Behind the Bonehouse (33 page)

She listened to him right behind her, breathing hard, smelling of whiskey and hatred. Her head had stopped bleeding, and that helped, and she pulled herself up and moved on, trying to protect her face with the arm holding the basket.

“There're stairs comin' up. Take 'em down to the river.”

Just when she thought she couldn't go any farther, her boots thick with mud, heavy and hard to stay up on, she saw a thinner patch of undergrowth up head. And when she got there, she could see stairs that headed left toward the river, and climbed up on the right too, through thick grass and brush that hid the road completely.

Then she heard the first car they'd met in almost an hour, and saw lights in the darkening dusk stabbing through the line of trees up above by the road.

“In here. Fast.” Butch tapped her on the shoulder with the barrel of his revolver, and it startled her so she almost fell, which made Ross start wailing. Butch grabbed her arm and pulled her back into the underbrush, while he hissed at her to shut him up.

“Shh, Ross. It'll be okay. I'll give you a bottle in a minute.”

When the car was past, Butch listened for half a minute, then shoved her on toward the stairs and told her again to head toward the river and keep the kid quiet.

The river was very low, and the shallow stairs, overgrown with grass and weeds and shrubs starting up, ended in a strip of sand wide and deep enough to be a kind of beach. It wasn't more than a temporary beach, because when the river was running high all this land below the road would be flooded. With the cliffs and the flooding, this whole strip was nothing now but unused land cluttered with the bones of a few old fishing shacks and the prohibition roadhouse, long abandoned and left untouched by everyday human life.

But there, where the broken stairs met the strip of flat ground, the broad bow of a dilapidated houseboat was pulled up on the sand, the disintegrating wooden stern listing in shallow water.

There were two padded benches abandoned on the sand that must've been in the houseboat to begin with, but now lay covered in mold, the plastic upholstery ripped into strips exposing filthy stuffing.

Jo stood and stared at the cracked wooden siding, and the broken glass in the top of the door, as Butch stepped up on the warped wooden bow—a wide flat square-cornered bow designed like a deck on a house, where one aluminum-framed folding chair leaned against the door.

Butch threw it out of the way and wrenched the door open, the screech of swollen wood cutting across the quiet of the river bank like a knife in Jo's chest, and motioned her up onto the deck with his .38.

She stepped up on the sodden wood, the smell of rot and mold overwhelming, the rain dripping through the overhanging porch as though the roof weren't there.

Butch shoved her inside the cabin and pulled the door closed behind them—and Jo stood and stared at the wreck, at the water covering the rusting floor, deeper ahead of her toward the stern, shallower by the bow.

Black mold grew around the window frames, and lichen stuck to the walls. A metal sink had been half ripped out of its cabinet on the right side close to the door. A built-in table was centered on the left, shooting out from the wall between windows, a wooden chair in front and behind it, the bottoms of their cracked legs standing in dirty water. It dripped in places from the ceiling too, and gathered in beads on the outside walls. Maps curled and hung in strips where they'd once been smoothed between the two windows on the long right-hand wall.

Someone had been there recently. A sheet of plastic covered the table. A bucket sat on it close to the windows to catch a drip from the roof. A loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter sat in the middle by a jar of instant coffee and an unopened fifth of bourbon. There were two metal cups and a gallon jug of drinking water. And opposite the table, along the right wall, was a raised wooden bench-like bed with a blanket and pillow in a clear plastic bag sitting in the middle.

A cast-iron Franklin stove stood in the back right corner, to the right of the solid rear door, its doors standing open, kindling, newspaper and several small logs waiting, ready to be lit.

Butch had waded over to the table, while Jo looked at the cabin, and he said, “Put the kid in the basket on the table,” as he laid the handgun on the plastic with the barrel pointed at Jo.

Jo did, after feeling to be sure the plastic was dry. And then took a bottle out of the diaper bag with a can of formula and a bottle opener.

Butch shoved her down in the wooden chair with its back to the front door, her feet in more than an inch of water, and tied her ankles to the legs of the chair. Then he stood and grabbed her arms and started to tie them behind her.

“Don't. Please. I've gotta hold him and feed him a bottle, and be able to change his diapers. You know. You've got kids, you—”

“Shutup!” He stood and stared at her for half a minute. Then tied her elbows to the corners of the chair back, leaving her hands free enough that she could hold Ross, who was whimpering already, getting ready to cry.

“He's hungry. I need to give him a bottle. That'll help settle him down.”

Butch dropped into the chair on the other side, watching her the whole time, as she sat Ross in her lap and poured formula in a bottle. She laid him down in the crook of her left arm, but he wanted to sit up and lean against her, and she held the bottle in his mouth as best she could, while he held on to it too.

“Why have you done this?”

“Why! I've lost my wife. I've lost my kids. Even my last job. Alan Munro needs to know what it's like to have what you love ripped away!” Butch unscrewed the top on the bottle of bourbon and poured what sounded like a sizeable slug into a metal cup.

A
lan left Equine earlier than normal, not much after 5:30. He'd gotten to a spot in a methods report where it made sense to stop work—and he was restless, which wasn't much like him, and he wanted to get out of there and get himself home.

He'd been more tired than usual the last week too, and he'd begun to think that the anxiety and the stress and the interrupted sleep that had driven him for weeks had left him feeling limp and slow once the pressure released.

But it'd been a good day at Equine. He'd interviewed a very promising lab director candidate. And the new production manager had made some progress with the viscosity control in the de-wormer paste, making it more likely that they could move to the new Sigma blender sometime soon. Which meant that as Alan drove home he was thinking about what he'd tell Jo about work, and what he should make for dinner. He liked to cook when he had time, and Jo could use a night off.

The rain was horrific by the time he got halfway to Versailles. He actually had to pull off and wait once on the Lexington Road. But there were hardly any cars on McCowans Ferry, and the windshield wipers were slapping against the glass in a rhythm that made him hum something that sounded to him like an old English ballad, and he was smiling to himself at how badly he hummed as he slowed down the last long hill that took him on toward home.

Then, in the fraction of a second when the wiper cleared the glass, he saw Jo's truck pulled off on an angle on the right side of the road by the pillar at the end of their lane.

He pulled over behind it, and ran to the driver's door, and saw then that the left front bumper had been grazed by another car. The damage didn't look serious. Not enough for Jo to abandon it. And then, when he pulled her door open, he saw the key was in the ignition and her purse lay open on the floor.

She never would've left her purse,
or
her keys,
or
walked home with Ross in the rain. And adrenaline hit Alan like lightning in the blood, firing every nerve, whipping him back into combat, his whole body coiled and tense, as he started the engine, and put it in reverse, and found that it drove just fine.

There're tire tracks in the mud by the pillar.

There's red paint on the fender.

Someone ran her off the road, and it's got to be Butch.

“You bastard!”
If you hurt either one of them you'll wish you'd never been born!

He pocketed her keys and grabbed her purse and drove his own car up to the house to phone Butch at home.

It wasn't that he expected Butch to be there, or answer even if he were. He had to start somewhere, and eliminate what he could, and make some sort of move fast for the sake of his own sanity.

No one answered, which was no surprise. It made more sense that Butch would call him, and make some threat or demand.

Toss was gone, so he couldn't have seen anything. He'd fed the horses and turned them out, and gone off to play cards with his hunting buddies and wouldn't be back till eleven.

Alan called Spencer, who picked up the phone in his barn. He didn't live all that far from Butch, and he said he'd check out Butch's house, then come on to Alan's.

Alan stood by the phone in the farm office, his fists planted on Jo's desk, staring through the archway into the dining room without seeing a thing.

He limped up the two broad stairs, and on through the dining room, across the front hall, and the living room beyond, then down two steps to their bedroom.

He pulled on a long-sleeved black cotton turtleneck over dark gray jeans, then laced up his old brown work boots with dark rubber soles.

He slid his Swiss army knife into one of his pants pockets, and took a key from a metal box in a high cabinet in the master bath and hurried back to the mudroom, off to the right of the kitchen. He opened the carved pine door Jo had found in a barn sale somewhere that she'd hung to hide the tall metal safe he'd had built in the wall.

He unlocked both its locks, the Yale and the combination, and took two latched wooden boxes off a high shelf and laid them on the kitchen table. He grabbed two holsters and two extra magazines and two full boxes of .45s before he relocked the metal safe and closed the thick pine door.

They were Colt pistols—M1911s—U.S. Army officer issue in World War I and II. He took the magazines out of both boxes and loaded eight cartridges into all four, then slid them, and the ammunition, into zippered pockets in the hooded black raincoat he'd brought in from the mudroom.

He got two flashlights out of a mudroom drawer, and put in new batteries at the kitchen table. Then he threaded his belt through the slits in the holster, and put it on, with his back to the fireplace, making himself close his eyes and take a deep breath.

Please keep them safe. Help me find them fast. Keep me from taking revenge before I can make myself stop.

When Spencer ran through the front door, Alan was on the phone in Jo's office, and Spencer said, “Earl?” as he pushed back the hood of his navy blue raincoat, and stood dripping on the sisal rug in dark pants and combat boots, watching Alan check a number he'd written on a pad.

Alan said, “No, not Earl,” as he hung up. “
If
we can find out where Butch's taken them, and that's a pretty big
if
right now, I don't want the cops rushing in. You and I'll do better alone, with what we did in Europe.”

They stared at each other in silence for a minute. Then Spencer nodded and opened the closest of the wooden boxes sitting on the old pine desk. He unwrapped the cloth around the Colt pistol, then pulled the slide back and locked it, looking to make sure there was no round in the chamber and no magazine in the grip. He slid a finger across its scored wood, then the dull, dark blued steel barrel, as he said, “Good old John M. Browning. He knew what he was doing when he came up with this. Where's the magazine?”

Alan pulled two out of his coat pocket, along with a box of .45s, and handed them to Spencer before he dialed the phone—and hung up in disgust. “Busy! Again! Where would Butch have taken them? I'm trying to get his wife in Louisville to see if she's got a clue.”

Alan dialed again, one foot tapping the floor fast, before he hung up and dialed “0”. “Operator, this is an emergency. I'm trying to reach a number in Louisville that's continuously busy, and I have to get through right away! … No, I can't. It's a matter of life and death!”

He waited, pacing as far as the phone cord let him, till the operator told him to place his call again. He dialed, and waited, and then said, “Frannie, this is Alan Munro. Butch has kidnapped my wife and baby. He's not at his house, and I don't know where to look. Where do you think he'd take them? … He's from Harrodsburg originally, right? Is there … Well, where else do you think? … He wouldn't come to you, would he? … Okay. Yeah. I understand. Let me give you my number. I'm trying not to call the police, hoping to find them first, but …

“No! I don't want to hurt him. Not if I can help it. … So you think he's that unstable? … Yeah, I wondered about Korea. You could see that whenever the topic came up he … Yes, I understand. Do you remember his license plate number? And the model and color of his car? It's red, right? … Thanks. Yeah. Maybe that'll help.”

Alan wrote down the number and description as he said, “She doesn't have any idea!” He threw the pen on the desk and raked his hands through his hair, then gripped both sides of his skull. “Maybe I
should
call Earl. He could put out an all-points bulletin, although—”

The phone rang, and Alan grabbed the receiver. “Yes? … Great! … Do you know where it is?” Alan wrote for half a minute, then said, “Thanks. I'll let you know what happens,” and dropped the receiver in the cradle. “Frannie. She said Butch had a friend he knew in Korea who was from Harrodsburg, who has an old houseboat docked south of here on the Kentucky River. She said since she left Butch, he's talked about going there for the first time in years, though why she doesn't know. But if he wanted to hide Jo somewhere, that might make sense.”

“Does Frannie know where it's docked?”