Catacomb (6 page)

Blistering paint peeled in long coils from the walls and ceiling. Dan’s father ducked through a sagging doorway and into what looked like a classroom beyond. Inside, he opened a closet door covered in graffiti.

“We can’t stay,” Marcus said to nobody. “Just leave it. This place is such a disaster, and we don’t have time to pack everything. Do you really want to get caught here, Evie? Let’s go.”

He glanced over his shoulder in alarm, directly into Dan’s face.

And then he was gone.

D
an stared into the dank bowels of the classroom storage closet. The shelves had been knocked out and scattered into the room, leaving a kind of cave for vagrants. A few pillows and blankets littered the floor, eaten to tatters by rodents and insects. He squeezed his nose shut with his thumb and forefinger, pressing into the closet and kneeling, searching among the disintegrating remnants of a camp. There was no telling how long it had been since the place was last used.

He toed aside the pillows and blankets. Something moved among the discarded bedding, distorting the fabric before tearing through it. A whip-thin rat darted out at him, shrieking and then scurrying out of the closet. Dan sank back against the gutted shelves, holding his chest and catching his breath from the sudden shock. The hole left by the rat showed a glimpse of faded yellow, and Dan carefully moved the blankets to find a sort of nest, torn pieces of paper piled together. Most of it had been chewed and soiled beyond recognition, but a few half sheets of paper still held visible text.

Dan gathered what he could, shuddering from the damp, foul smell and clumps of fur and droppings that clung to the pages. He poked around the closet for more, but there was nothing. Behind him, the school echoed with the voices and footsteps of his friends.

Out in the main hall, he discovered Abby documenting the ruins with her camera. Jordan hugged himself, staring around at the precariously open and broken ceiling.

“There you are,” he said, breathing through his mouth. “Where the hell did you go?”

“I saw something,” Dan said. “It might have been . . . I’m not sure. But there was some old junk in a closet. I took it to look at later.”

“Dan,” Abby said, staring at him over the eye of her camera. “What did you see?”

“One of those visions,” he admitted. “I think it might have been my dad. Hopefully some of this stuff was theirs.” Grimacing, he held up the stained, old pages.

“Delightful,” Jordan mumbled, holding his nose and scowling at Dan like he was crazy.

“We could try and dry them out with my blow dryer,” Abby suggested, unfazed. She returned to her camera, wandering over to a mound of rotting and piled tabletops. Her camera clicked softly as she shot the ceiling, the classrooms, Jordan. She was taking so many pictures that it was a few minutes before Dan noticed it, staring past her to the maintenance door he had entered through.

A softer, faster
click-click-click
came from the bushes right outside the door.

Abby wasn’t the only one taking photos.

“What the hell,” he whispered, racing toward the door.

A slim shadow huddled against the shrubs outside, photographing them. When Dan neared the door, the guy swung the camera over his shoulder on a strap and raced out of view.
Dan followed, cursing the low-hanging boards nailed over the maintenance hatch.

The guy was fast, far faster than Dan, nimbly leaping over the landslide of junk in the front yard. Skidding down the embankment, he reached a black motorcycle parked across the street from Abby’s car. Out of breath, Dan stumbled down the hill, watching as the stranger hopped on the bike, slammed one foot down on the gas, and then executed a neat circle before speeding away. A red insignia flashed on the back of the cyclist’s jacket, but Dan was too far away to read it, and he had missed the license plate, too.

Panting, Dan stared after the motorcycle as it disappeared.

“What was that?” Jordan was out of breath, too, running back toward him. “Did a cop see us?”

“I don’t think it was a cop,” Dan said. “Someone was photographing us.
Watching
us.”

D
an was tired of losing his appetite just before every meal rolled around.

“You really think this person was taking pictures of us?” Abby asked, leaning toward him with both elbows propped on the booth table. “Why would anyone bother?”

Two hours on the road had brought them back to the Montgomery area for a late lunch. They’d stopped in another diner to stretch and use the restroom, but none of them wanted to stay still for very long.

“I have no idea,” Dan said. The whole drive here, he’d been trying to make sense of the vision in the school and the stranger photographing them. At least Abby and Jordan had heard the motorcycle, so Dan knew the encounter hadn’t
all
been in his head. And on the bright side, Facebook had been indifferent enough to send a “We’re looking into it” response to Dan’s report of the incident.

“Hey, you love taking pictures of old crap, Abby. Maybe this weirdo likes taking pictures of people taking pictures of old crap,” Jordan said, but he looked pale, nervous.

Dan didn’t like it either.

“Well, whoever it was is probably still back in Birmingham,” Abby pointed out, “but we should keep our eyes open anyway.”

“Agreed,” Dan said. He had only managed to order a soda, and was sipping it slowly while nibbling on the complimentary bread. He never liked taking his meds on an empty stomach, and the snacking helped.

“Once we pass Mobile we’ll be coming up on the Magnolia Cemetery,” Abby said, switching tracks and trying, and failing, to lighten the mood. “If we’re still okay with stopping, I’ve been dying to see this place.”

“Phrasing?” Jordan said wryly.

“Okay,
excited
to see it,” Abby said, sticking out her tongue. “Mr. Blaise wouldn’t shut up about it. I think he did some charcoal sketches of it back when he was our age.”

Their waitress, Randy, appeared just then, snapping her gum and bringing them the check. She had candy-apple red hair permed out in a frizzy halo that wouldn’t look out of place on Ronald McDonald’s sister. “Magnolia, you said? Y’all really should see it if you’re not in a big hurry. I suppose it ain’t normal to recommend a cemetery to tourists, but this one’s special.”

“Yes! Have you been?” Abby directed her attention fully to Randy. “I’ve been looking into these rum runners from the time of Prohibition and the history of them is so, so cool. I’m trying to find a way to add them into this photo project I’m working on.”

Dan twisted to stare out the window at the car, where the damp old pages he had found were drying in the sun on top of the Neon.

“If you two want to give me money for the check, I’ll be right out,” Abby said shortly, turning back to finish her conversation with Randy. Dan hated that they were fighting already,
even a little bit, but he truly was anxious to see what was in those papers.

“So, you really think you saw your dad?” Jordan asked as they walked to the car. “I mean, your
real
dad. Wait, is that kosher? Is it weird to say
real
? Sandy and Paul are great. You know I think they’re totally great.”

“No offense taken,” Dan assured him truthfully. He didn’t exactly know what the correct nomenclature was himself. “I think it might have been him. I mean, he looked like me. Didn’t sound much like me, but that’s not so strange. I heard him talking to someone—‘Evie,’ he said—but she didn’t appear to me.”

Jordan nodded, chewing thoughtfully on the bendy straw in his to-go cup. His eyes darkened behind his thick-rimmed glasses. “If you did see him, what do you suppose he was doing in that old school?”

“Squatting, maybe?” Dan suggested. “It sounded like he was in a hurry, maybe even being chased. I’m hoping in the rush to get out, he and my mom might have left something behind.”

“There’s only one way to find out.”

The pages crinkled and cracked in his hands.

Abby and Jordan remained silent, but he could feel the combined weight of their anticipation bearing down on him like a concrete block. They didn’t want the smelly, moldy papers in the car any longer than they needed them, so the three of them stood in a semicircle in the parking lot.

“Okay,” Dan said on an inhalation. “Here goes. What do you have for me, Mom and Dad?”

Breathing through his mouth, he pulled the top page close and squinted at the faded handwriting. It was a letter addressed to
Marc & Evie
.

“‘I hope you two are safe,’” Dan read aloud, making out the writing as best he could. “‘A PO box is smart, but still traceable. Just lay low until this stuff with Trax Corp. blows over. They’re leaning on me hard to give up my sources, but those morons know I won’t budge. Some of their people have come sniffing around the office. Thugs. The animal cruelty was a big find, but the smuggling is even bigger. I’ll try to keep that bloodsucker Tilton off your backs. Just don’t stay in one place for too long, all right? In a few months Trax will have more to worry about than a few trespassers and you can come back to town. Everything is fine at the
Whistle
. You know me, I can hold down a fort.’” Lowering the pages, Dan let Abby take them to inspect. “It’s signed ‘Maisie.’”

“It sounds like your parents were whistleblowers or something,” Abby said, reading the page over again. She flipped to the second salvaged sheet. “Another letter from that Maisie person. Sounds like whatever your parents found, it got this Trax Corp. shut down.”

Dan went to her side, reading over her shoulder.

“And there was a warrant out for their arrest,” Dan added, pointing. “Even before the police report I have. I guess the breaking and entering wasn’t an isolated incident.”

“But your parents must have been right,” Jordan said, going back to his phone. “I mean, Trax Corp. closed, yeah? So they must have been doing something illegal.”

Dan nodded, but he was elsewhere, imagining how frightening it must have been for his parents to move from place to place, dodging arrest. They must have been squatting in the school, avoiding motels or any places where they might be recognized. He couldn’t believe his own parents were
fugitives
. Of course, after bouncing around from one foster family to the next throughout his childhood, the revelation felt right, somehow. As much as he loved and appreciated Paul and Sandy, there had always been a noticeable but unmentioned gulf between their all-American goodness and his darker tendencies.

“There must be more about this company online,” Dan mused. “If they got shut down, there might be articles about it. Although this was in the eighties. If it wasn’t a big company, there might not be much.”

“Maybe not,” Jordan said, hunched over his phone. “But it looks like the
Whistle
was definitely a newspaper. Small one, but they’ve got a Wikipedia entry. Maisie Moore was the editor-in-chief until 1995. No mention of your parents, but the paper was based in Metairie. That’s not far from New Orleans. Maybe Maisie still lives in the area.”

“That’s brilliant,” Abby said. She handed the letters back to Dan carefully, mindful of their delicate state. “She knew your parents, Dan. We can look her up when we get to town.”

“Don’t get my hopes up.” But they were already up. What if Maisie Moore had contact information on file for his parents? After all these years of not knowing, could finding them be as easy as that?