Tara felt Hardy's hand on her arm, pushing her out, out form beneath the pyramid of mattresses.
"I need to breathe," Hardy said, her mouth pulled low, close to Tara's ear. Tara scooted along the floor, the fabric of Hardy's sweatpants making a scrape sound as it moved against the cement floor.
Tara stood up, rolled her ankles over, cracking them. Hardy rose up alongside her, but Tara was already moving off to the stairwell. She leaned against the wall and pressed her head into the empty space at the bottom of the stairs.
Nothing. No sound from upstairs, and Tara felt the silence swell through the wood of the house, expanding the walls, the doors, like the way the humidity did in her own house in the summer.
She wiped the back of her hand across her forehead, and felt the damp come away.
"Did they leave?" Hardy said.
Tara took another look up the flight of stairs where a broom, and mop rested at the top in the right-hand corner, and to the left, the squat rectangular door stood shut.
She moved away from the stairwell, a chill running over her skin where moments before sweat had coalesced. "I don't know," she said. She crept toward Hardy, her fingers gliding over her lips.
"Think we should make a run for it?" Hardy said.
"They know we're here, though," Tara said. "That cop that was down here definitely did, and even if he didn't think someone was down here with him, his partner upstairs definitely saw the plate of food on the table."
"I know," Hardy said. "But if we know that they know that someone is here, then they also know that we know that –"
"Ok, I get it," Tara said, and she had to stifle a grin. "Want to just say screw it and go?"
Hardy moved toward the basement door, and when she did Tara heard a faint creak coming from the floorboards above. She grabbed the back of Tara's shirt with her fingers, but let the fabric fall through them.
"It's nothing," she said, and saw Hardy's head still directed toward the basement door. "Just the wind or something."
But even as Hardy reached out, moving the deadbolt lock down to the open position, Tara felt something stirring around inside her head, something that wanted to speak, tell her she was a moment away from making a mistake.
Hardy pulled the door open toward them, a breeze invading the sterile space around them, a chill coming into the room. Hardy had one foot outside when Tara saw it. On the windowsill inside the basement, behind an old flowerpot, an antenna stuck up behind it.
She picked it up: a baby monitor, the dot-sized red light on and glowing.
Something dropped inside her stomach. She could see Hardy standing outside the basement door, her back flat against the rock wall. She pulled the door open an inch, and moved her hand toward herself twice for Hardy to come back in, and then brought her hand up to her lips at the same time.
Hardy stood there, staring at her. She spread her arms out wide, and rolled her head to the side, her bangs catching a breeze as she did, and they were kicked around on her forehead. Tara moved the baby monitor in front of her chest, held it there like a model on The Price Is Right.
Hardy took a step toward the door, and then stepped down into the basement and as soon as she did, Tara laid the monitor down outside the door, and closed it. Closed it hard enough so that it'd be heard through the other end of the monitor but quiet enough for the cops on the other end not to suspect anything.
She grabbed Hardy's arm, and pulled her toward the basement steps. She peered around the corner, straining her ear once more – could she be sure they weren't upstairs, waiting?
She skipped up the steps, two at a time, Hardy trailing her, and then squeaked open the basement door.
Nothing. No sound. But why did it feel like the kind of silence that was produced by someone on purpose, someone lying in wait for her?
She moved down the hall, Hardy's bedroom on the left, then a bathroom, and at the other end, the kitchen opening up into its square nook.
She could see her plate of eggs and bacon then, uneaten, abandoned at one end of the kitchen table, she could feel Hardy's breath on her shoulder.
Tara ducked into Hardy's room. The pants, socks she'd left there that morning were gone. She pulled the blinds back, gazed out into the driveway, the road beyond. No one. But that didn't mean there wasn't a car on the other side of the house.
She popped the window open then, unlocking it and pulling it upwards. Glided the screen up a couple of inches, and pried it out slowly, the thing scraping rust onto its metallic holding place.
Hardy stood beside her, speechless, but took the screen in her hand when Tara passed it to her.
"Look," Tara said. "I want us to avoid your backyard, and avoid the main road. On three, I'm going to hop down, and cut through your driveway, through the Cooper's backyard, and make my way down to the bottom of the road like that."
"Running through people's gardens?"
"Yes. Wait 10 seconds after I go. If no one chases me, follow me down. But if someone does, I want you to go out through the front door, and run up the road until you get to the tracks."
"But we shouldn't split up," Hardy said.
"I know. But if we have to, meet me in the woods behind the elementary school in one hour. Take the tracks there. Don't be seen."
Tara punched her cheek with her lips then without thinking, and threw one leg out the window. She held onto Hardy's hands, as she got the other one out, and then let go, fell to the driveway with a smack.
She threw herself around, and sprinted, down through the driveway, through the Cooper's backyard, their boxer snorting and quipping behind her. Reached the chain-link fence, threw herself over it onto the driveway beyond, and then down through the next garden, a sprinkler out tossing water above her head, a woman sitting outside, sipping something beneath an umbrella. Tara heard her choke, cough, and the plastic lawn chair scrape backwards as Tara sprinted forward.
When she reached the woman's wooden fence, she stopped, and turned to look back toward Tara's. Her bedroom window looked shrunken down now, unsuspecting.
A memory waded through her skull. Five, picking crabapples out in this backyard, the trees shorter then, the woman who lived here taller, watering the plants herself, smiling at her, telling her to take as many as she could eat but knowing her mom would scold her for making herself sick, and then hearing her mother's voice calling down through the backyards, calling her home.
She stared at Tara's window, willing her to come out, to show herself, and then a gunshot rang out across the neighbourhood. The woman screamed from somewhere behind the umbrella, and then the sound of her feet shuffling on the grass. Tara saw the crab apple tree then before she ran, only it couldn't have been the same one she was thinking of. She saw it stand there, dwarfed between two large oaks, or at least, planted there within the last couple of years. Its limbs hadn't yet offered any fruit.
Tara heard another gunshot ring out and she ran, ran all the way back to Hardy's.
YOU ARE READING
Escape From Norriswood
Mystery / Thriller"Naughty girls can make a lot of money," Bobby had said again. Click. "And we're going to make you a lot of money. Enough to pay your way through college." He brought the Polaroid down from his eye. "Now let's get some shots of you in the bedroom."...
