The Hidden Things Read online

“Mr. Cooper, your wife’s been trying to reach you.”

  “Is she okay? I was in a meeting.”

  “She’s fine. Not to worry. We just came to see if we could find you while she was trying to get you on the phone. It looks like we got here first. Now, Mr. Cooper, I do need to tell you that there’s been an incident at your home.” The cop raised his hands, palms out, staving off the reaction that blazed up on John’s face.

  “Was my house robbed?” John grabbed his head between his hands, all ten fingers flexed to exclamation points. “Jesus Christ, was it a robbery?”

  “No, sir. Everything in your house is fine. And your daughter’s fine, too, but I’m just sorry to have to say that she was attacked in your home.”

  “What?” John dropped his hands onto his thighs, leaning over like a spent runner. “What? Carly? Oh, God. Is she okay? Is she hurt?”

  “She’s okay. A bad kid forced his way in as she was letting herself into the house after school.”

  The cop continued his story, but John didn’t hear him. Relief and fury flooded his mind, a chemical no-no of two feelings that don’t mix well.

  The police weren’t there for him. He tried not to wilt. The deliverance from that specific terror threatened to buckle his knees. But the lump in his throat, the sudden rush of acid and heat from the thought of anyone hurting Carly, overwhelmed him. And surprised him, too.

  “—and she was already over at the neighbor’s house, but they both saw the little punkass run across your lawn while they were on the call with 911. He must’ve woken up and taken off like the devil was on him. But your wife said there are cameras and we—”

  “Woken up?” John was disoriented by the Goldilocks detail of a story he’d missed most of. “He was asleep?”

  The younger cop glowed with amusement and surrogate pride. “She got him good. She knocked him out, Mr. Cooper.”

  “Carly knocked somebody out?”

  “Your daughter’s a little pistol. She’s really something.”

  “Stepdaughter,” John said, and winced at the nasty impulse to distance himself.

  He’d lost track of his face. John tried never to lose track of his expression. Words were important in convincing people. Keeping your story simple was security. But body language was everything.

  A shadow crossed both of the police officers’ faces, and he was fairly certain that neither man had consciously realized that John Cooper had just stepped out of the good-guy lane, maybe just one foot, maybe only a toe over the line. But noted, nonetheless.

  “Mr. Cooper, your wife says that your security cameras are motion activated. This guy should be all over your recordings. We need to get this footage. This attack was incredibly bold.”

  The younger cop couldn’t contain his affectionate admiration. “And she’s really fine, don’t worry, she’s totally okay, she’s awesome.”

  The older man smiled in agreement. “But this guy is really dangerous. We need to let the public know. If you’ve got a good picture in there somewhere, somebody will recognize him. Somebody will tell us who he is. We can stop him before he gets to someone who can’t handle him.”

  John Cooper felt the trap of his own devising snap closed. While the police pointed and nodded enthusiastically over his shoulder as he pulled up the video clips, one after the other, his mind was already far ahead into what came next, into what he would say.

  He watched as Carly found a way to be okay in all her thin, kind, funny, sweet, brilliant, not-nearly-wary-enough unreadiness. He watched her win the day with no help from anyone after pounding away on an alarm system that had been disabled because John Cooper couldn’t let a computer call the police to his home, no matter what. He couldn’t let blind chance tug its way off the leash.

  With the officers behind him, their distractingly laden belts squeaking against their cuffs and guns, John kept his shoulders down and level. He was thankful for the setup that kept them behind him so he could have the privacy of his own face while he went through the recordings.

  They watched for the best shots to use for their website and to send out to the media outlets. They had to find this guy before he could hurt someone else. And John had to help them.

  The calculations played out, and he wrestled the twinge in his heart at Carly’s desperation and triumph on the screen. Let it go. She’s fine. He had to think. The calm he mimed was at odds with his body’s urge to hand over every file, to let them have everything, anything, if it would only let him get in his car and not stop driving for days.

  But he fought it all. He didn’t know how he was going to get away with three things, three things that stood in the way of the part of him that wanted to see this through. That part of him was frantically writing new lines into the script to clear his path.

  He needed to decide what he would tell his wife and daughter—stepdaughter, damn it—about why they had been filmed coming in and out of the foyer of their own house for better than half a year when they didn’t know it. And why the panic button might as well have been the thermostat for all the good it did for poor Carly to bang away at it.

  And the painting. Goddammit, why had he never thought about what else it could mean to have even a little bit of it in view of the foyer camera? It had never occurred to him that anyone would see these images. Not from any of the cameras, but especially not from that one. It was the entire point.

  Interior 1 was only for him, only there at all because he hated that the painting was hanging out in the open. It didn’t look like much, but if anyone, inside the house or a delivery person or salesman peering in through the sidelight window, ever stopped to look at it or gave it any special notice, at least the camera would let him know. He would see them looking. He’d gauge the reaction. Then he could decide what to do about it. But that had been the end of the plan. He’d never imagined that anyone besides him would know a camera was there.

  Only a corner of the painting was in the recordings anyway. The unframed panel wasn’t all that big to begin with. Just a triangle of the lower left corner, no more than seven inches deep, took up a slice of the camera’s capture in the far right of the shot.

  The cops, no surprise, hadn’t reacted to it at all. That was something. But it wasn’t everything. Some people out there would know what it was.

  More than one person in the world would recognize even a small section of that painting and know its worth. Beyond that, a few would know what all it had been through.

  He’d already dealt with three of them. One, still alive and an eternal pain in the ass; another who made John wonder about how hot a grudge could burn and for how long; and one who’d bled out all over his shirtsleeves and the pavement under his feet four years ago.

  CHAPTER THREE

  * * *

  The whole thing was over so fast. Her favorite song was longer than that. Just a few minutes, start to finish. Finished. It was over now. It would always be over.

  It didn’t quite feel that way, though. Carly couldn’t stop fiddling with it in her mind. How could everything fly around in less time than it took your favorite song to play and then land in a different order?

  What Carly remembered most, once the guy was inside the house with her, was an overriding, all-caps, red-font chant: NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!

  No. No in some animal way that wasn’t a word. It wasn’t even a thought, really, just an overwhelming refusal in every scrap of matter and energy that made up Carly Liddell.

  No was her skin, and her eyes gone hot in her head. No was an itch in her teeth to sink into any warm thing that came close enough to bite. No to him. No to the terror rising up in her throat to choke her. No to the thought slashing through her mind like lightning—He’s too strong. I can’t stop him.

  Any recollection of what she’d actually done in those few not-song moments was far away. Like on another planet far away. (And how long had it really taken, anyway—how many real minutes and seconds? It felt like infinity, as if in some way it was still happening, as if maybe
it would always be happening. But no.)

  In a memory that should have been fresh, almost every image and sound of the struggle in the foyer was vague and skippy. She’d kicked him or something and he’d fallen down hard. The wet thud of his head hitting the tile, that was kind of clear. But she wasn’t very big and she didn’t know how to fight, so it didn’t make much sense. She really did not know exactly how she’d gotten away.

  The first clear impression, after he was down, was an electric giddiness that blazed up her every nerve. The doorknob in her hand, cool and solid, reeled her in from overload and let her catch the scream that was rushing up into her mouth. She wrapped it up tightly, that scream. She strangled it in her throat like her fist squeezing down on the brass. The only sound was the gasps of air sawing over her dry tongue.

  The guy was silent. Carly strained to hear any movement behind her. He was—(NO!) The scream in her throat wriggled to be free at her instinct to turn around, to check to see if he was getting up.

  She didn’t look. She cranked open the door. She still didn’t scream.

  She ran, her boots sinking into the spongy grass of the lawn—three strides, four, five, six—and she shoved down the crazy laugh that tried to bubble up into the floaty space that not-screaming had stretched into her throat. No was fading. Carly was coming back online. For her to laugh about this was just nuts, and that would make her cry. She kind of thought she should be crying.

  Where her head had been full of nothing but No! now the swerve and dance of random thoughts, the weaving hum of thinking, came back to her. She was aware of being aware.

  A stop-and-start afternoon rain raised a warm haze off the street. She breathed up the smell of oil, metallic dirt, and the ghost of spent tires. Her elbows hurt. She wanted things. To be far away. A milkshake. Her mother. To not have left school yet.

  Ada flared brightly into Carly’s mind. She wanted to talk to her best friend, to tell her what had happened. They were usually together after school, but Ada had to get new glasses today. That’s why Carly had come straight home.

  Ada played the ukulele. Carly drew. Carly had stacks of sketchbooks filled with cartoon characters and portraits of her friends and family. Ada wanted Carly to teach her to draw, so Carly had bargained for lessons on the ukulele. She’d never gotten past messing with the tuner the day before. Just yesterday? Really?

  When Carly plucked a string, the tuner caught the vibrations out of the air. It measured what she’d done and delivered a little electronic verdict, a pixel needle wagging through the red toward the green zone, the sweet spot. Turn the peg, get closer to the green. Turn too far, and overshoot it back into red. It was like a game. More fun than the little guitar.

  Carly did look back just once as she ran, when she was flying across her side yard into Mrs. Carmichael’s. He’d never catch her, even if he was back on his feet now.

  But she ran faster anyway. Concrete to grass. Grass back to concrete. The pavement disappeared under her long, sprinting legs and it rose up into two short stairs and a stoop. She pounded on the green door of the neighbor’s house. The silk-flowered wreath jumped off its hook and rolled away.

  That’s when things had gotten frustrating.

  Trying to explain what had happened—to Mrs. Carmichael, and later to the police and to her mother—was like trying to tell a dream as a story right after you’d woken up. She kept stammering through backtracks to fill in the details of what came before to make it all make sense.

  It was important to them, in a different way than it was important to her, that she set the links in the chain in the right order. The story had to go smoothly from then until now, for everyone’s sake. Carly needed to be able to see it correctly in her mind to sort it out. They only needed to know how to catch him.

  In Mrs. Carmichael’s house, Carly finally fought the tingle of tears, but more from not being able to get the story out than from shock, although the shock was certainly there. Her body was shaking with spent adrenaline. Her teeth chattered as she tried to talk. The aftertaste was metal and ashes.

  Something turned and tightened in Carly as she watched Mrs. Carmichael react to her story. Carly didn’t know Mrs. Carmichael well. She was the nice neighbor, the woman who carved half a dozen amazing jack-o’-lanterns at Halloween and lit her porch with them for three nights running. She was the lady with the little white dog and always a smile and a wave. Now she was the first person to pull Carly into a fierce hug after what had happened. But there was a message in the embrace.

  Mrs. Carmichael’s hug felt charged with more understanding than Carly felt for her own idea of the last few minutes. No! But yes. Something had happened to Mrs. Carmichael, something that made her know what Carly had just been through. But Mrs. Carmichael knew more, knew worse. In the tremor of her arms, Carly could tell.

  Instantly they were part of the same set, even though Carly was only almost fifteen and Mrs. Carmichael was way older than even her mother. Carly wanted to know, but was sure that she would never ask. She could feel the woman’s fingers trembling, holding Carly’s face in her hands the way Carly imagined a grandmother would. The wary sadness in the woman’s eyes. The way she pulled her mouth into a lipless line, hemming in her own story behind a tight sadness, Carly knew that this was as close as they would ever get to talking about it. It felt both right and wrong.

  She thought of the ukulele. The peg turned.

  Carly told her story, over and over. First, to the EMTs from the fire truck that got there while Carly and Mrs. Carmichael were still calling it in. She’d told Mrs. Carmichael that she wasn’t hurt, but the word attacked had been part of the 911 report, and that’s all it had taken. Carly told the story to the police as they arrived next, two sets of two, minutes apart. Then to another man in regular clothes. They said he was a lieutenant, who seemed like the boss. Everyone said the detectives were on the way. That sounded like a big deal, so she tried to get the story better, get it ready.

  She couldn’t talk at all, at first, when her mother came rushing through Mrs. Carmichael’s front door.

  There is no proper term, no single word, for the tidal wave of emotion on the far side of a near miss. It’s made of a fear that’s completely after-the-fact. There’s nothing to fix. Everything is fine except the trembling and the terror spiked with fury at the carelessness of the universe. It’s resentment shot through with bright pangs of superstitious gratitude toward whatever Power intervened to make it a horribly lucky day. It’s love concentrated to a strength that’s nearly poisonous.

  The worst of it, though, is the gift of preview—that cold ghost of grief that whispers that it is still out there for you, simply waiting for some other day.

  Carly and her mother shared all of it in an unbroken look as they scrambled past the small crowd of policemen and Mrs. Carmichael’s barking dog to get to each other. Her mother grabbed her up, trying to hold her, stroke her, and look into her eyes all at once. Carly couldn’t breathe, pinned by the desperation on her mother’s face to be sure, all the way through, that she was okay. They told each other in sobs and nods. She was fine. They would all be fine.

  But the clutching quickly lost its practical power. Muscles relented. Breath slowed. Mrs. Carmichael’s grandfather clock clucked its second hand at them, and everyone else ran out of places to look to give them the privacy of their reunion.

  Carly turned back to the police.

  The story was her job right now. Their expectant looks gently reminded her of it, so she went back to work. They seemed happy enough with what she told them, fired up even. They always smiled at the part where she knocked him down, however it had happened.

  But her recollections became more frustrating to her as what happened became a script instead of an actual memory. The whole narrative took on the order of recitation, and she lost the reality of where she’d stood, what he’d said, why she had bolted inside the house instead of out into the street for help, what he’d done, what she’d done, how she’d made it bac
k to the door and beyond. The details of it receded as the tale of it bloomed. She was the foremost authority on the subject, and she wasn’t sure she believed any of it.

  They took a break to move the whole circus back to the Liddell house. From the porch Mrs. Carmichael watched them leave. Carly looked back and tried to let her know with the right-temperature smile and steady eyes that she understood what had passed between them.

  The parade of cops and their pair of guarded civilians crossed the two front yards, properly on the sidewalks this time, not in the grass. (That’s the square where he called to me and I stopped. I should have kept walking. Or started running. Infinity.) Carly was steered across the stoop with her mother’s shoulder set against her own, her mother’s arm around Carly’s waist. The door was unlocked, so the police went in first. Each of them stepped over the lump of her backpack, but Carly picked it up and put it on the bench as she would have done if it had been a regular day.

  And just like that, everything looked normal. As if it—whatever it really was—had never happened.

  Carly excused herself to the bathroom and stared into the mirror. The only difference she could make out was in the urge she felt to pull a face. She bared her teeth at her reflection. But that was the wrong kind of different. She flushed the toilet and ran the water in the sink to buy more time.

  The beep of the sensor on the opening front door zapped her heart back into her throat. But that was stupid. It wasn’t like the guy would come back. And it wasn’t like she was all alone this time.

  Still, the best she could manage was to lean her ear to the door, listening, her heart kicking in her chest. Someone rushed past the bathroom. Then she heard her mother’s muffled cry: “John!”

  Carly flung open the door.

  They’d been a family of two since Carly was a toddler. Her father had left them, divorced them, and evaporated before she’d ever known him. Her mother, though, was a hard, unstoppable, high-speed engine of shake-it-off. Carly sometimes wondered if part of the reason her father was so thoroughly gone was that her mother was so thoroughly fine with it.