Frontline

by Alexandra Richland

  Sensing the shift, Randall holds his hand out and gestures to a nearby chair. “You should eat something, Miss Peters. You need to get your strength back.”

  He pulls out the chair from beneath the desk and lifts the steamed domes to reveal one plate of bacon, scrambled eggs, and hash browns, and another with a stack of golden waffles. My stomach, now apparently emptied of river water, groans with hunger and I’m suddenly lightheaded from the delicious aroma.

  Instead of picking up the fork, I reach for the earrings. They’re delicate upon inspection, gorgeous pearls with a diamond set on top. With some force, I remove the post—the part that spears the earlobe. A micro thin wire protrudes in its place. I give it a tug and it slips out of the pearl. The middle is coiled and at the end hangs some sort of bead. My fingernail splits the bead and it cracks in two pieces, one falling back to the desktop, nothing but a light plastic shell. The other half houses a small microchip.

  Will you wear them tonight?

  Trenton’s voice echoes in the memory of that moment. Tears flood the corners of my eyes and snake down my cheeks. All at once, a rush of rage and embarrassment hits me like another wave of white water. I lash out against it, pitching the microchip toward the wall where it cracks and bounces away, burying itself somewhere between the fibers of the carpet.

  “Miss Peters, please calm yourself,” Randall says. “He only meant to—”

  “Get out.” My voice cracks beneath the weight of the words.

  Randall casts his eyes to the floor, as if searching for a quick explanation that might be found there. A moment of consideration passes before he marches to the door, still avoiding my stare. Once in the hallway, he eases the door shut behind him. It clicks into place and his footsteps fade away.

  The pain arrives then, fierce and agonizing, and I’m paralyzed in the middle of the bedroom with nothing nearby to catch my fall. My legs weaken under the crushing weight of Trenton’s lies and betrayal, a burden that grew heavier the longer I ignored its inevitability.

  Tears curve at the crest of my chin and plunk against the bathrobe’s thick cotton folds as I slump down to the floor. My deep breaths sputter with aftershocks, like a rapid series of hiccups, infuriating me further and intensifying my sobs.

  The soft morning light hardens as the sun rises higher in the sky. A short glance out the window reveals the trunks of tall pine trees stretching above the cabin. Just a few feet beyond where their thick roots spring from cracks between rocks, a cliff gives way to a ravine that stretches out to the horizon, covered by vast green forest. I yank the curtains shut, immersing the room in blue shadow.

  So much for making a run for it.

  The domes are cold and have lost their condensation by the time I slam them back over the platters of the congealed breakfast and leave the tray in the hallway outside the bedroom door. My empty stomach seems to have given up on the prospect of any food and I’d rather starve than eat Trenton’s handouts.

  A doorway in the corner of the bedroom leads to a small bathroom. I turn on the cold water faucet, take off my bathrobe and lay it over the closed toilet seat, and then cup my hands beneath the rushing tap water and drink several gulps. My bra and thong feel stiff with dried river water. I remove them and brush my teeth using toothpaste and a toothbrush I find perched on the back of the sink that look brand new.

  The mirror above the sink reflects my puffy eyes, chapped lips, and frizzled hair. Dried tears leave crusty streaks down my cheeks and my body is bruised in a few places. Yesterday when I looked in a mirror, I felt Denim’s careful hands shaping my hair, and I shared her warm smile when she finished my makeup. Moments later, Trenton’s eyes shone as he looked at me in the dress and shoes he picked out—and then wearing the earrings he presented me.

  And I thought you couldn’t look more beautiful, Sara.

  Those moments seem like they took place in a different lifetime.

  Back in the bedroom, wrapped in the bathrobe, tears come again, but only in small bursts, my ducts as exhausted as the rest of me. I slump against the end of the bed and keep my eyelids closed, easing the sting of tears as they spring from my raw, red eyes.

  When I open them again, it’s impossible to see any of my surroundings, except the bedside clock, which tells me it’s now late evening. Darkness seeps through the closed curtains and coats everything. I strain to focus until I see a thin beam of golden light glowing from beneath the bedroom door. The second fake earring glints on the desk. I pick it up and drop it into the bathrobe’s right pocket.

  Dark hardwood flooring runs the length of the hallway outside the bedroom, past three closed doors on the left, before the corridor ends at a wooden staircase. A matching wood banister to my right tops a row of long, thin spindles that overlook a massive sitting room enclosed by a vaulted ceiling. Smooth river rock frames the fireplace on the far wall, in which a tall fire burns newspapers and blackened logs. A kitchenette opens at the opposite end of the room. I wipe the sleeve of the bathrobe across my eyes, ensuring all traces of tears are gone, then walk softly toward the light and peer over the banister.

  Sean and Chris sit next to each other on one couch, wearing white dress shirts with no ties and light gray dress pants, typing quickly on laptop computers. Stacks of papers spill from file folders and litter the coffee table in front of them.

  Randall stands before the fire with his arms folded, staring pensively into the flames.

  Trenton lies across a second couch, opposite Sean and Chris, a bloody cloth wrapped roughly around his left shoulder. Dark violet crescents sit beneath his wide, glassy eyes. He hasn’t changed out of his tattered tuxedo. He looks like a Wall Street bigwig who survived the jump from his office tower during the 1929 crash.

  “And do we have any idea where that might be?” Trenton says.

  “They’re New York plates on the van, but the license hasn’t been renewed in three years. It last belonged to someone named Edward van Sykes, a plumber, now deceased,” Chris replies.

  “Any offspring?”

  “Two sons, both with records . . . breaking and entering, car theft. It’s pretty minor stuff.”

  Randall chuckles, but it’s a hollow sound. “Congratulations, Mr. Merrick, you have two of New York’s finest delinquents after you.”

  Trenton shakes his head. “There’s no connection. Where would they have gotten that kind of firepower? They had semi-automatic weapons.”

  “That they didn’t know how to use worth a damn,” Sean says.

  “And there’s something else.” Chris looks up from his computer. “They were picked up a year ago for allegedly being hired to kill some woman’s cheating husband. The whole thing went bad. The husband survived, later reconciled with the wife, and dropped all charges. Because of a family connection with the courts, miraculously, it never made it to trial.”

  “So what are two inept thugs doing chasing you?” Randall asks. Sparks erupt from the burning logs as he jabs them with a poker.

  Trenton shakes his head again. “It doesn’t make any sense. None whatsoever.”

  “Unless you weren’t the one they were after,” Chris says.

  All eyes fall on Trenton.

  “I doubt it.”

  “Why?” Sean says. “Maybe you don’t know as much about her as you think you do.” His head jerks slightly when he says “her”, motioning toward the upper story. I dip back into the shadows.

  “I know enough to know she’s not in any kind of trouble right now.” Trenton hoists himself onto his good arm and reaches for a bottle of water on the coffee table.

  Randall steps over, reaching the bottle first, and hands it to Trenton.

  “A patient she didn’t treat properly? Someone bitter about their medical bills?” Sean says.

  “No,” Trenton replies.

  “An ex-boyfriend? Ex-husband?”

  “No!” Trenton growls the word, almost spitting his last mouthful of water across the coffee table at the two of them. He heaves the plastic bottle
into the fire. The logs hiss and spark.

  He glares at Chris and Sean until they retreat behind their computer screens. Randall stands his ground next to the fireplace, still as a sculpture.

  “Yes . . .” Trenton sighs, flopping back onto the couch. He winces slightly.

  “Yes, what?”

  “Yes, she has an ex-boyfriend. At least one that I know of.”

  Chris and Sean peek from behind their screens.

  “Do you have a name?” Sean asks.

  “She never gave it to me. Let’s start by running down the names of all the male students at her high school who graduated the same year she did. She almost said his name once. It started with a ‘P’.”

  “No!” The word jumps from my mouth and ricochets against the stone fireplace, echoing in the vast heights of the vaulted ceiling. My hand flies to my mouth, but it’s too late. The four of them stare up at me.

  “Sara?” Trenton shoots upright, but doubles over quickly. Randall hurries to his side and tries to ease him back down to the couch, but he pulls away.

  My raw, swollen feet carry me over the wood steps; the pain doesn’t register. I float like a banshee down toward Trenton.

  “Who do you think you are? Snooping into my life again? How dare you!”

  Randall steps forward. “Miss Peters, we’re just trying to figure out—”

  “My ex-boyfriend? Shooting at us? That’s the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever heard!” My voice sputters over the dry patches in my throat, but the volume of my scream makes up for it. “What is this really, Trenton? An excuse to hunt down and kill everyone who’s ever looked at me twice? Held hands with me? Kissed me? Fucked me?”

  The last part blows Trenton back against the couch with as much force as the bullet, but the grief on his face looks like it connected with twice as much impact.

  “Miss Peters, that is hardly necessary,” Randall says with a stern edge.

  “Sara!” My voice sounds like a rusty fork scraped across a glass plate. “My name is Sara! Not Miss Peters! How many fucking times do I have to repeat something to you people before it takes root in your tiny brains?”

  Chris and Sean sit glued to the back of the couch. Trenton seems distracted and unfocused, as if he barely recognizes me.

  “People tried to kill us yesterday, Trenton! Why? Up until a week ago, I was just a nurse at Manhattan General, working my shifts, living my life. Then you showed up. You changed my lock. You tried to make my apartment more secure than the fucking White House. You complained about me taking the subway. Now I’m getting shot at! It seems for all your effort, you’ve only made things more dangerous for me.”

  Randall steps forward. “Which is exactly why, Miss Pete—Sara, we need to—”

  “Which is exactly why you people need to stay the fuck away from me!”

  The fire pops and crackles, sucking the air from the room and filling it with a heat so intense that my skin feels like it’s melting beneath the bathrobe.

  “I want to go home right now,” I say, focusing solely on Trenton. “I don’t care who does it. Phone one of your other employees to pick me up if you have to. I just have to get the fuck out of here and away from you.”

  Trenton’s eyes darken. He leans forward, elbows balanced on his knees.

  “It’s not safe for you to return home, Sara.”

  “It’s not safe for me here, either.” I cross my arms over my chest. “When I’m with you, people try to kill me.”

  “I said no.”

  I glare back at him. “Fine. Then I’ll leave by myself.”

  To hell with the miles of forest surrounding us.

  I move toward what I assume is the front door. The door handle is a simple brass loop curving from a large plate set inside thick, dark oak. I wrap both hands around it and tug. It doesn’t budge. I scan the door, but don’t see a lock or keypad.

  “Let me out of here!”

  I push my right foot against the doorframe and pull harder, tugging with all the strength in my body, which fades in seconds and leaves me panting for breath. Tears well up again at the corners of my eyes, but I catch them with the bathrobe sleeve.

  There’s no damn way I’m crying in front of them.

  “I said let me out!” Calling upon any remaining gusto, I kick the door repeatedly with my sock-covered foot. Pain bursts up my leg.

  A firm hand presses against my left shoulder. With a speed I didn’t know I possessed, I swat it back. I turn and see Randall with both of his arms held in the air, surrendering.

  “Calm down, Sara,” Trenton says from behind him.

  I blow past Randall and march over to Trenton on the couch. The shadow of stubble sprouting from his jaw and upper lip accentuates his haggard face.

  “I was almost killed yesterday and you want me to calm down? I’m being held prisoner in some godforsaken forest by a billionaire playing secret agent, and you want me to calm down?”

  I reach into the pocket of the bathrobe, seize the second earring, and hurl it at Trenton. It whistles past his head and slams against the couch cushion. He doesn’t flinch.

  “You should eat something, Sara. You’re hysterical.” He leans back on the couch as if my freak-out means nothing to him.

  Even screaming at this man, with the words amplified in a giant room beneath a vaulted ceiling, he still doesn’t hear me. I walk back to the stairs and climb a few steps, knowing what little strength and breath I have left are wasted here.

  “Well, it’s good to know you guys are so on top of things.” I motion to Chris and Sean who haven’t moved from their chairs, eyes glued to their laptop screens, probably hoping I’ll disappear in a puff of smoke. “I’m sure you’ll find out everything you need to know by looking into the men I’ve dated—money-laundering, embezzling, assassinations. Maybe you should phone my dad. He kept a close eye on me, too, and could probably give you a few leads.”

  Trenton’s eyes seem locked on something distant, coated in a glaze of exhaustion. Suddenly, he blinks. The glaze clears and he bolts up straight, grabbing a pen and a pad of paper from the coffee table.

  “What?” I say, gripping the railing. “What is it?”

  Trenton guides the pen across the page, producing a jumbled scrawl I can’t read from my perch on the stairs. He tears the page from the pad and slides it over the coffee table to Chris, who leans forward and picks it up.

  “Nothing.” Trenton waves me away.

  “Fuck you, Mr. Merrick.” And with those words I finally get his undivided attention.

  “Sara.” My name is said in an agonizing whisper.

  I draw myself up to full height, on the verge of tears because I wish more than anything that his concern and care for me are real.

  “Fuck you and your bullshit declarations of always putting me first, for pretending you have feelings for me. Your so-called gifts. Your wretched Tin Men. Your insincere vows of wanting to protect me. As soon as I get out of here, we’re done. You hear me? Done! I can’t believe I spread my legs for you in your fucking Bugatti!”

  “That’s enough!” Trenton’s roar shakes the room. He stands to deliver the rest of his lecture and lists back and forth as if he’s about to faint. His dress shirt and the towel covering his shoulder are saturated with blood.

  “You listen to me, Sara.” The veins in his neck and forehead bulge, and his face floods a ferocious red. “You will go upstairs and eat some goddamn food and that’s final!” He points to the second floor using his good arm, his blue eyes unrelenting.

  Like a ten-year-old told to clean her room, I stomp up the rest of the stairs, trudge into my temporary bedroom, and slam the door as hard as I can. The vibrations rumble through the walls, then fade, as a cold, thick silence regains control of the cabin.

  A thin beam of moonlight streams through a crack in the curtains. I draw them back, bathing the whole room in a soft, silver glow. My ducts must have recuperated because the tears come hard and fast, mixing with agonizing sobs that I muffle with the bat
hrobe sleeve.

  In the city, I’m lucky to see one or two stars from my apartment window. Tonight, in the Adirondacks, millions of them blink across the sky, random as paint speckles scattered over canvas from the tip of a thrown brush.

  I think about a camping expedition my mom, dad, and I took to Mount Shasta when I was seven. Two days before our trip, I watched a movie about a whole family uprooting itself from the city to settle in a remote wilderness. The premise fascinated me. Our first night at the campsite, with my parents sound asleep in our tent, I snuck into the nearby woods, thinking I would embark on an adventure of my own. Millions of stars twinkled in the sky that night, too. The trees surrounding me shone silver in the moonlight and the forest sounded louder than a crowded city. Crickets chirped, frogs croaked, and the first hoot of an owl I ever heard in my life echoed from a tree branch high above.

  But when a twig snapped close by and something shuffled in the dried leaves, I screamed so loudly, the entire campground lit up. I remember a chorus of running feet, my father and two other men I recognized from the tents next to us crashing through the underbrush, the look of terror on my father’s face when he found me standing there, screaming myself hoarse while a small rattlesnake slithered into the hollow of a nearby log.

  I remember the helplessness that froze me where I stood, and my father’s powerful hands shattering that fear when he picked me up and hoisted me over his shoulder. I remember the warm kisses from my mom that greeted me when my dad set me back down at the campsite, assuring all the bystanders I was fine. I never felt safer than in those moments with my family, and any time trouble reared its head after that, I always knew I could count on them to come running.

  But that was years ago, without an entire country separating us. Now I’m trapped again, frozen in one place, the rattlesnake fully grown now and circling.

  I wonder how long it’ll take before Denim files a missing persons report.

  Oh, God, my only hope of getting out of here relies on Denim.

  Now I wish I told Kelly about my date, too.

  “Miss Peters? Uh, Sara?” Randall calls through the closed bedroom door. His knuckles tap softly against it.