Chapter Fifty-Seven Hanna
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Hanna
Stale air filled my lungs as I walked into the cavernous darkness. I breathed in, fighting to draw in clean air. The deep
inhale ended in a fit of coughing. The kind that doubled me over. My energy depleted, I leaned against the gray wall of the
passageway. Cold seeped through my jacket and into my bones. The sensation of bugs crawling in my hair and cobwebs sticking
to my face had me standing up straight again.
I shivered, trying to throw off whatever creeped and crawled around us. “This is gross.”
“Understatement.” Stella waved a hand in front of her face. If something flew around her, only she could see it.
He had to be here.
The comforting words repeated in my head, cutting through the numbing fear. When the phrase started to fade, I mentally shored
it up. Concentrated on saying the words over and over until a flicker of hope took hold.
Marni shuffled her feet but stopped when something crunched under her shoe. “There’s debris on the floor.”
“Are there lights in this part of the house?” Stella aimed her flashlight at the ceiling. “Oh, shit.”
The patchwork of rafters and beams strung together with thick spiderwebs had my previously latent claustrophobia springing
to life. The fear of it all caving in, burying us alive, no longer felt like a remote possibility.
Strangled breathing hiccupped in my chest. I blew out a long sigh, trying to calm the frenzy of nerves firing off inside me.
“It’s okay.”
“Is it?” Marni ducked, then stood up again. “I thought I saw . . . Never mind.”
I dragged the stick along the wall. A rough screech of wood against cement. No breaks. No change in tone. All of that meant
no exits.
The search inched us forward but to where? The narrow hall cut a path through the inner workings of the house. No peepholes
or windows showed the way. Soaring twelve-foot ceilings provided the only hint of comfort as darkness pressed in from every
direction.
The faint beam of the flashlight brought us to an intersection. I almost slammed into the corner wall before I saw it. The
passageway branched off in three directions.
“Which way?” Stella pointed her light down each hall, showing off an abundance of bleak, undefinable nothingness and little
else.
I struggled to get my bearings as I mentally walked along our path, trying to place the rooms on the other side of the walls.
The trail looped in my head until every inch of space blurred together.
It had been years since I spent time in this house, and that was before walls buckled and beams rotted from water damage. Before furniture littered the floor.
I couldn’t come up with the floor plan. “There has to be a way through. A doorway. The passageway must lead into a room we
recognize.”
Marni bent down as she shined her light to the right. “Does that one look like it goes upstairs? Maybe it leads to Noah’s
old room.”
“Jeremy wasn’t in there,” Stella said.
Marni scoffed. “Not that we could tell.”
Jeremy alone. Cold. Hungry. Injured. The possibilities littered my mind. The dank air. Rats and who knew what other kind of
animals holed up in here. People who wanted to hurt him. I didn’t let my brain tiptoe any farther into the unimaginable.
“Straight.” I picked a direction at random. We needed to search every one of these halls, every wing, every stretch of darkness.
“Right.” Stella took a step forward, then stopped. “Do you smell or hear anything? I’m desperate for any sort of clue.”
Marni scanned our immediate surroundings. “This space is, what, three feet wide? We can’t even walk in a row. How is he curled
up in here?”
Alone. Cold. Hungry. Injured. The list of horrors kept spinning in my head.
“Straight.” I shouted the word this time to block out their questions and their doubts.
Their comments made sense. They were right to wonder and assess and try to dissect every clue, but I needed not to think.
Marni and Stella followed in silence. I saw their quick glances in each other’s direction when I yelled. I got it. My bossiness
and trying to control the situation hadn’t gotten us anywhere so far. Days had passed since the fire. If he was hurt or . . .
“He has to be here.” I would have heard him or sensed him if he waited in the walls at Xavier’s house.
“Agree.” Stella whispered the response from behind me.
We walked and I dragged that stick and listened to the unbroken melody of wood against wall. Every weighted step filled with
danger and pounding anxiety. The scenery never changed. Gray walls. High ceilings. No way out.
I stopped. “I don’t know . . .”
“Keep going.” Stella put her arm around my shoulders and dragged me forward. “This leads somewhere, Hanna. It’s illogical
for this to be a dead end.”
Logic. The argument made sense when nothing else did. My muddled brain couldn’t form a response or a reaction. I let her pull
me along. Deeper into the waiting darkness.
The stick clipped along. The clicking song echoed in my head.
Thunk.
Stella stopped walking. “What was that?”
“Wait,” Marni said at the same time.
I tapped the stick against the wall in a circle. Believing, hoping, felt too perilous. The downfall and disappointment might
knock me over. Still, I tapped. The outline of a door. I traced it, then did it again.
“An exit.” I jammed the end of the stick against what felt like a seam.
Marni sighed. “Thank God.”
Stella pressed her hands against the wall. Brushed over the concrete. “Here.”
I wedged my shoulder against the hidden door and it shifted. The thick, unforgiving wall turned into an opening. Fresh, cold
air slipped through the crack.
We didn’t need words. We all pushed and shoved and searched for a magical switch to let us in or out.
The heavy wall swung. We stumbled into a room. My eyes fought against focusing. The flashlights only provided a narrow beam
in which to operate and mine had started to blink in and out.
That smell. So familiar. Musty yet not. A mix of soil and trees. Rain.
I felt around the wall just inside the door. My fingers hit the switch and then a sound. The click of a light turning on.
The buzz and glare from the fluorescent light hanging in the middle of the room.
No, not a room. The garage. The back half of the tandem space.
Jeremy’s car. It sat there, in its own space, cut off from the front of the garage bay by a wall of boxes, half covered by
a tarp that had fallen off the front.
I blinked but the vision didn’t move.
Marni walked around the front of the car with slow steps. “Is this—”
“Yes.” I drew the tarp back and put my hands against the passenger side window. When I opened the door. I could smell Jeremy. His scent. That bodywash he liked.
“Where is he?” Marni pulled the rest of the tarp off and let it fall to the floor. She stared at the closed trunk as she asked
the question.
No, no, no. My mind begged for another answer. My heart shattered as those blocked thoughts about the worst things that could happen
flooded my brain.
Jeremy drove an older-model sedan. It was sturdy and not fancy, so I believed, probably wrongly, it would be heavier and less
likely to crumple in a crash. It still used a key to start it. I kept his extra on my chain. I pulled it out of my back jeans
pocket, but I couldn’t take the next step. Dread froze me in place with the harsh truth that this could end in the worst possible
way.
“What if . . .” I couldn’t even say the words.
Stella stepped in front of me and held out her hand. “Let me look.”
I stared at her fingers. Watched her put the key in the lock.
“Here!” Marni shouted from the far end of the wall of boxes.
She’d stepped into the front space of the tandem stalls. In the roomier, three-stall garage at the front and along the far
wall. She ducked down. Disappeared from view.
I raced over to her. To the cordoned-off area where Patrick and Victoria’s gardener used to store lawn equipment. The makeshift
walls stretched to the ceiling, but the sides of the structure were held together by wire and posts. A fence of sorts that
was see-through in spots.
A lump covered by what looked like a dusty old outside furniture cover. A sneaker peeked out from the side.
“Jeremy!” I tore at the opening of the structure. Ripped skin and broke fingernails. My heart hammered as Marni and Stella
pulled at the wood slats with me. Tugged at the lock that held the enclosure shut.
The wire bent. The decaying wood buckled. I slipped through a space where the sides scraped against my back and my stomach.
Once inside the five-by-five pen, I dropped to my knees and tore the cover away.
Needles on the floor. What looked like vomit.
Jeremy with his body curled into a ball. Not moving. His dark hair plastered against his forehead with a smear of blood.
My hands shook as I reached for him and checked for a pulse. Please. Please. A steady thump. My body collapsed and I let the sobs come as I wrapped my body around his. A whoosh of relief knocked me
forward.
“He’s alive.” I whispered the glorious words into his shoulder. “Alive.”