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Badger pins me in that stare. “So, we’re going to play amateur detective now like Harley Granger? You’re going to start your own true crime podcast?”
There’s something funny on his face. Is it fear? Worry for me? Something else? I know all his expressions and I don’t know this one.
“You said you’d help,” I remind him.
“And I will.”
“So, let’s go poke around in my dad’s office.”
He nods and follows me out into the cold.
15
Three Days Before Christmas
“Lolly.”
“Yes, mom?”
“I’m not happy with your choices, honey,” she says. We lie together on my bed like we used to do at story time. And the room is lit orange by my night-light and the sheets are so soft. I have Juniper, my big stuffed tiger, tucked under my arm.
“I know,” I tell her. “I’m sorry.”
“There’s no time for sorry, sweetie. You have to get tough.”
“But I’m not tough,” I say, looking up into her soft kind face. My mom, I can tell her anything. She always knows what to do, what to say. “Mom, I’ve made so many mistakes.”
“Well,” she says, putting a gentle hand to my cheek. “That’s why they put erasers on pencils. Everyone makes mistakes. It’s what you do next that counts.”
“I’m scared, Mom.”
“Lolly, honey. Wake up.”
“I’m so tired.”
She’s stern now. “Lolly. Wake. Up.”
I am up. Not lying safe in my childhood bed, but on the cot in this basement prison. The line of gray light is bright, and I can see the space around me. I am not bound, but my limbs ache and my head is full of sand. The room wobbles and tilts as I push myself up. On the wooden table is a picnic basket, a bottle of water. I am aware of a deep, ravenous hunger, and my whole body aches with thirst.
I stumble over to the table, twist open the top of the bottle, and drink the whole thing in big gulps. Then I sit coughing and coughing. Once I’ve recovered, I dig through the picnic basket to find a peanut butter sandwich wrapped in parchment paper. Is it poisoned? Drugged? There is nothing that would keep me from eating it. I devour it, feeling quickly nauseated. But I manage to keep it down.
After a while, I feel more solid, more clearheaded. On the other chair there’s a pair of jeans and a red sweatshirt. I realize that I am only in my underwear, shivering in the cold. I scramble into the clothes that smell clean and are far too big. Everything hurts. Both knees are a deep purple, elbows skinned. My jaw, my back. It hurts to move my head.
I have to get out of here. It’s that simple. There must be a way.
First, I climb the staircase to the door. It’s a thick and heavy solid wood, locked tight. I shake and rattle it, then pound on it with damaged elbow, my painful shoulder. I inspect the hinges, but they are shiny and new, gleaming in the meager light. There’s no way out here. I start to cry, feeling the fear and frustration edging toward panic. But I swallow my sobs and force myself to breathe, to think.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way. That’s what my dad would say.You’re only stuck if you believe that you are.
Think.
I am in a basement. I try to envision my own basement at home. My dad used it for his woodworking shop. There was a door into it from the house. And there was another way out. Two metal doors at the top of another shorter staircase that pushed open into the back yard. I walk around and don’t see anything like that.
What else? There was a row of high windows, level with the ground.
Something clicks. The line of gray light. It must be coming from a window.
I walk over and look up, my eyes searching in the dim. There are tall bookshelves in front of it. The shelves are lined with novels and textbooks, thick leather-bound volumes of encyclopedias, dictionaries. There are classics, and popular fiction, thick books about earth science, psychology, genetics. I don’t care about any of it. I toss them mercilessly into a huge pile on the floor, then I use all my strength to move the shelf, inching it away from the gray line.
