My flashlight battery was giving out and I could only see the side of the trunk dimly.
Swing, thud, rest. The trunk was turning gray. I blinked, sat. Hallucinating, not good. I put a finger on the gray spot: it was a hole, light was seeping in from the kitchen. I was shivering now with a feverish excitement. I took the crowbar and used what was left of my muscles to pry out a chunk from the side. It peeled away like a sardine tin, the metal siding hanging loose like a great lip.
I lay on my back with my boots against the opening. Kicked, kicked again, felt more of the metal give. It wasn’t a very big hole, but it was wide enough for me to slither through. I landed in an awkward heap on the old linoleum.
Sunshine on Lake Michigan had never looked as clean and bright as the dim light seeping in through the ivy-shrouded windows. I lay for several minutes, soaking it in, breathing in must and mold on the linoleum as if it were bottled oxygen.
An old industrial clock over the sink told me the time. Three P.M. I’d climbed into the crate six hours ago. Time to get help, time to move on. I turned on the kitchen tap, held my head under the stream of water, gulped down great mouthfuls.
I didn’t want to move, but Durdon and Davilats might come back at any second. If they’d broken into my office, the combination I’d given them wouldn’t open my safe. They could blow it open, but it was possible they’d come back to torture the actual combination out of me. Or the BREENIAC sketch’s actual location.
I took my flashlight and my picklocks to the Subaru with me, but left the digging tools where they were: my shoulder muscles were too watery to lift the pickax again. My back felt as though someone were shooting Tasers up and down the cervical vertebrae.
As I stumbled through the front door, Ms. Basier was getting out of the Volvo with her daughter. The two stared at me without speaking, then scuttled into the house. When I looked at myself in the Subaru’s rearview mirror, I didn’t blame them. Standing under Julius’s kitchen tap, I’d turned the dirt in my hair and skin into mud. My clothes were also caked with dirt. My eyes looked like portals to the Inferno.
I drove slowly, sticking to side streets all the way north. It took over an hour to cover the twelve miles, but by taking the slow route, I could rest my sore back against the seat.
When I got home, Mr. Contreras started haranguing me almost before he had his front door open. He hadn’t heard from me since I left the apartment two days ago, he didn’t know why I couldn’t let him know for a change, and here was young Sunny Breen—he stopped short when I swayed and half fell onto the bottom stair.
Peppy came over and started licking the mud from my face. Mr. Contreras’s scolding changed to clucking. Behind him, I heard Alison Breen cry out, “Oh, what happened, oh, please don’t tell me that it was my father who did this.”
I was too tired to open my eyes. “Rory Durdon,” I said. “Rory Durdon and a bent cop he picked up downstate.”
I heard her start to sob but I just curled up against the stairwell wall, an arm around the dog.
“What happened, doll, how’d you get like this?” Mr. Contreras asked.
“The guy who drove us up to Lake Forest the other night,” I said. My lips were so thick that the words came out slowly, like cold molasses from a bottle. “Rory Durdon. His cop buddy Tasered me. Then they locked me inside a root cellar. I couldn’t get a phone signal down there. I had to hack my way out.”
“Tasered you? Oh, no!” Alison cried. “I was afraid—after the reporter came, Mother called Dad—she and I, we were both worried—I can’t believe—oh, what is happening?”
“She can’t talk right now,” Mr. Contreras told her, adding to me, “We need to get you cleaned up, doll. Can you make it up the stairs to your own bath or do you want to use mine down here?”
The third floor seemed a great distance away, but I wanted to be in my own place, to get into clean clothes and throw these away. I unlaced my boots; Mr. Contreras got down on the bottom step next to me to pull them off. Without their weight on my feet, I managed to push myself up the stairs.
Alison followed anxiously behind me, asking questions, but I felt as though I were in a swamp in some alien world, unable to think or speak. Mr. Contreras took my keys the third time I dropped them and opened my front door for me. He turned on the taps in the bathtub. When I started to unbutton my shirt, though, he left hastily, shutting the door behind him.