“Amelia. Why are you home?” Steve returned her pleasant greeting with a growling reprimand that made the room come into focus.
Steve was standing by the safe, which was in the back of the office behind all the desks. It was open. Randy stood just a few feet away from Amelia in front of Caleb’s empty desk. Both men looked shocked, like she’d caught them looking at porn on their office computers. But this wasn’t something as juvenile as pornography. No.
Randy looked . . . different. He wasn’t wearing a nice suit and a hundred-dollar tie. He wasn’t even wearing a pair of designer jeans. He was dressed all in black and had dark gloves on. In front of him on the desk was a dark blue ski mask folded in half and a silver handgun with a black handle. Amelia’s eyes widened and an immediate flood of fear made her head feel light. The room was just as dark as the kitchen other than the horizontal streams of light coming from between the blinds covering the large picture window that overlooked the driveway. The rest of the room was dark and stuffy, and it smelled slightly of gasoline or lighter fluid or something equally pungent.
This was bad. Really bad. She didn’t know what she’d just walked into, but there was no way that Amelia was supposed to see it.
She should want to demand answers. She should want to know what the hell was going on. But she didn’t. Knowing wouldn’t be safe. Knowing would hurt too much. Instead, Amelia did what she had learned to do over the past twelve years—she pretended everything was fine.
“The lights in the kitchen are out,” Amelia started to respond, still heading toward the breaker box.
“Shit. Shit!” Randy ran a hand over his face and glared at Steve. “You said no one would be home.” He moved in front of the desk, obscuring her view of the gun.
Steve, unlike Randy, didn’t panic. He stood slowly from his crouched position in front of the safe and shook his head slowly. It was his “How could you be so stupid” face. She was used to seeing it when she washed a red sock with the whites or when she locked her keys in the car with the car running. Today the look was more somber than angry.
“The power is out, M. I’ve called the power company. We’ve got it under control,” Steve said calmly in the voice he used with her when he was trying to convince her of something. The voice worked like a hypnotist’s swinging locket—and, usually, she couldn’t resist it for long.
“Okay,” she responded out of pure instinct, used to accepting Steve’s pronouncements, and turned to leave. But then she felt it, those little flapping wings inside her, the ones that had been fighting for so long to get out, to be free. She kept promising she would let them out soon . . . soon. Twice already today she’d tried to make them stop, twice she flinched away from her resolve, but as she went to walk through that steel door back into the kitchen like a good little wife, the last silken strands holding in the magnificent creature inside her snapped.
She turned around and put her back to the door, the slats of light hitting her across her body and warming her in a zebra-like pattern of light and dark.
“I’m not going anywhere till you tell me what is going on.” The words were easy to say, but the panic that rose inside her after they escaped was harder to hide. She straightened her shoulders and stood up taller.
Steve closed his eyes and sighed like she was a child asking for a lollipop before dinner. “Oh, Amelia, always sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong.”
She’d really done it now. She almost wished she could shove the words back in and run away. She could’ve called the police. She could’ve grabbed the girls from school and stayed a few days at her dad’s house till she figured things out. There were guns involved, for goodness’ sake.
Then he shifted from annoyed to sorrowful, his voice heavy like he was ready to cry. “I tried to keep you out of this, M. You can’t say I didn’t try, but if you insist on knowing, then . . . that’s fine. You’re on the line for all of this”—he pointed to the room and the filing cabinets and the safe—“if I go down, so if you really want to know, I’ll tell you. Anyway, we really could use another set of hands.”
CHAPTER 33
ELLIE
Wednesday, May 11
6:09 a.m.
Although 911 response times in Broadlands were excellent, with just one text to Travis—Caleb @ Nancy’s. Meeting in the basement. Come ASAP—Ellie couldn’t predict how long until backup would be here. So, she followed Collin down the cement ramp to a doorway with no door. Instead, a piece of plywood stood up over the opening with a giant DO NOT ENTER sprayed in orange paint across it in a diagonal.
“Collin, it says ‘Do Not Enter’; maybe we should listen,” Ellie said, mostly to herself. The plywood was shifted to one side, leaving enough room for Ellie to squeeze through.
Inside, there was a massive open area, empty and vast, rays of light breaking the darkness in a few areas where the high windows were clear of debris. Off to one side, a burst of light cascaded from one giant gash in the ceiling, the jagged edges of the floor blurring into a celestial outline that resembled a sun in the damp gray of the basement. A large puddle of standing water reflected light around the room, its sparkling surface almost beautiful in the morning light.
But as Ellie’s eyes adjusted, she realized that the world was not exactly gray in this barren dwelling. The walls, though lacking any kind of shelves or framed pictures, were not completely empty.
Top to bottom they were covered in a beautiful mural. Some scenes were done with spray paint in a style that seemed to mimic graffiti, others with a brush and some kind of acrylic. These paintings were not words or gang tags like you might expect in an abandoned basement; they were works of art. The first ceiling-high painting was of a day worker crying, his face covered by his dirt-coated hands. His child lay by his side, either sleeping or dead.
Ellie gasped, taken in by the beauty of the pictures on the wall. As she turned in a small circle to view the whole scene, she noticed a shift in the art. First it was dark and sad, images of the transient workers who not only filled Steve’s roster but many of the farmers’ come harvest. There was something captured in the eyes, especially of the children, a happiness that comes from knowing you are loved but always with a tinge of sadness that could only be produced by hunger and poverty. She swore she could recognize some of the faces—maybe not exact representations of people she had known, but a familiarity that made her want to reach out and ask how she could help.