Mapmaker (13 page)

A thousand yards became two thousand. I fought back a tide of panic. The woods were endless. Was Blaney looking for me? The police? Beth? I knew she was and she must be worried sick. Harrison, my father’s best friend, my legal guardian, had been talking to the people who’d taken me—unless I’d mistaken his voice on the computer. I wasn’t sure what was real or not anymore.

“Hello!” I yelled to the sky. “Hello! Help me!”

The sun was overhead now; it was midday.

For a few hours, I’d managed to hope, but now I was losing it. I could be in a national park. I pictured the map of the eastern states, those green areas, how they were so small compared to the towns and villages.

I turned due east, toward the coast. The pain in my ankle was like a person screaming in my ear. Maybe Alison and the men had left me because they’d known I’d get lost and die. I was so afraid of the unknown. I’d never been lost. I was more afraid now than when I’d been taken in the car.

“Hello!” I tried to scream again. “Help me! Help!”

Plowing eastward, I caught a glimpse of something lying beneath the leaves. It was orange, plastic. I kicked the leaves away with my foot: an orange Nerf machine gun, a child’s toy. Quickly I searched for a path, a disruption in the leaves or footsteps in the mud. Nothing was clear. I walked ten steps due south, then another ten, still nothing. If a child was playing in the woods there must be a house nearby. Maybe?

This was hope. I heard the sound of wind again, waiting
to feel it or see it in the branches and leaves but the leaves were still. I turned around and glimpsed a foam orange bullet. The ground to the north-northwest looked trampled. Fourteen yards in that direction, I saw a second Nerf bullet lying in the leaves.

The sound of the wind came, but there was no breeze.

It wasn’t the wind I was hearing. It was a car. It was so faint, though. I froze, waiting.
There …

My ankle burned but I ran. Marking where I’d been before so I didn’t waste any time retracing my steps. With the falling leaves and the muddy ground, everything looked the same. That’s when I saw the third bullet and the clearing light.

I stopped, catching my breath. I shifted all my weight to one foot. In front of me the trees thinned, a dirt trail no more than a foot wide cut through the woods.
NO TRESPASSING
signs were nailed to the trees, a fire pit was dug into the ground, filled with charred wood. Cigarette butts and beer bottles littered the ground. I’d never been so happy to see signs of human life.

The path came to a clearing and a red clapboard house.

I’m safe
, I thought.
I’m safe now
.

In the dusk, the
red house looked like home. I imagined a family in the kitchen, eating dinner. I walked past the plastic wading pool, its turquoise faded from the sun and the water filled with fallen leaves. A child’s bike lay on the ground, the wheels missing. As I drew closer, the story I would tell the nice family inside played on fast-forward:
I am lost. I am in danger. Call the police and call my stepmother
. They would take me in, feed me, act concerned to mask their initial fear
of a strange and filthy teenager showing up from their backyard unannounced. And then they would make the calls.

A silver-colored car was parked in a dirt drive. It had a Virginia license plate. I was in Virginia? As I drew closer, I saw that the red paint on the house was chipped in many places, marred with ugly stains. The blinds were drawn in the upstairs windows; the two downstairs windows were boarded up with plywood. Through the screen in the back door I could see a bare light bulb burning in the kitchen.

I walked up the back steps. I felt an overwhelming mixture of fear, hunger, and thirst. I couldn’t tell if I was hot or cold. I held my hand in my sweatshirt pocket. That joy when I first saw the house from the woods, like finding a gold coin, was gone. I tapped on the screen door, overcome with my need to find someone,
anyone
, to help me.

There were sounds—indistinct voices and footsteps upstairs—but no one answered. On the round table inside the kitchen, an ashtray, I could see a pack of cigarettes and beer cans. A pot cooked on the stove. My nose wrinkled at the strange metallic smell that came through the screen.

Now I had a bad feeling. Showing up here might be more dangerous than being alone. There were clearly people in the house, and they didn’t want to be found.

I looked toward the road. No other house in sight.

Just go. Just keep going
.

I counted in my head to the number seventeen. This was something I hadn’t done in years. It started as a nervous tic after Mom died, because I knew it was exactly seventeen feet total from the foot of my bed to the foot of my father’s bed.

When I’d finished counting, the voices upstairs grew to a
shout. I walked away without thinking, quickly toward the road. I didn’t know which way to go: left or right? It was lighter to the left, so I went southwest toward the setting sun, following the downward slope of the hill. There were no lights, no other houses. I moved quickly, even running in short spurts until the pain in my ankle made it impossible.

I guessed I had forty-five minutes before dark. I felt my right side pocket. I had some cash and my bank card. Thank God Beth had always warned me to keep some money “on your person.” Thank God I’d followed her advice. Thank God for Beth …

My wallet was in my canvas shoulder bag—back at my cubicle along with my phone. Pathetic, but I was lost without my phone. Did I even have anyone’s number memorized? My brain came up empty. I hadn’t eaten anything since I’d left MapOut. Like a broken clock, my mind kept ticking back to lunchtime at work Friday, asking WHY I hadn’t eaten both halves of the sandwich I’d packed, remembering how I’d thrown the brown crusts and leftover peanut butter into the woods for the birds.

The dirt road cut between two overgrown, untended fields. I hurried along it, limping now with every step. The light was turning a greyish purple. A flock of birds flew in a V overhead, heading northeast, carried by the wind. Every step I took tore at my ankle. As I staggered in the near dark, I made a list in my head: aspirin, ace bandage, water, food, call Beth …

No, I had to call the police first. I knew Beth would be going crazy, worried sick. But what about Blaney? What had they done to her? Did they kill her? Kidnap her?

I stiffened.

An unmistakable distant sound cut across the dirt road: the long muted blast of a train horn. I ran toward it until a single pair of headlights rushed into view and vanished in the distance. Then I sprinted, trying to ignore the pain in my ankle.
When I get there, then I’ll be safe
. My legs burned when I finally reached the paved road of a town.

I’m not sure how
long I stood at the town’s edge. Beyond the crossing were the lights of storefronts. A spire stood dark against the night. At first I thought it was a church steeple, but as I walked closer it looked like a castle or fortress. I blinked several times, fighting fatigue. The light turned green and I concentrated on walking a straight line, toward a lighted pizza sign.

As soon as I pulled open the glass door, my mouth watered. I counted the money in my pocket: twenty-six dollars plus some change and my bank card. Hunger overrode anything else: my fear for Blaney, my concern for Beth, thoughts of Connor.

And then I glimpsed myself in the mirror on the back wall.

My hair was ratty, clumped, my hands and face smeared with dirt. The rip that ran down the side of my jeans—torn from the fall in the ravine—was stained with brownish spots of blood. My eyes widened at the unrecognizable reflection. This wasn’t just a homeless girl; this was a filthy, crazy vagrant. Someone who might be dangerous. Me.

The fat bald man behind the counter asked for the money before he handed me two slices on a paper plate and a bottle of water. I couldn’t blame him. He eyed me suspiciously as I
sunk into a corner booth. What happened next was a blur of starvation; I inhaled the pizza and the water. Only when I’d finished did I notice the other people around me: four kids my age on a double date, talking about a baseball game. The girls were wearing the boys’ jackets, maroon and blue.
ALTON HIGH FOOTBALL
.

I was in Alton, Virginia.

For the first time since I’d escaped the car, I could think clearly again. I yawned. My stomach felt unsettled, but a warm, delicious drowsiness suddenly rose up from deep inside. I thought about curling up in the booth cushion.

Fighting the impulse, I rubbed my eyes, hard. I pictured Alison as she injected me, the expressionless look on her face as she pulled out the gun. Why would they have killed me in the woods, but not in the car? They hadn’t followed me down the ravine, so I doubted I could be traced. They had my phone; I hadn’t used my bank card. Not yet, at least. But I couldn’t assume they gave me up for dead or lost forever.

In the tiny bathroom of the pizza place, I cleaned up as much as I could. I scrubbed my face with the foam from the grimy dispenser. I tried to wipe the dirt and bloodstains from my clothes with a damp paper towel, but only ended up smearing the mud around my dirty clothes.

When I combed my hair with my fingers, I noticed my hands were shaking. They were still shaking when I left, the fat bald guy staring at me.

I’d mapped enough towns to know that most had a police station, a post office, and a church, so I took my chances and walked toward the castle-like steeple. The night wasn’t cold, but I kept shivering. After a few blocks I hit Main Street: rows of impressive eighteenth-century buildings wrought with decorative stone, probably once banks or grand department stores, now mostly dark or boarded up. I knew this small-town story well. At MapOut we weren’t just putting new places, things, shops, and restaurants on the Map—we were also taking them off, erasing them. In some towns, Main Street vanished completely when a Walmart appeared down the highway.

Above the massive double doors on the castle-like fortress, in line with the steeple high above, was a pair of stone engravings:
ALTON TOWN HALL
and
POLICE STATION
. Rows of small square windows made the whole place seem especially forbidding, and for a second I wondered if this were also a jail.

Two girls sat on the steps, smoking. One looked up at me as I passed. She had blue eyes and blonde hair; she looked about my age or younger, and was very pregnant.

I pulled open one of the doors, the smell of pine disinfectant reminding me of middle school. Inside, a small fluorescent-lit antechamber was packed with a half-dozen miserable people. One man held a bloodstained towel to his arm. Posters of missing children and sex offenders lined the walls.

At the far end was a booth, protected by bulletproof glass. A plump woman in a police uniform sat on the other side, looking either angry or bored.

“How can I help you?” she asked through the plastic grate.

“I need to talk to a police officer.” My voice shook. “I need to report a crime.”

“You need to report a crime,” the woman repeated. Her tone was flat. She reached forward, taking a yellow piece of paper from a tray of pastel-colored forms. “Fill this out,” she said, pushing it through an opening slot.

“I have to fill out a form?”

“Yes, you do.”

“Can’t I just tell you what happened to me? Or talk—”

“Fill out the form,” she snapped.

I glared at her. I had been drugged, kidnapped, people had tried to shoot me. Now was the time for the law to come running to my rescue. I scribbled as quickly as I could.

The details were barely legible, but I didn’t care. As soon as I was done, I slid it back under the bulletproof glass. The woman glanced at it and slid off her stool. After what seemed like an eternity, a side door opened and a male police officer stepped into the hall. He was greying, rugged, paunchy, maybe Beth’s age.

“Tanya Barrett?” he grunted.

“That’s me,” I said, my voice a cracked whisper. My heart raced as I followed him through a door marked
DETECTIVE WARREN MORRIS
.

I followed him into the tiny office. There was no place for me to sit. He slumped down in his desk chair and glanced over the yellow report I’d filled out. My eyes wandered to a navy mug, printed with
PROUD PARENT OF AN ALTON HIGH HONOR STUDENT
. A gold-framed photograph of two children, a boy and a girl, sat beside it on his desk. In the picture the boy looked about twelve and the girl fourteen. She had a pretty face, brown hair pulled back, and a big smile with braces.

“You reported that you were kidnapped, drugged, taken in a car, shot at …”

He kept his eyes on the paper. His hands and face looked dried and weather-beaten.

“It’s true.” I spoke quickly. The words poured out in a frenzied rush as I retold the story I’d summarized on the paper: how I’d been at MapOut working late when the electricity was cut off, and how I’d gotten into the car thinking it was my friend Blaney …