The first step is easy. Now that I’m not being force-marched through a field in the rain, now that the mask has been pulled from my eyes and I can concentrate, it takes all of five minutes to pry my wrists far enough apart to access the knots with my long fingers and worry the knots open and free my hands. A couple of minutes more and my legs are free also, and I can get up and stagger about the barn.
Where’d they get it, I think suddenly. That helicopter. The troubling thought appears as it has on occasion before, floating to life unbidden like a laughing ghost … if they’re such hapless dimwits, Nico’s pals, if they’re deluded losers chasing their illusory asteroid-foiling scenario like children playing dress-up—then where’d they get a helicopter? Where, indeed, did they get the Internet access that Jordan allowed me the use of, that last night in Concord; the same night he stood, smug and taunting, telling me there was more to it than I could possibly know. More than Nico could possibly know …
Leave it. Come on, Palace, leave it. Stay focused. It doesn’t matter right now, obviously. Now I need to keep working. I need to get out of the barn.
I walk around, a couple of wobbly circuits, sniffing in the corners like an animal, getting a sense of the place. It’s a barn, is all, a barn like all barns. A big abandoned drafty room, maybe thirty feet by sixty feet, split into three sections: feeding stations on either end, where the animals were slopped or given their oats, and then in the middle the smaller area for hay storage. Walls constructed of wooden planks, old but sturdy, securely joined. Peaked roof. Racks on the wall where once the tools were hung. A ladder to a loft, six flat wooden rungs leading up. I stop and breathe, holding one hand over my nose. The fetid humidity of the place is like another person trapped in here with me, a dismal clinging presence tracking my steps.
Whatever animals once resided here, it can be presumed, have long ago been taken out for slaughter. Plenty of hay, though, piles of it, old and stale and cracking in bales and loose piles.
There is only one entrance, the big double barn door, which I know to be chained from the outside. And I can tell from here that the trio of tiny windows, letting in moonlight up on the loft level, are too small to accommodate a grown man—no matter how thin, no matter how desperate to squeeze through.
“What else, Detective?” My voice is tired, too, worn and gray. I clear my throat and try it again. “What else?”
There’s nothing else. Houdini has given in to sleep and lies curled into himself beside his small puddle. I try the door, just to try. I grab the handle and shake it, hear the mocking jangle of the chains on the other side.
I step away from the door. Under the thick odor of the barn I smell myself; days of sweat, of fear, faint stale whiffs of burnt chicken and charcoal.
There was a barn on the edge of my grandfather’s property when we were growing up, one of several outbuildings no longer in use. Some ancestral Palace, in the mists of New Hampshire history, had kept horses, but all that remained by the time my sister and I found the place—by the time it became one of her innumerable hideouts—all that was left was old hay, rusted instruments, the earthy odors of manure and sweating animals.
I found her out there once, drinking whiskey she had siphoned from Grandfather’s stash, the day she was supposed to be taking the SAT.
I smile to myself now, in the darkness of the Amish barn. One thing about Nico, she never apologized. Never lied.
“Aren’t you supposed to be taking the SAT?” I asked her.
“Yuppers.”
“So what are you doing?”
“Drinking whiskey in the barn. You want some?”
I did not want some. I dragged her home. Reregistered her for the test, drove her myself.
Hide-and-seek, our whole lives.
Houdini is up, rustling around in the hay, chasing after a mouse, batting helplessly at the ground. I watch the little mammal escape the clutches of my addled dog, watch it slip through the tiny gap beneath the bottom edge of the slat. I get down on all fours beside the dog, sniff at the hole. A whisper of cool air from outside; the smell of the grass of the farm. But it’s a mouse hole. A bare smudged circle in the ground.
I stare at the hole.
It would take a long time, but I could do it. Give me a month, maybe. Give me a year. Give me a year and give me a shovel and I could bust right on out of here, worm myself through and emerge gasping like a jailbreak prisoner on the other side. Just give me time.