Escape from Memory (13 page)

Mom didn’t say anything.

“Maybe you need to be convinced that you should tell me something,” Rona said. She pressed the gun deeper into Lynne’s back. Lynne winced. Rona smiled, a nasty, heartless, reptilian smile. “I have reasons to keep you and Kira alive right now. I don’t need this girl. And”—now she looked directly at me—“yes, my little friend,
this
is what’s known as blackmail.”

I looked at Lynne, to see how she was taking all this. She yelped just a bit, and I thought that that was amazingly brave of her. I would have screamed. Then I saw that Lynne was swaying a little, like she might faint. She reached out and grabbed the door for support.

“Give us some time,” Mom begged frantically. She wasn’t even trying to sound calm anymore.

“There’s not much time left,” Rona said, and she jerked Lynne toward her. Lynne was still holding on to the door, so the motion pulled the door back. Lynne let go only seconds before the door shut.

And then I saw that Lynne had not just been holding on to the door to keep herself from fainting. She’d been sticking a scrap of paper there.

I
PULLED THE PAPER FROM THE BACK OF THE DOOR
. L
YNNE HAD
attached it with chewing gum.

“See how smart Lynne is?” I told Mom proudly.

I unfolded the small square, which was just paper torn from one of Lynne’s school notebooks. Of course—she’d had her backpack with her when she hid in the trunk of the car.

The note said:

Crythe is a ghost town. Except for the main street and the castle we’in, it’s all in ruins. And I’m pretty sure some of the Crythians are actors.

Then, in big, emphatic writing, she’d added:

DON’T TRUST AUNT MEMORY!

“Thanks a lot,” I muttered. “Don’t you think I already figured that out?”

“She probably wrote that before she was caught,” Mom said distractedly.

I had a sudden chill. I could just picture Lynne sneaking back into my room, trying to warn me before she went for help. What if that was the reason she got caught?

I made myself focus on the rest of the note.

“Crythe’s a ghost town, and the people are just actors,” I muttered. “Does that mean everything here is just a—a fraud?”

“It didn’t used to be,” Mom said. “But in the war … a lot of the village was destroyed. Rona must have repaired just enough to make it look good, and perhaps she hired extra ‘villagers.’” She squinted off into space, deep in thought. “At least some of the original Crythians must still be here, or Rona wouldn’t have gone through that charade with the ceremonial dress. I don’t know how to think about all of this…. Was she trying to trick you and them both? Does she suspect that some of them know more about your parents’ invention than they’ve let on? And she thought you might get them to tell?”

I sank to the floor.

“We don’t know anything,” I said.

Mom whirled around. She kicked the wall.

“We know this is real,” she said. “So was that gun.”

I swallowed hard.

“She’s not going to kill Lynne, is she?” I asked in a shaky voice.

“We have to have a plan,” Mom said. “There must be some way to rescue you and Lynne without betraying the entire world.”

I didn’t think about it until later, how Mom hadn’t included herself in the list of people who needed to be rescued.

Mom sat down by the door again, her chin on her knees, her face in her hands.

“I have to be able to think,” she mumbled. “I’m not good at plans. If only Toria and Alexei were here …”

A chill traveled down my spine.

“They can be,” I said slowly. I could barely bring myself to say the words. “If you hypnotized me and gave me access to their memories, wouldn’t it be just like—”

“No!” Mom shouted. She’d never shouted at me like that before. I stared at her and she stared back. “Anything but that,” Mom added, only a little less vehemently. “Everything Rona has done proves that your parents’ memories should not be … resurrected. I have to protect you from that. Protect the rest of the world. No, we have to trick Rona, make her believe we’re going to give her the secrets, and then make sure you and Lynne are safe before she finds out the truth…. Oh, if only I could think of something!”

I didn’t want Mom to see how relieved I was that she didn’t expect me to be hypnotized, become my parents. I hunched over and shoved my hands into my pockets. That’s when I felt the keys I’d put there the day before and had totally forgotten until now. I pulled them out, one from each pocket.

“Mom, look,” I said, feeling a sudden thrill. “Maybe …” I didn’t have a complete plan formed in my head, but something was coming together. I looked down at the tag on the first key:
SAFE-DEPOSIT BOX, FIRST BANK OF WILLISTOWN
. I held it out to Mom.

“Where did you get this?” Mom asked.

“From the kitchen cabinet, back home,” I admitted. “When you wouldn’t answer any of my questions, I thought …” It all seemed so long ago. Now I couldn’t imagine being so naive that
I believed I could get answers from a lockbox. “Never mind what I thought. What if we tell Rona that the secrets are stored at the bank?”

“But they aren’t” Mom said. “As soon as she sees they’re not there, she’ll just be right back at us, madder than ever. She’ll kill Lynne without a single qualm.”

I shivered, not wanting to be reminded how high the stakes were.

“No, Mom, she can’t open your lockbox,” I said. “Nobody can but the person who owns it. The bank people won’t let her. I—” I couldn’t look Mom in the face. “Lynne and I called the bank to find out what their rules were, and they told us. So you’ll have to go with her back to Willistown and to the bank. You can tell her you won’t go without me and Lynne. And then when we get there, we can tell the security guard, and they’ll call the cops.”

I could see a few problems with that plan—like, wouldn’t Rona figure out that we could turn her in once we got to the bank? I looked back up at Mom, wondering if she’d shoot down the whole idea.

“That just might work,” Mom said slowly. “Except … we’ll have to tell Rona that the lockbox is in your name.”

“What?” I said, suddenly confused.

Now it was Mom’s turn to avoid my eyes.

“It’s better that way,” she said. “Safer.”

W
HEN
R
ONA
C
UMMINS CAME BACK
, M
OM MET HER AT THE DOOR
.

“We have a deal to offer you,” Mom said in a dull voice, her eyes trained on the floor.

I stood a few paces behind her, where Mom had told me to stand. Mom had scripted the whole thing. I felt like a little kid again, just obeying my mother, without a single thought in my own head.

“A deal?” Rona’s eyes glinted with interest. “So you’ve come to your senses after all.”

“You didn’t leave us many choices,” Mom said, still in the emotionless tone of someone who is either drugged or deeply depressed.

“Well, let’s hear it,” Rona said eagerly.

“All my sister and brother-in-law’s notes on their, um, experiments are in a bank vault back in Ohio,” Mom said. “Kira has the key.”

This was my cue. I reached into my pocket with what was supposed to be a dramatic flourish. I’m not sure I carried it off. I was so nervous, my hands shook. When I pulled the key free
from my pocket, it swung on its ring like a miniature pendulum.

“I knew there was a reason to kidnap you!” Rona chortled. “Hand it over.”

She reached out, as if it had never occurred to her that I wouldn’t automatically do as she said.

At the last minute, just before her hand brushed mine, I pulled the key away and stuffed it back into my pocket.

“Not so fast,” Mom cautioned.

But Rona’s reflexes were lightning quick. In the time it took me to blink once, Rona had pulled out her gun and had it pointed at my head.

“I said, hand it over!” Rona commanded.

It was a weird thing to have a gun pointed at me. I’ve seen people point guns all the time in movies or on TV at my friends’ houses. But it’s different when it’s my head the gun is aimed at, my life that’s only seconds away from being extinguished.

I heard Mom gulp. She stepped between me and the gun.

“I said we had a deal, not a giveaway,” she told Rona. I hoped I was the only one who heard the quiver in her voice. “That key won’t do you any good without Kira.”

Rona squinted at Mom. Mom kept talking.

“The safe-deposit box is in Kira’s name,” Mom said. “She has to sign at the bank to have it opened. Only she can remove any of the contents.”

Mom’s voice was definitely shaking now. I hoped Rona thought it was just because she was scared. What if she guessed that Mom was lying?

“Come on, then, Kira,” Rona said, motioning me toward her with the gun.

“You take all three of us,” Mom said. “Me, Kira, Kira’s friend. Take us back to Willistown. We open the safe-deposit box, you take everything that’s inside it, you set us free.”

“You have it all figured out, don’t you?” Rona growled. “I think you have a little bit too much figured out. No. I’m taking just Kira. You and the other girl will stay here. That way, she’ll have some incentive to play this straight. Any tricks and …” Rona squeezed the trigger. I screamed, terrified that, any second now, a bullet would rip through Mom or me. Maybe both of us. But at the last minute Rona had pulled the gun to the side, shot into the wall.

Rona laughed gleefully.

“Scared you, huh?” she taunted us.

“That was dangerous,” Mom said. Her face was white and angry. “Bullets can ricochet. You might have killed any of us.”

“I just wanted you to know I was serious,” Rona said.

“So am I,” Mom said. “You take Kira and Lynne both. If you have to have a hostage, you can keep me here until you have the secrets. Then you release me, too. Deal?”

I gasped. What was Mom thinking? Rona would kill her for sure when she discovered there were no secrets in the lockbox.

Rona glanced my way, and I struggled to regain my poker face.
Rona mustn’t suspect, she mustn’t suspect,
I repeated to myself again and again. I didn’t let myself think anything else.

Rona narrowed her eyes and studied my face even more carefully than ever before.

“You’re scaring me with that gun,” I muttered, trying to sound childish. I had to make myself seem like a stupid girl who knew nothing about secrets or secret plans, who was merely terrified out of her wits.

I must have succeeded. Rona turned her attention back to Mom.

“Deal?” Mom repeated. Her jaw was set, her eyes blazing. I wondered that I had ever considered her mousy.

“All right,” Rona said. “Come on, kid.” She reached out to grab my elbow, and I was too stupefied to pull away.

“Mom?” I said weakly.

“Everything will be fine,” Mom said in that reassuring mother voice that I’d heard plenty of other kids mothers use, but never Mom. Never before that morning. “Just do what we talked about.”

Rona looked suspiciously from me to Mom.

“You try any funny stuff, kid, and your so-called mother here is a dead woman,” Rona said threateningly. “So are you and your friend.”

“You can’t hurt the girls,” Mom said firmly. “The bank has instructions to destroy the contents of that box in the event of Kira’s death.”

Nice bluff,
I thought. Mom spoke so convincingly, I could almost imagine reams of secret papers going up in smoke. I wished there really were papers, instead of blocked-off information in my brain. And I wished I could figure out the full extent of Mom’s plan. I tried to catch Mom’s eye, but she was looking past me. She grabbed me by the shoulders and wrapped her arms around my back. She buried her face in my hair.

“Don’t worry about me,” she whispered into my ear. “There had to be a sacrificial lamb.”

Rona pulled me away from Mom.

“Hey, hey, none of that,” she said. “Come on.”

She pressed the gun into my back and steered me out the door. The feel of the cold metal through my shirt made me so terrified, I didn’t even say good-bye to Mom.

I
WAS AFRAID THAT
R
ONA WOULD RENEGE ON HER SIDE OF THE
bargain right away and try to leave without Lynne. And then, without Mom, I would have to stand up to Rona all by myself. Would I be able to do that? I didn’t think so. Because if I could, I would be digging my heels in right now, screaming,
I’m not leaving Crythe without Mom!

Except Mom had said for me to go. She had told me not to worry about her.

Dazed, I crossed the basement and climbed the stairs. I was barely aware of anything around me except the gun jabbing into my back.

Just outside the kitchen, Rona directed me to a door I hadn’t noticed before. I opened it. It was a small closet, empty except for Lynne’s unconscious form on the floor. She lay curled into a fetal position, her long brown hair covering her face. Her school backpack was still strapped to her back, and somehow that made everything worse.

“If you hurt her …” I said, trying desperately for the threatening tone Mom had used.

“Relax,” Rona said. “We only gave her a mild sedative. For her own good. She was getting hysterical.”

I tried to imagine Lynne hysterical but couldn’t.

Rona gave Lynne a soft kick, and Lynne moaned and rolled over. I saw that her arms and legs were bound. She opened her eyes. As soon as she saw me, she struggled to sit up.

“Kneel,” Rona commanded me.

Seconds later Lynne and I were handcuffed together, her right wrist and my left one. Then Rona took a rope and tied our ankles together too. She grunted in satisfaction when she was done.

“That way, one bullet will stop both of you,” she said.

“Three-legged race,” Lynne whispered in my ear.

I knew what she meant. Lynne and I had been partners at lots of birthday parties and Sunday school picnics and end-of-school class day relay races when we were little kids—she thought we could make a break for it.

I shook my head warningly.

“They still have Mom,” I whispered back.

Lynne’s eyes got big, and she frowned questioningly.