ON HADN’T SLEPT WELL. He was worried about Stacey. Still he dragged himself out of bed and into the shower. He’d promised Jeff a half day’s work. He decided to drop by the apartment and get a change of clothes before going in. He did his best to keep from waking the family as he walked down the stairs past the study. Danny sat at the computer, the glare of the screen reflecting on his face.
“What are you doing up?” Don whispered.
“Trying to find out what’s on the disks.”
“Making any headway?”
“I’ve been at it most of the night, and now I think I know why he
destroyed the information. I’ve almost figured it out.”
“You better get some sleep.”
“In awhile.”
“I’m going in to work. Tell Christina I’ll see her about noon.” “Sure.”
The threatened storm from the night before had just arrived. Droplets of rain pelted against his face as he mounted Alan’s ten-speed. The dark, rain-heavy clouds that rolled down the mountainside cooled the valley. Don pushed off down the drive. Up the street sat the sedan that had passed him the night before. The car was empty. Glass littered the asphalt near its back door. There were no clues as to what had happened.
Climbing back on the bike, he rode toward his apartment. The cool moist air seemed to slip right through him as he peddled along.
Arriving, he made a cautious entrance. The wool overcoat and extra clothing Stacey had left were gone. He wondered if his cop friend had spent the night there—after warning him to stay away. Climbing into his work clothes, he grabbed a jacket and headed out. There wasn’t so much as a peep from Melvin.
The light sprinkles had turned to rain, and by the time Don sloshed up to the building—the tires of the bike flicking a rooster-tail of water—he was soaked. He went straight to work, the fine powder sticking to his clothes.
Stacey completed his preparations and lay down for a few hours’ sleep before the expected call from Bingham. In the vacant house deep in the orchard, the new leaves on the trees gave plenty of cover.
With the mountains to his back and the rain on his fur, Sig, too, was content. He wasn’t fond of the bandage Stacey had applied, but still took the opportunity to give his master a wet kiss when he came near to apply the salve. He’d never before experienced a real dog fight. True, he’d chased away some of the neighborhood dogs, but they were nothing like the hulking animal he’d faced in the field. That brute was a trained killer.
Earlier, Stacey had spoken with Agent Buseth, Tovar’s boss. The two of them talked for several moments before detailed instructions were given. The agent had seemed most interested in the fountain pen, as he suspected Bingham would be. Buseth warned Stacey not to underestimate Bingham. He also advised him of the dangerous nature of the pen and its contents. Stacey was left with the impression that as long as he was in possession of the pen, he was calling the shots. To test the theory, he’d warned Buseth that if he tried to locate him from the phone signal, he’d never see the pen. Buseth yielded to the demand. He’d cooperate and wait for further instructions.
Christina forced herself out of bed at seven a.m. Atask of supreme importance was at hand. She fluffed her pillows and arranged them importance was at hand. She fluffed her pillows and arranged them year-old looked like. It just might buy her a little more time. Most of the family stayed in bed later on Saturday mornings.
She’d been careful in choosing the words she spoke to her father the previous night. She’d said, “I won’t go back in that house”—not once mentioning the possibility of searching the shed for more clues. Someone needed to see what was buried in there.
She crept to Danny’s room, but he wasn’t in his bed. Shuffling downstairs, she peeked into the study. Danny was sound asleep on Alan’s desk. “Danny,” she whispered. He didn’t move. She gave him a shake. “Danny!” He stirred ever so slightly. “Come on, we’ve got to go check out the shed.”
Beyond exhaustion, the boy couldn’t open his eyes. Mumbling something about being back by noon, he turned his head and fell back asleep.
“I’ll have to do it by myself,” Christina muttered. “Melvin can’t get away with what he did.”
In the garage she found a small garden shovel and a screwdriver. Feeling the rain, she went back inside for her jacket. Unable to locate it anywhere, she found Jake’s in the laundry room and decided to borrow it. Though much too large, it would keep her dry. Her bike was in the backyard, its tire flat. The only other one was Jake’s. He never uses it anyway, she reasoned. And I’ll be back in just a couple of hours.
Taking caution, she parked the bike behind some bushes down the street from the apartment. Moseying up the sidewalk, she tried to convince herself that her shortness of breath was from peddling the bike. “I’m not afraid,” she chanted over and over under her breath. For a moment, she stood behind the big spruce in the yard next door, watching the house. Nothing was out of the ordinary. Melvin’s orange cat sat meowing on the back step. If she could just make it into the back without being seen, she’d be in the clear!
Glancing both ways, she made a run for it. A bundle of nerves, her foot slipped on the slick concrete and she went down, sprawled across the driveway. The trowel fell from her hand, clattered across the pavement and clanked against the step, out of reach. The cat hissed and bolted for the backyard as Christina struggled to get out of sight. She shuddered, crouching beside the building.
Peeking through a crack running between the shed and the garage, she could see the back step. There came the darn cat again, crying to be let in. Then the back door creaked open, and Melvin stepped out. Christina, her heart racing, held her breath as he peered up and down the driveway. She assumed he could see the trowel she’d dropped—and in fact did walk down the steps toward it, momentarily passing out of Christina’s view. Then back up the stairs and into the house he went.
Leaning up against the garage wall, she stared down at her scraped, trembling hands—and started to cry. The rain dripped off the garage roof onto the jacket. What am I doing?! This man has tried to kill! No one knew where she was but Danny—who was sleeping at the computer!—and here was Melvin, wide awake!
Looking down at her skinned hands, she noticed how pink and tender they still were from the rope burn. Her fear slowly transformed into anger. She thought of what he’d tried to do to her and her friend, and imagining the other girls—who knew how many—less fortunate than herself.
Drawing the screwdriver from her pocket, she brazenly began to remove the rusty screws from the metal siding, stacking them at the base of the shed in a neat pile. They were tight; the job was slow and difficult.
Finally she had taken out enough of the screws. Carefully folding and creasing the corrugated tin flap upward, she squeezed inside. Jake’s coat hooked itself on the tin as she entered. She pulled it free, then waited while her eyes adjusted to the darkness. Slivers of light slipped in from joints at the corners of the structure and from around the doors. Tiny particles of dust drifted and danced in the mostly vertical rays. Sunbeams! she mused, even without the sun shining!Christina hoped that was a good omen.
Without the trowel the work would be tedious—and dirty—as now she’d have to dig with the screwdriver. The boxes she and Danny had gone through had been resealed. She started breaking off the stringy weeds and tossing them to the side. The button on the sweater seemed to stare up at her in the darkness.
Hands trembling, she cautiously began to dig, working her way around the sweater in an attempt to extricate it first. The work was slow and painful. She would pick at the dry, crusty dirt with the screwdriver and remove it with her bare hands.
Jake had hit the snooze button twice before finally prying himself out of the sack. It was against his nature to get up so early on a Saturday. He went into the bathroom thinking he would go back to bed after he and Bryce returned the laser. As he tugged on a pair of pants, he glanced out the window. It was raining! Asweatshirt pulled down over his head quelled his shivers.
After putting on his shoes, he opened the closet to get his jacket. Oh, that’s right—he’d left it in the laundry room. Another thorough search—no jacket. Where was it? He was unfazed; it’d show up sooner or later. More than likely his mother would pull it out of some obvious spot.
In the kitchen, he poured himself a glass of orange juice and sat down to wait for Bryce.Three or four inches down, the dirt turned to a dark clay which gave off a foul, stale odor. The rotten fabric of the sweater gave way to mere strands of fiber. The name Leah echoed in her thoughts. The black letters written on the boxes behind her seemed to whisper that name to her.
The hole she’d been digging was now 18 inches in diameter and a good two feet deep. Her fingers were now raw from moving the dirt. The palms of her hands stung. The trembling gradually subsided as she dug to the rhythm of the rain bouncing off the shed from the garage. And for a while she propped up her courage by focusing on putting Melvin in jail. But before long her only wish was that Danny would have come with her.
Bryce rapped on the back door. Kate, just exiting her bedroom, walked across the family room to let him in. “You’re up early this morning.”
Jake came huffing from the kitchen. “I gotta run. Bryce and I need to take his dad’s laser back. Have you seen my brown jacket?”
“It’s hanging in the laundry room.”
“It is not,” he griped.
“So, where did you leave it?”
“I don’t know.”
“So wear your red one.”
“Are you kidding? That’s from two years ago. It makes me look like a dweeb!”
“Well, dweeb,” Kate mocked in a good-humored tease, “I guess you need to take better care of your things.”
He stormed back into the laundry room and pulled out his old jacket. The arms rode up several inches too far, exposing his wrists. The slam of the door as he left was his way of saying his mom was to blame for the mood he was in. She watched him out of the kitchen window as he raged like a miniature hurricane around the backyard.
Kate smiled a sympathetic smile. It does make him look a like a dweeb, she thought—whatever that is!
Within a minute Jake stormed back inside. “Now I can’t even find my bike!” he yelled. “I’ll bet Danny used it because his is flat.” And up the stairs he marched to bang on Danny’s door. No one answered. He barged in, then, just as quickly tore out again. “Where’s Danny?” he shouted over the railing into the open family room below.
“I think he’s still in bed. With all this noise, though, you can bet he’s not sleeping.”
“He’s not in bed.” Two-timing it down the steps, he caught a glimpse of Danny asleep on the study desk. “Danny, where’d you leave my bike?” he yelled.
Danny jerked awake, mumbling incoherently. “—Wha-a-at?”
“Where’s my bike?” Jake repeated.
“Christina probably took it,” came the reply. Then he promptly plopped his tired head back on the desk.
Jake was not at all satisfied with the answer. “Why would Christina take my bike?!”
“Cause her bike has a flat and so does mine.” He lifted his head and yawned.
“I’ll go ask her.” Jake started up the stairs.
“She’s not there...” There came another yawn, and then—“...she’s gone to Melvin’s shed!” He sprang to his feet, a panicked look on his face. Why couldn’t he control his big mouth?
Jake returned to the study—his mother close behind. “You’d better tell me what you’re talking about, young man,” she ordered.
Danny stuttered...then, seeing his mother’s glare, began spilling the beans, jar and all. “We were in his shed the other night...and found boxes of old clothes that said Leah on them. Christina picked up a sweater from one of the boxes...so I picked up a shirt and the button fell off. When I looked for it I found a different one—hooked to another sweater buried in the dirt....She went back to dig it up and see if Melvin’s daughter’s buried there.”
Kate began to yell for Alan, still lounging in bed. Jake came skipping back down the stairway. “She’s not in her bed. Uncle Don’s gone, too.” A relieved expression came over Kate and she relaxed a bit, thinking Don and Christina were together.
Alan came racing out of the bedroom to the top of the stairs. “What in the world’s going on?” he shrieked, pulling his robe the rest of the way on.
“I’m not sure! Christina’s gone; so is Don.”
Finally Danny piped up again. “Uncle Don’s at work. Left early this morning. He told me he’d be back by noon.”
Kate again flew into a panic. “You tell your dad what you told me. I’ll call Cecily to see if she can pick Don up from work. Then we’ll call the police if we need to.” Alan looked on, dazed and confused.
The phone rang several times before a tired Cecily picked up. “Hello.”
“Cecily, this is Kate. We think Christina’s missing again. Don’s at work. Will you please see if you can find him? We’ll meet you at the apartment.”
Cecily was suddenly wide awake. She didn’t have time to ask questions; Kate had already hung up. Taking a jacket from the closet, she lit out for the Jeep, still wearing her baggy sweats. No big deal: Don could care less about how she looked, anyway.
Alan didn’t dress either. “Call the police!” he shouted as he and the three boys rushed to the car. The vehicle sped from the garage as Kate was patched into County Dispatch.
The clay grew slick and oily and the odor grew worse the farther down Christina dug. The pile of dirt in the middle seemed to fall back in the hole as quickly as her hands could scoop it out. She stopped digging. Was that a sound she heard from outside? A sliver of the driveway could be seen through the crack in the doors. Nothing.
She thrust her one pointed tool in the dirt. It struck something solid. She tried to pull it out, but the clay was packed too tightly around it. Something squeaked at the back of the shed. Christina glanced behind her; the tin flap seemed to move. Was it rattling in the wind? Her eyes moved back to the crack in the door, and again she listened. It was difficult to hear anything but the splashing rain and the thumping of her heart.
Sweaty and a little nauseated, she continued tugging at the screwdriver. It still refused to yield. I’ve got to get out of here. The raindrenched jacket grew heavy. She shrugged it off and threw it on the boxes behind her. Then a shadow passed across the crack in the door. She found herself holding her breath. Did someone know she was there? The incessant rain muffled all the other sounds.
She reached down into the hole one more time, and suddenly lost her balance. Trying to catch herself, she grabbed the screwdriver. It gave way under her weight—and there she was, half in the hole, blinking dirt from her eyes. And hanging from the end of the screwdriver was a piece of jagged bone. Around it was draped a chain with half a purple heart.
Christina opened her mouth to scream, but she could draw in no air. Her lungs filled, but not with oxygen. And she knew it was more than decaying flesh she smelled—there was gas, too.
Wrestling to gain her balance, Christina pushed her way out of the hole. Her head spinning, she crawled to the back of the shed, longing for a breath of fresh air. But the flap wouldn’t budge; it was screwed shut! Someone had replaced the screws! The noise wasn’t the wind at all. It was someone closing me in!
In the bottom corner of the shed she could vaguely hear a gentle hissing sound. Something was being fed into the shed! She struggled to her feet as the vertical shafts of light seemed to spin around and around. She stumbled toward the crack of the door, then fell back alongside the hole. Lying there, looking down at the dirty, half purple heart hanging from that jagged bone, the last horrifying thought that raced through her mind before she closed her eyes and drifted away, was, I’m going to be buried here next to this body!
Alan and the boys fishtailed around the corner. At the apartment, Danny was the first one out, hitting the pavement on a run before the vehicle had even stopped. Straight to the shed he flew. Seeing the hose running into the shed at its base, he ripped it out and banged against the metal side. “Chrissy! Chrissy!” he yelled. He raced around back to see if she’d gotten in. The sheet-metal panels were screwed tight.
“She’s not here,” he said, puzzled. Scurrying to the front door of the apartment, he jumped down into the stairwell and pushed and pulled at the knob. “It’s locked!” He frantically began kicking at the door. Alan, coming up from behind, moved him aside. Backing up a few feet, he flung his shoulder against the door. The sides of the weathered jam splintered and the door collapsed, sending Alan crashing to the floor. Danny jumped over his dad and ran hollering through the apartment.
“She’s not here, either!” he brooded. Darting madly back up the steps, he ran headlong into Melvin, standing in the driveway.
“What’s going on here?”
“Where is she!” Danny screamed, swinging his arms. Melvin was quite adept at dodging the barrage of fists.
All at once Barker pulled up, lights flashing. As Melvin averted his attention from Danny’s attack, the boy connected with a blow to the midriff. A puff of air escaped Melvin’s lips. His face turned red as he dropped to his knees and crumpled to the ground on his side. Danny pressed his own knee into Melvin’s shoulders and continued to punch at the dazed man.
Two feet off the ground and being held by his father and Lieutenant Barker, Danny continued swinging his arms and legs frantically, determined to finish the job. “He’s got someone buried in the shed,” he screamed at the top of his lungs, “and now he’s got Christina!”
Alan took hold of Danny in a bear hug. “Settle down, son!”
Melvin rolled over in the wet driveway to get up.
“What are you talking about?” Barker asked.
“His daughter’s buried in the shed out back. Christina and I found a sweater buried in the dirt.”
Barker turned to Melvin. “Mind if we take a look?”
“This is ridiculous. No one’s buried in my shed!”
“Then you won’t mind if we look.”
“Hi, Grandpa!” Christina ran—though it felt almost like she was floating—to meet her grandfather. Everything seemed so bright and clean. “Are you feeling better?”
“I’m feeling much better, dear. And I’m so glad to see you!” “How’d we get here?” she asked.
“That’s not important right now.”
Melvin finally gave his consent; they were more than welcome to inspect the shed. “I’ll go get the keys,” he said, turning toward the house.
With a roar, glass from the windows of the garage sprayed out across the open driveway, showering Melvin’s car. Pieces of metal flew straight into the air. Bits of clothing shot everywhere, gently drifting to the ground. Everyone standing within 30 feet of the garage was blown off their feet, leveled by the blast.
An eerie calm then washed over the area. Besides the random thud and ping of items dropping from the sky, the only sounds that could be heard were the barks and howls of dogs throughout the neighborhood.
Moments after the explosion, Don and Cecily pulled into the driveway. They’d both felt the blast’s percussion from a block away. Shards of glass covered the hood of Melvin’s car; the shed’s doors, which lay gnarled and black, had been smashed into the wood fence. Part of the shed had landed on the house’s roof, and another metal wall lay in a twisted heap on the next door neighbor’s lawn.
“It’s time to go now,” Grandpa said to her as he led her by the hand.
“I’m going to miss you, Grandpa.”
“I know,” he said softly, his words seeming to drift away into the rainy sky.
Alan raced to the spot where the shed once stood, Don and Cecily right behind. Amid the rubble, a hole and a pile of dirt was all that remained. The rain, oblivious to what had just occurred, continued to fall, unimpeded. A small torrent of water sloshed off the garage roof and began filling the hole. As the muddy water surged, Don noticed the glint of half of a purple heart undulating in the hole.
“Daddy!”Everyone’s eyes followed the sound of the voice. It was Christina! She stood in a wobbly daze on the back lawn. Her hair was scorched, her face smeared, and her clothes covered with mud and soot. Don rushed over to pick her up. “What happened? ...Are you okay...What—?”
“I think so.”
“One-twelve, dispatch. I need an ambulance right away....” Cecily waded through the debris to where Don stood, Christina
enfolded in his arms. He slowly lowered Christina to the ground and peered over at Melvin, who stood in horrified dismay, staring numbly down into the hole. Don’s fingers tightened into a fist, a river of hate flowed from his eyes. If it hadn’t come pouring from his mouth, an onlooker would still have seen the thought pass clearly through those lethal eyes: “I’m going to kill him!”
He hurled himself at Melvin at whiplash speed. Barker was the first to be tossed from his path; Alan the second. Melvin dodged Don’s initial charge, and made a dash for the back steps. That’s where Don’s grip closed around his leg. “This time you’re dead!” he bellowed as he steer-wrestled the wild- eyed landlord and slammed him to the ground.
“No, Daddy!” Christina’s voice rang out clearly, with a distinct sense grace and serenity. Don froze. “It’s okay,” she said, shuffling to her father’s side and touching his arm. “It’s okay.”
Don’s anger was immediately replaced by sobs of grief. His hands dropped to his side and he slumped to one knee. His daughter wrapped her arms around his neck and held him tight. This hug was different like the one he’d gotten from Rex. Don knelt among the bits of muddy gravel and scraps of cloth and fragments of glass and wood, holding his daughter, his salty tears mingling with the rain.