Instinct by Jason Hough (ebook reader web TXT) 📗

Barbara and Daniel “Buck” Rogers live in a large brick two-story home that should probably be designated as a historical landmark. The place is a century old, not that you’d ever know from looking at it. The couple keep it meticulously maintained.

Buck is as charming and amusing as his nickname suggests. Former astronaut, of all things. He now lives in semiretirement. Fishing most days, and on the others traveling around the world talking to everyone from school kids to CEOs about space. He and Barbara were at a conference in Paris when their son passed away.

That had been on a Saturday, almost two weeks ago now. The couple had returned the following Monday. Oblivious to their son’s passing, they’d learned the news by finding half the town standing on their front lawn in tears. Greg, myself, and Doc were on the porch, waiting to explain—or try to, rather. I shiver again just thinking about it.

Buck himself had done the whole tough-alpha-male thing. Buried his son, thanked all the mourners, then gotten right back to work. Can’t fault him. I’d have done the same, I think, not that I’ve a kid of my own to lose. I just know the M.O. of losing yourself in your work when life becomes too real.

Barbara meets me at the front door. Her salt-and-pepper hair is swept back in a severe bun and she wears no makeup. Her hands are clasped in front of her at the waist, pale against a simple black dress. Her face is as still as Lake Forgotten itself. Without so much as a word she leads me into what can only be described as the parlor.

The sun has come out and streams in brilliantly through three large windows. She takes one chair and gestures for me to take the other. On the sofa opposite are a sleeping bag and pillow, ruffled with recent use. She must not want to sleep upstairs where her son’s room is.

A silence falls. Dust swirls in the sunbeams.

In a flat, matter-of-fact voice, Barbara says, “You’ve lived here, what is it, a month now?”

“Two, Mrs. Rogers,” I correct, gently.

“Please. Call me Barb. Had you met my son?”

I nod. I’d come here ready to be a shoulder for her to cry on, to be swept up in her grief. The way she moaned at learning of Johnny’s passing, and the raw emotion on display at the funeral, that was the Barbara I expected, not this… this automaton. It’s unsettling. “I met him several times. He helped me stuff envelopes for that fundraising drive—”

“Can we agree that my son was a good boy?”

This question seems primed to open a door I thought Greg had closed already: the suicide theory. I answer carefully. “I suspect a mother’s opinion is biased, but my own impression is that yes, he was a good kid. No, not just good. A great kid. Everyone thought so. Look, if the insurance company is giving you a hard time, have them call me. No one in this town thinks your son took his own life. None of the usual signs were there. No note. No depression or problems at school. Nothing. He was a happy, bright, wonderful kid.”

Barb looks down at her tea. Her eyes glisten but she holds it together. “It’s not that.”

“Then what? I’m here for you.”

She steels herself. “Hiking,” she says.

“What about it?”

“I don’t understand it.”

I hold my breath, because no one understands it.

At my silence she goes on. “Other than for school, Johnny rarely left the house. I know it’s the way the world is now, but he was always looking at one screen or another. Before you think this reflects poorly on my parenting, we tried taking those confounded things away. He would just switch to books, or playing chess with his father. I once forced him to go outside and play, desperate for him to behave like any other kid, and you know what he did? He sat on the steps under the awning just out back and read a novel.”

“An introvert,” I say, thinking of Katherine Pascoe.

But she shakes her head. “It’s not that. He had plenty of friends. But they would engage one another via their phones, or gaming machines. Ex-Box or whatever it’s called.”

“An agoraphobe, then?” Of course I had heard about the kid’s lifestyle, holed up in his room playing games for hours on end, but no one had gone so far as to suggest this, at least not to me.

Again Barbara shakes her head. “We feared that. Had him tested a few years ago and then again when Doctor Ryan moved here. But, the assessment was that it was not a phobia. He simply disliked the outdoors. Intensely.”

This last word she says, well, intensely. No other way to put it. I nod my understanding.

“So… why the late evening hike, then?”

“This is what I wanted to talk to Greg about. Because no one else will listen, but I know he would.”

“He would,” I agree. “And I’m here to help, too, if I can. Greg and I have talked about this quite a lot, Mrs. Rogers.”

It’s the question that’s been on everyone’s mind, truthfully. Why does a boy with no interest, desire, or aptitude to hike and camp suddenly walk out of his home and off into the woods at nine one Friday evening? He tells no one where he’s going, takes nothing with him but the clothes on his back, and gets a mile up the nearby ravine before slipping and falling to his death.

The explanations whispered around town are as varied and strange as the people living here. Everything from sleepwalking to following a ghost to—

“Is it possible,” she asks in that terrible even tone, “that he was tricked into doing this? The promise of meeting a girl? Some kind of prank by one of his friends, gone awry? A dare born of peer pressure? Or perhaps even something more malicious?”

I study the floor. I can’t fault her for wanting