“In the kitchen, making food.”
“I can’t eat, Ben. I just can’t,” she said. Caroline had peeled up a fifteen-foot span of the flooring, exposing a splintered subfloor. She’d spent days testing colors for this floor. They’d spent a week sanding, staining, and waxing it. It had all been undone in a few hours. The hallway was ruined and the ceilings of the floor below would soon follow, and Ben didn’t care.
“Me neither,” he said.
Neither of them had found Bub, of course, but Caroline thought she’d traced the sounds to this part of the third floor. She was nearly certain of it. And Ben had his own hunch to follow.
Ben took the tower stairs to the attic, thinking of the man in the smoke.
The man was clever. He’d set the elder tree on fire to distract them while he took Bub. They’d found empty jugs of gasoline that he’d taken from the shed. The fire had been ignited by some kind of homemade fuse so that the man would be well away by the time the gas caught. But instead of escaping downslope to the county road once he had Bub, the man had headed for the forest.
The FBI assumed that the kidnapper had run into the forest in order to confuse his pursuers and then made for the county road or one of the access roads and driven Bub elsewhere. But if the man really lived in the forest, maybe Bub had never left the Drop in the first place. Ben left the chief a voice mail, asking him to call him back so he could share this theory.
Ben also thought the man must have some kind of connection to the Crofts. He seemed to know the place too well to be a stranger. And from the messages the man had left Charlie alongside the mutilated animals, it seemed clear that he wanted the Tierneys to leave. He could have been the one who’d set fire to the shed back in the summer, to scare them off. He could have mutilated the deer whose head Ben had found just outside the door and left the carcasses of the animals he lived off to rot in the pit in the woods. He might have been the noises in the night and the eyes they felt coming from empty rooms. They might have been living with the man all year without knowing it.
Ben still had the box from the archives of the Swannhaven Dispatch in the attic. He checked his notes against the newspapers. John Tanner, the boy who had set the fire at the Crofts in 1982, would be in his late forties now. The man in the sketch Charlie had helped with could easily be that age.
He glanced through the newspapers again to confirm that Tanner had been sent to the Lockwood Institute in 1983, after spending some time in a juvenile detention center. Ben called Lockwood and was told that Tanner had been released last year and sent to an assisted-living facility.
Ben took down the number for that facility and was about to call when the faint ring of the front bell sounded through the attic floor.
He ran to the foyer and saw Charlie talking to Chief Stanton in front of the open door.
“Anything?” Ben asked.
The chief shook his head.
“Charlie, wait for me to answer the door, okay?” Ben said.
“But I know him.”
“Just do it for me, okay?”
“Okay, Dad,” Charlie said. “I made peanut butter sandwiches for us.”
“Thank you.”
“He’s a good boy,” the chief said after Charlie had left the room. His voice splintered in his throat. The man looked worse than he had the day before. Ben guessed that he hadn’t slept or eaten since the day of the dinner party, either. “I was already headed here when I got your voice mail. Mary sent me up with one of her casseroles.” He handed Ben a bag heavy with Tupperware.
“Nice of her,” Ben said.
“And Caroline?” the chief asked.
“She’s holding up,” Ben said. The ax blows from the third floor were barely audible from here.
“Good. You’re not on your own with this, Ben.” The chief rested a hand on his shoulder. “The whole village is behind you. The biddies too old to search have been holding prayers at the church since yesterday. In today’s service we talked about nothing but you folks. Now, what did you call to tell me?”
“I got something more out of Charlie. He just needed to find a way to tell me.”
Ben told the chief about Charlie’s previous encounters with the man.
“I’ve been asking myself why the man would go deeper into the forest after taking Bub. Why he spent so much time at the Crofts through the summer and fall. I think we’re dealing with someone who exists in a world in which the Crofts is the center,” Ben said. “How much do you know about John Tanner?”
The chief looked at him with an expression as close to astonishment as his ashen features could muster.
“What is it?” Ben asked.
“JoJo’s all I’ve been thinking of since I saw that sketch yesterday,” the chief said.
—
“How well did you know him?” Ben asked. He and the chief were halfway to the far end of the lake, to Charlie’s blind. The chief told Ben that he’d called Lockwood yesterday and gotten the same information Ben had learned today. He’d also checked in with the assisted-living facility. They told him that John Tanner had been in residence there for two months when he disappeared, in the middle of December of last year. They hadn’t heard from him since.
“He was a year ahead of me in school,” the chief said. “That was before they closed it down and started busing the kids to North Hampstead.”
“So you knew the Swann brothers, too.”
“In this small a village, all of us know one another. Have since we were in diapers.”
“But Tanner was a foster kid, wasn’t he?”
“But he was from Swannhaven. The Swann sisters took him in when his parents passed.”
“What was he like?”
“Called him JoJo. Big guy. Was always big. Could have made a go of football if he knew which end of the field to run for.”
“Not too bright?”