At the mall, Mike had wanted to blame Libby for losing Trevor, had wanted to scream at her, but now it was his fault. He’d done what he could, but it hadn’t been enough. He’d failed. Trevor was gone because of his inadequacy as a father.
He leaned back on the couch and wiped a tear from his cheek.
He wondered about Trevor and the other boy, if they were safe, if they were still alive. He didn’t want to think those kinds of thoughts but couldn’t help it. Libby had always been good at controlling her thoughts, but he had not. His mind went where it wanted—he simply tagged along. Sometimes he chalked it up to artistic tendencies, but right now he cursed his overdeveloped imagination.
He looked toward the hallway. He didn’t know for sure, but he thought Libby had probably gone to Trevor’s bedroom. They could have sat together and talked, had another cup of tea, but once they’d exhausted their conversation about Trevor, things had gotten a little awkward. Mike hadn’t wanted their conversation to get too deep, too emotional, because he thought it might make her uncomfortable, but you could only go so long on small talk, especially on a night like tonight, when already mundane topics like weather and work seemed all the more unimportant.
He thought about the kidnapper. Why would he take Trevor? He’d asked himself the question a hundred times, and he still had no answers. Had he gotten the wrong kid—meant to get some rich, spoiled brat and taken Mike’s precious Trevor instead? Maybe, although Mike couldn’t imagine anyone coming into this house and thinking they were rich or even well off. It could have been a random act of violence, but that didn’t make sense either. Nothing about the kidnapper had seemed random. He’d come into the house purposefully, come straight to the bedroom and gone after Trevor with only a single attempt to wound Mike. If he’d been after meaningless violence, Mike would have been the more accessible target. Besides, if it had been for the money, they’d have gotten a phone call, and if it had been pure aggression, the guy would have killed both Mike and Trevor on the spot, not taken the boy with him. Something else was going on here, something he didn’t understand.
From the table beside the couch, the phone rang. He’d put it on the charger after the cops left.
He looked at the phone but didn’t move to answer it. What if Deputy Willis had called to tell him they’d found Trevor’s body stuffed into a drainage ditch or spread across the highway? He didn’t know how he would handle that, if he could handle it. Surely, if he heard such a thing, his heart would simply stop beating and he’d drift off to wherever it was dead people went, to wherever Trevor had gone.
He reached for the phone and held it in his hand, not pressing the talk button, watching the fluttering light and trying to hope.
Libby came into the room looking worried and ten years older than normal. She opened her mouth to say something, but before she could, Mike punched the talk button and pressed the receiver to his ear.
“Yes?” he said. “Hello.”
THIRTY-THREE
It had taken Trevor a long time to move across the crawlspace above the ceiling. The yellow stuff (or at least what he hoped was the yellow stuff, what he dared not let himself think might be the cobwebs of giant vampire spiders) kept getting on his face and in his hair and itching him. The ceiling joists sometimes bowed and tilted at crazy angles. He almost slipped a couple of times, and although he didn’t know if he was heavy enough to break through sections of ceiling that didn’t have water damage, he didn’t want to test it.
He crawled in the dark until he thought he’d gotten to the other side of the house, where, if he remembered right and hadn’t gotten himself all turned around, the kitchen was. Once there, he waited, listening for sounds from beneath, for some sign that he’d been caught and that the crazy man was waiting for him to show himself.
The only sounds he heard were his heartbeat and sometimes a creaking board from behind him, which was scary because it sounded like a monster chasing after him but also okay because he knew it was really just the house settling. Houses settled down and made funny sounds sometimes. His daddy had told him all about it.
After repositioning himself so he was straddling one of the boards, his feet splayed and resting on the joists to either side, Trevor felt for the lump inside his chest pocket. Good, he thought, still there.
Holding tight to the board beneath his bottom, he lifted one of his feet and tapped it against the ceiling between the joists, moving by feel alone, everything black blurs on blacker blurs. He’d expected the ceiling to be hard, like rock, but to his surprise, it cracked and gave way easily. Trevor kicked a little harder, and his foot went right through.
The yellow stuff tickled his exposed leg just above his sock, and he heard something clap against the floor in the room below. He pulled his foot out of the hole he’d made and tried to look through it.
He saw nothing below. The hole was gray, lighter than everything else up here, and he saw it all right, but he had no idea which room lay below. If it was a room at all. Maybe he’d kicked his way into a closet or a dead space between rooms. Or maybe Trevor had gotten all mixed up and come back to where he’d started, maybe he was staring down into the windowless room and Zach was just below, staring up, wondering how he could be so unlucky, how he could have gotten stuck with a doofus like Trevor.
No. That didn’t make any sense. There were lights on in the windowless room. Unless Zach had turned the lights off—and Trevor couldn’t think of any reason why he might do such a stupid thing—this was someplace different.
He kicked again, and the gray hole widened. Another chunk of ceiling smacked against the floor below.
Still, no sounds came from the house other than those he was making himself, no cries of Hey, what do you think you’re doing up there? and no blasting guns trying to turn him into Trevor jelly. He wondered if the crazy man had left, or if maybe he wasn’t very good at hearing. He guessed if he hadn’t gotten caught yet, he probably wouldn’t, so he poked his foot through the ceiling again and kicked his leg back and forth until he thought he’d made a hole big enough to fit through. Bits of ceiling rained against the ground, and Trevor felt the dust—and of course the yellow stuff—on his bare leg.
He leaned over and squinted through the darkness.
The kitchen.
A dark and shadowy kitchen, but a kitchen for sure. The half-full package of bread on the counter beside the sink proved that. The refrigerator was right beneath him. Or almost right beneath. Close enough he thought he could swing through the hole and onto the top with only a teensy chance of falling to his death. He held a hand over the phone and leaned closer to the hole.
The refrigerator hummed. On top of that sound was the chirping of crickets, though Trevor didn’t know if he was hearing them through an open door or window, or simply through the roof. He wriggled even closer to the hole and positioned himself for a swing onto the fridge.
His arms wobbled, tired—he supposed all of him was tired, but his arms especially. He poked his tongue from the corner of his mouth and went for the fridge anyway. If he fell, at least he could say he tried.
He swung from the space above the ceiling like a monkey from a tree, his body starting off all squeezed together but ending up fully stretched. His toes slid across the top of the fridge, and he let go of the joist. The escape, the chance for a phone call, his life—although it all could have ended right there, Trevor wound up doubled over on the top of the fridge with one arm dangling over the side and his legs folded against a pair of cabinet doors.