Chapter 1
The Blue Horse
Ethan Cole could tell what was wrong with a dryer from the next room.
It was the only thing he was proud of, and he knew how small that was. A dryer made a sound when it was healthy, a plain, round, rolling noise, like a long car going over a bridge. When something inside it was failing, the sound changed. A squeal meant the idler pulley. A thump every few seconds meant a worn drum roller. A low grinding that came and went meant the bearing at the back, and a bearing was a day's work and a bad mood.
This one thumped.
"Roller," he said.
"You haven't even looked at it," said Bill.
"I don't need to look. Listen. There. Every time the drum comes round, you hear the flat spot." Ethan put his hand on the side panel and felt it through the metal, a small knock against his palm, like someone tapping on a door in another building. "Mrs. Dolan's got a roller with a flat spot. Two rollers and a belt. Sixty dollars in parts."
"And if you're wrong?"
"I'm not wrong."
"If you're wrong, I'm telling her it was your idea."
"It's always my idea." Ethan grinned. "That's why you pay me the big money."
Bill Hartley snorted. He was sixty-five, a heavy, bald, patient man in a brown work apron, with half-moon glasses on a string and a pencil behind each ear. He had owned Bill's Appliance Repair for thirty-one years. It was one long room on Fenn Street, between a nail salon and a place that sold phone cases, and it smelled of solder and machine oil and the coffee Bill made at six every morning and drank, cold, until three. Along one wall stood rows of dead washers and fridges, tagged with yellow paper. Along the other ran a bench with a vise, a pegboard of tools, and a radio.
"You've been looking at your phone like it owes you money," said Bill.
"It does owe me money." Ethan wiped his hands on a rag. "It's just not the phone's money."
It lay on the corner of the bench, face up, with a crack across one corner that he kept meaning to fix. Nobody ever rang him with good news. The people who rang him were the bank, the loan company, the second loan company, a man called Derek who worked for a third, and Claire. He picked up for Claire with his whole body, like a man stepping onto a bridge he knew was weak.
"If it's something, you can take an hour," said Bill.
"It's nothing."
"All right."
"Thank you, though."
"Don't thank me. I'll dock it."
It was a joke. Bill had never docked him a minute in six years.
At lunch he sat in his car with half a sandwich and did the sum.
He did it most days, like poking a bad tooth with his tongue. The car was a 2009 Corolla with a cracked dash and a passenger window that went down and not up. In the glove box he kept a small green notebook, and in it, in a tidy hand, he wrote numbers.
Rent: 940. Car: 212 insurance, 60 gas. Loan 1: 310. Loan 2: 188. Cards: 360. Child support: 625 current.
And at the bottom, not added, because adding it was no use, 9,600 behind.
Fifteen months of not being able to pay. Fifteen months of Claire saying it's fine, I'll manage, in a voice that got lower each time, until last spring it stopped being a voice and became a letter from a lawyer.
The hearing was Monday.
Family Court. Mon 9:30. He had it written in a box. He didn't need to. He had known it in his sleep for six weeks. A judge he had never met would look at a page, and the page would say that Ethan Cole, with a job and no savings, was fifteen months behind on supporting his eight-year-old daughter, and the judge would decide what kind of father that made him. His lawyer, a woman called Ms. Reyes who charged ninety dollars to say it, had told him what would probably happen. Supervised visits. An hour, every other Saturday, at a center. Somebody in the corner with a clipboard.
It's not a punishment, she'd said. It's a risk assessment.
What's the risk?
That you're unstable.
I'm not unstable. I'm broke.
To a judge, said Ms. Reyes, that's the same thing.
His phone buzzed.
It was Claire. Can you talk tonight? 7ish? Pete's cousin says there's a thing you can do before Monday. Pay something, even part. Shows good faith. I'm not trying to trap you. I just don't want this to go badly.
It was kind. That was the worst part. She had never once been cruel about it, not even in the bad year, the year he stopped coming home on time and then stopped coming home. She'd said I can't do this, and he'd said I know, and she had packed a bag for herself and a smaller bag for Maya, and he had stood in the hall with his hands hanging like two wet towels and understood that she wasn't leaving him. She was leaving the shape of him, the way you leave a house with a leak.
Sure, he wrote.
Then he put the phone face down on the seat and sat for a while with his forehead against the cold glass, thinking about who he had left to ask.
There was only one person.
Rick Hall had been his best friend from age eleven to age twenty-six, which was the year Rick moved to the north side and bought a car wash. Not a big one. Three bays and a vacuum stand, on Calder Road, with a sign shaped like a bubble. But it was a business, and it had a bank account, and for the last two years Rick had also had a new truck, a good watch, and the loose, easy, slightly guilty look of a man who had come into something.
They still talked. Not often. A beer at Christmas. A text on birthdays. It was the kind of friendship that had been very strong once and now lay in the drawer like a good tool you never needed.
Ethan drove there after work.
It was ten to six, and the sky was going orange over the shopping center. The bays were empty. A boy in a yellow vest was hosing down the floor of the middle one, and Rick was in the office at the back, a glass box the size of a closet, with his boots on the desk and a phone against his ear. He saw Ethan through the window. His face did something quick and complicated, and then he smiled, and waved, and said I'll call you back to nobody.
"Cole!" he said, coming out. "Look at you. You look like death."
"Thanks."
"I mean it kindly." He gave Ethan a hard, quick, back-slapping hug. He smelled of hot wax and expensive aftershave. "What's wrong? Don't tell me. It's money. Nobody drives to a car wash for the view."
Ethan laughed. He didn't mean to. It came out sounding like a cough.
"Come in," said Rick. "I've got beer in the fridge. It's the good one."
He asked at the second beer.
He'd rehearsed it in the car. He had a speech, which began I wouldn't ask if, and went through a series of reasons, each one a little worse than the last, ending with and I'll pay you back with interest. He got as far as the second reason. Rick put his bottle down on the desk, and held up one hand.
"How much?"
"Ten."
"Ten thousand."
"I know. It's a lot. It'd clear the arrears and a bit. I wouldn't need it long. I could pay you back a hundred a week."
"For two years."
"Yes."
Rick looked at him. He had a broad, good-looking, slightly weathered face, with a flat nose from an old fight and a pair of small bright eyes. He was not smiling now. He rubbed his jaw with the back of his hand.
"I can't, Ethan."
"Okay."
"It's not that I won't. I mean it. If I had it, I'd give it to you, I wouldn't even take the hundred a week." He swallowed. "It's tied up. I'd have to explain, and I can't. I'm sorry."
"It's okay."
"It's not."
"Honestly. I had to ask." Ethan stood. He felt very tired, and a little sick, and mostly embarrassed. "Forget it. I'll think of something."
"Sit down."
"Rick."
"Sit down. Please." Rick got up, and went to the door of the office, and closed it, and then, which was odd, went to the window and pulled down the blind. The boy in the bay was whistling. A truck went by on the road. In the sudden dim, with the neon from the sign coming through the slats in thin pink stripes, Rick turned round, and looked at Ethan, and said, in a different voice:
"I know somebody who could give you five million dollars."
Ethan thought it was a joke.
He waited for the punchline. He sat with his bottle on his knee and his eyebrows up, and Rick stood with his back against the blind and his arms folded and did not smile, and the quiet went on, until Ethan said, "Who is it? A prince? Does he need to move some money out of a country?"
"It's not like that."
"It's always like that."
"Listen to me." Rick came and sat on the edge of the desk. He leaned toward him. He kept his voice low. "I'm going to tell you something, and I want you to hear all of it before you say anything. I'm not supposed to. If it gets out I'll lose a lot. But you're my friend. And you're sitting in my office asking me for ten thousand dollars. And I can't, and I can give you five million."
"What for?"
"For a game."
"What game?"
"It's a survival thing. Twenty-four hours. They put you in a big empty place, and you have to stay alive and out of sight for a day and a night. That's all. You don't get caught. If you're still free at the end, you get paid."
"Caught by who?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know?"
"They don't say. It's part of it." Rick opened his hands. "It's like hide-and-seek. For adults. For a lot of money. Rich people pay to watch. I think of it like a very expensive reality show."
"They watch."
"On screens. It's private. They're careful."
"And somebody looks for you."
"I think so."
"Who?"
"I told you, I don't know, Ethan, it's not my job to know." He said it too fast. He wiped his mouth. "Look. I'll tell you everything I do know. It's a short list. You get a phone. You carry it. Every two hours, you switch it on for a minute and a half, so they know you're alive and inside the lines. If you miss one, you're out. You get a bag, some water, a map. You can't bring anyone. You can't tell anyone. After that you're on your own."
"That's it?"
"That's it." Rick hesitated. "No. There's one more thing. I'd rather you heard it from me."
"What?"
"You can't back out." He said it to the floor. "They put fifty thousand in your account first, to show it's real. And it is. But when you keep it, that's a yes. Once you've spent a dollar of it, you're in. You can't give it back. You can't say you've changed your mind. I've never heard of anyone who did."
"And if I did?"
"I don't know, Ethan. I swear to God. I heard a story. A guy got cold feet, in the spring, and told his wife. They say he was found in a river two days later." He wiped his mouth. "I don't know if it's true. I'm only telling you what I heard."
"So I play, or I die."
"No. It's not like that. It's hide-and-seek, with a bad penalty for not playing." He tried to smile. "That's all."
"Five million dollars."
"Yes."
"For hiding in a field for a day."
"It's not a field. I haven't seen it. I think it's some old industrial place. They don't tell you till the night." Rick looked at the floor. "I'm not going to say it's safe. I don't know that. I'd be lying. I just know the man who knows the man, and he says people do it, and they get paid, and I've never seen one of them come back to complain."
"Come back?"
"I mean. Complain. I don't mean come back." He laughed, too loudly. "God. I'm saying this wrong."
Ethan did not laugh.
He sat quite still on the plastic chair, with the beer warm in his hand and the pink light going across his knees. A thing was happening inside him that he didn't like. It was a small, cold, quiet feeling, as if a window had been opened at the back of a house.
"Rick," he said. "How do you know?"
"What?"
"How does a man who owns a car wash know somebody who runs a game with rich people watching?"
Rick did not answer.
The boy in the bay had stopped whistling. Somewhere a pump was running, with a low steady beat.
"I get paid," said Rick.
He said it to the floor.
"They call it a scout. I find people. I'm not the only one, there are maybe a dozen of us. We keep our ears open. A man comes in who's in trouble, who's got debts, who's got nobody. I'm allowed to say a few words. If he's interested, I give him a number. And if he signs, I get ten thousand."
"You get paid for me."
"If you say yes."
"That's the new truck."
"That's two trucks." Rick looked up. His face was gray and sweaty, and his small bright eyes were wet. "I'm telling you because I won't lie to you. You're the one person I won't. I'm telling you I'll make ten grand if you do it, and I'm still telling you not to, if there's any other way. I'm telling you both things at once."
"Why?"
"Because you asked me for money, and I haven't got any." He tried to smile. "And because I've been carrying it round for two years, and you're the first one I've known."
"The first one you've known."
"Every other one was a stranger."
Ethan put the beer down on the floor.
He did it carefully, without a sound. He sat for a moment with his hands on his knees. He looked at the blind, and the pink stripes on the carpet, and the boy's shadow passing behind the slats. Then he said, in a voice that sounded calm:
"How many have you sent?"
"Eleven."
"Did any of them win?"
"They don't tell me."
"Rick."
"I don't know, Ethan. I swear to God. They sign, and they go, and I get a text. Payment released. That's all I get." His voice cracked. "I always thought, if they were hurt, I'd hear. A wife. A mother. I'd read it in the paper. And in two years I never have. I keep looking. I look every day."
"And?"
"And nothing."
"That's not the same as nothing happened."
"I know," said Rick, very quietly. "I know it's not."
He got up.
He couldn't stay. He didn't feel angry. He had expected to, and was surprised. He felt as if somebody had picked him up and set him down a few feet to the left, so that the whole room looked slightly wrong. He went to the door, and took hold of the handle, and stood there with his back to the man on the desk.
"Take the number," said Rick.
"No."
"Please."
"I'm not going to."
"I'm not asking you to do it. I'm asking you to have it." He had come across the floor. He was holding out a small white card, plain, with nothing printed on it but a telephone number written in blue ink. "In case. Monday. If it goes badly. I'd rather you had it than didn't."
Ethan looked at the card.
He thought of Monday. He thought of a room with a long table and a woman in a gray suit, and a plastic chair in a church hall, and an hour every other Saturday, and a woman in the corner with a clipboard. He thought of Maya's face going slowly polite.
He took it.
"Thank you," he said.
"Don't."
"I'm not saying it because."
"I know." Rick's eyes were shining. "Say Rick sent you. That's all you need. They'll know."
"Okay."
"And Ethan."
"What?"
"Don't tell Claire."
He sat in the car in the lot for half an hour.
The sky had gone dark. The lights of the car wash came on, the bubble sign, the little blue rim round each bay. He sat with the card on the steering wheel and the engine off. A mother and a child went by with a pizza box. A man walked a very small dog. It all looked so ordinary. It looked like the last place in the world where a thing like that could be true.
It's a scam.
It's a man who owns a car wash and has gone a bit funny.
It's a pyramid scheme.
It's hide-and-seek.
He tried each one, like keys. None of them fit. What fit was Rick's face. It was a plain, damp, ashamed, honest face, the face of a man caught carrying something heavy across a room. It was not the face of a liar. It was the face of a man who has told a hundred lies, and is very tired, and has decided, for ten minutes, to tell one true thing.
At twenty past seven he took out his phone.
He had missed two calls from Claire. He looked at them for a while. He thought, I'll ring her. I'll say I've got an idea, I'm going to fix it. He thought of what she would say. What idea? And he'd say, I can't tell you. And she'd go quiet, and say, Ethan, if it's somebody dangerous.
He put the phone away.
He started the car.
He rang the number from the kitchen.
It was a quarter to nine. He had come home, and put the kettle on, and not drunk the tea. The apartment was small and tidy, the one thing he did well at home: a table with two chairs, a sofa from the curb, a television on a crate. In the second bedroom, the little one, a lamp shaped like a mushroom stood by a child-sized bed, which he dusted every Sunday whether or not she was coming. He stood at the counter with the white card in one hand and his phone in the other, and the number on the screen.
I'll just see what they say.
He pressed the green button.
It rang once.
"Mr. Cole," said a man.
He had expected a recording. Or a long pause, and a click, and a voice reading from a script. What he got was a real voice, warm and quick and amused, with a faint dry crack in it, like a man who has been talking all day and enjoys it. It sounded like somebody calling to say the pizza was on its way.
"I haven't said my name."
"Rick rang ahead." A small chuckle. "He's very conscientious. It's the only thing I've ever had to teach him. I'm the House. I know. It sounds like a cartoon. I inherited it, like a cat."
"I want to know what this is."
"Of course you do."
"I'm not saying yes. I want you to understand that. I'm just asking."
"It's the best way to start." The voice sounded pleased. "Shall I tell you in order? It saves everyone's nerves."
"Go on."
"On Friday night you'll be taken to a large closed area. You'll be given a phone, a bag, a map, and a pair of boots. You'll have twenty-four hours. In that time you must stay inside the boundary and not be caught. At the end of it, if you're still free, you'll be paid five million dollars." He paused. "That's the whole of it, as far as the rules go."
"And who's looking for me?"
"People."
"What people?"
"I can't tell you that."
"Why not?"
"Because it's part of the game." The voice was gentle. "I'll be honest with you, Ethan. I don't like to lie. It's the one rule I keep for myself. So I won't say there's nobody. I'll say that I can't say. The first hours are about finding out. You'll like it more, I think, if I don't ruin it."
"That's not very reassuring."
"No. I don't suppose it is."
"Is it dangerous?"
"It's a game of hiding," said the House, pleasantly. "There's a risk in every one. You're a grown man. You've crossed the road."
"That's not an answer either."
"I know." A faint rustle, as of a man settling back in a chair. "It's the best I can do. I'm sorry."
Ethan looked at the card in his fingers.
"I'm going to hang up," he said.
"You're welcome to."
"I'm hanging up now."
"Check your bank first."
"I'm not going to."
"It's only a number. It won't bite."
He did not know why he did it. He thumbed the screen, and opened the app, quickly, with his mouth set, like a man pulling a splinter. The little wheel turned. The screen loaded.
Current balance: $50,211.34.
He stared at it.
He'd had, that morning, one hundred and eighty-six dollars and thirty-four cents. He knew the cents because he had counted them in the car. He looked at the number for a long time. It stayed. He tapped it, and a line of gray type came up, flat and ordinary as a grocery receipt.
Deposit. Ref: HOUSE/CH3. Cleared.
The kitchen was very quiet.
"Is it there?" said the voice.
"It's there."
"Good. It's yours. And I'm afraid, so is the game. The money is a deposit, Ethan. Keeping it is saying yes. Spending it is signing."
"I didn't say yes."
"No. You will. I find it saves time to say so now."
"Then I'll give it back."
"You can't. It's not that kind of money." The voice was perfectly kind. "And there's something else I must say, so that nobody can tell you afterward that I didn't. You may not tell anyone about this. Not Claire. Not your employer. Not the police. You may not ask anyone for help, in the game or out of it. If you do, I'll know. And the game will end."
"End how?"
"It will end," said the House, "for you."
He said it so gently that Ethan did not at first understand. Then he did. It went into him slowly, like cold water into a boot.
Ethan put his elbow on the counter and his forehead on his hand.
"Why me?"
"You'll know."
"I want to know now."
"I'm afraid you can't." It was said with real regret. "That comes in its own time. But I'll give you a little present, for free. To show good faith."
"I don't want a present."
"Tell Maya," said the House, "that the blue horse is very good."
It was the longest silence he had ever heard on a telephone.
It went on so long that he began to hear the line itself, a faint hiss, the sound a wire makes when somebody is breathing at the other end of it. The kettle clicked off. In the pipes behind the wall, a tap dripped. He thought, very clearly, I'm going to be sick.
He stood up.
His chair went back. He walked across the kitchen with the phone against his ear, six steps, the longest six steps of his life, and stopped in front of the refrigerator.
It was a small white one, with a dent in the side. On the door, held up with a magnet shaped like a banana, was a sheet of paper. It was large and creased, the kind they give you at school for art, and on it, in thick wax crayon, somebody had drawn a horse.
It was blue.
It was a deep, solid, wonderful blue, the color of a swimming pool at night, with a mane that went the whole way down its back in loops of yellow, and four legs of slightly different lengths, and an eye like a large round button. It stood on green grass. Over its head, a sun with a face smiled. Under it, in the corner, in pencil, in the unsteady letters of an eight-year-old, it said:
For Dad. By Maya. Do not throw away.
She had given it to him on Sunday.
He had taped it up himself, that night, after she'd gone. He hadn't shown it to anyone. He hadn't even told Claire, because Maya had said, in the car, in a whisper, It's a secret. It's just for you.
"I didn't touch anything," said the House. "I want to be clear. We were in on Tuesday afternoon, while you were at work. I'm sorry. It's an ugly thing to do. We took one photograph and went. We didn't open a drawer. We didn't touch the little bed."
"You."
"I'm telling you because I won't ever lie to you, Ethan. I'll leave things out, now and again, because I have to. But I won't say a thing that isn't so." The voice softened. "I thought it might be easier if you knew from the beginning that I'm not a stranger. I'm only somebody you haven't met."
Ethan stood in front of the refrigerator.
He was shaking. It was not a big shake. It was a small fine steady tremor in his knees and arms, like the vibration in a floor when a train goes by two streets off.
"If you go near her," he said. His voice came out thin. "If you so much as. I don't care how much money. I'll find you."
"I'm not going to touch her."
"You said you'd been in."
"I said I'd been in your kitchen. I never said a word about hers." The voice had lost its smile. "She's the reason I picked you, if you want to know. A man with a reason. They're the ones who last."
"Don't say her name."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't you ever say her name."
"All right." A pause. "That's fair."
He took the phone away from his ear. He held it in front of him in both hands, like a thing he didn't know how to put down. The screen said Call Connected. 06:12. He pressed the red button. And he stood in the little kitchen with the refrigerator humming beside him and the blue horse looking down at him with its round button eye.
He didn't answer Claire's call.
It came at nine, buzzing on the table, and went to voicemail. It buzzed again and stopped. A text came in ten minutes later. Everything ok? We said 7. Then: I can do tomorrow if that's better. Then nothing.
He sat on the kitchen floor with his back against the cupboard and his knees up.
He had looked for cameras. It had taken three-quarters of an hour. He'd been systematic. He'd gone round every room, taking things off shelves, running his thumbs along the edges of picture frames, unscrewing the smoke alarm and the light fittings and the little white box where the heating controls were. He had looked behind the television and under the sofa. He knew where to look. He had fixed a hundred machines and he knew the places where a thing could hide in a thing, and every one of them was empty.
We were in on Tuesday afternoon.
A man had stood in this kitchen. He had stood on the linoleum with the burn mark by the stove, and looked at the horse, and taken out a camera, and framed it, and pressed a button. And then he'd shut the door, and Ethan had come home that night and eaten a bowl of cereal and gone to bed.
He hadn't felt a thing.
That was what he couldn't get past. He'd always thought you would know. A place would feel different, after: a draft, a cold patch, a smell. But there had been nothing. He had slept like a stone.
That's how good they are, he thought.
And then, from a long way down, in a smaller and meaner voice: That's how little there is to take.
He thought of Monday.
He thought of a plastic chair in a church hall, and a woman with a clipboard in the corner pretending not to listen. An hour every other Saturday. He thought of Maya looking at him across a room with her face going politely blank, the way a child's face does when she has learned that grown-ups say things they don't mean.
He thought of Rick, saying, I look every day.
It's hide-and-seek, he told himself. It's twenty-four hours in a big empty place with a phone in your pocket. People do worse for less.
It almost worked.
He got up at last, with a hand on the counter, because his legs had stiffened. He went to the table. He opened the laptop, and typed in the bank, and the password, and the screen came up, bright and unbelievable. $50,211.34. He sat and looked at it. Then he went to the page where you paid things, and typed a number into a box.
9,600.00.
Beside it, the name. Family Support Services, Calder County. His thumb hung over the key.
It's yours whatever you decide.
He pressed it.
A little wheel turned. A green tick came up, and a line of type. Payment received. Thank you.
He sat there for a minute with his hands on his knees, feeling something he couldn't name. It wasn't relief. It was bigger and stranger and closer to fear. It was the feeling of putting your weight on a bridge and finding that it holds.
His phone buzzed on the table.
It was a text. It came from no number, only a name, in plain gray type.
Payment received at 22:41. Thank you, Mr. Cole. The terms are now binding. The House.
He read it twice.
Spending it is signing.
He had thought he was paying a debt. He had stood in his kitchen with the laptop open, and the number in the box, and felt for the first time in fifteen months like a man who was getting something right. And all the time, in a small gray room somewhere, a clock had been running, and a pen had been poised, and the thing he had pressed with his thumb had not been pay. It had been a name at the foot of a page.
I could say no. I could ring and say, I didn't mean.
I could say it to Rick. To Claire. To a policeman.
And a man was found in a river.
He sat at the table in the yellow light of the kitchen with the dent in the fridge and the blue horse, and the fine tremor came back into his hands. For a long time he did not move. Then he got up, and went to the window, and looked down into the street. It was nearly empty. A man was walking a dog under the lamp. A gray car stood at the curb by the bench that nobody sat on, with its engine off.
It had not been there at six.
He watched it for a quarter of an hour. Nobody got out. Nobody got in. The man with the dog went home. The lamp flickered, and steadied, and a cat walked across the roof of the car, and sat down, and began to wash.
They want me to see it, he thought.
He drew the curtain. He put out the light. And he left the white card on the table, face up, with its blue number, where he would see it when he woke, because there was nothing in the world now that it could still tell him.