Found and Lost (8 page)

13

“You're going to catch cold in those clothes. Come on upstairs and grab something dry.” Belinda, their new hostess, led Violet and Khloe through a spacious foyer with furniture that belonged in a museum. Red velvet–upholstered chairs with wooden feet, carved like the paws of some big cat. A dark wooden table. Someone had spent hours whittling leaves and flowers and vines down each table leg. A wide burgundy-carpeted staircase wound a spiral on the far side of the room. Halfway up, Khloe stretched out her arm and bumped Violet's bracelet with her own. Violet nodded at the soft
clink
. They were still together.

And nobody was going to harm Khloe or brainwash her. Not that this bottle-blonde grandmother seemed inclined to brainwash anyone, but personality and appearance couldn't override the Christian ideas in a person's head.

Their chauffeur had stayed only minutes after delivering them, which was just as well. Violet stayed at least three arms' lengths from his hulking frame and broiling gaze. Belinda sent him on his way with a travel mug of coffee and hugged him before he left, as if he were more teddy bear than grizzly.

Subconsciously, Violet must have expected some sort of military bunker or mobster penthouse, because her first step into this house had caused a ripple of surprise and relief. And Belinda didn't need a name to become a person. Her compassionate smile and Southern twang loosened the knot of fear inside. Violet could think more clearly now. Observe. Gather evidence.

The hallway Belinda led them down was narrow and ridiculously long, with rooms on either side. This house must have more than a dozen guestrooms.

“You'll sleep in here.” Belinda motioned them ahead of her, into a room with ivory walls, two twin beds, and two old oak dressers. All the furniture looked to be about a hundred years old.

Someone had stenciled blue and red flowers over one wall, as well as a border around the whole room. Khloe reached out to trace the petals. Even when hiding from the Constabulary, she couldn't lose her artistic self for long. She stepped closer to a floral painting on the far wall, probably analyzing its use of light or color or something.

“You'll want to sleep soon, but first things first.” Belinda opened a walk-in closet and turned on the light. “Pretty sure this room's got both your sizes.”

Someone had installed shelves on two of the closet's paneled walls, and stacks of clothing filled most of them. Violet picked up the nearest pair of jeans and unfolded them. Size five.

“Where did all this stuff come from?” Khloe's voice drifted over Violet's shoulder. She stepped around Violet to paw through a pile of bright T-shirts.

“Resale stores, clearance racks,” Belinda said. “There's been a collection going for a few months now.”

“You take money from people?”

Belinda's laugh was too loud for the small closet. “My heavens, no. My husband and I pick up things when we can. Marcus does, too. But most of it's from someone else.”

“A resistance fighter like you?” Was that admiration in Khloe's voice? Surely she couldn't be won over with a closetful of hand-me-downs. But she browsed as if she were at the mall, slow steps from one shelf to another, touching every piece of fabric in sight.

Khloe, these people are not all as safe as your dad.

“Don't know that I count as a fighter. I'm just a hostess. But yes, from someone like me. She's well-off and wanted to use that somehow, toward the cause. Most of my closets are stocked like this one.”

Khloe held up a hot pink shirt and tilted her head at the graphic, a blue tree with branches spreading up to the neck.

“Once you're changed, you looking for bed or breakfast?”

“Bed,” Khloe said.

Yes. They needed to talk, and not in this woman's hearing. “Bed sounds good.”

“One last thing.” Belinda hefted about half a pile of sheets and quilts and moved them to the other side of the closet. She shoved the rest of the pile aside as well with a soft grunt. “Now where is it …?”

Her fingers ran along the paneling. She pushed with the heel of her hand, then sat back a moment on her heels, lightly panting.

“Darn that man and his precautions, I can't even find it myself.”

“Find what?” Khloe crouched beside her.

“It's right here. Used to have a little knob to pull, but Marcus took it off and reset the door so it opens to the inside and … well, shoot, where …?”

Her fingernail lodged in a seam between two panels, and a low door swung into the wall. Khloe gasped.

“Now, girls, we've never had a Constabulary agent search this house. Never even seen a squad car on our road. But if something ever happens, you hide here until someone tells you the coast's clear. Flashlights in there, water and snacks, not much elbow room, but you'd both fit easy.”

Khloe brushed her hand along the paneling. “This is the coolest house in the world.”

Violet folded her arms to keep from shaking some sense into Khloe while this Christian lady watched. Once Belinda was out of the room, though …

Amusement gathered in the creases around Belinda's smile. “About half the upstairs closets have rooms like this.”

“Why?”

“It was built in the early nineteen-hundreds. We're guessing these are servants' quarters. My husband didn't want the walls paneled at first, but there's no other way to hide the doors.”

Belinda chatted a few more minutes about the history of the house and a tunnel in the basement that stretched several hundred feet to surface in the woods, which must have been used during Prohibition. She might have talked for hours, if Khloe hadn't yawned.

“Enough history lesson for now. Y'all get some sleep, and I'll make breakfast whenever you wake up.”

Halfway out the door, she pivoted back to face them.

“I promise, this is the last thing. My husband, Chuck, he's off in some cabin with his fishing buddies right now. He'll be back tomorrow, and if you're still here, he might ask about … well, your faith. Please don't take it personal.”

“What do you mean, our faith?” Khloe said.

Good question.

“Well, he believes there's a God out there somewhere, sure. I do too, most days. Used to be enough for us, but around the winter time I noticed a slow change, and now he questions pretty much everyone we harbor.”

“But you're Christians. You're in the Christian resistance.”

Confusion crinkled Belinda's face, then smoothed out. “Sugar, the resistance fighters, or whatever you want to call us—only about half believe in Christianity. The other half of us just believe in freedom.”

Violet took a step back. Something here didn't add up.

“You're tired.” Belinda retreated a step too. “We'll have a chat in a few hours.”

Violet nodded, Khloe shrugged, and Belinda disappeared down the hallway.

Khloe shut the door after her. “I'm definitely wearing this tree shirt in the morning. Let's see if they have any pajama pants short enough for me.”

Violet grabbed some size-medium sleep shorts and a random shirt in her size, V-neck, salsa red. She turned toward the wall and stripped off her wet top and jeans. Khloe's voice rattled in the background of her brain.

If they weren't Christians, why did Belinda and her husband and half of these resisters do what they did? Either something
else
made Belinda as illogical and dangerous as a Christian, or she
wasn't
illogical and dangerous. But if Belinda was a logical, safe person, she wouldn't harbor dangerous people. Or work with dangerous people.

The shorts slipped from Violet's hand. She plopped down beside them on the bed. Her brain was turning into one of Khloe's smoothies. She had to sleep. In the morning, all of this would make sense.

In the morning. Friday morning. Austin would be texting her like crazy. Her fish would be hungry. She was scheduled to work a cashier shift, and tomorrow was payday. Good grief, what was she doing? She had a good, normal, everyday life. What would happen to all of it? She tugged on the cotton shorts and crawled under the covers.

“I think we're okay here,” Khloe said. “Belinda's not even a Christian. And that Marcus guy knows my dad, so when it's safe again … My plan's going to work, Vi. I won't have to go to re-ed.”

Everyday life had become, well, dispensable. Small. “You heard what he said about the con-cops. They don't give up.”

“I'll be the one that got away.”

Until her best friend turned in the people hiding her.

14

Only the most despicable husband would leave his wife in a hospital waiting room, waiting for their daughter to … Clay choked, huffed in a breath, and hit the accelerator. The car revved with its eternal death rattle. He jerked the wheel, and the back end skidded on slush. Four in the morning, and the road crews still hadn't cleared the aftermath of a blizzard that had ended six hours ago, or seven, or maybe eight. He hadn't been keeping track of the time when he charged through the hospital doors. He'd wanted the snowflakes to float around him and consume him in silence, save him from Natalia's gulped tears and Khloe's repeated gagging. Hearing his baby throw up didn't stab him so badly anymore. But the confusion of a five-year-old, the whimpers, the questions—they drove him down the corridor, to the elevator, to the doors, outside, just to hear the silence of the snow. And by then, of course, the blizzard had ended.

“Daddy, does hair always grow back?”

Finding his snow-covered car in the parking lot hadn't been planned. Nor had inserting the key and driving away. Natalia would awake from her bedside chair to discover Clay's absence, and a shouting match would probably follow, because she didn't understand. He could breathe here, inside the heated car, wipers streaking the windshield, away from the smells of disinfectant and his daughter's vomit. Away from the possibility of screwing up Khloe's final weeks. Days. Hours. The doctor wouldn't speculate beyond that, but soon.
Not rallying like we'd hoped, Mr. Hansen.
She'd die, and Clay would have to figure out how to live, a father without a child.

He didn't want to.

The car found its own way, the way his bike always did, some sort of unconscious, man-to-machine telepathy. Highway, highway, miles, miles, exit, streets, streets.

Snowdrifts piled against houses as if trying to knock them over. The houses huddled against the wind on either side of the street in uniform dilapidation. Weather and entropy had flayed white paint from the siding. Chunks of space gaped in brick foundations. Duct tape held a sheet of plastic to one door, where the screen should be. Probably not one whole car sat in the overly populated driveways. Tire gone here, window gone there, not a hubcap in sight. An entire neighborhood of missing pieces.

Clay coasted down the street in his clean, intact three-year-old car. Breaths came deeply now, rhythmic. Maybe some thugs would trickle down the porch steps from both sides, clenching baseball bats. Maybe they'd break a taillight. Maybe they'd drag him from the car and leave him stranded on the snowy street, or take the bats to his body. He eased off the accelerator again, down to twenty miles an hour. Fifteen.

Doors and windows didn't open to him. No one even saw. No danger here.

Was danger what he wanted? Was Natalia right when she called him an adrenaline junkie?

He slid through a stop sign and turned onto a new street. The car made its way back toward the hospital. Miles and highway again. His headlights speared snowflakes that dashed themselves to the ground.

Clay parked and slogged to the entrance farthest from the pediatric wing. In the building with his daughter, but not in the room. Closer, too close, not close enough. He plodded past the information desk, down corridors. He'd been gone almost three hours. Had Nat noticed?

Or worse, had Khloe noticed?

He had to go back. Into that room. Sit and hold his baby and wait for weeks, or days, or hours. But his feet balked at the elevator. His hand refused to press the button. The door slid aside, and a petite brunette in pink scrubs rushed past him without meeting his eyes. He took one step before the elevator closed, then stared at the smooth door.
I can't.

He didn't remember finding the chapel, didn't remember entering it. He had nothing to say to God. There likely wasn't a God in the first place. But his knees buckled right there in the aisle, hit padded carpet. He crawled to the front, to the table that bore a cross, a menorah, a Buddha, other statues he didn't recognize. All these ways to God. Assuming He was out there, and assuming He listened.

A burning ache seized Clay's stomach. He tried to get up, tried to go to Khloe, but his legs seemed paralyzed. Natalia said she needed him, Khloe would want him there, yet he couldn't move.

“Can I be of any help?”

The voice at his ear jarred him up from his hands and knees. He pushed to his feet and gripped the shiny curved wood of the pew.

“So sorry.” The man had been crouched next to Clay, but he stood now as well. Short, husky, black hair and brown skin. His tan suit jacket hung unbuttoned.

“It's fine.” Clay squeezed the back of the pew. “I was just leaving to … to …”

“How is he? Or she? The person you're here for?”

“Dying.” The word zapped the air with an electrical shock. He couldn't stay here with this kind-eyed man in this sacred place, with the truth he'd just voiced into existence. But his body quaked from inside out. He couldn't walk away.

“Sit, please. You look like you might—”

“There's nothing wrong with me.” But Clay sidestepped into the second row and sat, hands still curved around the pew in front of him.

“Would you like to talk? Or pray?”

“I've never prayed before. And I don't … I don't think I want to talk.”

The man sat down in the front row. “Up to you, of course.”

“I think I want to die.”

He must have said those words aloud, because the man's hands shifted in his lap. And now more words came, unstoppable, an avalanche.

“She's not rallying, they said. Not this time. Fever and throwing up. A five-year-old shouldn't have to … She doesn't know why she's sick. She asks me, and what am I supposed to say? Is it God? Is it me, did I do something, did her mother do something? And there's no knowing when she'll go, the fever spikes and every time I think this is it, she's going, but she doesn't, and I need to be in that room, I have to be there when Khloe goes, but I can't. I can't.”

His face pressed into his arms. He rocked forward.

“Oh, God, don't make me go in there. Don't make me go in that room.”

Warm hands gripped his shoulders. “God won't make you.”

 

By the time Clay realized where he was going, his bike's back tire had nearly fishtailed more times than he dared to count. He'd get a ticket if he passed a cop, but he couldn't seem to let off the gas. History flickered in and out of his head like a windblown candle. The chaplain pointing to the cross as superior to all the other relics on that table—a gutsy proclamation even twelve years ago—and an hour later, Clay's stilted prayer that mostly eluded his memory. God had delivered Khloe from the tumor, just as the chaplain had promised. Now He had to deliver her from the Constabulary's evidence against her.

Where was she right now? The June sun cast mirages over the pavement far in front of him, and his bike gunned forward as if trying to splash through one before it disappeared. He coasted onto an exit, and next thing he knew, he had parked on the third level of the cement garage, paid the admission fee, and stepped into the Sterling Heights Museum of Arts.

He power-walked the first level, past fiberglass cases of tarnished spearheads and grotesque dolls and crumbling pottery. Khloe preferred modernity. He took the marble stairs two at a time. Here. Level Three. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when artists depicted life as it was, not as they interpreted it to be.

“Slow down, Dad. Look. No, I mean seriously look.”

“I'm looking. I just don't see what you see.”

“You're such a nonartist, it's so tragic.”

He stalked through long doorless rooms, one after another. The coolness seeped into his skin. He'd passed maybe a dozen people since he stepped into the museum. Maybe some of them were teachers like him, not at work on a Friday morning in June. Art teachers, perhaps, planning the way he often did over the summer, though his version was usually to read a classic and develop essay questions along the way.

Khloe's favorite painting hung on a north wall in this wing. He passed through another doorway and halted. Here. Slow steps carried him closer to the painting, two girls sharing secrets and a handful of nuts that looked like white grapes.

“Okay, but Dad, the nuts don't matter. Look at the way her hair ribbon pokes up on the one side, and the dust on their feet. I wonder what they're talking about.”

“They were real girls?”

“Maybe, but it's like … like they're
all
girls. And they're me and Violet.”

He was standing too close now, just feet away. One of these girls was Khloe. One was Violet.

Violet.

Her parents hadn't called yet. No shock in that. They might not realize her absence for another day or two. But the Constabulary … Violet's ID had been left behind too, on the shelf beside Khloe's. Those agents should have asked about her.

Unless they didn't need to ask, because they knew where she was. His stomach turned over.

They'd caught her.

She wasn't with Khloe. She was in custody. And Khloe was alone.

Clay turned his back on the painting. His two girls—really, Violet was more his daughter than Scott and Diane DuBay's, if you gauged that by the time she spent at her parents' house. Clay had lost Violet, too, not just Khloe, but the flood of guilt over Khloe always came first. Since she was born. No, since she was diagnosed at three with a tumor outgrowing her brain.

He had no business here, prowling a museum for memories. But he'd braced for death so many times that his heart tried to fit this new absence of Khloe into the “forever” category without fighting back. Unacceptable.

“With her father gone, anything could have happened.”

Holing up in a museum counted as “gone.” Clay strode from the room without another glance at the painting. He practically ran down the stairs and to his bike. Somewhere in those woods behind Janelle's store, Khloe had hidden. If he couldn't find her there, he would go to that house with the deck Marcus had told him about, at the end of the street. The deck he'd told Khloe would be a safe haven if she ever needed one.

Common sense didn't overtake him until he'd nearly reached Janelle's store. He wasn't supposed to know where Khloe's illegal activities had taken place. Biking there and searching the woods would be an admission, a stamp of guilt. The Constabulary had raided their meeting less than twelve hours ago. Agents would be prowling those woods for days.

He drove past Apple Lane with a sourness on his tongue and a burning in his stomach. Two Constabulary cars squatted in front of the store. Clay didn't brake. The squad car that passed him in his own subdivision flattened the last of his action-seeking panic. No, he couldn't look for his daughter—not in the woods, not under that deck, not anywhere at all.

Someone else could, though. Someone they weren't circling like vultures after carrion.

Clay parked the bike in the garage, and the reality of his uselessness nearly knocked him off his feet. He curved a hand around the handlebars and relaxed into the reassurance of his bike, the speed and autonomy. His eyes closed, and he breathed for a long minute.

He pulled out his phone, and it almost slipped to the cement floor. Oh. His palm was sweaty. He'd gotten a text sometime in the last hour. Omar.

Prof H, you seen Zena's newest argument? She sent it yesterday.

No, he hadn't checked email yesterday. Or pondered Willa Cather's writing motivations. Why had fiction ever mattered so much? He opened a reply to Omar, stared at the empty text, and hit cancel. He punched in a number instead. It rang, rang …
Formulate your clues. Let him know without letting them know.
Because of course, they were listening.

“Hello.” Marcus's voice came over a faint whir of wind. He must be driving. Probably between contractor jobs.

“You have a minute?”

“Sure.”

The silence dried Clay's mouth, worsening the sour taste. Something caught in his throat, and he cleared it with too much noise.

Marcus waited on the other end, silent and unhelpful.

“It's my daughter. Khloe.”

If Marcus truly did lead the resistance movement, he had to know about the raid by now. He could help Clay decide what to do.

“What about her?” Marcus's voice betrayed no gravity at all, merely curiosity.

“She's missing.”

An appropriate beat, a feigned shock. “You call the cops?”

“No, man, they came to me. The Constabulary. They said she's mixed up with … some pretty serious garbage.”

“Dangerous.”

Understanding clicked. The guy had asked about the cops, and now with this one word, Clay was being cued. And warned. All at the same time. Marcus knew exactly what Clay wasn't asking.