the time Vic burned her own house down.

“I didn’t mean to burn the house down,” Vic said. “I was just trying to get rid of the phones. I stuck them all in the oven. It seemed like the simplest way to stop the phone calls.”

“The phone calls from dead people?”

“From dead kids. Yes.”

“Is that the predominant theme of your delusions? Does it always revolve around dead children?”

“Did. Was. Past tense,” Vic said.

Hutter stared at Vic with all the affection of a snake handler approaching a venomous cobra. Vic thought, Just ask me already. Ask me if I killed my little boy. Get it out in the open. She met Hutter’s gaze without blinking or flinching. Vic had been hammered, shot at, nearly run over, institutionalized, addicted, had come close to being burned alive and had run for her life on several occasions. An unfriendly stare was nothing.

Hutter said, “You might want to rest and freshen up. I’ve scheduled your statement for five-twenty. That should get us the maximum prime-time coverage.”

Vic said, “I wish I thought there was something I knew—something I could tell you—that would help you find him.”

“You’ve been very helpful,” Hutter said. “Thank you. I have a lot of good information here.”

Hutter looked away, and Vic imagined that the interview was over. But as she rose to go, Hutter reached for something leaning against the wall: some sheets of bristol board.

“Vic,” Hutter said, “there is one other thing.”

Vic stood still, a hand on the back of her chair.

Hutter put the stack of bristol board on the table, turned so Vic could look at the illustrations. Her illustrations, the pages from the new book, Search Engine’s Fifth Gear, the holiday story. What she had been working on when she wasn’t assembling the Triumph. Hutter began to shuffle the big card-stock pages, giving Vic a moment to take in each picture, rendered in nonphotographic blue pencil, inked, then finished in watercolors. The paper rasped in a way that made Vic think of a fortune-teller shuffling a tarot deck, preparing to deal a very bad outlook.

Hutter said, “I told you, they use the Search Engine puzzles at Quantico to teach students about careful observation. When I saw that you had part of a new book out in the carriage house, I couldn’t help myself. I’m stunned by what you’ve got on the page here. You really do give Escher a run for his money. Then I looked close and started wondering. This is for a Christmas book, isn’t it?”

The urge to get away from the pile of bristol board—to shrink from her own drawings, as if they were photographs of skinned animals—surged inside her and then was smothered in a moment. She wanted to say she had never seen any of these pictures before, wanted to scream she didn’t know where they had come from. Both of these statements would’ve been fundamentally true, but she clamped down on them, and when she spoke, her voice was weary and disinterested.

“Yeah. My publisher’s idea.”

“Well,” Hutter said, “do you think—I mean, is it possible—that this is Christmasland? That the person who grabbed your son is aware of what you’ve been working on and that there’s some kind of connection between your new book and what we saw when we tried to track your son’s iPhone?”

Vic stared at the first illustration. It showed Search Engine and little Bonnie, clasping each other on a shattered plate of ice, somewhere in the Arctic Ocean. Vic remembered drawing a mechanical squid, piloted by Mad Möbius Stripp, coming up through the ice beneath them. But this drawing showed dead-eyed children under the ice, reaching up through the cracks with bony white claws. They grinned to show mouths filled with delicate hooked fangs.

On another page Search Engine hunted for a way through a maze of towering candy canes. Vic remembered drawing that—drawing in a sweet, lazy trance, swaying to the Black Keys. She did not remember drawing the children who hid in corners and side alleys, holding scissors. She did not remember drawing little Bonnie staggering about blind, her hands clapped over her eyes. They’re playing scissors-for-the-drifter, she thought randomly.

“I don’t see how,” Vic said. “No one has seen these pages.”

Hutter raced her thumb down one edge of the stack of paper and said, “It struck me as a bit surprising that you’d be drawing Christmas scenes in the middle of the summer. Try to think. Is there any chance what you’ve been working on could tie in to—”

“In to Charlie Manx’s decision to pay me back for sending him to jail?” Vic asked. “I don’t think so. I think it’s pretty straightforward. I crossed him, and now it’s get-even time. If we’re all done, I’d like to lie down.”

“Yes. You must be tired. And who knows? Maybe if you have a chance to rest, something else will come to you.”

Hutter’s tone was calm enough, but Vic thought she heard an insinuation in this last statement, the suggestion that they both understood that Vic had more to tell.

Vic didn’t know her own house. There were magnetic whiteboards leaning against the couches in her living room. One of them had a map showing the Northeast; another had a timeline written in red marker. Folders crammed full of printouts were stacked on every available surface. Hutter’s geek squad was squeezed together on the couch like college students in front of an Xbox; one of them was talking into a Bluetooth earpiece while the others worked on laptops. No one looked at her. She didn’t matter.

Lou was in the bedroom, in the rocking chair in the corner. She eased the door shut behind her and crept to him through the dark. The curtains were drawn, the room gloomy and airless.

His shirt was smeared with black fingerprints. He smelled of the bike and the carriage house—a not-unpleasant cologne. There was a sheet of brown paper taped to his chest. His round, heavy face was gray in the dim light, and with that note hanging off him he looked like a daguerreotype of a dead gunslinger: THIS IS WHAT WE DO TO OUTLAWS.

Vic looked at him, at first with concern, then alarm. She was reaching for his chubby forearm, to see if she could find his pulse—she was sure he wasn’t breathing—when he inhaled suddenly, one nostril whistling. Just asleep. He had dropped off to sleep in his boots.

She drew her hand back. She had never seen him look so fatigued or so sick. There was gray in his stubble. It seemed somehow wrong that Lou, who loved comics, and his son, and boobies, and beer, and birthday parties, should ever get old.

She squinted at the note, which read:

“Bike still isn’t right. Needs parts that will take weeks to order. Wake me up when you want to talk about it.”

Reading those four words—“bike still isn’t right”—was nearly as bad as reading “Wayne found dead.” She felt they were dangerously close to the same thing.

Not for the first time in her life, she wished that Lou had never picked her up on his motorcycle that day, wished that she had slipped and dropped to the bottom of the laundry chute and smothered to death there, sparing her the trouble of dragging her ass through the rest of her sorry life. She would not have lost Wayne to Manx, because there would be no Wayne. Choking to death on smoke was easier than feeling what she felt now, a kind of tearing inside that never stopped. She was a bedsheet, being ripped this way and that, and soon enough would be nothing but rags.

She sat on the edge of the bed, staring vacantly into the darkness and seeing her own drawings, the pages Tabitha Hutter had shown her from the new Search Engine. She did not know how anyone could look at such work and suspect her of innocence: all those drowned children, all those drifts of snow, all those candy canes, all that hopelessness. They were going to lock her up soon, and then it would be too late to do anything for Wayne. They were going to lock her up, and she couldn’t blame them in the slightest; she suspected Tabitha Hutter of weakness for not putting her in handcuffs already.

Her weight creased the mattress. Lou had dumped his money and his cell phone in the center of the quilt, and now they slid toward her, came to rest against her hip. She wished there were someone to call, to tell her what to do, to tell her that everything would be all right. Then it came to her that there was.

She took Lou’s phone and slipped into the bathroom and shut the door. There was another door at the opposite end of the bathroom that looked into Wayne’s bedroom. Vic moved toward this door to close it, then hesitated.

He was there: Wayne was there, in his room, under his bed, staring out at her, his face pale and frightened. She felt as if she’d been kicked in the chest by a mule, her heart galumphing hard behind her breastbone, and she looked again, and it was just a stuffed monkey, lying on its side. Its brown eyes were glassy and despairing. She clicked the door to his room shut, then stood with her forehead resting against it, waiting to get her breath back.

With her eyes closed, she could see Maggie’s phone number: the Iowa 319 area code, followed by Vic’s own birthday, and the letters FUFU. Maggie had paid good money for that number, Vic felt sure—because she knew that Vic would remember it. Maybe she knew that Vic would need to remember it. Maybe she knew that Vic would turn her away when they first met. All kinds of maybes, but only one that Vic cared about: Was her son maybe alive?

The phone rang and rang, and Vic thought if it kicked her to voice mail, she would not be able to leave a message, would not be able to force a sound up through her constricting throat. On the fourth ring, when she had decided that Maggie wasn’t going to answer, Maggie answered.

“V-V-V-Vic!” Maggie said, before Vic could manage a word. Maggie’s caller ID had to be telling her she’d just received a call from Carmody’s Car Carma—she couldn’t know it was Vic on the line, but she did know, and Vic was not surprised. “I wanted to call as suh-s-ss-ssss-soon as I heard, but I wasn’t sure it was a good idea. How are you? It ss-suh-says on the news you were assaulted.”

“Forget that. I need to know if Wayne is all right. I know you can find out.”

“I already know. He hasn’t been hurt.”

Vic’s legs began trembling, and she had to put a hand on the counter to steady herself.

“Vic? V-V-Vic?”

She could not answer immediately. It took all her concentration to keep from crying.

“Yes,” Vic said finally. “I’m here. How much time do I have? How much time does Wayne have?”

“I don’t know how that p-p-puh-part of it works. I just don’t know. What have you told the p-p-p-puh-puh-police?”

“What I had to. Nothing about you. I did my best to make it sound believable, but I don’t think they’re buying it.”

“Vic. Puh-p-please. I want to help. Tell me how I can help.”

“You just did,” Vic said, and hung up.

Not dead. And there was still time. She thought it over again, a kind of chant, a song of praise: Not dead, not dead, not dead.

She wanted to go back into the bedroom and shake Lou awake and tell him the bike had to run, he had to fix it, but she doubted he’d been sleeping for more than a few hours, and she didn’t like his gray pallor. Tugging at the back of her mind was an awareness that he had not been entirely straight with anyone about what had dropped him in Logan Airport.

Maybe she would look at the bike herself. She didn’t understand what could be so wrong with it that he couldn’t fix it. It had run only yesterday.

She stepped out of the bathroom and tossed the phone at the bed. It slid across the bedspread and fell with a clatter and crack to the floor. Lou’s shoulders twitched at the sound, and Vic caught her breath, but he didn’t wake.

She opened the bedroom door and twitched in surprise herself. Tabitha Hutter was on the other side of it. Vic had caught her in the act of raising one fist, about to knock.

The two women stared at each other, and Vic thought, Something is wrong. Her second thought was, of course, that they had found Wayne—in a ditch somewhere, drained of blood, throat slit ear to ear.

But Maggie said he was alive, and Maggie knew, so that wasn’t it. It was something else.

Vic looked past Hutter, down the hall, and saw Detective Daltry and a state trooper waiting a few yards back.

“Victoria,” Tabitha said, in a neutral tone. “We need to talk.”

Vic stepped into the hall and eased the bedroom door shut behind her.

“What’s up?”

“Is there a place we can have a private conversation?”

Vic looked again at Daltry and the uniformed cop. The cop was six feet tall and sunburned, and his neck was as thick as his head. Daltry’s arms were crossed, hands stuck under his armpits, his mouth a thin white line. He had a can of something in one big leathery hand—pepper spray, probably.

Vic nodded at the door to Wayne’s bedroom. “We won’t bother anyone in here.”

She followed the small woman into the little room that had been Wayne’s for only a few weeks before he was taken away. His bedsheets—they had Treasure Island scenes printed on them—were folded back as if waiting for him to slip into them. Vic sat on the edge of the mattress.

Come back, she said to Wayne, with all her heart. She wanted to ball his sheets up in her hands and smell them, fill her nose with the scent of her boy. Come back to me, Wayne.

Hutter leaned against the dresser, and her coat fell open to show the Glock under her arm. Vic looked up and saw that the younger woman had on a pair of earrings this afternoon: gold pentagons with the Superman insignia enameled on them.

“Don’t let Lou see you in those earrings,” Vic said. “He might be overcome with an uncontrollable desire to hug you. Geeks are his kryptonite.”

“You have to come clean with me,” Hutter said.

Vic bent forward, reached under the bed, found the plush monkey, pulled it out. It had gray fur and gangly arms and wore a leather jacket and a motorcycle helmet. GREASE MONKEY, said the patch on its left breast. Vic had no memory of buying the thing.

“About what?” she asked, not looking at Hutter. She laid the monkey on the bed, head on the pillow, where Wayne belonged.

“You haven’t been straight with me. Not once. I don’t know why. Maybe there are things you’re scared to talk about. Possibly there are things you’re ashamed to talk about, in front of a roomful of men. Or it could be you think you’re protecting your son in some way. Maybe you’re protecting someone else. I don’t know what it is, but here’s where you tell me.”

“I haven’t lied to you about anything.”

“Stop f*cking with me,” Tabitha Hutter said in her quiet, passionless voice. “Who is Margaret Leigh? What is her relationship to you? How does she know that your son hasn’t been hurt?”

“You’re tapping Lou’s cell phone?” Feeling a little stupid even as she said it.

“Of course we are. For all we know, he had a part in this. For all we know, you did. You told Margaret Leigh that you tried to make your story believable but that we weren’t buying it. You’re right. I don’t buy it. I never did.”

Vic wondered if she could throw herself at Tabitha Hutter, slam her back over the dresser, get the Glock away from her. But the smart-aleck bitch probably knew special FBI kung fu, and anyway, what good would it do? What would Vic do then?

“Last chance, Vic. I want you to understand. I am going to have to arrest you on suspicion of involvement—”

“In what? An assault on myself?”

“We don’t know who bruised you up. For all we know, it was your son, trying to fight you off.”

So. There it was. Vic was interested to find she felt no surprise at all. But then maybe the real surprise was only that they had not reached this point sooner.

“I do not want to believe that you played a role in your son’s disappearance. But you know someone who can provide you with information about his well-being. You’ve withheld facts. Your explanation of events sounds like a textbook paranoid delusion. This is your last opportunity to clear things up, if you can. Think before you speak. Because after I’m done with you, I’m going to start on Lou. He’s been withholding evidence as well, I am sure of it. No dad spends ten hours straight trying to fix a motorcycle the day after his son has been kidnapped. I ask him questions he doesn’t want to answer, he starts the engine to drown me out. Like a teenager turning up the music so he doesn’t have to listen when Mom says it’s time to clean his room.”

“What do you mean . . . he started the engine?” Vic asked. “He started the Triumph?”

Hutter produced a long, slow, weary exhalation. Her head sank; her shoulders sagged. There was, finally, something besides professional calm in her face. There was, at last, a look of exhaustion and maybe, also, defeat.

“Okay,” Hutter breathed. “Vic. I’m sorry. I am. I hoped we could—”

“Can I ask you something?”

Hutter looked at her.

“The hammer. You had me look at fifty different hammers. You seemed surprised by the one I picked, the one I said Manx used on me. Why?”

Vic saw something in Hutter’s eyes—the briefest flicker of uncertainty.

“It’s called a bone mallet,” Hutter said. “They’re used in autopsies.”

“Was one missing from the morgue in Colorado where they were holding Charlie Manx’s body?”

Hutter didn’t reply to that one, but her tongue darted out and touched her upper lip, glossing it—the closest thing to a nervous gesture Vic had ever seen out of her. In and of itself, that was a kind of answer.

“Every word I have told you is true,” Vic said. “If I left anything out, then it was only because I knew you wouldn’t accept those parts of the story. You would write them off as delusional, and no one would blame you.”

“We have to go now, Vic. I’ll have to handcuff you. If you want, though, we can put a sweater over your lap and you can hide your hands beneath them. No one has to see. You’ll sit up front in my car with me. No one will think it’s a big deal when we go.”

“What about Lou?”

“I’m afraid I can’t allow you to speak with him right now. He’ll be in a car behind us.”

“Can’t you let him sleep? He isn’t well, and he was up for twenty-four hours straight.”

“I’m sorry. It’s not my job to worry about Lou’s well-being. It’s my job to worry about your son’s well-being. Stand up, please.” She pushed back the right flap of her tweed jacket, and Vic saw she wore handcuffs on her belt.

The door to the right of the dresser swung back, and Lou stumbled out of the bathroom, tugging on his fly. His eyes were bloodshot with exhaustion.

“I’m awake. What’s up? What’s the story, Vic?”

“Officer!” Hutter called as Lou took a step forward.

His mass occupied a third of the room, and when he moved into the center of it, he was between Vic and Hutter. Vic came to her feet and stepped around him, to the open bathroom door.

“I have to go,” Vic said.

“So go,” Lou said, and planted himself between her and Tabitha Hutter.

“Officer!” Hutter shouted again.

Vic crossed through the bathroom and into her bedroom. She shut the door behind her. There was no lock, so she grabbed the armoire and dragged it squealing across the pine boards to block the bathroom door. She turned the bolt on the door to the hall. Two more steps carried her to the window that looked into the backyard.

She pulled the shade, unlocked the window.

Men shouted in the hall.

She heard Lou raising his voice, his tone indignant.

“Dude, what’s your beef? Let’s all settle the hell down, why don’t we?” Lou said.

“Officer!” Hutter shouted for a third time, but now she added, “Holster your firearm!”

Vic raised the window, put her foot against the screen, and pushed. The whole screen popped out of the frame and flopped into the yard. She followed it, sitting on the windowsill with her legs hanging out, then dropping five feet onto the grass.

She had on the same cutoffs she’d been wearing yesterday, a Bruce Springsteen T-shirt from The Rising Tour, had no helmet, no jacket. She didn’t even know if the keys were in the bike or if they were sitting amid Lou’s change on the bed.

Back in the bedroom, she heard someone crash into a door.

“Be cool!” Lou shouted. “Dude, like, seriously!”

The lake was a flat silver sheet, reflecting the sky. It looked like melted chrome. The air was swollen with a sullen, liquid weight.

She had the backyard to herself. Two sunburned men in shorts and straw hats were fishing in an aluminum boat about a hundred yards offshore. One of them lifted a hand in a wave, as if he found the sight of a woman exiting her house by way of a back window a perfectly common sight.

Vic let herself into the carriage house through the side door.

The Triumph leaned on its kickstand. The key was in it.

The barn-style doors of the carriage house were open, and Vic could see down the driveway to where the media had assembled to record the statement she was never going to make. A small copse of cameras had been planted at the bottom of the drive, pointed toward an array of microphones at the corner of the yard. Bundles of cable snaked back in the direction of the news vans, parked to the left. There was no easy way to turn left and weave through those vans, but the road remained open to the right, heading north.

In the carriage house, she could not hear the commotion back in the cottage. The room contained the smothered quiet of a too-hot afternoon in high summer. It was the time of day of naps, stillness, dogs sleeping under porches. It was too hot even for flies.

Vic put her leg over the saddle, turned the key to the ON position. The headlight flicked to life, a good sign.

Bike still isn’t right, she remembered. It wasn’t going to start. She knew that. When Tabitha Hutter came into the carriage house, Vic would be frantically jumping up and down on the kickstart, dry-humping the saddle. Hutter already thought Vic was crazy; that pretty picture would confirm her suspicions.

She rose up and came down on the starter with all her weight, and the Triumph blammed to life with a roar that blew leaves and grit across the floor and shook the glass in the windows.

Vic put it into first and released the clutch, and the Triumph slipped out of the carriage house.

As she rolled out into the day, she glanced to the right, had a brief view of the backyard. Tabitha Hutter stood halfway to the carriage house, flushed, a strand of curly hair pasted to her cheek. She had not drawn her gun, and she did not draw it now. She did not even call out, just stood there and watched Vic go. Vic nodded to her, as if they had struck an agreement, and Vic was grateful to Hutter for holding up her end. In another moment Vic had left her behind.

There was two feet of space between the edge of the yard and that bristling islet of cameras, and Vic aimed herself at it. But as she neared the road, a man stepped into the gap, pointing his camera at her. He held it at waist level, was staring at a monitor that folded out from the side. He kept his gaze on his little viewscreen, even though it had to be showing him a life-threatening visual: four hundred pounds of rolling iron, piloted by a madwoman, coming right down the hill at him. He wasn’t going to move—not in time.

Vic planted her foot on the brake. It sighed and did nothing.

Bike still isn’t right.

Something flapped against the inside of her left thigh, and she looked down and saw a length of black plastic tubing hanging free. It was the line for the rear brake. It wasn’t attached to anything.

There was no room to get past the yahoo with the camera, not without leaving the driveway. She gave the Triumph throttle, banged it into second gear, speeding up.

An invisible hand made of hot air pressed back against her chest. It was like accelerating into an open oven.

Her front tire went up onto the grass. The rest of the bike followed. The cameraman seemed to hear the Triumph at last, the earth-shaking growl of the engine, and jerked his head up just in time to see her buzz by him, close enough to slap his face. He reared back so rapidly he threw himself off balance, began to topple over.

Vic blasted past. Her slipstream spun him like a top, and he fell into the road, helplessly tossing his camera as he went down. It made an expensive-sounding crunch hitting the blacktop.

As she came off the lawn and into the road, the back tire tore off the top layer of grass, just exactly the way she used to peel dried Elmer’s glue off her palms in third-grade arts and crafts. The Triumph lurched to one side, and she felt she was about to drop it, smashing her leg beneath it.

But her right hand remembered what to do, and she gave the bike more throttle still, and the engine thundered, and it popped out of the turn like a cork that has been pushed underwater and released. The rubber found the road, and the Triumph leaped away from the cameras, the microphones, Tabitha Hutter, Lou, her cottage, sanity.