Sunshine

There was a longer silence. Pat was looking at me. I met his eyes. He had held his breath till he turned blue last night. He’d already made up his mind to trust me, even knowing that I was lying about what had happened. That made me feel pretty bad until it occurred to me that there was another angle on last night’s demonstration: not only that Pat and Jesse and Theo were willing to trust me, but that they understood sometimes you had to lie.

“Okay,” I said.

“So,” said Jesse. “This second set of holes.”

I took a deep breath. “I’m not going to tell you.”

“Okay,” said Jesse. “I think these holes are from another shackle. If it had been empty while you were here, Rae, you wouldn’t mind telling us that. So, there must have been another prisoner, and it’s this other prisoner you aren’t going to tell us about.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Interesting,” said Jesse.

Pat stared out one of the windows, frowning. “Shackles in a ballroom aren’t standard equipment, so the suckers will have put them in special. The thing is, the space cleared around this house has been done recently too. You have to assume they did that as well. Why?”

I could keep silent on this one a little more easily. It seemed pretty weird if you didn’t know. And this one they couldn’t guess. I hoped.

They went off to look at the rest of the house. I stayed in the ballroom. I sat on the windowsill nearest my shackle, the one on the long wall—the window I’d peed out of. The window I’d knelt in front of when I’d changed my knife to a key. The lake looked a lot like it had the day I’d been here: another blue, clear day. It was hotter today though, summer rather than spring. I leaned back against the side of the window and thought about cinnamon rolls and muffins and brownies and the cherry tarts I’d started experimenting with since Charlie had ordered an electric cherry pitter out of a catalog and gave it to me hopefully. Charlie’s idea of post-traumatic shock therapy: a new kitchen gadget. I thought about the pleasure of sitting in bright sunlight. With two humans in easy call. I might have opened my collar and let the sun shine there, but I had the gash taped up and I wasn’t going to risk Pat or Jesse seeing it.

I thought about the fact that Mel, easygoing, laid-back, mind-your-own-business Mel, kept nagging me to look for a doctor who could do something about it, and found my refusal inexplicable and dumb.

Jesse and Pat came back into the ballroom and hunkered down on the floor in front of me in my window. There was a silence. I didn’t like this. I wanted to leave. I wanted to get away from the lake, from what had happened here, from being reminded of what had happened here. I’d done what they’d asked, I’d found them the house. I didn’t want to talk about this stuff any more. I wanted to go back to the car and make sure it was going to start, and get us out of here before sundown. I wanted to sit in the sun somewhere other than beside the lake.

“So, last night,” said Jesse. “What happened?”

“I don’t—” I said. Pat looked at me and I smiled faintly. “I wasn’t going to say I don’t remember. I was going to say I don’t know. It was—it was like instinctive, except who has that kind of instinct? If it was an instinct, it was a really stupid instinct.”

“Except that it worked,” Pat said dryly. “So, you didn’t think, ah ha, there’s a sucker a couple of streets over, I think I’ll go stake the bastard? Never mind that I don’t know how I know it’s there or that I’m going to stake it with a goddam table knife?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t think at all. I didn’t think from the time I—I stood up from where I was sitting at the counter to when—when Jesse had hold of me and was yelling that it was all over.”

“So why did you stand up—and pick up a table knife—and take off at a speed that wouldn’t have shamed an Olympic sprinter?”

“Um,” I said. “Well, I heard him. Um. And I didn’t like having him…on my ground. I was, um, angry. I guess.”

“Heard him. Heard him what? Nobody else heard anything.”

“Heard him, um, giggle.”

Silence.

“Was this by any chance a sucker from two months ago?” Pat said gently. “From what happened here?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell us any more?”