His questions over whether she’d take him to school faded into a new worry. Maybe she was still mad. Maybe she didn’t want to see him this morning. “Mom?” he called.
After a few moments of waiting, Everett went back inside and moved tentatively around the kitchen. Everything felt too . . . empty. No clinking dishes. No smell of coffee. But there wouldn’t be, would there? The power was out. Still, there wasn’t even a glass or bowl in the sink. His scalp crawled with prickling anxiety.
Where was his mom?
He went to the office and dialed her cell number. One ring. Two. Three.
On the fourth ring, he began to frown. On the sixth ring, he had to swallow past a thickening clog in his throat. When her voicemail answered, he listened hard to her voice and told himself things were fine.
“Mom? Where are you? Am I going to school?”
He hung up. He thought they’d made up yesterday, but maybe she’d gotten angrier and angrier the more she thought about his lying and stealing. He called her again. Then again. There was no answer.
He wasn’t going to freak out this time. He wasn’t going to scream and run and cry wolf. His mom worked here, so she was working. It was that simple. And if the power was out, maybe cell service was too.
This time he decided to search the grounds methodically, quickly moving along the alleys of the storage center, looking for any open doors or signs of tools being used. He’d made it through three sets of buildings and was walking at the edge of the vehicle storage area when he spotted it. Not a clue. Nothing so innocuous. What he saw was a shiny white rectangle tilted into the dead grass under the long end of an old RV.
His mom’s phone.
A strange little hum began around him, and it took Everett a moment to realize he was making the noise, a shaking in his throat, pressing up. A cry wanting to come out, like he was a scared toddler.
Everett crouched down and reached beneath the vehicle to retrieve the phone. When he turned it over, his call notifications still glowed on the screen, and it made him feel like he’d just missed her. That she’d just been right there a few seconds before.
“Mom?” he asked, his voice cracking and breaking in the space of that single syllable. She didn’t respond.
He didn’t feel even a whisper of guilt when he unlocked her phone with a security code he wasn’t supposed to know. No strange texts had come in. He found no phone messages except his. But she had gotten a phone call early this morning.
He looked up, turning in a slow circle. That was when he heard a door open somewhere ahead. The squeak of a spring compressing and releasing. A footstep.
Everett was just about to call out for her when he heard her voice. She was talking to someone.
“It’s not in the apartment!” she said frantically.
Everett frowned.
“I told you I dropped it when you tackled me. It’s here somewhere. Just call it. You’ll see.”
He was confused for a moment. Someone had tackled his mom? Then the phone in his hand buzzed, and a ringtone sang out. Everett looked up, and a man stepped into his sight, dragging Everett’s mom alongside him. Everett noticed the man’s black gloves first and the way one of them gripped his mom’s arm and held it too high.
But then his brain finished clicking through the connections of his memories, and he realized it was just a cop, and everything was fine.
Caught between relief and wariness, Everett stilled and watched for a long moment as the police detective smiled. “Hey, buddy! Checking out a possible theft!” His voice sang with cheer. “Come on over. Your mom is—”
His mom suddenly grew. She expanded, her body uncoiling and launching straight up at the man’s face.
She seemed to move in slow motion, her hands curving into claws as she landed on him. The police detective twisted and stepped back, but he couldn’t catch himself. He landed hard on his back just as Everett heard his mom shout, “Run!” in the loudest roar he’d ever heard, as if those claws had turned her into a beast.
But Everett couldn’t run. He was frozen in place, watching his mom wrestle with the cop, who was already struggling up.
Her face craned toward him, looking over her shoulder with huge, round eyes. “Run, Everett! Run!” He met her gaze, trying to convey that he couldn’t leave her, but she was roaring again. “Run! Call 911! Hide and don’t come back!”
“Shut the fuck up,” the cop wheezed as he raised up enough to dump his mom off him. His face was bleeding from a long scratch.
Everett saw the gun in a leather holster against the man’s side, so he squeezed the phone hard in his hand and he did exactly what his mom had yelled. He ran.
Hide, she’d said. Run. Hide. Call 911, and for the first time in his life, Everett was lucky to live in this place, because he could hide anywhere. He could choose from a thousand places, and this monster would never find him.
He vaguely heard the man cursing, heard his mom still yelling, Run, but mostly all he heard was his thundering heart and the crunching impact of his feet and his straining, keening breath as he ran as fast as he could through the vehicles. His mind tripped and fumbled, throwing up ideas for hiding places and dropping them before he could grab hold.
He’d just settled on sliding beneath the cover of a boat when his eye caught on the tall building that housed the biggest RVs. There, his brain ordered, and he zigzagged away from the last of the motorhomes and bolted for the structure.
Forty steps felt like four hundred, but he was finally, finally sliding safely around the far corner of the building. He raced immediately toward the metal ladder, but halfway there, he skidded to a stop and hurried back to the edge of the wall. Forcing his head out to peek around the corner was the hardest thing he’d ever done, but he had to be sure.
The cop hadn’t tracked him. If the guy had caught him going up the ladder, Everett would have been trapped, but when he caught a flash of movement, it was still far off inside the warren of wheels and boats and trucks.
Muttering some curse-filled prayer beneath his breath, he switched off the ringer of the phone, determined not to lose this chance to some stupid cellphone song. Then he raced to the ladder and scaled it far too quickly for safety, his sweaty hands slipping on the rungs before he threw himself over the lip of the roof.
Everything stopped then.
For a moment he was just Everett Brown, lying on his back, rough bits of the asphalt digging into his shoulder blades, thick white clouds sliding peacefully across the sky as he tried to catch his breath.
He could hear a bird singing somewhere, smell the damp earth of the meadow, and he suddenly pictured Josephine on the school bus. It was probably just pulling up to the school, and she was about to walk in, wondering where Everett was. But at least she was safe. He should never have involved her in this, and he was so happy she wasn’t here now.
The quiet moment passed in a few heartbeats, and then the phone lit up, but it only buzzed quietly in his hand. He’d done something right, then.
He forced himself to his feet so he could move toward the roof wall and peek over it. Another terrifying moment of forcing his body to make itself vulnerable. His guts shook, zinging with a strange electricity as he crouched low and sidled to the edge.
But he never had to force his head to rise and his neck to angle it over the ledge, because someone shouted his name.
“Everett! Come on out!”
He dropped down to his belly, cheek against the pebbled surface, his nose nearly touching the rough white wall. Had he heard the vibrating phone?
“Everett!” the detective shouted again. “Come on out! If you come out now, I won’t shoot your mom.”
His own whimper slunk into his ears as Everett whined in horror at the thought. He squeezed his eyes shut and felt his hands shaking and wanted it all to just stop. What was going on? Why would a police detective have his mom hostage? Why would he threaten to shoot her? It was Everett’s theft or investigation or his contact with Jones. He’d brought this on.