A Deadly Influence (Abby Mullen Thrillers #1)(15)

He cried on the floor, his toe throbbing with pain. After a while he crawled back to the bed and lay on it, hugging his Yoda plush doll. It took him a few minutes to notice that it, too, was different.

Several months before, Yoda’s ear had been ripped, and his mom had sewn it back on, but she’d sewn it wrong, and the ear had a lopsided angle. But now it wasn’t lopsided anymore. And the bright-green thread his mom had used to sew it was gone. So was the chocolate stain on Yoda’s foot. And it didn’t smell the same.

Neither did the bedsheets. They smelled different. Like new bedsheets.

He got out of bed, feeling as if ants were crawling on his neck. What was going on? Now that he was searching, he saw small differences everywhere. The torn corner of his Harry Potter poster was fixed. The wardrobe was not exactly the same color. And . . . and . . .

There was no window.

How had he not noticed it before? The small window above his desk was just . . . gone.

His drawings were still all there, the only thing that could not be replaced.

Except they weren’t his. In this drawing, Mom’s eyes were too small. The stars were wrong in the spaceship sketch, and it was flying the wrong way. And there was the drawing of his imaginary dog. He hadn’t drawn this. His drawing of the dog was cute. This dog leered at him, his teeth too sharp, his tongue too long, a bad dog. A dog that ate children.

He had to get out of this room. Something was very wrong with it. He rushed to the door and rattled it. “Gabi!” he screeched. “Mom!”

They still didn’t come, and he was beyond finding an explanation for it. Beyond understanding what the hell was going on. He had trouble breathing; a constant thudding in his ears disoriented him further. He needed to pee—or to throw up—but to do that he needed to go to the bathroom, and the door wouldn’t move; it was stuck—he was stuck.

He recalled a movie he’d seen with his mom. In the movie, these two guys needed to open a locked door, and they used a crowbar. He remembered how impressed he had been by the sound of the wood cracking as the door was flung open. He didn’t have a crowbar, but he had a metal ruler in his desk drawer. He could wedge it in the door’s crack and lean on it. It had to work.

He went over to the desk drawer and yanked it open.

There was no metal ruler in it.

Instead, there were more drawings. A stack of drawings. The top one almost looked like the one he’d drawn of their family, except his own feet were freakishly long.

He took out a stack of drawings and spread them on the table.

They were all his drawings, but they weren’t. Some were slightly different, a wrong color used, a person that seemed misshapen. A few were hideous, badly drawn people and then an angry scrawl, as if he had scratched out the drawing in frustration. In one of his drawings of Gabi and him, Gabi’s image had been circled over and over with a red crayon. His name was on almost every page, but on some it wasn’t his handwriting, and on others it was similar but not quite right. And on one page, his name was written over and over and over.

Nothing in this made sense, and of all the things he’d experienced in the past twenty minutes, this for some reason frightened him the worst. His bladder released, a stream of urine running down his pant leg and trickling on the floor.

A sudden click made him whirl, facing the door as it opened. A man stood in the doorway, the same man who’d said he was Gabi’s friend. He held a bucket in one hand and a bottle of water in the other.

“Oh,” the man said, glancing at the puddle of pee on the floor. “I guess I’ll go get a mop.”

Nathan didn’t answer. His eyes were fixed on the man—and the space beyond him.

This was not his house at all.





CHAPTER 11


“It’s crucial that we contact your ex-husband as soon as possible, Ms. Fletcher,” Detective Jonathan Carver said.

His gaze was fixed on Eden, and he seldom broke eye contact except to scribble quickly in his notebook.

Abby knew cops who were diligent and caring, but when talking to civilians, they seemed aloof. Typing their report into the computer while talking or pausing the interview to answer a phone or check something. Carver listened, and conveyed that he was listening. He had been the same when they were in the academy together. When he talked to you, you felt like he was really fascinated by what you had to say.

“I really don’t know how to reach him,” Eden said. “We separated less than a year after Nathan was born.”

“Do you have any shared friends? Maybe on social media?”

“I’m not on social media.”

Abby had been surprised when Carver showed up at the front desk of the 115th Precinct station. She hadn’t seen him since the academy. Now she had yet another opportunity to see how time changed people. In this case, unlike Eden, it was less shocking, and time had been kinder. Still the same thick brown hair, a small scar on his tawny chin. The age difference hid at the corners of his almond-shaped green eyes, where a hint of crow’s-feet showed.

“Ms. Fletcher, the reason I’m asking is that maybe the kidnappers approached your husband as well, or maybe it’s someone your husband knows. In more than ninety percent of abduction cases—”

“I have no idea how to contact him,” Eden said. “Don’t you think I’d love to get the child support payments?”