The Vanishing Game (28 page)

More thrashing sounds drifted up to us from the cellar steps and the door shuddered under a big impact. There was a high-pitched squeal that could have come from either Conner or Hazel
.

“‘The gingham dog and the calico cat,'” Dixon breathlessly recited, “‘wallowed this way and tumbled that…'”

“What she doing?” little Georgie said around the thumb in his mouth
.

“ … ‘employing every tooth and claw,'” Dixon droned, “‘in the awfullest way you ever saw.'”

Screaming and hammering sounds came from behind the door
,
followed by thumping that had to be the two of them tumbling downstairs. All of us stood rigid and silent, breathing hard and straining to listen. My heart knocked as if I'd run a race, and I felt a greasy clenching inside my stomach. No one spoke except Dixon, whose voice had dropped to a raspy murmur
.

“‘Next morning where the two had sat …'”

“Shut up!” Beth hissed
.

“‘They found no trace of dog or cat.'”

“I told you to shut up!” she cried, reaching for him. I stepped between them, holding the knife with both hands, prepared to use it
.

Dixon seemed not to see us at all. Instead, his eyes were riveted on the door as he recited the words from his beloved book. “‘The truth about the cat and pup …'”

“Come away, Dixon.”

“‘… is this: they ate each other up!'”

“I know, I know,” I said. He slipped his cold little fingers in mine and we waited
.

We waited for a sound from the cellar, waited for the police to come, waited for Jack and Noah to return. Two of those things happened at once. First we heard the doorbell, which Juliann scurried away to answer, and then we heard a fist slowly pounding on the cellar door. The police officers came into the kitchen. One of them asked me for the knife, which I handed over. The other answered the pounding on the cellar door, unlocking and slowly opening it
.

Hazel stumbled out
.

Hazel sat in one of the dining room chairs and blood oozed from the scratches on her face. There were bite marks on her arms and some of her hair had been pulled out. To my dismay, her pathetic appearance seemed to fuel the older officer's sympathy. He had a round face with gray hair flat as cardboard, and he talked to her calmly. The younger policeman was down in the cellar, searching for Conner
.

During my time at Seale House, I'd learned several things about Hazel. I knew she was a cold-hearted woman who could not be persuaded to any form of compassion. I also knew she was harsh, demanding, without conscience, and completely uncaring about children or their needs. And she was a drug addict. But the one thing I hadn't learned was what a skilled liar she was. For the first time I was able to understand why the social workers who visited were so accepting of her
.

I was at the far end of the kitchen where I could still see and hear her, my back in the corner the same way Conner so often sat. I
listened to her weave a story about the troubled boy and how she'd gone down in the cellar to convince him to come up. As she tried to reason with him, he'd attacked her and they'd fallen down the stairs. It was dark, so she couldn't see what happened to him, and then the door accidentally locked. This, she insisted, must have been the hand of God meant to keep the other children safe
.

I was ready to jump up and call her a liar when the officer came up from the cellar. He whispered something to his partner, who turned to look at Hazel with sympathy. Then he expressed his sadness at having to inform her that the boy was dead. It appeared his neck had been broken in the fall. Hazel burst into tears. She covered her face with her hands and sobbed
.

A deep sense of guilt welled up inside me. Although I'd hated and feared Conner, I hadn't meant for him to die. I'd only wanted to save Dixon, and for Hazel to stop being cruel and to understand what it felt like being locked in the cellar. I watched as the older officer started writing in his notebook and the younger one stepped away from Hazel to use the phone. Unobserved, she lifted her face and looked at me with tearless eyes and a silent, vicious snarl
.

Shaking, I stood and edged over to the policemen. “She's lying. She doesn't care if Conner is dead, except that she'll lose the money she gets paid for him. She locked him in the cellar all the time. She's locked every one of us down there, too, when she got mad.”

The older officer turned to Hazel, who looked up with a teary expression. “Jocelyn is just distraught right now. She gets so confused, trying to deal with the abuse she lived with before coming here.”

I looked at her with hatred, even though I knew it would only
help the officers believe her story. “She does drugs! Go check her room and you'll find marijuana and probably cocaine.”

“Calm down, young lady,” the policeman said. “Ms. Frey has run this foster home for a long time and she's got a very good reputation. I know, because I'm the one who found that boy Conner sleeping beneath an underpass. He fought me like a wildcat. I know what she's been up against in taking him on.” He eyed her bites and scratches with sympathy
.

Hazel gave him a watery smile and pulled up a saintly expression that looked as alien on her as if she'd sprouted antennae and fangs. I felt sick with dread, but this was how it was in the world of foster care. Because we were troubled kids with troubled pasts, nobody would believe us
.

The younger policeman hung up the phone. “The coroner's office is sending someone.”

I stared at his gun and saw the holster flap was unsnapped. A crazy idea niggled at the back of my mind. Just then there was some yelling from the front room that sounded like Beth, followed by sobbing from several small children. The officer turned in that direction and I acted quickly. I grabbed his gun and stepped back. He swore as I pointed it at him
.

The older man turned in my direction and held his hands out in a calming gesture. “Give me that gun, missy.”

“I will, but first you go up to her bedroom. Look in the drawer of her trinket table. You'll find drugs. Then you'll know I'm telling the truth!”

The squalling in the front room increased, and a few seconds later Noah and Jack came hurrying around the corner. “Jocey!” Jack said in a startled voice, coming to a stop. “What are you doing?”

“Hazel was going to send Dixon down in the cellar! I shoved her down there instead, and she got in a fight with Conner. She killed him.”

“No, no!” Hazel pleaded with the officers. “The boy fell down the steps and broke his neck. I would never hurt one of my children.”

“Give me the gun, young lady,” the older police officer said
.

“Not until you look where I told you to!” Panic thrummed away inside me like a trapped moth beating itself against a jar. Despite that, I held the gun steady in both hands. The cold metal seemed to send courage through my body to keep me standing
.

“We'll go check it out,” the older cop promised. “First give us the gun, or you'll be in a whole lot of trouble.”

“I already am.”

“Listen, I give you my word we'll go look. But I can't just leave you here with the gun, can I?”

Realizing this was true, I gave a slight nod and relaxed a little until the younger officer lunged. He grabbed the gun. Shocked, I panicked and pulled back. It went off with a loud blast that hurt my ears. Dropping it and staggering back, I watched in dread as his angry expression changed to one of shock. He grabbed his arm just below the shoulder, and blood oozed between his fingers where the bullet had grazed him. His partner snatched the gun from the floor
.

What happened after that was mostly a blur until I eventually found myself sitting in the front room along with the other children. We'd been herded there by the social workers the police had called. In my shaken daze it seemed odd that we were finally allowed to sit in Hazel's special room, where before we'd only come to dust or vacuum. Through the lace draperies covering the windows, we could see that it had grown dark outside. The snow on the ground reflected an eerie
glow. It seemed as if the flakes were frozen in freefall, but then I noticed it was only the pattern of the lace backed against the nighttime windows
.

I sat on the brocade chaise, Dixon on one side and Jack on the other. I looked at the kids in the room. Juliann and Georgie were sharing the rocker, hugging each other. They looked at me with blame in their eyes. Beth sat by herself on the loveseat. Her closed switchblade rested in her hand, her thumb stroking it like a talisman, and she continually murmured something to herself. I strained to listen, finally understanding what she kept repeating: “I won't go back home … I won't!”

All around the room I met eyes that were frightened, upset, accusing. Noah's expression was hidden from me as he sat on the floor, knees up, his face buried in his arms. Everyone else was glaring at me. “Why are they so mad?” I asked Jack in a miserable whisper
.

“Why do you think, Jocey? Most of these kids came from really bad places. They don't want to go back, or into a worse foster home than this.”

“But Hazel is a monster.”

“What's gonna happen to me?” little Evie wailed. She'd only been with us a couple of months
.

“They'll make you go back to your grandpa's house,” Beth said in a cruel hiss
.

Evie started to cry. I half expected Noah to intervene, like always, but he didn't even lift his head
.

All conversation was cut off when a policeman and the coroner pushed a gurney past us. A black bag lay on top. Acid rose in my throat, and I looked away until they'd gone through the front door
.
One truth about Seale House, I knew, was that the only two times children used the front door was the first time they came here, and the last when they left. Stunned into silence, we sat listening to the tick of the clock on the mantel and the distant murmur of voices in the other room. Soon Hazel was led past in handcuffs. She looked right through us with dazed eyes, as if we didn't exist. We overheard one of the social workers in the kitchen making anxious calls
.

“They must've found her stash after all,” Jack said
.

More seconds ticked by and Juliann whispered, “Maybe they'll hire a new mom for here.”

Beth shook her head. “Nope. They'll shut down Seale House for sure now.” Her voice was emotionless and so unlike her. She'd always run boiling hot, but someone had turned off the steam and now she'd melted into a little puddle of nothing. “Then they'll send us back to where we came from. Or a worse place, with bigger kids and a meaner mom. At least here we had each other. At least here we knew what to expect.”

I had never heard so many words from Beth, though for the first time I actually wished she'd shut up
.

Georgie hopped down from the rocking chair and came over to me. His white-blond hair and the purple shadows under his eyes made him look like a wraith. “I hate you, Jocey!” He threw his whole body into the accusation
.

As he stalked back to the rocking chair, Dixon slipped his hand in mine. I hardly noticed. A few seconds later I stood and moved over to where Noah sat. Hunkering down on the floor beside him I said, “Don't you understand, Noah? I had to stop her.”

He slowly raised his head and I was startled by the glaze
of hatred and betrayal. “Get out! If I ever see you again, I'll kill you.”

Tears stung my eyes, which had been so dry only seconds ago, and I recoiled from him. At that moment the lightbulbs in two lamps on either side of the room exploded, glass shards hitting against the shades. Darkness settled on the room, and Dixon let out a terrified wail as Evie started bawling
.

Jumping up, I ran through the house, a sob escaping me. I reached the back porch, pulled on my boots and coat, and hurried outside and across the yard, my feet sinking into the snow. Avoiding the cops out front, I slipped through the fence and onto the street, glancing back at the glowing lights from the windows. My eyes moved up to a sky gone black since the snow clouds had moved on. Stars stood out like bright chips of broken glass that soon blurred through my tears. Heartbroken, I ran
.

Noah and I sat together on the picnic bench, looking out at the river. It had turned choppy. The sky was more overcast now, the wind blowing. The boats had left the water and the vendor had packed up and gone. I shivered.