Escape from Memory (17 page)

Alexei let his fantasy play out luxuriously.

“Let me get Kira ready to go,” he told Toria/Sophia. “I just have to give her my memories…. All my memories will be hers.”

Groping around in the dark for his sleeping child, Alexei’s fingers brushed the real Sophia’s face. He stifled a shiver.

“Go sit on the stairs and wait,” Alexei said brusquely. “I want a few minutes alone with my daughter!”

As soon as Toria/Sophia was gone, he switched the flashlight back on and hooked up the computer. He was crying while he worked.

And that was the end of my father’s memories.

I wanted to believe that he’d cradled and kissed me before handing me over to Toria/Sophia. To Mom. I wanted to believe that he’d swept her into a romantic embrace before sending her off. But of course he wouldn’t have, because she wouldn’t have understood. I still wasn’t sure that I understood. For thirteen years my mother had been the wrong person. And she herself knew the secrets that Rona sought—but even Rona didn’t recognize her anymore.

My mother could die never knowing who she really was.

“Kira!” Lynne hissed in my ear. “Kira! We’re landing! What’s your plan?”

I
LOOKED AROUND IN CONFUSION, MY MIND STILL BACK IN
C
RYTHE
more than a dozen years before. The vast, empty field that passed for the Willistown airport lay nearly below us, getting closer with every second. It looked like a foreign landscape to me now—all that openness, all that level ground stretching from horizon to horizon. In less than twenty-four hours I’d grown accustomed to mountains, plunging roads, secrets hiding around every bend.

“You have to tell me your plan,” Lynne insisted, “so I know what to do. It’s
time
.”

I shook my head, unable to speak, unable to explain. Plan? I doubted if even Lynne could have emerged from the sea of memories I was drowning in with a coherent thought, let alone a plan.

Lynne read my blank expression quite accurately.

“Oh no,” she whispered. She looked away from me, eyes narrowing. “Uh, Ms. Cummins,” she practically shouted toward the front seat. Rona turned only enough to give her a cold stare. Lynne forged on. “Ms. Cummins, I just wanted to make sure—you
did take the time difference into account when you were working out all the details of, um, this trip, didn’t you? I mean, Ohio is three hours ahead of California, so it’s already after seven o’clock here, and I’m pretty sure the bank would be closed by now….”

“The First Bank of Willistown is open until nine
P.M.
on Thursdays,” Rona said icily. “I checked before we left. Don’t try to trick me, young lady. You’ll regret it.”

Lynne gulped and turned pale.

Nobody spoke as we dropped out of the sky and rolled to a stop at the end of a long, vacant slab of concrete. When the pilot cut off the engine, the silence roared in my ears like a giant question. I had the minds of two geniuses linked to my own. Why couldn’t I figure out what to do?

“I arranged for a rental car to be delivered here,” Rona said. “That must be it over there.”

Silently, Lynne and I looked over at a green car parked in an otherwise empty lot. The Willistown airport was mainly a place for weekend hobbyists—the one or two doctors in town who were rich enough to own a plane. So it was no surprise that the place was deserted on a Thursday evening. But disappointment hit like a rock—I realized that I’d been half hoping we could find somebody here to help.

“Well, come on,” Rona said impatiently. Already out of the plane, she was holding the door wide open, waiting for Lynne and me. I awkwardly scrambled out, tripping on the bottom step. “Come on!” Rona repeated.

I turned around, wondering why Lynne was hesitating. But Lynne was on my heels, still linked to me with the rope and cuffs. It was the pilot Rona had yelled at.

He gestured at the instrument panel.

“I take care of plane,” he explained.

“Plane? Plane? Forget the plane. We can buy a new one after all this is over. Out!”

In spite of myself, I almost felt sorry for the pilot. An old man should not have to be bossed around by someone half his age.

It was my parents’ memories making me think like that, making me think that age required respect.

Shakily the pilot obeyed Rona and climbed out of the plane. He, Lynne, and I walked a little ahead of Rona, toward the car. She wasn’t pointing the gun at any of us now, but she might as well have been.

“Isn’t it locked?” Lynne blurted out.

“They said they’d leave the keys in the ignition,” Rona practically purred. “You two evidently live in a virtually crime-free town.” She laughed, as if she’d made a particularly witty joke.

We piled into the car. Rona made Jacques drive. I kept watching him. If he really was Crythian, shouldn’t I recognize him? The only Jacques my parents had known in Crythe had been young and virile. This man was stooped and shaky, gray haired and wrinkled. Half of his face was suffer than the other side. With my parents’ memories, I suddenly understood: He’d had a stroke. Sometime in the past thirteen years, he’d been transformed.

We whipped past cornfields and farmers’ houses—places I’d seen before but didn’t really know. I could understand now how my parents would have felt about such inattention. How could I
not
have every hillock memorized, every gable of every house ingrained in my mind forever?

Poor Mom
, I thought. No wonder she could never fit in in America.

We were on the outskirts of Willistown in no time. Five traffic lights later, we were in the center of town. The pilot parked right in front of the bank. Rona whirled around to face Lynne and me.

“Now,” she said to Lynne, “we are leaving you in the car. Keep your head down and stay out of sight. Jacques will have a gun. He will not hesitate to shoot.”

She made a big show of producing a new gun from her purse; so she and the pilot each had one. At least one. What if Rona had another two or three firearms stashed somewhere on her?

That thought alone was enough to keep me quiet.

“And you,” she said, turning to face me. “I want you to understand. I have a cell phone with me, preprogrammed to call Jacques. If you try anything—anything at all—I’ll hit the call button and he will shoot your friend. And then hell call Crythe and they’ll kill your mother. Do you understand?”

Her eyes gleamed maliciously. I hated her, for all my parent’s memories. And my own.

Lynne and I exchanged frantic looks.

“But—,” I protested weakly. “I want Lynne to go with me. Into the bank.”

I should have been steeling myself for that statement ever since we left Crythe, instead of dwelling on the past. I sounded about as authoritative as a gnat.

“Right,” Rona said, almost laughing. “They probably have the ‘Teen Disappears’ signs plastered all over the place in there already. I don’t feel like getting arrested for kidnapping now,
when I’m so close. And, hey, I didn’t kidnap her. Think anyone would believe that?”

“I’ve been missing too,” I said, even more faintly. “Don’t you think I’m on those posters too?”

“Oh, but I called in an absence report to your school this morning,” Rona said. “They won’t be expecting you all week. Do you think I’m stupid?”

No, I thought I was. Rona had everything planned. She’d arranged details I hadn’t even thought about. And for the whole plane ride, when I could have been planning, I’d done nothing but wallow in memory, reaching for a father who’d been dead for years, a mother who might as well be. Who probably would be soon because I couldn’t help her.

I blinked back tears. This was when I was supposed to be strong, absolutely refusing to go without Lynne. I was supposed to remind Rona about Mom, sacrificing her, and demand,
Do you think I’d do anything to get my mother killed? Why does it matter to you if Lynne goes with us or not?
But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t speak the words “mother” and “killed” in the same sentence.

“All right,” I said heavily.

I looked once more at Lynne—and shouldn’t have. Her face was white with terror.

This is what it feels like to betray someone
, I thought. But I already knew that feeling, because of my parents’ memories. They’d felt as though they’d betrayed everyone in Crythe.

Wordlessly, I let Rona untie us and unlock the handcuffs. I had rope burns on my leg, and my wrist was sore from where the cuff had rubbed, but I still wanted to protest,
No! Don’t separate us!

I kept silent. I climbed out of the car and stood beside Rona on the familiar sidewalk. A few cars drove by, but I didn’t see
anyone I knew—certainly not anyone I knew well enough to signal secretly:
Call the police! I’m in danger! Lynne’s in that car! Mom’s being held hostage in California!

What kind of signal did I think could convey all that? And what did I expect anyone to do?

We climbed the stone steps. I tried to tell myself that Lynne was safer with the pilot than she would have been with me and Rona. He didn’t seem to have Rona’s killer instinct.

But he didn’t seem to have much desire to disobey Rona, either.

Rona held the door open for me.

“Now, act normal” she hissed as we stepped onto the tile floor.

“Normal.” What did that word mean, again?

I glanced around, trying not to look as petrified as I felt. A woman sitting at a desk asked, “May I help you?”

I thought maybe the woman was Carl Dotson’s mom. He was in the same grade as me at school, and I could remember his mother coming in to help with the holiday parties when we were in elementary school. She’d made heart cookies for Valentine’s Day, pumpkin cookies at Halloween.

No matter what Crythians believed, my memories didn’t do me any good. Mrs. Dotson couldn’t help me either.

“My niece here needs to get into her safe-deposit box,” Rona said smoothly, her voice containing just enough boredom to make it sound like
she
didn’t much care about that box, but it was something
I
wanted, and she was the type of kindly aunt who would indulge her niece’s wishes.

“Of course,” Mrs. Dotson said. “Have a seat, and I’ll pull your card. What’s the number on that box?”

I dug the key from my pocket and read off the number in a mechanical voice: “Twenty. Seven.”

“Okay. I’ll be right back,” Mrs. Dotson said. She walked back behind the counter where all the tellers stood. Neither Rona nor I sank into the leather chairs by Mrs. Dotson’s desk. Rona stood at rigid attention, her cell phone clutched very conspicuously in her right hand. My knees trembled, and I felt faint. In seconds Mrs. Dotson was bound to come back and say that number 27 was Mom’s safe-deposit box, not mine. And then Rona would know the truth, and she’d press the button on her phone, and Lynne would be dead. And so would Mom.

I had to stop that from happening. But how?

I swayed a little, and the back of my legs brushed Mrs. Dotson’s desk. That gave me an idea. It was a pretty feeble one, but at that point, I was willing to try anything. I groped behind me, hoping Mrs. Dotson was the type to use a letter opener. Then before Mrs. Dotson came back, I could stab at Rona before she had a chance to call the pilot out in the car with Lynne. With a letter opener, I could save us all.

My hand closed on something behind me. A pen. Was a pen a good enough weapon? I didn’t think so, but I kept it in my hand anyway. You know you’re desperate when your best hope is a twenty-nine-cent Bic.

Mrs. Dotson was walking back to us now. Rona glanced my way and deliberately placed her finger just above one of the cell phone’s buttons. I got the message.

“Okay, Kira,” Mrs. Dotson said. “Right this way”

I let out a deep breath, realizing for the first time that I’d been holding it ever since she walked away. But relief was a ridiculous emotion. This was only a reprieve. As soon as Rona
discovered that there was nothing she wanted in the safe-deposit box, Lynne and Mom were dead.

Somehow I managed to propel myself forward, following Mrs. Dotson. Rona was right behind me. I could hear her heels clicking on the tile. Each step sounded like a gunshot. Then, just as we reached the bank vault, Mrs. Dotson turned around.

“Oh, I’m sorry, ma’am,” she said to Rona. “I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for your niece over there. It’s bank policy that only boxholders themselves are allowed into the vault.”

Rona frowned. I could tell she hadn’t anticipated this. She squinted suspiciously at Mrs. Dotson. Then she regained her composure.

“Oh, of course. I can understand that for adults. But my niece here is a minor, and—”

“And minors are certainly entitled to rights too, don’t you think?” Mrs. Dotson said sweetly. The smile on her face very clearly said,
I’m going to be pleasant about this, but don’t think that means I’m giving in
.

Rona looked from Mrs. Dotson to me, considering. Finally, she said loudly, “My niece has no secrets from me, do you, Kira?”

She wanted me to say,
Oh, no, Auntie. Come along. I
want
you with me. I insist
. Did I have to? If I didn’t take her into the vault with me, would she call the pilot and order Lynne’s death? And Mom’s?

Mrs. Dotson saved me from having to decide.

“How nice for the two of you,” she said to Rona. Her voice might as well have been dripping honey. “I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. But rules are rules, and I’ve learned that the only way for me to keep my job is to follow them. I’m sorry. Now, if
you would …?” She gestured toward the chairs by her desk. I loved Mrs. Dotson suddenly. I could see Rona relenting.

“Well, I wouldn’t want to ask you to bend any rules on my behalf, no matter how trifling those rules might seem,” she said. “All right, Kira. I’ll be waiting right here when you come out.” Somehow she made those words sound warm and supportive, like a loving aunt promising to be there when her niece needed her. But I could hear the threat behind the words. She held her phone up. “If you’re in there a long time, maybe I’ll even take care of some business calls.”

I felt the color draining from my face.