Chapter 61
61
POLLY
Hank raided the medicine cabinet while I was out at the drugstore.
Everything is gone. Every last bottle of pills has vanished, stored in an undisclosed location. He even took the razor I use to shave my legs and the scissors he used to use to trim his beard before he let it go wild.
Clearly, he took my suicide threat seriously.
But right now, the true danger isn’t me taking my own life. We kidnapped a woman. And if she is still alive—which is not a given—she will certainly tell the police everything about what we did to her, if she hasn’t already. We will almost definitely both go to jail for this.
Unless I do something about it.
As promised, Hank doesn’t leave the house. Not only that, but every hour, he comes upstairs to knock on the bedroom door. If I don’t answer right away, he calls out my name. I have to answer at that point, because if I don’t, he will break the door down.
My chance comes in the early evening, when Hank goes out to the backyard to chop more firewood.
I knew he would do this. We used up most of our wood during the storm, and we use the fireplace in the evening in place of heat to save money. He assumes I’ll be down for dinner, and he wants to have the fire going.
Little does he know I won’t be here when he comes to fetch me for dinner.
I have a very short gap of time to make this happen. I used to work at Roosevelt Memorial, so I know that seven o’clock is the change of shift. Change of shift happens when the nursing staff from the day shift signs out all their patient information to the nurses coming on for the evening shift. When that happens, there’s about thirty minutes of chaos. The nurses are deep in conversation, and no meds are handed out. It’s a brief window of time when just about anything could happen.
That window will be my opportunity.
I search through the bottom dresser drawer in the bedroom, which is where I keep my scrubs. I used to wear them to work every day, but now they’re just sitting there at the bottom of the drawer, neatly folded, mocking me. I pick up a nondescript flower-print pair from the top of the drawer and change into them. I wrap my braid around itself until it becomes a neat bun. Then I look at my reflection in our bedroom mirror.
I look just like I used to when I went to work every day. Before everything went down the toilet.
I walk down the steps to the kitchen, taking them as quietly as I can so Hank doesn’t notice me coming down. But no—he’s distracted by chopping wood in the backyard. I can just barely see him out the back window, wearing only a flannel shirt despite the cold because he always works up a sweat from chopping. The sight of my big, strong husband chopping wood in the backyard is as familiar to me as my own face—he has done this every winter since we got married. He has always made sure that we don’t run out of wood for our fireplace. That we’re always kept warm.
I turn away from the window. It’s time to go.
It hits me that I never brought over lunch for Sadie today. I start to grab some tinfoil to make her a quick sandwich to drop off on my way out, but then I see out the window that Mitch’s truck is in their driveway. If he’s home, I need to stay away.
I linger at the kitchen counter for another few seconds. Hank raided our bathroom, but he stupidly left behind all the knives in the kitchen. My eyes rest on a pair of kitchen shears that we keep in our knife block. I grab them out of the block, testing their weight. Then I drop them into the pocket of my scrub pants.
I hope Sadie will be okay without me. Because after this, I don’t know if I’m ever coming home.