Sadie(29)

Only a little daylight manages to reach the first floor, from that one broken window I was looking through. The place is musty, dusty and smells of decay. I sneeze eight times in a row, which makes my eyes water more than I can see through. I wipe them and squint into the darkness and begin my trek from room to room, stepping around and through the garbage and debris, some of it recognizable, most of it not. I’m tense. The small noises I’m making seem too loud and I keep glancing over my shoulder, worried he’ll reappear. But he doesn’t.

So far.

I spot a Coke can that looks like it could’ve been from the eighties by the design. If not then, at least some time before mine. I float through the ghost of a kitchen, a dining room and a living room before I find myself in front of a mostly intact set of stairs leading to the second floor. Sunlight pours through the broken window at the top and highlights a palm print in the dust on the old wooden banister.

This way, it whispers.

The stairs have collapsed halfway up, leaving a gap wide enough it’ll be tricky getting across it. It was probably easy for a guy as tall as Silas, who looked to be over six feet. I stretch my right leg across the gap, get my foot on the closest remaining step and use the banister to hoist myself onto it. It shakes back and forth alarmingly and the small effort takes more out of me than it should, leaves me feeling nauseous and shaky. I better get a decent meal in me soon. I know what it’s like to be hungry and I’m better at it than most people, but I’m tapping into the last of my reserves. I’m not in the habit of making myself useless.

The stairs make disconcerting noises as I trudge up the last of them, finally getting two feet on the landing. It’s much smaller up here than it looks on the outside, and a little cleaner than downstairs. The collapsed stairway is too much of a deterrent to vandals, I guess.

I look around. I don’t know where Silas would have gone from here; there are no tells like the palm print. In one bedroom there’s an empty brass bedframe and moldy sheets, broken pieces of furniture. The other looks empty but for a wall where a small painting of a forest hangs. It’s somehow survived being in this place for who knows how long. In the bathroom, the sink has been ripped out of the wall and there’s shattered glass from the mirror of a broken medicine cabinet all over the floor. A stained, cracked porcelain tub with no feet holds a broken toilet inside it. The floor looks like it’s absorbed years of water damage. I’m afraid to step on it. I rub my sweaty forehead because it’s hot in here, stifling. I pull at my shirt collar.

Why the hell would someone like Silas Baker be out here?

The painting.

I go back to the empty bedroom and stand in front of it. It’s an oil painting, unsigned, and it looks wrong. It’s too … intentional. I press my finger against the canvas’s bumpy surface and then trace it along the frame’s immaculate edge.

It’s not even dusty.

I grab the picture by its corners and set it on the floor. Behind the picture, there’s a perfect hole dug out of the wall and in the hole, there’s a small metal box with a padlock on it. I reach inside and it surprises me, how light it is. I shake it and the rustling sound my ears are met with puts me in mind of money. Is that what this is?

Silas Baker, squirreling away cash … for what?

Does it matter?

I’d take his money. I always need that.

I leave the house with the box in my hands, making that perilous jump over the gap in the stairs and step outside. When I’m outside, I search for a rock to bust the lock with because anything is breakable if you put enough force behind it. I finally find a nice, gray, jagged one with some heft, curl my hand around it and give the box a good thwack. The rock hits the lock, then hits the ground. The impact tears the skin away from my knuckles and brings tears to my eyes. I clutch it against my chest and it takes everything not to cry out.

I try again.

And again.

And again.

The sun gets farther and farther up the sky. My stomach turns, sick from the heat. The heat makes my head feel foggy. My shirt dries of sweat and soaks itself through again. The lock never breaks, but the hinge holding the lock does, and when it happens, when it tears off, I don’t even realize it. I hit the metal box again and it flips on its side, its contents spilling out.





THE GIRLS

EPISODE 3


ANNOUNCER:

The Girls is brought to you by Macmillan Publishers.


RUBY LOCKWOOD:

Yeah, I saw her. She was blond, though.


WEST McCRAY [PHONE]: So … I think I might actually have a bead on this girl. I don’t know what exactly it’s going to lead me to—but it’s more than I started with.


DANNY GILCHRIST [PHONE]: Don’t sound so excited.


WEST McCRAY [PHONE]: I’m going to find Sadie and all she’s gonna want is to be left alone. You do realize that, don’t you?

[THE GIRLS THEME]


WEST McCRAY [DINER]: You’re telling me she had a different hair color than she does in this photograph? She was blond instead of brunette?


RUBY LOCKWOOD:

Yeah, and by the looks of it, she’d done it herself. And she was rail thin, a wisp of a thing, not much to her. Didn’t talk right either. That stood out more than anything else. She had a stutter.


SAUL LOCKWOOD:

Oh! Yeah … I remember her now. She ordered a … coffee. I thought she was a runaway. She pissed you off some, didn’t she, Roo?