Escape from Memory (20 page)

My arms felt weaker than ever.

“I—I guessed,” I stammered.

“Why is it so important to you to stay here?” she asked.

I couldn’t say,
Because I was afraid you’d kill us before you returned
to Crythe
. I couldn’t say,
Because I was afraid you’d kill Mom if I didn’t bargain for her life
. My mind flickered on a detail I’d half forgotten: the possibility that the police would come and rescue us at eleven o’clock, if Mrs. Dotson had done what I’d asked her to. Mom would still be in the airplane then. Would she be safe?

I had to hope so. But I couldn’t let Rona see that I had any hopes at all.

“Crythe scared me,” I said flatly. “I didn’t like it there.”

Rona threw back her head and laughed uproariously.

“A bunch of half-wits living in the past?” she asked contemptuously. “The terrified remnants of a failed experiment? Crythe is
nothing
. Right, Jacques?”

“Huh?” Jacques was practically asleep, huddled against the wall behind her.

“Forget it, Jacques,” Rona said in disgust. We all watched as Jacques’s eyelids drooped again.

“When this is over, I’ll be able to hire the best and brightest again,” Rona said. “Like your parents. Did you know that they used to work for me?”

I did, but I had to pretend that I didn’t.

“Doing what?” I asked.

“Oh, they were my ringers. R and D. Research and Development. I had this little computer company, see, that was up against the big guys. And your parents developed the greatest system, something that would make Bill Gates look like a two-bit idiot. But they had funny ideas about who owned their inventions.” She looked at me sadly. “This is really just about patent rights, intellectual property … business matters.”

Liar!
I wanted to shout. My parents had done their Crythe research on their own time, with their own equipment. Rona had no right to their work. Their mistake was in telling her anything. But I couldn’t defend my parents without giving away everything.

“You’re supposed to settle those problems in court, not with guns,” Lynne said boldly behind me. I turned around to give her a quick grin of gratitude.

“Oh, I forgot. They teach idealism in school nowadays.” Rona chuckled. “You’ll learn. The way the real world works—sometimes you just have to take what belongs to you.”

I knew I could trust Lynne to debate that. I was glad we’d managed to distract Rona from trying to figure me out. But my arms were trembling from holding the computer aloft for so long. This wasn’t going to work.

“Stand up, Lynne,” I said quietly while Rona was still chuckling.

Lynne scrambled up instantly. Rona stopped laughing and tightened her grip on the gun.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I announced. “Lynne’s going to hold the computer now!”

I didn’t give Rona time to object. It was only a second before Lynne had the computer held high over her own head, her eyes locked on Rona’s.

Could we do this for the next several hours—pass the computer back and forth whenever we got tired?

No.

I bent my head toward Lynne’s ear, pretending I was just reaching out to steady the computer.

“Jump into the bathroom the same time as me and we’ll lock the door,” I whispered.

Lynne flashed me a startled look that Rona had to have noticed. I watched the suspicion play over Rona’s face as Lynne and I inched backward, in unison, toward the bathroom.

“She’s protecting me,” I told Rona. “We’re just making sure you don’t shoot either one of us.”

“I could kill you both with one shot,” she countered. “Stop right there!”

We were on the threshold to the bathroom. I responded by jerking Lynne around behind me, slamming the door, and flattening myself against the wall, all in one smooth move. Lynne stumbled and sprawled across the length of the floor.

“I said to stop!” Rona screamed.

I turned the lock on the door. Seconds later a bullet whistled through the middle panel of the door.

Lynne rolled over and dove into the bathtub. I figured she knew what she was doing. I jumped after her.

“Is this tub porcelain or ceramic?” Lynne whispered.

“I don’t know—it’s old, that’s all,” I said, irked that she could ask such a stupid question when all I wanted to do was listen for the next bullet.

“But will it protect us, or should we hide behind the toilet?”

“I don’t want to risk getting shot while I’m switching places,” I replied.

The bathtub did seem safe. It was off to the side, not in the direct line of fire if Rona shot at the door again. I never thought I’d be looking at anything with claw feet as a safe haven.

“That didn’t hit you, did it?” Lynne asked.

I hadn’t even thought to check. I looked down. All my skin
cells seemed to be connected to one another, unpunctured.

“No. What about you?”

“I’m fine. And the computer—” She held it up, and both of us stared.

Rona’s bullet had gone right through the center of the computer.

M
Y FIRST REACTION WAS UTTERLY RIDICULOUS
. M
Y EYES FILLED WITH
tears, and I wanted to whimper,
Papa. Mama
.

That computer
had
been my parents’ most impressive invention, and now it was destroyed. For a second I felt the surge of nostalgia that I’d claimed Mom had felt for this computer.

Lynne didn’t have the same kind of emotional connection to waylay her.

“Hey, hey!” she shouted out to Rona. “Don’t shoot again. I know you don’t care about us, but you might hit the computer! Just leave us alone, and we’ll come out as soon as we hear Sophia’s voice.”

“You’ll climb out the window,” Rona said.

“From the second floor? We’d be killed. Send Jacques out to watch for us if you’re so worried.”

“You might as well come out of there. I’m going to pick the lock,” Rona said.

“Can she do that?” Lynne whispered frantically to me.

Silently, I shook my head.

“I don’t think so,” I said. One advantage of living in such an old house was that all the locks on the doors really worked. At Lynne’s house all we needed was a bent bobby pin and we could break into any room in the house. “And there’s not a key anywhere. One time we locked ourselves out, and we had to borrow Mrs. Steele’s ladder and break the window to get in.”

“What if Rona does something like that?” Lynne asked, panicked.

“She’d attract too much attention. Wouldn’t she?” I asked.

Outside the bathroom, Rona yelled again: “Maybe I’ll take the door off the hinges.”

“Oh no,” I moaned. “I’m so stupid.”

But Lynne didn’t look worried.

“The hinges are on this side!” she yelled back to Rona. Then she whispered to me, “Didn’t you know that when you decided to lock us in here?”

“Oh, sure,” I muttered. “Of course.” But my heart pounded because I
hadn’t
thought about hinges. Even my parents had never had to lock themselves in a bathroom to protect themselves from a gunslinging maniac.

“Don’t feel bad,” Lynne said, seeing right through me. “I probably shouldn’t have told her where the hinges were. Then she would have wasted time looking for something to take the door off….”

I ignored Lynne’s apology.

“What else could go wrong?” I asked desperately.

“Nothing, unless she tries to shoot off the lock,” Lynne whispered back. That was something else I hadn’t thought of. Lynne saw from my expression that she had to take charge.

“Just leave us alone,” she shouted out at Rona. “It’s not worth
the risk for you to do anything else. If you try to get us out of here, we’ll throw the computer out the window and we’ll flush the notes down the toilet. Got it?”

Rona didn’t answer.

Lynne and I listened, our hearts beating wildly. No more threats, no more gunshots, no tugs at the doorknob.

“Maybe Rona and Jacques left,” Lynne finally whispered.

“No,” I said. “They’re just waiting.”

“So what are we going to do?” Lynne asked. “When your mom gets here, I mean. What are we going to do about the computer?”

“We’d better start praying,” I said glumly. “It’s our only hope.”

That’s when we heard the tapping at the window.

I
F THE SOUND HAD BEEN ANY LOUDER
, I
WOULD HAVE PANICKED
, convinced that Rona or Jacques was going to break the window and that we had only a few minutes before Rona would discover the destroyed computer and kill us both. But the tapping was so faint, I wasn’t sure I could trust my own ears.

“Shhh,” I whispered to Lynne.

I stood up and crept over to the window. This was the only room in our apartment that had good blinds. I was lucky that they were pulled down. I slowly moved them away from the window, just enough to peek out.

A man’s face stared back at me.

“I’m Officer Lanur, miss,” he said through the glass. “Are you okay?”

Did he mean apart from having been kidnapped? Apart from practically having a heart attack from the shock of seeing a face at a second-story window?

He was motioning for me to raise the window. I unlatched it and opened it just a crack. I still had the notion I shouldn’t do anything I couldn’t hide quickly if Rona stormed into the bathroom.

“Did that shot hit either you or your friend?” the man asked.

Mutely, I shook my head.

“Then let’s get you out of there,” he said.

I stared at him as stupidly as if he’d suggested sprouting wings and flying.

“Unless you
like
being locked in a bathroom and getting shot at,” the man said.

I pulled the blinds back farther so I could see him better. He was clinging to a rope hanging down from the roof.

“They’re going to see you,” I whispered. “I just told her to send the guy out to look. She was worried we’d climb out the window.”

I’m not sure how much sense that made. Office Lanur didn’t seem the least bit concerned.

“Your two kidnappers are in the kitchen right now, having a snack,” he answered. “Don’t worry. We’re watching. We set up a stakeout, oh, ten, fifteen minutes ago. We don’t like innocent teenagers hanging out with trigger-happy freaks, so we thought we’d rescue you before we did anything else.”

Mrs. Dotson
, I thought. She didn’t wait until eleven to call the police.

She had saved my life.

I decided I should think better of the Willistown police, too, since they’d been able to spy on us all along without anyone noticing.

“What’s going on?” Lynne whispered behind me. She joined me at the window and then jumped back in surprise at the sight of an unfamiliar face.

“It’s the police,” I hissed. “They found us!”

“Pleased to meet you,” Officer Lanur said to Lynne. “How
about if we continue this conversation on the ground,
after
I get you out of there? I’m getting a little tired of impersonating a spider.”

Beside me, Lynne was beaming. I hadn’t seen her look so happy since the school officials agreed to let her do an independent study on binary numbers.

“But my mom—,” I started to protest.

“You tell us exactly where they’re holding her, and we can get her, too,” Officer Lanur said. “But let’s get you two to safety first.”

I was still working that one out—did I deserve to be safe when Mom wasn’t yet? But I knew I wanted Lynne out of danger. She was already pushing up the window, palms firmly hoisting at the bottom. The window surged up three inches, then ground to a halt. She bent down, shoved her right shoulder under the window, and pushed. The window didn’t budge.

“Why—won’t—this—open?” Lynne grunted.

It’s funny how, if you’re terrified enough, you can forget something you’ve known all your life.

“That’s as far as this window ever opens,” I said dully. “Remember?”

Lynne looked crushed and stopped pushing. I could tell she knew what I was talking about. But Officer Lanur still looked puzzled, so I had to enlighten him.

“It’s designed that way. One of the kids of the original owner fell out a window and was killed, so the father made it so none of the second-or third-floor windows in the house could open more than four or five inches. When Mrs. Steele bought this house, she had all the other windows replaced. But she didn’t bother changing the windows in the bathroom.”

I was babbling, but neither Lynne nor Officer Lanur stopped me.

“Okay,” Officer Lanur said slowly. I could tell he was having trouble letting go of some little fantasy about effortlessly rescuing two helpless teenage girls from certain death. “Um, is it a mechanical thing? How do we get around this?”

“I don’t know” I snapped in frustration.

Lynne was prying at all sides of the window frame with her fingernails, as if she could dig her way out. Tears blurred my eyes as I watched her. I was so tired all of a sudden.

Officer Lanur began talking quietly into a headset I hadn’t even noticed he was wearing.

“Um, I’m going to go back up to the roof here for a few minutes,” he told us. “I’ll bring back some tools to break in without making any noise. I’m sure we’ll have you out of there in no time at all.” I wondered if that was a white lie, the same kind that police officers told all the time in the movies—like,
Yes, yes, of course you’ll live. You’ll be fine
, to a person who was obviously bleeding to death.

We watched Officer Lanur rise and disappear over the edge of the roof. Lynne sank down to the floor and slumped against the wall.

“I thought we were getting out,” she moaned.

“We’ve got hours,” I said comfortingly. “It’ll be a long time before Mom gets here.”

Secretly, I was almost relieved that Officer Lanur hadn’t been able to rescue us right away. It gave me time to think. Should I refuse to escape without Mom? I could get the police to give me another laptop computer to fool Rona with once
Mom got here. I could tell the police to save Mom first. It couldn’t be that difficult, could it?

My thoughts got so convoluted, I didn’t hear the phone the first time it rang. But Lynne did.

“Listen,” she hissed.

We crawled over to the door. I put my ear against the wood.