“Yes,” CheshireCat says. “Especially with Annette’s help.”
I take a deep breath. Any temptation I might have to procrastinate on this is scattered by another gust of wind. “Right. I guess I’m doing this.” I go up the porch steps and ring the doorbell.
There are footsteps, and then the door swings open.
It takes me a minute to recognize the older woman who’s standing there, staring at me, but then I place her. I’ve seen her picture. This is Nell’s mother.
“Hi,” I say. “I was instructed to come here. So, I’m here.”
In the entry hallway, Nell’s mother takes my coat and searches it. In addition to my regular phone, my flip phone is still in the pocket; she shuts both phones off and sets them on the table. Then she pats me down, looking for weapons or yet another cell phone or who knows what. In retrospect, I should have filled my pockets with random bits and pieces of electronics, just to distract my captors.
Once she’s convinced she has anything that could be used to track my location or eavesdrop, she hangs everything neatly on hooks in the entrance hallway. She takes my boots and my socks and puts them in a closet, which she locks. Then she escorts me to the kitchen and points me to a four-legged stool in the corner. I take a seat. She holds up her phone and takes a picture of me, then puts the phone on the table and sits down with an embroidery hoop.
It’s a large kitchen, with lots of counters and enough space for a table. There’s a door to the backyard next to me; I can see someone’s garage light through the tiny window at the top, and I can see that the door is not just locked but padlocked. If I try to get out that way, I’ll be wasting my time.
There’s a digital clock on the counter. It has a speaker and looks like it probably also plays music. I don’t have much to do other than watch it, or watch Nell’s mom, who is sitting at the kitchen table, doing a counted cross-stitch that’s either two angels, or two gingerbread people; it’s kind of hard to see for sure from where I’m sitting, and I don’t really want to open up the conversation by asking.
I should have asked Boom Storm what, exactly, he was going to tell these people about me. I don’t know whether they know I’m a hostage, or what. They have been neither particularly welcoming—they didn’t offer me tea or anything hospitable like that—nor are they exactly treating me like a threat.
I wish I could get a reassuring update on how my mother’s work is going. My heart is beating faster, and to calm myself down, I picture her doing what I know she’s doing: sitting at the kitchen table with her laptop, drinking coffee and scrolling through the code looking for the part she needs to fix. I’ve seen her doing this a thousand times. It’s easy to picture.
Another woman comes into the kitchen. “Ellen,” she says. “We’ve gotten an update.” They lower their voices and have a conversation I can’t hear, but involves them glancing at me furtively several times. The other woman gives Nell’s mom a zippered cloth bag, like the sort of bag you keep pencils and pens in, except it goes clunk in an oddly heavy way. The other woman goes out again.
I glance at the clock. It’s a little before midnight.
Nell’s mom—Ellen—has picked up her cross-stitch again, but then she puts it down and looks at me. “I know you,” she says. “You’re friends with my daughter.” When I don’t answer, she clarifies, “Nell.”
“Oh, yeah,” I say. I look at her face, searching for … I’m not sure what. Concern? Worry? Exasperation or frustration or any of the things I’ve seen in my mom’s face?
I wish again I could get an update on my mother.
“Has she been to church?” Ellen asks.
I think the answer is no. “I don’t know.”
“Has she been fasting? Praying for forgiveness, for the Heavenly Lord to remake her into something clean and new? She has a rebellious spirit.”
I swallow hard. “I think she’s fine the way she is.”
“I guess you would.” She leans across the table. “You want to take a message back to her? Tell her that I know about the visit to the lawyer. She’s damned to hell, cursed, as a blasphemer against the Lord for turning her back on her godly mother and embracing a group of Sodomites.”
“The Sodomites were literally destroyed because of inhospitality, so I’d say the household that took in an abandoned teenager is probably doing okay.” I make a mental note to thank Hermione, the source of basically everything I know about the Bible.
Ellen leaps up, crosses the floor, and slaps me across the face. I’m not expecting this. No adult has ever hit me, not that I remember, anyway. I’ve been hit by other kids, but this strike comes with an adult’s furious strength and knocks me right off the stool.
“Get up,” she says, and when I don’t, she grabs me by my hair and shoves me back onto the stool. “Keep the words of the Lord out of your filthy mouth,” she says.
I wonder how many times she’s hit Nell. Or if Nell, raised by this horrible person, is pretty adept at saying whatever keeps her out of trouble.
My head hurts, and after a moment when everything went numb, my face hurts a lot. I press my hand to my cheek and don’t say anything. Ellen opens up a kitchen drawer and pulls out a roll of duct tape. She pulls my hands behind me and duct tapes them together. I don’t think this was part of her plan, because if they’d planned to duct-tape me, they’d have picked a chair to tape
