“I know. We’ll help her.”
“You’ll do nothing,” Mom says.
I don’t miss the emphasis on you’ll, or the way her eyes are locked on the spot where Malcolm rests his hand on me. Not wanting her to waste any energy worrying about that, I shift away from him. “Malcolm’s proven himself to me. You’re just going to have to take my word for it.”
She hasn’t spared more than a glance for him since I made her lower her knife. I can’t forget how alike we are. The strength of her animosity toward Malcolm will be at least as intense as mine was initially, and she doesn’t have the luxury of time to assuage it.
She shifts her gaze to him, narrowing her eyes as though trying to make a decision. Then she takes a shuffled step to the side, and her injured leg gives out.
Malcolm is closer than I am. He leaps to catch her and helps her to the bed. He grunts as his ribs bear her weight.
“I’m okay,” she says. “I moved too fast.”
“You’ve lost too much blood.”
Her eyes slowly close, then open halfway. “Just give me a minute, okay? Then we’ll talk. We’ll figure everything out together. Go clean up. I think I got blood on your sweater.”
I reach for Malcolm’s hand, because I can’t take hers. I’m afraid I’ll crush it. This moment is the worst yet. She looks so frail, weak.
Hurt.
“Okay,” I say, miraculously keeping my voice steady. “Call out if you need something.” Her eyes are already drifting shut again.
Malcolm follows me to the bathroom and lets me close the door behind him. The space is slightly larger than a phone booth. I place a finger to my lips and lean past him to turn on the water in the sink to full blast. I would turn on the shower, but Mom would never be so faint as to let the notion of me and a boy and a running shower go unnoticed, no matter how hurt she was. I whisper instead.
“I don’t know what to do. She needs a doctor.” I feel dizzy looking at the bloodied towels piled up in the bathroom. I put Lady Macbeth to shame scouring my hands clean of Mom’s blood before starting in on the sweater. When my intense scrubbing threatens to add my own blood into the mix, I release the hem of my sweater and force my hands apart to brace on the sides of the sink. Lifting my eyes, I find Malcolm staring at me in the mirror.
“You gonna tell me what she said?”
“She didn’t say anything.” I squeeze the porcelain. “I’m the one who talked. I told her all the lies I’d unraveled, and she didn’t deny any of them or offer excuses, but when I asked her point-blank if she killed Derek, she”—my voice goes tight—“she basically asked me how I could believe her if she told me she was innocent.”
Malcolm is leaning against the wall behind me, his hands shoved into his pockets.
“I just don’t know anymore. I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to know,” I whisper. Not because Mom might hear me, but because I’m afraid to hear myself. It’s my confession, the one that’s been steadily gaining ground on me for longer than I’ll admit. I focus on the reflection of Malcolm’s honey-brown eyes locked on mine. “And I know that’s not what I promised you.”
“No,” he says just as softly before pulling his mouth to the side in half a sneer. “You know it’s not like that anymore.”
“That’s not fair,” I tell him. “You’re here because of me, hurt because—”
He pushes off from the wall and tugs at a loop of my jeans to turn me around so we’re face to face. His hand stays warm and solid on my hip. “What’d you say to me that first night when you kept that window edge tight in your hand whenever I so much as breathed at you wrong?”
He’s so close that I have to lift my head to meet his gaze. “I said a lot of things I wish I hadn’t.”
His lips curl up slightly. “I’m not talking about all the threats. You told me that ignorance isn’t the same as innocence. I got caught in this because of me, I got hurt because of some sadistic bastard with steel-toed boots, but I did decide to stay because of you.” He lifts his hand, and his thumb lightly brushes the cut under my bangs, leaving a trail of warmth behind. “Because the only one who’s truly been innocent in all of this is you.”
Had I really ever been afraid of him? That emotion feels a million miles away from the one tingling through my skin and radiating through my chest. It’s almost enough to block out the chill stealing through the cracks around the window and the shadows creeping in under the door from the dark room outside.
Almost.
I curl my fingers around his wrist and lower his hand from my face. “If I’m innocent, why do I feel so guilty?”
“So we’re asking church questions now.” Then he steps away, giving me as much room as the bathroom will allow. It’s not much, but it’s worlds easier to breathe in here than in the room with my mom. “It was the same with my dad. He made all these promises to me and Gran after he got out of prison the first time. Said he was going to be there for me, show me how to be a man, that kind of stuff. Sang on Sundays louder than anybody. And afterward, when those same patterns started coming back, it was like as long as I never looked, never asked, he didn’t have to be a liar.” His hands return to his pockets. “But when they came for him again, when it all came out, I was the one left feeling like a criminal.”
The cold sink behind me is jarring after Malcolm’s touch.
“I’m not saying that’s you or it’s the same. I’m saying I understand not wanting to know. I still wish I didn’t.”
“But isn’t that worse? Was it any better when you found out?”
His eyes go soft, so soft. “I don’t know. I didn’t get to choose with my dad. And,” he says, “he wasn’t like your mom. He stole for himself, for the thrill.”
“But that’s what I don’t know. Tiffany Jablonski and Melissa Reed. All this time, has she been running from something or for something?”
His smile doesn’t reach his eyes. “From the second I met you, you never doubted her love. Maybe she ran at first from her mistakes, but you’re the reason she kept running.”
Something bright fills my chest at that. Not just from his smile, which is sunshine after the rain, but from the truth I recognize in his words. My mom’s always done whatever it took to keep me safe. I learned that from her. Even now, she—
Malcolm’s smile vanishes as I push past him and yank the door open.
The bed is empty. Mom’s gone.
“She conned me,” I say, my voice softened by disbelief. Not about being hurt, but about how weak she was. She didn’t need to lie down; she needed to make me think she was giving in, so that she could take off.
Malcolm hurries past me to look outside, but I don’t join him. I know she’s already gone. I check for the keys to Laura’s car and find them still safely tucked in my back pocket. That only means we’re not stuck here. Mom will get herself a car if she hasn’t already.
Malcolm is slow in returning. “I didn’t see her.”
“How many vehicles were in the parking lot?”
He has to duck back out to count before telling me, “Eleven.”
“There were twelve when we got here.” I also knew that there were exactly sixteen rooms, and nine of those had Do Not Disturb signs hanging from their doors.
“So she took one?”
“Probably. Maybe she even got the owner to give it to her.” Glancing outside myself, I register that a white Nissan pickup is missing. I stand there, trying to figure out what she’s doing.
Malcolm paces. “You still think she’s going to turn herself in?”
“I mean, I thought that was her plan. Wait till I’m eighteen so social services or whoever can’t come after me. But then why—”
“Run?”
I nod and sink onto the corner of the bed. “We could have all stayed here together, and she could have called the police in…” I twi
st around to see the alarm clock on the nightstand. “In an hour. She could have explained everything and never had to go through the investigator or his people, if that’s what was keeping her from the hospital. I don’t understand.” I run my hand over the crumpled polyester bedspread. In disarray, just like the rest of the room. And it stinks. It smells sour and faintly coppery from the blood. There’s an empty bottle of painkillers and some protein bar wrappers in the trash. Not a lot, but a few. She hasn’t had much of an appetite.
I can see her over the past few days, hiding here the way she thought I was hiding safely a state away, waiting. I drag my toe over the worn carpet and imagine her pacing around the bed. She chews her nails just like I do. I wonder if she imposed the same rules on herself that she did on me: no peeking out windows, no leaving the room, no phone calls. Another glance at the nightstand confirms that she didn’t yank the phone cord out of the wall. But she had a cell phone. She called Laura even if she didn’t call me. She could have called anyone….
Rising to my feet, I stride over to Mom’s left-behind bag and upend it on the floor. Clothes, shoes, and a few toiletries spill out, and not much else. I turn my head to Malcolm and rise from my squat.
Malcolm, still pacing, stops midstride. “What? What are you thinking?”
“How long do you think we were in the bathroom?” I start methodically moving around the room to check drawers.
“Five minutes maybe. Why?”
“Even still, she wouldn’t have known that.” I check the mini fridge, the microwave. “For all she knew, we’d be back out in less than one.”
“Okaaaaay,” Malcolm says.
“So she must have bolted the second we closed the bathroom door.” I’m removing picture frames from walls, tossing pillows and blankets. “She wouldn’t have had time to take anything. Look.” I nod my head toward the nightstand. “She didn’t even grab the knife.”
Malcolm starts picking things up, joining me in the search. “What am I looking for?”
“Her phone.”
He looks under the bed corners, and I remove the lid to the toilet tank. We unscrew the air vents, and Malcolm even thinks to unzip the chair cushions. But all we find is dust bunnies and liberally stained foam. The phone has to be close and easily accessible, in case she had to run again. Plus with her injury, it’s not like she dug a hole or buried it outside. It’s in this room somewhere. Nowhere else makes sense.
I turn to watch Malcolm pry up a corner of carpet. He isn’t looking at me, so I smile. I can tell he’ll keep searching with me until the very last second.
Empty-handed, he finally pushes to his feet.
“What’s left?”
He rubs a hand over his head. “The ceiling maybe, somehow? She had a knife.” He gestures toward it. “She could have used it to unscrew the light fixture and…”
“Climb up on a chair with her leg?”
He doesn’t say anything about how ridiculous that sounds; he just shrugs and pulls a chair under the light.
She would need someplace low, maybe even someplace she could reach sitting down—or, better yet, lying down. He’s right about the knife, though. If she could cut into something…
And just like that, I know.
It must show on my face, because Malcolm halts with one foot on the chair as I practically dive under the bed.
“We looked there, remember?”
But I’m not searching under the bed. I’m looking up, at the box spring, and yes, the lining is cut.
I’m turning the phone on to toss to Malcolm before I’ve even crawled back out. “Please tell me there’s a call log and you recognize a number.”
“Laura’s number, Laura’s number, Laura’s number—”
“That one.” Crowded beside him, shoulder to shoulder, I jam my finger against the tiny screen as a new number appears. “She called that number…right before we got here. That has to be where she went, right?”
One glance up at Malcolm’s suddenly blank expression, and I know he recognizes it. “Who? Malcolm, tell me.”
“That’s Mrs. Abbott’s number.”
The Abbott estate is set back nearly a mile from the road. We can’t even see the house through all the trees when we pull up to the gated entry. Malcolm groans before he kills the engine. “I don’t know if I can scale another wall.”
“You don’t have to,” I say as I unbuckle my seat belt.
His head snaps to me. “I’m not sending you in there alone.”
I find a smile for him somewhere in all my panic for Mom. “No, I mean you don’t have to climb over. Neither of us does. Look.” I point to the white Nissan pickup some twenty yards away. It’s parked right up against the wall. “Mom wasn’t scaling anything either. You’ll still have to jump down, but I can catch you if you want.”
“Hey,” he says as I turn to open my door. When I glance back over my shoulder, he fits his hand to my chin. “Apologies to your not-boyfriend, but—” And then Malcolm kisses me.
It’s fast and hard and I barely have time to close my eyes before it’s over, but it’s maybe the best kiss of my life.
“In case you drop me or something and lose that flicker of attraction you’ve had since I kicked you the first time we met.”
We’re still really close, inches apart. So close that I can see that his eyes are flecked with gold.
“You never apologized for that.”
“What do you think I just did?” That soft look in his eyes fades when he adds, “Now let’s go find your mom.”
Jumping down from the wall hurts. And Malcolm refuses to let me catch him, opting instead to accept my hand when he botches the landing and slips on some wet leaves.
“Okay?” I ask when he’s standing again. He glares at me in answer. No, he’s not okay, but it doesn’t matter. Like he said in the car, he’s not sending me in alone. I should probably be frustrated with his stubbornness, but I’m too relieved.
We move up the driveway as quickly and cautiously as we can. It curves around a pond at one point and branches off toward a pool and a guesthouse at another. The moon is bright and nearly full, but there are so many trees lining the property—lofty sycamores, maples, and evergreens—that we never have to stray from the shadows. The air is damp and cold, and my goose bumps have goose bumps before we finally see the main house.
Towering before us are three stories of light-gray stone, with arching windows and walls of glass, all covered with heavy drapes. It doesn’t look like a home so much as a mausoleum. That chilling thought brings me up short, because that’s exactly what it is. My father—my real father—died here.
My mother fled down this exact driveway that night, and she walked back up it maybe ten minutes ago.
I don’t know Mom’s mindset or her intentions, but I can’t imagine her brazenly knocking on the door. I start circling the house in search of an entrance. Mom wouldn’t have wanted to walk any farther than she already had, and judging by the car she didn’t bother hiding at the gate, she wasn’t planning to slip in and out unnoticed. My heart lodges high in my throat. I don’t think she’s planning to get out at all.
Where, where, where would she have gone in? I’m not looking up. She’s hurt; she needed someplace low. And she didn’t have time. She knew I’d come after her, and if I found her once I could do it again.
It’s the blood that tips me off. A basement window is broken, and glittering on one jagged edge is a smear of red. Relief isn’t the emotion that hits me; it’s more like intense panic, making me forget myself and call to Malcolm.
I have to break out more of the glass before I can wriggle through, and I still end up catching my sweater and slicing through a good chunk of my forearm. Malcolm has a much easier go of it, what with my blood, and Mom’s, signaling the side to avoid.
“You okay?” he asks.
; “Yeah.” The cut is long, but I don’t think it’s deep. The adrenaline coursing through my body isn’t letting me feel pain at the moment, though, so I don’t really know if it’s bad or not. I tear off the strip of sweater the window started unraveling, and Malcolm helps me tie it over my cut arm. The need to find Mom is jittering through me so strongly that it’s almost impossible to stand still, so as soon as he’s done, I dash to a narrow set of steps and up to the first floor.
Faint light shows us another staircase, this one immense, bringing a formal sitting room into view along with a stacked stone fireplace so big I could stand in it. Moonlight reflects off a marble countertop far in the distance, in what is presumably the kitchen, but neither Malcolm nor I move in that direction.
Because above us we can hear voices.
And one of them belongs to my mother.
The voices grow louder as we tiptoe up the stairs, and my pounding heart thumps with increasing intensity. For the first time since my mom left me, I’m at war between wanting to sprint toward something and wanting to flee from it.
There are no lights on in the long hallway at the top. The only source of illumination bleeds out from beneath a partially closed door at the end. Mom’s voice is steady as we draw near, strong and sure.
“—what you wanted.”
“What I wanted?” another voice says, an older woman, and I know by the way the hairs rise on the back of my neck that it belongs to my grandmother. “I want my son back.”
“He was never going to do what you wanted, be what you wanted,” my mom says. “I’m proof of that.”
“You’re only proof that he was afflicted by the same weakness his father was. And just like his father, he would have thrown you over the second he realized what his philandering would cost him.”
We’ve crept close enough that I can peer into the room and see a sliver of the scene inside. My mother’s back is to me, and dark red drops are shining wet on the gleaming wooden floor behind her. The trail leads back to the door Malcolm and I are hiding behind, and beneath our feet. It becomes hard to breathe when I think about the blood. I wanted to believe it came from cutting herself the way I had on the broken window, but she had to have been bleeding long before that. Jumping down from the wall alone would have torn open her already-injured leg, and the trek to the house must have been agony. She was wearing a jacket at the motel, but instead of cinching it around her thigh to help staunch the wound, she’s tied it around her waist, to hide just how badly she’s bleeding.
Girl on the Run Page 16
