Darwin's Children Part 7

Will looked miserably at Stella and fell back on the couch. Stella put the tray on a small folding table. She did not feel like eating. Both she and Kevin squatted by Elvira. Stella stroked the girl's cheeks, making her freckles pale. They remained pale. The patches had steadied in the last few minutes, and were now even more meaningless and vague.

"Can we make her feel better?" Stella asked.

"We're not angels," Will said.

"My mother says we all have minds deep inside of us," Stella said, desperate to find some answer. "Minds that talk to each other through chemicals and-"

"What the h.e.l.l does she know?" Will asked sharply. "She's human, right?"

"She's Kaye Lang Rafelson," Stella said, stung and defensive.

"I don't care who she is," Will said. "They hate us because we're new and better."

"Our parents don't hate us," Stella ventured hopefully, looking at Mabel and Kevin.

"Mine do," Mabel said. "My father hates the government so he hid me, but he just took off one day. My mother left me in the bus station."

Stella could see that these children had lived lives different from her own. They all smelled lonely and left out, like puppies pulled from a litter, whining and searching for something they had lost. Beneath the loneliness and other emotions of the moment lay their fundamentals: Will smelled rich and sharp like aged cheddar. Kevin smelled a little sweet. Mabel smelled like soapy bathwater, steam and flowers and clean, warm skin.

She could not detect Elvira's fundamental. Underneath the illness she seemed to have no smell at all.

"We thought about escaping," Kevin said. "There's steel wire in all the walls. Fred told us he made this place strong."

"He hates us," Will said.

"We're worth money," Kevin said.

"He told me his daughter killed his wife," Will said.

That kept them all quiet for a while, all but Free Shape, whose breath rasped.

"Teach me how to talk with my dapples," Stella asked Will. She wanted to take their minds off the things they could not hope to do, like escape.

"What if Elvira dies?" Will asked, his forehead going pale.

"We'll cry for her," Mabel said.

"Right," Kevin said. "We'll make a little cross."

"I'm not a Christian," Will said.

"I am," Mabel said. "Christ was one of us. I heard it in the woods. That's why they killed him."

Will shook his head sadly at this naivete. Stella felt ashamed at the words she had spoken to the men in the Texaco minimart. She knew she was nothing like Jesus. Deep inside, she did not feel merciful and charitable. She had never admitted that before, but watching Elvira gasping on the floor taught her what her emotions really were.

She hated Fred Trinket and his mother. She hated the federals coming for them.

"We'll have to fight to get out," Will said. "Fred is careful. He doesn't come inside the cage. He won't even call a doctor. He just calls for the vans. The vans come from Maryland and Richmond. Everyone wears suits and carries cattle prods and tranquilizer guns."

Stella shivered. She had called her parents; her parents were coming. They might be captured, too.

"Sometimes when the vans come, the children die, maybe by accident, but they're still dead," Will continued. "They burn the bodies. That's what we heard in the woods." He added, "I don't feel like teaching you how to freckle."

"Then tell me about the woods," Stella said.

"The woods are free," Will said. "I wish the whole world was woods."

19.

The rain came back as drizzle. Kaye pulled off and parked just north of the private asphalt road that led to the big, white-pillared brick house and outbuildings. The sky was dark enough that the occupants of the house had turned on the interior lights. The black steel mailbox, mounted on a chest-high brick base, showed five gold reflective numbers.

"This is it," Mitch said. He peered through the wet windshield and rolled down his window. A red pickup and camper had been parked in front. There were no other vehicles.

"Maybe we're too late," Kaye said, fighting back tears.

"It's only been ten or fifteen minutes."

"It took us twenty minutes. The sheriff might have come and gone."

Mitch quietly opened the door. "If I can grab her, I'll come right back."

"No," Kaye said. "I won't be left alone. I don't think I can stand it." Her fingers gripped the steering wheel like cords of rope.

"Stay here, please," Mitch said. "I'll be okay. I can carry her. You can't."

"You'd be surprised," Kaye said. Then, "Why would you have to carry her?"

"For speed," Mitch said. "For speed, that's all."

He opened the glove box and took out a cloth-wrapped bundle, pulled open the cloth, smelling of lubricant, and removed a pistol. He tucked the gun into his suit coat pocket. They had three handguns, all of them unregistered and illegal. Getting charged with gun possession was the last thing Mitch and Kaye lost sleep over. Nevertheless, they both looked on the guns with loathing, knowing that weapons give a false sense of security.

Mitch had cleaned and oiled all three last week.

He took a deep breath and stepped out, walking to the rear of the truck. Kaye released the brake and put the truck into neutral. Mitch pushed, grunting softly in the drizzle. Kaye stepped down and helped, steering with one hand, and together they rolled the truck up the asphalt road, stopping about halfway to the house. Kaye spun the wheel and turned the truck until it blocked the way. Hedges and brick walls lined the drive, and no vehicle would be able to get around the truck going in or out. She sat in the cab. Mitch took her face in his hands and kissed her cheek and she squeezed his arms. Then he walked toward the house, shoving his hands into the pockets of his slacks. He never looked comfortable in a suit. His shoulders and his hands were too big, his neck too long. He did not have the face for a suit.

Kaye watched with heart pounding, her mind a thicket.

The pillars and porch stood dark, the door closed. Mitch walked up the steps as softly as his hard-soled shoes allowed and peered through the tall, narrow window on the right.

Kaye watched him turn without knocking and descend the steps. He walked around the side of the house, out of sight. She started to sob and jammed her knuckles against her teeth and lips. They had been standing on tiptoes for eleven years. It was cruel, and whenever she felt she was used to the extremes of their life together, as she had this morning, almost, so close to feeling normal and productive and contented, working on her scientific paper, napping in front of her computer, she would come up short with some spontaneous vision of how they could lose it all. They had been lucky, she knew.

But rarely did her worst visions meet the level of this nightmare.

Mitch walked along the neatly trimmed gra.s.s margin, crouching below the windows along the side of the house. He heard a rasping, flacketing buzz, like a big insect, and glanced up with a scowl into the stormy gloom. Saw nothing.

His heart almost stopped when he realized the cell phone was still on. He reached into his left pocket and switched it off.

A gravel path reached from the back porch out to a long frame outbuilding behind the house. He avoided the path and the scrunching sound his shoes would make there, and walked along the soft margin, stepping from the gra.s.s, patchy and dead, onto the outbuilding's concrete stoop. He peered through the small, square window set into the steel door. Why a steel door? And new, at that.

In the room beyond the small window he saw a heavy mesh gate. He quietly tried the doork.n.o.b. It was locked, of course. He stepped backward, dropped his heel in a depression in the gra.s.s, caught his balance with a hop, then walked around the side, quickening his pace. The sheriff might arrive any second. Mitch preferred recovering Stella without official help. Besides, he knew Kaye could not hold out much longer. He had to finish his reconnaissance in a hurry, locate his daughter, and decide what to do next.

Mitch had never been one to make quick decisions. He had spent too many years patiently sc.r.a.ping and brushing through packed layers of soil, uncovering millennia of silent, unwritten history. The peace that had filled his soul on those digs had turned out not to be a survival trait.

He had thrown that peace away, along with the digging, the history, and almost all of his past life, and replaced it with a desperate and protective fury.

20.

LEESBURG.

Mark Augustine twitched his lips at the arrival of the man and the woman in the old truck. Little Bird gave them a series of clear, frozen pictures, at the ends of blurry swoops, the pictures cameoed on the big screens in blue-wrapped squares.

Two names came up on the last screen. Facial matching had led to an identification that Augustine did not need. The man walking around the house was Mitch Rafelson. The woman in the truck was Kaye Lang Rafelson.

"Good," Browning said. "The gang's all here." She looked up at Augustine.

Augustine pinched his lips. "Enforcement is hardly an exact science," he said. "Where are the vans?"

"About two minutes away," Browning said. Once more, she was completely in control and confident.

21.

SPOTSYLVANIA COUNTY.

Kaye heard engines. She looked over the hedge to the road and saw two blue-and-white Virginia State Police patrol cars coming from one direction and from the other, no sirens or flashing lights, a long, blocky white utility van, like a cross between a prison bus and an ambulance. She could not see Emergency Action's red-and-gold shield on the side, but she knew it was there.

She stood quietly as the patrol cars slowed and then nosed off with the van to see who would turn first into the private road.

"No snooping," the old woman said. "You with the gas company?" The woman was forty feet away, nothing more than a frizz-headed silhouette. She had come out of the house very quietly as Mitch had transited the back of the long building. She was carrying a shotgun.

Mitch turned and looked up the right side of the long building, facing the back of the house. He had made his circuit and found no other entrance.

"Don't be silly," he called, trying to sound amiable. "I'm looking for my daughter."

"We don't have parties," the woman said.

"Mother!" A man slammed open the screen door and stood beside her on the back porch. "Put that d.a.m.ned gun away. There are troopers out front."

"Caught him," the woman said. She pointed.

"Come right on up here. Let me see you. You with the troopers?"

"Emergency Action," Mitch said.

"That's not what he said," the woman commented, lowering the shotgun.

The man took the gun away from her with a jerk and stepped back into the house. The woman stood staring at Mitch. "You come to get your daughter," she murmured.

Mitch walked warily around her, then to the left, seeing the headlights of a car and a van at the end of the road behind their old truck.

"d.a.m.n it, you've parked all wrong," the man shouted from inside the house. Mitch heard feet stamping on wooden floors, saw lights go on and off through the rooms, heard the door open on the front porch.

As Mitch came around the corner, a plump, active man in shorts stood on the porch between the pillars, hands up as if surrendering. "What are they up to?" the man muttered.

Mitch's hopes were very low. He could not find Stella without making a lot of noise, and there was no way now he could imagine getting her away from the house even if he carried her. The woods behind the house and across a field looked thick. Bugs were humming and chirping all around him now that the rain had let up. The air smelled dusty and sweet with moisture and wet gra.s.s and dirt.

Kaye faced the main road and the newly arrived vehicles. Two men in two-tone gray uniforms got out of the patrol cars and walked toward her. The younger man cast a confused backward glance at the van.

"Did you call us, ma'am?" the older trooper asked. He was large, in his late forties, with a deep but crackling bull voice.

"Our daughter's been kidnapped. She's in there," Kaye said.

"In the house?"

"We just got here. She called us and told us where to find her."

The troopers regarded each other briefly, faces professionally blank, then turned toward the two figures emerging from the van: a tall, cadaverous male in a shiny black jumpsuit and a stocky female in plastic isolation whites. They slipped on gloves and face masks and approached the troopers.

"This is our jurisdiction, officers," the thin man said. "We're federal."

"We have a kidnapping complaint," the older trooper said.

"Ma'am, what's your business here?" the woman asked Kaye.