The Leaving Part 62

Rain turned roads to rivers. Frantic wipers failed. Ryan put the hazard lights on and slowed the car to rowboat speed.

They were on their way to an address Chambers had given them. Using Scarlett's jacket as a map, he had sent officers out looking for the house Sarah had drawn, and they'd found it overnight.

It all seemed too long in coming and sudden at the same time.

Lucas didn't feel . . . ready . . . even though he'd been waiting and waiting.

They were the last to arrive-just as the rain eased to drizzle-at a house that looked exactly like Sarah's sketch: a boring two-story, shingled ranch with a two-car garage. A house you'd drive by and not even notice. Chambers stood on the front porch with Scarlett, Sarah, Kristen, Adam, and various adults who had come. He and Ryan got out of the car and, closing his eyes for a moment at the bottom of the path, Lucas tried to imagine himself on that porch, walking up those steps. His brain conjured images of shoes-smaller shoes, beat-up sneakers-but he could have been imagining them.

"Everybody ready?" The raindrops clinging to Chambers's black jacket looked like snow.

Inside, everything was new, clean, modern. The opposite of what Lucas had imagined it would be like, based on the exterior.

The five of them fanned out in a large living room, forming a semi-circle looking out large windows. Wet gla.s.s garbled the view, but Lucas lifted his camera from where it hung on his chest and snapped a few shots anyway. A row of palm trees in the yard were being battered by wind and looked like witches with wild hair on bent brooms. Turning back to the room, he looked at Chambers, who seemed to be waiting for one of them to say, Now, this place, I remember, but none of them did.

"Let's go upstairs," Chambers said, and turned.

Up a wooden split-level staircase, they arrived in a main hall, where Lucas's gaze latched onto the third doorway on the left and wouldn't let go. He went and stood in it and lifted his camera again.

He fired off a few shutters from the doorway, then looked up and down the hall.

Each of the others had gone to stand in front of a different door.

Chambers stood at the one none of them had claimed.

Adam stepped through his doorway and then Sarah went through hers. Scarlett was next. Then Kristen.

Lucas felt he had no choice, so he inched in.

One window.

A small closet.

Walls newly painted white, the scent of paint still detectable.

The only evidence he had that maybe this had been his room was that he didn't like the feel of it.

Back out in the hall, he found just Chambers. "Did you find clothes and photos here, too?"

"This place is completely wiped clean," Chambers said. "Like nothing I've ever seen before."

"Like us."

Lucas started down the stairs again, felt a pull toward the backyard.

"Lucas, wait!" Chambers called after him. "I want us all to stay together."

Too late.

Lucas skipped the last step.

Then stopped and turned back and put a foot on it, pressed.

It groaned.

Chambers appeared on the staircase's halfway landing, Scarlett right behind him.

"This is the place." Lucas pushed on the bottom step again. Another groan.

Scarlett pushed past Chambers and Lucas and headed for another staircase. Lucas followed her down and out.

And the air smelled like dirt and ocean.

He felt free, but also . . .

There were no electrified or barbed-wire fences.

No fences at all.

Why had they stayed?

Scarlett cut across the lawn to the right, down toward a small barn, and he followed, wet gra.s.ses licking his feet and ankles.

"Scarlett! Wait!"

"I don't want to wait." She disappeared through an opening in the brush beside the barn.

Chasing her, his feet found boards over swamp, springy beneath him. He caught glimpses of her blue hoodie up ahead and thought he heard her laughing-like this was a game they were playing. Or had been?

Coming out of the woods and onto a road, he stopped. Across the way was the back end of some fenced-in industrial property. Scarlett had her eyes up as she moved down the road to the left, like she was tracking a bird.

No, she hadn't been laughing.

So who?

He reached her just as she stopped moving, followed her gaze. Steam billowed from the power plant's smokestacks in white swells and got absorbed into lingering storm clouds.

"We used to sneak out down that path," she said.

"Seems so." Had it been a memory of laughing?

"But we weren't trying to escape?"

"I guess not." His fingers twitched. "But I knew how to use a gun? Taught myself ?"

"So maybe we tried to get away," she said. "Once. Like if we somehow figured out who we were?"

"But it didn't work."

"And they erased the memory," she offered. "And all the memories involving how we figured out who we were?"

"But it happened again?" he said.

"And again," she said. "And so eventually we started to figure out ways to remember."

He nodded. "But what about my tattoo? The journal?"

"The penny, the map, the drawings. They brought us here, to where, but nothing has bought us to who."

"Or why."

"Lucas!" Chambers's voice was far away, irritated. "Scarlett!"

"Coming!" she called out.

Back through the pathway and over the planks, Scarlett went and Lucas followed, not liking the feeling of following. Had it always been like that between them?

"You need to stop running off," Chambers said when they came back out into the yard.

"Sorry," Scarlett said. But she didn't sound sorry.

Lucas wasn't, either. He was only sorry he wasn't finding his own answers. What did the tattoo mean? Were there hidden cameras here? Buried film?

What?

"The others are in here," Chambers said, indicating the barn.

The barn was pulling the same trick as the house. From the outside, it looked like it might house a farm animal or three on a good day. Inside, it was a slick lab. Empty fridges and freezers lined one wall; cages where mice might have been kept lined another; a large video monitor hung on a third.

"We've been working on the princ.i.p.al angle," Chambers said as they gathered around him, and Lucas had a moment of feeling so proud of Avery. "When you piece together all his calls, they start to form a narrative. That he was approached by this group who wanted to take a few kids for a few hours and try to erase the memory of the shooting."

"You're serious," Adam said.

"I am." Chambers nodded. "The princ.i.p.al facilitated the abduction after interviewing you all during those first days of kindergarten. The idea was that if it worked, they could treat all the students."

"That's completely insane." Sarah rubbed her own arms.

"We believe this is a serious group with unlimited resources," Chambers said. "We believe they're interested in military applications of the treatment."

"Military?" Adam's father asked from across the room.

"Postwar, yes." Chambers nodded. "Treatment for PTSD."

"But how did a few hours turn into eleven years?" Sarah looked like she might literally fall to pieces, leaving only a pile of jagged flesh on the white concrete floor.

"I can't explain that," Chambers said. "Not yet."

"And what about Max?" Lucas asked.

"We don't have clarity on that yet, either," Chambers said. "But it sounds like there was an incident, possibly an asthma attack. We're still working on all that. So unless you-"

"Where's Kristen?" Scarlett interrupted.

They found her back up at the house, in one of the bedrooms.

"Here." She pointed. "This one."

"This one what?" Lucas stepped toward her.

"An owl. In the knots of the wood." She knelt down. "Can you give me a hand?"

Lucas bent down to look and, sure enough, the knot in the floor-board really looked like an owl. He and Kristen both worked with fingertips to try to pull the board up. But it wouldn't come and so Chambers went and found a pocketknife and joined in the quest.

When the board finally surrendered, the others all gathered in. The small blue leather journal made Lucas think of babies-helpless, waiting to be lifted out of cribs.

Kristen reached for the book and stood and started to flip its pages.

"Well?" Lucas stepped toward her and Chambers did, too. "What does it say?"

"I need a minute," Kristen said, backing away from them, and she kept flipping.

She was probably feeling vindicated and Lucas envied her for it.

Then she looked up and said, "It's all over the place. There are huge gaps. Years with nothing, it looks like." She looked back down to read more.

Scarlett said, "Maybe you'd forgotten where it was? That you even had it?"

"Yes," Kristen said, turning pages. "Here." She read, "Found this journal again today."

"What about the last entry?" Lucas asked.

Kristen flipped ahead and read aloud: "We have decided to trust this journal.

We found it again today, after more than a year.

We're planning to leave tonight before we forget again.