I pulled the phone from my ear and froze. Through the front bay window, two blue-and-white strobe lights swept silently across the ceiling plaster. Evelyn’s front door opened below. She didn't call up to me. She didn't warn me. She simply stepped out onto the porch, greeted the deputy by his first name, and took the envelope from his hand.
The deputy wasn't looking for a runaway anymore. He had just delivered the expedited transport authorization, signed by a magistrate while the courthouse was dark.
CHAPTER 2 CONTINUED
"Tessa?" Clara’s voice crackled through the plastic receiver against my ear. "Are you still there? What was that envelope?"
"Emergency transport warrant," I whispered. My throat burned from the dry dust trapped behind the mahogany wardrobe. "Deputy Miller signed off on it. If I'm inside this house when that van pulls in at five-thirty, the paper protects them, not me."
"Then you don't stay inside the house," Clara said. Her breathing was ragged, weighed down by seventy-six years and the oxygen condenser that hummed constantly beside her nightstand. "My side gate has a rusted padlock on the chain, but the latch on the greenhouse storm door is broken. Thomas gave me an extra key to his storefront three months ago when he started having the dizzy spells. He told me to keep it in the blue butter crock by my flour bin. He said if anything happened to him, Evelyn would clear out the office before probate could audit the books."
A draft crept under the master bedroom door, carrying the faint, sweet scent of Evelyn’s lavender hand cream. She was coming back up the stairs.
"I’m hanging up," I said.
I clicked the plastic plunger down with my thumb, disconnected the gray modular cord, and pushed the wire back beneath the skirt of the armoire. My bare feet barely made a sound on the runner rug as I crossed the threshold into my bedroom and pulled the door until the strike plate rested against the frame without clicking.
Two seconds later, Evelyn reached the top landing.
She didn't knock. She turned the brass knob, pushing the door open six inches to let the yellow hallway light cut across the foot of my bed. I lay on my right side beneath the quilt, my back to her, my knees tucked against my chest to hide the bulky square of Thomas Reid’s notary ledger pressed against my stomach. Beneath my cheek, the cold paper of the county flyer crinkled softly against the ticking of the pillow.
"Tessa," she said.
I kept my breathing slow and heavy, the rhythm shallow and ragged like someone sleeping through a fever.
"Deputy Miller dropped off the magistrate’s certified clearance," she said, her voice entirely conversational, the tone a mother might use to announce a dental appointment. "Oakridge has an intake bay behind the south garden. You won't have to walk through the general ward. Arthur Pence called the clinic director directly to ensure you have a private room until the conservatorship hearing on the fifteenth."
She waited. The silence stretched between us, thick with the ticking of the grandfather clock in the downstairs foyer. When I didn't stir, she pulled the door toward herself, leaving it open three inches—just wide enough to catch the sound of any movement from the hallway.
"Rest now," she murmured. "Five hours goes very quickly."
Her bedroom door closed down the corridor, but the brass lock didn't turn. Evelyn rarely locked her door; she relied on the terror of her quiet oversight to keep things where she placed them.
I waited forty minutes until the rhythmic, heavy hum of the central heating unit kicked on in the attic, drowning out the ambient creaks of the old two-story frame. Then I rolled out from beneath the covers.
I didn't take a bag. A bag was an admission of flight, something an officer could spot from fifty yards away on an empty county road. I laced my running shoes tight, pulling the double knots down until the canvas bit into the bridge of my arches. I slid the yellow missing-person flyer, the Oakridge intake voucher with Dr. Vance’s forged signature, and my father’s black notary ledger flat against my ribs, zipping my heavy duck-canvas work jacket over them until the bulge disappeared beneath the stiff brown cloth.