Mother May I(82)

The earth was red with clay, the spring leaves and needles shading everything. He pulled himself up a small, steep incline. It leveled off into a shelf, and when he stood, he found himself in the open.

The garden. It was on a rare level place, the hill rising up again behind it. Over half of it was still skirted by the remains of a low rail fence. Some rails were missing. Other sections had been pulled over or coated by blackberry vines. Just to his left, a rusty gleam of silver caught his eye. An old bale of chicken wire, lying on its side.

His heart was pounding. The hidey-hole must be very, very close. He started across. The sun hit this cleared space directly, so bushes and wildflowers and vines had taken hold. Blackberry and wild-rose thorns snagged at his pants as he pushed through. On the far side, an improbable stand of bright sunflowers towered, off-season, tall, and crazy.

He scanned the hill ahead, and a flash of light pulled his attention. The gleam of heavy glass shining through the trees.

A window. The Dentons’ hidey-hole was right in front of him. He’d practically been looking at it, but only now did the shapes resolve. There was a weathered wall of gray siding built into the hillside. The cabin was narrow and tucked under a rocky overhang, in shadow. It had a heavy door and a single window. It had been built to blend, and as Mrs. Denton had said, the bulk of the house had been dug out from the hill itself.

His heart thumped hard, a booming in his chest. If he was right about anything, then it was this: Robert was here. Robert was fifty feet away, on the other side of that ancient wooden door. He knew it. He felt it. So why did he hesitate?

She wouldn’t bluff about this. She means him harm, Bree had said.

He felt Betsy’s fingers brush the back of his neck in warning, making the small hairs rise. Was someone with Robert after all? Lexie?

He unholstered his .38 and crept parallel to the cabin, moving out of the view from that single filthy window. Then he started forward again, angling his path to approach from the side.

He felt stupid doing it. Lexie wasn’t up here. Coral, who read mysteries and thrillers, would not let Lexie deposit forensic evidence at the scene of a kidnapping. Still, he felt watched. Still, he kept sneaking gingerly toward the window from the side, silent. If Robert was not alone, then it had to be Lexie. Who else would love Coral Lee Pine enough to help her steal a baby? Engineer Spence’s death? Coldly murder a toddler? There wasn’t anybody else.

If he looked through the window and saw Lexie holding the baby, he would have to make a choice. He could put a bullet in her eye, then kick the door down and dig the baby out from underneath her body. Or he could hope she would not have her mother’s ruthlessness and kick the door down first, commanding her to put her hands up, away from Robert’s frail, small neck.

He stepped soft along the wall, crouching, and then peeped up through the window.

There was only sunlight to brighten the dim room, and this single window’s glass was dirty, but the first thing he saw was the shape of the car seat with the small form blanketed snugly inside it. Robert. Alive. Not unhappy. He was stirring from a nap, yawning and stretching, bowing his small spine, eyes shut. Lexie was not there.

The second thing Marshall saw answered all his questions. Who else would help Coral take such a dark revenge? No one but Lexie’s own father. Who was dead. Who had long been dead. And yet. His hand was at work, here, too.

My husband had a good job in construction, Coral had told Bree. She’d been around the sites. Taking him his lunch each day. Mariah Denton had said, He worked demo for years. Marshall had filed that information away; he had not applied it.

The dynamite piled around the car seat was old. Very old. So old it was sweating, and the papery layers had begun peeling away. It must be as unstable as all hell, and there was a lot of it, stacked in a horseshoe around the baby.

Almost too scared to move, Marshall sucked in a shallow breath. He didn’t know shit about explosives. He wondered how much Coral knew. He didn’t see an obvious sleek black box with helpful numbers counting down in bright digital red. Instead he saw wires or cables or perhaps twisted fuses running in lines over and around the heaped dynamite.

Robert’s eyes were open now. He kicked one of his feet out from under the blanket, waving it around. The movement brought his puppy-covered sock quite near the old sweating explosives. Marshall’s mouth went dry.

He shielded his eyes with his hands, peering in, trying to make out details. The cabin was one room with a poured-concrete floor. There was a large camp stove next to a couple of folding chairs and a square table, plus a large, deep metal sink, like the kind in his laundry room. An ancient double bed sagged by the back wall, flanked by a sizable storage cabinet on one side and what looked a chest freezer on the other. That was all.

His gaze was pulled inexorably back to the explosives, his mouth too dry for him to swallow. One of the thick wires or cables ran in a looping coil that disappeared around the back of the pile of dynamite closest to Robert’s head.

What was at the end of that? A timer? A detonator? The baby was looking around now, awake, waving his limbs bare inches from the ancient, sweating stacks. It could all blow any second. If he were dumb enough to kick the door down, it would blow for sure. Even breaking out this window was a huge risk. Jesus.

At the other end of the state, his daughter was packing up her things, getting in the car. He wanted to be there when she got home.

You have a kid. You have our kid. You have no backup.