ABC Amber LIT Converter (22 page)

Rhonda’s heart jackhammered. She dropped the stone, which hit the cement floor and cracked, the wordsPAT HEBERT breaking off fromSTATION OWNER AND MANAGER.

There, in the far bay, was Warren’s car. The rabbit was strapped into the driver’s seat. The car was running, and a length of hose ran from the exhaust pipe to the back window cracked open.

“Shit!” Rhonda leaped forward, hurried to the car. She pulled the hose from the exhaust pipe and went around to the driver’s side. Locked. “Shit!”

Back to the tool bench, where she found a small sledgehammer. Two swings and she’d shattered the front passenger side window. She reached in, pushed the button to unlock the doors, then returned to the driver’s side and opened the door. The rabbit was leaning back, seat reclined like he was just taking a little bunny nap. She leaned over him, turned off the car, then found the button to release the seat belt.

He was heavy. Dead weight. No, she thought, not dead. Can’t be dead. Can’t be a killer.

She dragged him from the car. Laid him down on the cement floor of the garage.

Air. She had to get air. She unlatched the lock on the overhead door of the left bay of the garage and yanked it open. She took a deep breath, then crouched beside the rabbit. She placed two hands on the mask, and gently, ever so gently, she pulled it off.

A sob escaped her lips. She snatched her cell phone from her pocket and dialed 911.

While Rhonda waited for the ambulance, she thought about Ella Starkee—how the Magic Man was found dead in his living room the day Ella was rescued and was able to describe him and his car. He was a thirty-two-year-old janitor, described by coworkers and neighbors as a helpful, friendly man. Later, in a televised interview, Ella had only this to say about his death: “It’s sad, really. Sometimes, a person does a bad thing but it doesn’t make them a bad person. Sometimes…” she paused here, twirled her hair in her fingers, then looked straight at the camera, “sometimes, what a person needs most is to be forgiven.”

AUGUST 15, 1993

DANIEL HAD BEENgone for five days. Aggie was pacing in Rhonda’s living room, talking to Clem and Justine. Rhonda hovered in the kitchen, out of their line of sight, but where she could hear perfectly. She heard Aggie’s footsteps, the fevered pitch of her speech.

“Something’s happened to him,” Aggie insisted as she rattled the ice cubes in her empty glass, a not-so-subtle hint for one of them to pour her another gin and tonic.

“Ag, you’re overreacting,” Clem told her. “He’s just lying low. Guaranteed he’ll be back any minute now hungover and all fired up about some cockamamie money-making scheme.”

“He’s never been gone this long,” Aggie said. “A night or two. But not this long. Do you know what I did today, Clem? I even called up Laura Lee.”

Clem cleared his throat. “What did she say?”

“She claimed not to know a thing, but I think she was lying.”

“Why do you say that?” Justine asked.

“Because that’s what women like her do. They lie.”

Clem mumbled something Rhonda couldn’t make out, then she heard Aggie softly sobbing.

“I’ll go put on some coffee,” Justine said, and Rhonda darted back to her room.

“WILL DANIEL REALLYcome back?” Rhonda asked. She and her father were side by side in his old car in the woods.

“Of course, sweetie. Of course he will. Don’t you worry.”

But Rhondawas worried. If Daniel was out of the picture, what was going to stop Clem and Aggie from being together all the time? Surely not Rhonda’s mother. Clem would leave Justine and Rhonda and pick up his old life with Aggie. The thought of it made Rhonda’s stomach ache. She reached up and touched the wiry stitches above her eye. There were seven of them. Lucky number.Right.

Peter got nine stitches. Tock and Lizzy hadn’t been hurt at all when the wall came down. But the weird thing was, Lizzy hadn’t said a word since that night. Not to Rhonda or Peter, not even to Tock.

“She just needs a little time,” Tock said. “Let’s all quit bugging her about it.”

CLEM TURNED ANDlooked at their ruined stage once again. “I still don’t get it,” he said. “Did you all have some kind of fight?”

“Sort of,” Rhonda said, unwilling to admit to her father that she really had no idea why they’d torn it down, other than that Peter had told them to.

“It just seems like such a shame,” Clem said. Above them, the
pirate flag flapped in the breeze, the painted skeleton face the one remnant of their play that hadn’t been destroyed.

“I’ve been thinking,” Rhonda said, eager to change the subject.

“Nineteen seventy-nine was the year Peter was born.”

Clem’s jaw tensed. He gripped the cracked steering wheel and stared out at the woods in front of him, imagining some invisible road. “Yes. It was.”

“So that means Peter is your son, right? My brother.” The words felt thick and bitter in her mouth:son ,brother .

Clem closed his eyes. Shook his head. “No. He’s Daniel’s son. You can see that, right? He’s the spitting image of his dad.”

“But if you and Aggie were married…” She opened the glove compartment and found only a tangle of wires and the shredded leaves of an abandoned mouse nest.

Clem sighed. Got that faraway look in his eyes he did just before telling one of his stories.

“I remember standing in front of the nursery window and pointing Peter out to nurses, visitors, any passers-by. My son. My boy. My Yankee doodle, born on the Fourth of July, all-American kid.”

Clem played with the gear shift on the steering column, put his foot on the gas pedal, and pushed it to the floor. It let out a rusty squeak of protest, reminding them they weren’t going anywhere.

“It was exactly a year before I found out the truth,” Clem continued. “Peter’s first birthday. We had a little party in the backyard with Daniel. He brought red, white, and blue hats, streamers and sparklers. I went inside to put the baby to bed, but I forgot his blanket. It was his special blanket, he never let go of it. When I came back out into the yard to get it, I saw them: Daniel and Aggie. They were…” he cleared his throat. Rhonda nodded, trying hard to imagine the scene—all of them so young, her father married to Aggie, thinking he’d had a baby with her; thinking his life was perfect until that moment.

“When I stepped out the back door into the yard that night, I heard this strange popping sound inside my head, like a little explosion of bright white light cleaning everything out.”

Rhonda nodded. It was a little like how she felt tearing down the stage; like everything she knew and understood was somehow over.

“I knew right then that Peter was Daniel’s son. I think part of me knew it all along, even in the very beginning. But I pushed that part to the back of my brain. We believe what we want to believe, Ronnie; even when the truth is right there under our noses.”

JUNE 18, 2006

SOMETIMES YOU MAKEup a lie and it becomes this safe little house you live inside,” Warren said. “But it’s not really safe. The foundation is bad, ready to crumble and the people you invite inside with you, they’re all in danger, too.”

Rhonda bit her lip and took a step back, willing herself not to cry. She stood beside Crowley at one in the morning, listening to Warren’s confession against the backdrop of beeping monitors and doctors being paged over the intercom. Warren had pulled the oxygen mask off his face and it lay hissing at his chin, a whispered warning that seemed, to Rhonda, to be saying,Don’t listen. None of it is true.

Warren had declined the offer to remain silent or to have a lawyer present, eager to hurry up and tell his story at last. The beginning of his story was much like Pat’s story: after building a rapport with Ernie with herself in the suit, Pat offered Warren
five hundred dollars to come up to Pike’s Crossing, put on the suit, and take the girl one last time. She knew Trudy bought lottery tickets and cigarettes every Monday afternoon, after picking Ernie up at school, and that Trudy always left Ernie in the car during this stop. Warren was supposed to take the girl and drop her off in the woods off of Route 6. Pat had picked a spot. The idea was that she’d wander around lost for a few hours, overnight at the worst, but Pat would find her and bring her home. The lost girl would be found. The story would have a happy ending, just like what happened down in Virginia.

“But it didn’t work out that way,” Warren said, looking away from Rhonda and Crowley. “Pat had showed me right where the drop-off should be, but once I was driving along dressed in a rabbit suit, in a stolen car, I got nervous, you know? So I decided to take the long way around the lake, took that dirt road that snakes through the state forest, it seemed…less conspicuous. The map said it would connect with Route 6 just outside of town.

“I was all pumped up, scared as hell, the road was going on forever, all twists and turns. And I couldn’t see well through those fucking eyes. I was sweating like a pig. I mean, I’ve never done anything like this before. And the little girl, she was telling me a story about her day…” Warren stopped, swallowed, wiped at his forehead, then continued. “About how in school, it had been Letter F day: they made an F poster, ate fruit, had a contest to see which team could come up with the most words that started with letter F.” He mopped at his brow with the back of his hand, and was quiet for a long moment.

“So, we got to this hairpin turn and I didn’t see it coming. I was going too fast, I guess. I slammed on the brakes and jerked the wheel to the left, and the little girl, she wasn’t belted in…” He chewed his lip. Tears welled in his eyes. “It happened so fast. She was knocked against the door and I guess it wasn’t closed all
the way or something, because all of a sudden, the door was open and she was gone. Just like that.”

“You’re saying she fell out?” Crowley asked. “The door just happened to open all by itself?”

“The latch—it was broken,” Rhonda whispered. Like she’d told Warren days ago:Shit luck and random chaos.

“What?” Warren asked.

“Peter was supposed to fix it. It was written in the schedule at the garage. Laura Lee said the door wouldn’t stay closed unless it was locked.”

Crowley scribbled in his notebook.

Warren started to cry, and Rhonda’s first instinct was to go to him, offer comfort to him. But she couldn’t. Not knowing that it had been he who looked across the parking lot at her through painted mesh eyes. He who took Ernie on her last trip to Rabbit Island.

She didn’t want to believe that it was possible. It seemed like some sick cosmic joke. The only person she’d trusted through all of this, the man she’d started to fall in love with, had been the rabbit she’d been chasing all along.

Maybe you’ll catch up to him one of these days, Warren had told her just this morning.

Now here he was. She closed her eyes tight, trying to make it all go away. But there was still the oxygen hiss, the beeping.

Warren had stopped the car and run back to where Ernie had fallen out. She had tumbled down a steep embankment, and lay awkwardly, horribly still, on a pile of rocks. He scrambled down to her and saw at once that she was dead. Crowley pressed for details—how could Warren be so sure she was dead, not just knocked out? Warren described her battered little head, the impossible angle of her neck, the staring eyes, the long, desperate minutes of checking for a pulse, for breath—no, she was dead,
and it was his fault. Stupid with panic, he carried Ernie back to the car.

“I knew I couldn’t bring her back. But I couldn’t just leave her there. So…I decided to bury her.”

Rhonda shook her head.Why? she wanted to scream. And she realized what it came down to: Warren had simply made a series of bad choices. Horrible choices. Choices born of the need for quick cash, the chance to make an edgy documentary, the search for a shortcut, and, finally, sheer mind-numbing panic. Everything seemed like a good idea, or maybe the only option, at the time. Rhonda really saw him for what he was: a scared nineteen-year-old kid.

“I went back closer to the lake and found an old path through the woods. I carried her in my arms. She was so light.” He paused again.

“And where was this exactly, Warren?” Crowley asked.

“Hm? Oh, on the north side of the lake somewhere, I think. I got sort of turned around. But there was a clearing in a grove of pines. I found a hole there. Like the remnant of an old well or something. I laid her down at the bottom and piled rocks and dirt on top.”

“And Miss Clark’s vehicle?”

“I put the rabbit suit in my gym bag and returned the car, just like we planned. I handed the suit over to Pat and told her that everything had gone according to the plan: that I dropped Ernie off at the edge of the state forest, close to Route 6, right where she’d told me.”

Crowley looked skeptical. “And you expected that she would not find out the truth?”

Warren considered.

“I don’t know what I expected. It just seemed impossible to tell the truth. I could barely believe the truth, you know—like, how did this happen? Howcould it happen? And I told her the
lie so many times over the next few days—she got worried fast, couldn’t figure out what went wrong with her grand plan—that I started to believe it. To convince myself. I actually started to think that the little girl was going to come walking out of the woods at any minute. I could see it so clearly. Her little face all lit up as she told everyone all about her adventures on Rabbit Island. It seemed so…possible.”