The souls of lost lake, p.31
The Souls of Lost Lake, page 31
Wren turned onto a side road, the overhanging branch of a tree scraping the roof of her pickup. She glanced down at her phone.
Emily Ann Johnson was last seen on October 9, 1996. She is two months and three days old with red hair and dark blue eyes. She weighs approximately eleven pounds and was last seen wearing a pink sleeper with a white hat.
Emily Ann. That was her name? What if she was horribly and awfully mistaken? The baby’s picture was black-and-white, it was an older newspaper, pixelated and on the computer. Babies sometimes looked alike. There was a chance she was just plain wrong.
No. No, there wasn’t.
Wren dialed Eddie’s number. When the call didn’t go through, she looked at her phone. There was a signal, but it hadn’t connected. The problem wasn’t uncommon for cell service in this area. She tried again, only to have it connect and go to his voicemail. Panic was rising in her. She hadn’t seen him since the night in the camp kitchen. Hadn’t seen Troy either, but at least he’d answered her platonic texts. Eddie was simply off the grid—right when she needed him most. Right when he needed her, but she’d been too blind to realize, too dumb to know what Patty had alluded to all along. She and Eddie needed each other. Were meant for each other. They weren’t just buddies, pals, old friends. They were—
The truck bounced over a pothole, and Wren’s phone flipped onto the passenger seat. Growling, she left it there and turned into the short drive of the cabin. Jumping from the cab, she strode toward the cabin.
“Dad?” she called. She’d give him a chance to explain. Wren determined that as she hopped up the three steps onto the porch. “Dad?” It was only right. He wasn’t an evil man. He wasn’t bad. He was her father, for pity’s sake! There had to be an explanation.
“Dad?” Wren wrenched the cabin door open. She ducked inside and looked around. There wasn’t any sign of her father. No academic books splayed on the small table. No papers. His reading glasses weren’t there. Neither was his pivotal thermos of coffee that gave him the courage of Aragon, if not the personality of an Orc.
“Crud,” Wren muttered. She spun on her heel and hurried from the cabin, shutting the door behind her. She headed for her truck. It wouldn’t hurt to try calling his cell again. Maybe he’d pick up.
“Wren?”
She skidded to a halt as Pippin rounded the cabin. A fishing pole was in his hand. Wren sucked in a breath of relief. That’s right. He liked to fish at the small pond just yards into the woods from here. His brow was furrowed, his barely there mustache lifted to the right as he scrunched his mouth in question.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Where’s Dad?” she demanded. Wren opened the passenger side door and grabbed her phone. Turning, she slammed the door. Pippin leaned his pole against the porch.
“I’ve been trying to find Dad,” she continued, “and he’s not answering my calls. He wasn’t in his office. He isn’t at home. He isn’t here.”
“He is probably in town having coffee over his weekly Tuesday Zoom calls with the university.”
Oh. Pippin was right. Their father always did that. Zoom calls in the coffee shop on Tuesdays.
“I have a question.” Wren leveled her attention on her brother.
Pippin leaned against the hood of her truck. He didn’t appear to welcome the question, but he didn’t stop her either.
“Do you remember when I was born?”
He shrugged.
“Tell me about it.” Wren waited.
“What do you want to know? You were born. Mom and Dad brought you home from the hospital. You cried—a lot.”
“Did I?” Wren couldn’t help but laugh.
“It was annoying.”
Wren ignored that, and her brother’s frank, unemotional stare that offered no apology for it. “Do you remember Mom being pregnant?”
Pippin rubbed his mustache. “Sure.”
Wren flicked on her phone and showed the article to Pippin. He skimmed it.
“And?” Pippin raised his eyes.
“You don’t recognize it?”
“The baby?”
“Yes.”
Pippin’s expression was placid. “It’s a baby.”
“It’s me.” Wren watched his face. It was so blank. So empty. It told her nothing.
Pippin handed her back her phone. “It’s a baby,” he repeated.
Wren slipped her phone into her pocket. He was no help. If anything, he was more detached than usual. “Fine, Pippin. I’m going to head into town. See if I can find Dad.” She rounded the truck and opened the driver’s door to climb in.
Pippin’s arm stretched out beside her and slammed the door shut.
“Hey!” Wren leveled a glare at him.
Pippin was inches from her, his arm still extended, holding her door shut.
“What are you doing?” An uneasiness she’d never felt around Pippin made her shift away from him.
“You don’t need to find Dad.” He was still expressionless. “Dad’s in a meeting, and this type of thing would just upset him.”
“Pippin, I need to figure out—”
“You don’t need to figure anything out.” He offered a small sideways smile. It didn’t reach his eyes.
“Pippin, you’re freaking me out.”
“And you are asking too many questions.” He grabbed her arm. His fingers bit into her skin.
“Hey!” Wren scowled and wrenched her arm away.
“Come with me.” Pippin tipped his head toward the cabin.
“No.” Wren curled her lip at him.
“Yes.” Pippin took a step nearer to her. “I’m not asking.”
Wren stared at him, then pushed against him, reaching for her truck door. “Get out of my way, Pippin.”
It startled her when her brother’s hand clamped onto her wrist, his grip a vise. “We need to talk.”
“I don’t want to talk.” Wren twisted her wrist, but Pippin only gripped it harder. She whimpered, “Pippin?”
He yanked her away from her truck. Wren fell against him, and he curled his arm around her throat, tugging her back against his chest. Leaning into her ear, he clicked his tongue. “I won’t let you hurt Dad.”
Wren wriggled under his hold.
Pippin shoved her forward, and she careened onto the ground. The skin on her palms scraped across the gravel. She looked incredulously at Pippin while crawling backward. “What are you talking about?”
He stood over her. “I’m talking about protecting my father’s name—and my mother’s memory.” Reaching down, he yanked her up. Wren’s neck cracked as her head whipped forward. Her brother had become a villain.
“Where are you taking me?” Wren wriggled her wrists, but the plastic zip tie her brother had tightened around them bit into her skin.
Her truck jolted over a pothole. Pippin shifted gears, ignoring her.
“Pippin!” she snapped, but fear was crowding her throat. Her phone had fallen out of her pocket in the tussle with him on the ground outside the cabin. He’d overpowered her quickly, and in an irrational moment of random thought, she regretted ever quitting her martial arts lessons in fifth grade.
Pippin tapped the steering wheel, ducking to look out the windshield and up toward the sky. “Looks like it might rain.”
“Pippin!” Wren struggled with her wrists. Her ankles, also bound with a zip tie, were bleeding. “The ties are too tight,” she whimpered. There had to be mercy in him somewhere.
“You know,” Pippin said as he turned the truck onto an old logging road, which was mostly grass and ruts with two narrow trails for tires, the middle grown over by long weeds, “the more you struggle, the worse it’ll get. Zip ties are a beast.”
Wren stared at him in exasperation. He was so unaffected. Like they were out for a sibling afternoon jaunt in the woods. The truck hit a rut, and she bounced on the seat, her shoulder banging into the door.
Pippin pulled the truck off the trail, driving into an alcove surrounded by trees. He shifted the truck into park and shut off the ignition. Saying nothing, Pippin hopped out of the truck, rounded it, and opened Wren’s door.
“Come on.”
“Where are we?”
He didn’t answer.
“You need to let me go.”
Pippin gave a cynical snort of laughter. “That request never works. You should know that.”
Wren stiffened as Pippin reached for her and tugged her from the truck. She fell against him. “What did you mean you’re protecting Dad’s name? Mom’s memory? What do you know, Pippin?” She jerked away from him, but Pippin pushed her ahead. Tree branches scraped her face as she fell to the ground. Her knee cracked against a tree root, and she cried out.
“Oh. Sorry.” Pippin leaned over and flicked open a knife. “Forgot your ankles were tied.” He laughed. “Stupid of me.” He slipped the blade between her ankles and the zip tie, slicing through the plastic.
Wren limped to her feet as Pippin hauled her up.
“Please . . .” She opted for begging. Maybe that would anchor itself somewhere in the cold tundra of her brother’s glacial soul.
“Nice try.” He shoved her forward again. This time she could move her feet, so she followed his direction.
She ducked under another branch. Thornbushes jabbed at her shorts, snagging them. Wren ripped through them, Pippin behind her. She noticed he still held his knife. It was more than a pocketknife. As a kid she’d seen one of the camp staff gut a deer with a knife just like it.
“You know the baby in that article was me, don’t you?” Wren hated where her mind was taking her. Down narrow, dark alleyways of suspicion threaded with unclear theories.
“Arwen Blythe, what are you insinuating?” Pippin snapped a twig off a tree as he passed.
“I don’t know.” She grunted as her toe tripped over a rock that jutted up in the trail. “I haven’t pieced it together.” She didn’t want to either. Wren had suspected her father, suspected something not legitimate. But Pippin? He’d been twelve—twelve back then.
Pippin’s arm pushed in front of Wren, holding back a large leafy branch that blocked the trail. She glared at him as she squeezed through. The branch snapped back into place.
Pippin followed Wren. “It really upset Mom after she miscarried the babies.” His voice was monotone. Stating a simple fact that wound its way around Wren’s heart with a squeezing sensation that threatened to make it stop beating.
“I know.” Wren raised her bound hands to push the hair from her eyes.
“She didn’t deserve to suffer like that.”
“So what happened? They bought a baby from the black market?” Wren asked.
Pippin grabbed her shirt and yanked her back. Wren stumbled, reaching for her brother to keep from falling again. Her knee already throbbed, and a thin line of blood was running down her ankle into her sock.
Pippin was irritated. At least he showed emotion now, but Wren shrank away from his intensity.
“Black market?” He snorted in disbelief. “Is that what you think?”
“What else is there?”
“Who do you think took care of Mom all those years?”
Confused, Wren drew back. “Dad?”
“Me.” Pippin jabbed at his chest with his finger. “Dad all but lived on campus.”
“So? What does that have to do with anything?”
Pippin stared at her as if she were the one who’d lost her mind. “She lost babies.”
“I know she did.”
“She needed a baby.”
There was a nagging intuition in her gut, yet Wren refused to entertain it. “And?”
“I found her one.”
Wren stilled. It was what she had feared, ignored, avoided. “You can’t be serious.”
Pippin smiled grimly. “I found you. In the park. There in a stroller. Alone. You needed a mother.”
Wren choked. It felt as though fingers were closing around her throat, except Pippin wasn’t touching her. “You took me?”
Pippin shrugged. “The woman watching you was chatting it up with a few other ladies. You were asleep. When I brought you home”—his gaze grew distant—“Mom fell in love with you. Immediately.”
“That woman in the park was my . . . my mother!” Wren sputtered.
“No!” Pippin exploded, his index finger in her face. His expression darkened. “No. Mom was your mother. And Dad saw it too. He was going to take you—return you—but Mom knew what I was trying to do for her. She understood. She begged. Pleaded. Dad knew you were the only thing that was going to keep Mom alive. She was wasting away before I brought you home to her.”
“Pippin, you stole me.” Wren stumbled back into a tree. She leaned against it. Her breaths came in short incredulous gasps. “You literally stole me.”
“I re-homed you.” Pippin was sincere. She could tell he honestly believed his good intentions. “And Dad, after a week or two, accepted that. It was touch and go for a bit, but then Mom persuaded him until Dad did what needed to be done. He resigned from the university, and we got the heck out of Dodge. With you.”
“You all kidnapped me.” When she stated it out loud, it sounded so trite. So simplistic. But the complications that were intertwined among it were monumental.
Pippin waved her ahead. Wren didn’t bother to resist. She continued to reason through the stunning admission from Pippin. Mosquitoes landed on her arm. Wren couldn’t swat them away. She could feel the itching sting as they bit into her skin, leaving red welts in their wake.
Minutes later, Pippin urged her to the left. The trail had disappeared, and now they ducked and wove through the undergrowth. Sweat trickled down the sides of her face onto her neck. A black fly dodged at her nose. Wren lifted her hands and tossed her head to discourage it. It surprised her when Pippin noticed and batted it away.
“What?” He responded to her look of shock. “I’m not a monster.”
Wren had no reply. Her mind swirled with possibilities. With questions. She was the baby in the California newspaper. She was the reason her father had downgraded his position to move to Wisconsin, far away from questions.
“My birth certificate that Dad said Mom used?” Wren asked.
“Faked.” Pippin gave her a small shove forward.
Her mother was most definitely unstable, that had been clear, but this? And her father complying? The charade of caring for and raising an abducted child? It blew Wren’s mind.
Wren stumbled to a stop, her chest heaving, out of breath and parched. “I need water,” she gasped.
“Soon.” Pippin gave her shoulder a nudge.
They ducked under more growth and wriggled around a sapling. Wren’s bare legs were burning from scratches and cuts. Her wrists were throbbing from the zip tie.
“There.” Pippin pointed ahead.
She saw nothing but trees. Lots of trees. What looked to be a downed pine tree was crossed over a long-dead oak. Wren started to walk around it when Pippin stopped her.
“Here.”
“Here what?” She surveyed the area. There was nothing.
Pippin pointed at the pine tree. Wren let her eyes focus on the area, and slowly realization dawned as she noted that some of the brush wasn’t brush at all, but a camouflaged pattern on canvas with branches covering the majority. Pippin approached it and bent low, fumbling for something. Wren heard a zipper like on a tent as Pippin opened the flap. He looked over his shoulder at her and smiled as if she’d be interested in what he had to say.
“It’s a deer blind. I bought it a few years ago. Works great out here. Waterproof and everything.”
Wren stood, refusing to approach it. She did not know Pippin’s intentions, but hers were to stay far away from that blind. From the covering of the surrounding trees.
“Come on.” Pippin waggled his fingers at her.
“Heck no.” Wren shook her head and took a step backward.
He launched from his crouch, reading her mind and thwarting her instinctual plan to flee. Gripping her arm, Pippin pulled her toward the blind.
“No!” Wren dug in her heels and pulled against him.
“You’ll be safe in there.”
“I’m not going in that thing!” Wren kicked at him.
Pippin pressed his lips together and shook his head in irritation. Before Wren could react, Pippin’s hand smacked her across the face, cutting into her lip. She tasted blood. She felt her tears. He shoved his face into hers.
“Look what you made me do. Mom would be upset.”
“Mom’s dead,” Wren cried, the salt of her tears mixing with the iron of her blood.
Pippin’s eyes darkened. “Shut up!” he growled. Shoving her, Wren fell to the ground. With his foot against her backside, he pushed her forward into the camouflaged blind. She crumpled inside its dark interior. It smelled dank. Musty. Like urine mixed with earth.
Pippin glared at her as he whipped out another zip tie. He wrestled her ankles together and bound them with it. He tightened the tie before fumbling on the ground for something. Wren heard the metal clink of chain. It snaked underneath the bottom of the blind, having been bolted into the dead oak tree just outside. Pippin zip-tied her to the chain and then sat back on his heels. Wren tried to get her eyes adjusted to the darkness in the blind. Light seeped in from a few tiny tears, but otherwise it was well hidden under the brush.
“I’ll be back.” His voice had leveled again. “I’ve got some work I need to get done. I need to figure out what to do with you.” It was so matter-of-fact that it stunned Wren for a second. Then reality rushed in as she realized he planned to leave her here in the woods.
“Pippin!” she yelled. “Don’t leave me in here!”
He backed away and dropped the tent flap into place, zipping it closed. His voice from outside sent a chill through her. “You can scream if you need to. It might make you feel better. In the back of the blind there’s a gallon of water. I’ll be back in the morning.”
And then it was just his footsteps she heard, cracking twigs as he hiked away.
Wren sat in a huddled heap on the ground in the blind. She sucked in a terrified sob. Confusion, hurt, the shock of what had happened to her as a baby made her numb. But fear of Pippin’s instability terrified her. How she hadn’t seen it or put two and two together. His emotional distance. His social withdrawal. The way he isolated himself in the basement of his parents’ house as a grown man. It wasn’t normal. It wasn’t typical. Yet there had been no reason to suspect anything other than he was . . . well, Pippin.
