“Doubtful.”
“For all we know, Seth may in fact live elsewhere,” Shane reminds me. “But this is the address on his driver license, so we start here.”
“Okay fine,” I concede. “So Mom and Dad are on vacation. They own other homes. They’re in Gay Paree, or the Ukraine, or touring the moon.”
“Yes, quite possibly they could be elsewhere,” he concedes, nodding in agreement. “You want to leave?”
“No! That’s not what I’m saying! I’m saying if nobody answers the damn bell, I’m climbing the damn fence!”
“There could be dogs.”
“Then the dogs better watch out. Woman bites dog, that’ll be the headline. And you can’t stop me!”
Not sure how it happened, exactly, but suddenly I’m seething, lashing out, and Randall Shane is a convenient target. Oddly enough, the big man doesn’t react. It’s as if he’s been expecting me to flip out, and braced himself for it.
“What makes you look so smug!” I demand.
“The lights,” he says, pointing at the heavy foliage obscuring the curve of the driveway.
Are there lights twinkling through the leaves? Hard to say.
“The house lights? Are you sure?”
“No,” he says. “Not to a certainty. But moments after I first pushed the button, lights shifted.”
“The wind? A timer?”
He shrugs. “Maybe. My gut says somebody is home. And ignoring a buzz from the gate, that tells us something.”
“What?” I ask, embarrassed for teeing off at the guy. “What does it tell us?”
Before he can explain, a figure emerges from the bushes and takes a position several paces behind the locked gate. Surprising the hell out of me but not, apparently, Randall Shane.
In the darkness the figure resolves into a small, slender man dressed from head to toe in black. He has thinning hair, raccoon eyes, and seems to have rubbed dirt on his face.
The small man raises something that could be a gun and points it at us. Before I can duck, the beam of light makes me flinch.
Flashlight, not gun.
“Who are you?” he demands in a shaky voice. “What do you want?”
“Mr. Manning? I’m Randall Shane and this is Mrs. Jane Garner.”
“I don’t know you.” He backs away, looks ready to slip back into the foliage. “What do you want?” His voice sounds like a speaker with a loose wire, like he’s on the verge of laryngitis, and fighting it.
Shane raises both hands, as if in surrender, and takes a step closer to the gate. “We have reason to believe that Mrs. Garner’s daughter, Kelly, has run away with Seth Manning, who is listed as living at this address. Are you Seth’s father, sir? Are you aware that Kelly Garner is a minor? Can you help us find them?”
At each statement of fact the man in black seems to shudder, as if receiving a series of thudding body blows. Shaking his head, no, no, no. “Never heard of the girl,” he responds, voice cracking. “You’ll have to leave. I demand that you leave immediately!”
Shane slips closer to the gate. His own powerful, compelling voice becomes less demanding, more conciliatory. “Where’s your son, Mr. Manning? Can you help us, please? Mrs. Garner is worried sick. This isn’t about pressing charges, it’s about getting her daughter back.”
“Go away! You must go away!”
“Why is that? Has something happened?”
The man in black retreats, blending into the foliage. Only his eyes showing, like the Cheshire cat. “Nothing happened,” he says softly. “Go away.”
Shane takes a business card from his wallet, slips it through the iron bars. It flutters to the ground like a small, white leaf. “My card, sir. I can help you.”
The eyes vanish. The voice has been reduced to a pleading whisper. “You can help by going away.”
Then the leaves shiver and he’s gone.
Shane pulls the Town Car over in a shallow turnaround a few hundred yards from the Manning estate. He kills the engine. On the other side of the road, seemingly close enough to touch, the water is black, glistening. A few miles away, visible along the shore, the snug little cove exudes life. Docks, homes, streetlights.
A familiar, clustered warmth that seems alien out here on the Neck, where many of the homes are hidden from view.
Shane shifts himself in the driver’s seat, facing me.
“Your reaction?” he asks.
“Messed up,” I admit. The feeling of dread has returned, nagging at my guts. Getting into the car, my knees had been weak. “That was Seth’s father, wasn’t it?”
Shane nods. I can’t quite make out his eyes. He’s a handsome skull in the dark. “Almost certainly,” he agrees. “I addressed him as ‘Mr. Manning’ several times and he failed to correct me. Probably used to people knowing who he is.”
“His face was dirty,” I say, mouth as dry as sandpaper.
“Smeared on the dirt so we wouldn’t see him,” Shane says. “I’m almost certain he was hiding in the leaves, listening to us for a while before he revealed himself.”
“But why?”
The big man sighs. “This is pure speculation, but I assume he wanted to know who we are. Or more importantly, who we aren’t.”
“Why?” I repeat. “Why not call the security guards to run us off? Or call the cops? Why come out to the gate at all? People who live in houses like that, on estates like that, they don’t run around at night, dressed all in black, faces smeared with dirt.”
I’m unaware of clutching the back of the leather headrest until Shane gives my hand a reassuring pat, as if preparing me for bad news.
“In my estimation Edwin Manning is desperate,” he says carefully, gauging my reaction. “He’s making it up as he goes along.”
Desperate, frightened, lost. That was my impression, too.
“I’ve seen parents behave like that, many times.” Shane says. “Not the sneaking-around part, exactly, but the frightened-out-of-their-wits part. He’s sick with worry, just like you.”
“Because his son took off with my daughter?” I ask, dreading the answer.
Shane says, “Or because his son has been abducted, and he’s been warned not to contact the police.”
18. Calling All Fathers
It’s after midnight and Ricky can’t sleep. Lying a foot or so from Myla on the custom king, he just can’t make it happen. Too many things going on. His sleep button is stuck and the pills no longer work. White man’s medicine, all it does is slow his thoughts a few miles per hour, not nearly enough to let his mind rest.
Only thing to do when this happens, he decides, is get up, keep moving. Forward motion pushes all the crazy thoughts to the back of his head, prevents them from bouncing. Saved by gravity or momentum, or whatever the hell it is.
Ricky slips out of bed, leaves Myla sleeping like a curled-up kitten, a slender hand draped over her eyes. He prowls his new house in the dark, naked. Bare feet cool on the tiles, walking a circuit that takes him through the kitchen, into the hallway, past the three bedrooms he furnished for his children, around through the entertainment alcove, and back into the dining room. Sodium lights