Locked Inside

  “What’s with the camouflage shorts?” she asked, mostly to distract him, and herself. The Elf was twisting, trying to get a look at the back of his leg, and she thought that was a bad idea. “What’s with the shorts, period? It’s cold out—it’s only April.”

  To her surprise, he stopped squirming. “It’s what I wear,” he said.

  What if the bullet was still in there? Marnie uttered a brief silent prayer and then touched the gully cautiously. Then she pressed firmly. The Elf recoiled but still didn’t, wouldn’t, yell again.

  Marnie honestly didn’t think there was a bullet. She sent up a quick hallelujah. “Not very fashionable, camouflage,” she commented, wondering what she could use for a bandage.

  The Elf was silent.

  “Do you realize you look like some kind of nutcase skinhead? With the boots and all, that is.” Should she try to tear up the blanket? Or squirm out of her own tights and use part of them as a bandage? She could rip them with her teeth.

  The Elf was still silent. Marnie regarded his back thoughtfully. He was in a cotton T-shirt, in that same combat green camouflage, and she liked the idea of using cotton, but that would leave him half naked in this cold room. What if she managed to tear a strip off the bottom of the T-shirt? Then he could put it back on and wrap up in the blanket—which would never cover his legs; he’d need to curl up … But wait, the ankle should be elevated, right?

  The Elf was still silent.

  “You okay?” said Marnie.

  “Yeah.”

  “Cleaning,” Marnie said softly to herself. Her eyes flicked to the floor, to the abandoned, half-empty seltzer bottle. She stared at it. Her mind worked grimly. Fact: The wound had to be cleaned. Raspberry seltzer probably wasn’t very antiseptic, but what were her choices?

  “I’m not, you know,” said the Elf abruptly.

  “Not what?” The only alternative Marnie could think of was spit, and no sooner had she had the thought than she cringed. She picked up the seltzer bottle. About a third of the liquid was left. She had a feeling that spit was a better idea. Wasn’t animal saliva antiseptic? Was human?

  Kiss it and make it better, whispered the Sorceress mockingly.

  Marnie’s throat suddenly felt very dry. She swallowed.

  “Not a nutcase skinhead. Not a skinhead at all,” said the Elf.

  It took Marnie a moment to recall the conversational thread. “Oh,” she said. “I didn’t think you were. It’s just, you know, how you look.” She suddenly knew that it didn’t matter if spit was a better idea. She didn’t care if they both died; she was not going to spit up all over the Elf’s leg.

  “I would never have guessed you cared about appearances,” he said.

  Marnie stilled. Incredibly, her mind emptied of all thoughts of antiseptics and water supplies. Of Leah’s possible actions and inactions. Of how Max could be so stupid, thinking she’d run off to meet someone she’d only ever met online. Her hand went to her cheek.

  All at once she was hideously conscious of her body. She had been here for days. Days. Her hair. Her makeup. This dress she’d slept in, that she’d never liked anyway … and the bump on her head … and her black eye … and—she must reek. Speaking of which—oh, God. Yertle. Over there. She couldn’t smell it anymore herself. But she knew he would. He must. Right now, even. Right now.

  Yertle.

  Marnie stood there, frozen in the silence, holding the bottle of seltzer, and she wished there were an airshaft, with certain death at the bottom, that she could dive into. That would be infinitely easier.

  Hold on, whispered the Sorceress-voice. Hold on.

  Marnie breathed.

  “Listen, Elf, I have to clean your leg,” she said finally. “I’m going to use some seltzer for that. And then I think I should use part of your shirt for a bandage. Okay?”

  “Sure,” said the Elf. All she saw was his back.

  “Okay, then,” mumbled Marnie.

  In silence, somehow, together, they got his shirt off. He was painfully skinny. Stubbornly she emptied her mind of everything else and worked. It hurt him. But she did a pretty good job, she thought. The wound looked clean. She had used fully half of the remaining seltzer, fiercely ignoring the knowledge that this was their only water supply, and had let him drink another inch of it.

  “Thank you,” he said quietly.

  She tried to get him to wrap up in the blanket, but he refused. “You use it,” he said.

  But she wouldn’t either. He looked at her. She looked back.

  She would get used to the eyes. You could get used to anything.

  “Now,” croaked the Elf, “will you please tell me what’s going on? What’s with that woman?”

  Marnie gathered her wits. “You first,” she said. A slew of questions swelled within her. “There isn’t really a buddy Dave in some car, right? It was so obvious you were lying to Leah—”

  “I wasn’t lying,” said the Elf defensively. “There is a Dave. My friend David. I did come in his car.” He paused. “He’s just, uh, not here with me. It’s school break for us, too, and his parents took him off to some Caribbean island, end of last week. He loaned me his car, and I drove up to Halsett in it this morning. I was worried about you. I don’t know what I thought I could do, but …” He tried to sit up, and his face whitened.

  “You all right?” Marnie asked quickly. Deep inside, she was riveted by his words. He’d been worried about her? But he didn’t even know her!

  “Yeah.” The Elf eased himself back down. He threw an arm up to hide his expression. Plainly, he wasn’t all right. “Would you please sit?” said the Elf, gesturing somewhat wildly with the other arm toward the end of the cot.

  Sit? On the cot? With him? Marnie’s stomach performed an unexpected double flip. She surreptitiously lowered her head and sniffed herself. Nothing, which proved only that her nose wasn’t working.

  The Elf waited.

  Finally, gingerly, Marnie sat down at the foot of the cot, a careful few inches from the Elf’s long legs, with her back against the wall. By turning her head to the left, she could see the Elf. If she looked straight ahead, however, she didn’t have to see him at all. Or know if he was looking at her. An excellent option.

  “Could you just tell me your whole story?” she asked uncomfortably. “Everything about how you ended up here? The meeting with Max—everything from when we didn’t e-mail each other.”

  For answer, the Elf threw the blanket toward her. After a second she understood that she would have to wrap herself in it before he would talk. She put it over her legs, and his. She squirmed. She glanced at the Elf, and against her will, flushed.

  “Okay,” said the Elf, after another second. “Here goes.”

  CHAPTER

  21

  “Well,” the Elf began, “you’d said you’d be online at midnight Monday. And of course you weren’t. I e-mailed you twice, and then I checked Paliopolis in case I’d misunderstood and we were supposed to meet there.” As he talked, he grimaced slightly and began rubbing at the T-shirt strip that Marnie had bound around his leg, and Marnie’s worry about their lack of antiseptic resurfaced. But his expression was far away, in his story, and the rubbing appeared to be an unconscious reflex, so she decided not to ask if it was hurting. Besides, she knew the answer. How could it not hurt?

  “I even looked in on the Rubble-Eater, just in case you’d set a trap there or something,” the Elf had continued. He grinned at Marnie, and she found herself smiling a little, shaking her head ruefully. It was the kind of thing that she—the Sorceress—might have done.

  All at once it was astonishing how comfortable Marnie felt, sitting with the Elf, listening to him. Something in her, that was nearly always tense in the company of other people, seemed to dissolve. Unconsciously, Marnie curled her legs beneath her and leaned infinitesimally closer. The Elf had that inward look on his face that people get sometimes when they tell stories, so she even found it okay to watch his face, the play of expression, as he s
poke.

  He said, “It took a day or so, actually, before I started feeling antsy about not hearing from you. At first I thought you’d just gotten caught up in something or other. It happens. So I e’d you again Wednesday afternoon. And then I thought maybe I’d pissed you off in some way. I, uh, I tend to piss people off a lot.”

  “You do?” Marnie was surprised, then intrigued. “How?” Involuntarily, her eyes slid to his bare scalp, and he noticed. He turned away a little, and Marnie remembered that when they’d touched on his appearance earlier, he’d sounded kind of defensive, and he—

  “I assume you want only relevant facts?” said the Elf.

  —was still defensive. Okay, fine. “Right,” said Marnie. “So you e’d me on Wednesday afternoon.” She frowned. “Actually, why’d you do that? You knew I wasn’t responding to e-mail. If I was going to e you back, I would have already.”

  “Yeah. I don’t know! I just e’d you, okay?” He looked down. “Well, you’ll find out anyway, if we get out of here. Which I believe we will. I, uh—the fact is, I e’d you a lot on Wednesday.”

  Marnie was fascinated. “Define ‘a lot.’”

  Silence. Then: “Fifteen times. Not that I was counting.”

  Marnie felt her jaw drop. She stared.

  After a few seconds, the Elf began to babble. “Well, the first time was just to ask you to e me back. Then, well, I sent you something. Then I figured you were offended, so I apologized.” He scowled. “You try writing an apology when you’re not sure what you did wrong! And then I got a little worried, so I e’d about that, just to tell you to say you were alive, if nothing else. They all just added up, okay?”

  “To fifteen?” said Marnie. She, herself, had only counted to four. An unexpected giggle threatened to come out of her mouth. Perhaps the Elf was doing some kind of advanced math.

  There was a silence. Then the Elf said, “Assuming we get out of here, I don’t suppose you’d be willing to trash them without reading them?”

  Now was not the time for laughing, Marnie thought. The Elf would think she was laughing at him. Which she was not. Oh, she was not. The Elf was looking down again. She wanted to say something, but she didn’t know what, or how. She just felt … thought … felt …

  Oh, she was tired of trying to figure out what it was she felt. She didn’t know anything anymore. Except one thing, maybe.

  “No way am I deleting those messages,” she said aloud.

  The Elf didn’t respond. Marnie wanted to look at him closely, to try to figure out what he was thinking, but even more strongly, she didn’t want to.

  “And then your guardian Max showed up at my house on Thursday morning,” the Elf went on steadily. He had evidently recovered from his momentary embarrassment about the e-mail. “With some weedy guy who’d apparently been reading your online records as if they were a public Web site.”

  That riveted Marnie. Burglarizing her online records! She had to squash down sudden, fierce indignation. Of course she wanted Max and a huge team of experts investigating her disappearance. Of course she did. It was their best hope. But oh, how she squirmed to think of them reading her stuff!

  “And there was a big guy who never said who he was,” continued the Elf. “Looking at me like I had an arsenal of weapons stowed in the garage and was planning to blow up my high school on Adolf Hitler’s birthday.” He grimaced.

  “Huh,” said Marnie. She thought it likely that the Elf got a lot of that kind of suspicion from people. He was certainly asking for it. She wondered suddenly if that was what Mrs. Fisher and the dean had been thinking about her. She gritted her teeth.

  Then she noticed that the Elf was still rubbing his leg. “It’s hurting?”

  His hand froze. “No, no. Not much.” And suddenly Marnie was once again aware of the fact that he was only inches away. Too close. Looking straight at her again. She’d been more comfortable when he was a glyph on a screen; that was an utter, absolute fact. And yet …

  “Stop looking at me so hard,” Marnie found herself saying. And then added, out of nowhere: “You don’t know anything about me.”

  “Right,” said the Elf. He was looking very calm, very intent. “That was made very plain to me.” Marnie found she couldn’t meet his eyes. After another minute, he went on talking.

  It seemed that Max and his team were systematically questioning anyone who’d encountered Marnie in cyberspace at all. “I got pinpointed for special treatment because of all the e-mail,” said the Elf. “But after a couple of hours I think they believed me, that we’d only ever talked online, and that I hadn’t seen you. I did volunteer to take a lie detector test. But anyway, nobody thought I’d kidnapped you or anything like that.” He frowned. “They seemed pretty certain you’d run away, Marn. Nobody implied anything else. In the end they just told me to contact them if I heard from you.” He paused. “But what I don’t understand—this is a kidnapping, not a runaway situation. So why don’t they know that? Hasn’t there been a ransom note?”

  “I guess not,” said Marnie.

  “Why not?” asked the Elf bluntly.

  Marnie met his eyes.

  “That woman is nuts,” said the Elf. It was part statement, part question. “This is a kidnapping, but not an ordinary one?”

  Marnie nodded.

  “Tell me,” said the Elf.

  Marnie opened her mouth and then closed it. She looked down, at a loss. How could she explain? It was such a mess. Such an embarrassing mess. And some bits—the parts about Skye—were so very private. She thought of Leah’s intensity. Skyedottir. Of her own newly reinforced awareness of how little she knew about Skye. She thought of her own mistakes, her temper … Finally she said, feebly, “It’s a long story.”

  The Elf didn’t reply immediately, and at last Marnie had to look at him. Somehow he had managed to prop himself up on an elbow. “Oh, sorry,” he said. “I’m just having trouble deciding which sarcastic comment to make. I’d almost decided to go with the one where I explain that I’ve been working to improve my short attention span.”

  Marnie’s lips tightened. She thought seriously about kicking the Elf right in the gunshot wound.

  “Well?” demanded the Elf. “Are you going to tell me what happened here? How you got here?”

  “After you finish telling me your part.” That would buy her time. And she did want to know.

  “Fair enough,” said the Elf after a moment.

  Marnie took in a shallow breath, feeling reprieved, even though the Elf was still looking at her and she wished he would stop. Eventually, he did go on with his story. He had wandered around the Halsett campus, “checking things out,” until he eventually met a girl who’d been willing to chat, first about the campus and then about other things. From her, he had heard the latest school scandal, the tale of Marnie’s running away to meet someone she knew online. Idly, Marnie wondered who he’d talked to. Jenna? Since it was break, there weren’t many students around.

  “The thing that bugged me both times I heard that story,” said the Elf, “is that … well, I suppose I can see how someone might think it could be true. And okay, even though you hadn’t come to see me, I suppose you might be friendly with ten different people online, who knows? But …”

  “What?”

  “But I just didn’t believe it,” he finished. “In Paliopolis, you know every trap and scam there is. You wouldn’t just take off to see some stranger you only knew online.”

  You did, Marnie thought suddenly. Sort of. Although it was different, she knew. The things boys felt comfortable doing. Like it or not. Even reasonable or not. But she kept her mouth shut and listened to the rest of the Elf’s story.

  “She—this girl—told me you’d had lunch with a teacher before you ran away. So I just thought I’d talk to the teacher. I got her address from the phone book, but no one answered when I knocked. I was just kind of looking around outside her house when I heard the screaming.” He shrugged, then winced, and Marnie’s hands clenched; she kne
w he was in worse pain than he was letting on. It was only then that she fully took in what he’d just said. And remembered—he’d said it earlier as well.

  “Wait. I’m in the basement of Leah Slaight’s actual house?” Marnie couldn’t believe Leah could be so stupid. On the other hand, maybe it wasn’t stupid. No one but the Elf had come, after all.

  “Yeah,” said the Elf. “Get this: She hadn’t even locked the front door.”

  Marnie looked at the Elf. He was frowning. And then he opened his mouth. “So here’s the real question. If I could find you—okay, I wasn’t looking, exactly, but I did find you—why haven’t they? This Max and his bunch of experts. I’m smart, I’m not putting myself down. To tell you the truth, I think highly of my own brains. But I’m not a trained detective, and I don’t get why everybody is off chasing this Internet illusion, and not reality. When even I could guess that you would never …”

  Hearing the question aloud, Marnie knew the answer. It appeared, not in words, not in her brain, but in her heart. She bit her lip.

  My fault, said the Sorceress quietly. All that online stuff laid a false trail.

  No, Marnie replied forcefully in her head. Not your fault. Mine. Years of not talking to Max at all … She faltered. She sat in silence.

  The Elf didn’t say anything for a long time either, clearly pursuing his own train of thought. Then he asked gently: “Are you close to this guy Max? You, uh, you trust him?”

  “He’s okay.” Marnie knew it sounded feeble. She was still reeling from what she’d just understood.

  The Elf was quiet again. Marnie knew just what he was implying. It made perfect sense, if you didn’t know Max. Or Skye. Or the whole situation. “Look, Elf,” she said. “Max isn’t in on this. He’s out there trying his best.”