“Is Claude home?”
She pointed at the stairs. “In his room. You go on up, and I’ll bring you both some Kool-Aid.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Ziegler, but I don’t know if I’ll be here for long.” I planned to talk Claude into going into the tunnels with me. Either he would or he wouldn’t.
“It only takes a mouse’s minute to drink Kool-Aid,” she said, smiling warmly. Mr. and Mrs. Ziegler were in a hot tie with Brenda’s parents for the nicest parents in Pantown. They were just so normal.
“Thanks, Mrs. Z.”
I ran up the stairs. The Ziegler house was set up like ours, with the master bedroom on the main floor and two spare bedrooms and a bathroom on the second level. Since Claude was an only child, he pretty much owned the second floor. His bedroom door was cracked open, the bathroom door closed. Might as well wait in his room. I’d spent a good part of my childhood in there, relaxing on his nubby blue quilt hand-sewn by Mrs. Ziegler, staring at his movie posters—Carrie, Rocky, Jaws, Monty Python and the Holy Grail—so many times I could see them with my eyes shut.
I had his door halfway open before I’d realized I’d made a mistake, that he wasn’t in the bathroom but was in fact sitting on his bed, his back to me. He looked over, made a gargling sound when he saw me, and quickly stuffed what he’d been holding under his pillow, but not before I spotted the flash of a copper chain.
BETH
Beth had a rhythm. She clawed at the shape in the packed dirt for as long as she could stand it.
Then she’d cradle her shredded fingers, blowing on them to ease the pain, and rest.
When she woke, she’d dig some more.
She’d dredged enough to deduce that what she was unearthing was metal, probably five inches long, and as thick as her thumb. Likely an old railroad spike. Now that her fingernails were gone, the tips of her fingers mashed from digging, she’d had to modify her method. If she pushed too hard, she simply packed the dirt tighter. If she didn’t dig hard enough, her fingers slid across the surface. She’d found a happy medium, where she firmly—but not too firmly—jiggled a section of hardpack under the pad of her pointer finger. That loosened it a microscopic amount, enough that she could come at it from the side, using the top of her finger, where the nail used to be, like a tiny shovel.
The endeavor took patience and a steel will.
She had both.
She kept the dirt she removed nearby. If he returned, she’d dump it back in the hole and tamp it down. It would mean redigging it later, but it was better than being found out. Besides, it’d be easier to dig it out the second time. The hard part was loosening it in the first place.
What she wouldn’t give for a pen, or a nail clipper, or even a barrette, all the tiny conveniences she’d taken for granted. But she would persevere with nothing but her hands and her single-minded focus, and when she was free, she’d tell this story to her students. Not all of it, not the parts where he came in to visit her. She’d leave those out. But the lesson of never giving up even when your blood felt like sludge and every square inch of you was gray-tired and surrender was calling to you like sweet relief?
That was the part she would share.
She kept at the spike like an archaeologist, delicately removing dirt an atom at a time, her focus so absolute that she almost didn’t hear the voices above. This time it sounded like men only. Panicked, she dumped all the dirt back into the small hole, patted it down, and scurried across the dirt floor to the far corner, all without turning the kerosene lantern on. She knew the space by heart, had mapped out every inch.
She drew her knees to her chest, waiting.
CHAPTER 22
“Heather!” He leaped off the bed and hurried to me, standing too close, so close it seemed as though I could hear our rapid heartbeats echoing off each other. “What are you doing here?”
“I was in the neighborhood,” I said, cringing as the words left my mouth. Obviously I was in the neighborhood. I lived in the neighborhood. I fought the urge to flee and instead stared up at Claude, really looked at him. I had to crane my neck. He was over six feet tall, his sandy brown hair flopped over his forehead, those steady green eyes staring at me, begging me not to ask him what he’d been up to when I’d barged in.
I was more than happy to oblige.
It was impossible for him to have been the man wearing the copper-colored ID bracelet in that basement, anyhow, the awful man Maureen had been going to town on, because Claude-rhymes-with-howdy had been standing next to me when it was happening. It’s not like it was some gross club where all the members got a bracelet and a secret handshake.