The Leaving(84)

“You’re serious,” Adam said.

“I am.” Chambers nodded. “The principal facilitated the abduction after interviewing you all during those first days of kindergarten. The idea was that if it worked, they could treat all the students.”

“That’s completely insane.” Sarah rubbed her own arms.

“We believe this is a serious group with unlimited resources,” Chambers said. “We believe they’re interested in military applications of the treatment.”

“Military?” Adam’s father asked from across the room.

“Postwar, yes.” Chambers nodded. “Treatment for PTSD.”

“But how did a few hours turn into eleven years?” Sarah looked like she might literally fall to pieces, leaving only a pile of jagged flesh on the white concrete floor.

“I can’t explain that,” Chambers said. “Not yet.”

“And what about Max?” Lucas asked.

“We don’t have clarity on that yet, either,” Chambers said. “But it sounds like there was an incident, possibly an asthma attack. We’re still working on all that. So unless you—”

“Where’s Kristen?” Scarlett interrupted.


They found her back up at the house, in one of the bedrooms.

“Here.” She pointed. “This one.”

“This one what?” Lucas stepped toward her.

“An owl. In the knots of the wood.” She knelt down. “Can you give me a hand?”

Lucas bent down to look and, sure enough, the knot in the floor-board really looked like an owl. He and Kristen both worked with fingertips to try to pull the board up. But it wouldn’t come and so Chambers went and found a pocketknife and joined in the quest.

When the board finally surrendered, the others all gathered in. The small blue leather journal made Lucas think of babies—helpless, waiting to be lifted out of cribs.

Kristen reached for the book and stood and started to flip its pages.

“Well?” Lucas stepped toward her and Chambers did, too. “What does it say?”

“I need a minute,” Kristen said, backing away from them, and she kept flipping.

She was probably feeling vindicated and Lucas envied her for it.

Then she looked up and said, “It’s all over the place. There are huge gaps. Years with nothing, it looks like.” She looked back down to read more.

Scarlett said, “Maybe you’d forgotten where it was? That you even had it?”

“Yes,” Kristen said, turning pages. “Here.” She read, “Found this journal again today.”

“What about the last entry?” Lucas asked.

Kristen flipped ahead and read aloud:

“We have decided to trust this journal.

We found it again today, after more than a year.

We’re planning to leave tonight before we forget again.

We’ve read back in these pages and must believe it all to be true.

We have set our traps, tried to bring clues.

Wish us luck.”

She looked up. “We all signed it. But it was dated months ago.”

Chambers said, “You must have tried again to get away, and they stopped you. They let you go when they thought it was best for them, when they could control it.”

“Did you write names anywhere?” Lucas snapped at Kristen. “The name of who kept us here?”

“I must have,” she said, flipping through pages frantically. “Right?”

“I’m going to need to take that into evidence, Kristen,” Chambers said.

She looked like she might never let it go.





AVERY



Waiting was dog years.

Again.

Chambers was following up on any and all leads from the tip-line recordings, which Avery was told meant yes, looking to see if anyone or anything had been buried at the house where the principal had lived eleven years ago. But now that they’d found the place where Lucas and the others had been kept—for real this time, by the sound of it—that had probably taken up a good part of Chambers’s day and who even knew when they’d know anything?

So even though she’d skipped school, Avery went to the auditions that afternoon to support Emma. They sat in squeaky seats in the back row and waited for Emma’s name to be called.

But then Mr. Louska called Avery’s name.

She’d never crossed it out on the sheet.

Would she regret not doing it?

Be jealous if Emma got the lead?

Louska called her name again.

She stood.

Emma looked up at her.

All doubts fizzled on the spot.

Avery didn’t need to be the star of anything.

Preferred not to be, really.

Tragedy had made her famous for a time and now it was time to do things differently, to be, different.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That was a mistake. I’m not auditioning.”

“Well, that’s disappointing,” Mr. Louska said. Then, without missing a beat, he looked at his list and called whoever was next in alphabetical order.

When it was her turn, Emma sounded nervous at first, but by the chorus, she was soaring, like she really believed things were going to be better when she grew up.