SHE MADE IT through the day—barely—and swung through a McDonald’s drive-through after picking up Calvin, muttering the “Just this once” mantra that every overworked parent knows.
But Calvin, with the unerring instinct of every child of overworked parents, was having one of his bouncing-off-the-walls days, and her suggestion to play in the basement with his Legos or to run around the backyard with the dog met with a near-meltdown.
“Playground!” he insisted.
“But it’s dark,” she countered weakly. It wasn’t, not completely, the sun sinking a little later each day behind the ski mountain outside town, something Calvin pointed out to her with unassailable logic.
“Playground.” He stomped his feet. Jake sat beside him and turned a pleading gaze upon Julia, who wasted a few moments wondering if it was possible to drown in self-pity.
“Fine.” If nothing else, maybe it would wear out both Calvin and Jake and give her an excuse to put them to bed early.
Calvin raced around the living room, the dog on his heels, and grabbed his coat and flung open the front door.
“Wait!” Julia caught up with them halfway down the walk, lecturing Calvin the rest of the way to the playground about the perils of running off like that, only to be rewarded with him mockingly chanting “Stranger danger! Stranger danger!” at the top of his lungs, Jake barking a joyful chorus.
At least she could relax at the playground, pushing herself languidly to and fro in one of the swings while Calvin attacked the swing next to her, then the slides, monkey bars, and that awful relic from Julia’s own childhood, the spinner.
She’d refused to join him on the seesaw—another piece of equipment she deeply distrusted for the irresistible temptation it posed to legions of kids to leap off as their end rose to its height, leaving their partner to crash ignominiously to ground.
She felt the same way about the spinner. Some called it a merry-go-round, although her own private name for it was death trap; too many memories of mean kids pushing it faster and faster until she flew off, landing dizzy and nauseated. But Jake—who’d planted himself in its center, ears flapping as Calvin twirled the diabolical thing—appeared to have no such reservations.
She pumped her legs and swung higher, thinking of her whiteboard exercise the night before, of Mack Coates’s unmarred name, of the X erased from Cheryl Hayes’s. Despite her Occam’s razor lecture to Marie, her mind skittered among wild possibilities. Was Hayes in some way part of Coates’s trafficking operation? Did she steer women toward him after detaining them on minor charges?
It seemed farfetched, but it wouldn’t be the first time a cop had joined lucrative forces with the very people he arrested. Nearly every department dealt with such issues at one time or another, and for sure, such an allegation would merit Leslie Harper’s push for an oversight agency—and Hayes’s apparent objections to it.
Her phone dinged, interrupting her musings just as she was beginning to take them seriously. She twisted in the swing to check on Calvin—the spinner was behind the swing set—and then clicked on the incoming text.
Busy night! Two men, one right after the other. Do you charge by the hour or by the fuck?
Her hand shook so badly that it took her a few tries to bring up the security footage, swiping through the grainy images to see if she could detect anyone or anything beyond Dom’s surreptitious arrival and departure—shoulders hunched, coat collar turned up around his face, hat pulled down low—and Wayne’s far more confident stride to the front door, his fist striking it three times.
She looked again and again, repeatedly rewinding the images, but saw nothing other than the two of them. She started to forward the text to Wayne but thought better of it, still not wanting him to know about Dom’s visit. She glanced around, wondering if someone was watching her from behind a tree, hiding in the small building housing the restrooms, or masquerading as another parent.
But the playground was deserted.
It was deserted.
The fact sank in as she rose from the swing in one of those slow-motion maneuvers that seemed to take forever even as she called, louder and louder, trying to drown out the sound of her jackhammering heart:
“Calvin? Calvin! Calvin!”
Julia ran to the spinner and stared at it, as though looking hard would cause her son to materialize.
“Calvin! Calvin!” And, taking a chance, “Jake!”
Maybe the dog would come running, sink his teeth into her jeans and tug her toward her son and one of those cinematic reunions where mother, son, and dog collapse in a happy heap.
Jake was not that dog.
This was not that movie.
Julia sprinted to each of the park’s four corners, scanning the damnably empty streets leading away from it. Where the hell was everybody? Had the rest of the world, like Calvin and Jake, been swept up in some cruel, cockeyed form of a rapture?
Stay put. She’d taught him that from the moment he could understand his first few words. If you ever get lost, stay put. Don’t wander around trying to find your way back.
Useful, even lifesaving information in a place like Duck Creek, surrounded by wilderness and full of people who liked to spend their summers hiking and camping, their falls hunting, and their winters backcountry skiing. Every year, people reliably stepped off trails to investigate something that had caught their eye, or took shortcuts, and then kept moving until hypothermia or some even more unpleasant fate caught up with them, leaving searchers no clue as to which direction they’d taken. Stay put.
She jogged back to the spinner, still half calling, half sobbing Calvin’s name, fumbling for her phone, taking one last desperate glance around before calling 911, only to see a trio approaching.
Calvin.
Jake.
And Cheryl Hayes.
For a moment, she was in the movie she’d imagined, clutching Calvin even as he laughingly tried to squirm away from her kisses, the dog performing ecstatic arabesques around them as she showered her son with the mixture of relief and fury familiar to all mothers.
“Where did you go? I was so scared! Calvin, I told you never to wander off.”
“Why weren’t you watching him?”
Hayes’s words dripped like acid, dissolving their happy reunion.
Julia loosened her grip on Calvin, although not entirely, keeping one hand clamped around his wrist, wrapping the other in Jake’s leash. She maneuvered to her feet and met Hayes’s eyes.
The woman’s gaze flashed anger. She was in her running clothes, fists jammed deep in her sweatshirt’s kangaroo pocket. She withdrew one hand and pointed an accusatory finger toward the creek.
“I found him on the creek trail. Alone—well, except for the dog. He was chasing him. It’s almost dark now. A few more steps and he could have ended up in the water. Or one of the people who hangs around down there could have gotten him. Not all of them are as harmless as your friends. A lot of sex offenders camp out there because no one in town will rent to them. What kind of mother are you?”
Hayes’s voice rose throughout her lecture until she was nearly shouting, her face mere inches from Julia’s.
“Get out of here. Keep hold of him the whole way home, and once you get there, stay there. Jesus Christ. If you can’t protect your own son, how can you hope to protect yourself?”
She whirled and stalked away, shaking out her arms, jogging a few steps before breaking into a steady run.
Julia stood frozen, almost as shocked by Hayes’s last words as she was by the Duck Creek High logo emblazoned across the back of Hayes’s sweatshirt.