Runaway

by Anne Laughlin

  “I’m glad you shared it.”

  Catherine snuggled closer to Jan and leaned against her shoulder. Jan tried to open her mouth to say she had something to share also, but it remained clamped shut. She hated herself for it.

  *

  The night fell quickly on their first day on the ranch. Maddy sat around a fire ring that had been built behind the cabins, near the vegetable gardens. She nursed some kindling underneath a couple of split logs she’d found behind one of the cabins, feeling anxious for the flames to grow and cast off some of the impenetrable darkness all around her. She found the quiet and the darkness spooky, so unlike her suburban landscape that her imagination started to run wild, mostly along the lines of a horror film, something her brother may have watched.

  She saw a flashlight coming from the buildings and heard Kristi whistling. She whistled a lot, which was mostly annoying, but right now the most welcome sound Maddy could think of. Flames started to lick around the logs and take hold just as Kristi reached the fire ring. Tommy walked silently behind her.

  “Look, you’re a regular Girl Scout,” Kristi said. She turned off the flashlight and sat on one of the large flat rocks circling the fire.

  Maddy shrugged. “I got sent to camp every summer,” she said. “When you finally get old enough, just about the time you swear you’ll kill yourself if you get sent to summer camp again, they start teaching you some useful things. Like how to start a fire.”

  “Anything else that’s useful to us out here?” Tommy asked.

  Maddy thought about it for a minute. “Maybe. I can get back in a canoe or kayak if I fall out, and shoot a bow and arrow pretty well. I think if a deer stands absolutely still exactly twenty-five feet away from me and wears a bull’s-eye, I can put some food on the table.”

  “None of us have any business being out here, from what I can tell,” Tommy said. “I don’t even know what we’re supposed to be doing with ourselves. All I’ve done since we got here today is wander around and stare at things.”

  “Hell, Tommy. It’s just the first day. We’ll get things sorted out. I know one thing we’ll be doing and that’s splitting a shit load of logs. Every damn building here is heated with wood, and it’s already cold out,” Kristi said.

  They all stared at the fire, their winter coats on. Maddy kept poking away with a stick. She hadn’t seen David since dinner when he disappeared down in the storage room and shut the door behind him. He’d been holed up in there most of the day since their arrival.

  “What was David like in high school?” Maddy asked.

  “He was exactly like he is today,” Kristi said. “Smarter than what’s good for him and always in charge. We got up to a bunch of shit back then, didn’t we, Tommy?”

  “Yeah. David came up with a lot of ideas, and he wanted to try everything, even if he knew it was stupid.”

  “How about if you thought his ideas were stupid? Would you go along with David?” Maddy asked.

  Kristi was quiet for a moment. Tommy just looked at the fire. “I guess I didn’t ever think his ideas were stupid.”

  “Me neither,” Tommy said.

  “I just hope someone knows what they’re doing. We are totally on our own here,” Maddy said.

  “But that’s what you wanted, isn’t it?” Kristi said.

  “Well, yeah. But I don’t want to die out here, either.”

  Maddy shifted around on her rock, poking at the fire. She felt nervous, a little afraid of the dark and the woods. It made her cranky. Kristi moved over and put her arm around her.

  “Don’t worry, Maddy. I won’t let anything happen to you. It’s going to be great. We have this beautiful place all to ourselves. We’ll figure out what to do.”

  Maddy saw another flashlight pierce the darkness. She wanted to call out to see who it was, but she didn’t want to seem scared in front of the others. Diane came up to the fire ring and turned her flashlight off.

  “Hey, what’s up?” she said. She was cheery, as she usually was. She had taken charge in the kitchen and gotten a meal put together from goods in the storeroom, then dove right in to do the dishes after they were done eating. She was on task. Maddy envied her.

  “Not much,” Tommy said. “Just killing time. What’s going on back there?”

  “We’ve got some visitors.”

  “What?” said Maddy. How could they have visitors? “Who are they?”

  “Friends of David’s. Or really, friends of Drecker and those guys. There’s four or five of them and they all went into the storeroom with David.”

  Maddy thought of the pages she’d seen in David’s box of files with information and photos of some Idaho militia members. She supposed that’s who was in the storeroom with him.

  “Did they act like they were having a secret meeting or something?” Maddy asked.

  “They didn’t ask me to join them. I don’t know if it was secret. Do you have a problem with something?” Diane sounded a little suspicious.

  “It’s probably the guys Drecker wanted to connect with here once we got the ranch. That’s one of the reasons they bought it,” Tommy said.

  Now Maddy’s head was spinning. “Wait a second. What do you mean ‘they bought it’? I thought we bought the ranch.”

  Tommy looked a little confused. Kristi looked like she felt a little guilty. Diane looked contemptuous.

  “You thought that we, the six of us, bought this property?”

  “Well, yeah. I thought that’s what David said. It’s why I gave him the twenty thousand.”

  “Oh, honey. You are young, aren’t you? That money you gave us is what we needed for a down payment. Drecker and a few others took out the loan for the property. We’re just the full-time staff here.”

  Kristi put her arm back around Maddy’s shoulder, but she shrugged it off and stood up.

  “I am nobody’s full-time staff,” she said. She headed back to the house, fishing her flashlight out of her pocket as she stumbled over the rocks scattered all around the area.

  She heard Diane say, “Let her go,” and she thought Kristi probably was trying to come after her. The hell with her and all the rest of them. They had left her out, tricked her, made her look foolish. She was going to let David know what she thought about that.

  The entrance to the underground house was perfectly dark. The whole clearing that held the ranch’s buildings was dark, but some cloud cover had parted and the moon was starting to rise. She saw a huge pickup truck parked behind Ed’s old one. She opened the door to the underground house and headed down the stairs, relieved to see the artificial light streaming up from below. The quiet matched the quiet outside; there was no one in the main room of the house, no one in the kitchen. As she moved down the hall toward the storeroom, she strained to hear anything at all, but it was still dead quiet.

  She took a deep breath and opened the door to the storeroom. David sat at the table with four men and they turned their heads toward her as she entered the room. Ed and Warren were in chairs set against a wall. The men were all big. They made David look like a boy sitting next to them. His limbs were so slender and his hair was long and very deliberately messy. The other men had military haircuts and wore camouflage. David did not look in charge.

  He leaped up from the table and came to the door, taking Maddy by the elbow and steering her out, then closing it behind him.

  “What the hell is going on?” Maddy said.

  He kept hold of her elbow and took her down the hall to the main room.

  “Maddy, you can’t just barge in like that. We were having a meeting.”

  “But who are those guys?”

  He looked confused, as if he couldn’t figure out why she was asking the question. “What do you mean, who are they? They’re the guys we’ll be working with out here, with the co-owners.”

  “What co-owners? I thought this place was just ours.” She felt a little frantic. “I don’t understand this.”

  David was steering her to the stairs. “I can�
��t explain it to you now, Maddy. You’ll just have to wait. I have to get back in there.” He flashed her his smile, which looked fake to her now, like the car salesman’s did when she first walked into the CarMax. “Go on back out. We’ll talk later.”

  “But it’s cold out there.”

  “I’m afraid you’re just going to have to get used to that. Go on.”

  He pushed her gently up the first stair and she glared at him before stomping up the steps. She didn’t know what to do with herself. Going back to the fire seemed impossible. She hardly felt a part of them anymore. She waited for a few minutes and then crept back down the stairs into the house and into her bedroom. She had a right to be in the bedroom. Her $20,000 should have bought her that at least.

  She dug under the bunk bed for her bag and dragged it out. She had brought a few electronic gadgets with her to Idaho, but she hadn’t really expected to use her secret spy recording pen. She’d bought it online the year before to bug her parents’ bedroom. She wanted to see if they were as horrible in private as they were in front of her and Justin. Were they always that mean to each other? Did they ever talk about her when they were alone? The experiment lasted a week or so, when Maddy finally got bored listening in. It turned out that they were just as horrible to each other as she saw them be every day, and they never talked about anything but themselves. And they didn’t have sex, which was a relief.

  But now the pen might help her find out what was in store for her at the ranch. She didn’t trust these other men, the ones in Michigan or the ones sitting with David in the storeroom. She didn’t think they were intent on building something small and special and uniquely their own, a place for them to grow in ways that weren’t defined by others. She guessed, based on her reading, that they were intent on bringing down something large, and she didn’t want to be a part of that. She didn’t know if Kristi and the others knew about any of this and had been deliberately holding information back from her. She didn’t know why she’d even come out here. But now that she was here, she’d find out what was going on and get out if she had to.

  All she had to do was place the pen somewhere in the storeroom; it was powerful enough to pick up voices from almost any point in the room, and there were plenty of places to hide it in there. Then she just needed some private time to listen to what was recorded, which might be the trickier part. She stuffed the pen into her pocket as she heard the door to the storeroom open and the men walk down the hall past her room. A few minutes later, she heard someone walk back down the hall and the door to the storeroom closed again. She went into the main room a short while later and she could hear Diane and Tommy banging around in the kitchen. It wasn’t going to be easy to get the bug planted.

  Two hours later, when the house had been stone silent for a long time, an hour after she heard David and Ed and Warren come out of the storeroom and go into their rooms, Maddy got quietly off her bed and opened the bedroom door. Kristi snored softly on the top bunk. She tiptoed the few feet down the hallway and shined her flashlight onto the door of the storeroom. A padlock had been placed on the hasp outside the door. No, this wasn’t going to be easy at all. But now Maddy knew she really had to find out what they were up to.

  *

  The forty-minute drive from Spokane to Coeur d’Alene was passed in silence. Jan drove the rental car and Catherine stared out the passenger window. Jan could feel her turning her head to look at her. She did it every few minutes, and when Jan didn’t look back at her, she turned her face back to the window. One time she sighed. The closeness Jan had felt in the plane seemed to have receded beyond reach, and for no apparent reason, or so Catherine must have felt.

  For Jan, the reason stretched out before her as soon as they crossed into Idaho, her first time in the state since her escape at sixteen. Once she started plotting on a map the location of the several properties they were going to check out, there was no escaping the inevitable. She was going to be in the area of her father’s camp. She had no idea where exactly that camp was—her escape had been blind, from one unknown location into an unknown world. All she knew was she had somehow made her way to Coeur d’Alene, and from there to the west coast. All the properties they were visiting were about as far away from Coeur d’Alene as she guessed she’d travelled that night and into the following day, after she’d shot her father.

  The night was so dark there wasn’t a thing visible outside of the beam of her headlights. But the feeling of familiarity settled on her like a cloak. Some part of her lizard brain was activated by the smell of Idaho, the ions in the air, undoubtedly something she didn’t understand but unmistakably felt. She’d nearly forgotten that Catherine was beside her when she was startled by her voice.

  “I’m quite convinced that you are reevaluating everything and have decided I’m entirely too much trouble to bother with. Am I right?”

  “What?” Jan looked over and saw Catherine with her arms crossed, looking partly angry, partly frightened.

  “You should know that I don’t deal well with silences. If you’re upset, if you’re angry, just come out with it.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  They were entering town and a Holiday Inn appeared on their right. She parked in front of the motel entrance and shot out of the car with Catherine right behind her. There was no line to check in, no one else in the lobby. The young woman at the front desk greeted them brightly. She seemed more a girl, really. She had pigtails. “Good evening, ladies. Will that be one room or two for you gals?”

  Jan felt Catherine’s hand wrap around her forearm, keeping her from talking. “We’ll take one room, please.”

  “Oh my God, are you English? I love English accents! Say something.”

  Catherine looked at her blankly. Jan passed her credit card over and said, “If you wouldn’t mind? We’re anxious to get to our room.”

  She felt Catherine’s hand squeeze her arm again. The clerk briskly ran the credit card and turned over the key cards, all the while telling them how lucky they were to be in Idaho during such a beautiful time of year. They got out as quickly as they could.

  The room had two queen beds. Jan threw her bag on one of them and threw herself on the bed after it. Catherine kicked off her shoes and without a word or a bit of hesitation, draped herself over Jan, hip to hip, nose to nose. “I don’t like silence, except for when I like silence,” she said, lowering her lips to Jan’s and kissing her softly. “I don’t know how to figure out what you’re feeling, except this way.”

  Jan held her close. She wanted to hug her right into her being, hoping Catherine knew that was what she was trying to say as she pulled her in tightly. Were there words for that? Jan didn’t know them if there were. Not adequate ones. She moved Catherine to her side and held her gently by the side of the face. She kissed her for a long time. Every second of it felt right, while so much of her life had always felt wrong.

  They made love ferociously, consuming each other in large gulps. Jan was silent even when she was nearly shattered by her orgasm, while Catherine gave full throat to her pleasure. The other guests at the Holiday Inn would not be confused about what was happening in room 203.

  “I’m not very good with words,” Jan said.

  “But you’re an excellent communicator in other ways,” Catherine said. She looked up and smiled at Jan.

  “I meant everything I just did. If that makes any sense.”

  “Just hold me. That’s all I need you to do.”

  Jan drew her close and wrapped her arms tightly around Catherine’s slender frame. She could feel her breasts against her own. She could feel.

  Catherine lay tucked under Jan’s arm, quiet as she caught her breath. Jan wondered how long she’d have to wait before she could make Catherine come again. She’d never seen anything as sexy as the look on her face as she cried out. It wasn’t just sexy, though. It was powerful, a connection she’d never felt before. This was not sex as she’d ever experienced it. This was vulnerabil
ity and trust.

  “I have something I have to tell you,” Jan said. She held Catherine tight, wanting her close while she told her. Vulnerability and trust were not just about sex. She needed to give Catherine more than just her body.

  “I’m listening,” she said. Her voice was neutral. She must have known it was something big. She stayed as still as a rabbit.

  Jan told her everything and it took a long time to tell. What her life was like in the camp, how she escaped it, how she’d lived all these years not knowing whether her father was dead or injured, not caring much either way. She told her about her made-up identity and her life between the escape and settling down with her job at TSI. Catherine was quiet for a bit after Jan stopped talking.

  “Is it all right if I say something now?” she asked.

  “Yes.” Jan was so unfamiliar with everything she’d been feeling since meeting Catherine that the relief she felt from her confession didn’t seem that remarkable. It was just another new feeling.

  “I think that being back in Idaho must be hugely disturbing to you. I wish I’d known, only so Peet and I, or Peet and someone else could have come out here instead.”

  Jan loosened her arms and pulled away from Catherine. She sat up and looked down at her.

  “I’d think the thing that’s hugely disturbing would be the story itself. Doesn’t it, I don’t know, make you think I’m sick, or disturbed, or awful in some way?”

  Catherine put a pillow behind her back and relaxed comfortably against the headboard. “Look, if you want reassurance that I don’t think any less of you, you should know this. I hope you did kill the son of a bitch.”

  “Huh.”

  She pulled Jan into her arms. “Let’s enjoy getting all these horrible secrets out and into safekeeping with each other.”

  Jan lay with her head on Catherine’s shoulder, trying to assess the fallout from telling her story. There didn’t appear to be any. Catherine moved her fingers softly up and down Jan’s arm and kissed her on the top of the head.