Maurice shouldered past Jonah and charged down the hall.
Jonah followed.
Sally’s bedroom door was shut.
Not a breath of sound whispered from behind it.
Maurice threw open the door.
The room was empty.
No.
A child sat hunched in the far corner like a wounded animal, wedged between the bed and the desk, rocking and sobbing.
Lucinda.
What is at work here? Jonah thought.
From a face slack with shock, Lucinda’s lost eyes stared under Sally’s bed.
“What is it?” Maurice said quietly, as if to speak at a normal volume might upset an unseen threat in the room. “Lucy?” He stepped slowly toward his daughter.
Jonah remained fixed, though an urge to run coursed in him. He did not need to see whatever horror was under the bed. If his daughter had been under her bed this whole time—
Maurice approached Lucinda as if she were a feral puppy that might lick his hand or shred it with its needle teeth. He crouched, eyes level with his daughter’s eyes.
“Lucy?” he whispered. His squared, lumberjack shoulders seemed to slope now, his commanding stature deflate in the face of his daughter’s palpable terror.
Lucinda pointed her slim, quaking finger under the bed.
Jonah’s eyes tracked with Maurice’s eyes as Maurice pivoted on his heels. Jonah could not see under the bed from his vantage. Did not want to see.
Again, the urge to flee consumed him.
Maurice lowered himself, pressed his cheek flat against the floor, and looked under the bed.
His face was turned from Jonah.
His chest rose and fell with deep measured breathing.
Jonah needed to sit.
Slowly, Maurice lifted his cheek off the floor and knelt again.
He took his daughter’s fragile shoulders in his hands.
“Lucy?” he said. “What did you see?”
What was Maurice talking about, couldn’t he see whatever was under the bed that had terrified Lucinda?
Lucinda looked at her father gravely. “A . . . spider. A humungous spider.”
“A goddamned spider?” Jonah said.
Maurice wheeled on him. “Watch it,” he snapped and turned back to Lucinda, a palm to her cheek. “It’s okay. Go back out to the couch. And, stay there, like Daddy told you in the first place. Don’t move. Hear?”
Jonah was nearly felled by a terrific envy and loneliness as Maurice spoke to his daughter, as if any ill befalling them was an impossibility, their lives would continue forever, blissful in their normalcy. The fatherly display felt like a malicious twist of a jagged knife.
“Stay put, all right?” Maurice said.
Lucinda nodded, teary, gnawing her bottom lip. “It wasn’t just a spider,” she whimpered. “It was a monster spider. Where’s Sally?”
“Never mind the spider. Or Sally. Just get out to the couch.” Maurice stood and put his hand on her head and nudged her toward the door, patted her bottom. “Go on now.”
She inched past Jonah to pad down the hall. Maurice’s gaze found Jonah, and Jonah tried a meek smile.
“How’d the hole get in the wall?” Maurice nodded at the hole behind the door. “Looks recent.”
“The doors stick. I had to put a shoulder into it. Lost my grip.”
Maurice nodded, his gaze fixed on Sally’s desk. He picked up a piece of paper that peeked out from under a book on fossils. He looked troubled.
“What is it?” Jonah peered at the paper.
Two crayoned stick figures lay crooked at the bottom of the page. A girl and a woman, maybe. Judging by the hair. Red Xs for eyes. The rest of the page was scribbled in black crayon, except for a bright evening star shining in the top corner.
The drawing unsettled Jonah.
Maurice pulled open the desk drawer to find three more similar drawings. Red crayon was scribbled at the bottom of one page, so the stick figures appeared to be bleeding.
Maurice lifted each drawing by a corner, laid each on the desk.
Jonah reached for the drawings.
“No,” Maurice said and picked each drawing up again and slipped each into the pocket inside his jacket.
“What are you doing?” Jonah said.
“Evidence.”
“Evidence of what?”
“Why would Sally draw such things?”
“I don’t know.”
“No?” Maurice said.
“Of course not.”
“Why would any kid draw pictures like these?”
“Maybe something scared her.”
“Something?”
“Or someone.”
“Like? Who?” Maurice said.
“I don’t know. A stranger.”
“A stranger has been scaring your daughter and you don’t know about it? Wouldn’t she come to you about it?”
“Of course. I hope.”
“Did she come to you? About anything weird? I know Lucinda would come to me, pronto.”
Terror raked its claws into Jonah as he thought of a stranger harming Sally or Rebecca. Yet there was a scenario worse than that of a stranger or, even worse than that, of Jonah’s irate behavior the previous night being responsible for his wife and daughter’s absence. Shame flooded him for even thinking it, and he knew he could never reveal it. Because if it were true . . .
“If these drawings indicate a real fear or danger,” Maurice said, “which they may or may not since kids draw a lot of crazy stuff for no reason at all, the state cops will ask which is more probable: a total stranger troubling your daughter enough to make her draw these, or someone close to her?”
“You can’t think she drew those because of me?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think.”
“It does to me. Your turn to be honest. Do you think—”
“I think these are crazy kid drawings. Mildly disturbing, but a hell of a lot tamer than the crap we used to draw. Decapitations, warring beasts. Remember? But. It’s not up to me. The state police will filter everything through the spouse first.”
Jonah needed to find Sally and Rebecca. Now.
“Let me see one of the drawings. I won’t touch it.”
Maurice placed a drawing on the desk. Jonah studied it. The stick figures might easily have been asleep under the night sky, instead of dead. Even with the X eyes. And they might not be Sally or Rebecca. Maybe not even female. Maybe they were Sally and a friend. Lucinda. Or the bossy older girls Sally and Lucinda were always talking about being mean. Maybe Sally wasn’t scared of being a victim at all, maybe the stick figures were her victims: a fantasy of revenge against the mean girls. This frightened Jonah even more, that his daughter could be the aggressor, even if it were only played out in dark, imaginative drawings. All said, the drawings were works of imagination. No telling what they meant. If anything. But if Rebecca and Sally were not found right away, the drawings would put the spotlight on Jonah. Take the focus off whoever it should be on. Jonah couldn’t afford that.
“You don’t think they mean anything?” Jonah said.
“No.”
“Then, maybe,” Jonah began, tentative, “we’d be better off if—”
“Do not ask me to tamper with evidence.”
“If you don’t think they mean anything, and we think we’re going to find Sally and Rebecca safe, the drawings aren’t evidence. They’re a distraction.”
“It’s not up to us to decide that.”
“You can’t let drawings you don’t think mean anything be used against me.”
“They won’t be if we find Sally and Rebecca—”
“If.” Jonah swallowed hard. “Now it’s if? I can’t have fingers pointed at me. You see that. You said yourself we both drew crazier crap as kids.”
“And you thought Sally drew them because a stranger scared her. Now you want to tamper with them to avoid the chance they might be used against you?”
“Used wrongly. Waste time. Kids can be scared of anything. TV. Movies. Bedtime stories. Let me have the drawings. They’re my property. And even if they point to someone, a stranger, there’s no way to tell who they point to, just Sally’s potential state of mind, if that.”
Maurice stared at Jonah.
“Please.” Jonah felt the plaint in his voice, raw at the back of his throat as he pleaded for Maurice to risk his profession.
“I can’t destroy them,” Maurice said. He drew a deep, unsteady breath, took the rest of the drawings out of his jacket. “But. I can leave them here.” He set the drawings on the desk.
Jonah’s heart pounded.
“I need to check your bedroom,” Maurice said. “Stay behind me. If I tell you to leave, leave. Immediately.” He stepped into the hall.
Jonah snatched the drawings, tore them up, and stuffed the shreds in his pants pocket, a twinge of panic and guilt needling him the instant he did it.