Ryan trailed behind me, a hand on my shoulder, another on my waist, following my lead until I eased the basement door shut behind us and flipped on the overhead bulbs, which seemed to dance in the dark.
We bumped up against boxes and each other as we raced through the stacks, even in the light, on the way to the safe room. I didn’t bother hiding the code from Ryan this time: 23-12-37, and we were in. The security feeds flickered to life as the power turned on. But all I could see were dark, stationary objects in the orbs of light. The black iron fence, lit up and circling the house in a pattern I knew by heart.
There were plastic boxes lining the shelves from floor to ceiling on the three remaining walls. Flashlights with batteries and other light sources, boxed food, blankets and bottles of water. I tried to remember what she’d said about the radio—something about communication, even without electricity, even without phones. She’d truly prepared for everything.
I pulled the boxes down, one at a time, but Ryan stayed outside the door. “You can come in,” I said, pulling down the clear tubs that looked like they held electronics.
“I wasn’t sure if you wanted me to.”
I had asked him to turn around earlier. I had wanted to keep this from him. The darker parts of my life, the scarier parts. The part of me that was my blood. I had wanted to be anyone other than who I was. But there was no hiding anymore.
“Here,” I said, sliding one of the containers across the floor, closer to him. I opened the top, but Ryan was looking past it—past me—his face scrunched up in confusion. “Do you guys have a safe room inside a safe room or something?”
“Huh?” I dropped the flashlights I’d grabbed from the top of the box. Turned around. Saw what Ryan was talking about. The corner of the blue rug was folded up, caught on the corner of the crate, and in the floor was another compartment. A small square, completely flat, like a large bathroom tile, but with a tiny hole the size of my finger, to pull it up.
“Oh.” I removed the square tile and leaned it against the back wall.
It wasn’t deep—just the size of a safe, everything resting on a square piece of wood below. Inside were zippered, opaque pouches. I unzipped the first, and knew immediately why it was hidden. Cash. Large stacks of crisp hundred-dollar bills bound together with rubber bands.
“Whoa,” Ryan said.
“Oh,” I repeated.
There were two pouches like this, stacked full of money. Right. This made sense, if I thought like my mother. Without electricity, there would be no electronic banking. She was just preparing for everything.
The third pouch looked much emptier, and I expected a few stacks of bills in that, too.
But there weren’t. There were passports.
Our birth certificates and other personal documents were kept in a fireproof safe in Mom’s office upstairs. Maybe these were copies, for safekeeping. Or maybe these were the things from my mom’s previous life, long ago—before she was taken.
I’d never had a passport. Where would I go? I was barely allowed the ten miles to my school. And I’d never had any interest in going any farther.
I opened the passport on top, saw my mother’s picture staring back at me, with a plain white wall in the background. But this wasn’t her old one from when she was a teenager. This was new. Her hair, long and straight, parted harshly down the middle. And that shirt—I knew that shirt. Plain black with a scalloped collar. I’d ordered it for her two Christmases ago. I checked the date, and sure enough, it was issued just over a year ago.
But then my eye caught a mistake. The name. Amy Douglas.
Maybe she’d had to change it before—before she became Mandy Thomas—and never told me. She’d changed it, after she escaped, so reporters would leave her alone. So we would be free from the horrors of her past: the infamous kidnapping, her abusive home, a life that had gone from bad to much worse. She’d given me the last name Thomas when I was born, and she changed hers to match it as soon as she could. I never knew her any other way. Maybe this was a mistake.
I pulled out the second passport, expecting a corrected version.
My fingers tingled. The face staring back was my own.
The girl looked happy in front of the white wall behind her—our own living room, the wall between the two curtained windows. This picture was taken the first day I went to high school. I remembered my mother making a big deal out of it—All mothers have shots of their child’s first day of school. Come on, let’s do it! Acting too cheerful—faking it, for both of our benefit. She’d stood close, snapped the photo, said, Mug shot acquired, and I’d never seen the picture again.
And now here it was, beside a girl’s name that was not mine. Lauren Douglas. Born in late July, a few months before my own birthday. The passports trembled in my hand.
“What is it?” Ryan asked, searching through the boxes near the doorway.
“Nothing,” I said, storing it all away. The room was buzzing again, but it looked like I was the only one who heard it. “Just our documents for safekeeping.” I replaced the missing tile, smoothed the rug back over it.
Ryan went back to working methodically, his hands not shaking with fear. Like maybe there wasn’t someone just outside the gates who had done something to my mother. Like we weren’t trapped inside the house, a house set up to protect us because she knew it would happen.
And now there were passports in the floor—a version of us I didn’t understand.
He repacked a box, slid it back my way. Opened another. “How about this?” he asked, holding the radio over his head in triumph.
It was old and brown, with a rabbit-ear antenna and a black dial that moved a red line between stations. He flipped the power switch, and static cut through the room at a loud volume. Static, and music, and radio stations. “It doesn’t work both ways,” he said.
“God, this is all useless,” I said. When what I really meant was I am useless.
But Ryan was looking over my shoulder, his gaze fixed on the monitors with his head cocked to the side.
“What?” I asked, twisting around to see.
“I saw something,” he said. He stood, his shoulders turned tense, and he stepped closer to the security screens. He reached a finger up, touching a dark corner. “There. I saw…”
He turned back around, and I saw his throat move. His eyes were wide, and I reached for his shoulder, like I had in the car—
And then I heard it. A dull thud. Something that seemed to reverberate through my bones. A sharp hiss, like air leaking from a balloon, and all the lights went dark.
I groped for the flashlights that were somewhere between us on the cold basement floor. I couldn’t see anything—not even Ryan’s shape in the darkness. The static of the radio grew louder as all the electrical appliances in the house wound down to silence. No air circulating through the vents, or coolant in the refrigerator, or the faint buzz of the lights. Just the crackle of an out-of-tune station, Ryan’s breathing, and my own.
My hand found Ryan’s leg before the flashlight, and he gripped my arm, flicking on a flashlight with his other hand. He shined it in my face, and I held up my arm to block the light.
“What’s happening?” he whispered.
But he had to already know. It’s what my mother had always feared. It’s what she prepared me for. “Someone’s coming,” I whispered.
I felt his breath, warm against my face, coming sharp and fast.
The power was off. And the alarm—the alarm was off, and the gates could be forced open, and there would be no sound—no cry for help.
“The generator,” I said, moving closer to the light, keeping my voice low. “The backup electricity will turn on in a few minutes.”
But without electricity, there was no current running through the wire atop the gate. The spikes didn’t matter. The gate lock could be disengaged with a few tools, the doors forced apart. Whoever was out there could slip through the gap, and then all that remained were the walls of the house itself.
<
br /> The generator had to kick in first. It had to kick in soon.
“How many?” Ryan said. The light jerked across the boxes of the basement as he stood. “How many minutes?”
“Three,” I said, already counting down in my head from 180.
He swung the light to the stairs.
There were ways in; even I knew this. We had gates and locks and bars and cameras—but beyond that, there were window seals that could be broken. Latches that could be overcome.
We couldn’t see what was happening out there, not until the generator kicked in.
The not knowing was the worst. My hands groped across the cold, dusty ground. The seconds slowly ticked down—150.
Come on, come on. My hand connected with the other flashlight, and I headed for the stairs.
“What are you doing?” Ryan asked, grabbing my hand. I felt my blood pulsing, my heart racing.
A hundred twenty. Two more minutes. Her voice in my ear, a lifetime of education. You have to pay attention. “I have to see,” I said, weaving around a stack of boxes. Ryan was close on my heels. I spun around at the base of the stairs, realizing I’d left the safe room door open. It felt unnatural, and like it was calling to us—something that wasn’t meant to be left exposed. Like it all might disintegrate in the fresh air, paper turned to ash.
A hundred ten. No time. The stairs creaked as we made our way to the first floor. I ran my flashlight quickly across the walls. Everything was still, and safe. The curtains were pulled tight, and there were no lights—not even from the clock over the stove or the glow of the alarm panel. Eighty more seconds.
I turned off my flashlight, crouching low and peering out from between the curtains—but it was impossible to see anything clearly from this distance. It was impossible to make out any shapes in the dark, other than the wall, the trees, darker than the night sky.
But then the shadows shifted, or something moved, and I saw the faintest light near the back gate. The beam from a penlight, maybe, as someone worked at the manual locks of the gate, trying to disengage the bars from the concrete base.
Sixty. One minute. “I’m going back down,” I said. “To arm the gates as soon as the power turns back.”
But Ryan didn’t pull back from the window. “Ryan,” I said. Fifty-one, fifty…
I put my arms around his waist and tugged him back. “Ryan.” I knew how this could happen—how the fear could paralyze you if you let it. I’d sat at the kitchen table, immobilized, just moments earlier—and he’d been the one to pull me out of it. Forty-three, forty-two…
I gripped him tighter. “We have to go,” I said. I felt his muscles trembling, his body on edge.
He spun around, the curtains dropping in a wave behind him. “Go,” he said, pushing me ahead of him. “Go, go, go.”
I ran. My hands brushed the furniture and the walls, my fingers finding the corners and the doorway. I turned the flashlight on once we were back within the basement.
Thirty-one, thirty, twenty-nine…I stood beside the alarm panel, and I waited.
The waiting was agony. Seconds, stretching out. Like Ryan in the car, after I’d seen the emptiness below us. Waiting for him to pull us up to safety. Waiting, and then falling…
Twenty, nineteen, eighteen…
I heard something click through the basement walls. Something hum. A motor revving, winding up—the generator underground, coming to life. My body uncoiling with relief.
The basement lights flickered once with the surge before turning back off, and the freezer in the corner kicked in with a whoosh. I hit the reset button, heard the alarm beep once—Ready—and hit the code to arm it. I tripped over the open boxes on the way to the safe room, turned the video feed back on, and stared at the black-and-white images. The gates were closed.
But had someone gotten in when we hadn’t been looking?
“Why are the lights still out?” Ryan asked. They weren’t on in the basement, and they weren’t on in the yard any longer. The screen was mostly just a dark gray of shadows on shadows.
“The generator can’t power the whole house indefinitely. There are gasoline containers in the front gate booth, but…it’s still only connected to the essentials.”
“What are the essentials?” Ryan asked, because it was obvious that our idea of essential was probably not the same as his.
“Refrigerator, freezer, heat, and surveillance,” I said.
“There,” said Ryan, pointing at the screen. A flash of light at the front gate. Outside the front gate. His finger was shaking, and he pulled it back, balled his hands into fists, like he was embarrassed by it.
Suddenly, on the back monitor, another flash of light swung in an arc, like a flashlight was rolling across the ground. It came to rest at the metal gate, illuminating a second shadow. He was using the light.
He was down low, near the ground. And he was digging.
My eyes kept darting from screen to screen—front gate, back gate, light to light. There were two people.
“They know we’re in here,” Ryan said. “And they don’t care.”
The outside lights I’d turned on, his car out front—yes, they knew.
He gritted his teeth. “Open the door.”
“What?” I asked, wheeling on him. We’d both been staring at the screen, watching and waiting.
“The front door. Set off the alarm.”
“It’s not connected to the police,” I said. It was a warning for us to get in the safe room and figure out what was happening first, before calling for help. My mother thought it wasn’t safe to be on the police radar for a false alarm, not with our living situation so precarious. All it would take was a nudge and we might fall. Besides, right now without the phone lines, there was no way for the alarm system to call out, even if it had been connected.
“Yeah, but it’ll be loud. How close are the neighbors?”
Not that close, I thought. But if Annika had gotten back home…would she hear a high-pitched alarm? Would she try calling me, and then call the police? Or would she think this was just another odd thing about my life here?
“The friend I borrowed the car from,” I said. “She might hear.”
He held out his hand, and I took it, and I thought how ridiculous it was to be nervous of something like this in another circumstance, like before math class, earlier today. Now I held on to it and hoped it grounded me enough to keep me thinking, to keep me safe.
I followed him back up the stairs and went for the front door.
Ryan peered out the front window. His car was somewhere out there, around the bend, parked outside the gate on the side of the road. He glanced at me, and back to the gate, and I knew exactly what he was thinking.
If both people were at the back gate, could we make it?
Could we get through the gates undetected, start up his car, and make a run for it, leaving the abandoned house to them while we went for help? Or would they follow, drive us off the road before we could call for help—
My breath started coming too fast, and I steadied myself against the wall.
“We should’ve left, the second we thought something was wrong,” Ryan said. He balled up his fists again. “That’s what I’m supposed to do. That’s what I’m trained to do.” I felt the tension leeching from his body, filling up the room.
Really he must’ve been thinking, I should’ve stayed at the ceremony. I should’ve gone back with Emma and Holly and that other girl. I should’ve decided to call the police for myself, before we heard the car.
Really he must’ve been thinking, My life is in danger again, because of you.
I stared at the windows, at the doors, at the black iron gates, and I saw them all through his eyes. They were not his protection, like they were for me. He was nothing more than trapped here. With me. For no reason.
Hanging from the car, tumbling past me, tethered by a rope—his fate tied to mine.
I had to get him out of here.
“What’s that guy even doing ou
t front?” he continued. “Why not help the other one, out back. It’s like…” He swallowed. Shook his head. Changed his mind.
“Are you ready?” I asked, before he could give voice to the thing I realized too: It’s like they’re watching for us. Making sure we don’t leave.
“Okay,” Ryan said. “Yes. Open the door.”
I flipped the lock and put my hand on the knob. Paused. This house will keep us safe.
No. We weren’t safe. We were trapped.
I turned the knob and the front door cracked open, a cold gust of air pushing through.
I listened to the warning beep, and then, ten seconds later, the alarm started flashing. The light from the display flashed red, over and over, and there was a low, periodic buzz coming from the panel.
That’s it?
It wasn’t loud enough. It was only enough for us in this house—to wake us, or warn us. My alarm clock was more obnoxious than this.
It was only a warning—a call to action. But just for us.
And now I was wondering how safe an alarm truly kept us if it didn’t call for help.
—
Ryan leaned into the door, shutting it, turning the locks, like he’d done it a thousand times before. “Turn it off,” he said.
“Why?” I asked.
The buzzing of the alarm kept sounding, and we had to talk too loudly. “I don’t think anyone can hear that,” Ryan said.
But if I turned it off, it felt like we were doing nothing. “If someone drives by, they might hear it. Maybe someone out for a walk. I don’t know, it’s something, isn’t it?”
He shook his head. “I can’t think.”
“Do you have a car alarm? Where are your keys? Do you have a panic button?”
“My car doesn’t even have doors sometimes—it definitely doesn’t have an alarm.” He hit his palm against the door. “What do they want?”
I couldn’t think, like he said, with the buzzing of the alarm. I couldn’t concentrate.
The Safest Lies Page 11