Runaway (13 page)

“No, that’s your job. They like you better,” Jan said.

“You could try a little harder, you know.”

“Not with the Harringtons I can’t. It’s best I not talk to them at all.”

Jan pulled into her parking garage. She heard Peet telling Kevin she’d be done in a minute.

“Okay, I’ll call the Harringtons. If they approve the trip, I suppose we should go tonight. Do you at least have a starting point for us, an actual place for us to drive to?”

“Yep. Somewhere south of Detroit. But I think we should leave in the morning. Early.”

“You’ll get no argument from me. I’ll let you know what the Harringtons say.”

They rang off and Jan went into her apartment. Normally, she’d already be in Detroit no matter what the client said, but the pull of Catherine was strong. She felt guilty, but the desire to see Catherine that night easily trumped her guilt.

When Jan wasn’t working on a Saturday, which was rare, she spent the time cleaning her apartment. There was very little to do. She didn’t have many things, so not much got strewn about. She usually ate out, so the kitchen never needed real cleaning. She had a person come in once a week to do the bathrooms and floors. But still she always found something to fuss with, some shoes that needed polishing, a drawer that could be reorganized, a window that could be washed. The few women she’d brought home to her place usually teased her about its minimalism and sterile cleanliness, but Jan had never gotten over the satisfaction of having a place she could actually scrub clean. The cabin in the woods she’d been raised in could never have been called clean. Being simply habitable was a stretch.

But today, instead of cleaning, Jan sat down with her laptop and started Googling. Catherine Engstrom was an unusual enough name that she should be able to see right off whether there was anything on the Internet about her. And in 0.485 seconds she could see there was a lot. Not much of it was concerned with her work at Chartered Global Security. A website called London Arts Beat showed a photo of Catherine and a beautiful woman posing at the entrance to a building. The caption read:
Celebrated painter Ellen Sanderson hosted a reception at the opening of her new show at the Grimes-Brimley Gallery in Chelsea last evening. Accompanying her was her partner, Catherine Engstrom.

Jan saw that the date of the opening was exactly a month ago. She closed the laptop, went to her freezer, and pulled out a bottle of vodka. Almost as soon as she poured some down her throat she had to lean over the sink and throw it back up.

*

Packages and paper were strewn throughout David’s house, making it look like the aftermath of a savage Christmas party for camping and gun enthusiasts. Boxes of ammunition were stacked next to rifles and shotguns. Down coats were piled high like snowdrifts on the furniture while winter weight army boots lined one wall as if waiting for a platoon to muster. When Maddy, Kristi, and Tommy came through the door in the middle of the night, they tripped over power tools and landed on cookware. David flipped on the living room light as he came in behind them.

“Careful there! We can’t afford to break anything.”

“Well, can you afford to break people?” Kristi asked. “‘Cause I’m about broke, I gotta tell you.”

David laughed. “You’re unbreakable, Kristi. Strong as an ox. You’re just tired is all.”

“She’s not the only one,” Tommy said. He made his way into the kitchen and sat at the rickety table. Maddy sat beside him. She was worn out and her head hurt from taking the rifle butt to her helmet. She was still pissed off about it. No one at the training camp seemed to take the incident seriously.

“I can’t believe we have to go back to that place tomorrow,” Tommy said. He looked as miserable as he had all day. “There’s not one thing I learned there that seems useful to me.”

Maddy had to agree. Unless they were planning on hunting in the dark in Idaho, the entire six-hour exercise that evening had been a painful waste of time. Learning how to lob hand grenades didn’t seem useful for hunting elk and deer. Knowing counter ambush techniques, fighting positions, and wetlands ambush practice seemed absurd. But everyone involved in the training took it damn seriously.

“Tommy, you’ve always been big on learning for the sake of learning. Just think of it that way,” David said. “I can’t get these guys to give us a tailor-made weekend of training. Can’t afford to, anyway. We take what we need and don’t worry about the rest.”

Kristi sat across from Maddy and took her field cap off. Her hair stuck up in a thousand different directions. “I don’t know. It all may come in handy. We don’t know what’s waiting for us out in Idaho. It’s the Wild West, right? Maybe we’ll have to defend our land.”

Maddy thought about their property’s real estate brochure, which went on for paragraphs about how suited the acreage was for living a survivalist lifestyle. There were “defensible ridges” where you could take the high ground and track the movements of others approaching your land. If nothing else, she thought it possible they’d have to defend themselves against extremist groups in the area.

“I think I’ll just pass on tomorrow’s training,” Maddy said. “I’ve been wounded in battle today.”

“That son of a bitch,” Kristi said. “I can’t wait for tomorrow so I can take him down.” She looked fierce. Then she looked back at Maddy and her face softened. “I’ve got some Vicodin. Do you need some?”

“You’ve got Vicodin?” Maddy said.

“Sure. Steady source of it.” She said this as if she were talking about school supplies. Tommy groaned.

“I don’t understand. Are you an addict or something?” Maddy said.

Kristi laughed. “Oh, hell no. I’m not stupid.”

“Kristi’s resourceful,” David said. “That’s one of the things she brings to the table for us.”

“Thanks, man,” Kristi said. She smoothed her hair down. “But like I was saying, if you’re head hurts bad, I can give you something for it. Maybe you’ll feel different about going tomorrow.”

“She’s going tomorrow,” David said. “We need to be strong here, because we’re going to have to be twice as strong in Idaho. Right, Maddy?”

They all looked at her. Maddy wasn’t used to doing things she didn’t want to do. Her parents seldom made her do anything. But she didn’t want to look like the weakest link in a chain of weak links.

“Let me sleep on it. I feel like shit.”

“Yeah, let’s let her sleep on it,” Kristi said. “Where are we all sleeping, anyway?”

Tommy looked alert for the first time in hours.

“Kristi, you sleep downstairs with Maddy. Tommy will bunk with me,” David said. “Diane will meet back up with us tomorrow.”

“Great,” Kristi said. “Come on, Maddy. Let’s get you to bed.”

Maddy didn’t know if she liked the sound of that. Kristi suddenly seemed eager.

“But there’s only the one mattress down there. Where’s Kristi going to sleep?”

David smiled. “Get used to community living, sweetheart. Kristi and you are going to have to share the mattress tonight.”

Kristi got up and came around the table. Maddy felt like she was about to be escorted to the honeymoon suite. “Come on, kid. Let’s get you to bed. Your head must be splitting.”

David kept smiling as they left the room. Maddy’s head was pounding and she was starting to consider the Vicodin. When they got down to the basement, Kristi looked at the shabby corner where Maddy slept.

“Look how nice you made this,” she said. “It’s not half bad. Which side of the bed do you want?”

That was a strange question. Maddy had never shared a bed with anyone. Why would it make any difference which side she had?

“It doesn’t matter.”

“You sure? Because I always like the left side. I don’t know why. I was once with a girl who insisted on the left side and I knew I had to get rid of her.”

There it is, Maddy thought. Kristi’s a lesbian. She felt simultaneously thrilled and terrified. She’d never had sex with anyone, but when she imagined it, boys never came to mind. But neither did someone like Kristi.

Maddy made quick work of washing up. She asked Kristi to turn around when she used the toilet. Then she put on a T-shirt and shorts and slipped into the bed while Kristi brushed her teeth.

“I am so psyched about getting out of this town,” Kristi said. She was talking as she sat on the toilet. “I don’t know what your story is yet, but if it’s anything like mine, the idea of a place that isn’t all fucked up is like heaven to me. This town is dead. Dead to me.”

“Did you ever think of just moving to another town?” Maddy said.

“I tried it. I went to Kalamazoo and then to Lansing. It’s the same thing everywhere. No one wants to hire me, or if they do it’s for shit jobs. I want to build something for myself.”

That wasn’t so different from what Maddy wanted. She was going to suggest to Kristi that she could try getting an education and find better work, but then she remembered that she was a high school dropout herself.

Kristi got into bed with the same T-shirt she’d been wearing all day. She smelled earthy, but not in an entirely unpleasant way. Maddy could feel her warmth. Or was it her own warmth? Suddenly there was warmth, and she wasn’t sure what was happening.

“So what’s your story?” Kristi asked. “Did you just graduate from high school this year and decide to leave everything? What did your parents say?”

Kristi was leaning on one elbow, looking down at Maddy.

“I’m not really close to my parents. I’d say they aren’t in the loop on this decision.”

“You mean they don’t know?”

“Well, they know I’m gone, but they don’t know where.”

“Huh.” Kristi considered this. “Well, as long as you’re eighteen they don’t have a say, do they?”

“That’s the whole point, really. I don’t want anyone to have a say in what I do.”

Kristi lay down with her arms behind her head. The tip of her elbow was next to Maddy’s temple. She felt like rubbing her head against it, but she didn’t. They were silent for a few minutes.

“How’s your head?”

“It’ll be okay. Sleep will help.”

“Let me feel where he hit you.” Kristi raised herself again and gently touched the side of Maddy’s head. Maddy lay frozen, but she didn’t protest. “Yeah, there’s a little knot. It’s not too bad. You want that Vicodin?”

“No. We have to get up in a few hours. I’ll be a mess.”

“So you’re going to go tomorrow?”

“Do you think I have to?”

“Yeah. I think if we’re all going to make this trip together, you kind of have to.”

“That’s what I thought.”

More silence.

“So much for no one having a say in what you do,” Kristi said.

Maddy laughed, maybe for the first time that day. Or that month. She lay awake listening as Kristi’s breathing deepened. She felt far from sleep now, the body next to her so foreign. The more she thought about Kristi lying next to her, the more wide-awake she felt. She rolled quietly out of the bed and headed upstairs for some water, the cement of the basement floor cold on her feet. The house was dark, but as she stood in the kitchen with a glass in her hand she heard noises down the hallway to the bedrooms. She put the glass down and crept toward it. There were three bedrooms, with the doors to the two smaller ones open. The third was at the end of the hall, where a hint of light showed at the bottom of its closed door. As Maddy got closer she heard David’s voice.

“Yes, yes. Like that. Good boy, like that.”

Then there were some unintelligible words and other noises. Maddy wasn’t naïve. She’d watched porn on the Internet like everyone else. Tom and David were having sex, obviously. But if Tommy and David were getting it on, what was the deal with Diane the girlfriend? She turned around and tiptoed back to the kitchen before taking another long drink of water. She wondered what else was going on that she didn’t know about.

*

Jan threw her overnight bag into the backseat of her Jeep and climbed in. She put her laptop bag on the seat next to her. She’d been tempted to leave it behind, afraid she’d find herself obsessively searching the Internet for more bad news about Catherine. After throwing up over the first bit of information about Catherine’s long-term and apparently well-known relationship with a London artist, Jan had sat back down to torture herself with more news items and photographs of them together. By the time it had grown dark in her apartment, she’d finally had enough. She called Peet.

“I’m headed up to Michigan.”

“I know. I’m going with you, remember?”

Jan could hear Lily in the background. It sounded like Peet was in the car.

“I’m going now. You’ll have to meet me up there.”

Peet sighed. “What’s going on, Jan? Did something new come up?”

“I just can’t wait any longer. This will give me a head start in the morning. Did you talk to the Harringtons?”

“They’re fine with it. Now that they know she’s run away and has some money, they’re not as anxious. If you can call what they were anxious. At least they still want us to find her.”

“That’s big of them,” Jan said. She pulled onto Lake Shore Drive and headed toward the Skyway.

“Where are you headed?”

“There’s an area south of Detroit that seems to have a number of groups that have these weekend things.”

“Well, I can’t break away now. I’ll have to catch up to you. Check in with me in the morning, okay?”

“Right.” Jan threw her phone on the seat. It immediately rang. Jan saw Catherine’s name on the screen and when she grabbed it, it felt like a hot coal in her hand. She was speeding down the Drive, just as it sharply curved before Monroe Harbor. Her eyes flicked from phone to road and back again until finally the call went to voice mail. It was the second call from Catherine in the last hour. She’d not allowed herself to listen to the first message, but now she played both.

“Jan, it’s Catherine. I’m so mortified that the secretary found us like that. My God, the word will be all through the office by the time I get in on Monday morning. Well, nothing to be done about it. I’m not saying I’d do anything differently. The fact is that you’ve been on my mind almost constantly since we were together. I’m sorry if that sounds like too much, but I want to be honest with you. Can we see each other tonight? Call me as soon as you can.”