Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(26)
A scritching now—she hears it—followed by the rustle of what could be cloth.
Enough. She hurries forward and raises her flashlight. The weak yellow light seeps into the bathroom but fails to penetrate a shadow darker than the rest. Its eyes flash red. A crow, she realizes, as it lets out a screech and leaps from its perch on the toilet. Its wings beat the air and its claws rake at her and she swings her arm and her flashlight goes whirling off and for a moment she is uncertain which way is up or down, left or right, with the crow screeching and flapping its wings and crashing off the walls, finally escaping through the open window.
She is huddled on the floor. She laughs and the laugh cracks into a sob.
She and her father used to count crows. For the times they spotted the birds roosting in a tree, wheeling in and out of low-hanging clouds, he taught her an old Irish rhyme. One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a story that’s never been told. “Seven. That’s the one I want,” he used to say, squinting up at the sky. “I want that story.”
Anything but one. If they spotted a single crow, they would look around hurriedly, seeking another—as she does now, finding nothing but shadows all around her.
She packs what little she has and hikes her way out of town. A drop of rain strikes her cheek, and then another, and another still, and through the thickening downpour, she hurries to the nearest building, a Tesoro gas station, to wait out what she hopes is a passing storm.
She spins the card rack and chooses one at random. Its cover is cartooned with a baby in a sagging soiled diaper, a scab-kneed toddler picking her nose, a teenage boy clutching a sandwich and wearing sunglasses, a raggedy dog and spectacled grandparents, and, in the middle of them all, a bald middle-aged man in a white undershirt that can’t contain his potbelly. Inside, MOM—an acronym for Mother of Multiples—and a message from the sender, presumably a husband: Thanks for taking such good care of us.
Claire reads her way through all the cards, imagining whom she might send them to, and then wanders to the magazine rack and flips through a copy of People. Here is a shot of a starlet rising out of the ocean with her bikini dragged off her by a wave, a black censor bar covering her breasts. Oops is the caption. Claire wants to be interested—wants to read the articles as she would gobble candy—but part of her knows that her days of gossiping about celebrity nonsense are over.
Rain lashes the window. Out of the windswept murkiness comes a police cruiser, turning off the highway, into the parking lot, the tires splashing through puddles and throwing up fans of water.
Claire blindly sets the magazine on the rack and doesn’t pick it up when it flutters to the tile floor. Surely, she thinks, this is a sign, when a moment later the door chimes as the trooper pushes through it. He has the beginnings of both a mustache and a gut. His gun is holstered in his belt. He swings his arm wide around it, and in his hand dangles an oversize plastic mug with a bendable straw. He splashes it full of Cherry Pepsi and caps it and heads to the counter, whistling, the whistle cut short when Claire steps out from behind the greeting-card rack and says, “Excuse me?”
His feet drag to a stop. “What?” His mike squawks. His hand goes to it and he drops the volume as tinny voices chatter back and forth between blasts of static.
Then Claire tells him everything. But only in her head. In fact she only looks up at him, a man with handcuffs clipped to his belt, knowing that he could drop her, force a knee to her back, clip her wrists, pepper-spray her face in less than a minute. She finds it so strange that this is the situation she is in when about a month ago, around this same time of the day, she was sitting down to lunch with her parents—grilled ham and cheese, that was what they ate, along with small bowls of tomato soup—while NPR played from the faux-antique radio on the kitchen counter. The most ordinary thing in the world made suddenly extraordinary by the fact that she would never experience it again.
“What?” The trooper lifts the mug to his mouth and the straw becomes as dark as a vein when he sucks from it. “What do you want?”
She feels so naked under his gaze, under the fluorescent lights that hide nothing and make everyone appear as though they are dying. She imagines what she must look like to him: oversize coat, ratty hair, greasy skin, a faded bruise with an angry red gash running across her forehead. A runaway. That’s what he’ll think. And then he’ll make the connection—he’ll realize she is the girl—the one from the notice that could very well be circulating through every police station in the Upper Midwest.
She takes a step back and the rack rattles behind her and for a moment she can’t help but think of that card, the stupid one with the cartooned family on it. In her mind it flips open as her mouth opens and she says, “My friend says you can go seven miles over the speed limit and not get pulled over.” With every word she expects her voice to shake, but it doesn’t. “That you guys have, like, a seven-mile-per-hour cushion you give people. Is that true?”
“Don’t speed,” he says.
“Okay. I won’t. But do you?”
“I don’t speed.”
Inside the card. MOM. Mother of Multiples. M-O-M. An acronym. She is a few seconds behind the conversation when she says, “But do you pull people over if they’re only seven miles over?”
He sips again from his soda and then sets it in front of the register for the clerk to ring up. “Everybody is different. Maybe it will be your day to get pulled over and maybe it won’t. Maybe I’m feeling nice or maybe I’m feeling mean.” He digs in his pocket and rattles out some change. Behind him a wall of cigarettes and lighters and energy pills. “The next time you think about doing something foolish, think of me mean.”