The cobwebs over the shed’s door were as thick as boards.
Even Doug knew better than to talk about it. He leaned into good-mood joshing.
“And what did we learn that day?” he asked in the voice of a snooty professor.
“Firemen hate kids?”
“That they had the meteor! Right there in a glass case like the firecracker dude said!” He shook his head hard enough for his greasy whips of hair to sway. “Man, no one ever believes me about shit.”
A flimsy fence marked the southern border of the yard, though Lee had used wire cutters to expedite passage. Liv went first into the thicket, hoping her mood could survive it. It couldn’t. The coolness of the shade made her grinning lips go cold. Jokes and nostalgia might get them through this Sunday excursion, and the next, and the next, twelve more months before she escaped to college. Was letting this continue mercy or cowardice? Because each Sunday hurt her, which meant each Monday was spent building herself back into the Liv Fleming that Monica and the others expected.
“Speaking of firecrackers … Mr. Tooney, Angie Tooney’s dad? He came out Tuesday. I guess there’s some anniversary party? Anyway, Mr. Tooney definitely did his research because he was like, ‘Give me five girandolas, five roman candles, two chrysanthemums, two flying fish, and one giant peony.’ He had this envelope of cash he tried to give me before I even told him what I had in stock. He acted like he was buying coke. He wasn’t even listening to the safety instructions.”
There was one reason Bloughton didn’t wipe Doug’s family from its mind. Unless you wanted to truck your ass to the Missouri line, the Monks were it when it came to illegal fireworks. They were stored in a separate garage, the only building on the Monk property kept watertight, air-conditioned, locked, and free of critters, and because Doug’s dad set the prices, Doug had no room to haggle. It also meant he had no leeway to deny kids who forked over insults along with payment. Liv hadn’t been to Doug’s place in years and was glad. She couldn’t stomach the notion that the Fleming household had caught up to the Monks’.
“I think he was nervous because he had this little boy with him. I think he was worried the kid would say the wrong thing at the party and expose him as an illegal-fireworks-buying criminal and he’d end up serving life in prison, hard labor. People are so dumb.”
Fireworks sales were what kept the lights on and the toilet flushing. Doug’s dad, a trucker, touched down in Bloughton six or seven times a year to dole out truck-stop trinkets and drop off fireworks gathered from across the country. He’d stay for a couple of weeks before getting itchy for the road and his various girlfriends. Doug’s mom had never been in the picture. The only role model Doug had ever had was Lee Fleming. Now all he had was Lee’s memory. Liv carried the responsibility of that, which was why she was here, kicking through stickerbush at dawn.
“So the kid starts crying how he wants to see something explode, and Mr. Tooney definitely didn’t want this kid crying all day about it, so he asked if I could just shoot something off for an extra twenty. And I was like, ‘It’s two in the afternoon, man, you won’t be able to see anything,’ but he was practically begging. I didn’t want to burn good fireworks no one could see, but remember when I cleaned out my car?”
Two years of Sunday safaris had tramped a thin trail through the woods. Liv banked right at the dry gulley, circled a towering black ash, and ducked under a marquee of threaded branches, eyes squinted for the flash of metal that marked their first stop.
“I found a flare in the back seat. I didn’t know I had a flare. So I said, ‘Here, how about I shoot this?’ and Mr. Tooney said fine, and I did it, and we could even see it for a second. Pretty boring, but the kid liked it, and then they left, and I went back to my game, and then like an hour later I smell smoke and I look outside and there it was. A fire. You know that field of dry grass across the road? There’s this whole line of fire where I guess the flare went down. I almost shit.”
Liv looked over her shoulder at Doug. He was talking past gorp, grinning to his tale. Doug was on the short side, but not bad-looking, with a fox face and shoulder-length black hair so thick you couldn’t see scalp, not even when wind split it. In middle school he’d bought dumbbells at a garage sale and, in classic Doug fashion, committed to a workout routine of pointless rigor, developing tennis-ball biceps while ignoring every other muscle of his body. Today, and nearly every day, he wore a sleeveless T-shirt to show off his arms.
“I went out there to stomp it but it was too big and I only had flip-flops, so I had to call the fire department. I’m not even kidding. They asked what happened, and I couldn’t remember if I’d sold fireworks to any of them before, so I said I didn’t know. But I must’ve sold one of them something, because he covered up for me and said it was probably lightning. I spent the whole next day out there making sure there weren’t pieces of flare I had to hide. I don’t need the FBI on my ass. Now I’m out a flare and my flip-flops are melted. Fucking sucks, man.”
Doug pointed, his preposterous biceps flexing, as if Liv didn’t know exactly, precisely, down-to-the-square-foot where they were headed. She faced front again, though her eyes dragged behind. Looking upon this ugly metal contraption hidden in the woods was as close as she got to looking at the corpse of her father.
3.
It was a trap. Trap One, as Lee Fleming called it, or, when stirred by the fever of creation, Amputator. Based on the centuries-old model used by fur trappers, it was a stainless-steel spring-loaded set of jaws chained to a tree trunk that, when triggered by pressure upon the center plate, would snap shut, its triangular teeth driving into both sides of the trespasser’s leg. Whether the prey was fox, coyote, bobcat, raccoon, or possum, the pain would make it pull, digging the trap’s teeth in deeper, tearing tendon and muscle until the animal could only try to gnaw off its own leg.
How many hundreds of times had Liv looked at this thing that Lee had hammered, jointed, screwed, soldered, and sharpened in the shed? And still she flushed with shame. If the rust blotches and the weeds threaded through the spring eye were real, and they were, then everything else had to be real, too, from her father’s original town-square calamity to his plunge into delusion, paranoia, psychosis, and sickness.
Amputator was only the first of six traps Lee had placed at cunning intervals across the thicket, each one guarding an avenue of approach to the house. Reproducing a single trap design six times would have taken less effort, but who was to say which sorts of traps would be effective against his alleged abductors? He was determined to cover his bases. He’d rather die, he’d often said, than be dragged back into their hellish realm.
Trap Two, Hangman’s Noose, was the simplest and, when triggered, the most dramatic. Constructed from wood Lee had sawed from nearby trees (to ensure that it smelled native to the location), the trap did, in fact, resemble an archetypal hanging post. It was tripped by a wire noose hidden in the grass. A camouflage-painted cinderblock acted as counterweight, so that when the wire cinched tight, the weight would sink and the boom would spring upward, and the prey would find itself dangling upside down.
Trap Three, Crusher, was brutality incarnate and scary to manage. A six-hundred-pound log studded with nails, each one sharpened to a point by Lee’s diamond-stone file, hung ten feet in the air from a galvanized reeling cable wound through a mountaineer’s carabiner to serve as its own trip wire. It was the only trap never to have gone off and that was lucky. Liv doubted that she and Doug could hoist the log back into place.