By “safe place” she means that the location is kept secret. Even most of our volunteers don’t know where it is.
“Men have found it before,” I say.
Sister Martine doesn’t argue with that. Over the years children have told their fathers where they are. Women have told their sisters-in-law, who have told their brothers. Men have come to the shelter and demanded to be let in. And because the men have come, the police have come too.
“Are you afraid that the man who hurt them will find them?” she asks.
I shake my head. Then I tell her about the knife, the blood, and the news of the dead man in Ridgewood. She listens to it all with no sign of shock or judgment. Doreen might be the best at talking people down, but Sister Martine is the best listener I’ve ever met. I’ve told her things I’ve never told anyone else.
“Do you believe it was the boy who stabbed his father?” she asks when I finish.
“I don’t know,” I say. “If I asked the boy I think he would tell me.”
“But you don’t want to ask the boy.” She looks back out the window where Oren is pulling his sled up the hill, laughing as Alice throws a snowball at him. “Because whichever one did it, the end result will be that one of them gets sent away. Still, I worry that if we hide them, they will have to live with that guilt between them forever.”
“The guilt of killing an abusive man?” I ask.
“The guilt of killing a parent,” she replies, turning now to me. “No one should have to live with that.”
I avoid her eyes and look out the window myself. “They’ll have each other. Isn’t that what matters most?”
When I look back at Sister Martine she holds my gaze for a long moment. It’s hard keeping my eyes level with that blue stare, as blinding as the light reflecting off the snow. But I do, and after a long pause she gives one curt nod. “I’ll make a few calls, set up a place up north. Bring them to me tomorrow.”
I’m about to tell her that they’ve got their stuff and can stay here tonight; she above anyone will understand why I can’t have the boy a second night. But before I can, I see something that freezes the words in my throat. A police car has pulled into the driveway.
Chapter Seven
Alice
OREN SEES THE policeman before I do. We’re climbing back up the hill, both of us soaked from our many falls in the snow (and the snowballs Oren has slipped down my collar). But I don’t feel cold. I would go up and down this hill with Oren forever to keep that open look on his face, one I haven’t seen in months.
But then he freezes. The blood drains from his face and his features go sharp the way they do when he’s scared, like he’s drawn into himself to make a smaller target. I follow his gaze up the hill and see a dark figure silhouetted against the sky. For a moment I think it’s Davis, come back from the dead to punish us for thinking we could get away from him. I’d follow you to the ends of the earth, he told me once. I’d thought it was romantic, until I recognized it for the threat it was.
But then the figure turns and I see the uniform and that the man is bulkier and fairer than Davis. He’s turning because someone has called his name. Frank. A figure in a purple poncho is wading across the snow, arms flapping like a big-ass bird trying to take off. It’s Mattie, hailing the policeman like he’s her best friend. She must have called him to turn us in.
Oren tugs at my sleeve. “Come on,” he says. “Mattie’s trying to distract him so we can get away.”
As if. It’s more likely she’s trying to save her own skin. But I don’t need to tell Oren that. We do need to get away.
Oren pulls me toward the hedge that borders the sledding hill. I’d barely noticed it before, but Oren leads us straight to an opening in the dense, prickly wall and through it into a path bordered by more tall hedges. “It’s a maze!” Oren shouts, the color back in his face. He loves mazes. After we read the story about Theseus and the Minotaur he begged for a puzzle book with mazes he could solve. This is like his daydream come to life. “This is the perfect place to hide! C’mon.” He drops the sled and my hand and takes the right-hand turn.
I follow, hissing at him, “Slow down!” I don’t want to shout in case the policeman and Mattie hear us. I especially don’t want to call Oren’s name.
Oren looks over his shoulder and laughs before rounding another corner. Shit. I run to catch up, stumbling through the shin-deep snow. He’s turning our flight into a game. And whose fault is that? For months I’ve done the same thing. Let’s pretend we’re planning a trip! I’d said when I got the bus schedules. Let’s make it a secret. And then the one I feel worst about now: Let’s be extra nice to your dad.
I’d seen the look of hurt on Oren’s face after that one, as if I were telling him it was his fault when Davis hit him. After all, that was what Davis told him. Why do you have to go and make me so mad? Are you trying to work on my last nerve? Didn’t I tell you last time that this is what would happen? Aren’t you listening to me? Are you deaf or just stupid? Do you want me to hit you?
When I turn the next corner Oren is gone. My mouth floods with acid. He’s run away from me. All these weeks of telling him to be nice to Daddy, to tiptoe around Davis’s moods, so we could stay safe long enough to get away, what Oren has heard is that I blame him for the things Davis does. I have again and again failed to keep him safe. And now he’s taken his revenge by stranding me in this stupid maze like I’m the father in that horrible movie that Davis let him watch one night that gave him nightmares for a month.
A spark of anger flares in my chest. After all I’ve done for him, to be lumped together with Davis . . . but then I see the footprints in the snow. Little-boy feet splayed out like a duck’s. Duckfoot, Davis called him. He’s just playing a game with me. I still feel that ember of anger at my core, but I tamp it down. Better he still wants to play games.
As I follow the tracks of his booted feet I remember another game we used to play. Oren called it Tin Can. It began on a snow day when we were stuck inside. I made us grilled cheese sandwiches and Campbell’s tomato soup for lunch, Oren helping me pour the condensed soup from the can and then washing it out for recycling. He said his teacher had shown him how you could make a telephone out of two cans tied together with string. Sound traveled along the string because of vibrations. When I looked skeptical he insisted we try it.
I found another can amid Davis’s empties, used a screwdriver to punch holes in their bottoms, and tied them together with a length of heavy twine from Davis’s toolbox. You have to make the string taut, Oren told me. I stood in the kitchen and Oren took the can all the way down to the last bedroom. The house was what was called a shotgun shack, so he could go a long way without turning any corners. Look away so you can’t cheat and read my lips, he’d shouted. Which made me smile, because if I could hear him without the phone, what was the point of the phone anyway? But I turned to the wall, pressed the can to my ear, and waited.
Can I tell you a secret? Oren’s voice was a whisper in my ear, but it was as if he were standing right beside me. Over and out. That means you can talk now. You have to answer my question.
I moved the can from my ear to my lips and whispered, Yes, you can tell me anything. I moved the can back to my ear before remembering I had to say “over and out,” but Oren was already talking, a slow, steady murmur that traveled the length of the house and then traveled down my spine to settle into the pit of my stomach. They’re still there now, all those whispered words, all the awful things that Davis had done to him—the taunts, the threats, the slaps. They’re what led to my being here now in a ridiculous maze (why would nuns have a maze anyway?) following tracks in the snow—
Only the tracks have abruptly stopped. I am standing looking at an untouched square of white snow surrounding a statue of a woman holding up snow-covered arms as if remarking on the emptiness of the space around her. I check to see if Oren is hiding behind the statue but he is not. I look back at the tracks I was following but my tracks have covered
Oren’s. As if I’ve wiped them out.
I choke back a sob. I’m being ridiculous. There has to be an explanation—
And I know what it is. In that horrible movie the little boy leads his crazy father into the maze and then walks backward in his own footprints to trick him. That’s what Oren has done to me. He’s tricked me and abandoned me.
I sink down into the snow, my back against the statue’s stone base, and try to get my breathing under control. That boy poured his secrets into my ear and I did nothing. He could be making it up, I thought. No one will believe you, I told myself. Especially the last thing Oren had said. He couldn’t have known that. But the truth was I was afraid of what Davis would do if I told anyone. I put my own safety before Oren’s.
I cry until the tears freeze on my face, until I am so cold I might as well become another statue at the feet of the stone saint.
And what good will that do?
The voice—a boy’s voice—is so close that I snap open my eyes, sure it is Oren come back for me. But I’m alone. I notice, though, something I hadn’t noticed before. Across from the opening in the hedge I came through there’s another opening. And there are footprints there. I get up to look. They’re the same boot prints. The same duckfooted gait. Oren. Somehow he crossed the expanse of the square and went out the other opening without making a footprint in the square. Did he jump onto the base of the statue? Or sweep the prints away? Maybe the wind blew them away.
I wipe the tears from my face and follow the footprints back through the maze. When I finally exit I find Oren standing to the side of the opening, the sled by his side, looking up at the top of the hill. Mattie is still talking to the policeman, flapping her arms around like an agitated goose. The policeman’s watching her, arms crossed over his broad chest. At last he turns away from her and heads to his cruiser.
“It’s okay,” Oren says, looking back at me. “Mattie told him a story to get rid of him.”
I don’t ask how he knows that. I kneel down and turn him around to look at me, my hands digging into his narrow, frail shoulders. “Don’t ever run away from me like that again,” I cry, my voice coming out angrier than I meant it to. “You scared me half to death.”
His eyes get wide the way they would when Davis yelled at him. “I just wanted to show you I could take care of myself,” he says in a small scared whisper. “Didn’t you see how I doubled back like that boy in the movie?”
“Don’t make things up,” I say, shaking him just a little. I’m not the same as Davis, it’s just that when he makes things up it scares me. Like the thing he’d said that day into the can. “I saw your tracks leading out the other way.”
“What other way?” Oren asks, the tears spilling now, his mouth an O of hurt. “I came back the same way.”
But that can’t be. No more than Oren could have known what he told me through the tin can. I’d believed all the things he said that Davis had done to him. But after he’d listed them all he said, It won’t stop there. If we don’t leave he’ll kill both of us.
Chapter Eight
Mattie
I’LL GO SPEAK with him,” Sister Martine says, getting to her feet. “You go out the back door and get the boy and his mother away. I’ll call you later to arrange a meeting place.”
This would be a fine plan if Sister Martine could walk at a regular pace, but despite her best efforts (and some very un-nun-like muttering), by the time we get to the front door the officer has already gotten out of his cruiser and is walking toward the rim of the sledding hill.
There’s no way Sister Martine is going across that snow. I tell her I’ll call her later and wade into the drifts, calling Frank’s name. Because of course that’s who it is. Frank Barnes, Delphi’s chief of police. The last man I want to talk to right now.
On the plus side I don’t have to worry about how ridiculous I look. Frank crosses his arms over his chest and watches me wade through the snow. He could come to me, but he’s not going to make this any easier. For him I’ll always be the spoiled brat who grew up in the big house on the hill. Judge Lane’s daughter.
The Little Judge, he’d call me when I accused him of cheating at Monopoly or when I’d balk at some quasi-criminal prank he’d dreamed up, like sneaking into the courthouse at night or dressing up the statue of George Washington in women’s clothing. For a police chief’s son he had remarkably little respect for the law, which I’d always attributed to a contrary streak in his nature. Most things about Frank have changed since we were kids playing pranks—except for that contrary streak. He’s happy to stand and let me make a fool of myself bleating like a stray lamb stuck out in the snow.
I have the urge to give him the finger and turn around, but just past Frank’s bulky shape (he’s put on weight this winter, but then so have I) I spy a flash of Oren’s red jacket and blue cap on the hill. If Frank sees Oren and Alice he’ll know they’re not local. He’ll want to talk to them, and then he might connect them to that mother and son on the run from New Jersey.
“Yoo-hoo!” I call, hating myself for sounding like the dotty old spinster everyone thinks I am. But sometimes it’s better to play the harmless old lady. “Frank Barnes! Just who I wanted to talk to. Do you have a minute? Or are you out here looking to ticket speeding sledders?”
He doesn’t crack a smile. “I don’t know, Mattie, are you planning to sled? If you sled the way you drive I may have to.”
I force myself to laugh as I traverse the last few feet between us. Frank has pulled me over for speeding half a dozen times over the years and once for an illegal U-turn on Main Street at three in the morning. I’ve accused him of lying in wait for me in various alleys and lay-bys throughout the county. “Oh, I think my sledding days are behind me. I’d probably break a hip.” Out of the corner of my eye I see Oren pulling his mother toward the hedge maze. Clever boy. If they can hide in there until I get rid of Frank we’ll be okay.
“I think you’re made of stronger stuff than that, Mattie. What are you doing out here?”
“Just dropping off some donations.” I glance back at the building so I don’t have to meet Frank’s eyes. We’ve known each other since we were kids. Our fathers were friends—the judge and the chief of police—and we used to play while our fathers jawed on the front porch of my father’s law offices. One of the games we’d play was Three Truths and a Lie. Frank always knew what my lie was. “And having a chat with Sister Martine. Is that who you’re here to see?”
“I’m looking for a woman and boy gone missing from northern New Jersey,” he says. “I thought they might have landed here. Unless they turned up at Sanctuary.”
“A woman and boy?” I echo. “How old’s the boy? There was a woman with a three-year-old in two days ago who needed help applying for food stamps.” This is true so I give Frank a steady look, daring him to accuse me of making up indigent women and children.
Frank meets my gaze, unsoftened by my good works. “This boy’s older. Ten. The woman’s in her early thirties. They were spotted getting on a bus in Kingston.”
“What’d they do?” I ask, absorbing the notion that Alice is older than she looks. “Knock over a Stewart’s?”
“I’m just looking for them. They could be in trouble. Have you seen them?”
I shake my head. “Believe it or not, I’m not aware of every runaway woman and child in the Catskills and Hudson Valley.”
“So if I check Sanctuary’s log for last night I won’t find a record of a call from a woman on the run?”
“You’ll need a warrant to see those logs,” I say, bristling. Frank knows full well that he needs a warrant, but he enjoys piquing me on this point. “Unless we believe a caller presents a danger to himself or others, those calls are confidential.”
He shifts his weight, looks away, scanning the sledders for any strange ten-year-old boys, then brings his hand to rest on his hip near his holster. Letting me know what he’s got backing up his point of view. “What if I told you that woman and child wer
e in danger? Would you tell me if you’d been in contact with them?”
I notice he doesn’t threaten me with breaking the law by concealing Alice and Oren’s location. He knows that won’t sway me, that I’m more likely to talk if I think I’m protecting them. And it does give me pause. Frank might be a bit officious, he might throw his weight around like most men, and our history predisposes him against me, but he’s not a bad man. If he thinks Alice and Oren are in danger . . . but then I recall that the man who threatened Alice and Oren is dead.
“Of course if I thought a client was in danger I’d do whatever was necessary to keep him or her safe,” I answer, holding Frank’s gaze steadily. We both know this to be true.
Frank gives me a thin-lipped smile. “Always the judge’s daughter, eh, Mattie?” My carefully evasive wording hasn’t gotten past him.
I know I should laugh it off, but I can’t help thinking about the other time he said the same thing to me. The remembrance makes me mad. And as Doreen has often pointed out, I don’t have a filter when I’m mad. “Always the police chief’s son,” I answer back, “snooping into other people’s business.”
Frank’s face flushes red as if I’d slapped him. I’d like to take the words back, not only because they sound like something my mother would say, but because it’s thanks to Frank’s father’s snooping that I’m alive. I start to apologize but he cuts me off. “What did you want to talk to me about?”
I’d almost forgotten saying that and for a moment my mind is completely blank. But then I think of something. “There were some rednecks giving Atefeh a hard time last night in Stewart’s. Some hunters—Jason and Wayne—in a souped-up plow truck.”
Frank nods. “That would be Wayne Marshall,” he says. “You don’t remember him? He was in school with us, a year ahead of me.”
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