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  “You hurt? You hear me?” She mouthed. I couldn’t hear her words.

  “My phone,” I said to her, pointing to where I’d dropped it, ten feet away.

  “The who?”

  “My phone. My phone. Please, there, my phone.”

  The woman, about mid-fifties, with a dirty blond matted perm, housecoat, and road-stained slippers, shuffled to where I pointed, bent like an elderly grandma, and shuffled back, handing me my phone with her mouth in slackjaw.

  Shouting from the strip mall began—but only as a collective mass of moving sound, which I tuned out either because my eardrums had burst or because I needed to focus on the one call I had to make. Lola sat gasping for breath with the chief’s wrist in her hands, counting his pulse by keeping time on her Sanyo watch. By the look of her enlarged nostrils and squished nose, I could tell she was concerned with the silence between his heartbeats.

  I’m pretty sure my judgment was clouded when I made the call. I’m pretty sure I deliberately broke all sorts of department codes. But in that moment, I felt I had no choice.

  “Boyd,” I said when he answered. “I’m going to need your help after all.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  DAY 33 CONTINUES, GO

  And I know it seems useless,

  I know how it always turns out

  Georgia, since everything’s possible

  We will still go, go

  –“Go” by The Innocence Mission

  Dorothy, this vision I hold of her, like an old precious Polaroid in my purse, the photo changed only by the warping of color over time, but still and forever the same in terms of heart-caving nostalgia. Dorothy, sweetly sleeping, courtesy shock, courtesy sickness, her blond curls rising and falling with every inhale, every exhale. I wanted to keep my own breath in time with hers so that I might be a sleeping beauty just like her. To have someone stand watch over me, protect me from wolves, from dragons—yet, only lovely Dorothy, my new friend, my only friend, the closest one to my desire to mother a child, only she was worthy of such administrations. Only Dorothy deserved pause before the storm. I, I was a mere weapon.

  How was she able to sleep? I understand, I truly understand. In the moment I gave her my hand on her pillow, she likely allowed herself to succumb to whatever battle of insomnia and fever she’d been beating back. I was to save her. She handed me her fate.

  And I had work to do. And though I’d turned Love on for Dorothy, no other switch was on. Not even one for annoyance. I had abandoned all hope on cops showing up, so I put the possibility of them showing up, out of my mind.

  Hole-in-his-Face-Brad-y-Poo’s moaning began to carry outside, moving in the direction of my wing and the kitchen and his dead, burnt brother. I figured he would not be long in returning. And I guessed he’d likely recover from his brother’s corpse some tool or apparatus or artifact of demented sentiment, whatever, and then he’d reenter the kitchen. There, he’d soon figure I had used the phone, seeing as I left the envelope with the address under the dangling cord. With hand heel to forehead like a dunce saying “duh,” he’d finally realize I’d called the cops. I wasn’t going to underestimate the smarter of the dumb twins. Sleeping Dorothy and I had all of four minutes to escape and get to the van.

  I collected and stashed Asset #40—Dorothy’s knitting needles—in my back holster, while kicking Dorothy to wake up. I removed Asset #41, the bobby pin in her hair, and slid to the locked door. Only two months prior, I had maneuvered a mini-needle through Jackson Brown’s shaved skin to finely stitch her paw, which she’d slashed on a jagged roof edge while chasing a cooing dove. So since I was really a surgeon inside, picking the country lock on Dorothy’s cell door was as easy as popping a canister of Pillsbury cinnamon rolls with the flat end of a fork. Pop.

  With the door open, waking Dorothy became a liability and a duty. I slid back to her bed and as soon as I arrived, I bent to her lifting head. Cupping a hand, the one with the blood from my eye, I held firm to her dry, cracked lips, staring into her now startled eyes.

  “Dorothy, keep your mouth shut. And I mean shut tight if you want to live. Follow me, now. Get up, now.”

  I didn’t let go because I wasn’t sure she understood.

  “Do you understand me? If you make one noise, we’re toast. You have to shut up and follow me. Understand?” My holster banged into my up-bent shoulder, rattling the knitting needles, bedpost arrows, and keys inside.

  Dorothy nodded her head to indicate she understood.

  Slowly I released hold on her mouth; she wiped my blood from her lips.

  Are we blood sisters now? Is this what it means to have a best friend?

  Stop.

  Stop these ridiculous thoughts. Get to the van.

  Honestly, you’d think I’d kidnapped the girl. I had to push her from behind, prodding with my index and middle fingers on her spine as though a gun. Her one skinny leg and her one swelled leg wobbled from fatigue and emotional retching, and she continually turned to face me with a puppy-dog, quizzical gaze. “Turn and walk. Be quiet,” I kept saying.

  Step by step we crossed the threshold. She seemed so hesitant to take the flight down, checking me constantly with an expression of “You sure? You sure?” I pushed harder with my finger gun. Her back felt knobby and knotted, not fleshy as it should have been in her late state.

  Given the wetness outside, the stairwell’s thick air of must and dank hit our noses in a swift uppercut, so much heavier than in times of sunlight. Like a smelling salt, the mold must have slapped Dorothy to a sharper alertness, for she jumped and froze. I pushed again.

  I wasn’t mad at Dorothy. I had scant emotion. I just needed her to focus and quicken her feeble pace. Dorothy herself was most definitely not an asset. But she was my instant friend and now my ward, and we’d formed an unspoken bond no one else could ever really understand, even myself. So although I growled directives at her, I did take two pauses to pat her back to say, “Come on now, be strong. You can do this,” which is what Mother said to my father on the day he had to throw the first shovel of dirt on Aunt Lindy’s grave.

  We were about midway down the stairs, close to the top of the last flight. I fisted Dorothy’s greasy hair to halt her descent and hold her still. Fearing his return, I strained to hear any shuffle along the tar and gravel outside. Dorothy’s shallow breathing filled the stairwell with a rumbling static, like an old lady with pneumonia, that crickety wheeze of breath encumbered by phlegm. With her wrist in my hand, her heartbeat tapped too quick; with my bloody palm to her forehead, her temperature nearly burned me. Again she locked eyes with me, and in this second moment of tightening our bond, without her saying the words, I answered, “I know.”

  By my estimation, we had about a minute and a half to reach the bottom floor, exit the building, cross the small parking lot, and enter the forest path before Brad emerged from my wing. I had visualized the outside world and the path back to the van since the first day in this hellhole, even though I had been blindfolded and bagged when I’d arrived. I counted the steps, recorded the give of the ground, touched the air for climate, and had replayed those details into a visual memory of terrain, topography, and temperature. In my mind, I’d made the trek from van to building and building to van a hundred thousand times. And you know what? Apart from the building being a white building—a former boarding school—instead of a white farmhouse, I was dead-on exact on every detail. Goes to show what your senses and your memory, your prior learnings and your confidence, will give you if you’re able to strip out the nonproductive distractions of fear and anticipation. Listen. Smell. Taste. See. Live. Evaluate. In real time.

  Most people perceive only 1 percent of the colors in the vast spectrum of hues. The rare humans who visualize more than 1 percent report either a disappointment with everyone else’s dull perception of life or claim to have visited Heaven in their dreams. They have a type of super-sense, these lucky souls.

  A recent article in Scientific American reminded me of the super-s
ense I experienced during my time in the Appletree prison. Summarizing research published in the Journal of Neuroscience on the cross-modal neuroplasticity of the deaf and blind, the article proclaimed, “This research…is a reminder that our brains have some hidden superpowers.” If you’re not aware of cross-modal neuroplasticity, basically it is the ability of the brain to reorganize itself in the areas where a person may be sense-deprived. For example, how “deaf individuals perceive sensory stimuli, making them susceptible to a perceptual illusion that hearing people do not experience.” I really liked the introductory paragraph of the actual Journal article, which stated rather succinctly, I thought: “Experience shapes brain development throughout life, but neuroplasticity is variable from one brain system to another.”

  So I, a deaf person, a blind person, a person deprived of varying senses, one who with practice, built models of reality, a separate dimension of senses that overlaid with the world in a very true way. Perhaps emotions are merely another set of senses, and the absence of them makes for precision hearing, touching, smelling, seeing, imagining.

  Perhaps.

  Who knows.

  Detecting no scrubble of his footfall, we scrambled to the bottom of the stairs and shuffled our way outside. Looking left, looking right, I found no sign of Brad, so I pushed Dorothy diagonally across the tarred area to the opening of the path to the van. Our bodies were practically merged we were so close. We cut a shadow of two mountains stuck together with those bellies, which I studied with awe when we reached the mouth of the trail.

  Are we one girl? The same girl? Are we all the same at sixteen? So ready for life, and yet so young. I have to save us both. Us four.

  I leaned from behind to speak in Dorothy’s ear as I collected the keys from my holster. The heat emanating from her body made me think she might combust; my face grew flushed. I hadn’t noticed the sprinkles of rain until they cooled me of her warmth.

  “Dorothy, walk straight ahead exactly one minute. Running would be faster if you can. Trust me, I know it’s scary in there, and it will be dark, but it opens onto a large field with cows and a big willow tree. Under the tree is a van. We’ll take the van. I’ve got the key. Let’s go.”

  Dorothy nodded her head in a slow, nauseated way, and took one step into the forest. I followed, glued to her body. Our steps were in synch and so close together, as though we walked with tied legs, the sound of the door shutting behind us was slightly muffled by the thud of our double-footfall.

  “Oh, hell no! You girls stop now!” Brad’s voice was a high pitch of crazed depravity.

  I shoved the ring of keys in Dorothy’s hand.

  “Go now! Do what I said. One minute. Run! Go, go, go. The van key is the one that says Chevy. Go. Go.”

  These were the last words I ever spoke to Dorothy M. Salucci.

  I ran straight toward Brad, a knitting needle in one hand and a bedpost arrow in the other.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  SPECIAL AGENT ROGER LIU

  “Son. Of. A. Damn. Bitch. Lola. Sonofadamnbitch!” I said, after slamming the flip on my giant cell phone and cringing from the incessant ringing in my ears. Boyd had answered my call, and I think he agreed to check the schoolhouse and bring his gun, but I couldn’t hear him. Then he’d called back, I think within five minutes—I knew only because I’d set the ringer to vibrate. Boyd’s words melded together in a muffle to me, which must have registered on my face, for Lola crawled past the flaming car, grabbed the phone even though I hadn’t said a word to her, and listened to whatever Boyd was yammering on about. She relayed Boyd’s news—once again shocking and near unbelievable—by scrawling out a summary in the notebook she kept in the square pocket of her man pants.

  Here’s what her note said:

  B find DSaluc at his van. ?? Woods? No Lisa. B say, “Ain’t no sign of no other girl. Ain’t no one around here.” B used phone in school kitchen. B reports, “Some kinda smell downright awful in here, coming from the upstairs. Smells like death.”

  After this fairly appropriate, file-worthy note, she added her thoughts on a second page of paper, while saying the words slowly so I could read her lips:

  “And how the hell’s Boyd supposed to understand what an awful smell is? That shit-stinking chicken farmer.”

  The Bureau required all of our notes and observations, especially those we wrote, to go into the official record. But you try and stop Lola from spouting off on her constant opinions. I ripped her second note, wishing she wouldn’t editorialize so much.

  “With all the burning cars and people—like your dumb ass—I got to save, spare me the pleas about my opinions, Liu,” she hissed when I tossed the pieces of her note to the now slick ground.

  I knew what she said, mostly because I read her moving lips; the ringing, the ringing, how awful that ringing had risen. I was a mad deaf man, fighting to hear clearly again. I felt I was still dreaming, running so fast, beating my legs to pump harder and harder, my chest heaving in the stress to move forward, but moving nowhere, an inch an hour. Ring, ring, ring, the ringing drowned everything out, blurring the world. I clawed my hands, cupped my ears, searched the falling sky for any other sense, any color, only to find the mottled gray of an unfurling curtain—and the shadows of black, how they, too, fell like ghosts. The clouds had merged into a coiled thunderhead, and yet, despite the ominous darkness, relinquished only bits of water as though to torture us all in that strip mall parking lot. And the fire didn’t care; no liquid could quench its anger. Sammy’s Volvo, stripped of much of her paint, became a warped box of burnt steel. Only blotches of orange remained in the parts untouched by flames.

  One of those irritating raindrops, a fat one, plunked on the bridge of my nose, rolled on the crest before plunging left to ride the cavern of my cheek, and landed on the topmost rim of my lips. The friction of the water’s movement itched me to an untenable annoyance, so I quickly rubbed my face hard with the sleeve of my moist, gray jacket. The ringing seemed to soften when I fixed on this other sense.

  After reading Lola’s disdainful opinion of Boyd’s report on the smell of death, I shot her the “Seriously” look while covering both my ears as though this would dampen further the bleating bells. She backed down.

  An ambulance and a fire truck came onto my and Lola’s accident scene, the ambulance practically skiing in on two tires. By this point, Lola and I were standing and separately guarding the chief and the deputy. Onlookers had formed a half circle behind us, all safely at bay given Lola’s ferocious commands and spitting yells. While she kept our boundary intact, I scanned the crowd for anyone who might have an off-road truck.

  A woman in a quilted Carhartt jacket stood taller and wider than her compatriots. She had long, thick, farm-girl hair, and under her jacket she wore a flannel shirt, buttoned to the top and untucked over a pair of white-washed jeans. Mud melted up over the toes of her boots, the kind with a thick rubber sole. I placed her at about mid-forties. Apart from the Viking stature, she was rather attractive.

  “Ma’am,” I shouted, nodding to her.

  “Me?” She mouthed, inaudible to me. At this point, I suffered a dulled ringing accompanied by an auditory windstorm.

  “You got a truck?” I yelled.

  “Ford F-150,” she said. I moved closer and faced my ear directly on her speaking mouth. She pointed to a shiny, black Ford F-150, sure as rain, right behind her. Slow raindrops cut lines down her fogged windows.

  “All wheel?”

  “Of course,” her lips said, the woman sniffing back a bit of indignation. A man with mutton chops crossed his arms and nodded my way while screwing his face toward her, and with a nose flick, said, “This guy for real?” in his gesture.

  “Ma’am, we’re going to need your truck,” Lola intervened, having caught on to my struggle and to my intention.

  I stepped closer and pulled the Viking woman out of earshot of everyone else. “And if you could direct us to the old boarding school?”

  She again sniffed,
but added a disbelieving smile.

  “Wow. Hmpph,” Lola later told me the woman said. “I taught there twenty years, until the foreclosure. I’ve been wondering what the hell’s been going on up at the Appletree. Yeah, I can give you directions, all right.”

  I rolled my shoulders, scrunching in shoulder to shoulder, attempting to quell the screeching wind within my broken ears. Lola took over, although she too seemed distressed in the way she kept twitching her nose. The stench of burning metal and leather was probably unbearable to her superior olfactory sense.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  DAY 33 CONTINUES

  “Cool your heels, put that bandy down,” Brad said in his awkward manner of speech. He then, not awkwardly but very deliberately, aimed a nine-millimeter to my face.

  I paused in the driveway, Dorothy’s knitting needle and my arrow still poised. And there we stalled in an odd stand-off: me, pregnant and panting with MacGyver’d weapons, him, draped in a bloody jacket and with a cocked gun. Although our version of the classic stand-off was so far from a proper Western, in retrospect, I’ve always painted this memory with tumbleweed bouncing on its way to nowhere and crossing our toe-to-toe line.

  Where are the damn cops?

  But nothing. No one came.

  Still, we froze in place.

  Out beyond, toward the van, a cacophony of yelling erupted, which surely wasn’t the sound I had expected, such as the clunking of the van’s engine. The medley was of Dorothy’s high-pitch scream and then the more distinct chorus of men shouting. I, mistakenly, pivoted to listen to the noise beyond the pines.