Escape From Norriswood

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Rosalyn was on the main drag home when she heard the siren of the cop car behind her. She wheeled around on her feet and saw that it had stopped at an intersection at the beginning of the road.

She swore under her breath, and kept walking. Her head was light without having eaten anything yet that morning, and she could feel the tendrils of stress ink their way down her nervous system, into the cramps and knots in her back muscles, her legs.

She turned again: the cop car still had the red light.

"Deidra," she said, turning to Tara's mother walking on her left. The woman still had sunglasses on, her hood wrapped over her head.

"Get out of here now. Run. Just go."

The colour seemed to drain out of Deidra's skin then, a paleness rising up through her cheeks, her forehead.

Rosalyn grabbed the woman's arm. "That cop behind us is going to stop for us. I stole from the grocery store. Look," she pulled Deidra close, and at the same time, saw the traffic the cop car was amid begin to ebb forward out of the intersection.

"I don't trust the way that cop spoke to you at the hospital. And I have a feeling things are only going to be worse after what happened with that woman in the store this morning. So please, just leave."

"I get it," Deidra said. "My knee is just busted up, Rosalyn. I can hardly walk."

"Here," Rosalyn said. She walked Deidra over to the metal barricade separating the road from the bushes beyond. "I'll come back for you. Just hide in the trees for now, at least. If I don't call back, take a cab to the Moorland. Get some breakfast and don't leave the place until I'm back."

She helped Deidra over the barricade, and then handed her the basket of food.

She watched her then for a moment, her back to the road, moving into the greenery, the shrubs, the chamomile flowers blowing wildly around, and Deidra moving tepidly on her swollen knee. The police siren billowed around her. And then the car was behind her, the engine humming, the heat rising up off the hood.

She heard the car door slam shut, and Rosalyn took her head from Deidra. Please don't let him see her, she thought.

"Excuse me miss," the officer said. Rosalyn turned to look at him, and saw startle in the officer's eyes as he recognized her face. "You were at the hospital last night," the officer said. "With a woman who claimed to be Deidra Park."

Rosalyn didn't say anything, but just let him get nearer.

"I'm looking for these two women," he said. He held his smart phone out to her, and Rosalyn could see a picture on the screen from a black and white security camera. The picture was taken at the exact moment Rosalyn had walked between the two security pillars just before exiting the grocery store.

"That you?" the officer said.

"It is."

"Now where's the woman you were with? Because it looks to me like it was the same woman who you were with at the hospital."

Rosalyn glanced off into the woods beside the road, just a quick glance: no trace of Deidra. But the officer saw her movement.

"What? She go that way?" the officer said.

"No. No, she left after we got out of the grocery store."

"Now why exactly did she do that?"

"She felt ill. Especially after that woman fainted."

"That's funny," the officer said. "Because that woman claims she saw the ghost of herself, a mirage that looked so much like herself that she was convinced she had died -- just like her ex-husband died last night.

"Do you want to know what this woman's name is?" the officer said.

Rosalyn felt the wind swoop through her hair, the way the light looked, the clear, blue-sky overhead, the way it always looked in September in Norriswood.

"Her name is Deidra Park. The same name given to me last night by a woman who matches her physical description perfectly. At the hospital visiting her husband who was kidnapped by a man named Phil Newell after Phil thought the man was a clone of himself. Thought he escaped from some experiment somewhere."

Rosalyn watched the traffic stop at another red behind the officer.

"Anything else to say here, or should I just drag you down to a room at the shop?"

"What?" Rosalyn said. "You can't arrest –"

"I've got you for shoplifting, and I have a woman who fainted this morning and almost gave herself a concussion wanting to bring you in for whatever prank you pulled. That's disturbing the peace. Oh," he leaned in close to her face now, and she could taste the thick hum of coffee fermenting on his breath. "And whatever the hell this is – government cloning experiment or not – I'm going to get you for this, too."

Rosalyn took a step backwards.

"We can do this with handcuffs or without handcuffs, you tell me," he said.

The wind whispered to the trees on the side of the road, and Rosalyn tried to see if Deidra was there, if she could hear anything that was going on.

"Fine, we can do a resisting arrest charge, too," the officer said. "That's just more time we get to spend together, down in the lockup, you thinking nice and hard about the questions I'm bound to ask you."

He moved toward her then, and pulled her around so that her back was to him. She felt the handcuffs dig into her wrists, heard the click as they snapped closed.

He walked her over to the cop car, flicked the door open, and pushed her inside. When he sat down on the front seat, he clicked his radio on.

"This is Sergeant House. I have the burglar here, heading to the station."

Rosalyn heard the radio static on the other end. "I said this is Sargent House, over."

Nothing.

She could hear House swear under his breath, and then the siren flicked on overhead, and he flung the car around in a u-turn.

"This is House to Delta do you read me, over."

"House, this is Delta, I've been shot." Radio static. "I told you not to leave."

"We need all units to 39 Cresswater Place," House said. "All units and an ambulance to 39 Cresswater Place."

Rosalyn saw Tara's house flash into her mind. The address she'd memorized back in some English class in the 12th grade. The car roared through an intersection, Rosalyn's forehead bumping against House's front seat.