want me to do this?”
“You’ll figure it out as you go.”
“What happens when I get to White’s Cove?”
“You’ll know by the time you get there.”
“And that’s when I get Veda back? Alive?”
“Always keep my promises, Susan.”
Sue wishes that she could believe him. Right now she wishes it more than anything. “Where will she be?”
“The address is Eleven South Ocean Avenue. But fair warning, Susan: If you come even one minute late—or if you get there using any other route but the one marked in this map—you can still have her back. The only difference is that she’ll be dead. Do you understand the terms of this agreement?”
“Eleven South Ocean Avenue,” Sue repeats, “White’s Cove.”
“Look for the statue.”
“Statue?”
“And just a reminder in case you were thinking about somehow alerting the police—”
“How do I know you’re telling the truth?”
“You don’t.”
Something happens in Sue’s brain. A neurological event that she does not anticipate, a thing that begins where fear ends, a mother’s outrage coupled with an ambulance driver’s low-bullshit threshold. “All right.” She is not yelling. She is being very quiet. “I’ll do what you ask. I’ll drive through these towns with this thing in back. I won’t call the police or anybody else. I’ll be there tomorrow morning to pick up my daughter. But you listen to me. ” She pauses to take in a breath. It is a little disorienting to hear her voice sounding like this. As if some other persona has reemerged from a few years of civility, affluence, and good manners to remind her that, at one point, she understood with adolescent ruthlessness that the world ran on blood. “If you kill my little girl tonight then you better make goddamn sure that you kill me as well. Because you’re taking away everything I have in the world. And I will spend every waking moment for the rest of my life tracking you down. When I do, I promise you that you will die in a way so horrible that even a sick, sadistic son of a bitch like yourself would have to spend weeks trying to come up with something more painful than what I’ve got planned for you.” She breathes. “Now do you understand those terms, you cocksucker, or do I have to make it clearer?”
It is a good moment—it almost makes her feel human again—but she is greeted with nothing but a puff of cottony silence from the phone and she knows that he has hung up on her yet again. At this precise instant, however, Sue Young does not care. There are welcome times when the truth spills out of our mouths because holding it back is like suicide. This is one of those times.
She puts the Expedition in drive and, gripping the map in her right hand, starts to turn around and head east.
10:48P.M.
Ten minutes later she is flying back through Gray Haven with her foot on the accelerator, the map on her lap. It’s the kind of automotive sleepwalking that people do on the most familiar roads, the roads that carry them to their jobs, to school and church, the neighborhoods of their friends and family, back and forth through the towns they’ll grow old and die in. The years she spent away from here might never have elapsed—she feels as if she knows every pothole and curve from Townsend Street to the outskirts of town.
She glances down at the map, at the route and the remaining six towns that lie ahead of her. Clearly they’ve been combined in this order for some reason, though any attempt to find logic in a system devised by a man who kidnaps infants and plucks the eyes out of their nannies is, to say the least, ill-advised.
Still, she goes over them in her mind, one at a time, seeing the names, trying to make them add up to something.
Gray Haven.
Winslow.
Stoneview.
Ashford.
Wickham.
East Newbury.
White’s Cove.
Six towns she’s never heard of and one she knows inside and out.
It doesn’t make any sense.
Maybe it’s not supposed
“You’ll figure it out as you go.”
“What happens when I get to White’s Cove?”
“You’ll know by the time you get there.”
“And that’s when I get Veda back? Alive?”
“Always keep my promises, Susan.”
Sue wishes that she could believe him. Right now she wishes it more than anything. “Where will she be?”
“The address is Eleven South Ocean Avenue. But fair warning, Susan: If you come even one minute late—or if you get there using any other route but the one marked in this map—you can still have her back. The only difference is that she’ll be dead. Do you understand the terms of this agreement?”
“Eleven South Ocean Avenue,” Sue repeats, “White’s Cove.”
“Look for the statue.”
“Statue?”
“And just a reminder in case you were thinking about somehow alerting the police—”
“How do I know you’re telling the truth?”
“You don’t.”
Something happens in Sue’s brain. A neurological event that she does not anticipate, a thing that begins where fear ends, a mother’s outrage coupled with an ambulance driver’s low-bullshit threshold. “All right.” She is not yelling. She is being very quiet. “I’ll do what you ask. I’ll drive through these towns with this thing in back. I won’t call the police or anybody else. I’ll be there tomorrow morning to pick up my daughter. But you listen to me. ” She pauses to take in a breath. It is a little disorienting to hear her voice sounding like this. As if some other persona has reemerged from a few years of civility, affluence, and good manners to remind her that, at one point, she understood with adolescent ruthlessness that the world ran on blood. “If you kill my little girl tonight then you better make goddamn sure that you kill me as well. Because you’re taking away everything I have in the world. And I will spend every waking moment for the rest of my life tracking you down. When I do, I promise you that you will die in a way so horrible that even a sick, sadistic son of a bitch like yourself would have to spend weeks trying to come up with something more painful than what I’ve got planned for you.” She breathes. “Now do you understand those terms, you cocksucker, or do I have to make it clearer?”
It is a good moment—it almost makes her feel human again—but she is greeted with nothing but a puff of cottony silence from the phone and she knows that he has hung up on her yet again. At this precise instant, however, Sue Young does not care. There are welcome times when the truth spills out of our mouths because holding it back is like suicide. This is one of those times.
She puts the Expedition in drive and, gripping the map in her right hand, starts to turn around and head east.
10:48P.M.
Ten minutes later she is flying back through Gray Haven with her foot on the accelerator, the map on her lap. It’s the kind of automotive sleepwalking that people do on the most familiar roads, the roads that carry them to their jobs, to school and church, the neighborhoods of their friends and family, back and forth through the towns they’ll grow old and die in. The years she spent away from here might never have elapsed—she feels as if she knows every pothole and curve from Townsend Street to the outskirts of town.
She glances down at the map, at the route and the remaining six towns that lie ahead of her. Clearly they’ve been combined in this order for some reason, though any attempt to find logic in a system devised by a man who kidnaps infants and plucks the eyes out of their nannies is, to say the least, ill-advised.
Still, she goes over them in her mind, one at a time, seeing the names, trying to make them add up to something.
Gray Haven.
Winslow.
Stoneview.
Ashford.
Wickham.
East Newbury.
White’s Cove.
Six towns she’s never heard of and one she knows inside and out.
It doesn’t make any sense.
Maybe it’s not supposed
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