Down the Rabbit Hole

by Peter Abrahams

  “Then what is it?” said Cracked-Up Katie. “Your name.”

  Had to say something, real name out of the question, no fake names coming to mind except Miss Stapleton from The Hound of the Baskervilles. “Griddie,” said Ingrid.

  Cracked-Up Katie’s expression grew thoughtful, her forehead wrinkling, pushing ridges of dried pancake makeup out of the furrows. “Griddie,” she said. “Cool. Mine’s Katherine, but you can call me Kate.” She held out her hand. Ingrid shook it.

  Surprise. The only person who’d ever bought into her nickname turned out to be Cracked-Up Katie. And a second, smaller surprise: how cold her hand was.

  “Nice to meet you,” said Ingrid. The handshaking was going on too long. The actual shaking part was over but Kate still hadn’t let go.

  “So what are you running away from, Griddie?” she said.

  “I’m not running away,” said Ingrid, pulling her hand free. “I’m on my way to soccer.”

  “At the fields up by the hospital?”

  “Yeah,” said Ingrid, surprised that Kate would know a fact like that.

  “How are you getting there?”

  “Walking.”

  “Walking?” said Kate. “It’s five miles from here.”

  “It is?”

  “So. Lost after all.”

  “I wouldn’t say lost.”

  “No?”

  “How can you be lost in your own hometown?” Ingrid said.

  “Let me count the ways,” said Kate. With her free hand, she reached into the chest pocket of her lumber jacket, took out a cigarette and a lighter, and lit up, the lighter spurting a foot-long jet of flame. She took a deep drag. “Got any money on you, Griddie?” Smoke blew into Ingrid’s face.

  What kind of question was that? After most school days, the answer would have been no, but Mom hadn’t had anything smaller than a ten for lunch money, so $8.50 was sitting pretty in the zipper pocket of Ingrid’s backpack. Did Cracked-Up Katie have robbery in mind? If so, could Ingrid outrun her? Ingrid glanced at those gold lamé stilettos and decided the answer was yes.

  “’Cause if you do,” said Kate, blowing more smoke, “I could call you a cab.”

  “A cab?”

  “A taxicab.”

  Ingrid knew what a cab was, of course. She’d been in two, once when she and Mom had gone to New York to see The Producers, then on the vacation to Jamaica, where the Rasta driver had sung under his breath practically the whole way from the airport to the hotel, that Bob Marley song about burnin’ and lootin’. But Echo Falls wasn’t the kind of place where people took taxis. Had she ever even seen one in town?

  “Otherwise,” said Kate, “you’re not going to make it.”

  “I’ve got eight fifty,” Ingrid said.

  “More than enough,” said Kate. “Come inside.” She went up the steps and opened the door.

  Echo Falls was a pretty safe town. The local paper—which came out three days a week and no one took seriously (right off the top there was the name they hadn’t been able to resist—The Echo)—printed the police blotter and Ingrid always went to it first thing. Crime in Echo Falls meant lots of DUIs, underage drinking (Stacy Rubino’s brother, Sean, for example), and any-age drugging, some theft, some late-night mugging and second-home vandalism, bad checks passed at Stop & Shop and CVS, a little domestic violence, the occasional bar fight. No murder, no kidnapping, even in the Flats: a pretty safe town, but Ingrid knew better than to enter a stranger’s house, and would never have done so in this case except for the tremendous crack of lightning that zigzagged across half the sky at that very moment, seeming to tear it wide open like a gutted water balloon, raining down an icy flood. Ingrid flew up the steps of the crooked gingerbread house and ducked inside, thunder booming around her.

  Kate was already disappearing through a doorway at the end of a long dark corridor. The light was all fuzzy and grainy, the way it got sometimes in high-end movies. Ingrid waited in the entrance hall, the floor littered with unopened mail. She left the front door partly open, but the outside light hardly penetrated. To the right of the corridor, a staircase with warped wooden stairs led up into gloom. Ingrid smelled kitty litter. First she was the one actively detecting the smell; then it was coming to her, growing and growing, an inescapable stink. She looked around for cats and spotted none. From somewhere upstairs came a creaking sound, maybe a footstep.

  Kate came back along the corridor, materializing out of the darkness. “All set,” she said. “Be here any minute.” She dropped her cigarette butt on the floor and ground it under her stiletto heel.

  “Thanks,” Ingrid said.

  “No problemo,” said Kate. “Want to wait in the parlor?”

  “Outside’ll be fine,” Ingrid said, as thunder boomed again.

  “Parlor’s right here,” said Kate, kicking open a door with the side of her foot.

  The parlor: a small square room painted purple with gold trim, the paint peeling everywhere. A dusty chandelier dangled lopsidedly from the ceiling. The only furniture was a saggy and stained pink velvet sofa. Kate sat on it, patted the pillow beside her.

  “I’m okay standing,” said Ingrid.

  “Suit yourself,” said Kate. She felt around under one of the cushions, fished out two cigarettes, one bent. She offered the straight one to Ingrid. “Smoke?” she said.

  “Me?” said Ingrid.

  Kate shrugged, stuck the straight cigarette back under the cushions, lit the bent one with another eruption of flame. “So what do you do, Griddie?” she asked from behind a cloud of smoke.

  “What do I do?”

  “With your life.”

  “I go to school,” Ingrid said.

  “That’s it?”

  “I play soccer.” Which reminded her: She opened her backpack and took out her cleats, bright-red Pumas with glittering red laces ordered special. Why not save time by putting them on now?

  “But what’s your passion?” said Kate.

  Ingrid paused, the cleat still in her hand. “My passion?”

  “What you like to do the most.”

  That was easy. “Drama.”

  “You like acting?”

  Ingrid nodded.

  “Ever been in a play?”

  “Lots,” said Ingrid. “We did Our Town last spring. I was Emily in the birthday scene.”

  “Who is we?”

  “The Prescott Players,” said Ingrid.

  Because of that fuzzy and grainy light, Ingrid couldn’t be sure, but all of a sudden Kate seemed to go very white, and her mouth opened up, an empty black hole. Had smoke gone down the wrong way?

  “Do you know the theater in Prescott Hall?” Ingrid asked. “That’s where we perform.”

  Kate rose, her lips moving though no sound came out. She left the room—a little unsteady, maybe because of those stilettos.

  “Is something wrong?” Ingrid said.

  No reply. She heard Kate’s footsteps on the stairs. Ingrid went into the hall, looked up the staircase, didn’t see her. At that moment, a car honked outside. Through the partly opened door she saw a taxi waiting at the curb.

  “Uh, thanks,” Ingrid said, speaking back into the interior gloom. Then she moved toward the door, and as she did a huge cat, the biggest she’d ever seen, almost bobcat size, came gliding in from outside, tail hooked up high and a tiny blue bird in its mouth. Its hooked tail brushed her as it went by. Ingrid hurried out, slipping slightly on the unopened mail, and jumped into the cab.

  “The soccer fields,” she said.

  “This is adjacent the hospital?” said the driver, toothpick wagging between his lips, face on the ugly border between beard and no beard.

  “Yes, yes,” said Ingrid, checking his ID posted by the meter: Murad and then a complicated last name.

  “You are pressing for time?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  He flipped the lever on the meter and made a quick U-turn, driving back the way Ingrid had come. The rain was falling hard as they passed
Benito’s Pizzeria, Blockbuster, and Dr. Binkerman’s office, its parking lot now empty. A few minutes after that, they zipped by the hospital and stopped alongside the soccer fields. Empty soccer fields, not a soul in sight.

  “What time is it?” Ingrid said.

  The driver snapped open his cell phone. “Five on top of the button,” he said.

  Practice didn’t end till five thirty. Where was everyone? Ingrid paid the driver—five dollars plus a fifty-cent tip, which was possibly not quite enough, but wouldn’t a whole dollar have been too much?—and got out. The taxi drove off.

  Ingrid walked over to a bench on the sidelines and sat down. Cold rain soaked her hair, her shoulders, her back. A thought came, a little late, like maybe she should have stayed in the taxi and had the driver take her home. What was the route from soccer to her house, 99 Maple Lane? Through the line of trees at the end of the field, Ingrid could see the red cross marking the helicopter pad on the hospital roof, and beyond that the spire of the Congregational church. From the church, you went by the village green and turned right at that corner with the Starbucks. Or was it the next corner, the one with the candy shop? Ingrid didn’t know, but it was getting dark now. Time to go.

  Ingrid rose just as a car came up the road. A minivan, actually, and green: a green MPV van. Ingrid started running.

  Mom was already out of the car when Ingrid ran up.

  “Ingrid,” she said, rain dripping off the hood of her rain jacket. “Where have you been?” Those two vertical lines on Mom’s forehead, the only flaws in her soft skin, were deeper than Ingrid had ever seen them, and her big dark eyes were open wide.

  “Here,” Ingrid said, moving around Mom to get in at the other side. Mom put out a hand to stop her.

  “What do you mean, here?” she said. “I’ve been by three times and Dr. Binkerman’s office had no idea you’d even left.”

  “I just got here,” Ingrid said. “I decided to walk.” Maybe leaving a message to that effect with Dr. Binkerman’s receptionist would have been a good thing.

  “You walked?” Mom said. “And you’re just getting here now?”

  “I got a little turned around,” Ingrid said. All that other stuff—Cracked-Up Katie, the purple parlor, the taxi—seemed too messy to bring up at the moment. “Where is everybody?”

  “Soccer was canceled,” Mom said.

  “Canceled?”

  “The rain, Ingrid. Mr. Ringer called hours ago. And I was at Dr. Binkerman’s at four twenty-five.”

  “Oops,” said Ingrid.

  Mom gazed down at her. Not so much down anymore—almost eye to eye. “Nothing like this will ever happen again, will it, Ingrid?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Do I need to explain why?”

  “No.”

  Ingrid got in the car. Mom explained why all the way home.

  three

  NINETY-NINE MAPLE LANE was a two-story Cape built in the 1950s with a master-bedroom suite on the ground floor and three bedrooms upstairs. The extra bedroom—now an office with desks for Mom and Dad—and Ty’s bedroom faced the street. Ingrid’s was at the back, looking out over the patio, the garden, and the heavily wooded conservation land that stretched all the way to the river: a quiet room, ideal for reading. Ingrid lay in bed, her pinpoint light shining on the open pages of The Complete Sherlock Holmes.

  Sherlock Holmes was a cold man—although not as cold as Dr. Watson made out—but you could learn a lot from him. For example, right here in “The Red-headed League,” he tells Watson: “The more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face is the most difficult to identify.” Or, a few pages later, after Holmes has seen some clue on the knees of the pawnbroker’s assistant’s trousers—a complete mystery to both Watson and Ingrid—he makes a point of memorizing the order of the houses around Saxe-Coburg Square. “It is a hobby of mine to have an exact knowledge of London.”

  Ingrid stopped right there. Was it possible to imagine Holmes lost in London? No. London was his territory and he knew every inch. The obvious thought came next: Echo Falls was her territory, and she’d been lost in it that very day. There was nothing cute about that. It was just plain dumb. She decided to begin work on an exact mental picture of Echo Falls first thing in the morning.

  Then she remembered that tomorrow was Friday, a school day. Uh-oh. Was there math homework? Oh, yeah, a bunch. Had she done it? Fat chance. And was there a reading packet, too, something about Shays’ Rebellion? Who was Shays again? The red backpack, unopened, lay on the floor, probably in reach if she wriggled to the edge of the bed and made a good long stretch. Ingrid glanced at the clock. One forty-seven, practically dawn. Oh my God.

  Ingrid switched off the pinpoint light and closed her eyes. They wanted to snap right back open, but she kept them shut. She had a vision of Cracked-Up Katie taking a deep drag from the bent cigarette. Across the hall, Ty moaned in his sleep. Maybe he was having a bad dream. Ingrid felt on the shelf above her bed for Mister Happy, her teddy bear, old now and missing an eye, and tucked him in beside her. The rain started up again, pounding on the roof, flowing into the gutters and down the drainpipe outside Ingrid’s window. She listened, isolating all the separate sounds of the rain. Soon her eyes stayed closed on their own.

  She was in a little boat on a wild sea, but oh so snug, for some reason, and fast asleep.

  “Ingrid!”

  Fast, fast asleep, so delicious with the storm all around.

  “Ingrid! It’s ten after seven.”

  So snug, and even snugger if she rolled over and pulled the covers up like so. Mmmmm. Sleep in a full-force gale, the wind howling but little Griddie so safe and—

  “INGRID!”

  Ingrid squeezed over against the wall, making herself practically invisible. “Five more minutes,” she said, her voice thick, her lips almost glued together.

  “You don’t have five minutes, Ingrid.”

  “Four.”

  And then the intolerable. Snap—her covers were on the floor, whipped right off her, antisnug, definition of. Ingrid rolled over. Mom stood over the bed, dressed for work, arms crossed. Four was just a preliminary bargaining position; she would have settled for two or even one. One pitiful minute more of sleep.

  “Were you up reading last night?” Mom said.

  “No,” said Ingrid, getting out of bed, her bare feet touching down on the icy floor.

  “I see you didn’t wear your appliance.”

  “Oops.”

  “What’s the point of paying Dr. Binkerman all this money?”

  “Search me.”

  “Watch your tone.”

  “But I really don’t know.”

  “And this room is a shambles.”

  “I’ll stay home and clean it,” Ingrid offered, but Mom was already out the door.

  Ingrid went down the hall to the bathroom. She knew that in parts of the world eight or nine people might share a single bathroom, maybe even more, maybe a whole village. She didn’t feel that sorry for them: They didn’t have to share with Ty.

  Ty: who threw strike after strike on the baseball diamond but whose aim at the toilet was worse than a blind man’s; who required four towels—or as many as were available—to dry himself and left them in a soggy pile; who’d started shaving, which meant using both sinks, his and hers, leaving blood-spotted meringues of foam in each; who, worst of all, was now a brand-new experimenter in the world of men’s cologne. Ingrid stepped under the shower, hot and pounding, and gradually came to life.

  Mom and Ty were gone by the time Ingrid went downstairs; the school day at Echo Falls High—home of the Red Raiders—started half an hour before the middle school, and Mom drove right by it. Ty got a ride every day, and in the foreseeable future would be turning sixteen, getting his license and driving himself to school in a Maserati or Rolls-Royce. Ingrid would be taking the bus till the end of time.

  Dad was at the
table, drinking coffee and reading The Wall Street Journal. Dad always smelled good, like a forest but very faint; whatever the trick was, Ty hadn’t learned it yet. Dad was wearing one of those blue shirts with a white collar and white French cuffs, plus a black tie with orange tigers on it—Dad was a big supporter of Princeton football, although he’d gone to UConn. He was also the handsomest dad around.

  “Hey, cutie,” he said. “What’s shakin’?”

  “Not much. What’s in the paper?”

  Dad turned the pages. He was never in a big hurry in the morning. Dad was the financial adviser for the Ferrand Group, which was really just the Ferrand family, probably the richest in this whole part of the state—the middle school was named after them and so was a dorm at Princeton, where Ferrands had gone since forever and where Ty and Ingrid were headed too if it was the last thing Dad did—and Mr. Ferrand never got to work before nine. “Let’s see,” Dad said. “Unilever deal didn’t go through, IBM sent another ten thousand jobs to India, plane crash in Benin, wherever the hell that is. The usual.” He put down the paper and said, “When’s your next game?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Check the fridge.”

  Ingrid checked the schedule on the fridge. “Tomorrow at two.”

  “Home or away?”

  “Home.”

  “Against whom?”

  “Glastonbury.”

  “They’re the ones with that big fullback? Redhead?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Got to beat her to the ball, Ingrid.”

  Ingrid was hungry. That waffle on Dad’s plate looked pretty good, but he ate the last bite before she could ask.

  “Better get on the stick,” Dad said.

  Ingrid slung on her backpack.

  “And work on that left foot of yours. Speed takes you only so far. Got to—”

  “—master the fundamentals.”