by Tess Sharpe
“I’m—I’m—”
I don’t even let him finish—I don’t have the time. I need to go before he starts yelling or something. “Don’t forget.” And then I skip off, not wanting to run but needing to get the hell away. I push through the doors beyond him and break into a run, just in case he does try to follow. But he doesn’t. He’s more likely to run to Daddy than chase me.
The church is spread across acres of undeveloped land, and I don’t see the car for a few minutes as I swish through knee-high grass sheltered by old oak trees. I try to ignore the little spike of panic inside me, the irrational little voice that says, She left without you.
But then I catch a sight of blue through the trees. I pick up the pace, awkward in Haley’s plaid Mary Janes that have no grip on the soles.
I slide into the car and she starts the engine, driving on the dirt road until we get to the main one, turning left and heading away from the church.
“All clear?” she asks, glancing at her rearview mirror.
“All clear.”
“What did you do?” She gestures to my hand.
“Jamison was in the hall,” I say as we turn onto the highway.
“I thought you said all clear.”
“I did. It’s fine.”
She merges into the flow of traffic, taking the middle lane. She never drives too fast—it’s amateur to get pulled over for something like speeding—and we’ll sail over the state line toward the West Coast long before they even realize we’re gone.
“But you punched him?”
“I had to get past him. It seemed like the easiest way.”
She laughs.
“I thought it’d give us more time,” I explain. “He’ll go to his dad and cry about it. Elijah will text you. When you don’t text back, he’ll think it’s because you’re dealing with me. He might be so distracted, he won’t even check the safe until tomorrow night or something. He’ll probably blame Adrian before he realizes we’re gone.”
She’s not laughing anymore. She’s suddenly quiet. Have I done something wrong? I’d hoped she’d be proud.
“You thought of all that?”
“I thought about what you’d do.”
“Oh, baby,” she says. “You’re so sweet.”
It made me smile, that conversation.
It makes me smile, thinking about it now. But for very different reasons.
— 27 —
Phone Transcript, Lee Ann O’Malley Engages Hostage Taker #1 (HT1)
August 8, 11:03 a.m.
O’Malley: Thanks for picking up. You still haven’t told me your name.
HT1: You can call me Sir.
[Five-second silence]
HT1: [laughter] I didn’t think you’d like that.
O’Malley: You sound like you’re in a good mood. That’s encouraging. Can you tell me if the hostages inside are okay?
HT1: They’re fine. For now.
O’Malley: What can we do to bring this to a safe end for everyone?
HT1: I want to talk to Frayn.
O’Malley: Mr. Frayn is still in surgery, so I’m afraid that’s not possible.
HT1: You’re really keeping on this he was in a car accident stalling tactic?
O’Malley: It’s not a stall. His car was T-boned by an F-150 that blew through a red light. If you take a beat here, you’re going to realize that me keeping you from the only thing that you’ve expressed a want for is not to anyone’s benefit. If I could get the manager here to talk to you, I would. But he’s a little busy getting asphalt picked out of his crushed pelvis, so you’re going to need to start thinking about what else you want besides a chat with Mr. Frayn.
HT1: You really aren’t a cop, are you?
O’Malley: I’m just here to help out. What can I do?
HT1: You can tell the sheriff to back up about thirty feet. And then you can bring me a welding kit.
O’Malley: I can do that. But to get the sheriff to agree, I’m going to need to bring him some good news. If you let the hostages go . . .
HT1: You can have one.
O’Malley: Okay. I can do that. It’ll take a while to find a kit. Can you stay on the line?
HT1: Get the kit. Move the sheriff. Then you get the girl.
[End of call]
— 28 —
11:04 a.m. (112 minutes captive)
1 lighter, 3 bottles of vodka, 1 pair of scissors, 2 safe-deposit keys
Plan #1: Scrapped
Plan #2: In progress
“Casey,” I say. “Can you come over here?”
She gets up and walks over, looking uncertain.
“What?” she asks.
“In a few minutes, they’ll come in here. They’ll probably tie your hands up. Let them. They’re going to trade you.”
“Trade me?” Her voice shakes.
“You’re getting out of here,” I tell her. “They need a welding kit to get through the bars downstairs. They’ll trade you for it. They’ll take you through the basement exit, not the front. It’ll be scary, and they’ll put you in front of them, like a shield. Let them. Focus on your feet, on your steps. No sudden movements. Do not run away from them or toward the deputies when you see them. Just keep walking slow and steady until a deputy grabs you.”
“Why aren’t they letting us all go?” she asks.
I don’t have time to explain the fine art of con artistry or the power of suggestion, but luckily, Wes is there with a better answer:
“You’re the youngest, so you go first,” he says firmly.
“Wes is right,” Iris says, but she’s staring hard at me. I can practically see the wheels turning in that brilliant brain of hers. Iris likes puzzles, and I’ve just presented her with the one that is me. I can’t even imagine how many directions she’s going off in right now, with the bits I’ve told her and what Wes has said. Plus whatever I’ve let slip in the last year, little things that didn’t seem like anything when I was just Nora but now have got to be spinning in her head as she tries to get the clear picture.
“What about Hank?”
We all look at Casey, puzzled.
“The security guard? Shouldn’t he go first?”
None of us say anything. Because we’re all wondering the same thing: Is he even still alive? Gray Cap had had blood on his hands. Had he . . .
“Kids first,” I say, not answering her question. It makes her go white, and I grit my teeth.
“I don’t want to be alone with them. What if they . . .” She doesn’t finish. It’s like she can’t. Her lips tremble.
Iris makes a noise in the back of her throat, pained and strangled.
“They’re not going to hurt you,” I say firmly. “They need equipment to get into the safe-deposit vault. The sheriff won’t give them the equipment unless they give you to the sheriff.”
“How do you know?”
Because I made it happen. But that’ll just confuse her. “Because that’s what the one in the gray cap told me he was going to do. But we need to be fast. I need paper. A pen.”
Wes and Iris spring into action, and in a few seconds, I’ve got a sticky note and a pen. I draw a crude map on one side, detailing the hall and where they’re keeping us. And on the other, I write a message.
“My sister is Lee—she’s the one outside with the megaphone,” I tell Casey, handing her the note. “Tuck this into your shoe. Give it to her when you’re safe. And tell her something for me: Tell her that the guy in charge, the one she’s talking to? Tell her he’s a Raymond.”
“I—”
“She’ll understand what it means,” I assure her. “Can you do this?”
Her eyes are huge, the pupils blown wide from fear and adrenaline, almost swallowing up the blue-flecked hazel. She takes a breath, and then gives a shaky nod.
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“Great.” My hands grip her shoulders a little too tight, and when she stares up at me, eyes shining with tears, I want to be the kind of person who hugs people she barely knows in a crisis. But I’m not. That’s Iris. Or Wes. They’re snuggly, and I’m just sharp. The kind of person who can count on one hand—on four fingers—the people she’s hugged genuinely in her life.
“You’re gonna do great. You’ll get through this, and I promise, your mom is not going to be mad about you forgetting your bag.”
That draws an almost-smile from her, but it flicks out when I continue:
“Remember: Don’t run away from them. Do what they say.”
“And give your sister the messages.”
I squeeze her shoulders. “It’s just a few minutes of walking, and then you’re safe.”
“Okay,” she says, nodding. Then she gulps. God, this is not fair. I see myself in her. I see the steel wrapped in fear that all little girls find on the spike-strewn road to womanhood. I hate that this is where she finds it.
I look over my shoulder at Iris and Wes, and I don’t even want to start to figure out what their expressions mean. “You two need to act upset when he takes her. Like you don’t know why she’s going.”
The now-familiar scrape of the table blocking the door being drawn back creaks through the walls, and we all move back into the corner.
Red Cap comes in first, followed by Gray.
“Get her,” he tells Red, and Iris lets out a cry of protest when he grabs Casey way too roughly by the arm.
“Hey!” I snap as Wes jolts forward.
“Don’t touch her,” he says.
“Where are you taking her?” Iris demands, but they’re silent as they shuffle Casey out of the room. I fight the urge to grab Casey back, because letting her go . . . It’s for the best, I remind myself. They’re not going to hurt her. They need her; they just don’t know why or how bad, and if I can get her out before they do, then she’s safe.
Iris sags against the wall as the door closes again. Her hands are shaking. Her lip gloss is smudged. She’s so pale. And the worry creeps up inside me until her eyes flash and meet mine, and there is that inferno of a girl wrapped in seventy-year-old tulle that I fell for. Her eyebrow arches and her arms cross as she keeps leaning against the wall for support.
“You made that happen,” she says. It’s not even remotely a question.
“Until we hear honking from the parking lot, we don’t know they actually let her go,” I say, because I really don’t know how to not try to avoid this. My therapist would probably call me pathological or something, but I just call it sheer survival.
“You’re a con artist,” she says.
“She’s not on the take anymore,” Wes points out.
“Now you decide to defend me?” I ask him.
“I just mean, you’re not going around conning old ladies out of their pensions,” Wes continues, like that’s going to help.
“I didn’t con any little old ladies ever!”
This is technically true. But what’s also true is that I’ve left behind a string of crimes. They’ve stacked up, and they got worse and worse. The older I got, the deeper my mother drew me in, the more girls I had to be. And all the terrible, inevitable things that you think of when you think of a little girl growing up in that kind of life? They happened. And it built and built, until that night on the beach, with Raymond pushing me forward, Go, get it, now! and when it exploded, the sand went bloody and I walked free, but never clear. Never clean.
It’s not like I’ve fully given it up since moving to Clear Creek. I’ve just winnowed it down to the essentials.
“What did you do, then?” Iris asks. “Because from where I’m standing, you somehow mind-jacked the bank robber into giving up his best hostage for a welding machine before he realizes she’s his best hostage.”
“That’s exactly what she did,” Wes says.
“That’s . . .” Her lips press together, smudging her lip gloss further. “Your name isn’t even Nora O’Malley, is it?”
I shake my head.
“And that’s not your natural hair color, is it?”
I have to lick my dry lips before I croak out the answer. “It’s dyed.” I gesture to my hair and eyebrows, and my cheeks burn. It’s almost worse that this is happening in front of Wes. The one person who knows all the answers, who’s been in her shoes. Maybe it’s better for her, though, that she has someone who gets it.
I love her, and that means putting her first in this moment. Because I have lied like it’s truth so much that the lines blur scarily even for me. And I know what it’s like to love someone like that. It’s too hard. You can’t hold on to them. There isn’t enough them to hold on to.
“Are your eyes even blue?” she asks, and her voice cracks and my stomach drops. I’m moving toward her before I can think it through, but she shakes her head, short and decisive, and I freeze on the spot.
“They’re blue. Colored contacts make my eyes itch too much.”
She blinks, absorbing the information. “So you do this a lot. Change your appearance. Your name. Your . . .” She fades off.
“Not anymore,” I say, filling that dreadful, almost exhausted silence. “My mom raised me in it. But when I was twelve, I ran away,” I say, and it’s possibly the most understated way to put what I actually did. “Lee helped me. My mom’s been in prison since then. And I’ve been . . .” Now I’m fading off. Not because of exhaustion, but because I don’t know how to put it.
“She’s been in hiding,” Wes says.
Is that true, though? Have I been in hiding? Or have I been lying in wait?
“From who?” Iris asks.
“My stepfather.”
“But you said he was in prison, too.”
“He is. But he was powerful before prison, and just because he’s inside doesn’t mean he lost that power.”
“He wants to kill her,” Wes says.
“Wes.” I glare at him. He’s making it sound scary. But I guess it is, for him. And he knows it’ll be scary for her, too.
I don’t know if it’s scary for me anymore, or just a fact of life that I can’t let crush me.
“And she just told the guy out there all about it, because there’s a ton of money going to anyone who brings her back to Florida.”
Iris’s pale face barely flushes. “What? Why would you do that?”
“Because she’s completely incapable of staying safe.”
“I hate you,” I tell him.
“You do not,” he says back.
“Okay, fine, I don’t. But I am totally capable of staying safe. What do you think I’ve been doing for the past five years?”
He just shoots me one of those looks, and my love/hate relationship with his sarcastic streak swivels full into hate in that moment.
Iris rolls her eyes at us, then she zeroes back in on me. “How much are you worth?”
“The bounty’s up to seven million if they bring me back to Florida alive,” I say. “He adds to the pot every spring. Happy birthday to me.”
Something flickers in her face as she absorbs my words. “So he’s not a big fish in a little pond, your stepdad.”
I bite my lip. Telling Iris this is going to change things. She reads and listens to stuff about true crime and arsonists. She’ll have heard about him.
She’ll have heard about Ashley. About me.
I look at Wes, and he nods encouragingly. It’s okay. I know you can do it.
“My mother married Raymond Keane,” I say. “That’s who I put away.”
There’s a split second where the name doesn’t register, but then it clicks, and her eyes widen. She says, so fast her voice cracks, “The guy who allegedly chopped off his enemies’ fingers and fed them to alligators?”
“There’s no allegedly about it
. He did that. It’s one of his favorite drinking stories.”
It was one of his favorite threats. He kept an array of cleavers around, from his days as an actual butcher—the nickname didn’t come out of nowhere. I didn’t just wonder if he could break down a person’s body like a side of beef . . . I knew he could. He taught me everything I know about knives. He probably regrets that now.
“Oh my God,” Iris says. “I—” But before she can even articulate whatever she’s feeling, I hear it: honking. It’s coming from the parking lot. Three long ones, then two short ones.
My knees nearly buckle in relief. Wes lets out a smile that’s a little too big for today’s situation.
“Oh my God,” Iris says again. “You did it. Casey’s safe.”
Then she promptly turns around and throws up in the trash can next to the desk.
— 29 —
Phone Transcript: Lee Ann O’Malley + Clear Creek Deputies Receive Hostage #1 (Casey Frayn)
August 8, 11:25 a.m.
O’Malley: I’ve got the welding machine. Do you have one of the hostages?
HT1: I do. You’ll find that I’m a reasonable man. I’m giving you the youngest of the group. A little girl.
O’Malley: I appreciate that. A kid has no place in something like this. Are you a parent?
HT1: Are you?
O’Malley: Oh, you know family. It’s complicated. Why don’t I tell you how we’re going to do this?
HT1: I don’t think so. Put the welding machine in front of the back door. Stay at the end of the lot.
O’Malley: That can be arranged.
HT1: Call me when it’s done.
[Call disconnected]
O’Malley: We need to move to the back. He’s giving up one of the kids.
Sheriff Adams: Get this machine in position!
O’Malley: We’ve got to play this carefully, Sheriff. We don’t want to spook him with the rest of the hostages inside.
Sheriff Adams: I’ve got it, Lee. Stay back here, okay?
Deputy Reynolds: Sir, she’s been leading the negotiation. If he doesn’t see her—