The Shadow Constant

by AJ Scudiere

      

  Kayla had listened. As usual, there was only one of them up there tonight. That worked to the women’s favor. Kayla and Ivy had the advantage of being underneath, where every footstep could be heard.

  She bent the fork, and using the flannel shirt as protection, positioned it just so.

  She was nervous as hell and so was Ivy, but they had everything choreographed and rehearsed.

  It seemed both refused to think of the consequences if they failed. At the very least, the charade of Kayla as a nonfunctioning autistic would be shattered. She shut down that line of thought as she crawled slowly out of the bed, as though the concrete of the floor would resonate her footsteps throughout the house and wake the man. They had chosen the dark-haired one. He seemed smaller, weaker, less likely to get violent.

  Kayla pulled the smallest gear from where she’d rolled it into her clothing. It had seemed a valuable risk. She could still play her role if they found it. But they hadn’t. The blond made Ivy pat her down, afraid of what she would do if he did it. He never checked the bundle of clothing she carried like a teddy bear. Never found the gear she’d slipped in while he was manhandling her friend.

  Wearing the jeans the dark-haired man had brought her, she held onto her own pair. They were now shredded into long strips from where she and Ivy yanked the cuts Kayla had snipped into the hem earlier. Four of the strips had seams running the length; they would be the sturdiest. Kayla had them in her right hand; the others thrown over her shoulder. In her pocket was a carefully placed, open, and full bottle of water. Over her left arm was the flannel shirt, already folded. Ivy would use the comforter.

  She couldn’t see, but she knew Ivy was in the bed, on the outside, her arms and legs positioned to hold the covers up as though another person were there with her. The comforter was folded double already. It wouldn’t pass scrutiny or bright light, but there should be neither, and they needed only a minute.

  Taking a big breath, and knowing they were as ready as they could be, Kayla tucked herself into the corner behind the stairs and started banging on the pipe with the gear.

  The racket was awful. If she weren’t making it herself, it would have rolled her into a little ball of tears. But she kept banging. She needed the dark-haired man to come down, preferably flustered.

  It took longer than she expected, but he did.

  The basement, like the house, was roughly square, with the steps leading directly to the middle and creating pockets of shadow on either side. When the door at the top of the steps flew open, the man descended, a nine-millimeter leading the way.

  Kayla had not seen that coming, but she wasn’t forfeiting their one chance. He expected her to be in the opposite corner, in the bed. So she sent up a prayer for Ivy, and kept banging.

  He swept the scene with his gun but not his eyes.

  Ivy acted as though he had woken her, not the banging. By virtue of being tucked into the shadow on the other side of the stairs, she pulled it off. Her voice was heavy with sleep and she formed her words slowly, as though it took effort to do so. “Why are you here?”

  She shielded her eyes from the light.

  He must have seen the empty side of the bed, because he turned and looked directly at Kayla. Saw that she was banging on the pipe. His face hardened.

  But it was the opening Ivy wanted. His back was to her, and holding the comforter in front of her, she rushed him. Kayla rushed him too; in the dim light, she aimed and threw the water at his knees.

  Too flustered by the odd things happening, and probably charged with not shooting the only person who could build the Whitney Machine, he waved the gun, looking startled for just a split second.

  It was all Kayla needed. She saw that the gun’s safety was on, and it gave her the impetus to move forward without fear. Holding the flannel jacket between her and him, she joined Ivy in pushing him against the wall. She dove low, shoving at his knees.

  His wet leg made contact with the fork.

  Already bent and pushed partway into the outlet, the pressure pushed it the last bit. And the current surged through it.

  Kayla felt a little zing, and shoved at Ivy as they both tried to jump gracefully out of the way but fell backward as though blasted.

  It took Kayla another moment to get herself together, grab up the flannel, and tackle the man. The fork sparked as she knocked him off the contact. He wasn’t dead, only dazed, but that was all they needed. It seemed forever before the circuit snapped and the fork stopped spitting shards of bright light.

  They tied him with the strips of ripped denim. Dragged him, still out of it, over to the pipe, where they gagged him, tucked him in the corner and anchored him there with more of the tough fabric. Kayla used girth hitches and figure-eight knots, knowing they were both secure, and that the man would be unlikely to figure out how to undo them behind his back. She secured even his feet, so he would be unable to make noise unless he banged his head on the pipe. He was in the darkest shadow in the corner, and she hoped the other man looked down here and passed him over.

  Kayla checked his pulse and noted that his breathing was regular again as Ivy picked up the gun and commented, “I’m not all that concerned with his survival. He kidnapped both of us and held us here.”

  They stayed on the move though they talked. Upstairs they found the house empty, as expected, and dark as befitted a standard home on a suburban street at night. They were looking for their shoes as Kayla responded. “I already killed one man. I’d rather not kill a second one.”

  Ivy stopped dead. “You what?”

  “I’ll explain later. I say we go without shoes.”

  They found his wallet by his bedside and took his ID along with his eighty dollars of cash. Ivy had the gun and Kayla grabbed the knives. Hiding the weapons as best they could, they took a deep breath and headed out the front door.

  Kayla pulled it shut behind her and turned to face the street, only to see Ivy standing on the sidewalk, in her socks, in shock.

  An older, white-haired gentleman stared at both of them as though they were monkeys from the zoo.

  Why would anyone be out at this time of night? Kayla thought.

  Then it got worse.

  He looked at each of them for a second before speaking.

  “Kayla? Ivy?”

  23

  Stiltson’s Café, Brooklet, South Carolina

  Evan pulled the car up to the small diner. His mid-grade, mid-aged car matched the others in the lot. Able to see inside the wide windows, he scanned the faces, looking for his sister. When that yielded nothing, he turned to the surrounding businesses. There was a used car lot across the corner. Being used cars, the makes and models were scrambled. Kayla wouldn’t like the disorder. Since she didn’t like new things, she probably wouldn’t eat much of anything at the café either. And that was the least of his worries.

  All he had was her cryptic call from an unknown number. She said she’d been “out” for about four hours, whatever that meant. She told him Ivy was fine and that he should bring shoes.

  His standard neurotypical brain asked her, “Why would you need to tell me to bring shoes?”

  Kayla’s Aspy mind continued processing at hyperspeed and relatively far off the beaten path. “I’ll tell you when you get there, get shoes for me and Ivy.”

  At the first ring, he’d sat upright in bed, thinking he and Reenie had managed a somewhat normal night of sleep. After two full days with no contact, and after he and Reenie had each filed a report, the deputies finally declared Kayla missing. Evan had gone so far as to provide documentation regarding her diagnosis; he gave them copies of everything from Kayla’s elementary school though recent therapist visits. He invited the officers to contact her therapist, sworn she hadn’t run off with a boyfriend, and nearly threatened the officer.

  He’d spent his days stepping in puddles of guilt, waiting for someone to come and take fingerprints from Kayla and Ivy’s bedroom. Apparently he’d even failed at t
hat. Though Kayla was finally a real missing person, there would be no waste of black dust or actual time on her case.

  They told him she’d turn up.

  Evan insisted they were wrong.

  She’d done exactly that. So he was waiting at a diner after a brief phone call and a rattled-off address. And a demand for shoes.

  He was used to Kaylas demands. But now he had Reenie in his ear, softer, but just as demanding.

  “How did she sound? Why are you getting shoes? Don’t open the door to their room!”

  He couldn’t keep up. All along, Evan had hoped that Reenie’s pleasantries and ability to handle social situations would rub off on Kayla, and that Kayla’s logic and financial sense would somehow influence Reenie. Knowledge seemed to have flowed in the reverse direction. He shook his head and sorted his thoughts.

  At five in the morning, he awoke maybe a little too fast. “I have to open the door to the room. I have to get shoes for them.”

  “Why do they need shoes?” Reenie pressed again, from less than an inch behind him, which should have irritated him. Instead, it made him happy. He wasn’t losing anyone else without a good, old-fashioned, hand-to-hand fight.

  “I have no idea. Kayla said to.”

  “Ivy is with her, right?”

  “Yes.” He grabbed two pairs and handed them to Reenie. The task occupied her for all of half a second, then she trailed him back down the stairs and asked again, “How did she sound?”

  While she spoke, Reenie gathered a cloth grocery bag and slid the shoes in as deftly as she then slipped the straps onto her shoulder. She wore a light jacket in the early morning mist and had been ready to go even before he was.

  Tilting his head at her, Evan gave her his “really?” look. “How do you think? She sounded like Kayla. Her dial is always set the same.”

  Reenie climbed in the other side of the car and took care of navigation to the odd little café Kayla had directed them to. Speaking over the growl and hum of the engine starting, she smiled. “Actually, your sister has at least three settings that I have seen. She has normal Kayla, ‘lost it’ Kayla, and Kayla paying attention to Ivy. Since she’s not set on ‘lost it’ that sounds pretty good to me. I wonder what happened to them. At least they’re together now.”

  Evan followed her directions in the early sunrise. The streets hung with a thin Georgia mist that would disappear before eight a.m. The tension of not knowing how Kayla and Ivy had come to be at Stiltson’s Café was much easier to deal with than the tension of not knowing where they were, of praying they were more useful alive, or wondering if he would ever see his sister again. “I assume they’ll tell us everything when we get there.”

  He was glad, too, that it had been Kayla on the phone instead of Ivy. Ivy was an artful liar when she needed to be. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her, it was that she might have tried to spare him hurtful details in these early hours of reunion. He was grateful that Kayla couldn’t lie. She said she was fine. Had she been hurt, she would have catalogued all of it for him. All she’d told him was to bring shoes.

  Evan scanned the area but couldn’t find them. Quickly, he realized he was looking for the Ivy he’d seen the day before she went missing. Long, bare legs bracketed by tan work boots and cutoff jeans, brightly colored bra-du-jour showing through a tank, all topped by a long ink-black braid. That woman wasn’t here.

  The Kayla image in his head was wearing relaxed jeans and a T-shirt that would say something snarky. Or geeky. Or so obscure that even he wouldn’t understand it.

  But they might not look like that now. Maybe they looked like refugees. Maybe they looked like . . .

  The expression on Reenie’s face as she opened her door to scan farther told him she was having as difficult a time as he was and his panic ratcheted up by degrees. He couldn’t come out here and not find Kayla. He couldn’t talk to her on the phone and hear that she was okay only to have her snatched away again.

  “Reenie! Get back!”

  He yanked her into the car and reached out beyond her, slamming shut the door she had opened. He ducked his head and put the car in gear.

  “What—?” She alternated between scanning the area and looking at him like he was crazy.

  For the life of him, he couldn’t figure why he hadn’t thought it before. “What if it’s a trap?”

  “What are you talking about?” Reenie stared like he’d gone completely nuts.

  “There’s no better person to use to set a trap than Kayla. If they know anything about us, they know that I’ll believe everything she says.”

  Reenie’s expression made it clear that she hadn’t downgraded her opinion of his actions from batshit crazy. “She told you she was fine, right? She couldn’t perform a charade like that. Go back.” She pointed over her shoulder to the diner, which was rapidly disappearing behind them in a cloud of dust as he bolted down a back road that led to God knew where.

  “What if they threatened Ivy?” Then he got an idea. “Call her back. She called my cell, but I didn’t recognize the number so I answered. Call it back.”

  Though time seemed to stretch forever, it was only a moment before Reenie’s call got through. He could hear the electronic voice responding to her, so he wasn’t surprised when she shook her head and said, “Pay phone.”

  Then she looked at him in that way—the way that said she knew she was right. “It really might be a trap. ‘Bring shoes’ might have been some code of Kayla’s that we overlooked. But this is your sister—this is Kayla—and Ivy. We have to go back.” With a sigh, she drove her point home. “If you don’t turn around, at least stop so I can walk back.”

  Evan turned around.

  This time, he drove past the cafe, crisscrossing the intersection and looking out for all possible traps. Though he didn’t see any, that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

  After parking, he again stopped Reenie from exiting the car. Evan figured they would sit a moment and just watch. If someone was going to approach them, they may have better luck locked in the car, and if someone was waiting for them to go inside, this might just make them a little nervous. “Do you have your gun?”

  “Yes, but we can’t take it inside a restaurant!”

  “I’d rather be alive. I’m perfectly fine with a misdemeanor for bringing a gun into a diner.” He looked through the open windows at the hometown crowd getting their daily eggs, bacon and coffee. “Plus, I’d bet my life we aren’t the only ones in there with guns.”

  Just then an incredibly out-of-place Mercedes pulled into the spot next to them.

  The back windows were tinted, but the front was clear. An old man sat behind the wheel, wearing a shocking head of white hair and a partially amused expression. He was somewhat hidden from Evan’s view by his passenger, a woman who sat facing the driver, her back to the window. Long dark hair fell in unruly waves.

  Evan sucked in a breath, it might be Ivy. But . . .

  Just then the back window scrolled down, revealing a smiling Kayla. The smile looked a little overbright and possibly forced, but with his sister that might just be the genuine article. Traps forgotten, he was already halfway out of the car and opening the back door to the Mercedes. The give of the handle was a relief—for a moment he’d been certain that it was locked—that his sister was still just as captive as she had been.

  But Kayla tumbled out to him, looking much as she did the day before she left. She wore jeans and a T-shirt, her hair pulled back into a smooth pony tail. It figured that even in captivity Kayla would keep her hair neat and in her usual hairstyle.

  With pent-up tension gushing from every surface, Evan enveloped her in a massive hug. Nearly crying with relief, he finally stepped back to let her breathe. The hug was for him and he knew it. He saw then that she wore no shoes, just socks—the brand she owned fifty pairs of. Because they fit in a way that she could finally ignore her socks. Evan had no idea it would be such a relief to see those socks.

  Whoever had taken her hadn’t ev
en taken her socks from her. Kayla was okay.

  “Do you have our shoes?”

  Of course those were the first words out of her mouth. “Yes.” He grinned as he turned to get them and saw Reenie hug her tightly. For a moment he thought about stepping in, about reminding Reenie about Kayla and hugs, but then he decided they would sort it out themselves.

  “Here you go.” He handed over the shoes and made another covert inspection of his sister. She looked fine. Better than fine, in fact—which was highly unusual for an Aspy away from her home. She hated being away. She needed her things and her routine. “How are you?” He wasn’t sure he would be able to handle the answer, but needed to know.

  Kayla nodded in return, a common answer for her, just a yes or no even to open-ended questions. But her next statement surprised him, more than it should have. “Ivy was there.”

  She had latched onto Ivy as the representative of “normal.” Ivy made things okay. And Evan had to wonder if Ivy knew that. But now wasn’t the time.

  He didn’t comment as Kayla brushed off her incredibly dirty socks and shoved them into her shoes. He wondered how long she’d been walking around in just her stocking feet as Reenie leaned in the front window and asked Ivy, “Are you going to get out?”

  “Not until someone can take this gun from me.”

  Blinking, and leaping to look, he found Ivy, relatively motionless in the front seat, a nine-millimeter gun trained on the white-haired man.

  24

  Stiltson’s Café, Brooklet, South Carolina

  Kayla sat next to Ivy in the small booth. The seat was made of molded plyform plastic and wouldn’t have been comfortable except that she was feeling good. She was free again. Evan and Reenie were with her. Ivy was beside her. And she was eating a plate of eggs scrambled with real cheddar cheese and hashbrowns uniformly cooked to just under completely crisp.

  Under the table, Ivy was holding a gun aimed at Reginald Standish the fifteenth. He was the only person she’d ever met who had a stronger family name history than Reenie’s.