Prodigal

Chapter 16

16

Adam sipped air, expanding his aching ribs as little as possible, as Luther hit every bump exiting the Nicholson driveway.

“Where are you taking us?” JJ asked.

“Home, if that’s okay,” Grant replied.

Luther’s eyes kept searching for Adam in the rearview mirror. Or maybe it just seemed that way to Adam. JJ was right; he needed to have his story straight, but he didn’t. He couldn’t.

What if he was wrong?

He had to be missing something.

JJ’s dog was waiting for them and sniffed Adam’s leg as he struggled—with no offers of help—to get down out of the SUV. Once satisfied, the dog left him and fell back into line behind JJ, but Adam couldn’t help but feel some sense of uneasy déjà vu around the creature. He watched as JJ picked up a mug from the edge of her driveway before going inside.

Adam paused, appreciating the solidity of the SUV next to him, until Luther motioned him ahead. Grant was already waiting on the porch. Adam held his breath against exclamations of weakness in front of either man (God help me—steps!).

“JJ, you mind getting your first aid kit?” Grant asked.

Grant was a tough man to make out. He had never been anything but kind to Adam growing up, even at the worst of times, and kindness doesn’t always come easily to boys and young men. But that was decades ago, and now he was the Sheriff.

Adam waited until JJ left the room to ask, “Are you going to arrest me?”

“We need to talk,” was Grant’s careful response.

The three men sat at the dining table. Adam cringed as the sweatpants he’d worn to bed, now mud-streaked, touched down on JJ’s clean chair. When JJ returned, he was still struggling to find a position on the unyielding wooden seat that was more forgiving to his body.

“You know, those ribs could be broken,” JJ observed, sitting next to Adam. “You should probably get X-rays.”

“He probably shouldn’t have taken on a man with a fifty-pound weight advantage,” Luther said.

JJ glared, but Adam said, “Forty-two, tops. And I’m sure most of it was water weight.” Adam watched as Luther choked back a laugh.

Luther’s good humor faded quickly, though, when JJ insisted, “Adam needs to see a doctor.”

“He’s got you,” Luther snapped. “You’re a nurse.”

“JJ,” Grant’s calm voice cut in, “we need to speak with Adam now. When we’re done, you can take him to the ER in Plattsville if you feel like it’s necessary.”

Adam touched JJ’s arm, which happened to be the limit of how far he could reach without groaning. “He’s right, JJ.”

“Fine. At least let me get started before you bring out the rubber hoses,” she said, opening a first aid kit big enough for an Everest expedition. “You want me to cut that T-shirt off, or help you pull it off?”

“Let’s take it off,” Adam said. “Cut it off, and I’ll have Iris to deal with.”

Adam stood and JJ tugged on his jacket sleeves, sliding it off in one painful move. For the T-shirt, Adam successfully raised his right arm most of the way, but getting the left one even to half-mast made him groan, so JJ peeled the shirt off for him, more roughly than he would have liked. His hand went to the chain he always wore around his neck. The key that had belonged to his mother still hung there. Reassured, he settled in the wooden chair, cold spindles hard against his back.

Luther leaned in for a better look and winced. “Ouch—Mike Tyson’s gonna need some ice.” Then his gaze traveled up to Adam’s face, to the eye that was getting harder to see out of. “A lot of ice.”

“I’ve got cold packs in the freezer,” JJ said.

Adam watched, surprised, as Luther rose to get them.

He was still watching Luther rearrange frozen food when Grant said, “So, you want to tell me what all that was about next door?”

Goosebumps prickled on Adam’s arms and chest, and he felt self-conscious being shirtless. What had seemed like such a reasonable idea moments ago suddenly wasn’t. There was no other word for it: this was an interrogation. “Do I need a lawyer?”

Grant leaned across the table. “Goddammit, Adam! This isn’t Charleston or Morgantown or even Scranton.”

Adam’s ribs twinged as his breath caught. How the hell does Grant know where I used to live?

“I’ve got a missing girl, and I don’t have time for this crap. You can talk to the Feds over at the Command Center, and I’m sure they’ll be happy to read you your rights and do it by the book. Or you can talk to me and we’ll be done in five minutes. Why were you two beating the hell out of each other?”

“I didn’t mean to,” Adam admitted. In fact, he knew he hadn’t done much of the beating at all, just the being beaten.

As if on cue, JJ’s hands moved to Adam’s torso.

“JJ!” Grant said brusquely. “Not now.”

“What? It’s my house,” she protested, but she removed her hands and sat back in her chair.

Grant turned his attention back to Adam, waiting for an explanation. Adam grimaced as he shifted in his chair, now even more self-conscious and anxious. “You searched the Nicholson property? Top to bottom?”

“Of course,” Grant said.

Adam turned his head away from JJ, relegating her to his peripheral vision. “And you looked at Otto Nicholson?”

“Adam! That’s ridiculous,” JJ protested.

Grant ignored her and nodded. “Otto and Dorothy. We always look at the parents.”

JJ’s look of shocked outrage swung first to Grant, then to Luther opening drawers in the kitchen. Adam pressed forward while he felt the moment’s respite. “Are you sure Otto has nothing to do with his daughter’s disappearance?”

“Are you kidding me?” JJ asked. “He didn’t kidnap his own daughter—”

Grant held up a hand to preempt her rant. “Do you have some kind of evidence to suggest otherwise?” he asked.

“Not exactly,” Adam said. “Not evidence.”

“Then what?” Grant asked.

“Yes, what?” JJ demanded. “What gives you the right to come back here and accuse someone you don’t even know—someone you’d never even met before last night—of being some kind of goddamned sicko? Answer me!”

Adam worked his jaw, back and forth. He couldn’t look at JJ, couldn’t think about how she’d react if he spoke. Am I really going to do this?

His guilt over Danny had been with him so long, it was a part of him. It was like his DNA. It would never be gone. But if he could do something to help this girl now, and didn’t, he’d never be able to live with himself. What was the worst that could happen if he told them? They’d lock him up in prison? Well, actually, there was something worse. If he was wrong—if he was crazy—they might lock him up somewhere else.

“Can you promise me what I tell you will never leave this room?” Adam asked.

“No,” Grant said. “I won’t lie to you. I can’t make that promise.”

Adam’s eyes drifted up, not really at anything in particular, just away from what was in front of him. His hand strayed back to the small metal talisman on his chest, praying for guidance. He could have sworn he felt a warm breath against his forehead.

He had to tell them.

“I know Otto Nicholson kidnapped his daughter.”

“You don’t know that,” JJ said. “Otto is a good man.”

“I do, because I saw it,” Adam insisted.

“What do you mean, you saw it? You saw Otto Nicholson kidnap his own daughter?” Grant asked.

“No, but I saw her. I saw Rachel.”

Adam flinched when JJ grabbed his arm.

“Then where is she?” she asked, voice frantic.

“He has her in a cabin.”

“What do you mean?” Grant asked. “What cabin?”

Adam turned to JJ, and Grant and Luther didn’t exist anymore. Please let her understand. “Do you remember, a few months after Danny was kidnapped, when I had the nightmare in the middle of class?”

JJ glanced down at where her hands were squeezing Adam’s arm. She let go abruptly, fingers spreading away as if his arm were hot. “Yes, I do. That’s pretty hard to forget.”

“For me, too,” Adam said. “That’s why I remember the cabin. Rachel is in the same cabin I saw her in, in my old nightmare.”

“What’s he talking about, JJ?” Grant asked. “Her who?”

“I don’t know—”

But suddenly, JJ did know. Adam saw it in her eyes. Because no doubt JJ had been thinking about that time, too, ever since Rachel disappeared. JJ leaned forward, and her hand gripped Adam’s bruised arm again, painfully. “Your nightmare back then was about Sarah Edmunds?”

“Yes,” Adam said, and felt the secrets that had bound him, that had kept him from breathing freely for twenty years, loosening their grip on his lungs. If he’d been standing, the release would have sent him to his knees.

“So when you say you saw Rachel,” JJ said, “you mean you saw her the way you saw Sarah Edmunds. You dreamed about them both.”

Adam let out a sigh of relief and felt tears rush to fill his eyes. She understood. Now, please God, let her believe me. “Yes, Janie. Rachel is in the same cabin I saw Sarah Edmunds in twenty years ago.”