by Shannon Kirk
A long silence comes over the room.
All day I hear clomping around above me and outside the door. And now it’s dinnertime again. Gretchen just threw in a fistful of loose peanuts and a bottle of water.
“You need your protein. Oh, and Lucy, I do hope you’ll be okay again tonight. Daddy and I will be out back as usual a few hours, and then Daddy and I will leave for the pit. Won’t be back until morning. Ciao, bella. That’s Italian. Nighty-night. Hope you find the courage to start your puzzles soon! Pacing around all day is doing you no good.”
Does she realize how imbecilic it is to tell her captive that she and her freak father won’t be here all night? Maybe she’s confident I can’t escape this locked room and then out through the sealed door. Maybe she’s right and I’m overconfident. After all, this is her game, not mine. Maybe she’s tempting me into a separate trap.
I hear her walk away from the door, and I take inventory of the contents of the room again. I run a hand over the solid door and doorframe and newer, and more unpickable, doorknob. I set my tongue in my teeth and consider solutions.
They want me to demonstrate agency? To advocate for myself? Well, I’ll show you self-advocacy. I’ll show all y’all what it means to take charge.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
MOTHER
Night again, and Mag is hiding within a grove of trees, off to the side, within the valley and atop a boulder. Her vantage for view of the trail on the Sabin side of the gorge and of the pit within the cave is perfect.
The train of captives and captors has arrived and set up in their spots. Lights. Table. Tent. Tripod over pit. Boiling pot of water. Captives in pit. Check. Check. Check. Same as last night.
Through her binoculars, Mag watches Laura positioning herself to the baby’s skull, and by the way she sits straighter in her spot and looks up to the top of the cliff wall, where she’d heard Mag’s owl call this morning—but where Mag is not tonight—Mag knows Laura’s found her note in the eye socket.
“Earl, need you to go over the facts again, please,” Laura says, especially loud tonight. Mag assumes Laura needs a distraction so she can read her note.
“You got it,” Earl says.
Remembering Laura’s caustic barbs, her quick temper, her biting wit, her open, relentless competition with Mag after the lemon-tree night when they were fourteen, Mag imagines Laura’s fingers trembling to unscroll her note. And she knows Laura will soon know nobody else could have written this note, because it is written in the same pattern the girls always wrote notes in order to set up a night’s secret challenge in the Triple C treetop course: first the stakes, next the object of the night’s game, next the rules, and last the timing. The pattern of tonight’s gorge challenge is irrefutable evidence of Mag’s identity and presence, more so than if she’d left verified DNA.
If this were their secret treetop challenge, one would be up in the tree course—with safety clicks, lifeline, carabiner, harness, transition cables—jumping to high platforms, crawling across log bridges, climbing up ladders bolted to trunks, swinging on ropes to nets spread between canopies, and one would be assigned to the ground. And whoever’s turn it was to write out the night’s challenge would set the stakes and the rules—like Mag has done here tonight. And since it would be night in the forest and dark—their vision thus blocked or blurred—and they had to keep their game a secret, only birdcalls and no speaking marked where one was in relation to the other.
Mag recalls the spitting tirades Laura would give upon reading her challenge notes:
Oh, you want me blindfolded, Magpie, yeah? Fuck you, I know this dumb Triple C course blind. Oh sure, walking backward while holding a brick paver from the main lodge’s walkway that I have to extricate with a spoon before I can start the ground course beneath you, while you rope swing in harnesses high above? Bite me, bitch. You in the trees, me on the ground, again, rolling a bowling ball with one hand and no sleep for two days? Whatever.
Laura’s endurance had allowed her to compete with Mag’s athleticism.
But.
All that’s in the past.
Focus. Stay sharp, Laura. Read the note. Tonight’s challenge is not a game. It’s life or death. Focus, Mag thinks, hoping telepathy exists.
Tonight’s particular challenge doesn’t need to be in sync, like their secret Triple C treetop night challenges. And, knowing Laura and how desperate she was to secure Lemon the dog after she stole him from her mother, and how bereft she was upon the death of Copte the parrot, and believing the psychoanalysts’ opinions that Laura truly loved Lucy in her twisted way, Mag is banking on Laura executing tonight’s challenge so they can together save Lucy.
Given the way Laura crouches down in the pit, Mag knows she’s reading her note.
Stakes: Baby bird trapped in house. They’ll burn her alive.
Object: Raven needs ring of keys.
Rules: *Emus can’t know.
*Leave keys in Owl’s tree, the one where you turn to piss, the one with the limbs that look like a goalpost, eighty crawl-steps from pit. Set keys next to orange mushroom.
*After you piss, pick keys back up and return to Emus.
*Again, Emus cannot know! They’ve rigged things. Bird will burn.
Timing: I’m watching, so you set timing. But tonight!
Emus have been classified as the dumbest birds on the planet. Mag knows with Laura’s caustic temper she’s calling the Sabins far worse than emus in her mind, and she can almost hear her, hear Laura’s retort to this note. She’d say something like, “You think you’re so clever, Magpie, with your lame bird jokes. Ha, ha, ha,” and roll her eyes. “Your challenge is impossible. But I won’t let you beat me.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
LUCY
What I really need is a screwdriver. The house has been stone quiet for a couple of hours now. And I did listen for and heard both Gretchen and Jerry leave after she threw me a fistful of stupid loose peanuts. So yeah, a couple of hours alone. It’s safe to work.
I don’t have a screwdriver, but I do have my titanium-hard jellyfish pendant. All in, with the floaters, the thing is as long as my pinkie. The head is silver and domed, and the floaters from that are pointy. It’d be fantastic if the damn thing had a handle, but it doesn’t, so I’ll have to deal.
Guess what, this is good. The jelly head fits right on in the screw head of one of three screws in one of the three hinges holding the door to the doorjamb. The screw head is that pain-in-the-ass plus-sign kind that requires the Phillips screwdriver, and the grooves are worn, so my jelly pendant head keeps slipping. Also, this first screw is sunk deep in the wood, so she ain’t budging. But she will. I’m not giving up. I’ve got all night to work my jelly in these nine screws.
I will rip your door off the hinges, Gretchen.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
MOTHER
Whenever Mag wrote a challenge for Laura for their treetop games, Laura would read it fast, say one of her caustic lines, and ultimately finish, “Challenge accepted,” all within five to ten minutes, tops. For their first few challenges after the lemon massacre, Laura had written the night’s rules so that Mag could “win” the answers to the questions she’d raised: What happened to Lemon the dog? Who helped her murder the lemon trees? And why did they help her?
Although Mag had completed Laura’s initial challenges, it was only ever the first question Laura agreed to answer. She’d keep moving the goalpost on what Mag had to do to get answers to the next two questions. So in between, Mag wrote treetop challenges for Laura to complete, the difficulty and danger increasing every time.
And now, watching Laura in the gorge, Mag waits, hoping Laura will accept this current challenge and help save Lucy.
Please get those keys. Do this. Help me save my baby.
Mag waits, camouflaged, at her post on a boulder by the long-eared’s pine. She listens; she watches. It’s been two hours since Laura found Mag’s note in the skull’s eye socket. The silence in the gorge i
s deep. Night wind whooshes, Jerry reads, Earl’s done with his bedtime stories of gorge and bone facts, and, importantly, Gretchen has entered the tent for a nap.
“Lady problems. Need to use the bathroom,” Laura yells up to Jerry Sabin.
By the tone of Laura’s voice from the pit, the pitch, the authority, the volume, Mag knows Laura has figured out how to execute the challenge.
“Hurry,” he says.
Laura then trills her tongue in what Mag recognizes as a wild turkey call.
“What the hell was that?” Jerry says.
“Just clearing my throat, asshole,” Laura says.
Game is on. Mag pops to her feet but stays low on her boulder. Watching.
Laura must know Gretchen Sabin is napping, given the lack of her squawking voice.
“Oh, Laura, did I ever tell you about how I came to be on this property ten years ago?” Earl says as Laura is maneuvering out of the pit.
Mag is unsure, but she thinks, given Earl’s volume and tone, and the way Laura nods at him as she rises out of the pit, that whatever Earl is about to say is meant to distract Jerry Sabin. Mag zooms in to watch and strains to hear every word.
“Many times. But tell me again, Earl. Will help me scoot up out of the hole. Keep talking,” Laura says.
“Oh, so, see, I had known about this property since I was a boy. I fled one day long ago, in the fifties. I was ten. Oh yup, a boy. My daddy ran a cult here. His followers called him Jonny Guile, but his real name was Alton Sams Taylor. He was terribly ill in the mind. He’s your reason, all right, we got all these bones. But I escaped. I did. I was just a boy. A boy. He made me photograph that day, what he did to these people that day. Anyhow. I got away. Raised myself on the streets. Got married, had a son, Jerry here, but then got divorced. Apparently Jerry listened a little too close to all my stories of growing up with my cult daddy, and he got himself obsessed. A little deranged, and he knows this. He admits this now. Don’t you, Jerry?”
Jerry moves to the lip of the pit. Earl keeps talking. “When Jerry was a grown man, he came here, bought this property. But I didn’t know. I was estranged from him after the divorce. Anyway, so one day, ten years ago, I had to see the place again. Had to see my son again. Curiosity got the better of me. I crept in, oh, I’ll tell you where, how, anyway. Ten or so years ago . . .”
Earl is droning on about ten or so years ago, and Jerry Sabin appears addicted to this story, given how fixed he is at the lip of the pit. Laura emerges topside, cracks her knees and shakes her legs, which appear made of crooked bone on bone. She stands, not straight at all; her ankles toggle.
On the Sabins’ topside folding table, which Mag watches Laura approach behind Jerry, is a ring of keys lying beside Gretchen’s latest puzzle-in-progress. This one is a blown-up picture of a creepy brown house in a forest, which Mag can tell from the box’s standing box top.
Laura hobbles toward the table, which she must pass on the way to the gorge floor to get to the “bathroom” behind the long-eared owl’s pine.
Earl’s voice is louder now. “Ten years ago, I snuck in. Ayup, Jerry, you, right? You caught me; at first you didn’t recognize me, but then you had me stay the night. The next day, I was walking in these here woods with my gun, when out of nowhere . . .”
Laura grabs the keys. Mag cringes when Earl tells the next part of his story: how he accidentally shot Jerry’s pregnant wife.
“But I tell you, was a trap, a frame-up. Because . . .”
Laura tucks the ring of keys in her disgusting sweatpants pocket. She drops to the ground, hands and knees, and begins eighty crawl steps to Mrs. Owl’s tree.
Jerry Sabin is laughing, engaged with his dear old daddy, Earl. Laughing about his father shooting his pregnant wife.
“Dad, you old dummy! You did fall for my trap. And look at you, doing the Lord’s work for your son and granddaughter. Paying your penance!”
Earl, apparently in an effort to keep Jerry distracted and engaged, maintains a chipper tone. “Jerry, you and little Gretchen are indeed the smart ones here. Oh boy, and after that day, what with little Gretchen’s mental state, I have to be honest, was easy for you to convince me to stay longer. I had to be sure you were both well. A’course . . .”
“Of course, you didn’t really have a choice in leaving, now did you, Dad?”
“No, Jerry, I suppose I didn’t. You made that very clear.”
Laura has crawled onto the gorge floor and is winding her way around the obstacles of stones and boulders and scrub brush and bushes. Jerry is trailing behind with his prissy little gun, but his attention is on Earl’s voice, booming up and out of the pit.
“Things never did improve, now did they, with Gretchen? Maybe I should have ran, got you both help, after she found my pictures from that Death March day and painted it. Or when she made us come out here and find the pit, and things, well, escalated. I never should have ever returned to the old place and stepped back into your life, right, Jerry?”
“Oh, well, now, you were a good worker for ten years, though. Was good of you to stay on after your tragic trespass—our deal’s been good, no? We’ve sure lived up to our end. I still haven’t told anyone you’re the bad hunter who killed a pregnant woman and her baby and fled. Haven’t said a word to anyone about your part in your father’s mass murder. And you’ve lived up to yours, working hard for us—the metalwork, the construction, the brickwork, the digging, doing the Lord’s work. You have. I think the deal’s incredibly fair.”
Laura’s crawling along the gorge floor. Jerry’s trailing behind, holding his gun toward her but stepping sideways to keep up his conversation with Earl.
“Gretchen’s gotten so much worse since the day you shot . . . well, her mother.”
Earl says something Mag can’t hear; her attention is now fully on Laura, who is making a turn at the owl’s tree.
“Well, anyway, definitely agree things have escalated. I do need someone to do the manual work, though. Look what happened when I fell in the pit? Broken leg and finger!” Jerry is gasping now, reliving a reverberating personal trauma he cannot handle.
Laura sly-drops the keys in the hole of the owl’s trunk, beside the orange mushroom. Does she sense how close Mag is to her? Is this why Laura pauses behind the tree, scrunches her shoulders around her neck, closes her eyes, and whispers as if in prayer, “Touch my skin. Please just touch my skin.”
Mag slides silent down the backside of the boulder. Crouching into a space on a thin trail she made herself, free of crunching leaves, she slithers on her stomach toward the base of the owl tree.
Jerry yells back to Earl, “Dad, hold on. Hold on. Hard to hear from here. Hold on.” Jerry, now paying attention to wherever Laura went off to, walks toward the owl’s pine.
“Hurry up in there,” he yells. He must know Laura can’t hobble off and up the serpentine trail; he doesn’t seem too concerned. Yet he does want confirmation, because now he shouts, “Tell me you’re in there or I’m coming in.”
“I’m in here, fuckface,” Laura shouts. Mag is frozen on the ground between them, low behind shrubs and therefore hidden. But if Jerry walks any closer, she could be cooked.
Laura crawls to and crouches where she usually pees. Jerry stands midway between the pee point and the pit so he can guard both Laura and Earl.
A whoosh of air brushes Mag’s cheek, a funnel of wind through the valley. She’s about five feet off from grabbing the keys, but frozen on the spot, afraid Jerry is too keen on the area behind the owl’s pine.
Laura must sense that Mag needs a distraction, because she begins to make disgusting grunting noises, as if groaning through a painful shit the size of a sideways football. Priss-ass Jerry is cringing out there, turning his face and nose the other way.
Mag slithers, grabs the keys, presses them into her blue clay to make impressions, sets the clay in her back pockets, and sets the keys back by the orange mushroom.
“Whoo, whoo,” she calls out, once she’s slithered back
behind her boulder.
The coast is clear.
Now Laura must return the keys without the Sabins seeing.
Laura whispers in resignation, in pain, “I can’t believe I let you in again. You never touch my skin. I’m always alone.”
What is this? Was she always obsessed and I didn’t see?
Focus.
Just focus for now.
Laura crawls out, slower than need be, slower and dragging. She re-collects the keys from the mushroom hole.
As she begins her crawl-steps through the valley floor toward the pit, the keys in her pocket, and now Jerry stepping behind her with his gun, Gretchen emerges from the tent. She stands behind the folding table with the brown house puzzle, right where Laura needs to return the keys. Mag sees only Gretchen’s head and torso; her lower half is severed for her. In her quick nap, her apple-print dress corkscrewed around her body.
Mag’s heart is about to beat out of her chest.
The boiling pot of water and the folding table are the items that divide Laura from Gretchen.
“Daddy! Didn’t you remember I forgot my earplugs tonight! Why are you letting him talk so loud and you’re yelling!”
Gretchen scowls when she sees Laura.
And then the worst happens: she looks at the table. Like she knows.
“Where are the keys?”
Jerry trots around Laura, leaving his lame gun limp at his side.
“Daddy! Where are the keys?” Gretchen yells again, more panic in her voice.
“I don’t, I don’t,” Jerry is saying. Patting his pants pockets.
On her hands and knees, Laura cranes her head up, looking away from Gretchen and to the far cliff wall. A glint on the rock wall catches Mag’s eye, something like a silver flashing fish from where she believes she saw a raven’s nest.
Laura stands fast, grasping the keys in a closed fist. Her legs wobble, but she fights through. “Coyote!” she yells, pointing with her left hand toward a crop of bushes in the dark, while she stumbles forward. Gretchen, standing before her, and Jerry, off to the side, follow the direction of Laura’s left pointing hand, so they don’t see what Laura’s doing with her right hand. Only Mag, behind them and hidden atop her boulder in a grove of trees, watches as Laura thrusts the keys. They land above Gretchen’s head in a long line of pines behind the Sabins’ tent.