The Boy from the Woods(28)

Whoa. Pay dirt.

Naomi had been researching her classmates. There were six, maybe seven of them, but two names stuck out right away. One was Matthew’s. The other was Crash Maynard’s. The searches on Matthew—as well as his other classmates—were surface and quick. Did this mean anything? Or did teens Google each other all the time? You meet someone, you search online about them. Of course, Naomi had known these kids forever. She had grown up with them, gone to school with them, been a victim of their taunts and blows.

So why now?

He skimmed down through the rest of her Google searches. Nothing much stood out, except for an odd two-word search followed by an odd three-word search:

challenge game

challenge game missing

He focused on the added word: Missing.

He clicked through the links. As he started reading, his heart sank. He was midway through the pages when he heard a noise that startled him.

Footsteps.

Not close. Not coming up toward him. That was what was odd. There was only one person in the house. The father. Bernard Pine. He was in the kitchen. But these steps weren’t coming from the kitchen. In fact, now that he thought about it, he had not heard a sound coming from downstairs the entire time he had been up here.

The footsteps were faint. They were coming from inside the house, but…

Wilde closed down the browser and slipped across the room and into the corridor. He looked down the stairs. The footsteps were louder. Wilde could hear a voice now. Sounded like Bernard Pine. Who was he talking to? Wilde couldn’t make out the words. He crept closer to the top of the stairs so he could hear better.

The door beneath the stairs flew open.

The basement door.

Wilde jumped back. The voice was clear now, easy to understand.

“It was on the goddamn news! That woman was here too. What do you mean, who? That lawyer from TV, the one who did the report.”

Bernard Pine closed the basement door behind him.

“The cops just came. Yes, the chief, Carmichael, he knocked on the door. They’re probably still…” Wilde had his back pressed against the wall, but he risked a look. Bernard Pine had his mobile phone in one hand. With the other, he pushed aside a curtain and looked out into his front yard.

“I don’t see them right now, no. But I can’t…I mean, Carmichael might be right down the block, watching. There were news vans here too.…We are probably being watched.”

We? Wilde thought.

Unless Pine considered himself royalty, “we” meant more than one person. Except that Wilde had cased the house. He had only spotted one person. Bernard Pine. If someone else was here, there was only one place that person could be.

The basement.

“Yeah, Larry, I know you told me not to do this, but I didn’t think I had a choice. I don’t want to get caught. That’s the big thing now.”

Pine hurried up toward the stairwell where Wilde stood on the landing. He was hustling now, jumping the steps two at a time. Relying on reflexes, Wilde dove back into Naomi’s bedroom and rolled toward a corner. Pine passed him on the landing without glancing into his daughter’s room.

The basement, Wilde thought.

He didn’t wait long. The moment Pine was past the door and in his own bedroom, Wilde came out. Moving on the balls of his feet—not the toes, the toes made noise—he padded down the steps. He spun to his right and came to the basement door. He tried the knob. It turned.

He opened the basement door silently, stepped inside, closed it behind him.

There was a faint light below him. Wilde had two choices here. Choice One: Tiptoe down the steps and sneak slowly toward whatever was to be found. Choice Two: Go for it.

Wilde went for Choice Two.

He took off his mask and strolled down the cellar stairs. He didn’t disguise it. He didn’t hurry nor did he dawdle. When Wilde arrived at the bottom, he turned toward the light.

Naomi opened her mouth.

“Don’t scream,” Wilde said to her. “I’m here to help you.”





CHAPTER

ELEVEN



The basement had been finished on the cheap. The walls were faux wood made of some kind of vinyl, stuck up on the concrete with adhesive. The sofa was a hand-me-down convertible that was right now open into a queen-sized bed.

It was blanketed with stuffed animals.

Naomi Pine sat on the sofa’s armrest, her shoulders slumped, her eyes down, so that her hair hung in front of her face like a beaded curtain. She wasn’t skinny, which in today’s world was to say she was probably overweight, but Wilde didn’t really know. She was neither pretty nor ugly, and while her looks should be irrelevant, they weren’t, not in the real world and especially not in the teen world. So he looked at her, at her whole being, and it stirred his heart. In truth, if he could be totally objective and maybe it was the history of the situation talking, Naomi Pine looked, above all else, like an easy target. That was indeed the vibe. Some people look smart or dumb or strong or cruel or weak or brave or whatever. Naomi looked like she was always in mid-cringe, as though she were asking the world not to hit her, and that just made the world sneer in her face.

“I know you,” Naomi said. “You’re the boy from the woods.”

Not exactly accurate. Or maybe it was.

“Your name is Wilde, right?”