“You promised me.”
Her brow furrowed as an irritated note crept into her voice. “I’m not going to break that promise. Another thing I’m not going to do, young man, is bury the most important scientific happening of the decade. Now I want you to trust me, okay? I know you’re a little scared right now, but you’ll see. Everything is going to be fine. We’re going to have a picnic and then you are going to show me a very old hiding place of yours. Please trust me, Andy. I know best.”
Andy sat in sullen silence for a few minutes then looked into the back of the car. Ellen had loaded the back seat of her sedan with pillows and blankets in case he wanted to nap while they drove. There were two bags of groceries, as well. The boy looked at Ellen and noted that she didn’t use her seatbelt. Andy settled into his seat, reached to the door, and snapped his seatbelt in place. There was time.
As they left the limits of the city, Ellen Draper finally broke the frosty silence. “Andy, do you know where we are?” She nodded toward the crowded four lane highway upon which they were driving.
He adjusted his seatbelt so it wouldn’t rub against his neck. “Beaman Road,” he answered. “It goes through Harrison and Grange Corners, then it goes to two lanes, twists up through the park and ends at the expressway outside Watertown.” He looked at her and she was biting at the skin on her lower lip.
Andy sat back and let his gaze play among the hills, trees, and wildflowers while the thoughts in his head sped from one dark corner to the next. He knew the park. He remembered a traffic rotary and a tourist information center, closed for the season. On the other side of the small wooden building was a parking lot. There was a playground next to the parking lot. Sand boxes, swings, monkey bars, slides, teeter-totters, and the whirl-around. His senses swam as the years fell away.
There weren’t many people there that winter twelve years ago. The ground was frozen but there was no snow. The air was bitter. There was only a woman leaning against a station wagon. She was chain smoking cigarettes.
A child.
Little boy. There was a child in the back of the station wagon. Four years old; perhaps five. “Can I get out? Can I get out and play? Can I please? Please!”
“Oh, all right!” she snapped as she tossed away her cigarette and yanked open the tailgate. “Stay close to the car and keep your voice down.”
The little boy climbed down from the back of the station wagon and ran to the whirl-around.
Billy watched from the edge of the trees. The little boy looked happy on the whirl-around. Twice he squealed with glee. The second time he squealed, the woman lit another cigarette, looked at her watch, and said, “That’s enough. Get back to the car. We have to go.”
“No!” protested the boy.
The woman went to the whirl-around, grabbed one of the handles, and pulled the turntable to a halt. She slapped the boy’s face and dragged him to the car. Lifting him up, she threw him in the rear and slammed shut the tailgate.
“I do you a favor and look how you pay me back! Stop that damned crying,” she commanded. The boy continued crying and Billy Stark felt his own throat closing with rage, his jaw muscles straining. “Do you want me to give you something to cry about?” Reaching through the open rear window, the woman slapped the little boy. Once, twice, three times.
Then Billy moved from his hiding place.
Andy looked down at his hands. There were no scars, no blood, no signs pointing to what they had done. They were new hands. Every cell in them was new. He was a new person. He wanted nothing to do with Billy Stark, and Billy wanted the same.
“I know where the woman is hidden,” he said. Then he told Ellen about the woman, the crying boy, and the station wagon, how he had carried the woman into the woods, down to the bottom of the gorge. It was steep, choked with brush and trees. No one ever went down there. Billy went down there, however, because Billy always traveled paths unfamiliar to most persons. He met fewer of them that way. There was the entrance to a tiny cave above the stream at the bottom of the gorge.
When he was down there he lost track of time.
Hours.
Days.
There were no feelings. His heart felt dead. By the time he returned to the parking lot, the station wagon and the boy were gone.
“I remember,” said Ellen. “I was still in college. The TV and newspapers were screaming about it, the kidnapped boy. What was his name? Jimmy something. Jimmy Patrick. His picture was everywhere. He’d been kidnapped, and a few days after the ransom note was delivered, the police found the boy in the park sleeping in a car. The boy never would say what had happened to the woman.” She raised her eyebrows and looked over at Andy.
“Ellen, it’s a long way to the park from here. Is it okay if I go in back and eat something.”
“Of course. Do you like peanut butter and jelly?”
“Yes.”
“Let me pull over.”
“It’s okay,” said Andy. “I’ll just climb over the seat and make myself something.” He unclipped his seatbelt, stood on the seat, and climbed over the back.
Once he was on the back seat, he looked around Ellen’s shoulder and saw that the speedometer read over eighty miles per hour. There were two paper grocery bags in back. In one he found the peanut butter, all fruit jelly, and white bread along with a few other things she had picked up at the store: paper towels, yogurt, dishwashing detergent, toothpaste, dinner candles, a clear bag of plastic eating utensils, a box of animal crackers.. “Is all this stuff for the picnic?”
“When I was at the store I picked up a few things I needed at home.”
“Can I have some animal crackers?”
“Sure. I got those for you. Have an apple juice, too. I got them out of the cooler.”
Andy opened the box, placed a rhino cracker in his mouth, and chewed as he looked into the other bag. Household ammonia in a special bag, parmesan cheese, paper napkins, tomato paste, pasta, aspirin, a small bag of apples, a six-pack of apple juice cartons in a quilted plastic bag, and a newspaper.
Using a plastic knife, he made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and as he was eating it, he took out an apple juice, removed the pointed straw, punctured the carton with it, and took a sip. As he was eating, Ellen said in mock hysteria, “I can’t take it anymore! The smell of that peanut butter is driving me crazy! Could you make me a sandwich?”
“Sure.” He pulled out the peanut butter, opened the jar, and used the same plastic knife he used to make his own sandwich. As he was spreading the peanut butter he took a moment and considered the household ammonia. It left too many unanswered questions. He would have to stick with the animal crackers. Lifting the wax paper liner full of animal crackers from the tiny box, he placed it on the floor of the car. On Ellen’s sandwich, he put the peanut butter extra heavy with only a thin layer of jelly. As he stood to hand it to Ellen, he stepped on the liner full of crackers, crushing the contents.
While Ellen ate and Andy finished his apple juice, the boy refolded the three blankets, one atop another, on the back seat so that they exactly fit the width of the seat, but only half its depth. There were several throw pillows, and he placed one of them on the seat next to the right hand door. Another he placed flat on the floor next to the right hand door, and a third he put on the floor leaning against the right hand door. The last pillow he put on the floor leaning up against the back of the passenger seat.
When they reached the end of the four lane part of Beaman Road, the traffic seemed to triple and Ellen pressed on the accelerator and began passing the cars in front of her, weaving in and out of the other lane, dodging the trucks and cars coming the other way. One trucker gave his air horn an angry blast as he hit his brakes to avoid hitting her.