She’d forgotten she was Emily. Forgotten she had roommate problems.
Alice dredged up a smile and extended her hand to shake his and he seemed slightly surprised, and maybe amused, but he shook it, and his hand was firm and dry and warm, and Alice wanted to keep hanging on, but she let go and turned and there were the elevators and she walked toward them and her legs worked and everything.
She pressed Up. The elevator door opened immediately. She stepped in. Turned around.
Paul was watching her. He looked uncertain, and she thought, What if he thinks he’s done something crazy? What if he says to himself—Is this safe? Is Ginger going to be okay?
So she smiled and waved and hit Six and the doors closed and Paul was gone.
The elevator felt like a cell.
The same space and comfort she would have if the police found her.
The doors opened.
Alice stepped out on Six, and a redhead down the hall was waving cheerfully. “Hi, Emily! I’m Ginger.” Ginger was pretty, in a plump settled way, as if Ginger had finished growing up and was ready for marriage and children and a career. Alice felt twelve to Ginger’s thirty.
“I haven’t seen you around,” said Ginger, smiling.
“I’m a freshman,” said Alice. “I haven’t been very active on the campus.”
Ginger nodded sympathetically and drew Alice into her room. “I have extra sheets if you want fresh ones.”
“Thank you,” said Alice, “but it’s fine, I’ll be fine, this is really nice of you.”
“I won’t tell Barb, and she sure won’t notice. I’m off, I have a date, I’ll be in late. Just leave the bathroom light on.”
“Thank you,” said Alice, and she wanted to fling her arms around Ginger and tell her They all believe I murdered my father, but she didn’t, and Ginger said, “I’ll try not to wake you when I get in.”
And Alice was alone in somebody else’s dormitory.
She stood in Ginger’s shower for a long time, hoping hot water would take away pain, but it didn’t. She folded her jeans and T-shirt, washed out her underwear in the spray, and scrubbed the peasant dress, yucky from the bed of the truck. She draped the wet clothing on coat hangers to dry in the night. Naked, she slid into the roomie’s bed, put her head on the pillow and in spite of her plan to lie there and think things through, and come to a reasoned, logical decision about tomorrow’s actions, she was asleep immediately.
When Alice woke up, it was four in the morning. She knew because Ginger had a digital clock whose square numbers gleamed in the dark. Alice could hear breathing, presumably Ginger’s.
Alice could not cry because it might wake Ginger up.
She must read the printout. But she was not at home, she couldn’t read under the covers; the printout would have to wait till morning.
Wait.
Maybe the disk was not the important thing.
Dad had told her to bring the Corvette.
Maybe the car itself was the important thing!
The Corvette. Was there money stashed in some hidden compartment? Some vital paper slid under a floor mat?
Alice’s mind raced from thought to thought but refused to complete any real function. She couldn’t get anywhere except closer to tears. She wanted to collapse, but she was in a bed; she was already collapsed.
Alice thought she’d been awake all night, but when the alarm went off in the morning, it tore through her sleep like lawn mower blades.
Ginger had the volume up high. Rock music slammed into every inch of the small room, hard and fierce, bouncing off walls and bookshelves.
Alice hung onto the sides of the bed. She had been in the middle of a dream in which she watched two men kill her father and did nothing to stop them.
“And it’s exactly seven A.M. on a beautiful Thursday morning,” said the announcer, in a rolling, delighted voice, “and all you people who have postponed getting up since six-thirty, you guys need to throw those cozy covers off, grab the bathroom first, and wake up in the shower.”
Ginger obeyed. She threw her covers off. Her comforter and pillow hit the floor and she stumbled to the bathroom and slammed the door, and Alice wanted to turn the radio down, but moochers (and liars) probably did not have the right to adjust volume.
“Police are still searching for the girl whose father was found brutally murdered in his condominium yesterday. Marc Robie, age thirty-nine, was beaten to death. After sending her own mother an E-mail confession, his daughter Alice Robie, fifteen, fled the murder scene in her father’s red Corvette. The car was found at Westtown Mall. Several witnesses describe a slender girl with brown eyes and shoulder-length brown hair, wearing a long, flowered peasant dress and white sandals.”
That dress was hanging in this room. It was possible, Alice supposed, that Ginger had not seen it. After all, Ginger had come home last night in the dark and, this morning, raced into the bathroom too fast to examine laundry.
Ginger could not have missed a word of that radio announcement. Alice did not hear the water come on in the shower. Ginger was probably barricading herself into the bathroom.
But for some people, radios were just company, and those people did not really ever hear anything. Perhaps Ginger was studying her complexion in the mirror and thinking about her date last night.
I can’t hang around to find out, thought Alice.
She, too, flung off the covers, slipped into her underwear—crunchy the way clothes dried on a line always were—yanked on her jeans and T-shirt, crammed the peasant dress into the backpack, pulled on her sneakers, tied them frantically, slipped out the door, and ran down the hall.
What would Ginger think? If she hadn’t known already, she would know now. She would tell Paul. She would say, Thanks a lot, Paul; you put a murderer in the same room with me.
There was somebody standing in front of the elevator, and Alice could not have a conversation, so she took the stairs, flying down six flights.
In a few minutes, when she figured it was safe to emerge from the bathroom, Ginger would call the campus police.
Alice hit the outdoors running, and to her absolute amazement, there were plenty of other runners. People in ugly sweats or impressive stylish running clothes jogged or speed-walked or galloped, all in the same direction, so Alice headed that way, too, passing most people because she had more to run about than they did.
Up ahead was a trail marked with varnished pine signs and a moving feet logo. Here and there were sharp little notices:
NO BIKES.
The big backpack flapped against her shoulders and slid down and got in her way and threatened to slam against runners who passed her. “Sorry,” she kept saying.
The trail wound through a small woods, down a long, gentle hill, and by the edge of a pretty creek. Weeping willow fronds hung like pale yellow shades.
After six tenths of a mile (Alice knew because the trail was marked every tenth of a mile) the footpath was breached. The runners had to pause, push a Walk light for a busy six-lane road, and cross the traffic to where the footpath began again. The real runners ran in place while they waited. Others stumbled and panted and leaned on the trunk of a tree.
I need a car, thought Alice, watching the commuter traffic. She felt completely capable of stealing a car. She ran her fingers through her long hair in a familiar comforting gesture, pulling it back and then smoothing it down again.
In a red Saturn, Alice’s friend Cindy drove by, peering out her car window. Alice stepped behind a jogger whose large gut definitely ought to be slimmed down, but not now when Alice needed it for protection.
Cindy’s window was down, and her face was outside of the car, like a dog scenting the breeze. Cindy was the passenger. Her mom was driving, and also craning her neck, as if checking out her side of the street. What could they be looking for? They were miles from the high school, where Cindy needed to be in another ten minutes.
Alice was suddenly aware that the joggers were staring at her, and even the mo
st dedicated had ceased to run in place.
Her ears played back a sentence one of them uttered. “You look like the girl who was on the news last night. The one the police are looking for.”
Alice’s heart skipped. She made a topknot out of her hair and waved it like a pom-pom. “People have been saying that to me all morning. I can’t help it if I have brown hair.”
They kept staring at her.
“My gosh, I bet ten people stopped me jogging,” Alice said. “Is it my fault I have brown hair? What am I supposed to do—quit my run early? I have two more miles.”
The college boy who had accused her actually blushed. “Like wow, I’m sorry. But you know what? I really did just telephone the police.” The guy actually had a cell phone on his hip where normal runners had water bottles.
“Oh yikes,” said Alice, laughing. “Well, let’s hope I have time to take a shower before they interrogate me.”
Everybody laughed with her, and everybody crossed the big street together, Alice in the middle, between men’s shoulders and women’s flapping ponytails.
Cindy and the red Saturn were only half a dozen cars beyond the crosswalk. Cindy’s head was poking back and forth.
Alice was pretty close friends with Cindy, who had been through divorce twice with each parent, a horror so enormous that Alice could not even think of it as real life, but as a soap opera taking over. Cindy had been able to nod at everything Alice confided about her own mother and father.
Of course tons of Alice’s friends’ parents were divorced, and Alice had expected that it would not upset her when her mother began to see other men, but it was hideous.
How could Mom stand the presence of any man but Dad? Couldn’t Mom see that these men did not measure up? How could Mom giggle and put on perfume and buy a new wardrobe and experiment with expensive makeup as if she, too, were fifteen and learning how to flirt? And how could she fall for Mr. Rellen, who was old and paunchy and had a prickly beard?
Cindy would say, “Yeah. It’s like that, don’t worry, it won’t bother you after a year or two.”
Could Cindy and her Mom be looking for Alice?
I can’t waste time thinking about Cindy, Alice told herself. The important thing is that runner. He actually called 911 from his cell phone; from his jogging path. How long before the police show up?
Alice stayed in the pack of runners, or they stayed with her, and in a few paces the trail picked up along the same creek, and there was a sense of country, even though the greenery was just landscaping to screen traffic.
Alice glanced through the leaves and recognized another car. Laura Schmidt’s very old Taurus wagon. Laura’s older sister was driving. Both Laura and Lucy should be in class this very minute. But no, they were miles away from the high school, cruising a main road. And slowly. Lucy, whose boyfriend had gotten into trouble big time for drag racing at midnight; Lucy, who had gone along and no doubt enjoyed every minute—Lucy was driving half the speed she ought to be, staring all over the place.
The path wound behind a Bagel Deluxe, and Alice slowed her tempo to let the group go on without her. Then she swerved off the trail, crossed an acre of parking lot, and jogged in the back door of Bagel Deluxe. The door to the ladies’ room was behind a trellis, which gave a fake, see-through privacy.
Inside, she took inventory. Out of the backpack came the glasses and the baseball cap. Alice threaded her hair through the hole. There was nothing else she could do. She had no makeup, no scissors for a haircut, no pillow with which to gain weight. Alice had read somewhere—or Dad had told her—that weight gain was the best disguise. Add fifty pounds, and no cheekbone, throat, profile or even hand would look the same.
Along with the peasant dress, sandals, and purse were three copies of TWIN: two on disk, one on paper. This was the kind of stupid decision that gave Dad work: people who subjected all copies to the same risks. She stuck one disk in her jeans pocket.
Get breakfast, she told herself. You have three dollars; get some orange juice, get a bagel. You need calories.
She slung the backpack over both shoulders, tried to pretend she didn’t look like the girl described on the radio and shown on television, and left the ladies’ room. She would have a raisin cinnamon bagel with cream cheese and then she would feel better.
There was quite a line, but it moved very fast; people knew exactly what they wanted. Alice yearned for food so badly she was embarrassed for herself. She was next. One bagel would not do. She needed two of them, or eight.
The woman two ahead of Alice was juggling a coffee, an orange juice, and a bagel, along with her purse and briefcase and laptop. In spite of this, the woman looked Alice straight in the eye and caught her breath. “Hey—” she said.
“Hi,” said Alice, smiling. “I think I recognize you, too. Aren’t you Julie’s mom? Can I help you carry something?”
It worked. The woman got busy explaining that no, she was Matthew’s mom, and Matthew was only six, and probably…
“Well, you have a nice day,” said Alice, still smiling, and she stepped casually out of line. She walked back out the rear door. She did not have the composure to prevent tears. Tears came in spasms, like a garden hose with a kink. She took paper napkins out of a metal table container to mop her eyes.
Beyond the parked cars was a long, raised, planting area with city-type trees as neat as crayon drawings. Past that was more shopping, with traffic entrances and exits for the next set of stores. It was much too early for any of the stores to be open. In the distance, Alice could see a church spire and the towers of office buildings, glinting like sunglasses. Alice always wondered what held up a building that seemed to be one-hundred percent glass.
Dad worked in a one-hundred percent glass building.
In fact, he worked in one of those.
How far was she from actual downtown? One mile? Two?
The still-rising sun was behind Alice and did not shine in her eyes, but cars turning into the parking lots moved slowly, and Alice thought they could probably not see very well.
And there, most visible, was the car belonging to Paul Chem. As a reward for his brilliance, his grandparents had gotten him a Jeep Wrangler: the real kind, squared off and open, for moving soldiers.
The Jeep was full of guys—three or four of them standing up, hanging onto the frame, looking around and having a wonderful time.
There was no reason for Paul Chem and his friends to be around here; there was nothing here for them; at this hour there was nothing here for anybody; certainly not for high school students who belonged in class.
Only the possibility of finding Alice.
Being hunted by the police was scary, and yet police did that: They hunted the bad guys. But being hunted by her friends! And these did not qualify as friends—they were just people she would recognize in the hall. Why were they doing it? What sick thrill could they be getting?
Maybe she should not believe her own eyes. She had had several shocks, and not enough sleep or food. Perhaps she was hallucinating. It was an evil mirage: a dancing chorus line of classmates that she was constructing from her imagination.
She found her fingers splayed against her cheeks. She was holding her head up with her hands. Her spine had weakened. Without assistance, she would droop and puddle in the road.
Like Rick Rellen, Paul Chem held a phone in his hand as he drove.
They’re calling in to each other, she thought. He’s saying, “I checked the K Mart lot and the Twenty Outlets Under One Roof lot. What’s my next assignment?”
Was the whole city literally looking for her? Was this an actual team? A squad? People with training? Had somebody said, “Everybody who wants to hunt Alice meet before school, and we’ll divide up the city and suburbs and have a hotline so we can update each other.”
If this were true, then Alice had become entertainment.
Girl murders father; high school turns out; better than a car wash! Better than a football game!
After all
, they’re tired of tag sales and bargain hunting. Why not hunt a person? A cheap safari, so to speak. And you get on television if you pull it off.
How dare they!
How dare her classmates turn against her! Hunt her down, eyes scanning crowds, phones ready, gas tanks full!
Alice wanted her mother so badly. Who else could stop this invasion? Who else would know how awful it was, and hug her, and keep her safe?
But to reach her mother…
No. There was too much in between.
She could not bear to be caught by these boys. Caught like an animal—a bad dog that had gotten off its leash and had had to be brought home and tied up.
No. They would not catch her.
Alice ducked down behind parked cars and watched Paul Chem circle. There was no question about his intent. He was searching for something, and it could only be her. Finally the Jeep headed for a distant exit that had its own traffic lights and would leave Paul heading in the wrong direction to locate her.
She stood up, feeling protected by the cars parked behind Bagel Deluxe, but she was wrong.
Paul Chem leaned out of his Jeep, skidded on a turn, and shouted, “Alice!”
Chapter 8
ALICE FLUNG HERSELF AROUND Bagel Deluxe and across the six lanes of traffic. Cars would brake in time, or they wouldn’t.
Paul Chem would be blocked by the concrete curbs, the raised gardens, parked cars, and a complex series of traffic lights. Would he abandon his precious Jeep and come after her on foot? Alice bet that he would not.
Cars honked as if they were in a marching band. Alice made it across and darted down a side street.
She was on the edge of the city. Low buildings were like foothills before the mountains of downtown. The side streets were all one-way. Alice doubled over a block until she was running the wrong way on a one-way street; the Jeep could not follow her here.
In the distance, a city bus belched smoke as it slowed for a stop. Alice had never been on a bus. Her neighborhood had no public transportation. Was that bus her answer, or was it a fifty-seat trap, and if she got on, strange faces would glint with the thrill of capture, shouting, “You! You’re the one!”