Twenty-Six

When I went back into the main attic room and lay down on my mattress, my defiance began to fade. Fitch’s tests had left me with a headache and the awfulness of knowing the truth about Matt: that what I’d felt between us had been nothing but a lie. Those two things made me feel so devastated, I nearly stopped believing in myself, in my ability to escape.

Hayley tended to me while Abigail sat across the room, watching. There was a microwave and a cupboard full of canned food; Hayley zapped some instant ramen. I didn’t feel hungry, but she pushed the mug into my hands.

“You need to keep up your strength,” she said. “Don’t let him win.”

“Hayley, look at us,” I said. “He’s already winning.”

“This doesn’t sound like you,” she said. “You’re an upbeat, we-can-do-this, we’re-outta-here person.”

“That’s nice, but you hardly know me,” I said.

“Sometimes you just know—you know the most important things about a person right away.”

Her words should have made me feel good, but they were a kick in the stomach. I had thought I’d known Matt. I stared at the rope bracelet on my wrist. If I’d had a knife at that moment, I would have cut it off.

“Are you hearing me?” Hayley asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“So come on, Oli. Pull it together. Eat that soup.”

I obliged her.

Even though it was just instant, made from powdered chicken broth, I had to admit it tasted delicious. I felt the warmth when I swallowed, and it went all through my body. I ate the whole mugful quickly. It helped me think. To make sure my brain was okay, uninjured by his stupid machine, I kept challenging myself. I tried to mentally run through my life list—all the birds I had seen over my lifetime so far. Starting with the most common—our Connecticut state bird, the American robin—all the way through my most recent, the merlin at Ocean House.

After listing about fifty more, I felt my feistiness returning. I stood up, did a couple of squats, and punched the air.

“She’s back!” Hayley said, and that made me laugh. I glanced at Abigail. She was lying down again, reading a book. She seemed not to be listening to us.

“I’ve been thinking about Fitch watching us,” I whispered to Hayley. “Whether there’s another person spying or not, we need to find the cameras.”

“I think you were right. There are two, in the taxidermy birds. The snowy owl and the kestrel.”

I looked at the stuffed raptors again. I couldn’t see any wires or other evidence of equipment.

“How can we be sure?” I asked.

“One time after Iris and I first got here, he took those two birds down, and I heard Abigail ask him why. He said they ‘weren’t working.’?” Hayley glanced at Abigail again to make sure she still wasn’t paying attention to us.

“I’m pretty sure he wasn’t referring to dead birds not working,” I said.

“Exactly. I didn’t realize it at the time, but guess he thought the cameras were broken. It turned out we’d had a power outage—just for a few minutes, but enough to interrupt the signal and send them offline,” Hayley said.

“That’s what we have to do,” I said. “To get ahead of him. Break the cameras for real.”

“Then what?” Hayley asked.

“He’ll come to investigate, and because the cameras are broken, he won’t see us hiding by the door. We can grab him, knock him down, tie him up,” I said. “Whatever it takes to get away, we’ll do it. Then we call the police, get Detective Tyrone to come and arrest him.”

“Detective Tyrone?”

“Yes, she’s in charge of my sister’s case. I wanted to call her as soon as I found Iris in the woods, but Iris wouldn’t let me,” I said.

Hayley nodded. “The boy—Fitch, I still can’t get used to knowing his name—threatened us, right from the minute he took us,” Hayley said. “Told us that if one of us ever got away and told the police, he’d kill the other.”

“Iris took it to heart,” I said. “No matter how much Matt or I begged her?.?.?.”

“Matt?” Hayley asked. “You mean, Fitch’s friend?”

“Yes,” I said, flinching. “I thought he was my friend, too. But never mind, that’s over. How do we disable the cameras?”

“We can’t reach the birds,” Hayley said.

It was true. The attic walls were at least twelve feet high. And we didn’t even know for sure in which birds the cameras were hidden. I glanced at Abigail. She seemed to be asleep again, but was she? Or was she really eavesdropping? Would she tell Fitch what we were planning?

Hayley and I had been standing with our heads close together. If Fitch was watching, he might know we were conspiring, so we stepped apart and went to different parts of the room. I walked around the perimeter of the attic. I studied every inch of the walls again and saw how the old wood was splintered in places, how some of the rusty nails protruded.

My grandmother used to say that if we stepped on a rusty nail, we could get lockjaw. That made me oddly paranoid—seriously, how many nails, rusty or not, are lying around on the ground? But for a long time, I never walked barefoot without looking down at my feet. As I circled the attic, I have to admit, I was a little groggy from the tests, but I imagined Fitch slamming into one of these nails and getting lockjaw.

And that’s not me—I never wish bad things on anyone. It bothered me that I was having such a terrible fantasy, but I told myself, and I knew it was true, that I had to somehow disable Fitch in order for us to escape. I had vowed to Iris that we would free Hayley.

Thinking of Iris made my stomach flip—where was she? Had Fitch finally succeeded in destroying her? This was a monster who buried girls in the dirt. I wasn’t going to let that happen again.

But lockjaw—what was it, anyway? It might keep someone from being able to talk, but it wouldn’t exactly take them down enough to keep them from hurting us. So I kept moving, because I wanted to find a weapon to use.

I had to thank my grandmother for giving me the idea that danger could hide in ordinary objects, like a nail hidden in the grass. On my second route around the room, I paused in front of the sibyls. The sisters were lovely—beautiful in their own distinct ways, but with the same sisterly similarity I saw between Iris and Hayley, between me and Eloise.

I studied Athena, Daphne, and Circe. Having met Daphne downstairs, it was easy to tell who she was. In the painting, her hair was dark and neatly curled, instead of flowing long and white the way it was now. I gazed at her peaceful face, her kind eyes, and wished she could tell me what to do, what she knew that might protect us.

And in a way, Daphne did help. Because my gaze went from her face to the window beside her panel, and in the particular way the yellow streetlight was shining through, I saw a small crack. It was in the middle of the glass, shaped like a starburst. I wanted to go closer and examine it, but I was afraid Fitch might be watching.

“What is it?” Hayley asked, picking up on my excitement, walking over to me.

“Don’t look now,” I said. “But I think there’s a tiny crack in the window.”

“I’m listening,” she said.

“Abigail said it’s supposed to be hurricane glass, but if there really is a flaw, the window can be broken,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “But even if we broke it, what would we do? Jump? It’s how many stories down to the ground?”

“Four,” I said.

“So it wouldn’t really help us,” Hayley said.

“It might,” I said. “We could at least signal to someone outside.”

“Right,” Hayley said. “We could wave a sheet until someone on the street noticed.”

I closed my eyes, pretended I was outside. How many times had I passed the Miramar in my life? I could see the sprawling Victorian mansion rising tall on the edge of the harbor. I pictured the old yellow hotel, shabby after being in the salt air and wind for a century and a half, with the white-curlicued gingerbread trim broken off in places, some black shutters hanging by one hinge. And zigzagging its way up the side was that creaky, rusty-looking stairway to the top.

“There’s a fire escape!” I said.

“Seriously?” Hayley asked. She didn’t live around here, so of course the hotel wasn’t emblazoned in her mind the way it was in mine. The Miramar was a shoreline landmark.

She lurched forward, starting toward the window, but I grabbed her arm. “Remember—he’s watching,” I said, nodding toward the stuffed raptors.

“Right,” she said. “So what do we do?”

“Didn’t you say the feed cut out at one point?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “When the electricity went out.”

I nodded, scanning the walls around the stuffed birds. Power had to come from somewhere, either a battery pack or a regular old plug in an outlet. Growing up around boats meant that I had stuck by my father’s side when he had to fix the various systems on all the vessels: the diesel engines, the steering cables, the water tanks, and the electrical panels.

I tried not to be too obvious, staring up at the snowy owl and kestrel, but I quickly saw what I’d been searching for. Cords were hidden in the birds’ feathers, and discreetly plugged into outlets in the rustic ceiling, painted the same color as the splintery brown wood.

“Okay. You know where the cameras are, right? Don’t look now. But all we have to do is unplug them,” I said, and of course Hayley looked. Human nature. I almost had to laugh because I was practically giddy with hope and with the knowledge that we had a way out of the attic.

“How do we do it?” Hayley asked.

“That’s what we have to figure out,” I said. I smiled, as if I thought the solution was right there in my grasp.

But the truth was, I had no idea.