Abandoned: A Thriller Read online

  Something bottomless opens up in my soul.

  “She was screaming, you know? He gagged her, but it hurt her so bad. She jumped against the handcuffs he used, and her wrists and ankles were bleeding, they were bleeding so much. He danced to the music he put on, and he laughed sometimes.” Another swallow. Her eyes still fixed on me. “So this one time—you asked me how she looked—so this one time, while it was happening, I saw it in her eyes. It was only there for a minute, but I saw it.”

  “What?” I prod her, still biting on that cold granite. Shoving her face into the darkness of it.

  “She wanted to give me to him. Just for a moment. She wanted to give me to him, and she hated herself for wanting that.” The sound of loss in her voice, at that moment, is heartbreaking. She shakes her head, seeing the image, not fully able to believe it but knowing it was real. “She died hating herself for that, Mama-Smoky.” Bonnie hugs herself and starts to rock, back and forth. She moans a little, and the tears, which have never stopped, stream a little harder.

  No no no no no, I want to tell her, she didn’t die hating herself. She died loving you.

  I resist this urge. We’re not done yet. I don’t know what done is, just that I’ll recognize it when we arrive.

  “So here’s what you need to understand, then, Bonnie,” I tell her, and I’m still amazed at the absolute disinterested cold of my tone. “Listen close, because I need you to get the differences here. What you did and what you are not. Both are equally true. What you are not is evil. You are not the same as the man who did that to your mother.” I lean forward now, fixing her with a heartless, baleful gaze. “But when you killed that innocent cat? When you hunted it down, caught it, brought it into our backyard, and put a bullet into its head? At that moment, what you did to that cat was no different than what that man was doing to your mother. You say you want to do what I do in memory of your mom?” I sneer then and hate myself for it, because it actually makes her flinch. I bring my face close to hers, close enough so she can feel the heat of my breath. “She took the pain to save you, Bonnie. When you killed that cat, you spit in her face.”

  Hey eyes widen more than I would have thought possible, and her face goes white. There is a space of horrified silence, and then Bonnie’s breath expels from her chest, as though she’d just been punched in the stomach. She lets out a low moan. It’s a hushed, soulful thing, the voice of misery.

  Now we’re done.

  She scrabbles back on the bed, fisted hands to her mouth, shaking her head back and forth, back and forth, horrified at herself, at what she did, at the truth of it. This time, I go to her. She fights me, but I grab her and clutch her to me, not letting her get away no matter how hard she tries or how much she pummels. Eventually she stops resisting, and her arms wrap around me and she just cries. Sobs and sobs and sobs. I cry too. In the midst of my own mix of relief and self-hatred, I lean down and give her the truth I’d denied her earlier.

  “When your mom died, honey,” I whisper into her hair, “she wasn’t hating herself. She was loving you. Don’t let him take that away from you.”

  I glance up at some point and see that Tommy is there. I wonder how much he saw. He watches for a little while longer, his gaze unfathomable, and then he gently closes the door, leaving us alone.

  Bonnie has wept herself to exhaustion. She’s in my lap, too big to fit comfortably but unwilling to let me go. “I really am sorry,” she says.

  I stroke her hair. “I know you are, honey. Believe that.”

  We fall into silence again. She sighs once, and I continue to stroke her hair. I glance out her bedroom window and see my old adversary: the moon. So … we meet again. The attempt at humor topples to a soundless death.

  “Listen, baby,” I say after some more time has passed. “There’s nothing wrong with you having a goal to do what I do when you grow up. I mean, it’s not the career I’d want for you, but if you still want it when you’re older, I’ll support you.”

  “I’ll still want it,” she says.

  “But there have to be limits, Bonnie. That’s part of the secret and the safety net. There’s a huge difference between us and them. We can understand them, but we’ll never be them, you follow?”

  “I think so.”

  “Here’s the thing you have to understand: They can pull you under. They can suck the life and the soul out of you, and once that’s done …” I search for a metaphor. “Think of yourself as a lighthouse. No matter how foggy it gets or how rough the sea, the lighthouse will guide you home. Well, if you get too close to them, if you go too far, the light can die. You don’t become what they are, but you lose yourself.”

  She’s quiet for a time, thinking about this. “If the light goes out,” she asks, “can you ever get it back?”

  “Almost never.” I put a hand under her chin, angle her face up to mine. “That thing you did with the cat? That’s the kind of thing that puts the light out, honey. You understand?”

  She nods. I let her chin go, and she snuggles back into my embrace. “So what do I do?”

  “You learn to balance. Look, honey, regular people, they know how to enjoy life. It’s more natural for them to look for the good stuff than the bad. It’s harder for people like us. We have to force ourselves to engage in the good stuff. Even when we don’t want to. The thing is, even if you have to force yourself in the beginning, somewhere along the way you’ll find yourself having a good time.”

  “But how does that work for me?” she asks, and I’m pleased to hear the impatience mixed with the pleading. I cracked her, but I didn’t break her. Thank God.

  “Well, let’s see. Balance and Bonnie. Okay, here’s an example. You told me you wanted me to take you to the shooting range, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, fine. I’ll agree to do that every other week. On the weeks off, you have to find an extracurricular activity at school to take part in. I don’t care what it is. Band or track—I don’t care. Just something any other thirteen-year-old would do.”

  “Sounds boring.”

  “It might be, at first. But you’ll be surprised. There’s an old acting trick. If you make yourself start laughing, at first it’s just going through the motions. It’ll feel silly, sound silly. But you almost always end up laughing for real. This is like that. Besides, it’s really a part of your current goal, anyway.”

  “What do you mean?”

  What do I mean, exactly? I can feel the idea swarming within me. It’s something I understand innately but have never had to put words to.

  “Our biggest advantage over the monsters isn’t that we know how they think, honey. That’s not so hard. It’s that they can never understand how we think.” I kiss the top of her head and whisper again into her hair. “They can’t understand how we can love each other so much, and they know it. That’s what they hate us for the most. Love is the light.”

  Bonnie is finally asleep. I’d lain in bed with her as she tried. She kept waking, checking to make sure I was still there. I waited until her sleep was certain, and then I disentangled myself and crept back to my own bed.

  I remove my clothes, which smell of salt: the sweat from Bonnie’s troubled forehead and the wet from her tears. I crawl into bed next to Tommy, naked, and reach for him.

  “She okay?” he asks.

  “She will be.”

  “You okay?”

  I shake my head, realize he can’t see that in the dark. “Not really. Can you make me okay?”

  He pulls me to him and kisses away my tears, then his lips find my lips and later we come together in that sweetest way. Afterward, I am lying with my head on his chest, listening to the gentle thump thump of his heart and the slow, even sound of his restful breathing. He’s fallen asleep after sex, the man way. I’m headed in that direction but take a last moment to look at the moon and whisper some words to the God I’m not sure I’ll ever really reconcile with.

  Thank you for showing me how to reach her, I think, my eyes begin
ning to flutter. Keep doing things like that, and we might have a truce.

  It’s probably my imagination, but the moon seems to disappear behind a cloud at that exact moment, and I imagine it’s Him, the Him I doubt more than I believe in, saying, You’re welcome.

  CHAPTER NINE

  His father sat him down on the living room couch one year. He patted the seat next to him.

  “Move closer, Son. I have something I want to show you.”

  The Boy complied, sitting on the old couch, with its faded plaid print. Everything in the home was the same: serviceable, not tattered but faded by use and by age. They were neither poor nor rich, but his father had known the harshest kind of poverty, so they kept things until they died.

  His father picked up a large book from the coffee table and placed it on his knees. There was a photograph on the front. A bunch of melting clock faces.

  “Read what it says on the front aloud,” his father instructed him.

  “The life and works of Salvador Dali,” the Boy said, mispronouncing it as Dahl-eye. His father corrected him, and made him say it again.

  “Dali was a painter. Some think he was nuts; many think he was brilliant. I think he was brilliant.”

  The Boy knitted his brows, looking for the lesson in this.

  “You mean he was smart?”

  “Smart is knowing your multiplication tables. Brilliant is casting a different light on the world.”

  The Boy frowned, struggling with the concept. “I don’t get it,” he admitted.

  “Some people look out at the world and they see it differently from other people, Son. They try to share that sight with us, through paintings, or poetry, or the classical music we listen to sometimes.”

  “Like Beethoven? Like the Ninth?”

  He loved the Ninth. In his plodding and single-minded life, it was light through a prison window. It made his blood move faster. “Yes, exactly like that.”

  The Boy looked at the Dali book with new interest.

  “And you’re saying this man does the same thing with his paintings?”

  “I’m saying he does the same thing for me with his paintings. You might not feel that way.”

  Confusion set in hard. In his world, Father was always right.

  “That doesn’t make any sense, sir. How can I see something differently from you?”

  “I’m raising you to be strong, Son. There’s a world out there full of ways to be weak. It’s true, the road of strength is simple, single, and narrow, so in most things I teach you, there’s just one way. You follow?”

  “Of course.”

  “But when it comes to this,” he gestured at the book, “or to the music or poetry, it’s not as clear-cut. And that’s okay.” His father rubbed a hand across the book, a loving gesture that the Boy had never seen and rarely felt. “Dali’s paintings talk to me. They may not talk to you. The point, though, what I’m trying to tell you, is that you need to find the ones that do.”

  The Boy pondered this, struggled with it, could come up with only one question.

  “Why?”

  His father turned to him, his gaze serious. “The basic key to survival isn’t toughness, Son, it’s speed. Thinking and doing and killing faster than others. You’ll never be as fast as you can be unless you’ve found the ones that talk to you. I don’t know why it’s so, but it’s so.”

  Why didn’t you say that in the first place? is what the Boy thought but didn’t say. “Find the one that talks to you, Son, because it’ll make you quicker. But don’t fall into the trap of thinking that it proves anything. It’s an x-factor, like a vitamin that works but we don’t know why. We read the poems, and we listen to the music, and they make us faster, but neither one is evidence of the soul.” He leaned forward, like a dark tower, overwhelming the boy with his presence and his blackness. “There is no soul, Son. There’s only meat. Never forget it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  And he never did.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I wake up exhausted but not unhappy. It’s the wrung-out but comfortable feeling of satisfaction that comes from doing good work.

  Some part of me had known, I suppose. I’d let certain things slide when it came to Bonnie, because of her past, and that was a mistake. I feel I’m on the right road to correcting that error.

  Tommy is already gone from our bed. This is the case most mornings. He is one of those infernal morning people, who wakes at 6:00 A.M.—or earlier—and lands on both feet, ready to go. He likes to run in the morning, which is a nightmare scenario for me. Sometimes I’ll wake up as he’s putting on his sweats and watch with a single, bleary-but-appreciative eye.

  I listen with an ear and sniff the air. I hear a faint murmur of voices from downstairs and smell the delicious aroma of frying bacon. It’s enough of a motivation to get me out of bed. Tommy cooks a mean breakfast.

  I stumble my way into the shower and turn it up to high and hot. This is my bliss place. Six years ago or so, Matt gave me a serious shower upgrade as a birthday gift. A contractor gutted the old vinyl one and installed a double-headed, temperature-controlled, marble-tile-and-glass wonder. There’s even a seat, where I can sit and watch the steam build as I wake up or shave my legs. I love it every morning, and today is no exception.

  Each showerhead has its own spray control. I put both on pulse, which delivers a wonderful light pounding spray. I stand and rock a little as the water pummels me, a somewhat goofy smile on my face.

  If we do move to Virginia, installation of the same shower will have to be part of the deal.

  My head is beginning to clear. Generally speaking, it takes me about thirty minutes to really arrive in the present. The shower gets the ball rolling and coffee seals the deal.

  I wash my hair, turning one of the heads to spray, which delivers hard, almost sharp jets of water onto my scalp. The temperature is as hot as I can take it. Cold showers are for the insane.

  I finish with some reluctance and proceed to get myself dressed. Black slacks, white shirt. I pad back to the bathroom and perform my bare nod to makeup. I’ve never been much of a makeup gal, less so now than before I was scarred. I pull my hair into a ponytail and secure it. Back to the room. Black jacket, flat pumps. Shoulder holster. Open the gun safe (need to remember to change the combo tonight, I think), grab my Glock, work the slide, then jam the magazine home. I triple-check the safety. I’ve been paranoid about this ever since I heard about an agent blowing two of his toes off. I pull the charger out of my cell phone and the phone gets clipped to my belt. My ID goes inside the inner pocket of the jacket. One final check in the bathroom mirror, and I decide I’m fit to face the world.

  I grab my purse and head down the stairs. The breakfast smells are getting stronger, and my stomach rumbles in reply. The scent of coffee makes my nose twitch in anticipation.

  Bonnie’s heard me coming. She meets me at the bottom of the stairs with a fresh cup, something she hasn’t done in a while. Guilt, I decide, has its upside.

  “Thanks, honey.”

  “You’re welcome.” She looks a bit worn but stable. I have the idea she’s feeling a similar exhaustion to mine—wrung out in the right way.

  I sip the coffee and crinkle my eyes in an approving smile. “Yum.” It earns another smile, and she goes to the kitchen and grabs three plates and glasses and utensils to set the kitchen table.

  Tommy is working at the stove. He’s wearing a red-checkered apron, a look and design that remind me of Betty Crocker cookbooks. I first saw him wear it in his own apartment. It was all he was wearing, and we barely made it through breakfast before I attacked him.

  I walk over, stand next to him, and place a hand in the small of his back, that comfortable spot. He moves some bacon over onto a paper towel to drain the grease. It sizzles deliciously. “How do you want your eggs?” he asks. “Fried or scrambled?”

  “Fried today, I think.”

  “We aim to please.” He nods toward the refrigerator. “Bonnie fresh-squeezed
some orange juice this morning.”

  “My favorite. Wow.”

  He gives the slightest shrug. “She’s pretty helpful right now.”

  “Did you guys talk about last night at all?” I murmur, low enough that Bonnie can’t hear me.

  “Nope. I doubt we will either. But I think everything is okay, for now.”

  I lean against the counter and sip my coffee and watch as she sets the table. She catches me watching and gives me yet another tentative smile.

  “Yes,” I say to Tommy. “I think you’re right.”

  “For now,” of course, remains operative, but that’s life.

  “All ready,” he announces, using the spatula to scoop everyone’s eggs onto a serving plate. “Can you get the bacon?”

  I transfer the now less-greasy bacon from paper towel to actual plate and carry it over to the dining table. Bonnie grabs the pitcher of OJ from the freezer. Tommy adds a plate of toast, checks everything over, and nods once, satisfied. “Let’s eat,” he says.

  The room is filled with the sounds of people too busy eating to talk: clinking of utensils against china, the crunch of bacon being bitten into, the quiet slurp-and-swallow of orange juice and coffee disappearing into stomachs.

  I’m on my second cup of coffee, and between the shower, the great breakfast, and the relative harmony of my home, I’m feeling awake and alert and refreshed. I eat the last of my eggs and push my plate forward.

  I rub my stomach in an exaggerated way and roll my eyes heavenward. “Awesome.” I sigh.

  “I agree,” Bonnie says. “You cook a good breakfast, Tommy.”

  “Mom told me a man who can cook would always make a favorable impression with the ladies. I guess she was right.”

  I check the clock. Bonnie will have to leave to catch the school bus in about thirty minutes. Time enough to tell them both about my offer from Director Rathbun. It’s a bit of a skydive, but scheduling, for this family, is difficult.

  “I have something you guys need to know about,” I say. “Something I was offered.” I give them the full rundown, leaving nothing out. When I finish, both of them are quiet. I scan their faces nervously, looking for any signs of upset.