Dreamland(46)

“I want to see it when we get back to the house, okay? Will you show me?”

He nodded again, lost in his own little adventure, and Beverly flashed on the hours she’d spent coloring with him in the months before she decided to leave. She’d never been one of those parents who thought that everything their child did showed how gifted they were, but Tommie got pretty good at staying between the lines, which she couldn’t help but find impressive. She also taught him the basics of printing so that by the time he’d begun kindergarten, he was able to write his own name—and other words—without her help.

She should have bought coloring books and crayons when she went to town earlier. It would help with his adjustment to their new life, and she knew he needed that. His dream last night revealed that in his own childlike way, he was as stressed as she was. She hated that he missed his father, hated that he probably didn’t understand why they’d needed to escape in the first place. She wondered how many weeks or months would pass before he realized that from now on it was just the two of them.

They stayed at the small creek for another half hour. In that time, Tommie caught eight tadpoles. All of them were in the jar, alien-like with their odd wiggling bodies. Beverly put the lid on, watching as Tommie put on his socks and shoes. She’d taught him to tie his shoes the year before, though the loops were far from straight.

Tommie carried the jar as they wandered back, his eyes on the tadpoles as he walked beside her. They were rounding the ramshackle barn when Beverly absently glanced toward the house and saw a dirty old pickup truck parked in the driveway.

She blinked, making sure that her mind wasn’t playing tricks on her, her heart suddenly slamming in her chest when she understood that what she was seeing was real. Taking Tommie’s hand, she backed up, keeping the barn between her and the house, her heart continuing to pound.

“What’s wrong?” Tommie asked. “Why are we stopping?”

“I think I lost my bracelet,” she improvised, knowing she hadn’t even brought a bracelet with her when she and Tommie escaped. “I must have left it at the creek, so let’s go check, okay?”

Her legs were wobbly as she led Tommie back to where they’d started. In her mind’s eye, she could still see the pickup truck in the driveway. Who had come to the house, and why? She tried to slow her racing thoughts, aware that Tommie was watching her.

It wasn’t the police or the sheriff, not in a pickup truck like that.

It wasn’t a black SUV with tinted windows.

Nor had she seen a group of men swarming over the property. If they were Gary’s men, they would be wearing suits and sunglasses and have short-cropped hair, so who else could it be? She kept trying to think, but ideas became jumbled until she took a long deep breath, which seemed to help. “Think,” she muttered. “Think.”

“Mom?”

She heard Tommie but didn’t respond. Instead, she tried to but couldn’t remember if the owner of the house had been driving a truck—she hadn’t paid enough attention. But why would the owner come to the house? To check on how she was settling in? Because there was paperwork she’d forgotten? Or maybe she’d sent a handyman over to fix something—hadn’t the woman told her she worked with a handyman, or had Beverly imagined that?

Was that who it had been? The handyman? Would he come over even if she hadn’t contacted the owner to have something repaired? Or was it someone equally innocuous, like a salesman or a person who needed directions?

Questions, questions circling her mind, without answers.

At the creek, she let go of Tommie’s hand. Her palms were sweating. She felt almost faint, like she was about to pass out.

“I wonder if I left it where I was sitting,” she said to Tommie. “Can you check? I’ll look over here.”

She bent low, trying to stay out of sight, and realized she could still see the rear bumper of the old dirty pickup truck in the distant driveway, beyond the thick foliage of the dogwood trees. But she had to fake it, had to pretend to search for her bracelet, so that Tommie wouldn’t become frightened. She had to act the part like a performer onstage, even as the word truck began to flash in her mind like a strobe light, along with the obvious questions. The truck, the truck, the old dirty truck! Who was it? Why had he come?

If it was one of Gary’s henchmen, he wouldn’t be content to simply knock at the door. He would go inside and search. He’d see a small backpack slung over the kitchen chair. He’d see the plate with sandwich crumbs and a glass with milk residue in the sink, but what would that tell him other than that someone had been there? He’d have to venture upstairs, to their rooms, but since they’d brought almost nothing with them and the closets were filled with other people’s clothes, there was nothing he would be able to trace back to either Beverly or Tommie…

Except…

She froze at the thought of Go, Dog. Go!, Tommie’s favorite book, along with the Iron Man action figure.

Both were on the nightstand. If the man so much as peeked in the room—and it had to be a man, Beverly decided—he would no doubt find them, but the question was whether Gary would have noticed she’d taken them.

She wondered if the man was in the house now. Wondered if there was more than one man opening drawers and checking the refrigerator and hunting for books like Go, Dog. Go! and Iron Man action figures. She wondered if he wore black leather gloves and if he had a gun beneath his jacket while another equally dangerous man kept a lookout. She wondered whether he would wait for her or decide to search for her, and as she scanned the pasturelands beyond the creek, she knew there was nowhere to hide.