Cal unlocked it, opened the tailgate and lowered the rear seats.
As his friends watched, trying to understand Cal’s actions, he unpacked Gage’s small sleeping bag and spread it carefully on the rear. Then he set out prepackaged cheese and crackers, peanut butter and crackers, three juice boxes, apples and bananas. Gage loved those snacks. Next to them, he set down Gage’s favorite handheld video game, the one he’d left on the kitchen table before they’d come to the fair.
Gage cherished the little game and Cal knew it would be the first thing he’d pick up if he returned to the car. Cal inserted fresh batteries, brushed the game tenderly with his fingertips before typing on the small keyboard. A couple of men watching over Cal’s shoulder saw his brief message.
Gage, we’re searching for you everywhere. You’re not in trouble son, just stay here and we’ll come and get you. We love you, Mom and Dad.
A few people sniffed and throats were cleared as the men turned away.
“Guys, let’s search along the edge of the lot by the fences and the alleys,” one of the men said, intending to give Cal privacy.
The other fathers moved away across the lot in different directions, leaving Cal alone sitting on the Ford’s tailgate.
As the wind kicked up, Cal remembered that Gage didn’t have a jacket or hoodie and wondered if he was cold, wherever he was right now. It may have been Cal’s exhaustion, his strained emotions, but at that instant Cal was hit, like a sledgehammer to his gut, with the probability that he would never see Gage again.
He sobbed into his hands as the wind carried his pain into the night and Gage stared down on him from one of the big screens that were still lit over the fairgrounds, with the words Lost/Missing and Last Seen Wearing calling out above his description and blazing in the darkness.
I’m so sorry, Gage. I’m so sorry for everything I’ve done, son.
“Mom, help me!”
Faith hears him first, crying out, then screaming for her.
“Mom, help me! Please come and help me, Mom!”
He’s still in the Chambers of Dread. It’s where he’s been all this time.
Faith gets in her car, flies to the fairgrounds, scales the fence, rushes into the horror house, passes through the jaws of the Demon King, plunges into the darkness, following Gage’s pleas.
“Mom, please, please, help me!”
“I’m coming, sweetheart! I’m coming!”
A cloaked figure points the way for her with a blood-dripping head. Faith blurs through the labyrinth, races by the flames of the burning witch queen.
“Hurry, Mom!”
Faith comes to the fanged clown thumping a malevolent tune on the keyboard of skulls at the organ and nodding the way for Faith over the river of snakes, through the cavern of bats and spiders. She weaves through the tombstones in the graveyard as the zombie points. “He’s in there!”
“Mommy, help me!”
Gage is lying on a cutting table and the insane butcher—surrounded by twitching limbs and bleeding torsos—raises his cleaver over Gage’s neck.
Faith screams at him, “Stop!”
She rushes to Gage, but hands clawing at her lower legs, wretched hands of the damned from the Dungeons of Dread, keep her back. She struggles, reaching toward Gage, his eyes ballooning as the cleaver begins its descent. She cries out to him—oh God—straining, almost reaching him—almost!
“Why didn’t you take my hand, Mommy?”
“Gage! No! I’m here! Mommy’s right here!”
Faith fights to break free—to save Gage—but the hands are holding her...pressing her down...voices are calling to her...
“Faith! Faith, honey, wake up!”
She gasped and startled awake. Michelle and Pam were with her, holding her down.
“You’re having a bad dream,” Michelle said.
Battling through her torpor Faith discovered she was at home in her bedroom.
“A dream?”
“Yes, it’s just a bad dream.” Pam nodded.
“Gage is home?”
Before they could stop her, Faith bolted from her bed and hurried to Gage’s room. She called for him but the deathly quiet of his empty room and his empty bed that was still made stopped her cold.
“Gage?”
She picked up his pillow, held it to her chest and pressed her face into it, smelling a trace of him.
That’s all she had now, that and her guilt.
Was this the price she’d have to pay for her sins?
“Faith, honey.” Michelle and Pam took her shoulders. “Let’s get you back to your bed. You need to rest.”
Racked with unrelenting agony, Faith slammed her back to the wall and slid to the floor. Through her sobs, as Michelle and Pam helped Faith to her bed, they heard her say, “I’m being punished! I’m being punished!”
Officer Angie Berg heard it, too, and made a note of it in her log.
Thirty minutes before dawn under a coral sky a man and woman stepped out of a blue Chevy Impala and walked to the front step of the Hudsons’ house.
The woman was in her early thirties, white, five foot four, slender, hair pulled in a tight ponytail. She was jacked up on Starbucks. The man, midthirties, was black, six foot two, with a bearlike physique, calm and confident. Both had clipboard folders.
They rang the doorbell.
When Cal, who’d had about forty-five minutes of sleep since returning from the fairgrounds, opened the door, the woman spoke.
“Mr. Hudson? I’m Detective Rachel Price and this is Detective Leon Lang, River Ridge Police.”
Both held up leather-cased wallets showing their badges and IDs. Cal remembered them. They’d been standing with Berg and Ripkowski at the press conference.
“May we come in?” Price asked.
A new wave of concern rolled over his face. “Did you find Gage?”
“No, sir, not yet,” Price said.
“What about the car? Did he come to our car in the parking lot?”
“I’m sorry, no. But we’ve got more people involved and there are things we need to do as soon as possible, so may we come in?”
Cal surrendered the door and walked them inside.
“There’s coffee in the kitchen,” he said.
Some of the Hudsons’ friends were in the living room; some were asleep and others were talking softly on phones. The TV was tuned to a breakfast news show. Sports highlights were on. The volume was low.
“I’m sorry. It must’ve been a rough night,” Price said.
Cal