by Rysa Walker
CHAPTER NINE
“I know we’ll stand out more in a smaller town. But there will also be fewer dead people hanging out to potentially complicate life.” I keep my voice low, since we’re past lights-out and I really should be back in my own room. It’s not the first time I’ve been grateful that Libra sleeps like a rock. A snoring rock, but still . . . “I’m thinking middle-of-nowhere Ohio. Or Iowa. Someplace with more corn and cows than people.”
Deo gives me a long look over the top of the computer screen, slowly arching one eyebrow. Even by the dim light of the computer screen I can tell the eyebrow is lined in dark blue, just like his eyes, and they make his point without the need for a single word. Deo and rural don’t mix well. He lived at a group home in rural Maryland for six months. Six very bad months, between the fact that the place was horribly run and the fact that the kids at the local middle school had little tolerance for Deo’s sense of style.
We’ve been over this several times already. He might be safe here, once I’m gone. But he’s made it clear that he’s coming. And the truth is, I’m not sure that leaving him behind is an option for me either, since all I can say is that he might be safe. Not knowing would make me crazy.
“Fine, Deo. Where do you suggest?”
“What about Asheville, North Carolina? I’d still prefer Chicago, but Asheville meets your criteria of moderate size and off the East Coast. And Rolling Stone called it the ‘new Freak Capital’ a few years back, so . . . I think we’d both fit in pretty well, don’t you?”
“When does the next bus leave? And how much?”
“Not until Sunday. Tickets would be thirty bucks more than Chicago.”
“Each?”
He nods and rolls his shoulders, the way he always does when he’s stressed, before looking back down at the screen.
“We’d have enough left for dinner at Taco Bell when we arrived. Assuming we didn’t eat anything on the bus trip. Also assuming that we stick to the dollar menu.”
I fall back onto the ancient beanbag and unplug my phone, which clearly needs a new battery. The stupid thing seems to slide straight from fully charged to mostly dead since I got it back from Porter.
It’s after midnight. Kelsey’s probably already asleep. And even though I hate, hate, hate having to bring her into this, I don’t see any other options.
But she answers on the first ring. Maybe she wasn’t asleep after all.
“Anna! Where are you?”
“Back at Bart House.” I give her a brief rundown of the past few hours, leaving out any names and any words that might put the conversation onto some sort of automatic alert with the NSA or whatever, then conclude with a simple plea. “She knows, Kelsey. Deo and I need to get out of here, which means I need a loan. I promise I’ll pay you back, and we won’t tell anyone that you helped.”
“Anna.” She was silent the entire time I was talking, not even stopping me to ask questions, and her voice has the same tone it always does when she’s trying to calm me down. “I can’t just let the two of you take off on your own like that. You may be close to eighteen, but technically speaking, you’re still a minor. Deo’s barely fifteen. I have an obligation to—”
“It’s okay, Kelsey.” I try to keep the disappointment out of my voice. “I understand.”
“Don’t you dare hang up. Let me finish.”
I take my finger off the button. Kelsey’s not psychic, but she knows me so well it’s spooky.
“I was saying that I have an obligation to be sure you’re safe. But that doesn’t mean I think you should be at Bartholomew House right now. Maybe . . .” Her voice trails off for a moment. “Have you taken your sleeping medication yet?”
“No.”
“That’s good. Can you get out at this hour?”
“Think so. Not that either of us has actually done it, but . . .”
“Take whatever belongings you need and meet me here at the house. Do you remember the address?”
Deo, who’s close enough to hear the question, shakes his head. “That’s probably the first place they’ll look.”
“I know,” Kelsey responds. “I said to come here. I didn’t say you’re staying here.”
Getting out of Bart House after hours isn’t exactly easy. There’s an alarm system on both the front and the back door, and also bars on the ground-floor and second-floor windows that give the house its cozy, welcoming appearance. But just because you can’t get out through the usual methods, doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Libra has an on-again, off-again relationship with a guy named Lamar. He’s maybe five years older than Libra, and even though she’s cagey about it, I think he might have a record that would knock him off the list of people she’s allowed to visit. The third time I noticed her sneaking out and back in without getting caught, I agreed to keep her secret, but only if she told me how she managed it.
Not that I had any intention of leaving Bart House at the time, but you never know. I learned long ago to keep my options open.
Ten minutes after my conversation with Kelsey, Deo and I are ready to put Libra’s exit strategy to the test. After twelve thirty or so, there’s never anyone in the living room, and Libra said that, most of the time, if you’re really careful you can make it into the kitchen and to the door leading down to the basement without getting caught. There’s no exit in the basement, but there’s a narrow window about six feet off the ground. It’s behind a row of shrubs, so maybe the security firm missed it. Anyway, Libra says that if you stand on the dryer and lean a bit to the left, you can lift yourself up and shimmy onto the back lawn. Then you just have to climb the back fence, work your way across a few neighboring yards, and you’re two blocks off Georgia Avenue. In her case, Lamar is waiting there to pick her up, but since we don’t have a Lamar and since the Y Line has stopped for the night, we’ll have to hunt down a cab.
We make it to the kitchen without a hitch, which is a good thing. If Libra got caught in the living room or kitchen, all she’d have to do was pretend she came downstairs to get a drink or something and, worst-case scenario, call Lamar and cancel her plans for the evening. She’d only be in trouble if they caught her in the act of squeezing through the window. Deo and I, on the other hand, are already under scrutiny for missing curfew, even if it was—or maybe because it was—at the behest of the local authorities. And our backpacks are crammed with pretty much everything we own, including the pepper spray and sock full of coins that Daniel surprisingly turned back over to us without so much as a lecture when he dropped us off at Bart House. If anyone had seen us coming downstairs, we’d have been totally screwed.
The basement door squeaks when I push it open. To me, the noise is like a klaxon sounding.
“It’s okay,” Deo whispers. “Keep moving.”
I do, and Deo follows, closing the door behind him. We’re about five steps down when he says, “I feel like we’ve walked into a horror movie. Two teens sneak down to the basement, where the psycho killer lurks in the dark.”
“If you’re trying to lighten the mood, it’s not working.”
“Don’t worry. The psycho killer always targets teens who are sneaking to the basement in order to make out. But I do wish we had a flashlight.”
“I have a flashlight app on my phone, but I don’t want to risk it. What if someone comes downstairs and sees the light under the basement door?”
By the time we reach the bottom, my eyes have started to adjust. I make out the washer and dryer below the window, which is the only source of light in the room, and nudge Deo toward it.
“Want me to boost you up?” he asks.
“No. You go ahead.”
Deo hoists himself onto the dryer and inches the window open. It slides easily enough that I think Libra must have oiled it, even if she apparently didn’t bother with the door at the top of the stairs. Once Deo shoves his backpack through the window, he pulls himself up and through the opening.
I climb onto the dryer and hand my backpack to him. That part is
simple enough, but as I stand, I realize getting out the window is going to be a bit more difficult for me. I’m shorter than Deo—and shorter than Libra, now that I think of it.
“Should have let me give you that boost,” Deo says, getting onto his stomach and reaching his hands down toward me. We lock arms. I kick off against the dryer, then use my sneakers to walk up the wall. I end up scraping my head against the window casing, but I make it.
Deo’s still facing the window. He tenses, but before I can ask what’s wrong, he says, “Run!”
I don’t question him, just grab my pack and haul ass across the yard. When we reach the chain-link fence at the back, he doesn’t ask if I want the boost. He simply grabs me around the waist and lifts me until I’m almost at the top. Our backpacks land in shrubs on the other side just as I grab the wire to flip myself across the fence. Deo and I hit the ground at almost the same instant and he tugs me down into the bushes.
“What was that about?”
He turns around so that he can peer through the leaves. “Light came on under the doorway at the top of the stairs. Someone must have heard us. And I doubt it was Pauline. She sleeps like the dead.”
I look back at the house, relieved to see the basement light isn’t on. “Maybe Marietta wanted a midnight snack. We should get moving, though. I wouldn’t put it past her to do a bed check if she thinks she heard something.”
Although I don’t say it, we both know that if that’s Marietta in the kitchen, she’ll probably check our beds, even if she doesn’t check house-wide. When Daniel brought us back, he told her a cruiser would be keeping an eye on Bart House and that he’d be picking us up tomorrow so we could answer some more questions. To his credit, he also told her that we’d done absolutely nothing wrong, but one look at her pinched face made it clear that she wasn’t buying one little bit of it.
I call a local cab company to have a driver meet us outside an apartment complex just off Georgia Avenue. If Marietta discovers we’re missing she’ll alert the police. That makes hanging around on a street corner trying to flag down a cab a very bad idea.
The driver drops us about six blocks away from Kelsey’s place, in a subdivision near Kensington, just to be on the safe side. Deo hasn’t been here before, but I had secret sessions here twice a week for six of the seven months that the state had someone else assigned as my official therapist. I made stuff up to tell the other guy and saved my real problems to discuss with Kelsey as we sat in the white rockers on her front porch. Those rockers are still in the same spot, along with the spider plants in macramé hangers that Kelsey’s daughter made when she was a teenager.
The only thing that’s different is the car in the driveway. And Kelsey’s behind the wheel.
“I thought you said she didn’t drive?”
I shrug. “She doesn’t. I didn’t even know she owned a car.”
Kelsey walks to the office, bikes to the grocery store. She takes the Metro or Uber if she needs to go anywhere more than a few miles away. Once, she admitted to me that she might have gotten past her fear of getting behind the wheel if she’d scheduled time with a therapist herself after her husband was killed. I said why not do it now, but she just laughed and said that walking the half mile to work was better for the environment, better for her health, and better for her nerves.
She gets out but doesn’t close the car door. “I’d hoped we could do this tomorrow morning, after you’d gotten some rest, but I received a call about twenty minutes ago from . . . what’s that dreadful woman’s name?” She shakes her head, annoyed.
“That would be Marietta.”
“Yes, thank you, Deo. I didn’t answer, of course. But she left a message, asking me to call if I heard from either of you. She’s probably alerted the police that you’ve run away again. Your best bet is to head out now.”
“Whose car?” Deo asks.
“Mine, of course. I bought it two years ago so my granddaughter would have something to drive when she was taking classes at GWU, but she’s living with that Jason boy now and they don’t have parking spaces for both cars. I go out to the garage and crank it every few weeks, just to be sure it works. Are you sure you’re not too tired to drive?”
“I’m not sleepy.” It’s not exactly a lie—I’m at the stage Deo calls tired but wired. “But in case you’ve forgotten, I don’t have a license.”
“True. But how many of your previous lodgers were licensed drivers? Five? Six?”
Seven, actually. Three of them even drove in the DC area. “But none of them have driven recently.”
Deo rolls his eyes. “I’m not worried. You’ll know how to drive the same way you knew how to fix that leaky pipe in Kelsey’s office. The same way you know French, a lot of really boring history, and the capital of every country . . . or ice-skating. You remember last winter?”
I do. I wouldn’t have gone at all if it hadn’t been one of those mandatory group home outings. I was scared to death, not just of slipping my feet into shoes that might have been the last happy moment of some malcontented spirit, but also the more mundane fear of falling and breaking my neck on the ice.
But when I rifled through the memory banks, I discovered that Lydia, the sister who hung out on the porch swing for all those years waiting to tell her Vietnam vet brother good-bye, had spent every spare moment in the winter on the pond near her house. After my first tentative step onto the ice, that section of my brain kicked in, bypassing my fear and communicating directly with my body. I was doing figure eights and even managed a few pirouettes by the time we left the rink.
I was incredibly sore the next day, so sore I could barely walk after exercising muscles that I didn’t even know I had. But once that wore off, I’d gladly have gone back to the rink. Ice-skating may be the most fun I’ve ever had, but that’s the only chance I’ve had to do it. All of the outings since then have been bowling or movie nights, and there’s no way I can fit an expensive hobby into my budget on what I make at Joe’s.
Joe. Yikes.
I’m on the schedule for the next five days, and this will leave him short. I actually like my job at the deli, and I hate knowing that he’ll need to hire someone to replace me.
“It’s got all of those safety gadgets,” Kelsey says, “like the autopilot lane control and sensors. Not that I’ve ever tried them, but Casey said they were useful. Oh, and I forgot to check the gas tank. Hopefully it will be enough to get you there, but if not, there should be plenty of stations along the way.”
“Um . . . on the way to where?” I ask.
“My beach cottage. It’s about an hour away. I don’t go often, now that Barbara is gone. Mostly, I rent it out, but there’s no one scheduled until Thanksgiving. If things aren’t . . .” She stops for a moment, and a worried frown creases her brow. “If things aren’t sorted out by then, we’ll figure something else out. Just tell the GPS Cottage and it will navigate for you.” She presses the keys and some money into my hand. “I’ll e-mail you the QR code for the security system and the wi-fi. And this is all the cash I had on me, about a hundred and twenty dollars.”
“Kelsey, I appreciate the loan. We’ll get it back to you. But we should just take the bus or train. You could get into trouble.”
“Anna, look at me. The worst that will happen if I’m implicated is that I retire a few months earlier than planned. So what? If your lives are in danger, crossing ethical boundaries is the least of my concerns.”
As if to emphasize that point, she reaches out to pull both me and Deo into a hug.
Kelsey doesn’t hug . . . or perhaps I should say she doesn’t hug clients. She has made an exception exactly once, when I was seven and had just gotten rid of that creep Myron. On that occasion, she pulled me into her lap and held me while I cried. I remember it vividly—the feel of her sweater against my damp cheek, the way she smelled like vanilla, and the way she rocked me back and forth, whispering shh over and over as she smoothed my hair.
At my next appointment, she spent the firs
t five minutes apologizing. She explained how her behavior at the previous session was a violation of the rules of her profession and a violation of my trust. And she promised she’d never cross that line again. I told her I understood, and I kind of did, even back then. But I still thought those rules were stupid. I’m pretty sure Kelsey thought they were stupid, too. I needed someone to hold me that day, and if not Kelsey, then who?
Her shoulders feel thinner now, more fragile. But she still smells like vanilla.
“Just go,” she says, when she breaks away. “Don’t worry about me. I haven’t taken a personal day in three years, and I’m about to make up for that. A car will arrive in about an hour to take me to the airport, and I’ll catch the five-fifteen flight to Indianapolis to spend some time with my daughter. I’ve already bought the ticket and canceled my appointments for the next few days, so don’t argue with me.”
I open my mouth to do exactly that, but we have so few options. And she seems to have everything arranged.
“Thank you.” I slide behind the wheel and close my eyes for a few seconds to see what I can find in my collected memories of driving. I skip past Abner, the handyman with a DUI, and past a few more who probably never drove a modern vehicle with a GPS or power everything. Arlene Bennett, however, in addition to driving to work, and to her multitude of doctor’s appointments, ran her kids to ballet, soccer, and everything else under the sun. The last time she drove was in early 2017, and that’s about as close as I’m going to get to perfect.
Anna, this is a bad idea.
My puttering around in the files seems to have stirred Molly up. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t mean driving is a bad idea. She means leaving DC, leaving her buddies who are trying to find Lucas and Cregg. And I do feel a tiny twinge of conscience. But I’m not safe here and I don’t think Deo is safe here, either. Staying isn’t an option.