I think that it’s more than that. Lance Graham had trusted Kyle to sneak up on me in the dark. I wonder if Kyle has helped his father with anything else. He’s big for his age, and handsome. He could have been a real asset in distracting a young woman before an abduction. I picture him going up to that girl in the parking lot of the bakery. Leading her off to his dad’s SUV.
It makes me feel a spasm of disgust so strong it’s like nausea.
I tell Kezia that Kyle has a rifle, and she nods grimly. She’s already eased her gun out of its holster. “Get Sam to go around back. I don’t want Kyle having another way out of this. You stay here with the boy.”
Sam’s already on it, I see. He moves around the cabin, between it and the rock face; I hope there aren’t sleeping snakes back there, or worse. He doesn’t come back, so I assume there is a door. I assume he’s covering it.
I tell Kezia, “I’m going in.”
“No, you’re not!” she says. She reaches out, but I’m already gone, walking straight for the door. I can see the curtain move. Kyle’s watching me. I wonder academically if a rifle bullet will go through this vest; it might, at this range. Depends on the caliber and the grain.
I have my Sig out of my pocket, and I hold it down, finger off the trigger, as I try the door. It opens. Kyle hasn’t thought to lock it after his brother left.
Inside, it’s very dark except for a single, guttering candle that sits on a rough table at the back of the room. The bitter, uncertain light flickers over Kyle, sitting on a bunk near the window. He has his rifle aimed straight at me.
There’s no one else in the cabin. No one. This is straight up a trap.
I turn and yell, dodging out the door, and Kyle’s shot misses me by fractions. I am moving toward Kezia, and behind her, I see Lee has moved from where I left him at the tree line. He’s now standing in a perfectly learned shooting stance. He has a handgun that he’s pulled from his pocket because I didn’t search him, he was just a boy, and he’s pointing it at Kezia’s back.
“Lee!” I scream, bringing my gun up. “Don’t do it!”
He’s startled, and his shot goes wide. Just barely wide. It shatters the window of the cabin, and Kezia turns low and fast. She advances on him with a stunning volley of shouts to drop the gun drop the gun and he does, convulsively throwing it away, and I spin back toward the cabin because Kyle is still in there, armed, and where are my children, God, please . . .
Kyle throws open the door and aims the rifle straight at my face. I have time to react, to shoot, but I don’t. I can’t. He’s a child. He’s a stunted, twisted child, but I can’t.
Sam tackles him from behind and drives him facedown into the mud. The rifle slides away, and Kyle fights, screaming, to get to it. Kezia has snapped handcuffs around his brother Lee’s wrists, and she sits the boy down hard and takes out another pair. She lets out a shrill whistle, and Sam looks up. She pitches, and he plucks them out of the air and restrains him. He hauls the boy up and makes him kneel with his face against the cabin’s wall.
I can’t breathe for the terror pounding through me. Not from the near-miss. Not from Kyle and Lee.
My kids have to be here. They have to be here.
I run back into the cabin. It’s tiny, barely big enough for a cot, a small table, a thick fleece rug, the open back door . . .
I kick the rug away and uncover a trapdoor.
I take the candle from the table and pull the handle on the trapdoor, and the cold, moist air that glides out makes the flame shiver uneasily. I wish for Kezia’s powerful little flashlight, but only for a second. There’s a wooden ladder leading down.
I go.
My arm doesn’t like the strain, but I hardly notice the pain now. I still feel sick and dizzy, but it’s not important, nothing is important but what I will find here, under the earth.
What I find is hell.
I step into the past.
There, ahead of me as I turn from the ladder, is a metal stand with a winch attachment. The thick cable hanging from it ends in a loop.
A noose.
It’s the same as the one in Melvin’s garage. But it isn’t just that. I recognize the tool shelves to the right, filled with parts, drills, vises. I recognize the red tool drawers that form a line across the top of a workbench.
As I turn back toward the ladder, I recognize the pegboard that’s been set up behind it, heavy with saws, knives, screwdrivers, hammers. There’s a tray to the side with medical equipment. Another that has a hunter’s tools to flay the skin.
And my gaze falls on the last, perfect addition: the rug. It’s the same style of rug that Melvin kept right below his victims, an incongruous little middle-class detail in a torture chamber.
Graham has re-created Melvin’s killing floor down to the last, obsessive detail.
The smell of this place makes me reel and put my shoulders against the ladder, because I know this smell. It had rolled out of my Wichita garage, spoiled meat and old blood and the metallic stench of terror, and it is here, in this place. Exactly the same.
I can’t help it. I scream. I scream the names of my children as my heart breaks and my mind snaps and all I want to do is die.
Graham never meant for them to live. He only meant for me to see this.
I’m still holding the Sig, and for a terrible, beautiful moment of clarity, I think how perfect it is that I’m going to die here, in the same way that Gina Royal withered away and perished. Looking at the same horrors. Feeling the same sense of complete loss.
And then I hear my son say, “Mom?”
It’s a whisper, but it is as loud as a shout, and I drop the gun, drop it like it’s on fire, and I scramble on all fours across the floor, the rug, around the hulking horror of that winch, and behind it, behind it, I see the barred grate set into the false wall. It’s padlocked. I stumble back to the tools and rip a crowbar out of the pegboard with such force I send things flying and clattering, and I run back to the door. I jam the forked end under the hasp and yank. Wood splinters. Gives. The hasp tears free.
I use the crowbar to lever the door, and inside I see Connor, I see Lanny. They are alive, alive, and all the strength leaves me in that moment and I crash to my knees as they rush toward me and throw themselves on me as if they want to disappear inside me.
Oh God, it’s so beautiful. The relief hurts, but it’s the hurt of a wound being cauterized, all the bleeding stopped.
I am still rocking my children back and forth on the floor of this hell when Kezia and Sam find me. Both are breathless, braced for the worst. I see Sam’s face and I think, My God, because he has just walked through a shrine to the place where his sister suffered and died, and I can only imagine how hard this has been, to take these steps past that winch and reach us.
But we’re alive.
We’re all alive.
15
The blood in my house, I find, was from Kyle. And it was Lanny’s doing.
“I heard them fighting,” she tells me, once we’re outside again in the clean night air. Kyle and Lee Graham are both tightly handcuffed, and Kezia has fastened them to a hook set into the cabin’s wall. I can’t imagine what it’s for. I don’t want to. “I grabbed the knife and I came in and I cut him. Kyle, I mean. I would have got him, too, if his damn dad hadn’t been with him. I got us to the panic room just like you taught us, but he knew the code. I’m sorry, Mom. I let you down—”
“No, I did.” Connor’s voice is a bare whisper, almost pulled away by the wind. “The code was in my phone. I should have said so. You could have changed it.”
It all fits together now. Connor’s phone, taken from him by Graham’s kids. I remember my son’s hesitance the night Graham brought the phone back, how Connor had almost told me something important. He hadn’t wanted to make me mad, because I’d told him over and over again not to write the codes down.
I can’t let him believe this is his fault. Ever.
“No, baby,” I tell him. I kiss his forehead. “It doesn’t matter. I’m so proud of you both. You stayed alive. Right now, that’s what matters, okay? We’re alive.”
Kezia’s got foil blankets in her survival kit, and I wrap the kids up to preserve their body heat. They’re bruised. They took a beating in the fight. I ask if there’s anything they want to tell me about what happened at the cabin. Lanny says nothing happened. Connor says nothing at all.