~~~~~
The click of the door closing behind her sounded unnaturally loud in her ears, but she couldn’t vouch for it not sounding equally so in other, less tense circumstances where the halls of the school were equally empty. She had never really paid attention before even though she had been standing in the same spot at times even later (and emptier for that matter). There had never been a time that she would have classed the school hallways at night as creepy. It wasn’t the building, the time, or the seclusion of the place on a Friday night when no games were being played or activities were being held that caused that impression. It was actually the lack of solitude that had changed her mental image of the feel of the hallway. It had been invaded. It had been desecrated by the ill intent of the owner of the voice that had goaded her into stepping out into the hall.
She felt exposed and vulnerable even within the confines of the hall. In the office, she had felt less like she was prey even though there had still been a solid sense of being trapped. The office was still, somehow, a part of her space, and she had felt safer (not safe, safe wasn’t something she had felt since this whole thing had started) in it. There was a part of her that itched to reopen the door and slide back inside. It wanted to block the door with whatever she could manage and take the relative safety of the familiar place with only one entrance to watch and hope that they could hold out (she and Seth) until someone came to rescue them.
It wasn’t a practical thought. Practical, she figured, had very little to do with the impulses one experienced when one was scared. She was scared; she didn’t see how it was possible for her to not be. What she was more, however, was worried about the little boy that she had shut in a closet somewhere behind her in her best effort to protect him. Seth was enough to keep any other thoughts swirling through her head at bay in favor of what was practical. (Katherine was looking at it as practical; others might view her decided course of action as something different than practical. They might use words like chancy, delusional, and unnecessary. In the end, there wasn’t any room for anything of note to make its way to the front of her mind but the necessity of keeping the man she was walking out to meet away from the baby.)
She placed her hands down at her sides well away from the knob of the door, and she took several steps forward as if to remove herself from further temptation. The only sound that reached her ears was that of her footsteps (that sounded far too loud in the way that normal sounds do when everything else around them has gone quiet).
She stilled, and she waited. She couldn’t walk too far away. She couldn’t chance somehow missing the one who had claimed to be coming for her. It wasn’t as though she didn’t know that she had other options. It wasn’t as though she didn’t know that she could take off running down the hallway. She could try. She could hope he would follow but not quite catch her. She could hope that she would run into other people outside the boundaries of the school building and that everything would end perfectly with everyone safe and sound (and mind game playing stalkers locked safely away to never disturb her again). It might not end that way. He might not follow her at all. He might proceed directly to Seth. She couldn’t chance that. There would be any number of things that she would try if it was only her. It wasn’t only her. That fact changed everything -- even how she looked at self-preservation.
A movement caught her attention from the corner of her eye, and she turned her head to see the human shape that was approaching from the far end of the hallway. He stopped as he registered that she had seen him and nodded his head slightly as if acknowledging her notice. That (even in the midst of the other thoughts swirling around in her head) struck Katherine as being profoundly odd. It wasn’t as though she was in possession of some sort of a guide illustrating what to expect in the form of proper behavior from stalkers who intended you harm, but this didn’t seem quite right to her somehow.
“I am sorry,” he told her in the same tone of voice with which he had plagued her in the phone calls. She felt her eyes rolling even as the thought occurred to her that that slip might not be the best of ideas. Another part of her argued back that it hardly mattered -- he wanted to kill her. She had every right to roll her eyes at him if she felt like it. Whatever he was, sorry certainly didn’t seem to be at the top of the list of possibilities.
“I know you don’t think that is possible,” he replied as he moved close enough to her that his features became clear even in the dimness of the hall. Katherine decided that it made it worse that he looked so normal -- adult male, older, grey starting to appear in flecks in his hair, glasses that seemed to be inclined to slide down his nose. He looked like she should pass him on the street without a second glance, encounter him at the front of a classroom, or ask him for help at an office supply store. There was nothing about how he looked that screamed “be careful, he’s dangerous, watch out.” It didn’t seem right somehow -- even though she was hardly naive enough to not know that that was the way things worked. A part of her wanted him to look like someone who would cause her to feel as unsafe, uncertain, and lacking in control in her own life as he did. She wanted to feel like people would look at him and know -- that he would get picked up and locked away to never do this to anyone again, but she couldn’t think anything of the sort. She could only think that he would walk away from this and slip back into blending with everyone else, and she found that thought more disturbing than any impending harm that was heading her way.
“I can’t blame you for that,” he was still talking (and still moving closer). “I haven’t given you any reason to think anything else. But, I am sorry. I’m sorry that I had to scare you. I’m sorry that you even had to be involved. But, it was the only way. It is the only way. It had to be you. It has to be you because of her.”
He paused again and looked at her -- really looked at her as though he was studying her and trying to see something that was eluding him.
“I never would have looked at you and put it together,” he said as if there was something about that that confused him and had him stuck on the thought. There was something about that tone of voice and the way the words were spoken that struck Katherine with a rock solid conviction that there was something off about them (not that there was really anything about this situation that wasn’t off). They displayed not quite normal mental functioning -- like someone with OCD talking about something that he was fixated on at the moment.
“You really don’t look like her at all,” he shook his head and sighed. “This would be so much easier if you looked more like her. It would be even easier if you acted like her, but you don’t. It doesn’t change it. There isn’t any other way, but I guess it’s too much for me to hope for that you would understand that. I don’t really want to hurt you, you know? And I’m not going to, not really. All those words before that scared you were just words for her. I’ll make sure that it doesn’t hurt. You won’t even be awake to notice, okay? There’s no reason for you to be scared now. There’s no reason for there to have to be any pain. You’ll just go to sleep. That’s all. You don’t have to worry about anything ever again.”
He looked at her with an almost pleading look -- as if he was hoping that she would pat him on the back or tell him that it was all okay (or some such equally so not going to happen option).
“I can’t blame you for not understanding,” he said sounding as if he was trying to convince himself. “It isn’t your fault. None of this is your fault. You and I -- it isn’t our fault. It’s all theirs. You won’t see it this way, but I’m doing you a favor really. They’ll never have the chance to make you one of them. Your daddy took you away from them, but I’ll make it so they never get you at all.”
Katherine had just recognized that the object that he was clenching in his hand was a syringe when she heard the sound of running coming from the stairs at the end of the corridor.
“Kady!” A voice was yelling -- a voice that she knew even better t
han she knew the voice that had been haunting her phone.
“Caleb!” She yelled back partially out of sheer shock and partially in response to the sense of safety that flooded over her when she heard his voice.
She actually felt it served her right when she felt the pinch of the needle entering her arm. She had turned her back on her assailant when she turned her head in the direction of Caleb’s voice. That had been a ridiculously unintelligent thing to do. The last thing that she saw before she succumbed to the overwhelming urge to close her eyes and surrender to the blackness that was rushing up to meet her was the stairway door flying back against the wall as Caleb entered the hall in a blind sprint.
She didn’t get a satisfactory answer out of Caleb as to what had happened next. Even years later, he avoided that topic of conversation. The short version (and Katherine had no doubt that it was a heavily edited version at that) was that her stalker hadn’t been expecting anyone else to show up and hadn’t been prepared to be challenged by a boy (still a kid but nearly six feet tall) who was more than capable of punching him in the face. At heart, Caleb’s story was that Chad Wiltshire had been short sighted and counting on only dealing with a petite teenage girl who was out cold and had completely lost any sense of what he was doing when things didn’t go the way he expected.
It wasn’t a bad explanation. The police certainly didn’t question it or give it a second thought. Katherine might not have given it a second thought herself if she didn’t know Caleb as well as she did. It was there in his eyes where she could clearly see it -- something else had happened. He wasn’t telling something. She knew that look far better than she wanted to know it. It appeared on Caleb on a regular basis. She also knew that look well enough to know that Caleb wasn’t going to let whatever it was slip.
Caleb bottled up secrets like other people put family jewelry in a safe.
Chad Wiltshire was an escapee from a mental institution. He had disappeared from it five months before, and he was now found and returned. That seemed to be all the local authorities cared about. Why look for rhyme and reason from someone who was clearly insane? That seemed to be the general consensus. Mention was made of the fact that he had had a daughter with dark hair around the same age as Katherine, and that was enough to keep anyone who had been inclined to maybe ask a few more questions happy that they understood well enough what had happened. To them, that fit right in with the repetitions of how Katherine “didn’t look much like her.”
Her dad just wanted to know that the man who wanted to harm his daughter was locked away (far away) and wouldn’t be bothering his little girl again. There was a muffled sort of semi apology from at least one member of the local police department about not taking Katherine quite as seriously as they perhaps should have. There were a few days of Katherine being the center of copious amounts of gossip about her near death experience and rumors about Caleb having fought off a gang of mob hit men that had come after her (they never did trace out how that particular one had gotten started). Caleb and Katherine both had flushed and tried to sink back into the woodwork at all of the attention, and things had gone back to what passed for their normal.
Everyone moved on; everyone figured it was all over. The only lasting change to the state of Katherine’s life was the cell phone that her father insisted be on her person at all times from that moment forward. The Reynolds didn’t even drop her as their babysitter (which was a bit mind boggling if she was perfectly honest).
It didn’t seem to occur to anyone (at least not anyone that was mentioning it to her) that it was odd that someone so mentally unstable that he was going to fixate on, torment, and then kill a girl just because she was in the same age bracket as his daughter (and happened to be a brunette) would wait five months to take such an action or travel across five states before picking a target.
Maybe that was just a personal evaluation. Maybe that was just Katherine overthinking because she had been the target and there was a part of her (a part that seemed to get more vocal with each casual dismissal of there being any need for further information that she received) that really wanted to know why he had chosen her.
It didn’t make sense -- much in the way that the things that he had been saying to her immediately before Caleb arrived didn’t make sense in the context of what everyone decided had happened. No one else had heard those things though, and everyone in an official capacity hushed her up and told her there was no need for her to keep going over it -- they knew all they needed to know. “We’ll find you a good counselor if you need to talk it out,” they told her. There was little chance of that. She wasn’t damaged. She wanted answers.
Katherine couldn’t (more like wouldn’t) talk to her dad about it. He had been petrified. She wasn’t going to keep dragging him through it just because she couldn’t get things to make sense in her head.
There was always Caleb, but the one time she had tried everything had gotten completely derailed. She had found him sitting on her front steps on Saturday afternoon when she and her dad had finally been allowed to go home. They had actually made her stay overnight at the hospital to make sure that what he had given her was well and truly out of her system. Between overzealous medical personnel and swarming members of law enforcement reassuring them that everything was fine and under control, it had taken forever to get out of there.
Her dad had clapped her best friend on the shoulder while they had exchanged some sort of nonverbal communication that Katherine couldn’t completely follow because she didn’t always translate guy code so well (she thought it was something along the lines of “thank you” and “of course” and “she takes an awful lot of taking care of for someone so small” but that might have just been her imagination projecting).
“I’m off to take a shower,” her dad had announced letting them know that he was giving them a chance to talk without adult interruption. Subtle wasn’t always the man’s strong suit, but she loved him anyway.
She was tempted to say something snarky to break the strange tension that came over the two of them when her dad left the vicinity, but nothing came to mind. Besides, Caleb had his overthinking things look on his face, and while she usually tried to break him out of that with some sort of an attempt at humor, she couldn’t fault him for overthinking -- she surely was.
“Thank you,” she told him with nothing but sincerity in her voice.
“I’m mad at you,” he replied not looking her in the eyes. That was not what she had been expecting.
“What?” She practically squeaked.
“He was going to kill you, Kady,” he still refused to look at her. “He was going to kill you, and you were just standing there.”
“Seth was . . .,” she started, but he didn’t let her get very far.
“I know that,” he huffed. “I know that, and I know what you were probably thinking. That’s why I’m mad at you.”
“You’re mad at me because I was trying to protect Seth?” She demanded getting a little annoyed in turn. She wasn’t trying to claim that she had come up with the best plan ever, but it wasn’t like she had just woken up that morning and thought “oh, I think today would be a lovely day to get a psycho to come after me.”
“I’m mad at you because you wouldn’t be you if you hadn’t tried to protect Seth.”
“That doesn’t even make sense!”
“I know that!” He replied before dropping his voice back down. She really wished he would look at her; it would make it so much easier to figure out what was going on in his head. “I know it makes me sound selfish and like a jerk. It doesn’t even make sense even in my head, but I’m still mad at you.” Katherine got her wish as he finally looked at her and met her gaze (and like wishes often go, she half wished he hadn’t). She’d never seen Caleb look so lost and devastated.
“I thought I was too late,” he told her before she suddenly found herself buried in his chest. At any other time, she would have made a smart a
leck comment about him cutting off her air supply, but she just tried to make comforting noises and muttered things like “I’m okay.” She would have patted him on the arm or back or something, but he had her arms pinned between them -- she couldn’t wiggle them lose from the death grip he had on her. “I thought you were gone.”
She wasn’t sure how much later it was that he finally (mostly) let her go. They were sitting side by side on her steps with one of his arms still wrapped around her shoulders and her head still tucked against his chest. He hadn’t been crying -- she would have heard the snuffling in his breathing or have felt tears dripping into her hair if he had been, but he had been upset and really rather intensely focused. He seemed calmer. She thought it might be okay to try to put things back on a conversational track. She had questions, and Caleb was really the only one she had to try to help her sort out the answers.
“What happened?” She asked softly. He still heard her; she could tell by the way he stiffened back up against her.
“You collapsed, and I thought . . . I thought . . . I was . . .,” he stumbled over the words. She could feel him shake his head “no” even though she couldn’t see it. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Caleb,” she tried.
“No.” She knew that tone. She wasn’t in a mood to appreciate it much, but she knew that tone.
“Fine,” she knew her annoyance came out in her voice but she didn’t try to check it. She was the one who had had the near death experience. If anyone should be allowed to play the I don’t want to talk about it card, then it was her. If she wanted to talk about it, then she was inclined to think that other people should at least attempt to humor her.
“Why were you at the school in the first place?”
He sighed, but she could tell that he was going to give her an answer this time by the way that his hand started brushing up and down her arm as if he was trying to brace her for hearing something unpleasant.
“I came over here to bring back that book I borrowed for our history report,” he started.
“But you knew I was working at school,” she challenged knowing that there was something else to that.
“I got into it with my parents, okay? I needed to take a long walk, and that seemed like as good an excuse as any.”
“Sorry,” she told him trying to crane her neck to look up at him, “do you want to talk about it?”
“Yeah, it doesn’t really seem like that big of a deal at the moment,” he commented loosening his grip a little so that she could scoot far enough that they could actually make eye contact. “I figured I would just leave it with your dad if he was home.”
“Which he wasn’t,” Katherine commented.
“Or on the porch if he wasn’t,” Caleb continued as if she hadn’t said anything. He made a really strange sort of clicking sound in his throat before he kept going. “The door was open. It was wide open, but there were no lights on inside. I thought maybe it didn’t get pulled closed all the way when somebody left and the wind caught it, but I flicked the light on ‘cause I thought I’d leave your book inside. There was . . .,” his arm tightened against her again. “There was a message.”
“Message?” She prompted when he didn’t keep going.
“He had been in your house, Kady. Okay? The details don’t really matter. He had been in your house, and he left a message expressing his condolences for your dad having to plan a funeral.”
Katherine shot up and was halfway to her door before Caleb grabbed her hand and pulled her back down.
“Your dad didn’t see it,” he told her. “The police took pictures and checked over everything while you guys were at the hospital, and they told my mom it was okay if we cleaned it up before you came home.”
“I was stupid, Kady. I saw it and panicked. All I could think was that I had to get to you before he did something to you. I should have taken three seconds to make a stupid phone call. I should have . . .,” he trailed off (and she found herself smushed up against him again).
“Hey,” she chided. “Don’t do that. Everything’s fine. It all turned out fine.”
“I could have gotten you killed because I wasn’t thinking,” he insisted.
“I think you kept me from getting killed because you weren’t thinking,” she countered. “What would have happened if you stopped and called the police?”
“They could have gotten to you quicker,” he replied instantly.
“How do you figure that?” She inquired.
“Huh?”
“Look, you and I both know that they weren’t really taking the whole phone call thing very seriously. It’s not like they expect the town to be overrun with crazies all of the time. They would have asked you questions. They would have wanted explanations and details. Who knows how long it would have actually taken before they caught on to what you were trying to tell them and actually sent somebody out to check on things at the school? Stop beating yourself up already; you got there in time. We don’t know that anybody would have if you had done things differently.”
“Barely,” he muttered somewhere above where she was still being held in place.
“Pardon?”
“I barely got there in time.”
“You do realize that barely still means you got there in time?” She decided to change tracks. “You do realize this is going to be all over school on Monday?” She asked him. “You’ll have the cheerleading squad ahhing over your heroic rescuer status.”
“That’s not funny,” he told her, but she could feel some of the tension leaving his frame.
“Oh, it’s definitely funny from where I’m sitting,” she replied.
“You could have died.” She was half tempted to ask him if he didn’t think she was already aware of that.
“I didn’t.” She responded instead.
“I might have . . .,” he tried, but she wasn’t going to let him put the conversation on repeat.
“Nope, no what ifs and no moping,” she declared. “You get hero status. Prepare to fend off legions of fangirls.”
“You’re such a brat sometimes,” he told her, and she smiled because she knew it meant that she had successfully distracted him from the dark path his thoughts had been focused on taking.
“Legions of fangirls,” she enunciated very carefully.
Then, he was tickling her. They were both laughing; everything was okay for the moment. They were just being them -- Kady and Caleb being Kady and Caleb. That didn’t mean that she had forgotten her questions. That didn’t mean that she put away her wanting to know why. She wouldn’t obsess over it so that it got in the way of the rest of her life. She wouldn’t dwell, but whenever an opportunity happened to present itself, she was going to dig. She was going to understand someday what it was that had made Chad Wiltshire come after her of all people, and she was going to understand why what he had been doing was so important to him that he had made a tape of his taunting of her over the intercom at the school and left it for the police to find. Insane was just insane was what others had decided, but it was far too personal for Katherine to leave it at that.
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