Faintly, a call came from the distance.
She hammered at the drywall. When the rocking chair came apart in her hands, she picked up a large geode from the floor and used that. Cracks spread across the wall as the grate’s housing came loose. The vent was far too narrow for her to get into, but if she dislodged it she might be able to access the main duct connected to it. Once there, Caroline thought, she might be able to tell if Bub was above or below her. Figure that out and she’d finally be making some progress.
She cut her finger on a prong of bent metal. In the shadows, the blood looked black. But Caroline found herself choking back a laugh. All those people in the woods, and Bub had been here the whole time.
She slammed the geode against the wall with all her strength. Flakes of yellow paint and fragments of crystal rained onto the carpet. When Caroline succeeded in widening the hole, she tore at its edges with her hands. Sinewy clumps of drywall collected at her feet. Once she’d cleared enough room for her shoulders, she forced herself into the space between the walls.
This house had taken her baby, and nothing was going to stop her from getting him back.
40
Seized with cold, Ben stood in front of the bathroom mirror. His hands trembled under the water from the tap. The flow from the faucet felt like a blowtorch, but it was the fastest way to get feeling back into his fingers. In the cold room, the water created billows of steam.
He wiped the fog from the mirror and was surprised by what he saw. Other than his greasy hat-pressed hair and two days of growth, he looked the same. Tired around the eyes, but it was still him. It didn’t seem right.
That night, after Charlie told them where the man in the smoke had gone, Chief Stanton ran into the night. The tracks he’d found led him to the edge of the forest before he lost the trail. The snow had been too powdery to hold any footprints for long. The chief had called in the abduction, and the FBI arrived early the next morning.
The agents had been most interested in Charlie’s story, but Ben doubted they’d be able to do much with it. Charlie had told them that he woke up to Bub crying, and Bub hardly ever cried. So Charlie went into one of the cabinets that connected their rooms. He’d wanted to see what was wrong with Bub. That was when he saw the man. Charlie had remained hidden in the cabinet when the man went into his room, looking for him. He’d stayed there until Ben and the chief arrived.
The agents had Charlie sit down with a sketch artist, and the result was a drawing of a gaunt, heavily bearded man with wild hair, who looked like a character from any child’s nightmare. The agents hadn’t questioned how an eight-year-old had gotten such a detailed look at the face of a man he’d seen in an unlit room through a crack in a cabinet door. Ben doubted they would have gotten a satisfactory answer if they had asked. Ben knew he would have to be the one to get it out of Charlie.
The FBI also had a lot of questions for Ben and Caroline. Most couple’s children did not suddenly go missing, and this was the second time in just over a year it had happened to the Tierneys. Whether this was terrible luck, incompetence, or something else entirely was of understandable interest.
The agents had taken rooms in Exton and were coordinating with the state police, while Chief Stanton assumed control of the searches of the Drop for traces of the kidnapper. Yesterday’s searches had been fruitless, but the chief pushed for them to continue. If they discovered the kidnapper’s trail, they might learn something about the vehicle he drove, which would give the investigators something concrete to work with.
It had taken Ben more than a day to reach his brother. Ted was in Los Angeles, but he promised to get to Swannhaven as soon as he could. Ben wanted him to take Charlie back to the city: someplace where Ben knew his son would be safe.
This morning, Ben had been out before the sun. He thought the predawn silence might tell him something. The snow had made the forest strange. There were no birds, but the woods were alive with sound. From the ground, the rapping of icy branches across the heights of the ancient trees was disorienting. The shrieks of broken treetops punctuated the morning.
With a flashlight, Ben had walked the edges of the forest. From the ruined outbuilding by the gravel drive, up and around the lake, and down the Drop beyond the charred husk of the elder tree. He’d returned to the Crofts as the first angels of dawn tested the sky.
While drying his hands, Ben could hear the sounds of Caroline breaking through the walls of the floor above him. Like Ben, she hadn’t slept or eaten since Friday. She’d become convinced that Bub was trapped somewhere within the Crofts. Of course it was insane, but it was no more crazy than standing outside the Holland Tunnel all night, searching each passing car for a child’s face. A week ago, Ben might have tried to stop her, but if this was how she needed to look for Bub, he wouldn’t stand in her way. If it came to it, he’d help her tear this place down to its foundations.
In the kitchen, Charlie was at the sink, standing on a chair, trying to do dishes. The kettle went off, and Ben saw that Charlie had boiled water for tea.
“Should I go to school tomorrow?” Charlie asked.
“Do you want to go to school?” Ben asked.
“No.”
“Good, because I don’t want to drive you.” Between the police, search parties, and FBI, yesterday had passed in a whirlwind. Ben hadn’t yet asked Charlie the questions that had to be asked. With Charlie, they had to be asked in just the right kind of way. Now they festered in Ben’s chest, to the point where he almost feared letting them out. “Did you eat any fruit for breakfast?”
“This is breakfast.”
Ben looked at the clock on the microwave and saw that Charlie was right. It was nine o’clock in the morning. He had lost all track of time. “I’ll get out the applesauce.”