Page 20 of Leave No Trace
‘Good boy?’ Lucas echoed, squatting on the other side of the fence, holding his foot. Jasper barked.
I stared at his huddled form, trying to wrap my head around the fact that he was somehow here and not unconscious in his hospital bed. How did he get out? How could he have walked all this way without being spotted by his ‘Free Lucas Blackthorn’ fans? Three of them were stationed outside Congdon right now, holding signs as I’d driven through the gate. Smoothing Jasper’s fur, I checked both directions, finding no signs of life on the cracked pavement or behind the drawn shades lining either side of the street. Maybe it was the throb in my ankle, or the darkness, or the nervous rumbles vibrating under my hand, but long seconds passed where everything felt like I’d crossed into some alternate world in which cause and effect had simply drifted away from each other, disappearing as effortlessly as balloons in the night. I gave up. Turning in slow motion, I pulled Jasper inside.
I took him to his kennel and paused to nuzzle the warmth of his bristly neck, to breathe in his earthiness until I felt grounded again. When I latched the door shut and turned around, Lucas was standing inside the front door watching me.
He wore a long, tan coat with one sleeve hanging loose because of the sling couching his fractured shoulder. His face looked even more drawn than when he’d been sleeping, shadowed with beard and eclipsed by those blue eyes. They followed me now as I slowly rose and faced him.
I opened my mouth, torn between a dozen burning questions, before finally settling on a simple demand.
‘Explain.’
‘Okay,’ he agreed but said nothing else, instead peering inside the kitchen doorway. Then he moved along the hallway and looked in each room as if he’d never seen a house before. I supposed he hadn’t, at least not in the last ten years. He disappeared into my room and I limped down the hall to find him staring at the bed. He startled when he heard me and ran a hand along the wall, stopping at a bookshelf full of rock guides and speech pathology textbooks.
‘This is where you sleep.’
‘Yes.’
He frowned at the dark blue walls and took a few halting steps into the room before edging back around me, so close I could smell alcohol swabs and the bleached cotton of his hospital scrubs. ‘And the other door?’
‘Where my father sleeps, when he’s not on the boat.’
As he turned on Dad’s bedroom light and surveyed the room, I flexed my foot, testing it, putting weight on it. If it came down to my sprained ankle vs. his broken shoulder, my ankle would win. Lucas barely seemed aware of my presence, though, instead inspecting the minutia of the bedroom – an end table cluttered with work gloves, drill bits, and creased maps, rows of weatherproof jackets in various stages of succumbing to the weather, hanging in the closet, and a dark wood jewelry box, set back in the corner away from everything else.
‘What are you doing?’
Skirting past me again, he opened the linen closet and then went into the bathroom. When I followed he was standing next to the toilet, staring at the piece of driftwood I’d found on the shore last summer. I’d cleaned, sealed, and mounted the gnarled branch on one of the leftover slate tiles, and when Dad first saw it his mouth had dropped open.It’s beautiful, Maya, he said.I can’t believe you took garbage and made it into this.Running a hand over the wood, Lucas turned, shaking his head at the space I’d worked so hard to transform.
‘Lucas.’ I squared off, blocking the door.
‘I don’t know this house.’ His wrists were still raw from the handcuffs he’d somehow escaped.
I took a step forward and braced my weight. ‘Of course you don’t. You’ve never been here before.’
‘I remember...’ He swiveled around, searching the walls. ‘I remember a mountain of salt.’
A mountain of salt? I shook my head, trying to make sense of what he was saying. There were giant sand and taconite piles in the commercial zones near the harbor, but salt? Where would he have seen something that looked like a mountain of salt?
‘I only have a little salt shaker here. Do you want to see it?’
He didn’t reply, sinking instead into a crouch on the floor and holding his head. The doctor had warned about a possible concussion. Then I noticed one of his slippers – the kind they gave patients to use the bathroom or go to the cafeteria – was turning red.
‘Come on. You’re bleeding.’
I helped him back to his feet and checked his pupils, which looked normal, then grabbed a first aid kit out of the cabinet. Jasper whined when we passed through the living room.
‘So this was your grand plan?’ I couldn’t help the dazed laugh that bubbled out of my mouth when we got to the kitchen. ‘You wanted to escape Congdon to visit my house? I should have just bought some cookies and gone home instead of killing myself trying to stop you.’
He frowned at his foot, looking calmer now. ‘Maybe you could’ve locked up your dog, too.’
‘I think whoever trespasses in a yard with a sign that says, Attack Dog on Site. Enter at your own risk.deserves whatever they get.’
‘Why do you have an attack dog?’
I dropped into a chair, exhaling gratefully at the relief of pressure on my ankle. ‘My dad got him as sort of a welcome home present after I’d been gone once. He’s a sailor, so he lives on the lake for a good part of the year, and he worries. He thinks... he thinks I need protection.’
Now it was Lucas’s turn to laugh and I couldn’t help grinning. ‘I know, right? Dad trained him as a guard dog, but he’s a big softie underneath and it’s nice to have the company. The nights can get pretty long in the winter.’
‘Yes, they can.’ His smile faded. After a moment he seemed to forget about Jasper and dropped into a chair, studying the kitchen as if looking for something he’d misplaced. I watched him carefully, trying to gauge his mental state and how to approach whatever came next.
