Near the Bone(76)

“I don’t know. Can you even get angry?”

“I’m sure I can,” Mattie said, stung by the way he dismissed her. “I think I am now.”

He held up his hands. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I have to stop treating you like a regular person, I know. You haven’t had the same life as everyone else. If Jen was awake she’d definitely be beating me about the head and shoulders right now.”

William grabbing her shoulders. William’s fist in her face.

“You shouldn’t joke about things like that,” she said. “I know that you’re trying to be funny so that you don’t think about your friend, but it’s not funny at all.”

C.P. rubbed his face with one hand. “Yeah, you’re right. It’s not funny. I’m sorry. For real. I’m sorry. It’s not like I’m not sitting here looking at your black eye and the marks around your neck. They just kind of faded into the background, and I forgot who I was talking to. Let’s see how much you’ve got there.”

Mattie had forgotten about the money, even though she was holding it in her hand. She was still angry, still felt the bubbling and the boiling at the edge of her consciousness, but she recognized that he was sorry if he said so. He was foolish and awkward and often said the wrong thing, but he was sorry. She handed the money to C.P., who unrolled it.

“Holy crap!” he said. “These are mostly hundreds.”

He started counting the bills, putting the different types into piles. When he was done he looked up at her, his expression dazed.

“There’s $2,517 dollars here,” C.P. said. “Where did he get all of this money? Is he rich?”

“I don’t know,” Mattie said. There was so much she didn’t know about William. There was so much she still didn’t know about herself, huge chunks of her life that were missing, puzzle pieces that had no connector.

“I could buy a train ticket with that, right? And pay for a place to stay?”

“You could buy a plane ticket with that, never mind a train,” C.P. said.

“A plane,” Mattie said. She’d never been on a plane, not even when she was a child. She remembered longing to fly, longing to be so high up in the sky that everyone below was smaller than an ant. “William could never find me if I was in a plane.”

“Don’t you worry,” C.P. said. “That guy is going to be arrested once I can call the police. Your case is really famous, you know? It’s probably not something you want to be famous for, I guess. But you went missing and your mother was killed in a really brutal way—not to be mean about it or anything, I know it’s probably upsetting for you. There was a big search for you. It was on every TV station. And every year on the anniversary of your disappearance there are stories, you know, ‘what happened to Samantha Hunter,’ those kinds of things.”

“Samantha Hunter,” Mattie said. “I forgot that name for a long time. William told me my name was Martha, and he called me Mattie.”

She paused, taking a deep breath before going on. “In all those times that you heard those stories—did they ever say anything about Heather? About my sister, Heather?”

C.P. frowned. “I don’t remember anything about her. They always talk about you and your mom and they always show this same clip from around the time you were taken, of some guy, your mom’s boyfriend talking about . . .”

Realization lit his face. “Your mom’s boyfriend—it was that guy! The guy who kidnapped you! He was talking to reporters, acting like it was such a tragedy, and that he didn’t have any idea what had happened. The police interviewed him, I remember now, and they searched his house and everything but they didn’t find any sign of you and they had to eliminate him as a suspect. What did he do, stash you somewhere while he was off pretending to be worried about finding you?”

“You have to stay here while I’m out,” William said. “I can’t trust you not to run away.”

Mattie looked at the floor, at the small multicolored rug that covered the area behind the couch. There wasn’t a rug anywhere else in the cabin.

“He put me in the Box,” she said.

“The Box?”

“The Box is for bad girls who try to run away,” she said. Her voice sounded very distant to her own ears. “I was always trying to run away at first, and he had to put me in the Box so I would learn how to be good, to listen and to obey.”

She walked toward the rug as if in a dream. C.P. pushed his chair back and followed her. She sensed his uncertainty. He didn’t know what to do or how to respond. Mattie pulled up the rug to reveal a trapdoor in the floor. She tugged the ring to open the door.

Underneath was a wooden, coffin-like structure, narrow and long. It hadn’t been used in many years, and it was dusty inside. The corners had the remnants of spiderwebs and their prey, the shells of dead, desiccated insects.

“He put you inside here?” C.P. sounded like he was going to be sick again. “And left you here?”

“Yes. When I was bad.”

“You weren’t bad. You were a little girl, and you were scared, and you wanted to go home.”

He sounded angry, but Mattie wasn’t afraid of his anger the way she’d been before. It wasn’t anger that could hurt her. She’d gone away again, away to a place where she was safe and she didn’t have to think about the door closing over her head.