Pretty Is (16 page)

“It’s okay,” he said, sorry to have embarrassed her. It was so easy with Hannah. “You have everything you need right here.” For a moment she thought he might ruffle her hair, squeeze her neck, pat her shoulder. Her flesh tensed, hoped. Nothing.

All the same, the next time he went out he came back with ice cream. An offering. “What about my movie?” Callie demanded, then laughed and pirouetted across the floor to disguise her jealousy.

They did not discuss running away. Not in those early days. The first time he left their bedroom door unlocked at night, Callie had positioned herself between Hannah’s bed and the door, arms spread wide, challenging. “You wouldn’t do it, would you.” It was not a question. “Do what?” Hannah had said—noncommittal, aggravating. Hannah had imagined leaving; it was impossible not to. What else was there to think about at night when she tried to fall asleep and lay for hours staring at the dark place where she knew the window was? She had seen him watching her and knew that he could sense what she was thinking, that he didn’t even hold it against her. She had pictured herself slinking down the stairs, out the front door, into the dark, the woods, searching for a road that had traffic. Trudging along in her canvas sneakers, shivering in her nightgown, her sweatshirt hastily thrown over it while Callie thrashed and muttered in her sleep. Waiting for a car to come along, not knowing whom to trust. Not knowing if an approaching car was his. Walking for miles, maybe, before coming across anyone. Or being found by someone worse—a cruel bearded man and his zit-faced sons, for instance. Dragged into their foul-smelling pickup truck, country music jangling on the radio. She pictured the man following her, rescuing her from the rednecks, driving her back to the cabin in gentle, forgiving silence.

She knew she wouldn’t go. She was waiting to find out what he had chosen them for.

In years past they had seen stories on the news: little girls who disappeared, never to be seen again. Not in one piece, anyway. They paid close attention to his moods and studied how to please him. He liked their hair loose and plain, though sometimes when it was especially hot they tied it back anyway. He abhorred makeup, and had confiscated Callie’s. He disliked anything that smacked of worldliness; at night in the dark they sometimes spoke to each other of their real lives, their crushes, their ambitions, their petty rebellions, but never to him.

He wanted them to be pure, Hannah decided. He had this crazy idea that purity was possible. He wanted them to be those storybook girls she had imagined on the first morning—gentle and untainted, in love with wildflowers and the moon. Even when he spoke of their distant futures, he encouraged lofty and improbable dreams: Callie would be a legendary actress on Broadway; Hannah would be an acclaimed yet mysterious writer; they would be impervious to their fame, untainted by success.

Where did the gun fit into this picture?

It was to protect them. To make them possible.

*   *   *

One night after they had finished the dishes he swung the front door open and stepped onto the porch, pulling his pipe from his pocket. He left the door wide open behind him, and night air drifted into the cabin, swirling around the girls’ bare legs, stirring their hair, reminding them of their captivity. Two enormous moths dove clumsily across the room, hurled themselves at the lantern.

“Well,” he said, his back to them, “are you coming? Hurry up, the bugs are getting in.”

As if under a spell, they edged forward, shoulders touching; they had one will, one mind. They stepped onto the porch as though it might conceal quicksand. But the floor was firm and comfortingly familiar beneath their feet. Callie seized the doorknob, pulled the heavy door shut, imagining for a moment that it locked behind them, shut them out. Felt a whisper of fear, rejected it; strode down the steps, planted her bare feet in the cool grass. Hannah followed, less certain.

He remained on the porch, puffing on his pipe.

Hannah and Callie veered to the right, away from the driveway, toward the stretch of clearing their bedroom window overlooked. The grass was thicker and longer there, tickling their ankles. A sliver of moon revealed the edge of the woods, dense and black, forbidding. After a few exploratory steps they broke into a run, feet kicking up, dresses climbing their legs, arms wide. When they reached the trees they stopped. Peered between trunks, saw nothing beyond.
We could keep running,
thought Hannah.
Never stop until we got somewhere. A road, a house. We could crash right through those trees
, Callie echoed.
Keep running. He wouldn’t catch us.
They hovered, listening to each other breathe. Deep in the woods, something screeched—once, then again. Hunter or prey? They grabbed each other’s hands, turned, raced back to the front of the house, the grass slick under their feet.

There he was, the bowl of his pipe glowing reddish, smoke curling away from him, rising skyward.

Nothing had changed.

After that he often allowed them to go outside at night once the last glimmer of sunset had been snuffed out behind the mountains. Their days acquired a new shape, a welcome layer of anticipation. During the sun-dappled afternoons they found ways to occupy themselves, but always now they were thinking of what night would bring, of the strange dewy glamour of pipe smoke and darkness.

*   *   *

They didn’t know what to call the kidnapper. He steadfastly refused to tell them his name, for reasons they couldn’t fathom. It wasn’t as if they could report him, after all. When they suggested that he make something up, he wouldn’t do that, either. “We have to call you
something,
” they kept insisting, but he was not persuaded.

“Why?” he asked wearily, as if the topic bored him. “Why do you have to call people something? There are only three of us here. If you’re not talking to each other, you must be talking to me, right?”

But they needed something to call him, even in their heads. They couldn’t go on referring to him as “him,” or “the man”; it was too awkward, too impersonal. So they began calling him something different every day. Every morning they named him—names that struck them as silly, impossible, names he wouldn’t like:
Harry. Doug. Mort.
They hoped to annoy him into telling them something real.
Marvin.

It was the day they picked
Eugene
that he finally broke. “Nope,” he said, slamming his cereal spoon down. “Not that. You want to call me something? Call me … call me
Zed,
if you must. And that’s the end of that.” He carried his bowl to the sink. He never failed to clean up after himself.

“That’s not a name,” Callie objected.

“It’s what the British say instead of
zee.
I like it. It means nothing, but you can make it mean whatever you want. That should entertain you for a while.”

Zed
. It worked, somehow. And he was right; they did try to make it mean things.
The end. The last word.
Nothing too cheerful, really.

*   *   *

One day when he was out somewhere, they took an inventory of the food in the cupboards. They tallied fifty-two cans of soup, thirty of tuna. Eighteen of beans. Fifteen jars of spaghetti sauce. Thirty-six boxes of pasta, ten of Minute Rice. Thirty-two boxes of cereal. Not to mention sacks of potatoes and onions, a freezer full of bread, gallons of juice. Nothing fancy. Just a long-term supply of inexpensive, easy-to-prepare basics.

“I guess we’re staying for a while,” Callie said. It was the most concrete evidence they had yet come across that they didn’t need to be afraid. Whatever plans he had for them, murder didn’t seem to be at the top of the list. Not for a while, anyway. Not unless he had a long winter of chicken noodle soup and canned tuna ahead of him.

They were, after all, aware that what men like Zed do to little girls is murder them. They had grown up in the eighties, and were accustomed to the lurid headlines. Children abducted, assaulted, tortured, sexually abused, found in the woods, strangled, dismembered, or, as often as not, simply gone. For days, weeks, they waited for the touch that would change everything. The hand in the wrong place. They knew what men like him really
want
to do to little girls. Murder is more of an afterthought. Destroying the evidence, essentially.

But he didn’t touch them.

And he kept on not touching them.

And with every day that passed, they were more curious. Curious about what he
wasn’t
doing to them. It wasn’t that they wanted him to. But after a while what he
wasn’t
doing was pretty much all they could think about.

*   *   *

Once a hunting lodge, the cabin retained traces of its grisly former purpose. Aside from what he called the mud room, there was just one big, long room downstairs, with a kitchen at one end. You could see marks on the walls where hunting trophies must once have hung—unstained splotches that had been protected by taxidermied torsos from the wood smoke that had darkened the rest of the walls over the years.

There were three small rooms upstairs, with slanted ceilings that made them seem even smaller. One was Callie and Hannah’s bedroom. One was his, though he usually slept in a hammock on the porch or on the couch. The third was closed, at first, like his bedroom. A mystery. “What’s in there?” Callie had asked once. “Nothing that need concern you,” he had said.

It was near the beginning of the second week when he first left them alone. They emerged from their room in the morning and there he was, waiting. Too close: if the door had opened outward, it would have hit him. “Can I trust you?” he asked, looking from one of them to the other. “You’re good girls, aren’t you? I can count on you.”

Hannah looked down at her feet and got distracted by his. Low boots, brown leather, well worn. Her father had a similar pair. “Obviously,” said Callie, with her usual scorn. Hannah wondered why this should be obvious. Because they hadn’t run away?

“Hannah?” He was different that morning; even his movements had a different rhythm: staccato. Jarring. Hannah could smell his shampoo, his toothpaste. She took a step back without knowing she was going to. His night-blue eyes narrowed, too close. “Hannah? I want you to read while I’m gone. I’ll ask you about it when I come back.” She hadn’t finished her Connecticut library books yet, to Callie’s annoyance; Callie resented being excluded. He turned and headed down the stairs, a surprising spring in his step, almost jaunty. It wasn’t until he had his hand on the doorknob that he glanced back one last time. “Don’t open any closed doors,” he tossed over his shoulder. Wondering how long it would take them.

The cabin seemed colder when he was gone.

Fairy tales, again
. “Do you know Bluebeard?” Hannah asked Callie. Callie executed a quick jet
é
, crossing the threshold into the hallway. She didn’t like not knowing things.

Hannah took this as a no. “Never mind,” she said, as if it would be too much trouble to explain. But the truth was that she didn’t feel like telling that story: the dead wives, the instruments of torture. The door that was supposed to stay closed. She already knew what she and Callie were going to do, what they wouldn’t be able to help doing.

They inspected his bedroom first. They snuck in, as if there might be a surveillance camera, or maybe he had special powers that would allow him to sense what they were up to. They could not have said precisely what they expected to find. Something he didn’t want them to see, presumably. Family photographs? Love letters? Newspaper clippings related to some previous crime? Chains, blindfolds? Poison? At any rate, there was nothing. A high double bed with an old-fashioned iron frame dominated the room, neatly made, a faded patchwork quilt smoothed across it. Clothes were folded precisely in the dresser drawers: jeans, T-shirts, boxers, socks. Button-down shirts hung in the closet. No clock, no papers, no receipts, no loose change, no scribbled notes or shopping lists. No mess. A room that knew how to keep its secrets.

The mystery room turned out to be a storage room. A disappointment and a relief. They knew that whatever was in there wasn’t his; it had been there forever. Still, they thought it might have something to tell them. Perhaps the hunting lodge had been in his family for generations; perhaps he had been there a hundred times before. “Ancestral secrets?” Hannah whispered when Callie wrinkled her nose at the musty smell. “Ancestral mildew,” said Callie.

Mostly it was haphazardly stacked furniture: broken lamps, chairs missing legs, a sagging old sofa, stained, battered end tables. A big cracked mirror with a fancy frame. (“Mirror, mirror…” whispered Hannah. “Oh, knock it off,” said Callie.) The boxes were stuffed with the kind of outdoor gear you probably needed at a hunting lodge: long slick raincoats, waterproof boots, hats, gloves, camouflage vests. A few faintly musty old clothes looked as if they had costume potential, but most of what they found was irredeemably ugly and way too big.

There were, however, books. Four boxes of old paperbacks, pages falling out, covers worn and stained. Mysteries, Hannah saw at a glance; her mother had bookcases full of them. She grabbed the one on top. The faded cover showed a woman’s body sprawled on the floor of an elegantly appointed room. She was lying in a puddle of bright red blood and had fingernails to match, long and sharp. One of her high-heeled shoes had come off. She looked very pretty, for an obviously dead person. “Look!” Hannah said, thrusting it at Callie.

“Gross.” Callie backed away, refusing to be excited about something Hannah had found. “It looks like something’s been chewing it.”

“No, seriously,” Hannah insisted. “Look at it. This is a good find. They’re mystery novels. This one’s an Agatha Christie.”

Callie handed the book back and wiped her hands ostentatiously on her dress.

But Hannah knew she was right about the value of her discovery. She selected five paperbacks while Callie removed the last leg from a chair that was already missing three. They surveyed the room before withdrawing, saw nothing amiss. The mirror cracked their faces, proposed unfamiliar new versions of themselves. How strange, they thought, that they hadn’t seen their own reflections for over a week. They would have liked to drag the mirror with them but could think of nowhere to hide it. They turned off the light and pulled the door shut; let the dust settle and the cobwebs, lacy strands of disrupted time, fall still.