A tear slid from her eye, down her cheek, and disappeared into the knit sweater.
“It hadn’t been a good day. When Denny asked Nicholas to go to the store, he’d already finished a twelve pack. He’d come home from work mad. Another guy at the plastics factory had gotten a promotion Denny wanted. He didn’t eat dinner. Said it tasted like dog food and threw it in the trash. Mine and Nicholas’s food too, plates and all.” She started working the doily again, her fingers pressing and pushing against the fabric.
“I should have taken Nicholas and left. I wanted to. A few times I’d started to say let’s go to a movie to give your dad a few hours alone, but I knew Denny would have gone into a rage.”
Max imagined the man drunk, and getting drunker as his wife searched for any escape for her and her child.
“When he sent Nicholas for the beer, I was relieved. I thought he’d drink until he passed out and everything would be fine. But then Nicholas didn’t come back. It was cold that day. Nicholas had left in his snow boots and winter coat, but he hadn’t taken his gloves. After I went to the store and found out he’d never been there, Denny went nuts. He drove to the arcade and screamed in George Kassum’s face. George is one of Nicholas’s school friends. George looked terrified. No one had seen Nicholas. Denny drove all over town like a maniac, squealing in and out of parking lots, driving a hundred miles an hour on the back roads.” Joan paused and closed her eyes. She put her fingers up to her lips.
“Did you call the police?”
Joan shook her head.
“Not until the next day. I tried and Denny ripped the phone out of the wall. I had to go downstairs and borrow Mr. Shafer’s phone. He’s a vet on disability who lives beneath us. A nice man. He used to give Nicholas bubble gum. The police came out, but honestly, they took one look at our place and wrote me off. We’re poor. My husband’s a drunk. They know him at the station. Denny’s been brought in more than once. They figured Nicholas ran away. They wouldn’t blame him if he did. Neither would I, I guess.”
She tucked her fidgety hands into her lap.
“Do you think he ran away, Joan?” Max asked.
She shook her head.
“What do you think happened?”
She looked up at him, her eyes filled with tears. “I think someone took him,” she whispered.
26
Sid sat cross-legged on Ash’s bed, pulling at the fringes on a pillow. He gazed at Ashley’s backpack slung over the back of the chair at her desk.
The desk was not a usable workspace. It was covered with paperback books, homework, cassette tapes, clothes not yet put away, and a scattering of pictures Ashley insisted she was organizing into a scrapbook despite the book itself never having made an appearance.
The doll lay inside the backpack, and Sid couldn’t shake the feeling it sat in the claustrophobic little pouch, listening to them.
“Why can’t we just call 9-1-1 from a payphone and report an anonymous tip? I mean people do that, right? They can’t tell it’s us from our voices.”
Ashley shook her head. “Sid, you said yourself, your parents would tune you out if you mentioned weird stuff at The Crawford House. They won’t listen. If we don’t do something soon, that monster will get another kid.”
Sid frowned and pulled one of the tassels free.
“Hey,” she snapped, yanking the pillow away. “My Grandma Patty made that for me.”
He looked at the tassel in his hand, shocked. He hadn’t even realized he was pulling on it. “Oh shoot, sorry, Ash. I swear I didn’t mean to.”
“It’s fine,” she said, flinging the pillow across the room where it landed on a papasan chair. “By the time they do anything, it might be too late. We can go during day and set a trap.”
Sid groaned and leaned back on her bed. His head hit the wall with a thump. “This sounds like a terrible idea from a scary movie. We go out there to set a trap, and two days from now our pictures are on the back of milk cartons.”
“It only attacks at night,” she reminded him.
“You don’t know that. Warren went missing during the day.”
“I have a theory about that. I think he messed around in the woods after school. He and Travis were arguing that day. Maybe he didn’t want to go home, so he walked around in the woods. He lives like five miles from school. If he walked home, that would have taken him ages.”
Sid crossed his hands on his stomach and stared at the glow in the dark stars attached to Ashley’s ceiling. He didn’t want to agree. The summer vacation he’d imagined when school let out had been swallowed by Ashley’s growing obsession with the monster in the woods. If left up to Sid, he’d pretend he’d never encountered it. And maybe they hadn’t. It had been so dark that night.
“What if it’s not real, Ash? What if it’s like Travis playing an epic joke on us?”
“Then who killed Simon? And who took Vern, Warren, and Melanie?”
Sid sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. Ashley’s dresser was covered in pictures of her mother and Grandma Patty. Sid had liked Patty too. She had called him Bear because he was Ashley’s best friend, and since she’d nicknamed Ashley Pan when she was a baby, she’d said it was only fitting Sid be Bear like in the Jungle Book.
He liked the nickname Bear; it sounded strong, fierce. It made his size something powerful instead of embarrassing. Unfortunately, he made a better comparison to a teddy bear than the real thing.
“I’ll go with Shane then. Or by myself,” she said.
“With Shane?” Sid scowled, wishing Shane Savage would disappear. “Fine, I’ll go. But how are we going to trap it?”
Ashley picked up a snow globe and shook it.
Sid watched the tiny white flakes drift over a Christmas village.
“I’m not sure, yet. I told Shane we’d meet him at the willow over at Denmore Park. We’ll make a plan there.”
“ARE YOU SERIOUS, MAX?” Jake demanded. “She’s not an abandoned puppy. She’s a grown woman with an abusive husband who’s probably roaming the streets with a shotgun as we speak.”
“He doesn’t have a car,” Max said, knowing his comment would only infuriate Jake.
Jake’s eyes bulged, and he sucked in his cheeks and bit down, his signature trying not to say something he’d regret expression.
“You’ve gotta stop, Max. You’re not the hero, okay? You’re an English teacher at a middle school. You’re playing with fire and you know who’s going to get burned? Mom and Dad. Why would you bring her to their house? Why didn’t you just go to the police?”
Jake was right, but Max’s own anger had arrived at the party, and it wouldn’t be quelled.
“Jake, don’t put your bullshit on me. I get it. You’re stressed having to play domestic dad and all, but the man was ready to cave in her goddamned skull. Would you prefer I left her there to get her brains splattered on the kitchen table?”
“No, Max,” Jake sighed, his anger giving way to disappointment. “I would have preferred you take her to the police and left our parents out of it.”
He said nothing more, but he turned and gazed into the living room, where their parents sat cooing at the baby.
“Hi, Eleanor,” Max grumbled when he noticed her watching from the kitchen.
She gave him a sympathetic smile and a half wave.
Max had taken Joan to a women’s shelter in town after first stopping at the police station so she could file a report against her husband. The officer who took photos of her face seemed busy and distracted, snapping the shots quickly and only half listening as Max and Joan described what had transpired earlier that day.