Down the Darkest Road

21

The windows of the house were dark. There was no porch light on. No vehicle sat in the driveway. The garage door was closed.

Lauren sat parked on the side street heavily draped by huge old maple trees, letting her dark sedan hide in the deep black shadows like a big cat. She sat staring at the house, picturing Ballencoa in his bed, oblivious to the fact that he was being watched. That knowledge gave her a small sense of power, and she wondered if it was anything like what he felt when he was watching her.

The idea that they might have shared the same emotion made her uncomfortable. She was nothing like him, yet here she was . . .

As if her body was not her own, she found herself getting out of her car and walking toward the bungalow. She kept her purse close to her body, her hand inside the pocket, resting on the Walther. Her heart was pounding like a fist against the wall of her chest. She kept her head down, the bill of her black baseball cap low over her face.

She walked down the side street past Ballencoa’s house and turned down the alley.

The property was the size of a postage stamp, blocked from prying eyes by ficus hedges on two sides. A dark, dingy tarpaper shed stood at the back of the tiny yard. It had probably been the original garage for a single car, now used for who knew what. The small windows had been painted black from the inside. The garage door was padlocked down to a piece of metal embedded in the concrete slab.

Lauren crept around the building, one hand pressed to the wall as if she might feel the life force of someone trapped inside. She tried not to breathe. She willed her pulse to stop pounding in her ears. If there was someone inside, she wanted to hear them. She heard nothing but the whoosh, whoosh, whoosh of her blood rushing through her veins.

Ballencoa might have kept anything in the shed. It might have been a home to lawn mowers and garden tools. He might use it for his darkroom. It could have been full of boxes, storage for whatever a man like Roland Ballencoa chose to keep with him but never use.

Boxes of keepsakes from his victims (she had always imagined there were more than Leslie). Boxes of their clothes. Boxes of their bones.

It could have been a place to keep a girl or hide a body.

In the theatre of her mind, Lauren played a terrible movie of bondage and slavery, young women hanging by their bound hands from heavy hooks in the ceiling. One of the girls was Leslie. The terror in her eyes was enough to make Lauren feel physically sick.

She tapped her knuckles against one of the darkened windowpanes and strained to listen for a sound, any sound.

Nothing.

She tapped a little harder and pressed her ear against the glass. She waited to hear a moan, a groan, a cry muffled by a gag.

She heard nothing.

She looked for a way to open a window, but they were solid, incapable of opening. There was a regular door on the side of the building that faced the back of the bungalow. It too was padlocked shut.

She glanced up at the house, half expecting to see Ballencoa staring out a window at her, but no face looked out.

A reckless part of her wanted to go to the house and look in at him. She wanted to startle him, stare at him, frighten him. That reckless side wanted to go inside and touch his things and violate his space.

The other part of her was terrified at the prospect of having him catch her.

She gave the butt of the Walther a reassuring squeeze.

Somewhere nearby a car door slammed, and she jumped half a foot off the ground. The sky was beginning to lighten. The neighborhood was starting to awaken. The odds of being caught here increased with every minute. She needed to go soon.

A small dog barked close by. A man’s not-too-distant voice tried to shush him. The dog barked again. Closer.

A sudden rush of panic left Lauren dry-mouthed and weak-kneed as a short-legged Jack Russell terrier came bounding around the side of the shed, skidding to a stop at her feet. The dog threw its head back and started barking in earnest, its front paws bouncing off the ground with each bark.

Oh, shit. Oh, shit.

She glanced between the house and the dog. If the barking woke Ballencoa, he would look out and see her. If she ran, the dog would give chase and its owner would see her trying to flee the scene dressed like a burglar—like a burglar with an illegal concealed weapon in her handbag. She would end up incarcerated while Ballencoa walked around free.

“Roscoe! Roscoe!”

The man’s voice came closer. He was trying to whisper and shout at the same time.

“Roscoe! Goddamnit, come here!”

The dog hopped backward a couple of feet. He barked at Lauren again, then turned his head in the direction of his owner, torn.

Lauren looked back up at the house.

A light came on in a window at the back.

“Roscoe!”

Oh please, oh please, oh please . . .

She closed her eyes and held her breath. When she opened her eyes again, the dog had gone.

“You stupid little shit,” the owner grumbled, punctuating his statement with the click of a leash snap. He had to be in the alley. He couldn’t have been more than twenty feet away.

Lauren slipped around the end of the building, out of sight of the house. She felt so weak she had to lean against the wall for a moment, her heart thumping crazily in her chest as she waited for the man and dog to be gone down the street. She waited for Ballencoa to come out his back door.

Had he looked out? Had he seen her in that moment she had closed her eyes?

She thought she was going to be sick. Cold sweat filmed her body and ran down between her breasts and between her shoulder blades.

When she dared to move, her legs felt like rubber beneath her. She wanted to run all the way back to her car, but knew she couldn’t run. If she ran, she would draw attention to herself. If she tried to run, she was pretty sure her legs would buckle beneath her anyway.

She forced herself to walk down the alley to the sidewalk. She willed herself to stay upright as she crossed the street. She kept her head down, kept her purse held tight against her body.

As soon as she sat down in the driver’s seat of the BMW, she had to lean over and vomit on the street. When the nausea had passed, she leaned back in the seat, as weak as a kitten, and wondered what the hell she was doing.

But even as she wondered that, she thought about the shed and what might be inside of it. She wanted to know. She wanted to get inside and see for herself. She wanted to get into the house, to go through his things and hope to find some evidence . . . of what? Her daughter’s life? Her daughter’s death?

She remembered reading about a woman in north central California who had been kidnapped by a couple in 1977 and held as a sex slave until her escape in 1984. For the first year of her captivity she was kept twenty-three hours a day locked inside a wooden box under the couple’s waterbed.

Lauren stared across the street at Ballencoa’s house and wondered if her daughter might be inside, in a box under his bed.

That was why she was there. That was why she would take the risk. The constitution might prevent law enforcement from going into Roland Ballencoa’s house, but Lauren didn’t give a shit about the constitution. She didn’t care about unlawful searches or rules of evidence. She cared about her daughter.

As she stared at the house, the front door opened and Roland Ballencoa emerged. He walked down the front steps and went to his garage. A moment later he backed out in his van and drove away.