Eerie (23 page)

“I don’t understand what’s happening.”

“Me either.”

“So what now?”

“I put this thing in the car and start driving.”

Paige released her death-grip on the railing. She wiped her eyes. Her shoulders relaxed.

She went to the rack and grabbed her jacket—a charcoal gray peacoat with wooden toggles.

“We can take my car,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“I’ll drive. You navigate.”

“Paige, this is my thing now. My burden. You’ve carried it long enough. You don’t have to come.”

She put the coat on over her plaid pajamas, stepped into a pair of black Uggs.

“We’ve had enough of leaving each other, don’t you think?”

• • •

Excluding two brief excursions that had nearly killed him, it had been almost a day and a half since Grant had been outside, and the feeling of moving down the steps without an onslaught of debilitating pain bordered on surreal. Like walking out of prison. He didn’t entirely trust it, still half-expecting the blinding migraine to T-bone him at any moment.

The rain was torrential, huge drops smacking the flagstones beneath Grant’s and Paige’s feet as they headed toward the sidewalk.

“Where’d you park?” Grant yelled over the rain.

“Around the corner.”

They walked up the sidewalk, Grant holding the blanket tightly in his arms, grateful for the warmth.

Turning the corner, they moved alongside the wrought-iron fence.

Paige reached into her pocket.

Up ahead, the car alarm on a black CR-V chirped. Paige jogged ahead and opened the curbside rear passenger door.

Grant ducked in.

She shut him inside.

The car smelled new.

Rain pounding the roof and the windshield.

Paige climbed in behind the wheel, cranked the engine.

“Five-twenty,” Grant said.

“Across Lake Washington?”

“Yep.”

“That’s toward Kirkland. Toward Dad.”

“I know.”

Paige buckled herself in and put the car into gear. Pulled out of the parking space. There was no one on the street—pedestrian or vehicle. They cruised past rows of streetlamps, rain pouring through the spheres of light.

He blinked and Paige was accelerating up the I-5 onramp, merging onto the empty interstate.

He lost time again.

Falling inward.

Then they were several miles down the road, alone on 520, barreling east across the floating bridge as the toll cameras flashed blue above them.

Grant felt intensely purposeful. As zoned-out and deep as if he were under the influence of a psychotropic drug, and yet still in control of his faculties. The strangest paradox—complete self-ownership but on a new plain of awareness.

As if all his life had been leading toward this moment.

He didn’t speak.

Didn’t think.

Just clutched the blanket to his chest—was this what it felt like to bring your newborn son home from the hospital?—and watched the sleeping city out his window.

• • •

“Grant.”

He returned to the moment.

Lake Washington still out the window.

Paige was reaching into the backseat, her phone lighting up in her hand.

She said, “It’s Sophie.”

He took the phone.

“Hello?”

“Grant?”

“Are you with my father?”

“They took him.” Sophie was crying—he could hear it in her voice.

“Is he alive?” Grant asked.

“I couldn’t … stop it … from happening.”

“Is he alive?”

“I don’t know.” She was becoming hysterical. He could barely understand her. “I’ll find him, Grant. I swear to you.”

“I know you did everything you could. I don’t blame you for anything.”

“Are you and Paige okay?”

“I have to go now.”

“Grant, what’s wrong? Are you still at the house? Did something happen?
Grant?
”

He powered off the phone.

Paige said, “What happened?”

“They took Dad.”

“Who? My clients?”

“Sophie lost them. They got away.”

Paige began to hyperventilate.

“I need you to calm down,” Grant said. “You have to get us there safely.”

“Explain to me what happened.”

“I don’t fully understand.”

“Then call her back!”

“It doesn’t matter, Paige.”

“They took our father!”

“Are you still okay to drive me?”

Page relaxed her grip on the steering wheel.

“Yeah.”

She settled back into her seat.

“I’m trusting you, Grant.”

“Thank you.”

“I need to know that you know how this is going to end.”

“I don’t.”

“Then what are you trusting?”

Chapter 40

The sky over the gas station parking lot where Sophie sat with the engine cooling was just beginning to brighten into a flat gray. She ended her fourth and final call to Paige’s cell and let her head fall back against the headrest. Like every other attempt, straight to voice mail.

—Where are you? An APB went out half an hour ago, and a van fitting the description was just spotted in Bothell. I’m on my way. Call me.

—Almost to Bothell. Call me.

—I’m pulling into the gas station where the van was spotted. Where are you?

She had gotten the clerk inside to replay the footage—
van pulls up to the pump, glare on the windshield too severe to ID who’s at the wheel, but Vincent—unmistakable—exits from the sliding passenger door five seconds later. He walks around the hood of the van and stops in front of the pump where he digs a card out of his wallet and feeds it to the machine. Three unbearable minutes of waiting while he gasses up, the man staring dead into the camera the entire time. Finally, he caps the tank, returns the nozzle, and climbs inside. A few seconds later, the van rolls out of frame.

From the angle of the camera, it was impossible to tell which direction they had turned as the van left the parking lot, and no amount of coaxing could jog the cashier’s memory.

Sophie had spent the next forty-five minutes canvassing the area, checking motel parking lots, restaurants, and drive-thrus, her strategy ultimately disintegrating into blind Hail Mary turns down empty side streets.

She’d finally pulled back into the gas station and parked in the spot where she now sat, staring up at the ceiling of her car as if someone had scrawled the answers there.

Sophie shut her eyes.

The rain had tapered off into drizzle again, padding softly against the windshield.

Her phone rang beside her in her passenger seat.

She grabbed it.

Not Grant.

Officer Silver.

She answered, “Hey, Bobby.”

“I’m just leaving the brownstone in Queen Anne.”

“And?”

“Nobody home.”

Sophie’s heart lurched.

“You’re sure?”

“Empty as the warm, comfy spot beside my wife where I was soundly sleeping thirty minutes ago.”

“Did you go inside?”

“No. Just banged on the front door and then peered through the windows. Lights are on downstairs but it’s a ghost town.”

Sophie exhaled.

“Thanks, Bobby. I owe you big time for tonight. Apologize to Lynette for me.”

For a long beat, all she could hear was the acceleration of Bobby’s engine bleeding through the speaker.

She said, “You there, Bobby?”

“You know I got your back, right?”

“I know that.”

“There anything you want to tell me?”

She could feel the corners of her mouth beginning to quiver, her eyes blurring with tears. In this moment, there was nothing she wanted more in the world than to tell everything.

“Sophie?”

She squeezed the phone.

Steadied her voice as best she could.

“Everything’s fine. Go home, Bobby.”

The frequency of passing cars was increasing—early commuters heading toward the interstate to beat the rush into Seattle.

It felt like years since she’d seen her last clear day, one of those rare cloudless beauties when every horizon looms with mountains and the Puget sparkles and Rainier threatens to the south like the badass stratovolcano that it is.

What had she really seen,
really
experienced in Paige’s brownstone?

Grant had told her some whacked-out things. He’d certainly acted crazy.

But …

What had she
actually experienced
that verified a goddamn thing?

A bad dream and a power surge.

That was it.

Hadn’t seen any creepy twin girls who wanted to play forever.

No one crawling across the ceiling.

There had been the phone video from Paige’s room, but it was just that. A video.

So let’s talk about what you did see. Something you could actually write down in a report that wouldn’t get you laughed at and fired …

—Her partner had lied to her repeatedly about his whereabouts and absence.

—When she finally found him, Grant had overpowered her, taken her gun, cuffed her to a banister.

—She’d been held against her will in what was for all intents and purposes a modern-day bordello.

—A good man had died violently more than thirty hours ago in a bathroom upstairs, and her partner, as of yet, had failed to report his death, even to his wife.

—And when the shit really hit the fan with Art and their father at the asylum, brother and sister had vanished.

Yes, things had felt off inside the house, but now, with a little distance and perspective, the cold, dispassionate facts were rising out of the mire. And when it came time to sort things out—the actions of Paige’s clients, of Paige and Grant themselves, the death of Don—it was only those facts that would matter.

You covered for them, Sophie.

Lied for them.

And maybe she would’ve continued to. Maybe she would’ve extended her partner’s credit just a little longer, given him a chance to sort things out … but for Don.

Don overshadowed all.

Because when you stripped everything away, the simple fact of the matter was that a good man was dead. And his memory, his wife, deserved an accounting.

She scrolled through contacts.

Sorry, Grant.

Pressed dial.

It only rang once, and the voice of the woman who answered sounded a far cry from the person Sophie knew.

All she said was, “Hello?” but it carried the ragged weariness of a soul in torment.

“Rachel?”

“Yes?”

“This is Sophie Benington.”

“Are you calling about Don?”

Sophie could feel the tears coming, the emotion dislodging in the center of her chest like a giant piece of ice calving off from her berg of grief.

“I’m afraid I am.”

Chapter 41

Dawn.

They were in the clouds, moving along wet pavement, the fir trees rushing past.

Occasionally, he glimpsed a mountain—dark, wet rock, swaths of snow across the higher terrain.

There was no more rain, only mist, but it was thick enough at this elevation to keep the windshield wipers in perpetual motion.

Grant swallowed.

His ears popped.

The engine groaned, the CR-V struggling up the steepest pitch of road so far, the double yellow winding endlessly ahead of them.

His right hand was inside the blanket, as it had been for the last hour, a tiny, warm appendage gripping his pinkie finger. He stared out the window. Saw everything and nothing. A kind of dual consciousness.

All up the mountainsides, the clouds were catching in the branches of the dark, epic trees. Their sharp, clean scent so strong he could smell them through the glass.

Paige watched him in the rearview mirror. He could feel her stare. The intensity of it.

He said, “We’re almost there.”

She said, “I know.”

• • •

They turned off of Highway 2.

A gravel road shot ahead through the forest, badly overgrown, but still navigable.

Just ahead, recent tire marks made paths through the undergrowth that peaked up through the loose rock.

They rolled slowly between giant hemlocks, the CR-V tilting and swaying across the uneven ground.

Grant could feel the blanket growing hotter, the shuddering intensifying, its grip around his finger tightening.

It was a minute past six a.m.

In the narrow corridor below the trees, Paige had punched on the high beams.

After a quarter of a mile, they broke out of the forest.

He had come here once since that last family vacation when it had been the four of them. Several years ago, a case had taken him out to Nason Creek, and he’d stopped by the old homestead; driven in as far as the clearing, but he’d never shut the car off, never even gotten out. Just sat in his Crown Vic for five minutes, hands clenched around the steering wheel, knuckles blanching, as if he could steel himself against the storm he’d been fighting all of his life.

So much pain caught. So much joy missed.

And there was no better embodiment than this decrepit place.

The cabin stood in the middle of a small clearing that had become considerably less clear in the years since his last visit.

It was a log-frame house, single story, with a steeply-sloping roof of rusted tin.

The front porch was covered, and even though the light was bad, Grant could make out Vincent, Talbert, and Grazer sitting in the rocking chairs.

Paige pulled into the grass beside the black van and cut the engine.

“Are we safe?” Paige asked.

“Why don’t you wait in the car for a minute,” Grant said.

He opened the door and stepped out.

It was freezing, the forest dripping, everything wet.

The hemlocks leaned in above them.

Their smell like a time machine.

He saw Paige—a little girl—running across the sunlit clearing on a summer day. Their mother reading on the porch. His father chopping wood. Their own private oasis.

The smell of Talbert’s cigarette dragged him back to this cold, gray morning.

Grant moved through the waist-high weeds and stopped at the foot of the steps.