“Katelyn.”
Just my name. I follow his voice, and when I reach the chair, he steps down for me to take his place. The ceiling is plaster, and rough under my fingertips, so I know the second I encounter the smooth rounded trim that surrounds a scuttle hole. Malcolm’s hand is resting on the outside of my leg just above the knee for balance, since the chair, like everything else in the room, is on its last legs. I reach down and squeeze his hand. Yes, this is what I was hoping for. The panel isn’t big, maybe two feet square, but compared to the jagged window opening I squeezed through at the motel, it’ll be cake.
I step back to the floor and, still holding Malcolm’s hand, pull him as far away from the door as possible—six feet, maybe. I don’t get quite as close to him when I whisper this time. “I don’t remember seeing a pull-down in the hallway, so this must be the only access to the attic. It’s been completely painted over; we’ll have to score the edges to open it. Maybe that’s a sign they forgot it’s in here.”
Malcolm’s cheek brushes against mine. “And maybe not.”
We’re still close enough that he can feel me nod. “It’s our best option.” Malcolm doesn’t need to see me to understand the urgency behind that statement. Yes, I’m terrified of Blue Eyes, but there’s no physical pain worse than not finding my mom.
“But we can get out through there?” he says.
“It’s the only way out of this room I can see.” Which doesn’t answer his question. I have no idea what we’ll find in the attic by way of an exit, but it has to be more than we have now. “We need something sharp to loosen the panel from the paint.” I look up again, imagining the lightbulb overhead. “I could break the bulb, but it might be too delicate.” And it might cut my hands to shreds in the dark.
Malcolm turns away from me, and I hear him shuffling around the room. There’s not much to search. The whole space is about the size of my closet. The shuffling grows louder, and the pounding of my heartbeat grows with it. I don’t want our jailers hearing noises they can’t account for.
“Don’t worry,” I say in my normal volume. “I’ll explain everything to the investigator when he gets here. We’re safe for now. We just have to wait.”
Malcolm falls silent, and I wonder if he doesn’t realize I was talking for the dual benefit of Blue Eyes and the bounty hunter and to cover his rustling, but then he replies just as clearly.
“You’re right.” He stands, and his hand touches my arm, following it up to my shoulder. Leaning in, he whispers, “I need your earring.”
The studs are tiny emeralds that Mom got me for my last birthday, sixteenth or seventeenth, whichever one it actually turns out to have been. When I find her, Mom and I will have the mother of all fights—after I finish hugging her for three days straight. I never take the earrings out. When I cut and colored my hair that morning, shedding my former skin, I hadn’t even considered removing them. But I do it now without hesitation, handing over the small but precious piece of jewelry.
We keep talking about nothing after that, our voices loud and clear, and moments later Malcolm presses not just my earring back into my hand, but also a short screw that he must have taken from the futon frame.
“Will that work?” he says softly.
“Only one way to find out.”
We intersperse our random conversation with whispers detailing our progress as I take over securing our escape route. I slide the edge of the screw around the inner edge of the panel. The paint is thick, and due to the damp air, not as yielding as I’d like. I have the palm of my left hand pressed flat against the panel, pushing with steady, sustained force and trying to discern even the slightest give.
Our height difference isn’t so great that my standing on the chair puts Malcolm and me at eye level, but it’s small enough that bending down a little allows me to reach him without having to pause in my task.
“Two sides are lifting,” I say in his ear, excitement joining the words together. Malcolm’s hand on my shoulder keeps me from straightening.
“You don’t have to forgive me,” he says. “For any of this. Me saying I’m sorry doesn’t mean I expect that from you.” He drops his hand, but I don’t move away. “I just need you to know that, whatever happens. And thank you for saving my life at the motel. I don’t think I told you that.”
My breath catches. We’ve been speaking in hushed voices, whispers so soft that we have to press into each other to make them out. Right now, I’m leaning into him and he’s holding my head to his. It’s an embrace, and there’s no escaping the feel of his heartbeat thudding against mine.
“Why didn’t you just tell him what he wanted to know?” I say. “He wouldn’t have kept you in the trunk for all those days.”
“I don’t know.” Something about the cadence of Malcolm’s answer implies a shrug, but I don’t let it go.
“I think you do,” I say, testing the words on my tongue and finding I believe them. It’s one thing to hesitate about turning over me and Mom, not knowing for sure what his actions would ultimately cost him. It’s another to be tied up in the dark for days on end. “You gave us more time than you had to. Way more,” I say with assurance.
I can tell he’s looking toward me—knowing that he’s free because of me, just like I know I got away because of him. He saved me before he even knew me.
I let out a shaky breath. For the first time since this nightmare started, I’m not tensed and ready to strike or bolt at the slightest provocation. I’m not sitting next to Malcolm with a weapon in my hand or smothered by my own fear of what lies ahead.
“I forgive you.”
He goes statue-still; even his heart seems to pause as my words sink in. “Yeah?”
“But don’t lie to me again.”
“No, never. I’ve seen you with a blade.”
Somehow, I know we’re both smiling.
“Then let’s get out of here.”
Malcolm talks in a normal voice about his goldfish back at home, Stan and Ollie, while I attack the remaining two sides of the stuck panel. He won them two years ago at a carnival for a girl who tried to throw them away at the end of the night, which consequently didn’t inspire him to ask for a second date.
I tell him about the café where I work and my best friends, Regina and Carmel. I grow a little morose thinking about them. By now, Regina will have convinced herself that she did something to warrant my complete vanishing act and Carmel, who’s all too familiar with my mom’s antics, probably thinks I’m in the middle of another impromptu move. She’ll be making herself sick with worry until I call and tell her I’m okay. And Aiden…he predicted I’d bail on him, so if anything, he’s blaming himself for not knowing better than to get involved with me. Maybe he’s even eyeing someone new by now. That’s what I should hope he’s doing. The alternative is that he realized something bad happened and he’s concerned about me. Or worse, he’s gone to the authorities.
I can’t deal with thinking about the people I care about right now, so I redouble my efforts with the panel. A minute later I stop. “Malcolm? I’m tired. Are you tired? I think we should try and get some sleep.” I might have injected too much force into the word sleep, but the entire panel just lifted free from the last edge. I slide it to the side and rise on my toes so that the top of my head breaches the opening.
The attic, more of a crawl space really, runs the full length of the house, and under the canted roof it’s crowded with boxes and various junk. Based on the thick layer of dust blanketing everything and the assorted mouse corpses on the floor, no one’s been up here in a long time. Skimming past the rot and ruin, I see at last what allowed me to see any of it: a window.
The dim moonlight bleeding into the attic like a gloomy fog is barely better than the blackness below, but remembering Malcolm’s claustrophobia, I tug his hand and make room for him on the chair so he can see it: light, h
owever weak, and more space.
Crowded together, I whisper, “Can you get up?”
He doesn’t answer. One second, he’s beside me, and the next, his elbows are braced on either side of the opening, snowing dust down on both of us. He pulls himself up and through without a sound and turns back to lock arms with me.
“Wait.” I step down and move the chair as close to the wall as possible while still letting me reach Malcolm. When our captors open that door—hopefully, a long time from now and not because we inadvertently make noise escaping—then every minute of confusion will count.
My cardio may be killer, but my upper-body strength is so pathetic that I find room on top of everything else to be embarrassed by how little I help Malcolm haul me up.
“Okay?” I ask when he clutches at his side. I can’t tell if it’s the poor light making him look so pale or the pain I know he just endured. He nods, waving me on.
My pace is glacial since I don’t know which floorboards will creak—or worse, considering the condition of the wood. I slide one foot ahead of the other, ears alert, and wince as it becomes impossible to avoid the heavy curtains of spiderwebs hanging thick from every surface. I suppress a squeak as the first one tangles in my hair and still more stick to my arms. Something squishes under my foot, and I close my eyes to ignore the instinct to look down. I know it’s a mouse. I know it. One not long dead, by the smell of it. I have to stop at one point to carefully and quietly migrate a stack of moldy boxes from my path. Malcolm moves the higher ones.
And then we see it clearly: our so-called escape. And I know without a doubt we’re both thinking the same four-letter word.
“Shit.” Malcolm says it out loud.
I’m still staring, so I don’t think to caution him about his volume. It is a window, but it’s gotta be prison-regulation, because there is no way that it can be crawled out of.
“I can fit,” I say anyway, and Malcolm’s eyes immediately drop to my hips.
“Not all of you.”
I spare a flicker of energy to be offended.
He lifts his hands. “I’m not complaining about the visual, just pointing out the size discrepancy between that child-size window and us.”
“Both of us can fit.”
He opens his mouth to protest again, then shuts it. “Okay. How?”
“However we have to.”
There it is. We can fit out this window the size of a license plate because there is no alternative. We can’t go back to our cell and wait for our jailers, or the investigator who hired them; this is the only opening. If we have to find a working chain saw in one of these boxes and go roaring through, then that’s what we’ll do.
Luckily, like everything else in the attic, the window is rotting. We’re able to pry the frame free with just our fingers and gain an inch or two on all sides. A desperate prisoner emaciated to near-skeletal condition could make it out now, but that still excludes Malcolm, me, and my hips.
There isn’t any drywall or insulation in the attic, so once we get rid of the wood we’re left with brick and mortar, which has fared much more favorably over the years. I could work my fingers to the bone—and likely would—trying to dislodge only one brick, let alone the dozen we’d need, and we’d still be trapped inside.
Defeat pulls at me, trying to force me to the ground. Malcolm is just standing there—half bent over because of the low ceiling—waiting for me to figure a way out.
Meanwhile, Mom is maybe preparing to turn herself in over a death that’s not as clear-cut as the authorities believe.
I reach a hand outside and let the moonlight envelop it. Rain has started spitting, and more will come. The gutters along the streets will flood, and roofs will leak. And we’ll be here banging our heads against a brick wall. The window might as well have bars.
That last thought hits me like a slap in the face. If Malcolm had said it, I would have hit him. Probably more than once. Giving up is not an option. Regrouping is. Reassessing is. Finding a way when there isn’t one.
I pull my arm back inside. At least the spiderwebs have been washed away. The ones in my hair are more stubborn, but they relent eventually. When they’re off me at last, I cast new eyes around the attic. “Somewhere, there is a way out,” I say. “We haven’t looked hard enough yet.” I don’t say it may be in the form of an ancient shotgun that we use to blow off the door to the room below and hold our captors at gunpoint until they let us go, but I allow for the possibility.
We are getting out of this house.
Malcolm is the one who finds it, or hears it. Birds tweeting. In a corner eave of the roof, where brick meets wood and shingle, a robin is nesting.
“She burrowed in,” he says. “Why can’t we burrow out?”
We both see the waterlogged boxes, a stack right by the scuttle hole that neither of us had looked at in our eagerness to reach the window. The roof has leaked in this spot, not a lot, and probably just recently, but once again our faces are tilted up and our hands are pulling down. The storm has picked up, adding in rolls of thunder and sharp cracks of lightning. We break through sodden plywood and roofing, synchronizing each impact with the thunder as best we can, balancing our desire for urgency with our need to remain unheard.
Time exists only in the strikes and rumbles of the storm, but as more rain beats down on us through our ever-widening hole, the faster we work. We stop the second we both agree my hips and his shoulders will fit. Nothing tears at my flesh as Malcolm lifts me through the hole, and I’m not being pursued, making it infinitely better than the last tiny opening I had to force myself through.
I emerge onto the rooftop into a mass of oak leaves and branches that dump chilled water down my collar, soaking me instantly, but I press them back and move so Malcolm can pull himself up. Once he gets his shoulders through, the rest of him comes out easily enough. We grin at each other as rain pelts us and lightning crashes near enough for the scent of ozone to fill the air.
I skirt out from under the dense canopy, searching for a branch thick enough for us to climb down. The one I find is not within arm’s distance of the roof, no matter how close I stand to the edge. But it is, I think, within jumping distance. If I were on the ground, I’d know I could make it. Without a running start, in the pouring rain and cloudy night, I’m less confident.
Before I can talk myself out of it, I leap.
The bark is thick and scratchy against my palms as I catch hold of the branch, with my feet hanging below. My grip feels sure, so I swing myself so that the tips of my shoes reach a larger branch below. Inhaling rapidly a few times, I rock my body forward at the same time that I release my hands. After a split second of blind terror, my upper body overtakes my lower and I wrap my arms tightly around the gnarled trunk of the tree.
Turning, I find Malcolm watching me with raised eyebrows from the edge of the roof, one arm still bracing his ribs. My body definitely did not enjoy my Tarzan act, so I can only imagine what his will do. He’s blinking furiously, maybe because of the rain streaming into his eyes, maybe because he can see exactly how high up we are and that there’s nothing below to break his fall beyond a minuscule woodpile.
Despite how slippery and precarious my position feels, I give up one handhold and extend an arm, beckoning. I don’t dare risk calling out to him.
I venture a step closer to the house. He has to jump. He’s taller than me, with demonstrably more upper-body strength, but he’s also injured, and we’ve had to rely on his much-abused ribs too much already.
The sight is terrifying. He hits the first branch with an impact that reverberates through the trunk, and grimacing, he drops a hand. Dangling from one arm, he pumps his legs and lets go the second they’re over the branch I’m on. We collide into each other, me grabbing him, him pinning us both to the trunk.
My breath comes out in a whoosh, and I can feel his heart poundi
ng beneath his rib cage. Mine is pounding too.
“Nice catch,” he says before hugging me, without any pretense of holding us to the tree. My arms are already around him, but I shift them and hug him back in the rain.
Malcolm insists on climbing down the tree first. “In case I fall, I won’t take you out with me.”
I doubt that would happen, after seeing his one-armed catch, but I take his point and let him pick out the strongest branches before following. We look back at the house repeatedly during our relatively speedy descent, but I’m only seconds behind him when he hits the ground.
Hand in hand, we run.
Our post-prison-break swim through the suburbs is wet and cold. And I’m legitimately worried by some of the groans Malcolm is making with increasing regularity.
“Okay?” I call out over the heavy rain.
He nods, and we keep moving. He’s not, though. He’s been listing more and more to his left, but when I move around him to offer my shoulder, he waves me off almost angrily.
I don’t feel too hot either.
My side hurts, but I do my best to ignore the throb. It’s my head that claims all my attention. Every jarring footstep sends a corresponding jolt through my temples. I prod the base of my skull as we run and wince at the swelling goose egg. Glancing over at Malcolm, I don’t need to search for the spot where he was hit. It looks like he has a golf ball stitched onto the side of his head.
His toe catches on a square of sidewalk that a nearby oak lifted with its roots, and I have to catch him before he goes down.
“Stop. Malcolm, we have to stop.” I pull him under the shelter of the tree’s dense branches, and we huddle together, shivering for more reasons than the temperature. My body tells me we’ve run a half marathon. My head tells me we’ve gone maybe a mile or two.
Not far enough. Not nearly far enough.
We’re still in suburbia. Friendly scarecrows are staked in the freshly mown lawns of red brick middle-class homes. Hastily abandoned bikes line both sides of the street. Artfully carved pumpkins decorate every porch. The grass is still green even as the oak trees that guard the neighborhood have all turned golden, crimson, and rust.
Girl on the Run Page 12
