The Husband

siege.
    Mitch could have wept if he had dared to allow himself tears, but he would not have known for whom he was crying.
    He had never seen Daniel or Kathy cry. They believed in applied reason and "mutual supportive analysis" in place of easy emotion.
    How could you cry for those who never cried for themselves, who talked and talked themselves through their disappointments, their misadventures, and even their bereavements?
    No one who knew the truth of this family would fault him if he cried for himself, but he had not cried for himself since he was five because he had not wanted them to have the satisfaction of his tears.
    He would not cry for his brother.
    The wretched kind of pity that he had felt for Anson earlier was vapor now. It had not boiled away here in the learning room, but in the trunk of the vintage Chrysler.
    During his drive north from Rancho Santa Fe, with four windows open to ventilate the car, he let the draft blow from him all delusion and self-deception. The brother whom he had thought he knew, had thought he loved, in fact had never existed. Mitch had loved not a real person but instead a sociopath's performance, a phantom.
    Now Anson had seized the moment to take vengeance on Daniel and Kathy, pinning the crimes on his brother, whom he thought would never be found.
    If Holly was not ransomed, her kidnappers would kill her and perhaps dispose of her body at sea. Mitch would take the fall for her murder—and, somehow, for the shooting of Jason Osteen.
    Such a killing spree would thrill the cable-channel true-crime shows. If he was missing—in fact dead in a desert grave—the search for him would be their leading story for weeks if not for months.
    In time he might become a legend like D. B. Cooper, the airline hijacker who, decades earlier, had parachuted out of a plane with a fortune in cash, never to be heard from again.
    Mitch considered returning to the learning room to collect the gardening shears and the hand trowel. The thought of wrenching the blades from the bodies repulsed him. He had done worse in recent hours; but he could not do this.
    Besides, clever Anson had probably salted other evidence in addition to the gardening tools. Finding it would take time, and Mitch had no time to spare.
    His wristwatch read six minutes past three in the morning. In less than nine hours, the kidnappers would call Anson with further instructions.
    Forty-five of the original sixty hours remained until the midnight-Wednesday deadline.
    This would be over long before then. New developments required new rules, and Mitch was going to set them.
    With an imitation of wolves, the wind called him into the night.
    After turning off the upstairs lights, he went down to the kitchen. In the past, Daniel had always kept a box of Hershey's bars in the refrigerator. Daniel liked his chocolate cold.
    The box waited on the bottom shelf, only one bar missing. These had always been Daniel's treats, off limits to everyone else.
    Mitch took the entire box. He was too exhausted and too tightly knotted with anxiety to be hungry, but he hoped that sugar might substitute for sleep.
    He turned out the first-floor lights and left the house by the front door.
    Brooms of fallen palm fronds swept the street, and in their wake came a rolling trash can spewing its contents. Impatiens withered and shredded themselves, shrubs shook as if trying to pull themselves up by their roots, a ripped window awning—actually green, but black in this light—flapped madly like the flag of some demonic nation, the eucalyptuses gave the wind a thousand hissing voices, and it seemed as if the moon would be blown down and the stars snuffed out like candles.
    In the haunted Chrysler, Mitch set out in search of Anson.

Chapter 39

     
    Holly works at the nail even though she makes no progress with it, because if she doesn't work at the nail, she will have nothing to do, and with nothing to do, she will go mad.
    For some reason, she remembers Glenn Close playing a madwoman in Fatal Attraction. Even if she were to go crazy, Holly is not capable of boiling anyone's pet bunny in a soup pot, unless of course her family is starving and has nothing to eat or the bunny is possessed by a demon. Then all bets are off.
    Suddenly the nail begins to wiggle, and that's exciting. She is so excited that she almost needs the bedpan that her kidnappers left with her.
    Her excitement wanes as, during the next half-hour, she manages to extract only about a quarter of an