“Where are we going?” Max and Oz both asked as I fired up the engine.
“Strap in, everyone. Put your seat belts on,” I said by way of an answer.
I didn’t have the heart to tell them that I was clueless and frightened.
I didn’t have a plan.
51
OVER THE COURSE of the next three hundred miles or so, we drove through majestic plains and foothills, passing Pikes Peak and other scenic wonders that I would have marveled at any other time.
Once in a while one of the kids would wake up and I would stop for snacks and gas, but mostly they were good and stayed hidden in the car. All potty activity took place behind roadside bushes because that was the way it had to be. We weren’t on vacation.
It was déjà vu all over again. We were on the run once more, and I wasn’t the only one having sickening feelings as I recalled past events.
“It’s just like old times, huh?” Max said, but her face showed sadness and irony rather than any hint of humor. “I feel just like I did when Matthew and I escaped from that rotten, stinking, obscene School last year. Only back then we’d never seen the real world. Now we know.”
“I’d rather be on the run than with my bio mom,” said Ozymandias. “She called me Harold. Didn’t have a clue about avian life.”
“You got that right!” said Matthew. “Harold.”
I’d been driving for about six hours when we passed an old volcanic cone near Walsenburg, east of the highway that was part of the old Santa Fe Trail. I was burning out from a high-test blend of fatigue and fear when we finally crossed Raton Pass and the state line at noon.
That’s when I spotted a sign for a place called the Pines Bungalow Motel.
I pulled off the highway onto a smaller road just outside the town of Raton, New Mexico, and checked in. I paid cash for one night in a bungalow, way off the road.
Then I backed the car right up to the door of number eight. I went inside and checked it out before I allowed the kids out of the Suburban.
It was a dank and cheesy place with no amenities, apart from a thirteen-inch RCA, circa the mid-seventies. The carpet was dark gray, no doubt chosen for its dirt-hiding ability. The two double beds were lumpy with blankets and covers that would never get the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval—or mine, either. The place was perfect for one of those Hollywood creepy-crawler movies.
The kids were hungry, and I told them I’d go shopping. But first I wanted them to call their parents on the cell phone.
“The less said, the better,” I warned them. “I’m worried about their safety, too. We have to keep it short and sweet. And please, be nice. They’re scared, too.”
We rehearsed our lines and put a thirty-second limit on the calls. One by one, they told their folks they were on a “fly-away,” that they were in no danger and would be home soon. When the kids were finished, I called Doc Monghill and told his answering machine—without explanation—that I needed him to watch over the Inn-Patient for a day or two, or maybe even three. Or possibly for the rest of my life.
Suddenly, I was more exhausted than I’d ever been. I was at the end of my own resources. I needed help myself.
My heart was pounding as I cleared switchboard security and also an executive assistant.
Then I heard a male voice say, “Agent Brennan.”
“Kit,” I said, “I’m in the middle of nowhere. Literally. I’m scared out of my mind. And I’ve got the kids, all six of them. I swear to God, someone’s trying to kill us. I might be understating this situation a little.”
52
THAT NIGHT the kids and I sat around a cramped, fourteen-by-sixteen-foot motel room and told one another ghost stories. Real ones! A baseball game was on TV but nobody watched it. Mets and Rockies.
For the most part, the tales were about what the kids called their “months in captivity without torture,” “our bio-parent period,” “the abyss,” “nightmare in the suburbs,” “I know why the caged bird sings, too.” Basically, they sounded like most other kids growing up and being forced to obey rules for the first time. They hated it and wanted to rebel; they wanted to do what they wanted to do, when they wanted to do it.
Of course, it was more complicated than that if you happened to be—gasp!—different from other kids.
“We had to go into therapy,” Matthew confessed. “Can you imagine therapy in Pine Bush, Colorado, with some Dr. Phil-like guru who thought he knew what it had been like at the School for Max and me? Because he’d been tossed out of two schools himself as a kid.”
“Tell us about the cereal commercials.” Oz looked over at the twins, who were cuddled in my lap, and thought they were safe because they were little.
“No way.” Peter sat up straight and folded his arms across his chest. “Up yours, Ozymandias. I mean, Harold.”
“‘We love to fly,’” said Wendy, “‘and we also love to start our day with a balanced breakfast of Wingdingers.’ That’s how the cereal commercial went.”
“That’s wrong,” Peter interrupted. “‘We love to start our day with a balanced breakfast, including Wingdingers.’”
“We’re in test,” Wendy said proudly. “Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Columbus, Ohio.”
“Oohh,” said Matthew. “I’m impressed. Or is it ‘depressed’?”
“C’mon, give me a break.” I finally edged in as referee. “Anybody want to talk about the here and now? What we do next? Or should we start to career in TV and cinema. Like Ic’s appearance in Touched by an Angel?”
“Don’t anybody go there,” Ic warned, and put up his fists as if to box somebody’s ears, even mine. “Yeah, what are we going to do next? And who are the hunters?”
Suddenly everybody was looking at Max.
She threw up her hands. “Not me, guys. I don’t know who they are or what they want. I’m in the scary dark just like everyone else. Pinky swear.”
As I looked around the motel room at the others, I could tell that none of them really believed her, but they were afraid to challenge Max’s leadership. Nobody took up the pinky-swear invitation.
“Hey,” said Max, grinning, “How ’bout those Mets.”
Nobody laughed.
53
The Hospital
Ethan Kane stood tall and very imperial looking over a patient named Andrew Mellon McKay in the operating room. His mind was running fast on two tracks. On one, he prepared to do a miraculous arthoplasty for a $200,000 fee, and on the other track, he considered the disaster that had happened out in Colorado.
Max and the other bird-brats had disappeared off the radar screen. So had Dr. Frannie O’Neill. And darling Max knew too much for her own, or anybody else’s, good.
“We’re just about ready, Dr. Kane,” said one of the OR nurses.
“I’m aware of that,” Kane snapped.
She inserted a Foley catheter into the patient’s urethra to monitor hydration and kidney function. Dr. Kane sighed and began.
He examined the draped knee joint on the operating table before he made an incision across the patella with his scalpel. He pulled back the skin and began separating the muscles and ligaments to expose the knee capsule, the tough gristle surrounding the joint.
He could see immediately that the patella, or kneecap, had deteriorated beyond reasonable repair and that it would be both quicker and better to remove it entirely. He had suspected as much.
Dr. Kane selected a tool with a fine saw. With a soft rasping sound, he sawed off the end of the patient’s right femur and tibia, dropping the fragments and scrapings and the entire patella into a basin.
Then he chose a particularly fine-tooled drill, essentially a milling machine. It was three inches long and made of space-age metals and plastics. The holes it made were accurate to within a millimeter, perfectly calibrated to the dimensions of the pin ends of the artificial knee.
This perfect fit would make a difference of months in healing time. And when a patient was already eighty-three, months could m
atter.
Within seconds, the drilling was complete. He applied a medical glue to the pins before fitting them into the newly drilled holes. Satisfied with the perfect fit, Kane stepped back. Another doctor was waiting to attach the ligaments and muscles. He flexed his fingers absentmindedly, then moved to the other side of the table and the second draped knee.
“I’ve received unfortunate news,” Ethan Kane said to the team as they worked. “The experiment named Maximum is still unaccounted for, still missing. So are the others. They’re running. We don’t know where any of them are at this time.”
Kane thought about Max, her unquenchable curiosity and her fearlessness. And in that moment, he fumbled.
The scalpel spun at the ends of his fingers. The instrument dropped and clattered to the floor.
He stared at the knife lying on the brown-speckled linoleum floor, and his scalp prickled.
What the hell is going on?
This is unheard-of.
Ethan Kane doesn’t make mistakes.
54
MAX’S HEART skipped a beat as she watched through a narrow gap in the nearly closed, grayish blue curtains of the motel window. What is this?
A dusty black Jeep had backed into the parking slot in front of the cabin next to theirs. Who was here at bungalow eight? Then Kit got out.
“Oh God, hooray, hooray,” Max whispered to herself. “Now things get really interesting.”
She watched Kit stretch his long limbs, then shake himself like a big dog. He was dressed all in blue: blue denim shirt, blue jeans, and a navy blue blazer that set off the shining gold of his hair. Max’s heart lifted, and a sudden smile eclipsed her terrible, horsespit mood.
“Frannie, he’s here,” Max said in a whispery voice. “It’s Kit. The cavalry has arrived.”
Frannie’s expression changed in a second from bone-tired and sad to bright and hopeful.
Max felt another surge of happiness—and it was for Frannie. Kit was here! And the question in her mind was, why had they been apart? How could two smart people be so dumb? They belonged together. Anybody could see that, and feel it, too. Except, obviously, Kit and Frannie themselves.
Frannie pulled open the bungalow door and walked hurriedly to Kit’s car. She was so cute sometimes. They reached out for each other, hesitant at first, then they hugged hard and swayed together.
Without completely knowing why, Max’s eyes brimmed with tears. She got it then. She loved the way they were with each other. She just loved it!
The two grown-ups, “mom and dad,” finally let go of each other and started toward bungalow eight. Kit was smiling.
Frannie entered first. “Kids,” she said. “Look who’s here. Rumpelstiltskin!”
There was an explosion of excited laughter and yelling as the children flocked to hug Kit. He didn’t have enough arms to hold them. Max watched Kit greet each child in turn from where she stood off to one side of the room.
Then he sought her out.
“Hey, Maxie,” he said, walking over to her. “How’s my best girl in the world? Still playing hard to get, I see.”
“Why not? It always works,” said Max.
Kit was the only person who called her Maxie, and Max just loved that. He held out his arms to her and she wrapped herself around his waist and just held on. She was home. This was home—the eight of them together.
“I missed you, Kit,” she whispered. “Corny but true.” For the briefest moment, she had the feeling that everything just might turn out right.
But in her heart, Max didn’t really believe in happy endings.
She knew too much about the way the big bad world really worked. She knew more than Kit and Frannie.
Max knew that she and the other kids would never be allowed to live. Sad but true.
It just wasn’t in the cards.
A tragedy, that.
55
THIS WAS unexpectedly sweet. I was in Kit’s arms again, both of us fully dressed, decent—maybe a little too decent—but definitely cozy.
We had kissed a couple of times and hugged, but too much water had flowed under the bridge since we’d last been together. Passionate embraces would have felt weird and inappropriate.
Or so I told myself.
Right now I had some control. Not much, I’ll admit, but some. It’s a scientific fact that when a woman makes love to a man, a hormone called oxytocin is released in her brain that makes her bond to the guy like Krazy Glue. Accent on crazy. If that wasn’t enough, I still remembered how good it was to be with Kit. To quote from an old song, “Nobody does it better . . . Baby, you’re the best.” Nope, if Kit and I made love, I’d be handing him the keys to my heart, and I wasn’t about to surrender mine in this creepy bungalow motel.
Not here, not now, not yet.
Nuh-uh. Not me.
Not that he’d asked.
It was such a good thing to be held again, after going so long without. Kit and I didn’t talk at first, just breathed together quietly. Then out of pure nervousness, I suppose, I started to jabber about the situation at hand.
“I’ve got a lot to tell you,” I said.
“I’m here. I’ve got all night, Frances Jane,” he said. He always called me that when he was trying to calm me down. It was a little patronizing, but so what?
I told Kit how the kids had scared me silly by dropping out of the trees when I went for a walk in the woods. Then I told him why the kids had flown the coop. How I’d outsmarted killers by setting fire to the only thing I owned in the world, my house. Kit looked at me fondly, a smile twitching at his lips as I described our steeplechase down the ravine, and when I caught him up on the four-hundred-mile dash to the Pines Bungalow Motel, he laughed out loud.
“Jeez,” he said with a wide grin. “You’re actually better than Scully.”
“I am, aren’t I?”
I loved it when Kit smiled like that. Hard not to! I grinned back at him and maybe I touched his long blond hair for a minute. I love his hair. Don’t lose control, Frannie. Just keep playing Scully.
“The kids are maturing,” he said. “Oz is a man and a half. He show you his tattoos?”
I nodded. “Living out in the world has been good for them. Ic knows three languages already, and he’s making up a new one. Oz is our resident ornithologist. I think that his reading up on every kind of bird in the world is his version of Roots.”
“And Max? What’s her story?”
“Um, she’s still in charge, the mother surrogate. Maybe she’ll be a teacher someday. A professor.”
Kit was smiling at me again. “What I meant to say was, did Max tell you what’s going on? I assume that she knows. Max always seems to know more than she lets on.”
I shook my head no. “Max isn’t talking. So, now what?”
Kit’s face took on a serious mien. “First things first,” he said. “I think we need to set some priorities.”
“Like what?”
“Like we order out for three or four pizzas with all the fixin’s.”
I nodded. “And then?”
“And then I’ll have a private talk with Max.”
56
THAT’S EXACTLY what they did.
Veggie pizzas—then a heart-to-heart.
Max sat next to Kit on a low branch of a big old spruce tree in the nearby woods. The waistband of her jeans was pleasantly tight from the food she’d just packed away. She was treasuring the one-on-one with Kit.
She told him about living in Pine Bush—or “Bush League,” as Oz and Matthew called it—and about how hard it was getting along with the “regular folks.” She knew more than fifty names the kids had made up and used behind her back. Max said she’d also been hurt by the lies told in several news stories. “I just wanted to fit in, y’know,” she said. “Is that too much to ask?” Kit seemed to understand. He almost always did.
“You’ve got a lot to deal with, kiddo,” Kit said. “You’re doing great. I’m really proud of you. So is Frannie.”
&n
bsp; Max nodded. But she hadn’t told Kit half of what was on her mind. She hadn’t told him that she was on 24/7 red alert, listening and watching for anything out of place, or that she was certain she and the other kids were going to be abducted, maybe killed, and probably sooner rather than later.
Max had visualized their current location topographically. A quick flyover had given her a sense of the scale of the hillside and the height of the trees, as well as the wind speed and temperature in the forest microclimate. Actually, the area reminded her of the mountains around the Lake House. She and Kit had talked about that, too. Until Max finally said, “Enough nostalgia, Kit. It’s dumb.”
Now, Max’s ears registered a tightly woven symphony of traffic and forest sounds, and she could even hear Frannie running the shower in the bungalow.
She could count the whiskers sprouting in Kit’s shaved face if she wanted to. No bug on a branch, no puff of pollen could escape her notice.
But Kit was there, and it made her feel a little more secure. Being with Kit was as close to feeling taken care of as Max had ever felt.
Dad. Dear old Dad. Except Kit isn’t so old. He sure doesn’t act old. He and Frannie are just about the coolest adults ever.
Max sighed and looked out on the totally gorgeous evening. The sun had just dropped below the horizon, and the sky was red where it met the earth, fading upward to a greenish gold band, then a luminous cobalt blue ceiling sprinkled with stars.
The other kids were playing, laughing and shouting in the woods behind the bungalow, and it was almost possible to believe the lie they’d all told their parents today.
It’s just a fly-away, a harmless little runaway from home. No harm done. We’ll be home soon. La-di-da, la-di-da.
“Maxie,” Kit said, “we’ve got a real tough situation here. I think you know that.” Kit’s expression had gone grave, and Max felt a pang. “We’re going to have to leave this motel soon. Then what?”
“You’ll think of something,” Max said. “You always do. Am I right?”