She doesn’t know he is gone, not for sure, until the deputies come looking for him. He has been missing all day. She has never known him to break his routine, but figures, with the recent death of his mother, he may have earned an excuse. After the deputies rip through his office and bedroom, after they knock down bookshelves and turn over his bed, they drag Ella to a medieval display, a room full of lances and flails and tapestries, where Rickett Slade is waiting for her.
Of course she has seen him before, dropped her eyes when they passed in the street, but they have never spoken. He sits in a massive gold-trimmed throne. He barely fits, the arms of it biting into the sides of his belly. Across his thighs rests a baseball bat—her bat, the only weapon she keeps in her quarters, with the word Peacemaker burned by a magnifying glass across its cracked, wooden length. On the floor, tossed aside, lies the sign she wrote in careful calligraphy, Please do not sit on the display.
“Can’t you read?” she says.
He may smile or he may frown; it is difficult to tell. His face is pocked with acne scars, each of them carrying a small shadow. He motions with the bat, across the room, indicating where she arranged a Judas chair opposite the throne. The same sign rests on its spiked seat. “Please,” he says, “let’s both be where we’re not supposed to be.”
A deputy—a woman with her head shaved except for a rat-tail braid—grabs her by the wrist and Ella shakes her off and says, “Don’t you touch me.” She approaches the chair and lowers herself gently onto it. She has done so before, when no one was looking, and knows the points on the seat and back and arms dull enough to be tolerable for a short period of time. “Now is when I tell you I don’t know anything and you choose not to believe me.”
This time he does smile, she is almost certain. A hint of teeth beneath his upper lip. “Lewis didn’t tell you.”
“No, he didn’t tell me.”
“And how does that make you feel?”
“Mad. I’m mad.” And she is. She is trembling with anger. “And though I’m sure these feelings will pass, right now, frankly, I hate him.”
“How old are you, girl?”
“I’m sixteen.”
“And you’re going to take care of this museum all on your own?”
She stiffens then. She knows what she looks like to him, a plain-faced girl with short hair the color of old straw. She looks like someone barely worth talking to, someone your eyes pass right over. She isn’t going to let him dismiss her. “There’s no one else who can do it, is there? And he didn’t leave me much choice, did he? That’s typical. He’s the most arrogant, inconsiderate man in the whole world.” She doesn’t realize she is yelling until she finishes.
“We could always burn the place down.”
She can feel the seat digging into her now, hot points of pressure. “Go ahead. Enjoy policing the riots that follow. This place is holier than any church. The Sanctuary’s only escape.”
“Not the only escape. Your friend Lewis found some other way.” The sensation of his eyes on her is like two hands pushing her around. “We found a radio in his office. Isn’t that what it was? A radio?”
“It doesn’t work.”
“You aren’t using it to communicate with him?”
“It doesn’t work, so no, I am not.”
He shrugs. “Well, I smashed it to pieces anyway.” He holds up the bat, swinging it one way, then the other, like a metronome. “This yours?”
“You know it is. You found it in my quarters.”
“You keep it because you’re scared.”
“I’m not scared. I’m a realist. Sometimes you have to hurt other people before they hurt you.”
He rolls forward, extracting himself from the throne. It groans in relief. He crosses the room and stands before her until he fills up her entire field of vision. He reaches out a hand. “I’m not supposed to believe you.” Her entire head seems to fit into his palm. “But I do.”
There is a tug—followed by a sting—behind her ear. When he pulls his hand away, he pinches a clump of her hair between his fingers. He tucks it into his pocket. Then departs the room, flanked by his deputies. He speaks without turning to address her. “If you find anything, if he left anything, you tell me.”
“I don’t know what good it would do you.”
“Let me decide that.” He drops the bat when he exits the room, and the rattling echo of it seems to linger in the air a long time.
Later, she finds the note. There was a stack of paper squared neatly on his desk. Now the sheets lie scattered like dead leaves around the office. She traces her fingers along each one and brings them to her nose to smell. Finally she finds what she is looking for, the faint texturing and lemon scent. She lights a candle and holds the paper a few inches above the flame, and within seconds the letters begin to darken and shape into words.
Ella—
By now you know that I am gone. Check my office window nightly for the owl. Of course you will take care of the museum, and I’m certain you will do a fine job. Be sure to destroy this letter and deny ever having received it.
Lewis
No apology. No well wishes. No promise to return for her. No explanation beyond what she heard from the deputies. She lowers the note onto the candle and drops it to the stone floor and watches it flame and blacken upon itself. She walks through the museum then, every room of every floor. She has to see for herself that she is alone. She finally comes to a stop in the rotunda, where she throws back her head and yells at the starry mural above, “You son of a bitch!” The words clap back at her, her voice a dozen times angry. “You son of a bitch, why didn’t you take me with you!”
*
Slade lives in the prison. Wood rots. Plastic cracks. Cement crumbles. But stone and iron last. And that is what the prison is made of, stone and iron. It is a place of security, a place he can hide things away.