Chapter Thirty-Nine

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

For a second, the darkness was total, sucking us all down. Then a red light came on. Beatrice had pressed a button next to one of the tanks.

She and Gracie worked quickly. I didn’t watch; I focused on the door I was holding, even though there was nothing to see. The back of my neck was still cold. I strained my ears, listening.

Minutes ticked by. The sisters bickered under their breaths, trying to remember the correct sequence, hissing about canisters and fixing agents. I felt time narrow down to a fine point as I waited, knowing it was coming. And then I heard it.

There was a sound outside the classroom door, as if someone was standing there, waiting, shuffling as they lingered. I heard Gracie’s harsh intake of breath.

“If they come in here, they’ll know we’re in the darkroom,” she whispered. “When the red light goes on, a sign lights up above the door that says darkroom in use.”

In the red light, we all looked bathed in blood. Whoever was outside already knew we were in here. She seemed to always know where we were, wherever we went. But the Snell sisters didn’t know her like we did.

“There’s nothing we can do,” Eddie said, his voice flat. “Just keep working as fast as you can.”

They did, and seconds later I heard a soft creak as the classroom door drifted open, as if by a gentle hand. My palm was slick on the doorknob, and I closed my eyes, listening to her steps outside the door—the touch, maybe, of a rubber sneaker sole against the polished floor. There was the scrape of a chair, or maybe a desk, moving. I pictured her long hair, her eyes. The way she’d screamed at us in the dark that night, grabbed Eddie and tried to drag him from the car.

“What do we do?” Beatrice sounded panicked. I had never heard her sound afraid before.

Eddie’s voice was calm, and in the darkness behind my eyes, I wondered what he looked like. “Keep going,” he said. “As fast as you can.”

She was outside now, only a foot away through the door. I was cold, so cold. I thought she might try the doorknob, but she didn’t. Instead, I felt the gentle brush of something against the door, a scraping sound. One of the girls made a soft whimper in the back of her throat.

“She won’t hurt us,” Eddie said softly. And even though my pulse pounded in my throat, I didn’t think she would, either. If she wanted to, she would have done it already. Could she enter one of us and make them kill the others, like she had done so many times on Atticus Line? Perhaps she could. She could certainly force this door open, whether I held the doorknob or not. And yet she didn’t try.

The scraping continued, and then there was silence. A strange, sinister smell. Something popped, too loud. I wondered what she was doing out there.

The Snell girls were breathing hard as they worked, close to panic. “We have to dry the negatives,” Gracie whispered, her voice shaking. “There’s a—a dryer thing. There’s only four negatives. But the dryer makes noise.”

“Do it,” Eddie said.

I didn’t open my eyes. I didn’t have to. I kept my hand on the knob and listened to her outside, doing something I couldn’t figure out. There was a tinkle of glass. Then the cold started to recede. “She’s leaving,” I whispered.

There was a repressed sob, which sounded like it came from Beatrice. I admired her restraint. It was hard not to scream when Shannon Haller was only a few feet away, dead and not dead at the same time.

The dryer whirred, painfully loud. When one of the girls clicked it off, we heard another footstep in the hall and the classroom door opened. “Is anyone in here?” a voice said.

It was a man’s voice. A real, live, actual man. Even though we were about to be caught, the sound of it was comfortingly sane. Still, we all froze, and I kept my grip on the doorknob.

There was a minute’s pause, and then the man’s voice came again. “If you’re in here, say so. You won’t be in trouble. I just want you to leave.”

I opened my eyes and turned to look at the others. Beatrice was frozen in place, and Gracie had a strip of negatives in her hand. The negatives wavered in the air as her hand shook.

Eddie was standing still, his brows furrowed in confusion. The man outside must be able to see the sign lit up above the darkroom door, but he didn’t come to the darkroom. Instead, we heard him come into the classroom and straighten the chairs, grumbling under his breath. He was the janitor, doing a daily sweep of the building. He had to be.

There were more footsteps, accompanied by more grumbling. Then the classroom door closed and the janitor was gone.

“Oh my God,” Gracie breathed. “I think I’m going to pass out.”

“What do we do next with those?” Eddie motioned to the negatives. His voice was tight and calm. Iraq calm.

“There were only four exposures on the roll,” Beatrice said. “We can print them if we’re fast.”

“Do it,” Eddie said.

So the girls took paper from a stack on the shelf. Eddie moved to stand next to me at the door, so close I could feel his breath against my neck as liquids sloshed. It seemed like a long time before Beatrice said, “Okay, we’re done.”

She clicked the red light off, and I opened the darkroom door so we could all exit. I didn’t want to look at the photographs in there; I didn’t want to be in there for even one more second. I felt like I was suffocating.

“We need to get out of here,” Eddie said in his perfectly calm voice. “The janitor is still in the building somewhere, and he’ll probably be back.”

He moved to the door, but Gracie said, “The light.”

I turned to see her staring at the light above the darkroom door, the one that said darkroom in use. It looked slightly crooked.

“Bea, turn on the light,” Gracie said. Her sister walked back into the darkroom, and we heard the click of the switch. Nothing happened. The light didn’t come on.

I walked to the darkroom door, reached up, and touched the light. It tilted against my fingertip, and then it fell to the floor. The glass from the broken bulb scattered at our feet. Behind the disconnected light, the wall was burned and black, the outlet incinerated. There was a plastic-smoke smell in the air.

“Shannon,” I said. That’s what she had been doing outside the door. Of course she hadn’t tried the doorknob—she didn’t want to interrupt us. She didn’t want the janitor to interrupt us, either. Whatever was in those photos, she wanted them developed. She wanted us to see.

Beatrice made a strangled noise and grabbed her big sister’s hand. She had always been so bold and confident, but right now she looked young. She looked like a scared sixteen-year-old who had just seen something she didn’t understand. She stared up at the scorch marks on the wall, her eyes wet with unshed tears.

I took her other hand. It was cold, not with the presence of Shannon Haller, but with fear. I squeezed it, telling her I understood.

The four of us left the room in silence.