The Girl in the Maze (12 page)

Jarrell lowered his binoculars, let them dangle from the neck strap, and twisted his spine around, cracking the kinks out. His butt was killing him. Why shouldn't it be, after four hours crouched next to the steeple of the Pearl Street AME church? He looked down at his palms, where the tar-paper roof shingles had left pebbled impressions.

Jarrell was well acquainted with the building, and his current location. Two summers ago, Rev. Cleopatrick Sims had paid him fifty dollars a week to keep up the church grounds, clean out the rain gutters, and keep the grave markers clear of pine straw and other debris. Sims was pretty set in his ways, so Jarrell had no problem finding the key to open the padlock on the tool shed next to the cemetery, and he knew where to find the stepladder that gave him access to the church's low-slung roof.

He shifted to a sitting position, straightening his legs and letting his back rest against the steeple. A full block away, figures swarmed around Lydia Dussault's house like fire ants. Daybreak now, and he still couldn't tell what had gone down at Worthington Lane, but it was something big. At least half the fleet from the Amberleen County Sheriff's Department was there, as well as a battalion of paramedics and EMTs. A man in a dark suit was taking pictures of the exterior of the house, and a couple of deputies were driving wooden stakes into the ground and stringing yellow police tape between them. Several cops were fanning out, searching the grounds around the house, poking in the shrubs with sticks.

Jarrell noticed a convergence of movement near the front door of the house. He raised and refocused the binoculars. The door opened, and several paramedics emerged pushing a wheeled gurney. They seemed in no particular hurry. He could discern a human shape under the sheet.

Jarrell lowered the binoculars and took a picture of the scene with his cellphone camera—the brand-new one he'd been forced to buy after Fish-belly wrecked his Motorola in the river a week ago.

He raised the glasses and scanned the areas surrounding the house again. The sizable backyard contained a pair of apple trees, a pecan orchard, and a small, unkempt vegetable garden. Beyond the garden, there was a steep ravine filled with kudzu vines. The vines carpeted the sides of the ravine and shrouded a telephone pole at the edge of Garson Road.

Jarrell backtracked with his binoculars, double-checking for something he thought he'd glimpsed just a moment ago. He saw it again. The kudzu was moving.

He finessed the focus ring, trying to get a better bead on a dark shape nestled under the canopy of vines and working its way toward Garson. He could hear the sound of deputies' voices projected through bullhorns, calling out someone's name. The deputies were moving toward the ravine. Then he sensed a vibration in the roof. Another sound, one that caused him to pull his legs in and scrunch into the narrow shadow of the steeple.

The air thrummed rhythmically. A dark green chopper glided over the church roof, flying low, beating air, and causing the dead leaves to launch around him. Jarrell shrank his body, willing himself to blend in with the tar shingles and shadow.

The chopper passed on, moving toward the waterfront. Once it had cleared the church road, Jarrell scrambled across the shingles toward the eave and climbed onto the ladder. Halfway down, he jumped and hit the ground running and headed toward Bay Street.

Martha paused, one foot on black, grassless earth, the other held aloft, entangled in an itchy green spiderweb. Her arms and shoulders were also caught. She looked around, confused, unsure of the direction she was headed. But at least she was hidden.

Voices, amplified, shouted through bullhorns. They didn't know where she was, but she didn't, either.

Don't rest now, Lovie. You can't stay here. They'll drop napalm on this jungle, or spray gasoline. Burn us out.

Martha looked around. The vines were brown and ropey below the canopy, twining like dendrites, confusing. Which way to go?

Away, Martha. Away from them. You're already convicted, you know. You'll fry.

“Be quiet, Lenny—I need to think.” Fibers from the kudzu leaves stuck to her sweaty skin, making her itch like fire.

Lenny squatted in a clearing a few feet from her. His knees poked through his torn jeans like white pustules.

They found you last time. Remember the janitor closet?

“I hid there for a long time. They only found me because—”

Because they could see you, Lovie. You didn't right vanish. You'll have to do better this time.

Martha clawed at the itchy fibers on her calf. “You shouldn't be here—you've just come back because of the stress, the panic.”

But who else is here to help you? We're mates, you know. Even your Dr. Trauger said that. Mates for life.

Martha reached down, dug a muddy rock out of the bare earth, and flung it at him. The rock sailed into the center of Lenny's smirking face. His image fragmented like a broken reflection in a puddle.

She turned her attention to the task ahead—somehow getting out of this jungle without being seen. She tried to stand up, to walk on the ground, but could only make progress by crawling, picking her way through the mass of winding stalks.

Not far away, a familiar voice called her name.

“Martha? Come on out. There's no use hiding from us. We aren't going to hurt you.”

She paused. Morris's rounded intonation, even amplified through a bullhorn, sounded easy and reassuring, paternal. It carried a promise of protection. It was a voice she had once trusted, but, like so many things in her life, she would never trust it again. She pushed vines out of her face and clawed her way forward, toward a small clearing and a dark, round opening. The clearing was strewn with discarded fast-food containers and beer bottles. Beyond that, more kudzu, then the end of a steel culvert poking out of an embankment. Too small to walk through.

Maybe wide enough to crawl through,
Lenny offered.

“Martha. This is Aubrey. I'm your friend, I want to help you. Just give me a signal. Let us know where you are. I don't want you to get hurt.”

She was startled by the proximity of the voice, already so much closer than before. She lunged forward, tumbled out of the hammock of vegetation, and sprinted the short distance to the culvert, a few feet above the base of the ravine. Her shoes crunched through broken glass. She untangled the vines from her arms, scrambled up the embankment, and looked into the metal opening. Overhead, a rumble of traffic. Amberleen's version of rush hour.

“There she is!” a voice shouted—this time a different voice, not Morris. “I can see her…hurry, she's over there.”

Exposed now, working quickly, Martha put her head and shoulders into the culvert opening and wriggled forward, digging her elbows into the metal ribs. But something was holding her….

“Stop now, or I'll shoot.”

She glanced behind. No one there, just a tight knot of kudzu wrapped around her foot. Martha wiggled and wrenched free, leaving her shoe behind.

“STOP!” a voice shouted. Morris.

Keep moving, Lovie, else they'll kill us.

Martha worked her torso into the pipe—then, a sharp sting in her right leg, as if someone had touched her with the lit end of a cigarette. A gunshot cracked the air and echoed through the culvert like a hissing rocket. The pain spread quickly, fanning out into a white, blanching shock through her calf.

She dug her elbows into the steel ribs and heaved forward, wriggling farther into the pipe. She dragged herself forward with the points of her elbows along the slimy base. She got some traction with her left foot and let the injured one drag behind, useless.

They shot me,
she thought.
They shot me…why, why, why?

'Cause you're a criminal, Lovie,
Lenny's voice replied, disembodied.
And scuffers shoot at bad guys. That's the long and short of it, innit?

Shut up, Lenny,
she thought.
Just shut up, shut up and shut up
. The culvert wasn't long; she could see a disk of sunlight at the other side. She crawled toward it, her adrenaline overriding any consideration of her pain from the gunshot wound.

They'll be waitin' for you at the other end. You know that, don't you, Lovie?

Martha reached the end of the culvert and paused. Lying on her belly, she scanned the landscape beyond. No deputies here, no one at all. Not yet. Just another ravine. Crabgrass, litter, and a stagnant stream. At the top of the ravine, a row of old buildings. She recognized the lumpy, worn brickwork—the back end of the historic district. The blacktop overhead hummed with traffic.

She climbed out of the culvert and tumbled into a rancid pool of water. Needles of pain shot through her right leg. She curled into a fetal position and lay there, exposed.

Brilliant, Martha. This is the way to pop your clogs. Like a dog in a ditch.

Martha pushed herself up. Dark red marbles floated in the water. Marbles of blood.

She looked up the slope of the ravine. The base of the cleft was deep enough to hide her from the roadway. And she could see an alley between the first and second buildings. She ape-walked through the crabgrass, climbing toward street level.

At the top, she stumbled across a gravel lot, reached the weathered masonry of the nearest building, and held on to it, tucking behind a steel trash barrel. She glanced back down the slope. The blades of crabgrass were tipped in red, leaving an obvious trail where she had crawled. The globules of blood were expanding in the pool of water. She gripped the corner of the wall, nauseated at the sight of her blood, and took some weight off her injured leg. A hum welled inside her head and white shapes floated before her eyes.

The morning sun had yet to reach between the buildings. A narrow alley stretched for a block before ending in the bright light of the Bay Street business district, where she would again be out in the open. But along the wall were recessed doorways, possibly leading to basements or storage rooms. Places to hide.

Martha heard the thrum of a helicopter somewhere nearby. She limped along the cobblestones, gripping the weathered, edgeless brick with both hands. A Dumpster stood in her path, and she hopped around it, keeping the weight off her wounded leg and holding on to the metal lip to keep from falling. She reached the far corner of the Dumpster and caught sight of a door, a green wooden door with peeling paint, in a recess. She took a hop toward it. Something dark came out of the shadows.

Martha opened her mouth to scream, but before she could make a sound, a warm, soft thing clamped over her mouth. The shape from the shadows was bigger than she was, and it held her in its grip. She felt her weight leaving her feet. She struggled against the shape, tried to see it, but her vision was blocked by swarms of amoeba-like shapes. Then a roaring sound filled her ears and the amoebae multiplied and danced, lining up now, high-stepping like the Radio City Rockettes. The roar engulfed her like a churning ocean wave, submerging her beyond the reach of sight or sound.

Martha woke in semidarkness. The dark shape was gone. There were no amoebae, no ringing in her ears, just a feeling of weakness and fuzzy disorientation. A flatness. A calm.

She'd been asleep—how long? Hours. Maybe even days. She could see wood planks, timbers overhead. Cobwebs in the rafters. A wedge of blue sky peeked through a gap between the planks. She turned her head and looked to the side. More planking, rough-hewn.

In the center of the wall was a small window, its view to the outside blocked by a plastic roll shade. On the sill were small, irregular objects. Martha blinked. Stones? Maybe seashells.

Next to the window, a rusted metal sign advertising
NEHI ORANGE SODA
, nailed to the wall sideways. She raised her head slightly. At the far end of the room, a thread of sunlight outlined a rectangular shape. A door.

As she lowered her head against the pillow a slight movement near the rafters caught her eye. A model airplane, single propeller, turned on a string. She shifted her head the other way. Assorted objects lined the room's exposed framework. Pictures, a turtle shell, an animal skull, a raccoon skin. Some pictures were tacked to the wall. One face she recognized—Malcolm X, with his trademark glasses. She'd done a book report on the civil rights movement in high school. Others looked vaguely familiar—public figures. Another photo showed a man and a boy together. African Americans. They were holding rifles, smiling.

She tried to sit up and survey the rest of the room, but her head began to swim and she lowered herself back down. The cot she was lying on gave a rusty creak. The lumpy mattress smelled of motor oil.

Her mind skipped back, recalled images of events that now seemed as if they'd happened long ago, like a half-remembered childhood nightmare. She probed her last memories—spending the night at Lydia's house, and the next morning—had it really happened?
Please God, no.
Let that be a dream.

Her right leg was throbbing, and she could sense a tightness around it. She lifted her head and pulled the sheet aside. Her right leg was wrapped in a beige bandage that was secured with a clip. There was a reddish-brown stain near the center.

She was no longer wearing her shorts, just her underwear. She glanced around the room, feeling vulnerable, wondering where her shorts might be.

Martha lowered her head, tired from the simple act of lifting it up, and listened. No voices, only the birds chattering in the bright daylight that peeked through the wood slats.

Her mouth felt pasty. A plastic cup sat on a table by the bed, next to a kerosene lantern, and she reached for it. She felt a slight sting as she moved her arm. She was startled to see a thin plastic tube taped to her forearm. The tube snaked upward, led to another unlikely object—a bag of clear fluid hanging from a chrome stand. The fluid dripped from the bag. Martha closed her eyes, opened them again.
Look away, then look back.
The fluid bag was still there. She let her head rest on the pillow and tried to think.
How long, how long?

Her mind was numb. She knew there were terrible memories—searing images from her last hours of consciousness—lurking below the surface, but she wasn't ready to face them yet. And Lenny was back, his pasty visage, his reptilian voice, lurking somewhere at the periphery of her awareness. But the only voice she heard now was that of her own consciousness, stirring like dead leaves. She was in a one-room cabin, somewhere. Someone was taking care of her. For the moment, that was all that mattered.

She took the plastic cup and found that it contained water, as she'd hoped. She brought it to her lips and took a long, refreshing drink, then lay her head back down, tired again. She focused on the wedge of blue sky in the ceiling, closed her eyes, listened to the sounds outside the small windows. The buzz of cicadas, an occasional peal of seagulls. And another sound—a soft lapping.
Water,
Martha thought, slipping back into sleep.
I'm near water.

The next time Martha woke, she was aware of a new sound, a soft puttering. She raised her head and considered getting up, but found her body unwilling to cooperate. The putter got louder, then stopped near the cabin. Then, a bump, a splash, a sound of dragging, a clank of metal.

Martha propped herself up on her elbows and looked toward the front of the room.

Footsteps outside approached and stopped outside the door. There was a tentative knock.

“Who's there?” she croaked.

She heard the sound of a hasp being unhooked, and the door swung open. A flood of blinding sunlight. Silhouetted there, a dark shape, as tall as the door itself.

Martha started to work her feet toward the edge of the bed, clutching the sheet to her waist.

“Stay there,” a male voice said. “Stay in the bed.”

The shape stepped forward, the door jerked shut on its spring. Martha blinked, her view obscured by a bluish afterimage of the silhouette in the sunlight. The figure moved toward a wooden table, a brown paper bag propped in a muscular forearm. He put the bag on the table and went to the other wall and worked a string to raise a roll-up blind, letting more light into the room. For the first time, Martha got a good look at him. A black man, maybe about her age. No shirt—just a vest made of green camouflage material. An olive-green knit cap was stretched over his head.

“Is that too bright?” he asked, turning toward her. She tried to read his face. Large eyes. A small scar on his cheekbone. Handsome, intense.

“No, it's fine,” Martha said, blinking. “Who are you?”

“Jarrell,” the young man said. He took a step toward the bed and Martha drew her knees up.

“It's all right. Relax,” he said. “I won't hurt you.” He passed by the bed and went to the IV stand and looked at it. He flicked his finger at the clear plastic and then turned the little plastic gear below the bag, causing the drip to slow. He picked up a clipboard on the table next to the bed and wrote something on it. Martha noticed a tattoo on his arm, rendered in black ink—a stylized
S
that ended in a snake's head. It was a symbol she had seen somewhere before. In her groggy state, she couldn't quite place where.

Martha watched him work. Something about the young man himself seemed familiar.
How can that be?

“Let me have your arm,” he said. “I need to take your pulse.”

Martha stared at him. She wanted to be home.
But where is home?

“It's all right,” Jarrell said. “I just need to take your pulse.”

Martha nodded slightly, held her arm out to him. He took her thin wrist and held it, placing his big forefinger on her pulse, and looked at his watch. Martha's arm looked pale as a candle in his dark fingers. A chain with a silver cross at the end dangled from his neck. His bare shoulders looked smooth and powerful.

“You're a doctor?” Martha asked.

Jarrell said nothing, just dropped her wrist and made another notation on the chart. Then he went to the end of the bed and lifted the sheet off her bandaged leg. He looked at the dressing, lifting her leg and rotating it one way, then the other. Then he went to a long table where he'd placed a paper bag. He pulled out a small plastic container of orange juice and went to the side of her bed. He poked a straw into the box and held it toward her.

“Can you sit up? You need to drink this.”

Martha sat up, and he tucked her pillow behind her. She took the juice and sipped.

“Thank you.”

“How long have you been awake?” He looked again at the clipboard.

“About a half hour, I think. How long was I asleep?”

“About twenty-four hours,” he said.

“All day and all night? Then today is—”

“Wednesday,” he said, making another note on the chart. “You weren't asleep the whole time. Your blood loss caused you to drift into hypoxia, one of the early stages of shock. Without fluid, it might have progressed.”

She lay back and glanced toward the small window. Palmetto fronds clacked in a light breeze. “Where am I?”

“A secret place.”

Jarrell unpacked the grocery bag, placing items in a battered aluminum cooler.

“Did it really happen?”

“Did what really happen?”

“Lydia—is she really—”

“Yeah. She's dead.”

Martha felt a tremor somewhere deep within. But she wasn't ready to deal with this yet. Her mind's protective system kept a lid on her feelings.

“They think—the police think I did it.”

“Yes.”

“That's why—” Martha looked down at her bandaged leg.

“The bullet nicked your peroneal artery. So you lost a lot of blood.”

“But I didn't—it wasn't—”

He came over to the bed and removed the cushion from behind her head. “The bullet's gone. I removed it. You've got to rest.”

“What time is it?”

“Ten
A.M.
”

Martha mentally traced back through the last night she could remember taking her meds. Lydia's house. Nighttime. She had already missed at least a full day's dosage.

“I'm on medication.”

He turned toward her. “What?”

“I have a prescription. I take drugs. I have to take them every day. Medicinal drugs. I have to take them.”

“Prescription?”

“Yes.”

“What for?”

Martha hesitated. “It's private. But it's very important. I have to get my pill-minder….”

She swung her legs toward the edge of the bed.

“Oh no you don't.” Jarrell stepped over to the cot and pushed her legs back onto the bed. He pulled the sheet back over her. “You're not ready to get up yet. You'll break the clot.”

“You don't understand. I have to…you'll have to get it for me.”

“What kind of medicine is it? What is your condition?”

“It's private.”

“You have to tell me. Is your condition life-threatening?”

“No.”

“Where's the medicine?”

“I left it back there. At Lydia's house.”

Jarrell turned toward her and leaned over the bed. He laid one powerful hand on her shoulder. He pushed her down, causing the bedsprings to creak. His eyes were wide and shone like obsidian. Martha gasped.

“Okay, we need to understand something here,” he said. “You and I both are in a world of shit. Personally, I intend to get myself out of this shit. In order for that to happen, you're going to have to cooperate with me. Keeping secrets is just not going to work. The last place we are going to go is anywhere near that house. Not anytime soon. You get where I'm coming from?”

“But you don't understand….” Martha could hear her voice trembling. “I've
got
to have my meds.”

“Now, how critical is it? Will you die? Will you have seizures?”

“I won't die.”

“That's good. Because if you
can
live without it, you will. Nobody is going anywhere. Do I need to tie you down to this bed?”

He glared at her, eyes burning. Martha shook her head.

“Good. I don't want to do that, but if I have to, I will.”

Jarrell stepped away, going back to his business. Martha propped herself up on her elbows. Two doses. It's the first time she had skipped her medication at all, since the hospitalization. And she promised Vince she would
never
stop. Promised.

“How long am I going to be here?” Martha asked.

“I don't know.”

“Without my medications, there might be problems.”

“Problems? There might be problems.” He laughed bitterly.

Martha laid her head down again. The simple act of trying to get up had exhausted her. After a long moment, she spoke again, softly.

“By the way, my name is Martha.”

She heard the cabin door snap shut, and realized there was no longer anyone there to answer.