He’d returned from the dead once before. He never planned on hurting his family that badly again.
Sandy was pregnant.
He should do something.
As thoughts went, Sandy’s pregnancy was a curious one. It floated right above him. Something he could state, something he could repeat, and yet the three words refused to sound like English.
Sandy was pregnant.
He should do something.
The police were gone. They had wrapped up their party a little after one A.M. The computer was gone. His iPod, Ree’s Leapster. Some boxes had disappeared from the basement as well, probably cartons of old software. He didn’t know. He didn’t care. He’d signed the evidence logs where they had told him to sign, and none of it had made a bit of difference to him.
He wondered if the baby was his.
He would take Ree and run, he thought idly. There was a thin metal box up in the attic, tucked behind a thick piece of insulation, which contained two pieces of fake ID and approximately twenty-five thousand dollars in large bills. The pile of cash was surprisingly small, the metal lockbox no bigger than a hardcover novel. He knew the police couldn’t have discovered it during their search, because it was the kind of find that would have immediately engendered conversation.
He would climb the stairs to the attic, retrieve the box, slip it into his computer case. He would rouse Ree from her bed, shear her long brown curls, and top them with a red baseball cap. Throw on a pair of denim overalls and a blue polo shirt and she would make an excellent Charlie, traveling alone with her freshly shaved father.
They’d have to sneak out the back to avoid the press. Climb over the fence. He’d find a car a few blocks away and hotwire a ride. The police would expect them to hit South Station, so instead he’d drive them to the Amtrak station on 128. There, he’d park the first stolen car, and help himself to a second. The police would eye all trains going south, because that’s what people did, right? They headed south, maybe into New York, where it was easy for anyone to get lost.
Ergo, he’d drive the second stolen vehicle due north, all the way to Canada. He’d stick “Charlie” in the trunk and don a sports jacket and thick, black-rimmed glasses. Just another businessman crossing the border for Lasik. The border patrol was used to such things.
Then, once he and Ree hit Canada, they would disappear. It was a huge country, lots of land and deep green woods. They could find a small town and start over again. Far away from Max. Far away from the suspicions of the Boston police.
Ree could pick a new name. He’d get a job, maybe at the general store.
They could make it for years. As long as he never got back on a computer.
Sandy was pregnant.
He should do something.
He didn’t know what.
Upon further contemplation, he couldn’t run. Not yet. He needed to save Ree. It would always come down to Ree. But he wanted, he needed, to know what had happened to Sandy. And he wanted, he needed, to know about the baby. He felt that in the past forty-eight hours, fate had taken his legs right out from under him. And now, perversely, it was dangling a carrot.
He might be a father.
Or Sandy really did hate him after all.
If he couldn’t run, then he needed a computer. Actually, he needed his computer and he needed to understand just what Sandy had done. How much had thirteen-year-old Ethan taught her?
Best he knew, the family computer was still safely stashed at the offices of the Boston Daily. But how to retrieve it? He could drag Ree with him over to the offices. Police would shadow him this time, and probably two or three reporters as well. His mere presence would make them suspicious. What kind of grieving husband woke his kid in the middle of the night to go to work two nights in a row?
If the police grew suspicious enough, they might check out the computers at the Boston Daily. Particularly if Ethan Hastings kept talking to them. How much had Sandy found? What pieces had she put together without ever confronting him on the subject? She should’ve been angry. Furious. Frightened.
But she had never said a word.
Had she taken a lover by then? Is that what this came down to? She’d found a lover, and then, once she’d stumbled upon the computer files, made her decision to leave Jason. Except then she’d discovered she was pregnant. His? The other man’s? Maybe she’d tried to break it off with her lover. Maybe that had made the other man angry, and he’d taken steps.
Or maybe, on Wednesday night, armed with her newfound training from Ethan Hastings, Sandy had discovered Jason’s computer files. At that moment, she’d realized she was carrying a monster’s child. So she’d… what? Fled into the night without even her wallet or a change of clothes? Decided to save one child by abandoning the other?
It didn’t make any sense.
Which brought him back to the only other new man he knew of in Sandy’s life-Ethan Hastings. Perhaps the boy had assumed a more intimate relationship with Sandy. Perhaps she’d tried to tell him he was mistaken. Given all the hours he’d spent with her, trying to help her outwit her own husband, Ethan had taken this personally. So he’d come to the house in the middle of the night and…
The youngest killer in America had been sentenced for a double homicide at the tender age of twelve, so as far as Jason was concerned, Ethan Hastings met the age requirement for possible homicidal maniac. The logistics of murder, however, seemed complicated. How would a thirteen-year-old boy get to Jason’s house? Ride his bike? Walk? And how would a kid as scrawny as Ethan Hastings dispose of a grown woman’s body? Drag her out by her hair? Fling her over his handlebars?
Jason sat down at the kitchen counter, his head spinning. He was tired. Bone-deep weary. These were the moments he had to be careful. Because his thoughts might wander, and he’d suddenly find himself in a room that always smelled like fresh-turned earth and decaying fall leaves. He would feel the whisper of hundreds of spider-webs brushing across his cheeks and hair. Then he would see the quick scrabble of one fat hairy body, or two or three, dashing across his tennis shoe, or down his pant leg, or across his shoulder, frantically looking for escape.
Because you had to escape. There were things in the dark much worse than shy, panic-stricken spiders.
He wanted to think of Janie. The way she and she alone had welcomed him home with a huge hug. He wanted to remember how it had been sitting on the floor beside her, dutifully drawing unicorns while she prattled away on the importance of the color purple, or why she wanted to live in a castle when she grew up.
He wanted to remember the look on her twelfth birthday, when he had saved all his money to take her horseback riding for the day, because they weren’t the kind of family that could ever afford a pony.
And he wanted to believe that the morning of his eighteenth birthday, when she had woken up and discovered his room once again empty, that she hadn’t cried, that she hadn’t missed him. That he hadn’t broken his little sister’s heart all over again.
Because he was getting an education these days. He was learning that to be the family of the missing person was in its own way just as terrible as being the missing person. He was learning that living with so many questions was harder than being the person who had all the answers.
And he was learning that deep in his heart, he was terrified that the Burgerman was still alive and well. Somehow, some way, the monster from Jason’s youth had returned to take his family from him.
Jason paced for another ten minutes. Or maybe it was twenty or thirty. Clock was ticking, each minute inching toward another morning without his wife.
Max would return.
The police as well.
And more press. Cable news shows now. The likes of Greta Van Susteren and Nancy Grace. They would apply their own kind of pressure. A beautiful wife missing for days. The dark mysterious husband with a shady past. They’d crack open his life for the world to see. And somewhere in Georgia, some people would connect some dots and place phone calls of their own…