by AJ Scudiere
Kayla’s chest tightened down a notch. “Reenie and Evan didn’t believe me for a while. I’m sorry.”
A hand went through her hair, smoothing it, reassuring. “It’s okay. Don’t blame them. These guys tried to make it look like I’d left. I told them my car wasn’t running well. So they believed if they tried to start it, you’d all hear. And know something was off.”
“It was a good clue.” Kayla rested her head on Ivy’s shoulder, noticing that her friend smelled like soap. She may be wearing the same clothes, but she’d bathed and she didn’t seem hungry. “Did they take your stuff?”
She felt Ivy nod, even as the other woman’s arms tightened around her.
Tipping her head slightly, Kayla found her face near Ivy’s neck. Curled inside the oversized flannel shirt, she was comfortable and felt safe, despite the fact that she was sitting on the floor in a basement, guarded by a man she didn’t recognize. Despite the fact that they had held her friend for over forty-eight hours, she felt fine here. “Did they get your fork?”
Silently, Ivy laughed. “Of course you know about that. No, they didn’t. It’s part of the reason I insisted on staying in my own clothes.”
She took Kayla’s hand and pressed it against her hip, revealing the hard form beneath the denim where she’d stashed it. It felt as though she’d bent it flat; it had been cut from very flimsy metal, part of a set Reenie had picked out for the sole reason of being cheap.
“Good.” She could do something with a fork. “Why did they take you?”
“They thought I could build the machine. They weren’t sure what to do with me when they realized that I’m pretty useless with the Whitney Device.”
“What is it that you ‘know what to do’?”
“They think you are mentally . . . off. And I’ve perpetuated that. They want me to get you to build it.”
22
A Basement, Somewhere in Georgia
Two days later, Kayla had managed to accomplish as little as possible. Mostly, she’d succeeded at hiding her reactions to things, but only because Ivy had warned her the men thought she was truly autistic.
The two women laid down each night with their heads close together, stretched out on the sole air mattress. Neither minded.
The first day, Kayla had been given the flannel jacket. Repeatedly insisting that she stay in her own clothing—and smacking out at anyone who suggested otherwise—allowed her to stay as she was.
Ivy had transferred the pilfered fork to Kayla’s jeans and accepted the sweats in a show of making nice. She’d used fake, dulcet tones, “Look Kayla, I’m going to wear mine. See? They’re soft.”
Holding out the inside layer of the fleece, she’d gotten her hand batted away and taken a fingernail to her exposed arm. She’d shrugged at the man and said, “I’ll put them on and see if that gets her to cooperate.”
Later that same day, when Kayla and Ivy managed to convince the man that Kayla would only wear jeans and t-shirts, she was brought a cheap set of exactly that. The men searched piece by piece, inspecting the women’s clothing for . . . whatever they were looking for.
They didn’t find it. She’d hidden nothing in them. She’d only wanted to keep them with her, so she pretended an unusual attachment to the clothes. After a short debate, they handed each piece back and watched as she pressed each article flat, folding it carefully into a perfect square and laying it on her pillow. She then rolled the bundle and tucked it under her arm. Her sharp stare warned everyone that she would pitch a fit if they denied her this simple, if odd, comfort.
Though she fought it each day, she let them search the clothes. It was nothing but a ploy.
On that first day, the two women were taken upstairs for a restroom break. The man patted Ivy down after she came out and tried to do the same with Kayla, but she pitched a fit and perpetuated their belief that she was stupid.
She didn’t speak except when she was alone with Ivy. And even then she limited herself to a lot of nodding. That first night stood in the middle of the room, in the pitch dark, and waved the fork around. She whispered loudly, “I have a fork. I have a fork!”
Ivy had questioned her over that.
“Did I seem crazy?” Kayla had smiled in the dark, curled face to face with Ivy.
“Well, yes. But you told them about our one . . . weapon.”
“And if they come take it, then we’ll know that they can see us or hear us.”
No one came.
They were kept upstairs the next day with the windows and blinds all closed. Kayla listened for whatever sounds she could glean. Traffic ran thick and constant in the far distance, indicating a freeway. A smacking call from the yard beyond the window was a fox sparrow—thank you, NPR. She added in the sidewalk not far away—she’d heard the harsh, grinding breaks of a bus stopping outside around seven-thirty that morning, and she figured she was in Statesboro. It was the only place close enough for access to Hazelton House and to have the sounds she heard.
Though she was proud she’d put all that together, it was hard to do anything with it. She and Ivy had no communication with the outside world. Unless Kayla developed a sudden, psychic link with Evan, there wasn’t much she could do with the information except tell Ivy.
Kayla had looked off in the distance long enough—listening for sounds but pretending to ignore everyone—that by the time she let Ivy “persuade” her to look at what was on the table she was shocked to see the original Whitney schematic there.
Unable to inspect the old oilcloth, she bided her time. A moment later, she looked up at Ivy, the question in her eyes. She was given a subtle nod in return and she worked to cover the feelings flowing through her. Anger and shock and a sense of violation bubbled within.
These were the people who had taken the diagram from the historical preservation shop. They were the ones who had replaced it with the fake. Though they couldn’t get it to work, they knew someone at Hazelton House had.
For a while, she did what Ivy told her to. Looking over the schematic, listening to her friend tell her to build another one. Ivy showed her the gears, the pieces they’d gathered for her. “I tried to do it, Kayla, but I’m not as good as you are.”
Unsure what they would do if Ivy was not considered useful, Kayla knew she had to do some of what Ivy asked.
She went back to the table and began drawing a 3D sketch of the original Whitney Machine. She filled in shading and drew arrows, making every third arrow completely random. After about an hour, she smiled and handed over the beautiful and perfectly useless drawing of a machine that would never work.
“It’s pretty.” He smiled at her. She smiled back. His was blank behind the muscles that moved his mouth. Hers hid a mind constantly assessing and plotting.
Then he turned to Ivy, his voice cutting. “We need her to make it. We already have a drawing of it.”
“We’re getting there.”
When Ivy tried to prompt more, Kayla made uninterpretable motions, followed by noises of frustration and anger, until Ivy shouted out, “Scissors! She wants scissors.”
“She can’t have them.”
“Good God. Do you want her to make you a machine or what?” She turned away, “Give them directly to her. I know you don’t trust me.”
Kayla made her angry noise again, thinking she sounded a little like a baboon. But it was kind of fun and helped solidify Ivy as a necessary object.
She was confident enough that neither man would hurt her or Ivy. Ivy had laid the groundwork and she herself had established that she was unstable and there was nothing they could do that would change that. She’d seen enough far spectrum autistic kids to fake it brilliantly, and anything they looked up on the Internet would match because Ivy had said “autism” not “Aspergers.” So Kayla made the noise again and the man sighed and left the room.
He came back with scissors, which he watched like a hawk.
Kayla proceeded to roll and cut paper, demanded glue, and made hollow, scale models of
the pieces. She slid her paper axles through holes in the model. The gears spun, fitting together in perfect sync. It would never work—she’d left out a few key pieces. But she smiled and showed off the mechanics. And no one suspected that she’d managed to snip the hem of her jeans in several small key places.
Evan had sanded the corner of the cabinet so harshly that the top edge was now beveled. He stayed deep in his thoughts about cabinetry, forcing the exclusion of anything else.
This cabinet wouldn’t look like any of the others. They weren’t all identical, because he’d used scrap lumber from around the plantation. Ivy had parsed it out, Reenie had designed it, Kayla had funded it, and he’d built it. It had been a group project and a labor of love, but was now just a distraction.
He and Reenie hadn’t discussed it, and he figured the Hazelton House Museum was on hold until his sister was found. Mentally he added Ivy—until Kayla and Ivy were found.
Reenie no longer complained about their need to stick together. Glassy eyed, she sat in the corner, also sanding. He’d given her the work as something to do. Blinking slowly, she looked at him, then put down the sanding block and walked over close. “We have to get some sleep, Evan.”
He knew that. He felt it. He’d been awake or mostly awake now for almost forty-eight hours. Even after the initial adrenaline kick of finding Kayla missing had worn off, he still hadn’t slept.
He waited for a ransom demand. He patrolled the plantation grounds looking for footprints. For visitors, for a car to pull up and try to take him. He dared them to try.
But no one came. Or called.
No one but the police, who told him exactly what Kayla had said about Ivy. They said adults could leave. They said he could file paperwork, but little would be done to find an adult whose disappearance showed zero evidence of foul play. Evan had managed to convince them that Kayla’s Aspergers was a special circumstance—that though she was an adult, they needed to start looking. They’d agreed to a BOLO, but had refused to fingerprint the room.
Though she’d gone missing in the middle of the night, they used her “unusual disorder” as an excuse for any odd behavior. Once that was gone from the equation, all he had was a cell phone and a shoe in the wrong place. They clearly thought he was as crazy as they suspected his sister was.
It was Reenie who’d convinced him to lock the room, so there would still be fingerprints and evidence when the officials realized that Kayla was missing and they needed to investigate. Reenie tried calling every TV station and then the newspapers. But TV was in the city and they weren’t interested in what they called a “mentally imperfect adult who wandered off.” They wished Reenie good luck but then hung up. The newspapers turned out to just be one, and the local fair took precedence over this apparently uninteresting story. Unless they opened the can of worms that was the Whitney Machine—which they couldn’t really do without Kayla—they had nothing to bribe the media with.
Evan was stuck; he feared sleep, feared missing them coming back.
Reenie knew, and her next words allowed him to follow her up the hill and climb into bed, but they did not comfort.
“After they took Ivy, they came back. They checked out the machine again, several times in a few days. They probably thought she knew about it. But now they have Kayla, too. They don’t need to come back.”
Evan just hoped they continued to need Kayla.
Kayla had been right, it took two more days. And that was okay.
The cons of taking the extra time had been that she and Ivy were stuck here longer, and that Evan was probably shaving years off his life by worrying about her. At one point she’d considered calculating the physical damage done to his system from her disappearance, but she couldn’t seem to mathematically separate this instance from all the times she’d caused him undue stress in the past. She did make a vow to get along better with Reenie in the future, so that Evan wouldn’t be stressed by their discord and would finally marry the woman. Reenie was waiting for him to ask, and Kayla knew that if she had figured that out, then so had the whole world.
The pros of taking the extra time here were myriad. Right now their captors thought she was an idiot savant. Though there was only one guardian here at a time, there were two of them. She and Ivy weren’t mistreated at all, if you didn’t count kidnapping and false imprisonment. They were fed well, clothed, allowed to bathe daily and the men seemed to have no real interest in them as anything other than pawns in the race for the Whitney Machine. That might change if the women spent too long here. With time, they also risked their one advantage—the fork.
Kayla had wedged it into a corner in the basement ceiling between the rafters but needed a boost to get it there. They had no bed frame, just the air mattress. No sheets, just one thick comforter to share. And they had Kayla’s one change of clothes, and that only because she pretended she would get violent should they take away her precious T-shirt.
In another ploy, she’d felt her way up to the top of the stairs the first night and pounded on the door until it was answered. It was risky to anger the man, but in short, rude sounds she demanded a glass of water. She’d done it the second night, too; until Ivy complained they were all getting awakened every night and could she just have a bottle of water. Each night Kayla drank it and handed over the empty bottle in the morning.
With Ivy prepping their captors and Kayla playing loose with the definition of autism, the men now both believed Kayla to be randomly violent and irrational, an idea they had unwittingly played right into by snatching her in the middle of the night. They pulled her from her bed during deep REM sleep, touching her when she was well aware—even in her deep dream state—that she had gone to bed alone. And she had done exactly what this “pseudo-autistic” Kayla would have done. She freaked out and fought like a junkie needing a fix.
These past few days had been the only time she’d been grateful for her abnormal reaction. Without knowing it, she’d pushed the men neatly into the trap Ivy had been building. Of course, she’d been designing it to keep them from grabbing Kayla, too. While it hadn’t succeeded at convincing them it wasn’t worth it, she was buying both of them a way out.
Kayla hoped.
She’d gone upstairs that morning, her spare clothes in the usual bundle under her arm. She showered alone in the bathroom and brushed her teeth. Emerging with the second set of clothing on and the first bundled under her arm, she even garnered a low growl for the blond.
Each day they offered to take the clothes, and each day she acted like a mother wolf if they were attempting to steal her cub. She veered as far from human as she dared, and with a side helping from Ivy, they bought it all.
She’d built the paper model and spun the gears for them.
They rejected it.
In turn, she rejected the gears they brought her, even though some of them were her own. “Too big.” She muttered. The only words she uttered all day except in the dark with Ivy at night.
Yesterday, she demanded Styrofoam, which they found surprisingly fast. One phone call and the second man showed up at the door with big blocks of fine grain blue foam, knives, and a pick.
It was all she could do to keep her eyes from popping out of her head. They’d brought her an arsenal! But they kept too close an eye on the instruments and on her. She was only allowed one knife at a time, though she did eventually manage to get two knives in her hands at once by cutting into the Styrofoam turkey-style. But it didn’t gain her anything. She broke the block and the man counted and re-counted all the knives so many times there was no way to slip one away. They were stuck with plan one.
By the end of the day Kayla had produced nothing more than a few cog wheel-like carvings and a pile of dust big enough to make Ivy fret they would all die of “blue lung.” She’d also managed to piss the man off. He’d expected results, expected a threat would make her churn him out a Whitney Machine.
He’d expect
ed wrong.
At one point, he pulled Ivy aside, but Kayla was still in earshot. He’d bruised Ivy’s arm and shaken her, and it had taken everything Kayla had to appear unaffected. But he was paying no attention to her. Still, she absorbed every word.
“She was much more functional on the plantation. Why is she like this now?”
“Oh? So you admit you were watching us on our own property?” Ivy shot back.
“It isn’t yours.” He growled at her, angry at Kayla’s lack of progress and Ivy’s attitude. “And your only value here is with her. Why can’t she make this damned thing work?”
Bless Ivy, she didn’t look scared, just annoyed. “One, it took her weeks to build that thing in the first place, or weren’t you watching? After that, she built each one off the last one. Now she has to reinvent it.”
It was flat-out bullshit. Kayla kept carving the Styrofoam and suppressed a smile while Ivy ranted on.
“And two, that plantation was her home. She’s autistic! She was just like this when she first got to the plantation, too. You took her out of her home and brought her here under duress. You’re lucky she’s not sitting in a corner somewhere, rocking back and forth. Seriously, it’s called ‘autism.’ Do you not know how to use your Internet? Look it up.” Ivy shook off the offending hand, probably worsening her bruise in the process and came back over to Kayla. Without touching, she kneeled beside her friend and smiled. “Do you have everything you need?”
Kayla knew Ivy wasn’t referring to the unnecessary blue sculpture. She meant for tonight.
Kayla nodded.
