Read Mountain Madness for Free Online

“Wh…who?”
    “Trevor.” Libby gave the girl a quick shake and heard a woman somewhere behind her gasp. “My son.” Shake. “Trevor.” Shake shake. “You were just talking to him.”
    Libby looked left and then right, ignoring the non-responsive girl, staring past hairy legs and grungy sneakers to see if maybe her son had simply fallen or was kneeling on the ground and out of immediate sight. “Trevor!”
    One of the girl’s friends, a blonde-haired pixie, stepped forward and plucked Libby’s hands off her friend’s shoulders. “He left, ma’am.”
    It wasn’t only the ma’am that got through to Libby, it was the calm and rational authority in the girl’s voice. For a moment, Libby was looking at a negotiator or some sort of diplomat, a future world leader; then the girl said, “Just chill, okay,” and the moment passed. Libby ran her hands through her hair and gave the doe-eyed girl a quick apology before turning back to the pixie.
    “Did you see where he went? Any of you?” She scanned the rest of the girls and the crowd around them. “Somebody must have seen.”
    They shook their heads, all mute and sorry looking.
    “There’s a candy shop up that way a ways,” the pixie said, tilting her head away from the carousel. “He coulda gone there.”
    Libby’s gaze flicked in the direction the girl had indicated, and she shook her head. “But you were talking to him. He just got out of line and headed off without saying a word, and none of you looked to see where he was going?”
    The pixie shook her head and said only, “I’m sorry.”
    Libby wanted to scream. She’d had her back turned for a few seconds, maybe five, surely not long enough for Trevor to meander his way out of the crowd so casually that no one even noticed which direction he’d gone.
    At least nobody grabbed him — somebody would have noticed that . But she was hardly relieved. Kidnapped or simply wandering, Trevor was still gone, and she had an idea finding him this time would be harder than turning into the cereal aisle.
    She hurried away from the girls and the rest of the unhelpful crowd, too worried about her son to let the scene she’d made or the pity-filled eyes tracking her progress embarrass her.
    Libby rushed toward the candy store. Trevor wouldn’t have disobeyed her so deliberately, but she had no idea where else to look or what other alternatives to pursue. She’d come close enough to smell the licorice when another option, as sometimes happens, presented itself. The barrel-chested man standing stoically beside the cell phone kiosk cocked his head, and for the first time since setting down her soda, Libby felt her heart slowing down and her brain speeding up.
    Thank God . She turned away from the candy store and hurried instead for the cross-armed security guard.

FIVE
    DAVE MOVED TOWARD the small house. You might have called it a lumber if he hadn’t been so surefooted, so eerily quiet. He stepped over the discarded tennis ball and across a long length of garden hose that had all but disappeared beneath the tall grass like a scar beneath an untrimmed beard. He’d never come this close; on his previous visits, he’d kept to the woods, stayed hidden even during nighttime hours, when it would have been easy enough to spy on the boy and his mother through their drooping window curtains. The place was even shabbier than he’d realized. Scaly paint hung from the siding like loose, dead skin, and a ring of grass and dirt stains around the perimeter spoke of careless weed-whacking and untreated rain and snow damage. Dave climbed a pair of craggy steps to the back door. The weeds growing from the cracked concrete exemplified the home’s pitiful landscaping.
    His own home wasn’t exactly a paradise, wasn’t really a home at all (over time he’d gone from thinking of it as a prison to considering it a sort of base of operations), but that was different. This house was meant for a family. Dave had no family. Not