“Probably. Maybe she even got the owner to give it to her.” Glancing outside myself, I register that a white Nissan pickup is missing. I stand there, trying to figure out what she’s doing.
Malcolm paces. “You still think she’s going to turn herselfin?”
“I mean, I thought that was her plan. Wait till I’m eighteen so social services or whoever can’t come after me. But then why—”
“Run?”
I nod and sink onto the corner of the bed. “We could have all stayed here together, and she could have called the police in…” I twist around to see the alarm clock on the nightstand. “In an hour. She could have explained everything and never had to go through the investigator or his people, if that’s what was keeping her from the hospital. I don’t understand.” I run my hand over the crumpled polyester bedspread. In disarray, just like the rest of the room. And it stinks. It smells sour and faintly coppery from the blood. There’s an empty bottle of painkillers and some protein bar wrappers in the trash. Not a lot, but a few. She hasn’t had much of an appetite.
I can see her over the past few days, hiding here the way she thought I was hiding safely a state away, waiting. I drag my toe over the worn carpet and imagine her pacing around the bed. She chews her nails just like I do. I wonder if she imposed the same rules on herself that she did on me: no peeking out windows, no leaving the room, no phone calls. Another glance at the nightstand confirms that she didn’t yank the phone cord out of the wall. But she had a cell phone. She called Laura even if she didn’t call me. She could have called anyone….
Rising to my feet, I stride over to Mom’s left-behind bag and upend it on the floor. Clothes, shoes, and a few toiletries spill out, and not much else. I turn my head to Malcolm and rise from my squat.
Malcolm, still pacing, stops midstride. “What? What are you thinking?”
“How long do you think we were in the bathroom?” I start methodically moving around the room to check drawers.
“Five minutes maybe. Why?”
“Even still, she wouldn’t have known that.” I check the mini fridge, the microwave. “For all she knew, we’d be back out in less than one.”
“Okaaaaay,” Malcolm says.
“So she must have bolted the second we closed the bathroom door.” I’m removing picture frames from walls, tossing pillows and blankets. “She wouldn’t have had time to take anything. Look.” I nod my head toward the nightstand. “She didn’t even grab the knife.”
Malcolm starts picking things up, joining me in the search. “What am I looking for?”
“Her phone.”
He looks under the bed corners, and I remove the lid to the toilet tank. We unscrew the air vents, and Malcolm even thinks to unzip the chair cushions. But all we find is dust bunnies and liberally stained foam. The phone has to be close and easily accessible, in case she had to run again. Plus with her injury, it’s not like she dug a hole or buried it outside. It’s in this room somewhere. Nowhere else makes sense.
I turn to watch Malcolm pry up a corner of carpet. He isn’t looking at me, so I smile. I can tell he’ll keep searching with me until the very last second.
Empty-handed, he finally pushes to his feet.
“What’s left?”
He rubs a hand over his head. “The ceiling maybe, somehow? She had a knife.” He gestures toward it. “She could have used it to unscrew the light fixture and…”
“Climb up on a chair withherleg?”
He doesn’t say anything about how ridiculous that sounds; he just shrugs and pulls a chair under the light.
She would need someplace low, maybe even someplace she could reach sitting down—or, better yet, lying down. He’s right about the knife, though. If she could cut into something…
And just like that, I know.
It must show on my face, because Malcolm halts with one foot on the chair as I practically dive under the bed.
“We looked there, remember?”
But I’m not searching under the bed. I’m looking up, at the box spring, and yes, the lining is cut.
I’m turning the phone on to toss to Malcolm before I’ve even crawled back out. “Please tell me there’s a call log and you recognize a number.”
“Laura’s number, Laura’s number, Laura’s number—”
“That one.” Crowded beside him, shoulder to shoulder, I jam my finger against the tiny screen as a new number appears. “She called that number…right before we got here. That has to be where she went, right?”
