by K T Rose
Father Paul stepped up to Jessica and offered her a hand. She took it and he pulled her up. “Looks like you’ll be moving up in rank faster than I thought.”
“What’s going on?” she asked while brushing snow from her pants and wiping blood from her face.
“It appears we may have another rulebreaker in our midst.”
“W—what’d she do?”
“I’m not quite sure yet, but we’ll find out soon enough.”
He wiped his thumb under her nose. She winced. “Go get cleaned up and meet me in my room at noon.”
Chapter Ten
Jessica raced across the field, wincing at the deep cramp in her side. Oh please. Please, she prayed. If he’d found the phone, he would’ve told her. Right? She dove into the forest, shoving tree branches and kicking snow. She passed by Mr. Keys, who walked like he was taking a morning stroll.
Father Paul couldn’t’ve found it. There had to be another reason why Hazel was bound and tossed in the dungeon. Jessica’s heart pitched as she sprinted past the cluster of kids who were veering onto the left path, headed for the school trailer.
But what could it be? It couldn’t’ve been because she constantly harassed Jessica. If so, why would he act now? Even though there was no audio, she was sure he’d seen how they’d been treating her. There were the death threats, for starters.
Or maybe…
She picked up speed as the opening into the main quarters came into view.
Maybe she was in trouble for not disclosing something. Did she know that Tilly and Jessica were out that night? In the cemetery, mourning his father: he who shall not be named? Perhaps she knew about the chocolate stealing or…
Jessica gulped hard as she dashed through the opening.
Upon emerging from the woods, she stopped and caught a steady pace as she walked past McGee and Sister Green.
“I never would’ve thought she would break a rule,” Sister Green said.
“I know. I wonder what she did,” McGee said.
“I guess we’ll find out…”
Their voices trailed out of earshot as she veered for the Center and raced up the steps.
I…is Dale still alive? She blew off the story Tilly had told her. He was a kid that knew what he wanted to know. Jessica was sure he’d gotten the faces mixed up, Stephen and Dale. There was so much going on that night. And why would she let him go?
Only thing for certain was that Jessica needed to get to her mattress.
She yanked the screen door open and bolted for the steps.
A loud clamor rang from above.
She froze.
Deafened by her beating heart, she crept slowly and caught a glimpse of her closed door at the top of the steps.
She kept up the stairs and ended up in the hallway in front of her door, staring into Hazels’ room. Her mattress lay against the wall and her toiletries scattered. Clothes hurled across the hallway, hitting the wall and landing on the floor.
Perplexed, she stepped closer to the room. Blaze stood over one of Hazel’s eight opened drawer drawers. She hurled a pair of jeans over her shoulder, nearly hitting Jessica in the face.
“What’s going on?” Jessica asked.
Blaze huffed and sniffled, not looking away from her task.
“Blaze.”
She stopped and stood straight. Slowly, she put a hand over her face. Her shoulders jerked as her body tensed. “How could she be a traitor? Huh?” She cried into her hand.
“What are you talking about?”
“How could she—
“Blaze, what are you saying? Why are you gutting her room out?”
“Because Father Paul made me ride over here from the barn with him. In his hurry, he yelled at me. Told me to find something.”
“What?”
She sniffed and wiped her face. She shook her hands out at her sides and went back to digging through Hazel’s clothes. She tossed a shirt over the box spring.
“Blaze.”
“Don’t worry about it!” she snapped. “Now get out while I look through this mess.”
Jessica backed into the hallway, turned, and let herself into her room. Her gut swarmed as she pressed her back into her closed door.
Fuck.
She peered over her mattress. The sheets were pulled back just as she left them. Her heart slowed. At least that wasn’t the reason.
But it had to be serious enough to make Father Paul want her room torn apart. Hazel didn’t deserve to be in that chair, no matter what she’d done, at the very least, she cared about the people. She cared about Father Paul. Those tears they shared over Tilly were real. Jessica felt Hazel’s pain as she sat there in the snow, catching the blow to her side. It was almost like Hazel had used Jessica as an excuse to avoid witnessing what was about to happen to the boy.
But what was the deal with the phone? Why’d she need it? Had she been reaching out for…
Help?
Jessica lifted the mattress.
Bare.
***
The barn door sat open. As Jessica approached, she made out St. Pete’s hair as the wind carried it across his face and next to him, the sun bleached Billy’s hair with an orange tinge. They sat at the entrance of the barn, possibly on watch.
You can thank yourself for this, she thought. She’d only started the ‘escape from the barn’ movement.
As she drew closer, St. Pete stopped sharpening his pocket knife and Billy slammed the coin he’d been flipping onto the opposite side of his hand. The air was thick with chlorine.
“What are you doing out here?” Billy asked.
Jessica looked at St. Pete. He shielded the sun from his eyes as he waited for her reply to Billy.
To St. Pete, she said, “I—I want to talk to her.”
“Why?” Billy asked through grunts as he got up to his feet.
She rocked on her heels. “I just want to know—”
“Yeah. Yeah,” St. Pete said as his eyes sailed away from her and off into the field somewhere. “Me too.”
A long pause passed between them before he looked back up at Jessica. “But she’s not talking. I personally think Paul is off his nuts with all the meds but—”
Jessica cocked her head.
“Oh, that’s right.” He sighed. “I guess the cat’s out the bag. Paul’s been sick for a while now. It gets especially bad when he switches up his meds. See, the guy we used to get his meds from was busted by the feds, so we had to get a new guy. A new supplier means a new prescription. Paul was in such a hurry to get the new shit in, that we didn’t make sure the pills were legit.” He shook his head. “I told him about changing them up like that. I think that shit’s messing with his head.”
Her heart lightened. “Father Paul’s on medication,” she muttered.
“What was that?”
“Nothing. What does that have to do with me going to speak to her?”
Billy scoffed and St. Pete chuckled. “What? You think she’s going to talk to you?”
She shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Look, she’s not saying a damn thing to me or Blaze or anyone else. Tsk. Paul’s not even sure why he’s pissy at her. But he said he’ll talk to us once he figures some shit out. You’ll have to find out what’s going on when the rest of us do.”
She looked at her feet. “Please? Can I at least try? I’m just as fucked up about this as you are. The least you can do is let me try. Please, St. Pete?” She looked him in the eye, wearing her best frown.
“He said ‘no’. What could you need to talk to her about, anyway?” Billy asked, walking toward her with his hungry eyes and slanted smirk.
“Shut up, Billy,” St. Pete said. “I’m sure Paul will calm down and come to his senses once he figures out those meds make him paranoid. I told him to chill out with all that. But no. He keeps popping em’ away.” He snickered. “It’s all that fucker Dale’s fault. Since he almost got away twice, Paul has been fixated on the M word.”
“M word?”
“Yeah, Morgan. Funny. I thought the whole politician in a faux wig bit in his speech earlier was a shot at himself because the mere mention of Morgan makes him overreact and do a lot, like those politicians do.”
She wanted to dig. She needed to dig. Father Paul is…scared? She knew about the accident that made him chat with God (or so he believed), but was there more to it with this…Morgan? But shoving too many questions around would push St. Pete onto Billy’s side. “So…”
“Go ahead. But don’t stay down there too long and don’t open the door. Talk to her through it. If you don’t, she’ll get out and you’ll be the one explaining to Father Paul why she got shot in the face.”
Jessica marched up the floor and down the steps, looking over her shoulder before descending. St. Pete hadn’t moved from his spot on the floor. Billy stared at her with his famous straight, stalker face.
She stepped off the platform with an eerie heat on her back and a familiar buzz in her ear. That humming light still put her on edge all these weeks later. She found herself constantly checking behind her. She knew in her gut that Billy would be the one to pull the trigger on her. One day. Even in that very second.
She slowed her steps as the dim splash from the upstairs faded into a dark gray sheen. Her heart thudded with every step as she approached the steel door. She imagined what it’d been like for Mr. French when he came down that night to check on her and Dale, totally unaware that his head would be blown apart by his own gun under Jessica’s trigger finger. That sickening memory warranted her to slow down. The hallway shrunk on both sides, leaving her pulsating vision fixated on the door.
Hazel was behind that door, only a few steps away.
With all the rushing around, Jessica didn’t know what to say to her. Asking her what she’d done was a waste: why would she tell Jessica anything? She’d only cracked her nose and kicked her while she was down. At the very least, she could tell her about the phone and how it was missing.
Jessica stopped short of the locked door and slid down along the cement wall. A chill raced up her back as her coat rose up her waist.
“Hazel. Hazel. It’s me. Jessica,” she said into the crevice of the door near the silver hinges.
“Yeah. What do you want?” Hazel asked.
Jessica tried forcing words off her tongue, but the excitement was too much to hold down. “Please…” she finally said. “Tell me he’s being paranoid.”
Silence.
“Hazel?”
Only the high-pitched drone of the useless light at the steps.
“Please talk to me, Hazel.”
“Nope,” she said nonchalantly. “He knows most of everything.”
“About…”
“The phone? Yeah.”
“Uh—”
“I know you didn’t give it to him.”
“How?”
“Because you don’t want to be here.”
Jessica’s eyes nearly popped out of her skull. If it were that obvious to Hazel...Jessica’s confusion must’ve pushed past the door because Hazel went on, “You hate it here just as much as Tommy or Tilly or whatever you want to call him.”
Jessica shook her head and whispered, “I never said that.”
“You don’t have to. I know you want out because if you didn’t you wouldn’t’ve called yourself, Jessica.”
“I di—”
“You just did. You’re not like these people. You see through the bullshit and you actually feel. You’re not crazy, you’re not searching for an out. You’re just a kid who ended up in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the right attitude. You’re scared shitless and you really don’t know what you got yourself into. You’re not a killer like the rest of us. You’re not mentally fucked in the head like Paul. Billy might be, but you’re not. Yeah, you made some really fucked up mistakes. Mistakes that will haunt you for the rest of your life, but you own up to them, something a lot of these people that fall for Paul simply can’t do. That’s why they love this place. They just live to die, because through Paul, they are protected. Or so they think. You don’t think that, Jessica, because you’re smarter than that. I saw the look in your eyes this morning, when you questioned what was happening. You wanted to stop it because Paul’s spell didn’t work on you. You saw him as an assailant, trying to hurt an innocent. A lot like Franny hurt Brandy.”
Those names kicked the wind from Jessica’s lungs. But she never shared much about that with Hazel. “How’d you know about Brandy?”
“Because Paul knows. He treated me like a diary. That’s how I know you didn’t give him the phone.” She chuckled. “And you never were. Let me guess, you were going to use it against me?”
Jessica sniffed.
Hazel snorted. “You can’t fool me. Deep down, you knew I was going to take it back from you. And you wouldn’t’ve told a soul because you knew that phone was going to be your way out one day.”
Jessica cleared her throat. “Yes. I—I don’t know how he found it.”
Hazel sighed. “Doesn’t matter now. He’s going to kill me unless someone saves me from him. But that won’t happen, will it?”
“It can. Blaze was crushed and St. Pete is convinced that Father Paul’s taken too much of his meds—whatever that means. I’ll find out what he knows. I promise I’ll come back and tell you the charges. I’ll even speak up for you.” Jessica shook her head. “I don’t know how he found it and why he didn’t reprimand me for having it and not telling him.”
“Because he doesn’t know you had it.”
“No.” Jessica dropped her brow. “That can’t be true.”
“Well that’s the only reason I can think of. Think about it. If he knew you were hiding that, then…you’d be in here with me.”
“Why do you have it, Hazel?”
“You’ll find out soon enough.”
“Maybe not. It’s locked up. Password protected. You can’t feed into his paranoia if he can’t get any proof the phone is active. Maybe we can argue that you used it to play games. Or—”
“I’m done playing games. It’s too late for me. I’m,” she scoffed, “tainted.”
Jessica teared up. “Is there anything I can do to help? I don’t want you to die. I mean, you’ve been an asshole to me since I got here but you’ve protected me in so many ways I hadn’t seen. It’s my turn to return the favor. What can I do?”
“Jessica, the only thing you can do and get the phone, call the number inside and say, it’s a go. They’ll know what it means.”
“What? I can’t open the damn thing.”
Footfalls pounded the staircase as St. Pete rushed down. “Hey. It’s time to go.”
“Hazel,” Jessica said.
“Ah, come on. Don’t be so dramatic. She’ll be alright,” he said. He knocked on the door. “Hey, Haze, I’m gonna get this cleared up. Alright?” He turned to Jessica. “Come on, Olive. We’re leaving now.”
She followed behind him slowly, allowing a gap to form between them. By the time he reached the top, she turned and raced back to the door.
“Hazel!” she said in a sharp whisper.
“Paul,” Hazel said.
Chapter Eleven
“For fuck’s sake,” Techy whined as he banged at his laptop’s keyboard. His constant smacking made Jessica flinch; unfortunately, she had the luxury of sitting next to him on Father Paul’s suede couch.
Father Paul passed him a shot of brown as he sat in the golden recliner across from them. “Easy there. I’m not sure of the next time we’ll be able to get you a new one. Remember what I told you the last time you broke one? Hm? During our hacker incident?”
“Sorry, Father Paul. But this thing is iron-clad. Locked up. For sure it’s the work of a cyber-security genius. I can’t even get past this fucked up code.”
Father Paul dragged his thin fingers down his tanned face. He waved for Techy. “Pass it here. I don’t need you breaking it before we figure out who she’s been in contact with.”
&nbs
p; Father Paul set the phone down on his golden vanity, then looked over to St. Pete, who stood near the window. “Get your head in the game, St. Pete. If my suspicions are correct, Hazel may be that deep hole that’s too late to plug up.” He sighed. “Perhaps Nebraska has to be moved up.”
“You mean...” St. Pete frowned.
Father Paul gulped down his shot and prompted Techy to do the same. His face curled then he grunted and said, “Yes. We need to vacate by next week.”
St. Pete rubbed his prickled jaw and tossed a look over to Jessica. Her mind hadn’t left the barn. There was something different about Hazel. Jessica wasn’t sure if it was her being locked up in her own home, but everything seemed, different. Jessica’s thoughts were clear for the first time. She and Tilly had to get out and the quick move to Nebraska would be the perfect opportunity.
“Buck up,” Father Paul said, handing a shot over to St. Pete. “It’s going to be alright. We’ve been in worse positions before.”
“I know,” St. Pete said, slamming the shot in one gulp. He grimaced and bared his teeth. “I can’t remember anything she could’ve done that was a clue or sign. We’ve dealt with this before. No way she’s… ya know.”
Father Paul sat back and blew out a steady stream of air. “We don’t know anything until that phone is open.”
Billy, who had been sitting on the edge of Father Paul’s bed, hopped on his heels. A giddy smile lightened his face. “Can I try?” he asked.
“Go for it. Maybe there’s something magical about your hands that can get it open. Knock yourself out.” Father Paul handed him the phone.
Jessica watched Billy study the phone as if it were some anomaly. He stroked his chin. She sneered to herself. It had to be him. Who else would go out their way to search her bed for something that could get him some points with Father Paul? Violated, she crossed her legs and set back in her seat.
“I have Blaze and Domo out there on patrol, watching the horizon for unwelcomed guests. I figured there may be a tracker in that thing. Who knows how often she’s been in contact with…whomever?”