“It’s my favorite. It makes me feel at home no matter where I go,” the pale woman said. The fine folds of skin around her eyes shrugged as she smiled.
Willow asked the question that was always waiting. “You from out of town?” she said in a low voice, as she reached for the red and white box on the top shelf.
“Yeah. Just here helping the bank set up new software on their computer system,” the woman replied.
“So, how’s that going?” Willow had grown more adept at calculated words and tones in recent years. She aimed for friendly and not too curious.
“Oh, nearly done. Should be able to drive back up to Omaha next week, I expect.”
Willow received her thanks for retrieving the box of cereal, and introduced herself. The woman replied that she was Dorothy, not offering a last name. They finally said a muted but civil goodbye. Willow was distracted by trying to read the little woman with the ready smile. Maybe this was the ride she had been waiting for.
She waited two days before wandering over to the bank one afternoon after school. Willow thought of a reason to enter the small lobby of the hundred-and-thirty-year-old building, one of the oldest in town. She pushed through the glass door, with its faded brass handrail and spatters of corrosion showing on the brass plates above and below the glass, like black spots of blood.
Willow was legitimately a customer of that bank, but had lost track of how much was left in her little savings account. Her lack of attention paralleled the lack of funds, but she thought she ought to know exactly how much was left in there.
Though her relationship with organized religion was understandably strained, she knew she needed divine intervention to pull off her escape. She prayed a whispering prayer as she approached the teller and glanced about for signs of the woman from Omaha. Willow felt certain that she couldn’t ask about Dorothy without raising suspicion. Not everyone in that town was affiliated with the pagan worshippers, but their members held strategic and powerful places, and it seemed likely that this included someone at the bank.
The teller, a forty-year-old woman whom Willow recognized but couldn’t remember from where, looked up Willow’s account. “It’s not enough money to do anything with,” Willow said. “I just thought I should check and see if I need to close the account or something, ‘cause it’s so little.”
“Well, there would be charges these days, but you started this so long ago, and it’s a child’s account, so there’s no minimum balance or charge for going below any certain amount,” the teller said.
Willow looked at her name tag. “Patsy,” it said. Just then, Willow noticed Dorothy walking between offices, behind the tellers. But, with so many people around, she dared not say anything. Instead, she decided to wait around outside and watch the bank, hoping she could find a decent hiding place from which to do this. At least she knew that Dorothy was still working there.
Having concluded her business, including closing her account and pocketing $4.56 from her savings, Willow went across the street to the drug store. She would look for something useful to buy with her little treasure, something that might come in handy on a trip.
At five o’clock, Willow sat in her mother’s minivan, parked next to a large delivery truck across from the bank. No one could see her from behind, because of the truck, and she sat low in her seat so that she could just barely see over the dashboard. In late March, the sun was low by that time and its angle would make her difficult to see, the yellow beams looming over the drug store and blinding anyone who looked her way. Over two years of trying to find a way of escape had started Willow thinking about this sort of detail.
Just a few minutes after five, Dorothy left the side door of the bank and walked south, toward the motel, about four blocks away. Willow started the van and turned onto Main Street in the same direction. She would have to improvise to get a few minutes alone with Dorothy to let her in on as much of her story as she needed to win the stranger’s sympathy.
Less than a block from the bank, Dorothy turned and stepped into the town dry cleaners. Willow thanked God, or whoever was helping her, and swung a left turn to take a diagonal parking space outside the dry cleaners. She turned off the engine and began a systematic search of the area, looking for someone who might be watching her, someone who knew. Again, she seemed to be protected. There was no one that she could see.
Sliding across to the passenger side, Willow rested her hand on the door handle. That side of the van was closer to the store and would be more sheltered from curious eyes. Part of her relief at Dorothy stopping to pick up laundry was her certainty that no one there was part of the occult group. The proprietors were Korean and spoke little English. She was fairly certain that there was no one like that involved in the sinister ceremonies.
When Dorothy stepped out into the long shadows reaching across the street, Willow swung the door open and caught her attention.
“Oh, it’s you. I thought I saw you at the bank today,” Dorothy said. She slipped her reading glasses into her purse, holding her laundry under one arm.
“Hey, how about I give you a ride?” Willow said. “There’s somethin’ I was wantin’ to talk to you about anyway.”
Tipping her head at the odd invitation, Dorothy seemed to sense the gravity of what Willow was asking, though Willow thought she hadn’t betrayed anything in her tone or manner.
“Well, I guess that would be nice, given my extra load here,” Dorothy said, looking around briefly before stepping up to the van.
Willow smiled, trying to settle Dorothy down a bit. She seemed suspicious. Opening the sliding side door, Willow said, “You can toss your clothes in there.”
Dorothy complied and then climbed in the passenger door, which still stood open. Willow walked around the front of the van and got in the driver’s side.
Only at the point where she struggled to get the key in the ignition did Willow betray her sheer terror at the chance she was taking.
Dorothy responded to the obvious. “You seem nervous, dear. What is it you wanted to talk about?”
Willow took a deep breath and prayed a silent prayer again. “I have to tell you something very disturbing and to ask for your help. I’m just praying I don’t scare you away.” Willow cast a brief glance at her passenger and then concentrated on pulling out onto Main Street.
Dorothy chuckled nervously. “Are you in some kind of trouble?”
Willow spun the steering wheel and shifted into drive, careful not to do anything that would attract the attention of the police.
“I am. I’m in lots of trouble, and the hard part is that I don’t dare turn to anyone from this town for help. The people all know each other and they protect each other no matter what.”
“Oh, I know what you mean. But what’s the trouble?”
Willow inhaled another one of those wind-up breaths and tried to say as much as she needed, but not more than a stranger could handle.
“There are some people who are abusing me on a regular basis, and my mother is just looking the other way. There are people in authority that are covering it up, and I don’t see any way out of it except to run away from here.”
Dorothy held one hand over her mouth. Her eyes were round and her breath suspended. “Oh, my. You poor girl. So what did you want me to do?”
“I need a ride out of town that’s not in this van that everyone recognizes. I need to get far enough away from here that I can disappear. I know they’ll try to follow me if they can. I’ve thought of just trying to drive to a big city in the middle of the night, but I feel like I’m being watched all the time.”
Willow knew she was sounding paranoid, and maybe just plain crazy. Once more, she prayed for some divine help.
Out of the silence as the van turned across the oncoming lane and into the motel parking lot, Dorothy spoke in a hushed, library voice.
“I had a cousin who was abused. And she didn’t tell anyone for years. And I felt awful when I found out about it, all those years later.”
>
To Dorothy that was her answer. But Willow needed more certainty than she could find in that confession. Parked now next to the stairway up to the second level of motel rooms, Willow turned off the engine. She looked at Dorothy, hoping she would say more, as if the ears of the town would certainly hear if Willow said the words out loud, if she asked for help any more explicitly than she had already.
Dorothy looked at Willow’s big, blue eyes and saw her white knuckles on the steering wheel. She tried to smile, looking for words of assurance, without knowing exactly what she would was agreeing to do.
“I’ll do whatever it takes,” she said.
Willow burst out crying, something she repressed all day, every day, including when she was alone. Even in her catharsis, however, she knew she shouldn’t remain parked there any longer.
Wiping at her face with a fast-food napkin she grabbed from the console, Willow squeezed her thanks out through the emotions she was pushing back down inside.
She looked around the motel lot to locate Dorothy’s car. “Which is your car?” she finally said, regaining most of her voice.
“The red one over there.” Dorothy pointed to a Plymouth sedan, with pristine chrome and new tires.
“I’ll wedge a note under your right front tire to communicate. You can leave me notes in the same place. Try to park over there by those bushes so I can get in and out without being seen.”
Dorothy looked confused, mostly caught off guard by Willow’s quick improvisation. She just nodded.
“Do you know when you’ll be leaving?” Willow said, starting the van again.
“Next week, Tuesday or Wednesday,” Dorothy said.
Willow nodded, then she paused, trying to encapsulate her gratitude in order to deliver all of it in a second. But she just smiled and said another “Thank you,” through her emotion-clutched throat.
Dorothy gripped Willow’s near arm for a second, reached back for her clothes, and then climbed out of the van, scurrying toward her room on the ground level. She restrained an urge to look back, as if that would give too much away to the unseen watchers that Willow feared.
Escaping with Her Life
That weekend, Willow had detected no change in the behavior of the people who gathered in the candlelight beneath the church sanctuary. They seemed confident that life would merely roll into the future as it had rolled up to that day. Willow thought to tell one of the other girls there that she had a boyfriend from Oklahoma, and that she was expecting to see him in the next couple of weeks. She made the girl, whose name she was not allowed to know, promise not to tell anyone.
At the end of that evening, past midnight, Willow diverted to the motel and planted her first note against Dorothy’s tire, hoping she would see the little yellow tube wedged there. In that note she proposed hiding in Dorothy’s trunk early on the morning of the day she was supposed to leave. She would find a way to make her mother think she had simply left for school and make the school think she was sick at home.
With the seed about the boyfriend from Oklahoma planted, she planted another at home the next day, mentioning to her mother a young man she had met, but saying no more. Claudia just grunted in response to that misdirection, sharing the occult worshippers’ assumption that change would not be visiting them any time soon.
Willow parked the minivan along the street Monday afternoon, across from the house where Sarah Mayfield, a friend from school, lived. She knew Sarah was still at softball practice, but assumed anyone observing where she parked might not know that. Waiting until she could see no one along Main Street, Willow walked quickly the remaining block to the motel, staying on the shady side of the street and crossing only when no cars were in sight.
She slipped into the windbreak of low poplar trees along the edge of the parking lot and watched the motel and the road for signs that she was being observed. Dorothy had parked just a few feet from the thick cover, and Willow could see a pink wedge of paper under the tire. She pounced on it and retreated to her hiding place, thankful that the leaves were coming in full and that the trees had not been trimmed around the trunk.
Dorothy’s note, in a swoopy feminine script, said she could work it out so that she would finish at the bank on Wednesday, before lunch. She would leave a key in this same spot next to the tire so Willow could climb into the trunk. She promised to fill the trunk with warm and comfortable pillows, blankets and coats she would have to pack anyway. Willow smiled at this last touch. She did pause to hope that it was a bit warmer Wednesday morning, as there had been frost on the ground when she left for school Monday.
Willow kept the note, not risking replacing it with a reply. She hoped Dorothy would assume she had read it and follow through with the plan.
For a girl living on the edge of terror every day, adding her covert plan and the fears about getting caught nearly drove Willow to the breaking point. She slept little and ate almost nothing the rest of Monday and all of Tuesday. At eleven o’clock Tuesday night, she was packing her army-green backpack with the essentials, including $155 that she had squirreled away over the past year. Claudia shuffled past Willow’s door, and Willow froze. Then, stuffing her backpack between the wall and her bed, she slipped under the covers just as Claudia opened her door. The lock had been broken for years. Claudia liked it that way, now that she had no more boyfriends sleeping in the house.
Willow rolled over, making no pretense of sleep.
“Why you still awake so late?” Claudia said.
“Havin’ trouble sleeping is all,” she said.
Claudia just shook her head, drunk as usual, having difficulty staying awake at that moment. “Well, keep it down, I’m plenty tired and don’t expect to have no trouble sleepin’ myself.”
“Okay. Goodnight, Mom.” Though that simple string of three words may sound normal to most people, it was more than Willow said to her mother at the end of a day in recent memory. Calling Claudia “Mom” had become very rare by then.
Willow knew that even this mild show of connection, if not affection, was somewhat risky, but she couldn’t resist the need to assemble some small bit of closure. She assumed she would probably never see her mother again.
Claudia didn’t seem to notice the oddity of that farewell, too dulled by her beer to hear or to care. That very numbness, of course, made it easier for Willow to leave.
Willow intended to stay awake the rest of the night, unable to risk an alarm clock. But her lack of sleep the night before made that plan impossible. At five a.m. she woke with a start. She swore when she saw the time, more than an hour late, and little time left until sunup.
She dressed quickly, pulled her pack free from the bed and looked around the room, trying to think if she had forgotten anything. When she reached the living room she impulsively opened an old jewelry box on one of the end tables and pulled out three small childhood photos.
From there, she slowed down only to open and close the back door noiselessly, and again to open the side door of the garage, to mask her escape.
Willow had spent the past few days fixing an old one-speed bike that someone had left in the garage. The front tire was flat again when she checked. Cursing some more, she pumped it half full in about two minutes. When she put her ear to the tire, she could hear the whispery hiss of the leak. The only thing she could think to do was take the tire pump with her. She jammed it into her pack, hoping the little food she had packed in there would survive the crush. The lateness of the hour meant she had no time for careful arrangements.
Once she reached the highway, after checking that no cars were in sight in either direction, she began to ride as fast as she could. For a moment, with the cool wind trailing her hair out behind her and her legs pumping rhythmically, Willow felt a rush of hope. That feeling faded, however, as the front tire became mushy and her progress slowed.
Willow pulled off the highway and into a stand of cattails in the ditch. She pulled out the pump and tried filling the tire a little more this time. When she final
ly finished, rolled the bike up onto the highway, and started to mount, she saw a truck coming from behind her. She hoped she could get off to the side again without being seen, or worse, being seen trying to hide. Hopping back off the bike she ran back into the cattails. This time she pushed in too far and stepped into the water accumulated in the bottom of the ditch. She restrained the urge to curse again, remembering her prayers before. She opted for desperate pleas for divine intervention, as the eighteen-wheeler roared past.
This time, back up on the crest of the highway, she checked more carefully before hopping back onto the bike. She would be able to peel off of the highway in half a mile. She pushed hard for that goal.
Somehow, between the sound of the squeaky old bike and her own hard breathing, Willow had missed the sound of a car coming up behind her. It was too late to head for cover, so she simply kept pumping, balancing along the jagged shoulder amid the scattered garbage and gravel. The car gave her a wide berth and zoomed past just as she reached the side road that would take her the rest of the way to the motel. She prayed for protection from the people in the car, lest they recognize her and tell someone what they had seen.
The sun had reddened the eastern sky by the time Willow left the highway. She had just minutes before twilight darkness would yield to pale pink light. She pushed harder, her legs complaining in pain, her front tire widening as she looked down on it, her progress slowing more and more.
Concentrating so much on the flattening tire, Willow failed to notice the police car pulling onto the road a few blocks ahead of her. The first glint of headlights on the rim of her old bike wheel sent panic through her chest. Instinctively, she swerved up a driveway, the rim of the flat tire pounding into the harsh square curb at the bottom of the drive. She jumped off the bike and barreled it into a large hydrangea bush, aiming for the sparse grass next to the bush. She skinned her elbow on the sidewalk where she missed the grass.
The Words I Speak (Anyone Who Believes Book 2) Page 6
