Carole never said so, but the implication was always more than clear: Moms don’t do that.
As he parked his Porsche, deep down David knew that he’d been challenged by his wife. She’d made him feel like shit with her comments about their teetering marriage and his apparent lack of devotion to Charlie. He loved his son. Yes, he complained about the fact that he no longer got to enjoy Sunday morning sex. He’d whined about how she controlled him with the money. None of that meant that he didn’t love Charlie.
On the passenger seat, nestled in a bag on the black leather of the Porsche, was a bottle of Old Grand-Dad. He’d drunk that from college through the failure of his first restaurant. He’d sworn on his life that he’d never take another sip. And for years now, he hadn’t, though the thirst for alcohol never abated. In a way, it propelled him to be even more successful at Sweetwater than he’d ever been. He couldn’t drink, so all of his energy and all of his angst drove him to work harder. Work filled the place that alcohol had once staked out.
But that bitch Carole. She’d pushed him so hard with her cruelly insightful remarks. Even when she didn’t say the words, she’d challenged him all right. She’d questioned his manhood. His fatherhood. His role in a world that she’d bought and paid for.
David reached for the bag and pulled the bottle from it, settled it in his lap. Its bright orange label was a roadside warning cone. He ignored it. His hands shook as he twisted the cap, the tiny metal prongs holding it to the neck snapping like firecrackers. He seethed. He knew that he was about to undo everything that had gotten him as far as he’d gone with Sweetwater. He didn’t know for sure, but the industry rumor mill had him short-listed for a James Beard Award. The Portland PBS station suggested he might appear on a local version of A Chef’s Life.
“What you do with razor clams, sherry, and cream is a culinary gift to the people of the Northwest,” the producer had said. “A rethinking, a reimagining, of the flavors that make us unique. That we love.”
David held the mouth of the bottle to his nose and hesitated before taking in the sweet, oaky, and acrid smell of the alcohol that had been his downfall so many times. A hint of citrus filled his nostrils. He flashed to the time he sideswiped a parked car and kept going, rubbing the smudge of paint from the passenger car door with an old rag. Red paint. It had looked like blood. Inside, he knew it could have been. He thought of the time he nearly had a heart attack coming home from the restaurant after drinking well past closing. How the sound of a police siren sent waves of fear through every fiber of his being. He imagined a score of passersby gawking at him as he stumbled heel-to-toe, heel-to-toe, while trying to walk a straight line, or as he tried to blow into a Breathalyzer tube, or as he slurred his speech while arguing with the police officer. The handcuffs. The mug shot. The newspapers publishing an item about it.
Yet somehow—by the grace of God, he once believed—he’d avoided all of that. The police car swept past him, and David Franklin stopped drinking because he knew that if he didn’t, there would be nothing left but disaster. His life would be as empty as those pearlescent razor clam shells that were discarded after he’d proudly collected all of those rave reviews. He’d attended the meetings with those he once looked down on as losers, when really they were only different versions of himself.
Now whatever he thought he’d found when he’d pulled himself together had been eroded by the fact that Charlie was missing and that Carole somehow blamed him for everything. She might as well have taken a pair of her orange-handled Fiskars scissors to his balls and mounted them on one of her weavings.
The man from Ohio had mentioned to the chatty bartender at Anthony’s that he was staying at the Pines. He’d passed that information on to the police.
He also told David Franklin.
A Toyota Camry with Ohio plates, grimy from a nearly cross-country trip, sat parked in front of cabin 22; a NO HATE IN OUR STATE sticker was affixed to the back window. Inside, David was sure, the man who took his boy was doing whatever freaky, disgusting thing that he did. David took a full, deep drink from the bottle. It was nectar coating his throat, reminding his body what alcohol did for him. It gave him the kind of calming rush that made him feel ten sizes bigger. A kind of power surged through him.
I’ll make that freak tell me where my boy is, he thought, taking another drink before getting out of his car.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
MISSING: EIGHTEEN DAYS
David had cut his right hand. Blood oozed onto the leather-covered steering wheel, making his hand slip as he drove. The last thing he wanted was any attention to his driving—or to what he’d done. He’d ditched Brad Collins at the hospital and the Old Grand-Dad bottle somewhere between the cabins of the Pines and home. If he’d expected to feel more like a man for having beat the shit out of a pervert, he found the opposite to be true.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!!!
The expletives were useless, but they kept coming while he replayed what had taken place at the Pines as he tried to get home without getting pulled over.
Brad was caught completely unaware. The Ohio tourist was watching Judge Judy in his boxers when a rage-and alcohol-fueled David shoved open the cabin door. It swung so abruptly that David was uncertain if it had been unlocked or if he’d been given some kind of superhero boost from the bourbon that he’d guzzled in the parking lot.
“Hey!” Brad said, dropping his feet over the edge of the bed and standing as if at attention. “You’re in the wrong room, buddy!”
David pulled the door shut behind him and wheeled on him. “You pervert! You took my boy!” he said, then lunged at him, jumped on top of him. It was lightning-fast. Superhero-fast. It was faster than a man of his age could normally manage.
“I didn’t do anything to anyone!” Brad said as David, bolstered by the booze and powered by the contempt he had for himself and the world, pummeled the younger man over and over.
Brad tried to fight his attacker, but David Franklin was like some kind of machine. He just kept punching, emitting a grunt like a prizefighter with each swing. At one point his hands found a T-shirt and he shoved it inside the bloody man’s mouth.
All while demanding answers.
“Tell me where Charlie is!”
Brad had no idea, of course, and the T-shirt made speaking impossible. He tried to shift his weight and slither out from under his attacker, but David was relentless.
“You sack of shit! You know where my boy is and I’ll goddamn kill you if you don’t tell me! Where did you put him? Where in the hell did you put my boy?”
Brad managed to extract the T-shirt from his mouth. His lip was torn so badly that it hung like a piece of tenderloin on a skewer. Blood oozed like a ketchup commercial.
“I told the police,” he spat out. “I don’t know anything.”
David hit him again.
“Liar!”
Brad coughed up more blood.