Heaven Should Fall - By Rebecca Coleman Page 0,124

after he had been given Elias’s personal effects at the hospital. But not a thing had turned up, and his room was the only remaining place it might be.

I opened Elias’s dresser drawers and rooted around a little. His clothes were still there, folded neatly. They smelled like him, in a tidy, muted sort of way. Finding nothing else, I decided to brave a search through his old army duffel, slouched in the room’s far corner. But all it contained was a set of pressed BDUs, an old Bible with his name inscribed on the cover, an army-issue folding knife and a plastic wallet insert filled with photos of his family and a girl in a multicolored ski hat. No sign of the phone, not even a charger.

I sighed. That morning I’d called Dave from the pediatrician’s office phone under the pretense that I needed to reach my husband. Dave was already in Laconia. Ready when you are, he had said. My sense of gratitude to him was so profound that it twisted into discomfort deep in my gut. I didn’t like feeling so beholden to anyone, not for a favor so immense. But I had to get through this first so I could have choices again.

In the next room, TJ stirred, fussed. A sudden sleepy cry broke the air. I walked backward out of Elias’s room and shut the door silently, as though his spirit resided there and was owed absolute peace. Wherever he was, I hoped he had found a full measure of that.

* * *

The sound of the truck pulling into the gravel driveway woke me from a light sleep. Beside me TJ lay sprawled on his back in his diaper and undershirt, his plump cheeks moving in a faint rhythm as though dreaming of milk. The clock beside me said it was three-thirty in the morning. A car door slammed; beside me TJ shifted at the noise, but did not open his eyes. I felt relieved they had come home before morning, just as Cade had promised. I hated the thought of taking TJ away for good without seeing his father one last time.

I turned over and attempted to fall back to sleep, but within a couple of minutes the front door creaked open and I heard the heavy footfalls of Dodge’s boots, then the sound of something being dragged. Cade’s voice came in low and clipped. Dodge muttered a reply, and the dragging sound was replaced by grunts that indicated a heavy object being hoisted by both men.

I rolled over and lay still, my mind attuned to the puzzle of noise from downstairs. Perhaps they had hit a deer, like the day Cade had wrecked his car and Candy had butchered the doe in the front yard. But if that were the case, why would they have brought it inside in one piece? I lay there a while longer, listening. Then I eased myself past TJ and tiptoed down the stairs.

The front door was still open, the screen door propped with a brick, but the porch light was off. Dodge and Cade were both outside, unloading the truck. I looked around the downstairs. The only light came from the lamp next to Elias’s chair that we typically left on all night no matter what. I wandered toward the darkened kitchen. No blood or soil, no sign of whatever they had carried. A basket on the kitchen island overflowed with sweet corn. The beagles’ food bowls sat beside each other on the counter awaiting the day’s breakfast. On a slate square above the stove hung a tole painting of a house with a curl of smoke emerging from the chimney, beside a quote in country-primitive script: “He restoreth my soul, Psalms 23:3.” I could read it by the narrow band of light that blazed beneath the tightly closed door of the cellar. I looked at that door for a moment, considering. Then I threw it open and ventured down the stairs.

In the center of the room, tied with bungee cord to Eddy’s good Windsor chair, sat Drew Fielder. Above the strip of duct tape that covered his mouth he looked out at me with hollow, doomed eyes. The sleeves of his blue pin-striped oxford shirt were pushed above his elbows; his wrists were bound behind his back, and one leg of his khaki pants was slashed with a dark wet stain that appeared to be urine. Drew’s ankles were bound to the legs of the chair