Page 68 of Cut Off from Sky and Earth
The attic smells like cedar and must. The rafters are exposed, and some of the floorboards are as well. Wood paneling covers the walls, and old furniture, boxes, trunks, and bins are scattered apparently haphazardly throughout the space. There’s a wooden framed standing mirror propped in one corner and an old vanity. And there’s one round window, the kind you might see in a beach house. It seems out of place in a farmhouse in the North Carolina mountains. But I imagine with the peaked roof, it was the best shape the builder could come up with.
“If I have a signal, it’ll be over here.” She rushes to the portal window, and I follow.
The tang of sweat and fear rises from her skin, and I’m sure my own perspiration-slicked body is giving off a similarly metallic scent. I peer over her shoulder, squinting at the gray light streaming in through the window while she bends her head over the flip phone.
“No bars.” She raises her head and squares her shoulders. “You’re taller. Open the window for me.” She points, and I see a crank mechanism. I flip up the lock and turn the crank. The window opens to the side and cold rain trickles into the attic.
Alex stretches her arm out and holds the phone outside, pointing it toward the sky. She tilts the screen back toward the room so that we can see. We both let out a hoot of triumph. There’s a bar. Only one, but it’s there.
“You can call emergency services even if the tower is out, right?”
“As long as we have a signal, yes.”
She pulls her arm back in and hits the button for nine. The signal is so weak that I’m not sure it’ll go through. I close my eyes and pray.
A tremendous crash of glass echoes through the downstairs and the slam of the door shakes the house. I open my eyes and meet hers, my heart thumping. He’s come for us.
“Hurry up. Call,” I urge.
Alex’s finger shakes as she hits the one, then she clicks her tongue. “Lost the signal.”
She rises on her toes and holds the phone out through the open window to try again.
“Lexi, Emily, come out and play,” a male voice calls from below.
Alex starts, and the phone falls from her hand onto the pitched roof.
“No!” Her scream is anguished.
Nausea rises in my throat. My pulse races.
“You want to play hide-and-seek? Ready or not, here I come,” the man bellows.
Alex is leaning out the window, her feet dangling off the floor as she scrabbles for the phone.
“I know that voice,” I murmur to myself.
Alex cranes her head over her shoulder, still half-out the window. “Tristan?”
I shake my head. “No, but I know it. I know I know it. Does it sound familiar to you? Could it be Tate?”
“I don’t think so. But I don’t know. It’s been so long.”
“Whoever he is, he knows us.”
She drops her feet back to the floor and lets her head fall back against the wall, staring wide-eyed at the beams above. “I can’t reach the phone. It’s over.”
Her stricken expression chills me. My throat closes. This is it. I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop for seven years. And now it has. I slide down the wall and let the kitchen knife slip from my hand. Then I wrap my arms around my shins and rest my forehead on my knees. There’s no hope left.
A scene plays out in my mind. It’s my scene, the one I’ve had planned for my book. The scene where Maleen and Ruth come into their power. Now expanded, fleshed out by my visceral understanding of what the two women felt.
Maleen rent her hair in despair. “It’s over, Ruth. The food is gone. We have enough water for one more day. We’ve been forgotten, left to die in the windowless tower.”
Ruth raised her head, a defiant gleam in her eye. “You may be content to curl up and die here, but I’m not. I may die, but I’ll die trying.”
Maleen’s laughter was harsh. “Trying to do what?” She gestured around their prison. “How do you intend to escape this tomb?”
Ruth’s determination faltered under the weight of Maleen’s statement. And this—more than the lack of food, more than the knowledge that their deaths by starvation would be slow and painful, more than the pain of abandonment—terrified Maleen. Ruth had always, always, been the strong one. The capable one.
