Method 15 33 (18 page)

Before his complete collapse, I moved on to my next weapon, which I picked up in the same motion as when I released the bleach and TV. The loose floorboard in my hands became a battering ram. I laid it flat against his back from his left side where I stood. Using his falling motion, I pushed the requisite force—based on his weight and height—to drop him to his knees, propel him forward, and insure he’d fall headfirst in the water—which he was primed to do anyway. He splashed into my quarry, and I slipped out behind his now fallen feet to the hall, looking in. Simultaneously, I unhooked more of the red yarn, which I’d braided to form a rope, from a nail by the door. I fashioned the rope out of the yarn from the red knit blanket, Asset #5, which I began unraveling, as you know, on Day 20. He never noticed the uncoiling because I folded the blanket on its own disembowelment every single morning at dawn. The once dangling radio hit the water where his bleached and crushed head and torso lay, submerged. The crack and the sizzle of electrocution filled the room. Me outside, him within.

All of this took less than ten seconds, about the time he took to nab me from my street.

Now that, my friends, is justice. Cold, hard, burning, skull-splitting, electrified justice.

15/33 consisted of a three-part escape plan: TV, with unnecessary but added bonus of bleach pouch, electrocution, and drowning, each of which could have caused his death. If the TV missed, I still would have picked up the floorboard and pushed, expecting him to likely trip. If necessary, I would have mustered physical force and whaled him with the floorboard until he collapsed, then I’d turn to my failsafe and shoot him in the eyes and neck and groin with the bow and four arrows in the holster strapped to my back.

Arrows and holster? I had so many assets. The bow was
constructed of the elastic from the attic and my trusty now unbent bucket handle. The arrows were sharpened rungs I had removed from the bed frame and whittled with the ends of the TV antennas—the rungs and antennas being falsely re-secured each morning into their intended, decorative/sort-of-functional spots. The holster was the sleeve of my raincoat, pinch-tied at the bottom with more of the yarn, the strap made out of wiring I ripped from the guts of the ultrasound machine. Thankfully, the arrows were superfluous, then, which is why I didn’t fret over the inability to use them in practice. Praise God and his black angel butterfly, for I had the positional advantage, the element of surprise, and from my relentless study, I knew his movements, patterns, gait, steps, height, and weight so precisely, I very well could have metamorphized into the man.

What about those tacks? You’ll remember, on the first night in the van, I slept less than he did. It’s funny what sweat will do to duct tape and that van was hot and I had extra pounds. I felt the magic of my heat on the tape all of Day 1, and slowly but surely, my thin wrists loosened within my confinement. Finally, while he snored, I tested how far I might pull an arm free. Sure enough, fifty minutes into his slumber, my right arm slid out. Unsure of how long I had, and since the olive oven barred the side sliding door and a chain barred the back doors, I was likely out of time to free my left arm and legs—although I continued to fiddle. I bent to the backpack, retrieved the tacks—a commercial-sized pack of one thousand so stuffed the tacks didn’t rattle—and pocketed them in my lined, black raincoat. He stirred. I sat up straight. I put my hand back through the duct tape, slouched, and pretended to sleep. He yawned and turned in his chair. I felt him look at me.

“Stupid fucking whore,” he’d said.

Idiot. I will kill you with these tacks
, I had thought.

Thirty-three days later, I froze outside my jail cell as his sizzling and muscle-jumping body rounded out. When he fell, his body was limp, his legs collapsed and sprawled on the
floor in pigeon-toe, but his torso lifted to slump over the low bed frame and in the water in the box spring. The oddest part of everything was how his hips kept rising with every zap of electricity and banging the side of the bed—as if he were dream-humping the long board while sleeping submerged in the water. The water appeared blue with yellow streaks, swirling and spilling around him and to the floor. Sparks poured from the wall socket, threatening to catch and burn the whole joint, but didn’t, given that they burned to black dots on the floorboards. Pops accompanied the sparks, as did bubbles of his breath when his body settled into death and the angered electricity calmed. I waited until all popping stopped, like when you microwave popcorn, those last, slow seconds of one, two-three, silence, a fourth and final kernel pops. “Ding!” the microwave blares, “All done.”

A drone of dying lights sent a warping over the house: the electrocution had shorted the electricity. Although midday, the musty hall fell dark and a quiet dropped a cloth of eerie silence. I reached for an arrow on my back, standing as still as a stone statue in the park, mid-step, sword unsheathed. No noises came from his chamber of death. No footsteps fell behind me, above me, below me, or anywhere. I was outside my room. I shut the door and locked him within. I took the keys.

Silence.

My heart beat loud in my ears.

A swallow fluttered by the window in the stairwell, a herald tweeting, “The coast is clear.”

I hope you enjoyed your swim in my little pool, motherfucker
. I spit on the door.

I went downstairs and entered the kitchen. I had imagined it so often with the floral print fabric, wood worktables, white sink, and apple-green mixer, I felt deceived to find something wholly different. The truth in the vision winded me. Instead of a country kitchen, before me were two long stainless steel tables—commercial-kitchen style. The
stove was big and black, the mixer, boring egg-white. There were no colors in this room. There were no aprons with pink piping. No fat cat lounging on a rug. And, there was another surprise for me too.

Upon the steel table closest to me, I found a second china plate of food. This was surely not mine; mine was shattered upstairs, under the electrified remains of my perpetrator’s feet. This plate was wrapped in plastic with a Post-it on top. Beside it was an identical mug of milk and cup of water. I stepped closer. The note said, “D.” I looked in the trash. On top, plain as day, was another piece of saran wrap with a Post-it, but this one said, “L,” my first initial.
How did I not see this before?
We were not alone in the building.
Another girl. And her name begins with D
.

Still, this diversion was not a part of my plan.
Stay focused, finish 15/33, and then re-plan
. I found some envelopes with the address and a phone, dialed 911, and demanded the chief of police. I got him.

“Listen to me carefully, write this down. I will talk slow. I am Lisa Yyland. I am the pregnant girl who was kidnapped a month ago from Barnstead, New Hampshire. I am at 77 Meadowview Road. Do not come in a cop car. Do not put this on the radio. Do not make a scene. You will jeopardize me and another girl they’ve taken. Come in one regular car. Come quick. Do not put this on the radio. Do not make a scene. Are you following this?”

“Yes.”

I hung up.

Now I could attend to this other victim. I stepped outside. Finally, the full architecture. For once I was right, it was white. As I had noted previously, the footprint housed four different wings, three floors to each with a common attic adding a fourth level. A faded sign on the side said, “Appletree Boarding School.” The kitchen was so new though; the peeled paint of the exterior seemed misplaced. I thought of the scene in
Romancing the Stone
when Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas visit Juan to get a ride in his “Little Pepe,” a truck. Juan’s house was a run-down shack on the outside, but a virtual palace on the inside.

The girl, D, might be anywhere, and I was not about to go climbing all sorts of stairs looking for her. I wasn’t going to yell either. Fortunately, something caught my eye. In the far left wing was a matching triangular window, at the same height as mine. I walked around the whole structure. There were no other windows like them. Instead, all of the other windows were large, some taking up the whole wall of a room. I concluded that had she been in any of those rooms, there would be curtains. I looked up again at the triangular window and I swear the black butterfly fluttered in the pane, as if pointing the way.

I opened the doorway of this far-left wing and climbed three flights of stairs. The stairwell matched mine exactly. The third floor housed the same bathroom, in the same spot.

I rattled the floorboards outside a locked room.

“D?” I said.

Nothing.

“D, what’s your name? I just escaped from the other wing. Is someone there?”

A loud crash, something fell.

“Hello, hello! Please, let me out!” She screamed this phrase repeatedly, frantic she became, as I clawed through the ring of keys, which I had collected from my own locked door, and found the right one. Interestingly, her lock was antiquated, a simple turnkey lock so unlike my titanium upgrade.
Why was she so trusted? Underestimated?
I would have picked this lock on the first night. As her door opened, a blond girl struggled to sit on her bed. A pile of books was strewn along the floor, so I presumed they were the source of the crash. D wore a purple dress and one black Converse All Stars sneaker; her other foot was bare. I wondered again where my shoes were, as I scrunched my toes in the gifted, too-large Nikes.
Why was she allowed to keep her shoe?
This D was very pregnant, just as I.

“The cops are coming. They’re coming right now.”

As I said this, the sound of tires and an engine rumbled outside.

Why didn’t I hear cars pull up in my wing? She must have
heard whenever the Kitchen People arrived, The Doctor, The Obvious Couple, the Girl Scouts and their mother, Brad. Did she scream for help each time? They must not have heard her
.

“My name is Dorothy Salucci. I need a doctor.”

A car door slammed.
That can’t be the cops yet. I called 3.5 minutes ago. Must be the cops. Someone is walking around outside. Where are they going?

Beads of sweat dotted her pale face. Her eyes drooped in sickness, not lethargy. One of her legs was swollen and red; her right shin appeared as though it would burst. Her hair was matted with grease, the bangs pulled aside by one bobby pin.

Where are they?

Dorothy’s dungeon mirrored mine in many respects: wood bed without mattress on the bottom slats, just resting in the frame, plastic covered her box spring, the beams were the same, the window, the wood floor. But she had no TV. She had no radio. No pencil case, no ruler, no pencils, no paper, and no pencil sharpener. And I guessed, no tacks. She did have two assets, however, that I did not: knitting needles and several books.

Screaming began in another part of the building. My wing.

I tried to lift Dorothy, get her to move.

A door slammed. Again, my wing.

“Come, Dorothy, come now.”

She froze.

“Dorothy, Dorothy, we need to leave, now!”

Running feet outside the building below us.

And up the stairs.

Dorothy pasted herself to the wall behind her bed.

I pulled her arm.

A floorboard rattled behind us in the hall.

That’s when I accepted my colossal miscalculation.

As soon as I hung up with Boyd, Lola and I found our way to the Skyway, the one road to Indiana that afforded a quickened, lights-and-siren-blaring path. I called the local Indiana police station and warned of our imminent arrival, instructing the chief to not move a muscle or make one solitary call on the open wire. He said, “No problem,” and promised to bring his troops off the street by way of an innocuous code.

When we hit Gary, Indiana, we abandoned the lights and sirens, opting to blend into Indiana’s straw-and-wheat air like other unmarked motorists on this cold spring day. The sky was a steel blanket of gray with just a faint hint of fighting blue. The sun, a distant memory behind the murky froth.

Lola’s instincts were up on a high wire, for her sweat of Old Spice pervaded every last inch of the interior. I opened the passenger window as she drove.

“Shut the damn window, Liu, I’m dying over here with that pumping sound in my ears.”

The fast-moving air annoyed me too, and I suppose it annoyed even more a woman with a hound’s senses. I pushed the button to shut the window.

We beat our way into the police station, which had been turned into a makeshift command central of two men. The one-floor box of a structure had gray desks facing a waist-high wood partition, which itself faced the door. The wall of patrolmen in local blues I had expected to meet us was absent. An older officer extended his hand to mine.

“Agent Liu, Chief Marshall. This is my deputy, Hank. Sorry, I know you were expecting more of us. But soon as I hung up with ya, I realized, out of all the damn days, all my boys are attendin’ a funeral for the wife of their old chief. They’re all two-and-a-half hours away. But listen here, listen here.”

The chief stepped closer, peering into my eyes to accentuate his announcement.

“Listen here. You won’t believe this. Your kidnapped girl just called. I can’t believe the timing.”

“Dorothy called here?” I asked, incredulous.

“Dorothy? Who’s Dorothy? No, the girl said her name was Lisa Yyland.”

“Pink bear,” Lola whispered.

“Come again?” Chief Marshall asked.

“Never mind, never mind. Did you say Lisa Yyland?” I said.

“Yeah, you can hear it on our recording. She called three minutes ago. I’ve been trying your phone number. She said to go on up to the old boarding school. She’s waiting. Said not to use sirens or we’d jeopardize her and another girl.”

Another girl. Another girl. I bet that girl is Dorothy
.

“Who is Lisa Yyland? If you’re looking for a Dorothy, do you know?”