Only fifteen more steps and I’ll be back in my room again. I’ve made it. Nobody will know where I went. Tomorrow, it’ll be even easier now that I’ve done it once. James was right. It’s not that tough to get away with things here, if you’re smart.
I can fool all of them. The idea swells inside me. It makes me feel like I took something from them, something they stole that was mine. Power. I’ve got power now. When we’re safe on the Arcadia, the river carrying us far away from here, I’ll forget all about this place. I’ll never tell anybody what happened here. It’ll be like it never happened at all.
A bad dream with bad people in it.
I’m so caught in the idea, I step wrong. A floorboard creaks under my foot. I hold back a gasp, look down, then decide the best thing I can do is hurry on in case one of the workers shows up. If I’m in the bed, they won’t have any way to know who was—
I almost don’t see Mr. Riggs till I’m right on top of him. He’s coming out of the toddler room. He stumbles back, and so do I. His shoulder hits the wall, and he whispers, “Ooof.”
I turn to rush off, but he grabs me by a fistful of nightgown and hair. His big hand clamps over my mouth and nose. I smell sweat and whiskey, tobacco and coal ash. He bends my head back so far, I think, He’ll snap my neck right here. He’ll snap my neck and drop me down the stairs and say I fell. That’s how it ends….
I strain my eyes to see him. He looks around, tries to decide where he can take me. I can’t let him get me to the basement. If he does, I’m dead. I know it. Fern will come back tomorrow, and I won’t be here.
Checking the stairs, he wobbles on his feet. His boot comes down hard over my toe, and stars shoot across my eyes, and I moan. He clamps his hand harder, cutting off my air. I hear my backbone crack. I twist and push and try to get free, but he only crushes me tighter against him, lifting me off my feet and dragging me down the hall into the shadows by the bathroom door. His fingers fumble for the handle to open it. I whimper and struggle and pull until finally he growls low in his throat and pins me to the wall so he can get at the door. His belly crushes my chest, and blackness circles around my eyes, and my lungs choke for air.
His face comes close to my ear. “Y-you and me can b-b-be friends. I can git ya p-peppermints and c-c-cookies. Anythin’ y-you want. We can b-b-be best friends.” He rubs his cheek along my chin and my shoulder, his whiskers scrubbing hard as he smells my hair, then sticks his face in around the neck of my nighty. “Y-you smell like out-outside. Y-you b-been meetin’ one of the b-big boys down there? Y-you got a b-boyfriend again?”
His voice seems like it’s coming from far off, echoing the way foghorns do on the river’s cold mornings. My knees buckle. My feet go prickly and numb. I can’t feel the wall or him. My ribs jerk like a fish’s gills when it’s hanging on the stringer.
I see sparkle fairies. They dance wild in the dark.
No! I tell myself. No! But there’s nothing left to fight with. My body’s gone. Maybe I’ll suffocate and die. I hope so.
Just as quick, he lets loose of me, and cool rushes in where his body was, and a breath pours into my belly. I slide down the wall and land in a pile, dizzy, blinking and trying to push off the floor.
“Mr. Riggs?” The sharp voice of a worker comes from the stairway. “What are you doing up here at this hour?”
My eyes clear, and I see him standing in front of me, so she won’t see. I pull back into the shadows, squeeze tight against the wall. If they catch me here, I’ll be the one who’s in trouble, not him. I’ll get locked away again…or worse.
“H-heard thunder while ago. G-gotta close up the w-windows.”
The worker comes around the railing. The moonlight catches her, and I see she’s the new one that came since Miss Dodd left. I don’t know much about her or if she’s mean or not. She sounds mean. She doesn’t like Riggs being up here, that’s clear enough. If she gives him trouble, she won’t last long at Mrs. Murphy’s.
“I didn’t hear anything.” She twists back and forth, looking toward the bedroom doors.
“I’z out-outside when I h-heard it. Was s-some s-s-stray cats yowlin’. T-took my rifle out to k-kill ’em.”
“Good heavens. You’d have woken the whole place. Surely the cats aren’t hurting anything.”
“C-cousin Ida don’t like nothin’ prowling round where it don’t b-b-belong.” By Cousin Ida, he means Mrs. Murphy. He also means to let the new worker know her place.
“I’ll check the windows myself.” She’s not backing down, and I don’t know whether I’m glad or not. If she keeps coming closer, she’ll see me. If she leaves, Riggs will drag me off into the bathroom. “No need in disturbing your sleep, Mr. Riggs, when I’m being paid to watch the children at night.”
He moves away from me and closer to her, his steps uneven and wobbly. At the corner of the railing, he blocks her path. The two shadows melt into one. He whispers something.
“Mr. Riggs!” Her hand swings out of the shadow and back in. Skin slaps on skin. “Have you been drinking?”
“I s-s-seen how you b-been watchin’ me.”
“I have done no such thing.”
“Y-you b-b-be nice, or I’ll tell Cousin Ida. She d-don’t like nobody to g-gimme trouble.”
She sidles to the wall and slides past him, and he lets her by. “You…you will keep away from me, or…or I…I’ll tell her myself. I’ll tell her you got liquored up and were fresh with me.”
He lumbers on toward the stairs. “Y-you oughta look—see the li’l boys first. S-s-somebody tumped outta bed in there.” His feet fall heavy as he walks on down. The boards squeak and sing.
Hugging her arms around herself, the worker watches him before going to see about the toddlers. I stand up on shaky legs and hurry to my bed, and pull the covers all the way to my neck and wrap up. It’s a good thing, because the worker comes in our room next, maybe thinking Riggs was closest to it.
She walks along and lifts covers and looks at every one of us like she’s checking for something. When she comes to my bed, I breathe long and deep and fight hard not to shiver as she pulls the covers off me and feels my skin. Maybe she wonders why I’m wrapped up so tight when it’s sticky hot. Maybe she can smell the night on me like Riggs did.
She stays over my bed awhile.
Finally, she’s gone, and I lay there looking up at the dark. One more day, I tell myself. You only gotta get by one more day.
I think it over and over again, like a promise. I have to. Otherwise, I’d find a way to get that screen off the window, and I’d jump out and hope it’s high enough to kill me.
I can’t live like this.
I fall asleep knowing it’s true.
Morning comes in fits and jerks. I wake and sleep, waiting on the voices of the workers to tell us to get out of our beds and put on our clothes. I know better than to move before that. Mrs. Pulnik made sure to tell me the upstairs rules before she showed me my bed and the little crate underneath where I keep my clothes.
But I won’t be needing that crate for long. I’ll get us out tonight, all three of us—me, and Fern, and Stevie—no matter what it takes. If I’ve gotta grab a kitchen knife and stab it into somebody to get us past, I’ll do it, I tell myself. I won’t let anyone stop me.
It’s not till we’re downstairs for breakfast that I know I’ve been making promises that’ll be hard to keep. First rattle out the box this morning, Mrs. Pulnik spotted sandy footprints in the kitchen. They’re dried, so she knows they were put there last night. They fade out before the stairs, which means she can’t tell where the trail would end up, but the prints are big enough that she’s sure it was one of the older boys. She’s got them lined up, and she’s trying them one by one against the tracks to see who fits.