“Hiding,” she says. “Upstairs, I think.”
“Shit. We have to find him. I need to get my phone from the kitchen and then we’ll go upstairs and . . .” And then what? We tell victims of domestic abuse who are in their houses with their abusers that if they can’t get out they should lock and barricade themselves into a safe room with their children. The only room that locks is down here. But I don’t tell Alice that. “Stay right here. Watch the door and listen for breaking glass. If you hear glass breaking run upstairs and hide under one of the beds.”
I walk past her toward the kitchen but she grabs my arm. “I’m coming with you,” she says. Her hand is clammy and trembling. Her breathing sounds shallow. Like a person having a panic attack.
“Fine. Just try not to trip me up. This is no time for me to break a hip.”
She hangs on to me like a barnacle all the way to the kitchen. I feel my way to the kitchen table and retrieve the flashlights I pulled out earlier. I pocket one and hand the other to Alice. “Don’t turn it on yet,” I say as I feel around on the counter for the phone. “I don’t want him to know where we are.”
“You couldn’t see his face at all?”
“Not really. He had a baseball cap on under a hood.” The baseball hat jogs a memory: Camo from the Stewart’s handing Atefeh a MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hat. The asshole whose groin I doused with hot coffee. Who was driving a jacked-up plow truck with fake antlers on the hood, just like the plow truck that nearly ran me over as I was going into Sanctuary earlier today. I’d been too busy looking for Oren to notice, but now I’m sure it was the same truck. He might have waited for us to come out of Sanctuary and followed us back to the house.
“How tall was he?” Alice asks.
“Why?” I ask. The phone’s not on the kitchen counter and I remember it was still in my hand when I reached for the knife on top of the dryer. I must have dropped it there. I approach the back door warily, checking the window to see if the intruder is out there, but it’s too dark to tell. It’s full night now.
“Did he have a goatee?” Alice asks.
“A goatee? Honestly, I have no—” My hand closes on the phone. I thumb the home button and the screen lights up. “Thank God!” I say, and then realize that the lit screen might be visible from the outside. I turn my back to the door and bump into Alice. She’s so close that I can smell her coppery fear-soaked breath. In the light of the phone screen her face looks gaunt and haggard. Why did I ever think she was in her twenties? She must be thirty-five at least, and those years have not been kind to her.
I touch the phone icon and tap in 911. As it’s ringing the low battery alert comes on. Shit. It was plugged in only long enough to get a tiny charge before the power went off. But maybe it will be enough. The police operator answers on the third ring.
“911. What’s your emer—”
The screen goes black. “Fuck!” I swear, shaking the phone as if that will bring it to life.
“Mattie,” Alice says. “There’s something I have to tell you.”
“Not now, Alice,” I snap, years of reflective listening training going out the window. “We have to get upstairs. Find Oren. Block ourselves in my bedroom. We’ve got two guns and the police will trace that call. The chief of police is my—” I’d been about to say my friend, but that really isn’t true anymore. Frank Barnes hasn’t so much as smiled at me since the night Caleb and my parents died. Still, Frank’s too upstanding a guy to let personal feelings come between him and his duty. “He’ll head out here when he sees I tried to call. We just have to stay safe until he gets here. This asshole—I think I know who he is—is just a redneck blowhard. I pissed him off at the Stewart’s last night and he came out here to teach me a lesson. He’s probably nursing his injured paw and crawling back to the nearest bar, where he’ll tell the regulars that he put the fear of God into a couple of pussy-hat-wearing feminists.”
I’m not sure I believe any of what I’m saying. Secretly I am hoping that dumbass Jason has crawled off to freeze to death in the barn, but as soon as that thought appears in my head I picture Caleb in the barn and I have to brace myself against the dryer.
Alice grabs my arm to hold me up. She lowers her face so it’s inches from mine. “It’s not some dumbass redneck you pissed off at the Stewart’s,” she spits out. “It’s Davis. He’s alive and he’s come to get me and Oren. And he won’t stop until we’re all dead.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Alice
MATTIE DOESN’T SAY anything right away and it’s too dark to see her face. I can picture it, though, the same sour disapproval I’ve seen in a dozen caseworkers, foster parents, and teachers over the years. People who put their trust in me and were then disappointed when I wasn’t able to live up to the pretty picture they’d made in their heads. The young teachers and social workers were the worst. They’d get the idea that they were reaching the poor foster kid and then you’d make one little mistake—missing curfew, lifting a lip gloss from Walmart, punching the dickwad who called you white trash—and their pretty picture of themselves as your savior blew up in their faces. It wasn’t you they were mad at; it was themselves for being stupid enough to trust you.
When Mattie does speak, her voice is flat with rage. “You told me Davis was dead.”
“No,” I point out, “you told me that he was dead.”
“They found a body at his house.”
“Yeah, well, it wasn’t Davis, it was Scott.”
“Who is Scott?”
“Oren’s caseworker,” I say, “and a nice guy. I called him to tell him not to worry about us.” Yes, I’m leaving out the idea of running away with Scott. Mattie doesn’t have to know all my business. “When I called Scott’s cell phone, Davis picked up. So I figure Scott must have gone by to check on us and Davis killed him. That must be the body the cops found.”
Mattie doesn’t say anything right away. She must be deciding whether she believes me. It’s creepy standing here talking in the dark, like being in a confessional. One of my foster parents, Maria Tomaselli, was Catholic and took us kids to church every Sunday trying to convert us. I hid in the confessional one week and wrote some comments about the Virgin Mary and Jesus in Sharpie on the walls. Maria gave up trying to convert me after that; she’d made up her mind I was going to hell.
“Did you ask Davis to come get you?” Mattie squeezes out the words like toothpaste from a spent tube. “Did you tell him where you are?”
“No! What kind of an idiot do you think I am! Like I’d endanger my boy—”
“I know Oren’s not your son.”
This takes me by surprise—and it hurts too. She says it like she knows every dirty secret I’ve ever had. Like she knows me inside and out. But she doesn’t know the first thing about me.
“You assumed he was my son and I just went along with you. He’s still my boy. I’ve put up with Davis’s shit for two years because I couldn’t stand to leave Oren with him or let Oren end up in the system. I love that kid.”
I brace myself for her to challenge that but she doesn’t. “Where did you call from?”
“The CVS pharmacy phone. I don’t know if it has caller ID—”
“It does,” Mattie says. “Shit. Why didn’t you tell me? We could have told the police.”
“I’d’ve lost Oren. I’ve got no claim to him. And . . . I’ve got a record. Little shit . . . shoplifting, pot . . . but I’d never get custody of him. You know where he’d end up.”