The Safest Lies (23 page)

“Me too,” I said, and then she took herself to the edge and pushed herself over.

“Come on!” I heard Annika whisper-yell from the tunnel below.

I peered over the edge, and Ryan was looking back up, like he could read the indecision on my face. The door behind me, the pipe below. Out there were answers. On the other side of the wall were the only people who knew what had happened to my mother. The only constant in my life. The person who had promised to keep me safe—and always had.

He reached up a hand, like he understood. “Kelsey,” he said, and his voice wavered. “I would never forgive myself. Please.”

Impossible choices, and I had to start making them.

Little trades, like chips at your morality—strip away what you think you’re supposed to do, what you’re told you’re supposed to do—and keep chipping in the dark, until all that’s left is you.

I wanted my mother, I wanted to help her. But more than that, I wanted to be free.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered to the empty room.

I lowered my two feet into the hole, and I fell.

—

Ryan caught me around the waist as I slid to the bottom. His arms shaking, his mouth slightly open, he was staring into my eyes like he knew exactly what I had been thinking.

“I’m here,” I said. But I had to say it again before he released me.

It was dark and cold and musty, and the tunnel before us was darker and colder. We’d have to crawl. Cole was leaning against Annika in the space beyond.

Ryan shined the flashlight down the pipe, but all we could see were a few areas of standing water—no light at the end.

Annika put a hand to her mouth. “I can’t do it,” she said.

It was narrow, and we didn’t know where it ended, but it was better than standing still and waiting again.
Act before the fear.

“I’ll go first,” I said. “Just follow me. Close your eyes if you need to.”

Ryan handed me the flashlight, but it clanged off the base of the pipe as I crawled, and I worried someone would hear us. So I tucked it into my waistband and moved in the dark. I felt Annika periodically brush against my leg, and I heard breathing, but I didn’t call out or check in on anyone. Didn’t want our voices to carry. Didn’t want to be found.

We kept moving. We could’ve been crawling deeper into the earth, or through the mountains, but we kept going. And then I heard a steady drip, just before I saw a faint light. I started moving faster, and eventually when I looked up, I saw the moon through the sewer grate bars above. Like the black iron gates at home, shadows against the night.

I waited for everyone to catch up. “We’re at a road,” I said, my body trembling, from the cold and the wet and the fear. We were caged animals. Savage creatures living in darkness. With the water and the dark, the blood and the sweat, we were unrecognizable.

And then I climbed, pushing open the grate, stumbling into the ditch on the side of the dark mountain road.

The mountains seemed closer in the night, their shadows stretching ominously in the moonlight. The dying leaves rustling on the tree branches. I pictured that leaf in my lap, from when we were hanging over the car. Slowly curling, slowly dying. And I felt the vastness, as my mother called it. Everything and anything that could possibly happen, just a blink away.

I felt it like a rush of air, coming from nowhere. Felt it like me, running full-speed and free through the cold night.

T
he four of us lay flat in a ditch on the side of the road as Ryan made contact with his cell. “Help,” he said. “We need help. This is Ryan Baker, and there’s a home invasion going on at Blackbird Court in Sterling Cross. They’re armed, and we’ve escaped. There’s a gunshot injury.” The words poured out of him, and I knew there was finally,
finally
someone on the other end.

I crawled across Annika to get to Cole, who was lying too still, no longer pressing a hand to his side, and I listened to our breathing as Ryan continued. “I don’t know where we are. We’re on the side of a road somewhere near Blackbird Court. I think.” A pause. “I see trees. Just trees.”

I heard wheels on the road, saw him debating standing up, gripping the grass. Saw him change his mind, lowering his head out of sight. The headlights lit up the trees behind us as they passed, and I squinted from the sudden brightness.

“We’re not moving,” he said. “Not until the police arrive.”

He joined me in the grass beside Cole, nodded as he saw that I already had my hands over his side, pressing on his bandage. The movement and adrenaline had made him worse. His skin was cold, his eyes unfocused, staring off into the night sky.

“Hey, we made it,” I said.

His chest rose and fell, and he placed a hand over mine, on his side. But it was weak and cold, and it slid off just as quickly as it had appeared.

“They’re coming,” I said. I pressed myself close to his body, my mouth to his ear. “We’re okay,” I said as I rested my forehead against his shoulder. And I thought how unlikely that I should feel closer than ever to someone only as they were slipping. That it was only as they were drifting away that I wanted them to stay.

We lay that way until we heard sirens, and Ryan spoke into the phone, and then he stood on the edge of the road, his arms waving, until red and blue lit up the sky and the road and our faces.

—

The EMTs pushed me aside and took over, assessing Cole’s injuries. Cole winced as they moved him, which I took as a good sign.

“My mother,” I told them, gasping. “My mother was taken.”

One of them swung a head in my direction. “By who?” he asked.

I shook my head. “I don’t know, she’s just
gone.
”

“We’ve got officers heading to the house now.” He looked me over, blocking my view of Cole. “Where are you hurt?” he asked.

I arched my neck to see over his shoulder. “I’m not,” I said.

His gaze lingered on my arms. “You’re covered in blood.”

I looked down, saw it crusted into my jeans and my shirt. Felt it under my nails, thick and congealed. “Not mine,” I whispered.

I wiped my hands on my pants, but nothing happened. It clung to the creases of my palm, the ridges of my fingerprints.
Blood on my hands.
“He’s going to be okay, right?”

He placed a hand on my upper back, led me toward the road. “Come on,” he said.

Ryan and Annika were up on the road, speaking to a police officer. But all the words sounded too far away, out in the vastness. The flashing lights turned our faces garish and unnatural. So when the police officer gestured to the back of his vehicle, I happily obeyed. I wanted to crawl inside his car and never leave. Annika climbed in after me, followed by Ryan, and we were silent and stiff the whole way to the station. I imagined we were all repeating the same type of thing in our heads, like a prayer:
This is over, this is over, you’re safe. You’re safe.

—

An hour later, and Ryan, Annika, and I still sat in an office across from two plainclothes officers—one sitting at the desk, the other standing behind it. “Once more,” the one sitting said. His desk plaque said
DETECTIVE MAHONEY
. “From the beginning.”

Ryan let out an annoyed breath. Annika checked over her shoulder out the glass office windows again. The man standing behind the desk looked at me with a mixture of sympathy and compassion, but Detective Mahoney was all business.

Detective Mahoney held out his hands, palms up. “I know, I’m sorry. The more we can get right now, the more help this will be going forward. Even by tomorrow, things will start to fade.”

I thought of my mother, fading away too.

I closed my eyes, started again. “We got there, and the alarms were turned off,” I said.

“And what did you first notice that let you know your mother was missing?”

I thought of the feeling in the house. The emptiness. “I knew right away,” I said. “The door was unlocked, and the lights were on, and I heard the emptiness.”

“You heard the emptiness?” he said.

Apparently that wasn’t a normal response. But the house was never empty. It had a
feeling,
a stillness that resounded.

“And you decided not to call the police?” he asked.

Ryan groaned. “I should’ve,” he said.

“I called Annika,” I said. “I called her first. And then I sent a text to Jan.”

He consulted his notes. “This would be Janice Murray, then?”

I nodded.

He flipped through pages and pages of everything we’d given him. “Other than this
emptiness
you speak of, what else was there that made you think your mother had been taken?” he asked.

Ryan stood, pushing the chair back. “Is the fact that there were two men with a gun who forced their way into her house not enough?”

Detective Mahoney raised his hands again, as if he was used to calming people. He waited for Ryan to sit down before speaking again. “Okay. Here’s what we know, and what we’re trying to figure out. The house was empty when we arrived. We saw where the gate had been tampered with out back, and the bullet in the window, which all happened
after
you returned home, yes?”

I nodded.

He continued. “Nothing seems disturbed inside. Other than the smoke, which you yourselves admitted to.”

He paused, waiting for it to sink in. “You’ve heard the saying that the simplest explanation is most likely the right one?” he asked.

I leaned forward. “Yes. The simplest explanation is that the people who were in my house took my mother.”

He leaned forward as well. Folding his hands on top of his desk. “We have people looking. I promise. But here’s what the simplest explanation looks like to me: it looks like someone noticed your mother left, and they thought the house was empty, and they tried to rob it, and you were caught up in it.”

I shook my head, felt the need to rise from my chair like Ryan had, made myself speak calmly, rationally. “She’s agoraphobic. She can’t leave the house.”

Annika caught my eye. She kept staring over his shoulder, or at the blank wall, and every time someone spoke, she looked surprised. “Someone said her name,” she said. “Someone asked for Kelsey Thomas by name.”

The detective leaned forward again, and Annika slouched lower in her chair. “There’s another option, of course,” he said, “and I don’t want to worry you. But your name was just in the paper, along with your picture. And the timing makes sense. Look, you’re a pretty girl. It’s possible someone became fixated with you after the story. It’s possible.”

As if being a girl was a reason in and of itself not to feel safe. My mother did not cast her net wide enough, it seemed. The dangers were everywhere.

Ryan straightened his back, looked at me. I knew what he was thinking—my name in the paper still came back to him. But the police were grasping. They were finding a story that made sense. “And my mother, then? What happened to my mother?”

“We will need to talk some more to Janice Murray before making any conclusions. But we have a bulletin out to all departments. We have people at the house, searching for evidence. We’re going through your mother’s computer and her phone records. We’re interviewing neighbors.” He leaned forward, placed a hand over mine. “If she was taken, we will find her.”

“If?
If?
” My voice was rising, my frustration was rising, and something was rising in the back of my throat.

“Just a few more questions. You say you got out from a tunnel under the floor in the safe room of the basement?”

For the third time, I didn’t answer.

Detective Mahoney didn’t speak, but the man behind him took a step forward. “The house is a crime scene, Kelsey. We’re still processing, trying to piece together the story. We’re going to need that code.”

And I hadn’t given it yet. Kept saying I didn’t remember, but that was a lie, and Ryan knew it. I thought of the fact I wasn’t supposed to give the code to anyone.
Ever,
my mother had said. But she had also promised to always be there. She had been taken. And they didn’t believe it.

“Twenty-three, twelve, thirty-seven,” I said. The numbers felt like sandpaper in my mouth.

The other detective wrote it down, excused himself from the room, already reaching for his phone. “Yeah, this is Conrad….” His voice faded out in the hall. Ryan reached a hand down for mine.

“We’ve spoken briefly with Janice Murray, and she said she has power of attorney over you,” Detective Mahoney said.

“Right,” I said.

“You’ll stay with her?”

I hadn’t thought of the logistics of where I’d stay, who would take me in. Hadn’t realized yet that I’d have to keep moving, even as my life had seemingly halted. “Yes,” I whispered.

“I’ll arrange for someone to bring you to her house, then.”

“Not necessary,” Ryan said, and the detective looked to me for confirmation.

He turned to Annika. “Your mother should be here within the hour. Do you want to wait for her here or at home?”

Annika didn’t look me in the eye. “Here,” she said, and my heart sank. She was scared. She was scared of home, the one place that should keep us safe.

“Annika,” I said, reaching for her. But she didn’t look up. Just flinched at the sound of my voice. “I’m sorry,” I said.