10
The Curtis place was a two-story house barely visible behind a cattle gate.
They’d gotten an early start—in spite of the objections from one member of the team—and the morning shadows were still pulling back.
Tean hopped out of the Subaru, found the chain, and discovered a padlock securing it. He shook his head at Jem.
Jem gave him a thumbs-up, rolled the Subaru forward a few yards, and parked.
There wasn’t a shoulder, just a steep drop into the drainage ditch so the Subaru blocked one side of the road.
Tean suspected that was illegal. But they hadn’t seen another vehicle since the blacktop had changed to gravel, and around them, there was nothing but waist-high fields overgrown with Indian grass and, in the distance, pumpjacks.
“It’s locked,” Tean said when Jem got out of the car.
“Got that.” Jem studied the cattle gate, which changed to barbed wire on either side. “Ready?”
“There are No Trespassing signs.”
“Yep.”
“And we don’t know if anyone is still living there.”
“Only one way to find out.”
“We could get shot.”
“I guess so.”
“Or there might be booby traps.”
“True.”
“Or guard dogs.”
“Here we go.”
Tean was about to point out another hazard—what if they interrupted a home burglary in progress?—but Jem planted a foot on one of the crossbars and started to climb.
For lack of any better options, Tean went after him.
On the other side, the gravel drive continued toward the house. Their steps raised little puffs of dust, and aside from the wind, the only sound was the click and crunch of the stones underfoot.
“If somebody is in there,” Jem said, “and they do shoot us, what are we looking at? In terms of a worst-case scenario, I mean.”
“Well, we probably wouldn’t die right away.”
“Uh huh.”
“So, we’d be lying on the ground, in a tremendous amount of pain.”
“Jump ahead to the good stuff.”
“We’d probably get sepsis and die.”
“Don’t jump that far ahead. Would they cut off our dicks?”
“What?”
“Our dicks. Our dongs. Would the bad guys cut them off?”
“Why would they cut off our— Why would they do that?”
“I don’t know.” Jem shrugged. “Trophies. Or to make a warning out of us for other trespassers.”
“Well, they wouldn’t let anyone ever find our bodies. They’d feed us to the pigs.”
“Holy shit, that’s so cool.”
“It wouldn’t be cool to spend the rest of eternity as pig excrement.”
Jem seemed to consider this for a few steps before he said, “If they do cut off our dicks, I hope they cut mine off first.”
“I’m not going to ask why.”
“Because I love your dick, babe. I don’t want anything bad to happen to it. And maybe they’d be cool with just one dick trophy, and they’d leave you alone.”
Tean opened his mouth. And then he shut it again.
“What?” Jem asked.
“I’m having a lot of trouble with that statement. How can it sound so genuinely sweet?”
“Uh, we’re in love. Now, if they cut off our dicks and we survive and we can choose our replacement dicks, I’m definitely getting one of the ones with the nubs all over it.”
“Okay,” Tean said. “And now this conversation is over.”
Fortunately, by then they were almost to the house.
It was a two-story frame structure with a fieldstone foundation, and the paint looked like blisters that had popped and cracked in the sun.
On the shallow porch, plastic stargazer lilies were nestled in a food storage can that had once held strawberry slices.
A painted wooden sign, which Tean guessed had come from a chain home decorating store, said HOWDY, PARDNER.
The letters had been painted so that they looked like they were made out of rope.
Jem walked up to one of the windows and glanced in.
While he stood there, examining the interior, Tean turned in a circle, just in case.
In a neat rectangle around the house, a dormant lawn suggested that this—like the tract around the high school—would be a vibrant green once spring came.
A line of cypress ran parallel to the drive.
Tean could hear the wind, a kind of low-frequency sound that was almost in his bones, but the trees were still.
Farther back, the patch of lawn ended, and the hard-baked scrub of the basin ran for a hundred yards until the barn.
This structure looked older than the house, the paint gone except in streaks that might have once been red.
The bay doors had a timber latch holding them shut, but a single window in the hayloft was open, and it was like—
“It’s like staring into Satan’s butthole, isn’t it?” Jem asked.
“Uh.”
“The house looks empty, but I want to check around back.”
Jem moved off without waiting for a response, and Tean followed him. The old farmhouse. The abandoned barn. The strange, friendless boy. It was like hearing an echo just before it faded, and Tean had the sensation that if he turned his head fast enough, he might catch the sense of it.
But then they were around back, where a concrete slab served as a deck. A stone firepit held ashes so white they could have been snow, and webbed lawn chairs made a crescent around them. Bird droppings marked two of the chairs. One of the birds, it appeared, had recently eaten a mouse.
Jem moved along the back windows, checking each one. At the back door, he tilted his head toward yellow police tape crisscrossing the frame. Then he crouched near the cellar doors, rattled them, and frowned.
“So,” he said, “couple of options. One, I could pick the lock on these doors, and we go in through a super creepy torture dungeon.”
“Why do you think it’s a torture dungeon?”
“Or two, we go in through the back door.”
“Uh, back door?”
Jem stood, but he made a face. “The back door is boring.”
“I don’t know if I’m up to a torture dungeon today.”
“Okay, babe. That’s fine. It’s whatever you want.” Jem went up to the back door and nudged it with his foot. It swung open a few inches and then stopped. “It’s just not very badass, that’s all.”
“Why is the door unlocked? Is someone home?”
“Nah, you can see where they busted it out of the frame to get in. Probably emergency services—see?”
Jem indicated two deep grooves in the wood. They were parallel and close together, and they looked almost identical.
Tean hadn’t seen marks like that before, but his mind made the connection immediately.
A couple of months ago, when he and Jem had been snowed in at Kolen Lodge, the wolves had come for River Jordan.
Tean had been in the room when they’d forced the door, and he remembered glimpsing the tool they’d used—something like a crowbar, but with a forked end.
Later, he’d looked up the name: a Halligan bar.
And Jem was correct that it was something used by emergency services.
But.
“What?” Jem asked.
“The wolves used something like this at the lodge,” Tean said.
Jem was only silent for a moment. “So, you’re thinking maybe one of them has ties to police, fire, something like that? Or are you saying they broke in here?”
“Either. Or both. I’m not sure why Kai would have needed to break in. But then, I’m not sure of anything. We don’t know anything about his relationship with his mother. Maybe she wouldn’t let him in the house.”
Jem’s next exhale was slower, more controlled. His hand dipped into his pocket, and it came out with the barrette. “Right. Okay. Good note.” He nodded toward the police tape and, beyond it, what appeared to be a mudroom. “I’m going first. Keep back so I have room to work.”
Room to work was about as euphemistic as it could get, but Tean only nodded.
Ducking under the tape, Jem passed through the open doorway. His ROOS whispered against the floor, and one board creaked sharply. After a moment, Tean stepped inside.
The mudroom consisted of hooks on one wall, with waterproof jackets and heavier coats hung one on top of the other, and at the base of the wall, shoes and boots kicked off to lie wherever they fell.
The other wall was lined with cubbies that were stuffed with junk—a beach ball, a basket of rags, an umbrella, a bottle of sunscreen.
Jem kept moving.
The mudroom connected with the kitchen. The appliances were maybe ten or fifteen years old, when stainless steel had been the look.
Granite countertops. Cabinets that were a buttery yellow—not the kind of thing you’d see in a Utah house these days.
On one of the counters, a bowl of fruit held blackened bananas, and fruit flies flitted into the air when Tean got too close.
A hallway ran toward the front of the house.
What must have been the great room or family room or living room opened on one side—white-upholstered furniture that told Tean the Curtis family didn’t have any indoor dogs, and a maple-topped coffee table with a miniature ficus and a couple of titles Tean had seen in Costco: Where the Crawdads Sing, The Girl with No Name, Anxious People.
On the wall hung a mass-produced print of a watercolor of a bridge and a mass-produced print of an ink drawing of Jesus.
“He kind of looks like Obi-Wan Kenobi,” Jem said. Maybe something showed on Tean’s face because Jem laughed. “What? He does!”
They passed through the foyer. The dining room had a table set for eight—place mat, charger, plate, salad plate, the works—and the faintest layer of dust. On the walls hung several family photos, and Tean hesitated for a moment, studying them.
Kai appeared in many of them, although a quick check told Tean that the pictures never showed him as a baby or a toddler. In one photo, he might have been as young as seven, but that was the youngest. In others, he was a pre-teen, then a teen. And then Kai was no longer in the photos.
The adults in the photos aged along with him: a woman with the same dishwater-blond hair, clearly Kai’s mother; and a dark-skinned man Tean thought must have been Latino, who wore a heavy mustache and was built strong, almost stocky.
The stepfather, Tean decided, because Kai hadn’t inherited any features from the man.