And There He Kept Her (Ben Packard #1)(26)

“Jenny,” she said louder.

“Mmm,” he said. He left her and locked the door. She cried out for him to come back, to please leave a light. He ignored her.

Jenny, he thought as he slowly climbed the stairs back to the kitchen. The first time she said it, it sounded like she’d said Jeannie.

Wouldn’t that have been the goddamndest thing?

***

He came back hours later, after he took more pills and nodded off in front of the TV. When he woke, he made himself a lunch of frozen garlic cheese bread that he ate with six hot dogs cut up into jarred spaghetti sauce and microwaved.

The girl needed to eat. They always needed to eat. The reality of meals and trips to the bathroom hadn’t figured into his plans when he built the room. A genie in a bottle was supposed to take care of her own needs. Even Myra had gone to the trouble of hiding her bathroom habits from him through their whole marriage.

He microwaved a breakfast sandwich in a plastic wrapper and took it downstairs with the last of the hot dogs and spaghetti sauce scraped into a coffee mug. He waited while she struggled to sit up and keep herself covered with the blanket, then handed her the food. While she ate, he found a lamp and an extension cord to bring more light into the room. He watched her use her good hand to take apart the sandwich in her lap and pick at the egg and sausage.

“You flipped over the mattress.”

She nodded and set aside the plastic wrapper and biscuit halves. “What’s this?” she asked about the coffee mug.

“Hot dogs in spaghetti sauce.”

She looked at him in disbelief, then flinched as the pain hit her again.

“I forgot a fork. Use your fingers.”

She smelled it, picked out a piece of hot dog with her good hand, then set the mug aside. “How long are you going to keep me here?”

“As long as I want.”

“I’m going to need insulin.”

“How much is in your thing?”

The girl pinned the blanket under her chin while she rooted under it for her device. “It’s almost half gone.”

“When will it run out?”

“Maybe two more days.”

“Then what?”

“If I don’t have insulin, I’ll go into a coma and die,” she said.

“You sound like a problem that’s going to take care of itself,” he said.

She stared at him in horror as he took away the remains of her meal. He avoided her eyes. She broke into your house, he reminded himself. Not just the boy. Both of them.

He filled her beer can again with water from the bathroom sink. When he came back, she was crying. “Please don’t let me die in here,” she pleaded. “I’m sorry we broke into your house. It was wrong. Jesse already paid with his life,” she sobbed. “This shouldn’t be a death sentence for both of us.”

“Drink this.”

He watched her coldly as she drank the water. She was a thief. Here in this room because of her own actions. Why would he do anything for her? Just keeping her fed and watered was work.

“Use the bucket next time you have to go. That’s what it’s for. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

She looked stunned by his indifference. “Can’t you leave the lamp?” she asked as he carried it out.

“No.”

Emmett bolted the door, leaving the girl in darkness. He grabbed a beer and fell heavily into the rocking chair across from the basement door. There were still shards of glass in the window and on the floor from the break-in. The lake was smooth as a mirror, reflecting the dark trees against a pink and gray sky. Emmett lit a cigarette and watched the sun set.

You really going to let that girl die, old man?

Why not? He had no use for a genie—or a Jenny, for that matter—at this point in his life. So far all she’d done was cry, piss the bed, and pick at her food. It was like taking care of a goddamn baby.

Out on the water, a loon made its two-tone wail, asking its mate Where are you? A second later, she responded with her own haunting call. Here I am.

Behind him came the sounds of the chain sliding through the ring and the scrape of the bucket against the floor.





Chapter Nine


The month of May started with snow. Not unusual for Minnesota, not even unexpected, but still an unwelcome reminder of how short the time was from the last snow of spring to the first flakes of fall. Packard stood at the patio door and watched the cotton-ball clumps come down and decided to pass on the swim.

In the basement, he did his winter workout. Burpees, squats, lunges. Hanging from the pull-up bar, he closed his eyes and tried to imagine Jenny and Jesse’s actions the night they snuck out.

Jenny’s standing on the corner in her letter jacket at 1:30 a.m., waiting for Jesse to pull up in his mom’s car. She’s got no phone. The fact they both left their phones behind meant it was intentional. They didn’t want to be tracked or leave a cellular record of where they were going. It was planned and Jenny had agreed to it.

They’d talked on the phone for a long time before this. That could mean the plans weren’t solid. Things were being discussed and debated. Whose idea was this? Jesse’s—because he was driving? Jenny’s—because, whatever it was, she needed or wanted to be there?

It was the night of the supermoon. It started raining hard around 3:30 a.m. They went out of town and stopped somewhere secluded or private. Not in town or a public place, otherwise the car would have been spotted by now. Someone’s house. Someone not expecting them because no one expects visitors at 3:00 a.m. They get out of the car together. Or one of them gets out, followed later by the other one. If one had stayed behind and something happened, he or she could have driven away.